Announcement: Zoya is leaving Gamesbrief

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I’ve been working at Gamesbrief for four years. Nicholas first hired me in 2011 to help as an assistant, but over the next year, we developed a new set of goals for the site – we hired more people, and created a team that would turn the site from Nicholas’s personal blog into an evergreen resource with free content and a range of books and services that empower developers to thrive in an age when games are largely consumed for free.

Now around 20,000 people visit the site every month to access resources such as the free-to-play spreadsheet, the design rules for free-to-play games, and our best guest posts on running a games business, as well as Nicholas’s internationally-acclaimed expert analysis on the present and future of games and other media. For thousands of developers around the world, Gamesbrief is an indispensable source of insight. I’m immensely proud to have been Deputy Editor of a site that people truly value.

With Gamesbrief established as a resource, there is much less need for an editor of ongoing, regular content updates. So it’s time for me to move on. To that end, I want to tell you about two different projects that I’ll be working on in the near future: my translation practice, and a critical publishing project with an experimental games studio.

Translation

For the past few years I have been actively participating in building the conversation about games criticism and cultural history. Some of my most successful writing has been what I call “interlingual criticism” — bridging cultural gaps in the games industry by interpreting critical writing in other languages.

Outside of my work as a writer and editor, I’ve been working as a translator from Japanese to English since 2009. I came to games after doing an undergraduate degree in Japanese at Cambridge, because I was drawn to unpack how games portray cultural histories, and how the games industry itself works as a global trade network. Using my Japanese language skills to help people working in games is always a joy — whether that’s localisation, translating correspondence, or even translating classical poems for a game about robots.

I’ve decided to integrate my interlingual critical writing and my translation services into one place; you can learn more at my new site, secaican.com. Get in touch using the contact form there to chat about how I can help you with your next cross-cultural project.

Critical publishing

A couple of weeks ago, I announced at the blog of Silverstring Media that we will be expanding my two-year-old monthly ezine Memory Insufficient into a publication that will bring critical and historical writing into closer conversation with game design practice.

Silverstring is a game developer working in new media and experimental games, and a design consultancy working on a variety of interactive projects – from public institutions such as the Lewis and Clark Library in Montana, to IGF-nominated indie developers such as Lazy 8 Studios (Extrasolar) and Brace Yourself Games (Crypt of the Necrodancer).

Together, we aim to not only bring a critical and historical awareness to game design, but enable critical writing to thrive and grow. To learn more, read our manifesto at Silverstringmedia.com.

By far the most rewarding work this past four years has been talking with game developers and together making sense of complex creative problems. From now on, I’ll be focusing professionally on work that brings me into productive conversation with the craft of making and publishing games. Follow either of the links below to find out more about  how we could work together.