Short Term Changes

Hey all!

I wanted to let you know that there are some changes happening here at Thoughty, changes that I hope will be temporary. As you may know, I’ve been running Thoughty in some form for about eight years, more intensely for the last six. It can often seem like a slow, easy job, but there’s a lot more work behind the scenes doing stuff like juggling interviews and researching games and constantly researching game community and culture. But.. your nonbinary boy here is pretty wiped out.

The last two years of Thoughty have been wracked with stress over some of the major crises in games, as I have been personally affected by some bad shit that happened, especially with the effect on my mental health. Plus, trying to arrange interviews has become even more challenging – as I try more and more to interview marginalized creators, I have to deal with the fact that those interviews are more likely to take twice or three times as long, get dropped, or need to be rescheduled because marginalized creators are super overloaded. This makes it harder to keep things on schedule, and it also can be pretty exhausting constantly chasing people down and feeling like I’m just bugging people for interviews when they obviously have better things to do. It’s hard on me as an interviewer. And man, Zine Quest 2 was rough…

I also know that I have been slower in my responses. Since my accident in 2017, keeping up with written communication is harder, especially if it’s combined with stress, and I have been struggling with my own mental and physical health. This means that I have several reviews I’ve just put aside because reviews involve a lot of reading (which is very hard since my head injury), I have not been able to seek out interviews as much and have had to rely more on requests for interviews (which have been pretty great!), and I have not created a lot of additional content that I wanted to.

While I love interviewing, I also have felt kind of… icky about the fact that so much of my interviewing is strictly driven by Kickstarters and capitalism. The Kickstarters can be stressful for timing if the interview goes slow, but the bigger part is that sometimes I struggle with supporting Kickstarter and organizations like it when they’re doing things like trying to prevent union formation in their company. And even though I do love itchio, it’s still just about selling things – there’s a lot of pressure to be successful financially in the industry, and I feel it too. I feel strange sometimes being personally opposed to making our work be about its financial value, then framing interviews as focused on how to buy things – but it would be unfair to interviewees not to highlight their work and try to get people to invest in them!

All of these various things have made me worry – maybe I’m just no longer fit to run Thoughty, maybe I need to find a new person to run it, maybe it needs to shut down. It’s possible some of these are true. I am not ready to make those decisions though!

I have a couple more interviews to release, but aside from the occasional interview through the requests and my own movement to feature more Black creators, I’m currently planning to back off of doing timely project interviews as my primary purpose for the blog, and suspending reviews. I want to talk more about game theory and my own game work, plus my experiences playing games and how they influence my thoughts on design. This should be temporary, because I do actually rely on the funds from Thoughty and I do not expect people to stick around for my ruminations – I know the primary interest is promoting people in the community and making people aware of Kickstarters that are currently happening.

However, I am hoping it will give me a break and allow me some time to recover from the stress of interviews that have felt like a strain for all involved. I want there to be enthusiasm, and more timeliness, when I return to asking people questions about their projects! One permanent change is Friday Hi-Day is obviously dead – the response was virtually nonexistent and that was emotionally draining. It’ll be archived and maybe someday something better will exist in its place.

Thank you all for understanding! I hope you’ll stick with me through this, and understand that this is the only way I can think of to address the burnout I’m experiencing. If you go, please check in someday to see when the typical content has returned!

<3