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Zoya Street
Home   >   Sandbox   >   Support a history of mobile games

Support a history of mobile games

By on July 22, 2014

Back the project

Hey. Zoya here.

When I’m not working at Gamesbrief, I’m usually doing historical and critical writing about games, either independently or with magazines like Hyper (Australia) and Comics and Gaming (Canada). I’ve written one book about the Dreamcast, and more recently finished a mini-book about energy mechanics called Delay.

Today I’ve launched a crowdfunding campaign for another book. It’s going to be about the history of mobile games before the app store. I’m partly interested in this period because the app store clearly changed so many things about how games are distributed and marketed. I’m also interested for sort of the opposite reason: I think that a lot of the ways that the industry works now actually have their roots in how things were before the app stores came about.

I think that a lot of that has to do with people who don’t consider themselves gamers but who nevertheless played games on their phones. Mobile games history gives us this really great opportunity to think about cultural change from a bigger perspective, rather than focusing on core gamers and big companies. I’m interested in how a complex and well-researched history of mobile games could shake up the way we see games history in general.

If that sounds good to you, please go and back the project on Indiegogo. If you haven’t read those two other books I mentioned earlier, for the next week only you can get them bundled in a special reward tier!

About Zoya Street

I’m responsible for all written content on the site. As a freelance journalist and historian, I write widely on how game design and development have changed in the past, how they will change in the future, and how that relates to society and culture as a whole. I’m working on a crowdfunded book about the Dreamcast, in which I treat three of the game-worlds it hosted as historical places. I also write at Pocketgamer.biz and The Borderhouse.