2014, it turns out, was a big weird year of a lot of awful stuff and a few very cool, not so awful things. Here’s what it looked like for me, as a list of highlights mostly pertaining to this blog.
In January, I did a reflection on my relationship to HP Lovecraft and his fiction in light of his racism. I also wrote some brief remarks on an assorted collection of music videos.
A few months later, in April, I released a quiet little Twine game called Patrick. That same month I published a brief academic piece about replayability at First Person Scholar.
In May I began reading for my PhD qualifying exams, providing a little reading of some 16th century translations of Ovid and the peculiarly alienating effect the poem’s structure seems to have on certain elements of everyday life.
This was followed in June by more quals reading, with a reflection on the meaning of the figure of Guy Fawkes.
In July I went back in time and republished the first piece of fiction I ever sold, a horror story about zombies.
August saw the end of my exams reading and a loose, baggy monster of a post about the affective experience of gameplay as Ngai’s “stuplimity,” an incredibly important development for me that’s still influencing the way I’m theorizing games. At the end of August, a very awful thing happened in the world of videogames.
In September, I wrote about that very awful thing in a way that branched from my earlier piece on games and affect. I also passed my PhD qualifying exams, and since then have been chewing my nails off over the prospectus, which I will turn in this coming semester.
In October, I released a massive Twine game called The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo. The response to it was more than what I was prepared for, and certainly more than what I was expecting. I was incredibly fortunate to have Kim Parker on board for the art, and in the end we were covered in Kotaku, Polygon, Rock Paper Shotgun, Wired, The Sydney Morning Herald (?), and very recently named Paste’s #1 Indie Game of the Year. I think I can honestly speak for Kim when I say we were both floored by the incredible reception of this game, and I’ve been deeply moved by all the people who’ve contacted me personally to let me know what the game meant for them.
In November, The Uncle Who Works for Nintendo bit me in the ass. Or rather, Amazon’s cloud services did. Because of the increased traffic to my hosting, I had to move some of the sound files to Amazon’s S3 service, which did not notify me when I went well above and beyond the basic bandwidth caps for the month. However, people were again spectacular in ways I did not anticipate — and generously donated the funds necessary to help me pay my rent that month, while JayIsGames kindly took over hosting duties. UWWFN continued to exert its pull, as I guested on the wonderful podcast Justice Points to discuss the project and general social justice issues in gaming.
In December, First Person Scholar posted the transcript of a scholarly roundtable on the GamerGate fiasco in which I participated. I also made a Twine ghost story for you. And then I wrote this post.
Looking back over all that stuff, I realize I had a fairly productive year, despite feeling like I rarely get anything done and the fact that I go entire months without posting on this blog. What seems particularly intriguing to me, in retrospect, is how it clearly highlights the divergent professional and scholarly interests that are increasingly coming to define my work and my presence — Renaissance drama, the study of literature and culture, the study of games and contemporary digital media, and the production of artifacts in those media that, in strange ways, reflect my attempts to bridge the gaps of the discourses I am constantly trying to navigate.
It was not a year I expected, but I don’t this was a year anyone expected, or hoped for. But I was incredibly fortunate to receive the attention and support of so many people, and I hope to pay that forward as we approach 2015.
And finally, I have to say I would not be here without the love and support of my partner, who remains steadfastly by my side even when I quote Zizek while making dinner, even when I make comparisons between her family dynamics and Shakespearean tragedies, even when I stay up until two in the morning tearing my hair out over Twine code, and even when I plowed her new car into a yellow caution pole in a parking garage in August. Without her grace and good humor I don’t know what would become of me.