Exactly one year ago we started Matajuegos, this weird games critique blog in two languages. Since then, we posted more than forty articles on the relationship between games and empathy, art, mythology, gender, society, sex.
Three fifths of them are original texts, the rest are Spanish translations of articles we wanted to make more accessible, linking games to class, exclusion, capitalism, consent.
Matajuegos demanded much more time from us than we probably realize: we wrote a lot, edited a lot more, got into lengthy discussions with other people about whether what we were doing was meaningful. We’re going to keep putting time into it, but more intelligently so: we write less but better, we edit as usual, and we’re trying to make it easier for us to escape pointless discussions early on.
Also, every once in a while Matajuegos works as an reference point for people to say, “Oh right, these people are kind of leftist and intellectual and they’re interested in videogames from this or that perspective, maybe they’ll be into this or that project.”
As a result:
- we were mentors in the sex ed game jam organized by FundAV and Fundación Huésped,
- we put together a pen and paper interactive fiction workshop at the Feria del Libro Independiente, thanks to which a collective twine was made,
- we took part in a talk about the industry in general and another one about diversity,
- we organized open talks about game development and mental health under the name of Charlefante,
- we seized the chance to interview Nicky Case and Paolo Pedercini when they came to Buenos Aires for the Media Party,
- we were at Expo Lúdica in La Plata presenting Matajuegos hace twines, a collection of out text games.
It’s likely that the list will grow, and the items currently in it imply future efforts: Charlefante is going to happen again, we’re going to publish the interviews as soon as possible, and our pen and paper interactive fiction workshop is going to be polished and released so anyone can print it and set it up wherever they want (there already were two instances of it in Rosario).
Not every collaboration with other entities works as we’d like. Talks and workshops sometimes have very poor turnout, for example. That’s why we think it’s important to create resources for other people with better turnout than ourselves to organize activities promoting diversity in the world of videogames. And even though our focus of action is Latin America, Pablo Quarta, our spy at GDC tells us everyone who heard about our project asked how they could help.
We guess that figuring out the best answer to that question is one of the things we have to solve in our second year running.
Image: Die Ermordung Cäsars (Karl Theodor von Piloty, 1865).