Over the last few months, we’ve been working to grow Not Your Mama’s Gamer; we’ve completed a top-down redesign, added new features, begun streaming more regularly, and we’re working to organize our archives for better navigation (and to make sure some of our best older work gets the attention it deserves).
But the site itself is not new. Not Your Mama’s Gamer, the brainchild of Samantha and Alex, was designed as a space that would bring scholarly endeavors in line with personal passion, a space that would combine feminist interrogation of games and the games community. They, and the rest of the staff, have long believed that the only way to make a positive change in games is to bring together scholars, industry folks, and enthusiasts in a space conducive to open and honest conversation, and in 2013, those efforts began to receive deserved recognition, as Samantha and Alex were awarded the Michelle Kendrick Award for Outstanding Digital Production and Scholarship for their work on the site.
But there’s only so much we can do on our own without resorting to ads or traditional sponsorship. We have plans and ideas to grow the site even further, to bring in new voices and to create more original content, but we lack the funds to pay columnists and guests, and to buy equipment that will help create a better podcast as well as regular video content, and so we have decided to launch on Patreon. Patreon allows fans and users to “tip” a small amount of money each month, often in exchange for rewards such as early access to podcasts, site updates, physical goods, and more.
For four years, we’ve not only been volunteers, but we’ve been paying for the privilege. And it is a privilege to be here, to have a voice, to know there is someone out there, listening. But we’re asking you now to stand with us now, to be a part of that effort, to help us cover the basic costs of maintaining the site and upgrading equipment, to help us grow with new staffers and new features. Today we’ve released not only our podcast, but also an original video, a critical Let’s Play of Life Is Strange: Out of Time, co-created so as to deepen the analysis through conversation. This is the kind of thing we’d like to be doing more often, with more games, but our equipment is limited. With reader support, we can do so much more, and so we’re asking, please. Help us show you everything we can do.
Thank you for reading. You can access the Patreon at any time by clicking the new support page in the upper menu bar.
