By Adam Bierstedt
This is a new endeavor for me – I’ve been thinking about trying to expand Ludohistory as a project into more traditional blog-like things for over a year now, and it’s finally happening! That’s very exciting, but I wanted to start by outlining my vision for the blog and give all of you an idea of what we can expect.
In short, there’s really 3 kinds of posts I think you’ll likely see: Design Diatribes adapted from the Twitch streams, experimental content, and guest posts!
Design Diatribes
As many of you know, livestreaming is sort of my bread and butter for the project – I love the conversational nature of it, and I love getting to run ideas past you all live in chat. It goes a long way to clarify my own thinking on what’s going on. One of the channel point redemptions there is what I dubbed a “Design Diatribe” – basically, I ramble at a Google Doc for a while on a topic on the intersection of game design and history.
Basically since the beginning, people have been asking me if I’m going to make those documents accessible. To be honest, I didn’t want my half-formed deranged scrawlings viewable without the context of what I actually said alongside it. So, this is my solution! Every few weeks, I’ll convert one of those documents into a blog post that’s (hopefully) more convenient and beautiful and post it here for the world to enjoy!
Experimental Content
One of the advantages of a blog, though, is that we’re not entirely constrained by the media and material that performs well on Twitch! So, I want to take the chance to post a wider array of content within the channel purview. This might by some informal thoughts on rare book collecting, talking about something cool I read academically, talking about books or television instead of games, basically whatever feels appropriate at the time.
Guest Posts
One of the things that I’m excited about with the expanded scope of the project with a blog, though, is that it’s quite a bit easier to get people with different training and knowledge to participate! This project has never been a one-person endeavor, and so I’m super excited to be opening up a call for guest posts! I want this to be as inclusive as possible, so please, if you have ideas on media and history conceived broadly, send me a pitch! In particular, I encourage writings about non-Euro cultures and writings that thoughtfully examine race, gender identity, etc.
Unfortunately, and for transparency’s sake, these guest posts are, for now, unpaid. That will change as soon as I can make it work financially and I’ll publicize that, but for now please do keep that in mind.
I’m so excited
That gives a bit of an overview of what you all can expect here going forward. I’m going to shoot for something every week, but stay tuned.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop doing live and edited video content – check out the Projects tab on the site to keep up with my work on those. But, this opens the door to really expanding the scope of that “Ludohistory” can do, and I hope you all are as excited for that expansion as I am. See you soon!
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