During our third year as Matajuegos:
- we travelled to GDC 2018 and covered the birth of Game Workers Unite, the international organization for the defense of workers in the games industry (since then, many local chapters have sprung up across the world),
- we talked about Bitsy as one of the new tools/spaces for democratizing and resignifying the creation of videogames,
- we presented and created Onda verde, the collaborative videogame in support of the reproductive rights of women and all people in Argentina and the world (with over 150 participants),
- we travelled to Feral Vector 2018 and discussed its more human approach to running videogame conferences, standing in contrast to the behemoth that is GDC and surpassing it in many respects,
- we published translations and original articles on worldbuilding, feminist games, gatekeeping, philosophy, dictatorships, neorealism, humor, discrimination, workers rights,
- and after all that… we took a break. It’s lasted four months now.
Since we first started planning this blog in different cafés across Buenos Aires, one of our members moved eight-hundred kilometers away and another one has just moved twelve-thousand. We’ve been getting accustomed to the distance as we’ve worked towards the blog’s return, and we think that these new Ides of March are a good opportunity for us to come back.
How are we returning? Well, with the articles and translations you know and love, of course, but also with something new that none of us have really tried before: we’re going to release videos and podcasts.
Videos
The videos we’re producing are fairly short and to the point, so we can’t tell you much without spoiling the surprise, but they’re going to be about such things as the viability of having a Latin American audience, the working conditions of our industry, and much more. Here’s a few pictures to give you an idea of what you can expect in the near future:
Podcast
The podcast we’re producing is called En busca de Porko (Looking for Porko). It’ll be mainly a Spanish-language affair, but if you are kind enough to follow us we promise we’ll have some English-language episodes as well. (You can enable subtitles for the trailer.)
The podcast is about Porko, a now retired Argentine indie game dev who made several games in the early 2000s and who had a significant yet subtle impact in the Latin American and international gamedev community. In each episode, we meet with local devs to talk about their life and work, their design philosophies and interests, and their relationship and history with Porko’s games.
If that sounds interesting, you can subscribe to Matajuegos on YouTube or follow the podcast on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, Spreaker, SoundCloud or feed the RSS to your app of choice.
Dates
Next week is GDC 2019 and our attention, as that of the gaming world, will be utterly focused elsewhere , but on Wednesday the 27th we will be releasing our En busca de Porko’s first episode. Our first video will follow the week after that. From there our release schedule will return to what it was right before our virtual vacation, from which we’re very happy to be returning.
Image: La Mort de César (Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1867)