Matajuegos is now two years old. It’s been two years of miraculously keeping up our output frequency. There is always at least one person in the Matajuegos crew with some spare time to compensate for the others’ absences. Today I write this, tomorrow you translate that… It gets harder every day, because, to put it bluntly, we are overworked as hell.
We started out posting weekly in two languages with one monthly translation of a third party text and asking other people to send their pieces in to add them to our archives. Eventually we made the switch to biweekly, with a lot less of our own articles than the much quicker translations, doubting whether the hours invested in staying bilingual are even worth it. Since we never thought of making money, we don’t have any. We’re ashamed of adding more people that we can’t pay and, also, we have little time to integrate guest collaborations. Luckily, we have two new translators who with even more luck and effort will become authors and even though they never asked for it, we really should pay them somehow.
We’ve more than enough plans for the future but we lack time, lots of it, both to make them come true and to see which of them are worth it and what they would demand from us. There are many games we’d like to give visibility to, for which a textual analysis is perhaps not always the best option. We entertain the possibility of moving some of our output to other platforms: zines, YouTube, talks, flashmobs, etcetera.
The identity of Matajuegos guides us but it also demands a lot from us: making a Let’s Play channel is relatively simple, but making one that is up to our aspirations and that is visibly informed by empathy, the humane, critical thought, love, and culture is hard. And more important than whether it’s hard or not, it’s something that would consume the very same time whose scarcity we’re trying to resolve.
We wanted to reach this point of the year with a couple proposals and a plan of action more or less hashed out, but as you would have guessed, we had no time. We are in complicated times for online publications that wish to be sustainable, with Facebook no longer serving the purpose of spreading your work and even holding your audiences hostage. But we are also in times when we need to resist the ferocious march of fascism and the right in every way we can. From this space of ours we humbly do so with our art and little games.
We are hosted by relatives who have no idea what we do, we have a domain thanks to the kindness of Quarta, our ghost editor, and we keep posting stuff because we’re too stubborn to keep our mouths shut.
We’d like to give your a couple of proposals for making the matajuegian labor a bit more sustainable and we hope you’ll gladly accept them. On the one hand, if you want to tell us what things you’d like to receive from us in the future, we’ll thank you for it. On the other hand, if you don’t mind giving us free games or books that we want, we’d be thankful. Also, if you have personal experience with crowdfunding or have any idea how to fund an independent blog in these times we’re in (or have contacts who have any idea) and you’d like to share some of your wisdom with us, we’d be even more thankful. For the time being we can only pay in food and exchange of favors.
And don’t worry. While we look for solutions, Matajuegos is alive and posting.
Image: ‘Julius Caesar’, Act III, Scene 1, the Assassination (William Holmes Sullivan).