But not out out, it seems.

This is my first newsletter from outside of the games industry (or publishing, or magazines, or whatever). I assumed everyone would immediately blacklist me now that I can’t necessarily splash games across beautiful pages in a national magazine, but that doesn’t seemed to have happened just yet. Which is great!

We have a few new subscribers – all of which are handsome and delicious. You should check out the games page over here: https://adapress.itch.io/ . The Taming of The Slugiraffe might be why you’re here, but if not have a look.

We’ve sold two copies of this game digitally. We think that’s a bit mad, as it seems to have happened totally organically and isn’t linked to the originl crowdfunding in any direct way. Thank you if you’re one of those people who bought one of our games.

I’m going to be at UK Games Expo on Friday, I’ll be on the Talking about Books about Games panel, it’s on at 11am in the Panda Theatre. We’ll be working out whether it’s worth writing anything down about games at all. Join us to find out our verdict! If we decide ‘no’ it will become illegal to write about games, so it’s pretty nailbiting stuff for those in the industry.

Beyond that I hope to be able to wander the halls a bit. If you’re also wandering around at UKGE on Friday, get in touch, I might be able to play a game. Imagine that! My DMs are open on twitter.

These last couple of weeks on Twitter people have been saying weird things like ‘there’s no/little criticism in games’. These comments and the people agreeing with them are often people who don’t seem to be in the same game circles I am in where I consider the level of criticism to be quite decent (even if no one reads it). Importantly I don’t mention this as a way to say those people are wrong or otherwise, but just to highlight that there’s so many circles, groups, movements and distinct ‘communities’ within the hobby/industry and the overlap between each of these can be minimal or non-existant.

I wasn’t part of the Google+ era of TTRPG communitites, but I was on the platform and studying it (I worked in online marketing/comms/content/communities at the time). And all it was missing was a reason to be there. For some people they found their community (like in the TTRPG community, or for drone flying specialists apparently). It was a failure in the end because it thought it was twitter or facebook of the time – a kind of mass media that’s for ‘everyone’ or where ‘important stuff gets talked about’. Had it been seen as what it should have been by Google, an innovative way of sharing multiple community interests and been kept on as such, it might well have been the perfect thing for right now.

I’m sure that Google+ isn’t the answer to the disparate way that the TTRPG community is spread out, but its death has something to do with the way the community is so dislocated now. The answer is probably to just have a few too many books in your house and to talk to real people in the community around you. Whatever happens online is probably just for fun.

Thanks for reading.