Other Work

Recent research and … Star Wars (of course)

Since moving to Montana, I’ve come to the general conclusion that academics are like wolverines (well, at least academics in my fields): we like our space. We really, really like our space. One might say we’re ridiculously, fiercely protective of that & may in fact get pretty damn grumpy when we don’t get it. I’m currently knee-deep in a week that is making me want to crawl under a blanket and not come out – in the midst of a month that’s doing the same – mostly because my calendar app looks like someone else’s calendar got imported on top of mine. It’s forcing me to be really productive, which I appreciate (I’ve gotten TONS done in the past couple of days!), but I’m also realizing how loosey-goosey my week must look to a person on the usual 9-5.

In any case, amidst generalized work insanity & some personal nonsense, some recent stuff of import:

Jeff Wasserstrom (UC Irvine) was kind enough to think of me (well, more accurately, the Star Wars lianhuanhua) when the world was abuzz with speculation on the latest Star Wars premiere in China. While it’s a little weird to have a random purchase be my calling card since 2014, I’ve just gone with it – Jeff interviewed me for the Los Angeles Review of Books China blog, in the hilariously titled “Darth Vader and the Triceratops,” which came out a few days before my birthday (nice little birthday present, a new line on the ‘Press Appearance’ section of the CV. Thanks, Jeff!). There was also an amazing article in the Japan Times that a fellow UCSD Modern Chinese history-er pointed me towards, on the artist behind the lianhuanhua! Entitled “Red ‘Star Wars’: How China used pirate comic to promote science in 1980s,” I was a little sad to see no mention of a little post that went viral, but still – cool to discover more history about this thing that I will apparently be dealing with forever.

Shortly after that came out, my first academic article in eons came out – relating to stuff I’ve already yammered about a lot here in a much more casual format. “The Game People Played: Mahjong in Modern Chinese Society and Culture” is available at Cross-Currents (open access!). A quick plug: the Cross-Currents editorial staff were models of efficiency & great to work with, and the whole process was really pleasant. It’s not necessarily the article I dreamed of publishing, but for something that was mostly a hacked back version of a 3rd year grad school research project, I did OK. Thanks to Amanda Shuman, Chris Bateman, and Reed Knappe for a lot of good feedback while I was getting it ready for publication. And of course, that seminar from oh-so-many-years-ago – it makes me a little misty eyed remembering it!

I did want to include a couple of images I couldn’t in the article – paired below with the relevant portions of the article.

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The association between mahjong and baser social elements was not confined to Chinese observers alone. In 1925, the Japanese professor Aoki Masaru commissioned a series of paintings—later published as Pekin fuzoku zufu [Illustrations of Beijing customs]—depicting many aspects of life in Beijing. One series of three images illustrates some pleasurable (and morally suspect) pastimes: sandwiched between two well-dressed gentlemen inspecting beauties spilling out from behind a curtain in a “tea house” and opium smokers lounging while puffing on their pipes is a lively game of mahjong (Aoki 1964, unnumbered plate). It doesn’t seem accidental that mahjong is slotted alongside a teahouse of ill repute and opium. And yet, by the twentieth century, mahjong not only was attracting players from the upper echelons of Chinese society, but had fans in Japan and the West, as well. Despite being a trifling matter, mahjong was a concern for reformers because it cut across class, gender, and geographical boundaries.

And on one of my favorite cartoons:

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At the same time, some writers recognized that mahjong was merely a symptom, not the cause, of problems faced by urban residents, particularly women. In a compelling Women’s Voice article from 1947, the reader is drawn to a cartoon labeled “Still Comrades” (“Naiyi” 1947, 18). Four women hunker down over a mahjong game, complaining about their husbands. “My husband’s a refrigerator,” one says. “My husband is as cold as the snow of the Himalayas,” grouses another, while the next states that her husband is like a block of marble. “My husband is hot as a volcano,” declares the last, “but he only uses his heat on the body of his secretary.” Mahjong is simply a facilitator for the conversation happening at the table, and it is this social quality that the article takes up in discussing mahjong clubs.

On the minor agonies & ecstasies of editing and being edited

pillow book-sei shonagonLast night, I finished a third and (hopefully – barring minor skims) final major read through/edit job on a friend’s manuscript. I’ve been a little surprised with myself: it’s been a rather emotional process, and I’m not even invested in it beyond investment in the person who’s written it. It won’t go on my CV, and it’s not like this is the project of a grad school friend, which I’ve watched from its inception. I came in at the point at which it was mostly done, marked things up, asked stupid questions, dispensed advice (as if I knew what I was talking about), wrote “clunky” a lot in the margins, and stole the techniques of my advisors, when they reminded me I was being repetitive in my prose. I frequently felt bad he was stuck with me as an editor, she of stupid questions – I could see parallels to my own academic universe, and ferried loads of books over to him (“Cite this! Look at that! This is a really important book, what do you mean you’ve never heard of it?”), but couldn’t comment much on content beyond my initial reactions (I was terribly pleased with myself upon catching a typo relating to the Crimean War: about the extent of my abilities when it comes to Russian or Ottoman history). Oh, I like this. How interesting. Reminds me of X. I’m confused. Don’t assume your readers know as much as you. I only watched the last part of the process – cleaning up a mostly final draft, being offered a contract by a press, getting edits back from the copy editor. It’s been terribly instructive, as I start plinking away at my own nascent manuscript, waiting until I’m hopefully in the same final throes.

This process of editing – this particular round, which was on a pretty tight deadline for both of us, and the stakes seemed higher than ever because it all seems so final (I assume once this version gets shipped off, that’s more or less it: what you see is what you get in hardback) – has been difficult, and made me ponder my own work and working patterns. I don’t take criticism well, by which I mean I usually want to throw up before, during, and after reading it. It’s not that I don’t like getting feedback on my work, or that I don’t incorporate ideas (indeed, I often find it difficult not to attempt a fix on all the problems reviewers point out; I want to answer all the questions – even the big broad meandering ones, not really designed to be answered so much as point towards future research possibilities – they pose). But I often read reviews with my fingers splayed over my eyes – so I can cover them if the sinking feeling in my stomach gets too much to bear. This past year, I served as a referee for journal articles for the first time, and I tried to be so very careful in my comments and critiques. But with someone I know well (or at least, better than the anonymous-to-me author of a journal article), with my pen at the ready – and knowing I have the possibility of (as we usually do) flipping through it and boiling down my main points in person – I am much less restrained. “You’re doing it again!!” I’d write in response to some individual quirk of prose that had driven me crazy on previous drafts.

Why is this here? What does this mean? Footnotes 24 and 25 are missing. This is muddled. This should be moved to your conclusion. Move this to chapter 2. Clunky. Awkward. Rephrase. Awk. What? Weird phrase. I don’t agree with your terminology. Clarify. Confusing. I don’t understand.

Things I had perhaps thought of when reading those anonymized journal articles, but wrote carefully crafted narratives – utilizing the general formula many of us try to deploy with our students, say something good, say something critical, write how they can improve next time – to counteract; narratives that softened the blow of the criticism, of that final line saying revise and resubmit, or anything less than an enthusiastic accept for publication.

My friend called the other night, right after I’d finished reading a chapter that he’d told me he’d improved greatly after a lot of work, and the conversation seemed to go something like this:

“Hey, what’s up? What’re you into?”

“YOUR MANUSCRIPT IS AWFUL, AND I AM GOING TO EXPLAIN WHY IN EXCRUCIATING DETAIL.”

Of course, I didn’t actually say that (nor did I think it). He sounded tired, and a bit defeated, and I wondered if I should’ve just burbled pleasantries about all the things I liked at him. After we hung up, I sat and stared at my lap desk, with a manuscript – the written embodiment of years and years and years of work and sweat and tears and research and hopes and all sorts of things – spread over it, marked up with cranberry ink, and thought about all those times I had read comments on my work, from the advisors I both adored and was terrified of, from between splayed fingers.

❖

My undergrad mentor has, as I’ve explained, been a veritable font of wisdom from the first years of our acquaintance (about a decade ago, which seems crazy!) to the present. Her advice and commentary while I was in grad school always came with an extra bit of weight attached to it: we went through the same PhD program. Especially in times of crisis, it can be terribly comforting to hear from someone who’s been right where you were (literally! In the same seminar room!); someone who comes in with a certain specific perspective, not simply generalized from their experience at a different institution, with different advisors. It’s pretty rare, even in the small world subfields of disciplines can be, and it was a great comfort for me, a champion worrier.

At some point after my second year, I was grousing generally about the program and where I thought I fit into it, wondering why – despite working my tail off and making some real improvement after my first year! – it seemed like there was always something else to fix, something else to do (that I wasn’t doing), and nothing ever seemed to be good enough to garner a (desperately wished for) intellectual pat on the head. She told me something I now tell my own students: there comes a point in life where you won’t have anyone – no advisors, no fellow grads (who read your work because they have to, it’s part of seminar) – reading your stuff, giving you feedback (good and bad), and being generally invested in making you the best you can be, from the earliest days of a project. So enjoy it while it lasts; also remember that you’re going to have to rely on yourself in the future, without the protective casing of seminar. And so those years of “never being good enough” are actually good training for taking a critical look at your own work, in the absence of a room full of smart people looking at it for and with you. In academia, sure, you wind up with external reviewers, or anonymous reviewers, for this that and the other (and even the anonymous ones may, in fact, know who you are, and you may, in fact, be able to figure out who they are), and you’re generally getting feedback on your work at a certain point. But this is very different than working through the early drafts with not just luminaries in your field reading them (as your advisor – someone invested in your success), but six or seven or eight other people who are in the trenches with you.

I spent my first year and a half of grad school on heightened alert, my already defensive tendencies magnified by my fear, anxiety, and shame about being the worst grad student ever (in retrospect, I was certainly not “the worst ever,” but I was still pretty damn bad on most counts). It made the peer review section of our research seminar excruciating. I was essentially told by an advisor to knock it off; that I was smart, and probably had a future, if I stopped shooting myself in the foot by being reactive and defensive. So my second year, I tried really, really hard just to be open to those sessions, not take critiques of my work as a critique of my considerable failings as an academic and human being, and soak up all those comments. The product of that was quite good, my first foray into Li Huiniang. I still hear one of my advisors saying – in response to a first or second draft of some section – “You write like you speak – stream of consciousness!” when I’m writing. That comment didn’t fundamentally alter the way I work – my early drafts are almost always waterfalls of prose and it’s just the best and easiest way for me to work, to at least start getting ideas down – but I hear that comment when I’m editing, too. I internalized all those comments, the years of hearing feedback from known, trusted people who knew my work (and more importantly, knew me), and can generally apply it to my solitary editing activities. But I do miss those voices, and the process of sitting around our familiar table (where it seems I spent so much of my twenties; certainly spent a lot of time growing up).

❖

BerlinThe process of writing a dissertation is the first exercise in that lonely world of going it (mostly) alone, albeit with the safety net of advisors and committee. But a lot of us wind up far afield from the physical location of our grad school, and it can be isolating – the three years of being a PhD candidate were pretty miserable for me, and a lot of it boiled down to being lonely and wanting people to talk to about my work on the level I was used to from coursework. I was (and am) lucky for having a friend (also far afield from her grad school & cohort) who has been the world’s best editor. I’m pretty sure she knows my work better than I do, or can at least articulate it better!

I went to visit her in Berlin a few summers ago, and had a week of glorious weather and very long walks (she is a marathon runner; I am chubby and out of shape, but love to walk and walk and walk, especially in beautiful places like Berlin’s Tiergarten). We did a lot of walking and a lot of talking and enjoyed each other’s company; it was also good for my work. And, in a period where I routinely went weeks without leaving the house, she was my lifeline to some semblance of sanity, and also my faithful critic and conscientious editor, albeit on Skype (the Tiergarten was preferable, but one takes what one can get). She didn’t just get a singular sentence of thanks in the dedication section of my dissertation, she got a whole paragraph on my thankfulness for her work on my behalf, and the fact she exists in my life, and those times spent in the Shanghai Municipal Archives, and that we had a really wonderful golden week of walking and talking and drinking Weissbier and eating cassis sorbet, and how much I wished we could do that more often.

❖

I talked recently with another friend about the necessity of doing things without the expectation of something in return right now (what we term “service” in the Ivory Tower). I noted I’d been thinking about it while doing this editing, and some other things this summer and over the course of this past year. I’m probably a bit too quick to say yes to things that don’t even earn me a line on my CV or on my annual review like “service,” and all those articles on the Chronicle about life as a woman in academia make me think sometimes that maybe I’m falling into that trap. But I have a hard time being extremely protective of my time – I am protective enough, but I also know myself well enough at this point to know that locking myself away with no distractions generally leaves me staring at blank walls, blank Word docs – in short, not being particularly productive despite shuffling everything off my plate. It seems that people are constantly telling me to shuffle more and more off, to focus, focus, focus!, and all I can think is how boring that would be, and how lonely, and I already went through that with the dissertation, and I think another round of that misery might well kill me.

And really, when I total up the time I spend on those minor things – saying to a colleague, “Yes, I’ll help you set up your website,” for instance – or even more major things, like “Yes, I’ll read your manuscript,” they don’t really take up that much time. I’ve poured a lot of effort into this final draft because I care about the person who wrote it, and want the final work to be the best it can be for his sake; but I’ve also dedicated so much time to it because it’s summer, and I’m flitting from task to task in any case, and I can afford to pour six hours a day into combing through prose. There’s a fixed deadline in sight; this won’t go on forever; and it would be horrendously selfish of me to say “Do it yourself.”

I don’t think saying “Yes, I’ll read your manuscript on a subject I know nothing about” last November was a sign of being saddled with or internalizing certain expectations that come with being a female academic (that we’ll be nurturing and helpful, for instance); it was more that I understand the value of having someone read your work and give you feedback. It was a kind thing to do, and I suppose it was a generous thing to do; but I’ve benefited from having people do the same for me, and it didn’t really occur to me to say no. I generally assume people will approach my requests in something of the same manner. And if they don’t – well, I know to dial back the amount of effort I’m willing to put in for them.

And I think now that even the cranky marginalia is a generous thing, possibly the most generous thing: I realize now, in a way that I didn’t then, that those years of critique, the underlined sections letting me know just how clunky my prose was, the skeptical looks when I was explaining some half-baked thesis, came from a place of really caring about my work. And in some respects, represented a certain amount of belief in my talent and potential: the path of least resistance when editing is the intellectual pat on the head, the “Yes, yes, it’s fine, fine.” But that, of course, is not what leads to any measurable improvement. And I’m very grateful for all the people over the years who have read my work with a critical eye; I hear their comments in my head now, and it makes my work – done now in a much more independent manner – better.

When I hit the last page of the conclusion, I wrote, feeling plucky and pleased with myself for having gotten through the whole thing in pretty good time:

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What I maybe should’ve written was what a good book it is (despite my exasperated comments), and how I think it’s an important book, and how I hope people outside of his specialties will read it, and that I think he’s a brilliant person doing pretty singular stuff. But though all of that is true, I think my cranky marginalia is probably a better mark of the esteem in which I hold it: it’s more effort than the platitudes, true as they are.

It took me a long time to learn that. I was tickled when he told me, working on a previous draft, that he could anticipate my response: just like I can hear my advisors and professors and fellow grad students and Amanda! The fact that I carry those voices with me, all those comments written over the years, means that people cared enough about me and my work to want to make it better. It was a gift of a very particular sort, and perhaps not as immediately satisfying as concrete affirmations of my value, but irreplaceable: one of relative self-sufficiency in taking my work and making it the best it can be. Working in isolation, yet not. It’s one I’m immensely grateful for, and one I try – and largely succeed, I hope – to pay forward.

Placeholder & recent writing

From Benjamin Breen's interpretation of a 1981 photo of Hu Zhifeng as Li Huiniang

From Benjamin Breen’s interpretation of a 1981 photo of Hu Zhifeng as Li Huiniang

As I’m currently in the frantic final stages of writing my dissertation (for a 26 July defense – grad school is almost over! I still can’t quite wrap my head around it) as well as trying to get my life in order for a big move to beautiful Bozeman, Montana to take up an assistant professorship at Montana State University (I really can’t quite wrap my head around that – even though I’ve known since December, it’s still baffling and quite wondrous, and I’m thrilled with how things panned out this year), I’ve had less time to write than I’d otherwise like. But I have cranked out two pieces I was rather pleased with & they have both appeared in the past month:

The first was a reworked excerpt on a Chinese proposal, c. 1904, to “reform” the game of mahjong. The piece was pulled from my third year research paper (on mahjong & its social/cultural standing from the late Qing through the Republican period), which I have written about a few times here already. I was delighted to be included in Zoya Street‘s new effort, Memory Insufficient, an e-zine that hopes to encourage high-quality historical writing on games. With Zoya at the helm, we can look forward to a lot of good material & I hope the effort really takes off (it’s off to a splendid start, so I can’t wait to see how it develops). In any case, my piece “Mahjong as edutainment” can be found in the second issue, which is on Asian histories in games.

The second is a piece I’m particularly pleased with, on an important subject of my dissertation: the literary figure of Li Huiniang. I hardly ever say I’m happy with a piece of my own writing, but I’m really tickled with how well my recounting of the tale of Li Huiniang – moving from 1981 all the way back to 1381 – came out in “The Woman in Green: A Chinese Ghost Tale from Mao to Ming, 1981-1381.” Ages ago, Maura Cunningham put me in touch with Christopher Heaney, one of the founders & editors of a new journal of experimental and narrative history out of UT Austin (The Appendix). Chris was fantastic to work with, especially considering I was in a particularly flakey period, and the whole staff is putting out such a fantastically creative publication (I absolutely adore Benjamin Breen‘s take on one of my favorite photographs of Hu Zhifeng as Li Huiniang – a bit of his version is seen above, the original is below). I hope the piece was worth it in the end, and just like Memory Insufficient, I am really looking forward to seeing how The Appendix develops – they have already gathered some really impressive, very creative pieces in their first two issues. I hope I’ll have more fun things to contribute in the future. Getting out of the formal “academicese” box is so very valuable for us (and a blessed break from the dissertation for me).

And with that, it’s back to the grindstone. Where has the time gone?

Hu Zhifeng胡芝風 as Li Huiniang

Hu Zhifeng胡芝風 as Li Huiniang

Iron girls

'We are proud of participating in the founding of our country's industrialization!' (1954; from chineseposters.net)

I’ve been trotting through the history of Chinese women in the 20th century in preparation for a course I’m teaching this coming winter. Unraveling these narratives that have been put in service to nation building has been both a trip down memory lane (recalling the early days of my fascination with Chinese history) and diving into new-to-me secondary sources that have popped up in the past couple of years, while my attention was turned elsewhere. It’s been dovetailing nicely with other talk of gender, one that played out (for me, an outside observer) on Twitter and on blogs – I’m referring to THAT panel (“The Words We Use”) at Freeplay 2011, a games event in Australia.

[Some relevant links: Brendan Keogh’s take, Ben Abraham over at Gamasutra, a post by Searing Scarlet, and lots of other links to be gleaned from those]

It’s been interesting, as a woman-journalist-that-once-was – I’m not sure I still count among the illustrious crew anymore, having mostly been resting on my laurels for the past few years, but I was once – interesting and sad and irritating and all sorts of things.

I was never made to be uncomfortable at Kotaku – part of that was my own design (and listening to Ian Bogost’s admonition not to read the comments! – which I pass along on Twitter to this day), part of it was the fact that I generally shied away from writing about gender and sex, part of it was the fact that most of the audience (if not always the most vociferous) weren’t into making irrelevant, sexist commentary. I did do at least one long form essay on the subject of sexuality and gender, and I’m sure the comments were a mix of thoughtful conversation, some ‘What? This again?’, and a smattering of ‘tl;dr’ or ‘Maggie is such a pedantic bitch’ (I wonder sometimes if the vitriol that was occasionally directed at me for looking down on my audience and thinking Kotaku readers were stupid and generally being a stuck up bitch would have been lobbed had I been male; I honestly don’t know). I think I wrote that under the ‘Everyone must produce feature articles’ phase of my employment, and I had been thinking about eroticism in Chinese movies (specifically, the subtle foot squeeze in Red Sorghum (红高粱 Hong gaoliang) and the wonderful tension present in the Maggie Cheung/Tony Leung pairing of In the Mood for Love (花樣年華 Huayang nianhua)).

However, that was not my first brush with issues of sex and gender and games. My first experience with writing ‘criticism’ was on the subject of sex and gender in games; it wasn’t terribly sophisticated, but I was about 22, so I try and cut myself a little slack. It appeared on Slashdot, and the comments literally made me cry. I remember being too horrified and hurt to even look away. It probably was a stupid essay, and perhaps was only parroting things that had been said before (and better), and almost certainly wasn’t a shining example of the genre. But I had never in all my life been subject to the kind of commentary thrown at me (and never since – whatever one wants to say about the Kotaku comments section, comments were moderated to a greater extent and people did get banned). ‘Clearly she just doesn’t get fucked enough,’ or ‘Must be a fat, bitter bitch – anyone have a picture?’ – and on and on and on. It was shocking and hurtful and offensive.

Here I will say that I have absolutely benefited from privilege-with-a-capital-P – maybe it shouldn’t have taken until I was 22 to realize that people who didn’t want to engage with me on an intellectual level would simply hurl insults based on my gender instead, but the only place this has ever happened to me personally is when writing about games. No academic paper reviewer, no matter how monstrous, would return an essay with the notation that ‘Clearly this author doesn’t get laid enough and probably does not fit into culturally accepted standards of beauty, which is obviously impacting her ability to engage with post-colonial interpretations of subjectivity.’ I realize some of this is just the vagaries of the internet, but honestly. I bristle at the implication that comes out sometimes, the one that says that we should just get used to it, and things will change … someday. In the meantime, toughen up, cupcake.

I hadn’t killed any kittens or mugged any grandmothers; I had simply been audacious enough to write an essay that was linked by Slashdot. An essay about what I as a woman who wrote about games would like to see in the games that I played. The nerve I had as a youngster.

Even Kotaku commenters weren't heartless enough to insult the world's cutest pit bull

In any case, that early experience had a rather large impact on how I conducted myself later. I generally think I flew pretty under the radar. At Kotaku’s E3 party in 2008, I hid outside on the smoking patio, sharing a couch with Mike Fahey and an assortment of people who passed by during the course of the evening. No one recognized me – a strange position to be in, since everyone else I worked with seemed so visible, but not an unexpected one. I avoided putting a face to my posts and making things ‘too’ personal, occasionally in stark contrast to my coworkers. The only photographic evidence readers got of me was my bookshelf (unimpeachably academic and wonderful!) and my dog (way too cute to insult).

I wonder if any of my male colleagues, the ones writing under their own names, ever felt nervous about putting a picture of themselves out there for public consumption. I did. I posted one picture of me as an adult on Kotaku, and that was with my goodbye letter – I was already halfway out the door, if someone wanted to call me a fat pig as a parting shot, more power to them (no one did). Even my user icon was a game character and not a photo. I liked sharing bits of my life with the audience, but I never wanted to be too out there – and by ‘too out there,’ I mean using a photograph of myself, not spilling out my deepest, innermost fears and dreams on there interwebs – lest it could be used against me.

Yes, that speaks deeply to my own personal insecurities, ones that are quite independent and alive separate from the sphere of games writing, but nevertheless: that run-in with utterly inappropriate, extremely hostile, very-much-tied-to-my-gender commentary did have a significant impact. I couldn’t – still can’t, actually – imagine anyone using my male colleagues’ bodies as criticism of their writing: ‘Brian Crecente’s opinions are stupid because he’s unattractive’; ‘Simon Carless must be fat and bitter, that’s why I don’t like his essay’; ‘I need to see a photograph of this Ben fellow before I determine my feelings about his writing.’ No, I don’t think everyone – or even a majority – of people in the industry, or people who follow blogs and critical discourse, would say (or even think!) such things. But it doesn’t take much of a minority, just a vocal one, to drown out all the other voices.

It saddens me that we’re still having the same conversations we had years ago, despite what seems to be an increase in visible female writers and critics.

But I agree with those that say people are ‘tired’ of the talk of sexism, it’s all been said before, and any current debate will simply rehash that. I am alarmed by the notion that “gender will stop being an issue when we stop acknowledging that there is a divide.” There is a divide. Refusing to acknowledge the divide just means … refusing to acknowledge it (the author more or less contradicts herself a few sentences later & appears to advocate for people speaking up, but this sort of idea – that talking about an issue is what propagates it – is definitely in play well beyond the game blogosphere. I think it’s a lie, a dangerous one at that, and we should stop throwing it out there. Not talking about an issue will never resolve it, just make it easier to ignore). But I do understand the dislike of talking about it, and the exhaustion with the subject. There is fatigue that sets in as we go round and round in circles and nothing ever really changes.

There’s a fine line here, at times a contradictory one, but I think it’s one that we collectively walk every day in different permutations. I am a woman. I don’t want people to flatten that out and not see my gender (because what usually happens when gender magically “disappears” is categories collapse into one appropriate one, the default being heterosexual male, with differing experiences ridiculed or ignored), but that’s not the only thing that defines me, or even the most important one. But it is part of me. I don’t often think of my gender in relation to my academic work, for example (primarily because I exist in a comfortable, supportive ecosystem in my program). But I am always aware that my experience has been shaped to larger and smaller degrees by being female. It’s not the most important characteristic I use to define myself by far, but it is more than just a box to check on standardized forms.

I’m currently reading a collection of essays published by acclaimed women writers who grew up under Mao – Wu Hui’s wonderful Once Iron Girls: Essays on Gender by Post-Mao Chinese Literary Women. The experiences and ruminations of these writers – most of whom were once told they were “iron girls,” that they held up half the sky, that they were equal (and indeed, did do everything that men did and then some; but ‘a new woman is just like a man’) – is packaged neatly and tightly. Some of the essays are absolutely brutal; most will at least give the reader pause. I’ve certainly been examining my own life in contrast. Here’s the introductory paragraph by an essay by Lu Xing’er called “Women and the Crisis”:

In recent years, I have been thinking about women’s issues and written about them in a fiction series. I plan to continue writing about these issues in the future. Indeed, since ancient times, woman has never failed to be a topic involving prolonged, heated discussions. I am sure that women will continue to be talked about, in depth and forever. However, women’s situation and future will see few fundamental changes, despite so much writing, thinking, and discussing.

I said “fundamental,” not superficial.

(Ouch)

I would like to think Lu is wrong. I’m hardly the poster child for optimism (if something can be worried about, I can worry about it like a true champion worrier/pessimist), but I would really, really like to think she’s wrong, both on a big scale and on a smaller scale like … the community that writes about videogames.

Here is a slightly more positive take on getting over the gender divide: “Androgyny” (which can also be rendered as “neutrality”) by Bi Shumin:

Androgyny is different from saying that women can do whatever men can do. This statement identifies women as a little boat managing to get close to the mens large ship. In contrast, androgyny is the lighthouse. Toward its welcoming lights both men and women move forward, helping and enabling one another, leaving no one behind.

I have been lucky in my academic career to not brush up against overt sexism from professors or classmates, as I mentioned above. Reading Katie Williams’ response to the Freeplay panel was painful – not because it reminded me of my own experience, but because it was so foreign, and no one ought to feel like that, nor should it be tolerated by those in a position of power. It underscores the futility of staying quiet. I wonder if we haven’t done ourselves a great disservice by distancing ourselves from the discussion, saying we’re not interested in those kinds of issues. I hasten to say that I would have no interest in focusing exclusively on gender issues, but sustained conversation could be a good thing – both in public and in more private (possibly ‘safer’) spaces. I’ve never had the opportunity to sit around with other female journalists and critics and talk about our experiences, and it’s something I would be interested in doing.

Obviously these issues go way, way beyond a conference in Australia and women who write about games. I hope one day, Lu Xing’er will be proved wrong. Until then, I’ll simply wish for thoughtful and sustained discussion on issues that impact all of us, female or not.

I was a blogger once, and young (II)

Part I: The bare bones of it (sort of)

It’s quite strange to be writing openly about all of this, but I guess aspects of it have come up quite a lot since I left (not necessarily related to me in particular, but life at a blog like Kotaku in general).  It’s a lot of navel-gazing and I feel a very silly and incredibly conceited in some respects, but in others it’s rather cathartic and useful to ruminate on that part of my life.  So, apologies for the self indulgence spreading over two posts. It also occurs to me that I probably make too much over “page views,” but it was how our “success” was measured, and the way I got used to thinking of myself & how I fit into the larger picture of Kotaku and the gaming blogosphere.

a. On intellectual background

My workspace in San Diego, in the midsts of final editing of my 2nd year research paper. Â Can't wait to see what Ben Abraham & ANT have to say about this!

I grew up with an incredibly intellectual mother (who, while not a member of the academy, is a historian) who instilled in me a deep and abiding love for the wonderful, invisible, essential thing of history, and also a love of cultural “stuff.”  This ranged from poetry to painting to music to architecture to furniture.  I joke that I was raised to be a cultural historian.  It’s not really a joke; it’s true.  I would’ve had to work very hard to outrun my upbringing, and indeed - I tried on other things over the years and none of them quite fit.  Certainly, the academic skill of approaching cultural production in a particular manner was honed in college, then further in grad school (and is an ongoing process), but the basics were there, I think, from a pretty young age.

My first independent intellectual passion was Latin.  I now teach students who sometimes struggle with how to take a 9th century poem about some guy’s cat and apply it to their lectures and textbooks (not, admittedly, always the easiest thing to do); the leap from “literature” to “history” is not always a smooth one (this goes for films and music – and games – as well).  My adventures in Roman literature taught me how to do that, or at least try.  I didn’t just love Catullus because he was funny and sad and wrote beautiful poetry; I also loved Catullus because I could read his poetry and it said something about a subject I wanted to know more about, but it was up to me to dig that out.  I started learning early on how to at least try and think critically about cultural production, and how it fit in with other topics.

It was my introduction to applying cultural production to historical studies.  It was also the only reason I didn’t flunk out of high school, because while I was barely scraping by in most every other class (due to boredom and lack of interest, particularly when it came to things like “doing homework”), I never had trouble getting good marks in Latin.  It even occurred to my mother, despairing over my future, that maybe since her offspring’s intellectual proclivities included translating authors who had been dead for 2,000 years and falling in love with Tolstoy, all was not yet lost.  Sure enough, things improved dramatically after I got out of high school and on to better things, like college seminars on “masculinity and power in the US” and “Roman historians: Caesar, Livy, Suetonius.”  So, gratias vobis ago, my wonderful Latin teachers, and my treasured old friends like Catullus and Horace and Vergil and Ovid – I wouldn’t be a Chinese historian if it weren’t for you.  I wouldn’t have found a weird little niche on Kotaku if it hadn’t been for you.

The more I read, watched, and studied, the more I had a hard time shutting off the academic side of my brain that was constantly humming away in the background, analyzing and making connections – even when watching “fluff.”  When I really started to play videogames, I approached them in much the same way I approached most every other piece of culture I consumed – and the intellectual side, likewise, didn’t really want to shut off.  It was pretty natural, then, that I gravitated towards work that approached games similarly (though much more sophisticatedly) to the way that I wanted to approach cultural objects of all stripes.

b. On becoming a niche writer

I suspect, if one were to go back through my earliest posts for Kotaku, you would find that they were trying to play more to the general readership (I haven’t done this, but I have a vague feeling that’s what I was doing).  Not because of any financial incentives, but I did want to make my boss and fellow writers happy and fit the mold, so to speak.  At some point pretty early on, I realized my page views were dismal (though steadily increasing – but they never got close to the views that other writers on the site got) and short of me totally setting aside my personal interests, I was never going to be widely read.  So I just started mining the blogs I liked, the things I read, the things that were interesting to me. And there was the practical matter I mentioned: other writers on the site weren’t posting from these sources, so there wasn’t the anxiety over ‘Oh no, they posted X, Y, and Z today that I was going to post.’

I did get lucky here: my boyfriend through most of my Kotaku tenure kept up on a lot of interesting things and introduced me to a number of blogs that would’ve taken me much longer to stumble upon on my own.  Leigh Alexander’s Sexy Videogameland, for example, was one of these (so while I get all the credit for helping to solidify Leigh’s early readership, at least insofar as Kotaku writers are concerned, my ex deserves the real lion’s share of that!  Thanks, Dave – I’m sure Leigh would thank you, too, if she could).  Between the two of us, I managed to build up a pretty respectable list of feeds I kept up on, and a lot of it was very different than the average post on Kotaku.  At some point it occurred to me in a more obvious manner that hey, I was posting stuff that wouldn’t be appearing on such a widely read site otherwise.

This is how I eventually wound up with a Mao Cow of my very own

That moment was probably when Ian Bogost IMed me to say “Thanks for posting my stuff.”  After I got over my fangirlish reaction of “OMGOMGOMG, Ian Bogost is talking to me!” and “Why is he thanking me?  He’s Ian freakin’ Bogost!  His body of work is amazing,” I responded with something insipid like “Well, I don’t always agree with everything you say, but I really like your work” (dur).

But it dawned on me that if someone like Ian Bogost gave me a polite nod to say thanks for flinging traffic his way (though Ian is a nice guy, so maybe he was just being polite), maybe all this stuff did need a lot more exposure on a place like Kotaku than I thought.  This is a double-edged sword, of course – I sometimes felt a little bad about throwing smaller blogs under the Kotaku bus.  I think the really sharp work itself forms an interesting ecosystem and it chugs along just fine without directing the people who read Kotaku to it.  Also, I knew people could be really nasty in comments and most of the writers weren’t asking me to link to their work – many of them were probably just as happy not to be involved with the wider blogosphere that Kotaku was part of.  Ethics of blogging?  In the end, I figured a lot of people who just wanted to say hateful things were frequently too lazy to actually go over to the other sites, and simply spewed their vitriol on Kotaku.  Unexpected traffic could be a problem, I’m sure, but I just hoped it all balanced out in the end (and I think it did).

c. On becoming a Chinese historian and a niche writer

One of Abraham’s questions was on how grad school impacted my approach to my work on Kotaku.  It did a couple of things, in retrospect – it put a new stress on a couple of issues that had been bubbling for me and introduced some new variables.

First, and probably most important, I told myself I would simply not post anything I would be embarrassed to have my academic reputation associated with.  It wasn’t that I thought posting about porn stars and sexy cosplay and lowbrow humor was beneath me, but I just couldn’t imagine someone from my academic universe googling my name and coming up with posts like that.  The fact I wrote about videogames was weird enough; writing about porn stars playing videogames would’ve been (would be) too much. While I posted plenty of things (including my own longform pieces) that weren’t up to quality standards set forth for our research projects, I’m not ashamed to have anyone I know in academia come across any of it. I once got (very kindly) nailed – before I got to grad school – for overestimating the anonymity and vastness of the internet (e.g., the ability to hide).  And that was before I wound up with my name attached, in a very public manner, to things I was writing – so losing any hope of anonymity at all.  It was an incredibly embarrassing flub, but a really valuable lesson to learn early on.  I never wanted to embarrass my advisors and other people important to me in academia.  It solidified my leanings towards esoterica.  Unfounded worries?  Perhaps; but it was something that certainly channeled my efforts away from certain directions.

Actually, let me clarify that: I would have posted about porn stars and sexy cosplay had it been framed in the right manner.  There are plenty of smart ruminations on gender, sex, and all sorts of potentially “lowbrow” (in other manifestations) topics in the blogosphere, and I did post a lot of that. What I did not post were articles about scantily clad women making sometimes questionably informed comments about AAA titles I didn’t play, with an attached photo gallery of them rubbing themselves on a 360 controller or PSP (among other things, it just seems this is one type of post that raises ire on a semi-frequent basis).  I don’t have a problem with that sort of stuff, I just wish people didn’t attempt to wrap it in the veneer of “But she’s a legitimate gamer, don’t you see!”  Don’t try and “justify” it at all; it is what it is, just like a lot of what I wrote was boring – if not to me personally, then to large chunks of the readership.  I didn’t try and make it something it wasn’t.  I posted calls for papers that 99% of the Kotaku readership couldn’t have cared less about, and other people posted lingerie-clad women that insulted some of the readership.  We did it because we could, we wanted to, we had the power to do such things, and we had posts to get out.  That’s OK.

Goatgate was hardly as charming as this little fellow (Zhao Mengfu, detail from "Sheep & Goat," Yuan dynasty)

But generally, the “gimme” headlines just weren’t the stuff I wanted to post and weren’t the kinds of things I wanted my name (one that is still very, very young in academic terms) pulling up as a top hit when people googled me – so there was little reason for me to compete with coworkers for those coveted, attention-grabbing posts.  Again, unfounded anxiety?  Maybe.  But I also have to say I found most of my “biggest” posts pretty unsatisfying – that is, the things that were way out of the zone of things I was interested in, but “someone” needed to post, and were attention grabbing enough to draw in more than my usual readers.  The example I remember most clearly was the God of War “Goatgate” “scandal” (I use that term loosely).  It got me a lot of page views that week, at least in terms of my usual – somewhere around 40,000 for that article alone.  My general reaction was “meh.” It was sensational and dull all at the same time, and I just didn’t care all that much.  Though I still cannot believe I used to have a job where I could post things with titles like “Sony Decapitates Goat, Raises Ire” and get paid for it.  In essence, I generally posted things I was interested in and that I wanted to read.  I don’t want to read about porn stars playing Madden.  Why would I want to post it?

Anyways, that segues into page views, which are an obsessive part of working for a blog.  On that particular aspect of writing, then, grad school did another thing for me.  A lot has been made of the bonus system at Kotaku, which I have tried to explain elsewhere.  When I first started writing there, I was paid a certain amount per post (which was predetermined – I did 12 posts a weekend, and that was that).  There were quarterly bonuses, but those were tied to overall site traffic – beyond that, there was some sort of calculation on how much a writer had contributed to that traffic, and that determined your bonus.  At some point (I don’t really remember when – a little less than a year into my tenure, maybe), there was a change in the bonus system – salaries were fixed, and then bonuses were paid to individuals based on their particular target number of page views.  I never got one of those checks, so I don’t really know how it worked.  I also want to underscore that my comments on this topic (both here and elsewhere) apply only to the time that I was working for Kotaku, between 2007 and 2008.  I have no idea what the system is now, and I don’t want people inferring from my comments something that may or may not be the case about the current setup.

Salary was not, as has been incorrectly reported in multiple places, fixed to page views.  I got the same amount of money every month, at least in base salary (and in practice, since I never had a lot of page views (thus no bonus), in total), regardless of whether I had 500,000 page views or 5.  It’s a testament to Brian Crecente that he kept me on as long as he did, since I’m pretty sure my “underperformance” was a fireable offense in the Gawkerverse.

OK, what in the hell does Gawker’s bonus structure have to do with grad school?  This is actually key to my blasé approach to page views (and why I wound up comfortably inhabiting a niche that was really unpopular compared to the bulk of the site).  Kotaku wasn’t my full time job.  I didn’t need it to make ends meet – I didn’t need it at all.  I had a salary – because I was a PhD student.  Yes, the money was absolutely very nice; I missed it when it went away – but I was never in danger of not being able to keep a roof over my head, or the dog in kibble, when it stopped.  In my particular life situation, the carrot of a bonus proved utterly ineffective – I didn’t need it, and the pursuit of it would’ve meant turning away from the things I was really starting to enjoy by that point.  I have always been mulish in my temperament, and the idea of a little bit of extra money (based on a system I never figured out in the first place) wasn’t worth abandoning what I was interested in.  I dug in my little heels and basically ignored the fact that bonuses existed.  If Brian had said, “Maggie, you’re really underperforming and this is a problem,” I would’ve had to reevaluate my stance.  As it was, he never did, and I always had the impression that everyone thought my penchant for posting “weird” stuff that no one else did was, if not valuable, at least contributing something.

Would I have wound up writing on the 1904 "serious game" edition of mahjong without Kotaku? Probably not.

On a more personal level, actually starting my formal graduate studies combined with the crash course I did in game studies (when I started posting about it on Kotaku) and made me say “Hm, maybe this is something I ought to pursue.”  Which of course led to me reading more, and thinking more, then reading more, then posting more, then reading more ….  A self-perpetuating cycle.  There are very few historians and very few China studies people in the field (and definitely very, very few Chinese historians), and the more I read from academics I respect – and other writers just doing smart stuff with games – the more I wanted to be part of it, too.  There was a hole to fill, a China-shaped one, and I could be someone to help fill it.  The more brilliant critical writing on games I saw, written by all sorts of people in the scattered little sphere that made up my sources, the more I wanted to be able to contribute to it, too.  It’s one reason I’ve come back to writing, over two years after I stopped.  It’s one reason I’ve been slowly picking up blogs I put down in December of 2008.  I really liked being part of that ecosystem, I liked a lot of the people I “met,” and I really liked engaging with smart people with interesting ideas.  I still do (so I’m back).

I certainly made great connections at UCSD thanks to Kotaku – e.g., I met my friend Stephen when, during the break for the first session of a seminar I was enrolled in and he was thinking of taking, I staggered outside to catch a breather.  As the elevator doors were closing far too slowly for my liking, he came running down the hall, saying “Hey, hey!  Are you Maggie Greene that writes for Kotaku?”  I said that I was (now trying to keep the elevator doors open, to no avail), and he just said, “Keep up the good work!”  I managed to squeak out a thanks as the elevator doors shuddered shut.  Kotaku helped me meet a lot of interesting people on campus, which was and is great fun and good for me, intellectually and personally.  It also really expanded the network of academics I knew beyond the bounds of UCSD, and at least writing for Kotaku gave me a little foot in the door.  It had later (positive) ripple effects on my fledgling academic career as a “proper” Chinese historian.  I think the sheer strangeness of that line on my otherwise standard history PhD student CV helped when it came to things like applying for dissertation fellowships – particularly when combined with proper “academic” work in the field of game studies, incredibly limited though mine is at this point.

I think it’s a little unfortunate I left Kotaku when I did; I’m in a much better position now to write about games than I was two or three years ago, when I was writing about games.  But, part of the reason I am in a better position is because I did write for Kotaku – it was an essential part of developing that side of my academic and intellectual interests.

d. On a “legacy” (?): We are thinking

I stopped writing for Kotaku when I was 25.  I’m 28 now.  I find the mere idea of me having a legacy at this point pretty hilarious, but my name does still come up from time to time in conversations here or there, so I guess that means I did leave one.  I certainly wasn’t thinking of leaving one, nor really sitting down and pondering my role in the vast universe of the blogosphere – well, not frequently and not terribly cogently, at least.

I didn’t start off wanting to be a game journalist.  I still don’t want to be a game journalist.  I wasn’t fulfilling any particular dream of mine to be a writer or anything else.  People used to send emails and IMs saying “How can I break into writing about games?”  I would think to myself, “Submit a writing sample based on Lu Xun and Chinese dresses to a young blog and see where it takes you?  How should I know?”  I just wanted to grow up to be a Chinese historian (and I still do – just one that happens to research games).

At the heart of my job, I was an aggregator. I didn’t write all the interesting things I posted about, I just had to find them, pull out a few quotes, write a few vaguely coherent sentences to bookend it (sometimes, not even that), and add a link.  It was production, but of a particular kind.  I knew that I wasn’t as smart, at least when it came to writing about games, as all the people I was linking to – I wasn’t producing the stuff, after all, just offering occasionally pithy commentary and sometimes clever titles.  Furthermore, I was just one more writer, out of a long list of writers, that had passed through Kotaku (I mean, check the Wikipedia page if you doubt me here).  I fell into the job by dumb luck, and I wasn’t any different than a lot of other people (except, perhaps, in having dismally low page views).  It’s not like I built up a readership by the sweat of my own brow and laboriously worked to “CHANGE THINGS!”.  I didn’t.  I was just a writer on a Gawker Media blog, another cog in that big wheel.

But I did wind up doing something – I got a lot of things out to a much wider audience than they otherwise would’ve gotten.  I tried to make sure that those wickedly smart writers with blogs that had awesome titles got out on a place like Kotaku, and those readers who maybe wouldn’t have found them – but were looking for that kind of thing – got a little nudge in the right direction.  You know, just as I would’ve liked someone to do for me, if I’d been writing smart things about videogames, and like I wanted the big blogs to do for me before I discovered the intellectual underbelly of the blogosphere.  Much as I’m writing this now (partially) to help someone else’s dissertation (well, that’s the intent, anyway), just as I wish Meng Chao could write for me. I’ve gotten a lot of help over the years, and I like to repay those favors when and if I can.

I guess one of my favorite examples of “what I was trying to do at Kotaku” was also one of my last.  In late October or early November 2008, I got a really nice email from Daniel Martins Novais.  Now, this was nothing out of the ordinary – the Kotaku inbox I had was a thing of terror, filled with press releases, tips on news items, and lots of people pitching their blogging or game to us.  It was, in short, a giant headache with a few gems surrounded by a lot of dreck that was practically impossible to keep up with.

But Daniel approached this initial contact quite differently than most people (and quite wisely, though I don’t know if it was a calculated strategy on his part).  Instead of saying ‘Here’s a game I made and would you please post it?’, he first wrote an email to me (just to me – not to the general ‘tips line’ that went to everyone, or to a bunch of us all CC’d together), explaining that he had really been influenced by Jason Rohrer’s work (which I had posted all of, up to that point), really wanted to do the game design thing full time, and would I mind just taking a look at the game he made, just to give feedback, because he really respected my opinion?  No grubbing for a link or anything (of course, this made me more inclined to actually link to him if I liked the game).

Screen from Estamos Pensando

I played the game, called Estamos Pensando (‘We are thinking,’ unfortunately no longer available).  I saw the Rohrer connection.  It was polished, sad, and sweet.  I really liked it.  So I posted it.  It was one of the few times I remember posting something and watching it spread pretty quickly, since people actually gave my post credit.  A slight diversion here, one that probably belongs in the section above. The issue of “attribution” in the blogosphere is a fascinating one (it occurs to me that it would probably make a great study from several angles – has someone already done one?), and one reason I really remember Estamos Pensando is because (thanks to “via” links) I could actually see where my work was going.  With few exceptions, my impression of my work and its reach while I was doing it was confined to what I garnered from our stats page (listing page views, with me at the bottom of active writers – as always) and the occasional mention here or there.

I originally had one of my very favorite stories of making the acquaintance of someone in the game journalism world here, but in interests of not hurting said person’s feelings by appearing as though I’m poking unnecessary sticks at someone I’m really very fond of, I’ll just sum up the point: I took proper attribution really seriously and proper links, including the “via” part where warranted, were a matter of academic honor to me. I realize that probably sounds outrageously overblown (“It’s just a link,” right?), but bear with me. I once got “reminded” to give credit where credit was not due (on the assumption that it was due, an honest mistake), and it really, really offended me.  It generally bothered me greatly to see how things wound their way around without leaving a trail that led back to the people who had discovered whatever article, and I was incensed that someone would try and say I was doing the thing that I so disliked.  Lack of that little “via” seemed, somehow, pretty dishonest in a lot of cases. I tried really hard to make sure that I maintained my academic sensibilities where attribution was concerned.

Footnotes: I love them. LONG ones, too.

This was because, for me, a “via” link was the equivalent of a footnote, which of course I would not forget in a paper, since that would be plagiarism (and a fearsome, fearsome charge to have leveled at you).  I’m not saying that not linking is the equivalent of plagiarism (though sometimes, it can skate damn close to the line – I ran into this with the “Atlanta Examiner,” whose writer seemed to do little more than repost everything I posted in a weekend without credit to me); but for me, it felt like it.  I tried to treat fellow writers the same way I treated fellow historians, even if sometimes we were just aggregating and pointing back to the same original.  It was also just a matter of habit from writing a lot of papers – I love doing footnotes (one of the great soothing joys for me when I write papers) so filling in my little “via” link in a proscribed format was something of the same ritual.

A great many sites never seemed to feel the need to give me credit, even when I damn well knew there was a 99.9% likelihood they had gotten the article from something I posted.  I never sent emails or IMs saying, “Where’s my credit?”  I wrote for Kotaku, a giant juggernaut of a site – why did I need credit? (at least, that’s what I assume people who didn’t give my work the courtesy of a blogger’s footnote were thinking). I wanted credit because I wasn’t a faceless automaton; I wanted to see where things I found wound up, too.  I didn’t want other writers to feel the same way I sometimes did, so I was always careful to note where, if anywhere, I had procured a link from.  I’m sure things slipped through the cracks on occasion, but I wanted that to be as rare as possible.

In any case, Estamos Pensando was one of the few times that I distinctly remember other blogs actually showing a clear trail to me, and it was delightful to see it spread – more so because Daniel was genuinely thrilled with the fact that I had posted the game at all, and the fact it was getting nice attention from multiple spots thanks to that first post I made was icing on the cake.  It was just a post on a blog, but it made a difference – a good one – to someone. I felt really good about that. I still feel good about that.  That sounds appallingly sappy – and I really don’t care.

That was a late, particularly obvious case, but one that I would like to think sums up what I was doing – consciously and not – at Kotaku.  Giving a little more page space to a lot more things that shouldn’t have needed me, of all people, to be pushing them – but I somehow wound up with the platform and ability to do so.  I suppose there were a lot of examples like that, but I guess because Estamos Pensando was the last big one, it’s one I most remember.

I hit my stride at some point and was comfortable with the fact that I would never be “popular”; there were people out there who liked what I posted, and got something out of it – something they wouldn’t necessarily have found on Kotaku otherwise.  Sure, plenty of the audience thought I was a dull, pedantic, elitist snot (or me and my subject matter were just plain boring, or not why they came to Kotaku) – but I wasn’t writing for them.  I was writing for me, and people like me.  I wrote about the kinds of things I wanted to see on blogs like Kotaku, and apparently, other people did, too.

I did get to introduce people to neat sites and incredibly smart people and wonderful critical thinking on games.  I hope I did facilitate in building networks between readers and writers and other readers and other writers (and I think I did, in some cases – maybe not all, but some).  I at least wanted to show that there was a really interesting world of blogs that existed pretty apart from the “big guys,” and they were worth reading, too.  Sure, there were other sites doing this, and probably doing it a lot better – reasonably widely read ones – but they didn’t have Kotaku’s readership.

I hardly had a captive audience, but I had a lot more potential readers to hook than most people.  There were places to read about and talk about games in a really smart, intellectually engaged manner, if that’s what you wanted, and I wanted to point that out on the platform I had available to me.  I wanted to post about things that I thought were important and didn’t get enough press in general.  China, of course, would be the prime example – yes, I poked a lot of fun at silly press releases, but I also posted about “real” issues, and about a lot more than just laughing at crazy Chinese knockoffs.  In retrospect, this was an incredibly smart thing for me to do for my own benefit, because I now have a whole body of work to look back on as I write papers years later.  But from a less self-serving perspective, I did want to underline that there was more to gaming outside of the West & Japan than people dying after gaming binges and piracy.  I think I wrote a longform essay on the very subject of getting outside mainstream news and thinking about games as a truly global product – precisely because I found the blinkered regional perspective terribly frustrating, as both a writer and consumer of gaming news and writing.

I was the least read writer on Kotaku, but it was a bigger audience than a lot of us will ever have.  I had a funny conversation with one of my professors once, roughly the following:

“How many regular readers do you have, do you think?”

“Oh, I don’t know, not a lot – maybe 4,000 who regularly click on my stuff.”

“You realize that 4,000 would count as a book that sold well in our fields?  And you have that every weekend, without thinking about it.”

I think about that sometimes, particularly when I’m up late at night and struggling with Historical Stuff that is frustrating me.  I did have that.  No, it’s not a monograph or a list of publications in prestigious journals, but it is something, regardless of whether many of my colleagues would think it important or not.  I did make a difference, however little it may have been in the grand scheme of a blog like Kotaku (or the game blogosphere as a whole, or for game studies in the enthusiast press, or whatever). I managed to have a pretty impressive reach – not for a real, widely read blogger, but for an otherwise totally unimportant 20-something Chinese history grad student, even if it was something that was so far out of the purview of what “should” matter for my career that many people I respect highly never even gave it a thought.  For most people in my “real life,” it was an odd curiosity and little more (“Maggie writes for a blog, huh.  They pay people for that?”), but I had more of an audience at 24 and 25 than I will likely ever have again (and many academics never have), even for work that I try so hard at and put so much thought – and blood and tears and sweat – into.  How to explain that?  Sure, it was utterly pathetic compared to the reach my fellow writers had and have; but I think for many of us – a couple of hundred thousand page views a month is still quite the potential platform!

So I do try and remember that I did something once for a while that I was pretty good at (at least after a fashion; maybe not in the way I was “supposed” to be as a writer for Kotaku), and I did make some difference (I think), and people do still remember – even as I slog along at the moment, back to being a mostly anonymous, insignificant fish in the brilliant glittering sea of grad school and academia and my “real life.”  It wasn’t always so, I remind myself, at least not in some areas of my life.  And I’ll get there again someday, I hope, just in a different sort of way.  I remind myself of all the wonderful things and people that flowed from that lucky, dumb chance I had – one that I’m very grateful for – and all those connections that are humming along as we speak.

I was a Kotaku writer once, and young ….

A screen from Rohrer's Passage, which got almost as many page views for me as "Goatgate" - not quite, but almost

Postscript: This was surprisingly hard to write.  I meant to be a smart blogger and spread things out – and, since the person whose research made me sit down and write it in the first place is at GDC this week & I would assume has neither the time nor inclination to read this at the moment when there are so many more interesting and fun things going on than me pondering away incoherently, wait until GDC madness had subsided to publish it.  I have the patience of a gnat and want feedback immediately (which is unrealistic at the best of times, more so when it’s GDC week & 70% of people I know on the internet are there and very busy!): Well, was it useful?  What did you think?  Did that change anything about the ways you’re thinking about my career?  What else do you want to know? By the way, I think you’re missing X Y Z article of importance, and that one that you said was just a short blurb was actually …. However, it’s been sitting in my queue and I’ve been fretting over it, deleting this and adding that and fixing that grammatical flub or choice of words – and getting more and more upset, probably because it was cathartic to write, being the first (and last) time I’ve ever really written about that very important chunk of my life in any manner, and emotions are still bubbling up.  So, in the interests of not having it lurking, begging me to fuss with it more, I’ve just gotten it up & not on the schedule I’d intended, so I can get back to other important things.

It all sounds so conceited, especially the last bit, I think (is it possible to ponder one’s “legacy” without sounding a little full of yourself?  We’re supposed to leave that for other people to do, aren’t we?).  But then, I’m more given to being hard on myself for everything I haven’t done, rather than being pleased with what I have done.  Finding out that someone thought that my work was special enough to bother researching and writing about was a bit odd, then.  I research and write about things myself; I don’t think any of us select topics that we find irrelevant or inconsequential, since that would just be pouring salt into the open wound that is writing a dissertation.  So maybe it’s OK to be a little proud of what I did, whatever the sum of that is.  I’m looking forward to reading an outside perspective on that part in my life, and how it fits in with bigger issues.

It feels good to have written it, and just as good that I won’t have to do it again.  Unless, of course, Mr. Abraham has more specific questions he would appreciate my ruminations on – in which case, I will be happy to ruminate on specificities at a later date.  I suspect having to dig around to remember the specifics would be more like research, and less like navel-gazing whining, and would probably not leave me with such a mournful feeling.  Wang Xizhi, like so many of the old dead guys, spoke the truth – though the heart does give rise to longing, everything must come to an end.

I was a blogger once, and young (I)

Meditations on how I wound up doing things like cross stitching Final Fantasy logos & writing a how to on it for Kotaku

I got a gigantic shock this weekend while idly googling myself (one never knows what’s going to turn up – a habit I got into while I was writing for a blog, it was always interesting to see what people had to say about the things I was posting): I discovered that I’m part of someone’s dissertation.  More precisely, I guess, my work at Kotaku & me as Kotaku writer are part of someone’s dissertation, but even so.  I had a good laugh that it has to do with Bruno Latour & actor-network theory (ANT), and promptly sent it off to the professor who introduced me to Latour & ANT.  Probably more importantly, he was the one professor who seemed really interested in my work at Kotaku (I used to stop by his office and he’d always start with ‘So, how many page views for the month?’), and is the prof I go to when I want to ruminate on my game/new media/digital media stuff.  So I thought he’d get a kick out of the fact that I’m a chapter in someone’s dissertation (well, I gather at the moment I’m just on the outline & a few paragraphs – but I will be a chapter someday).

In any case, it’s weird reading about yourself in third person, in someone’s research blog, like:

I also tried to write down some ideas about the things that were making Maggie Greene do things, and so far I’ve come up with this list of black boxes ….

It’s really a fascinating turn of the tables – the historian goes from studying objects to being the object of study.  And it’s a little strange to see someone working through, in a general way, some of the same issues I work through with my subjects – but about me (lucky for him, I am still alive and well and open for questions!).  But I thought some of Ben Abraham’s “list of black boxes” for the hypothetical me that he’s trying to query in part through the digital traces I left behind was actually a pretty interesting list of questions for the me that’s sitting here typing this at 6:30 PM in Shanghai, eating the good kind of instant ramen (from Korea – it has bits of kimchi in it!).  So I’m going to try and “answer” some of them by doing what I do best – rambling (what I really mean is it just inspired me to think a little more about the job & what it meant/means to me, and I thought it a subject worthy of writing out, at least on my own little corner of the internet).

I hope Mr. Abraham realizes how lucky he is that he’s studying objects that can write sources on demand!  I’m downright jealous.  This, then, is both a self-indulgent gift to myself and a gift from one PhD candidate to another: my wish that, were most of my subjects still alive, they’d be nice enough to help a dissertator out (and I may have prayed a little to the God of Archives: “Please make my sources multiply and be bountiful; I’ll be a good object of study, I promise“).  We’re fallible, of course, extremely so, and this is colored by the rosy tint of time & all the other stuff that’s filled my brain up in intervening years. I’m also not too sure that my half-ripe ruminations two years after the fact are going to be particularly helpful for someone thinking about things that transpired while I was at Kotaku in a theoretically sophisticated framework, in a way that my brain just doesn’t work.  However, I hope it will prove of some use in combination with his own thoughts and research on the subject.  More sources are never a bad thing, right?  At the very least, it ought to fill in a few gaps and provide a little food for thought.

So here’s my yammering on how I wound up writing for a giant, widely read blog (and subsequently wound up a case study in a dissertation!) when I never, ever said to anyone “I really wish I could write about videogames for a living!” and it never, ever occurred to me that I’d ever have anything to do with videogames on an academic/professional level.  Since I am mostly incapable of keeping things short (and I think this is actually the first time I’ve ever sat down and written anything about this), I’m breaking this into two parts: the bare outlines of my blogging “career,” and how I came to wind up in a comfortable niche & what I was trying to do with it (I think).  That, at least, is the goal: I am very good at talking everywhere and nowhere at once, so my apologies if this isn’t entirely cogent.

A Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Girl: The Bare Bones (sort of)

My first run in with videogames? (Korea, with Miss Lee, 1983)

Unlike a lot of people whose work on games I read, I didn’t have any special attachment to them growing up.  I had a Gameboy when I was in elementary school, and then mostly put games aside until I was 16 (when I got my first console, a PlayStation).  Sure, I bumped up against them at friends’ houses and the like, but there was no ongoing fascination, no real formative moments that were defined by my attachment to this game or that game.  I didn’t play a lot of the ‘classic’ games (like Final Fantasy VII) until years later.  For my 19th birthday, I bought – mostly on a whim – a PS2, and mostly because I wanted to play Final Fantasy X.  I was taking what would wind up being a year long break from my college studies & actually had some disposable income, since I was working. I’d played good chunks of the eighth and ninth iterations, but nothing really hooked me.  But the tenth installment did, for whatever reason.

I remember a few things about that birthday: (1) my mum was out of town & a blizzard was rolling in, so I just had a nice dinner at my (formerly) favorite Korean restaurant with my aunt and uncle, and some friends braved the roads to come and hang out and (2) after everyone had departed the next day, I sat and had my first monster gaming marathon ever, fueled by one of those giant cookie cakes that my best friend had gotten me for my birthday.  It was a good cookie, in a hyperprocessed sort of way.  The game was better.

I also remember, while clocking through the game, that my mother fretted some – “Wouldn’t you like to, I don’t know, read a book or something?”  My mother is not the most technologically savvy of people, so I tried – with sweeping broad strokes of cultural essentialization – to explain it to her.  “You know how Kurosawa was good at those big, epic tales, like Seven Samurai?”  She nodded.  “Right, it’s kind of like that, but you’re involved in the action.”  This seemed to make some sense to her, and with apologies to Kurosawa for comparing his work to, well, a videogame of all things, I went on my merry way (I cried at the end of FFX & it’s the game that cemented my great affection for JRPGs, still my preferred genre).

I continued gaming, got more into it I guess, spent a few long sessions discussing and debating with friends who also gamed.  In 2005, my boyfriend at the time sent me a link to an article on the relatively new blog Kotaku about a new site called “The Game Chair.”  Its unique spot was interesting take on reviews – “progressive reviews,” where reviews would be written over the course of the game – and they were looking for writers.  I thought the idea sounded neat, so sent an inquiry – after some light chatter, the guy behind the idea wanted to see some of my writing.  Well, I didn’t have any bloggish stuff, so I sent along a recently completed paper entitled “‘So Many Parts’: Revolution and the Question of ‘Woman'” that I’d written for my very first seminar in Chinese history (incidentally, I would later use that same paper as part of grad school applications).  It talked about Lu Xun, 1930s Chinese films and fiction, and Antonia Finnane’s work on the development of the qipao in Republican China. This is probably a telling detail for the path my later career took.

So I started writing reviews for the site.  It was actually a fun intellectual exercise, and I’ve always liked to write – and write and write – not being given to brevity in any situation, except the ones where I need to be lengthy and expound on things in a cogent manner.  We also decided to write non-review “thought pieces.”  My first one was on girls and gaming – I found that there weren’t many women writing, thus people tend to say things like “Why don’t you write a piece on being a girl gamer?”.  At the time, I was sure I was going to wind up focusing on gender in China, so had some academic interest in it, too (I still do, though it’s not my primary focus) – but somehow it falls on us female writers in the gaming sphere to write about gender, games, and sex, frequently at the behest of others.  That post was linked on Slashdot.  This moment was enshrined in my memory as “That horrible time I got Slashdotted.”

The Slashdot experience introduced me to the god awful world that comments sections on the internet can be.  I was horrified to read the comments, which not only ripped my work to shreds, but also flung commentary at me like “Well, this must be because she’s fat and ugly and bitter and needs to get laid.  We need to see a picture to confirm!”  The best thing that could be said about that long, long page of comments is that the person who accused me of misusing the word “nauseous” at least backed down after I cited from the Oxford English Dictionary.  As I would later realize, the fact that this person backed down when confronted with evidence of his mistake, courtesy of something with the majestic authority of the OED, was by no means a common thing on the magical interweb tubes.  So props to that person for recognizing – and admitting – that maybe he didn’t know more than the ultimate dictionary on the English language.  The result of all this was that I was so upset I was in tears, even though my boyfriend said, “Honey, just don’t look.  It’s Slashdot, that’s what they do.” (Ian Bogost would later give me a similar admonition – several times – about reading the comments on Kotaku, but it can be so hard to tear yourself away, even when it’s making you frothy with rage)

Still, I wrote a couple of longer essays and some reviews, and really enjoyed it.  I also started poking around for other interesting sites related to games.  I’d been writing for The Game Chair for nine months or so when I packed up and headed to Taiwan; though I packed my PS2 and my DS, I didn’t really game much – so my writing petered off.

In the spring of 2007, Brian Crecente posted a call for female journalists on Kotaku (or something – I don’t really remember; I don’t know that I ever actually looked at the post).  My boyfriend (the same one who had seen TGC) sent my details along to Brian, who got in touch with me.  This time, I did have some game writing to pass along – my essays and reviews at TGC.  Brian took a look, must have liked what he saw, and asked me to keep a blog for a week so he could see how I handled news.  I’m pretty sure I panicked and covered a lot of obscure Taiwanese and China-related news (another potentially telling detail).  It was dull and boring, I’m sure, but while Brian thought I wouldn’t be a good fit for the full time weekly gig, he did ask me if I’d like to do some part time work on the weekends.  I, of course, accepted.  My first post was on women and gaming, because Brian said “Here, why don’t you write up something on this.”  Not unlike that first thought piece I did for TGC, and other essays I would later write.

As it turned out, I outlasted the person who got hired to do the weekday stuff by quite a while, and it also turned out to be a very good thing that I wound up on the weekend staff – when grad school started up, there was no way I would’ve been able to keep up with the work required of weekday editors.  It was also the weekend – slower in general, so real “NEWS” was a little harder to come by, and my posts weren’t immediately buried under a lot of other writing.  The schedule on a lot of big blogs can be absolutely punishing, and it is at Kotaku – a lot of readers comment on the fact that it’s just “too much” to keep up with.

So I wrote for Kotaku from late April or early May of 2007 until December of 2008.  It about killed me once I started school, since I never really had weekends off – some part of my leaning towards esoteric things was simply a matter of practicality.  No one else was posting from the same blogs I was (for the most part), so I didn’t have to worry that I was going to double post an article that someone had already gotten up on Wednesday.  It made prepping for the weekends a lot easier, since I tended to just gather things throughout the week so I could write them up in an organized manner and be done with Kotaku (and get back to my other job of being a grad student).

When Flynn DeMarco left, I was offered the chance to step up to the lead position on weekends, which I regretfully declined – I was with it enough to realize my workload as a PhD student was only going to get worse, and I was already stretching myself pretty thin with my meagre 12 posts a weekend.  Owen Good was hired to take over the lead spot, and it was nice having someone to commune with about work on weekends again.

I was told I would no longer have a position in late November 2008.  It came at a particularly bad time – I was having a spectacular, quarter-long internal breakdown over my doctoral studies and my first (and to date, only) “real” existential crisis on my choice of career paths.  Somewhat softening the blow was the assurance that it had nothing to do with my quality of work or my value to the site.  In hindsight, it was actually a good thing – the next quarter (which started about 2 weeks after my last day of work), I flung myself into researching Meng Chao and Li Huiniang with absolute abandon and started loading up my schedule with extra courses.  I probably could have continued the gig indefinitely, but Fate made sure I didn’t have to continue stretching myself that thin – at least, not because I was writing on the weekend.

Still, I was very upset.  I generally liked working for Kotaku and liked many aspects of my job.  I really liked making all sorts of cool connections with people like Ian Bogost and Leigh Alexander and Simon Carless and innumerable commenters and other bloggers – people who had nothing at all to do with what school I went to and who my advisors were.  Certainly there were things I didn’t like and that grated on me, but on the whole, it was a positive (if tiring at times) experience.  It was wonderful to get to be “Maggie, Kotaku writer,” not “Maggie, occasionally competent PhD student,” if only for a few hours a week.  It was the one place where – in the midsts of impostor syndrome and unhappiness over the fact that I felt downright awful at my new job of PhD student and was constantly being confronted with (what felt like to me at the time) my stupidity and incompetence – I liked what I did, and thought I got to do something quite interesting.  And useful, and purposeful, and different.  And it was something that I was at least good at, depending on how you approached my posts.

Screen from 'The Majesty of Colours'

I posted one of my favorite little games (at least, that I’d posted in my category of “Weird Artistic Timewaster”) on my last day of work; it was so wonderfully appropriate for how I was feeling.  Called “The Majesty of Colours,” Gregory Weir (the designer) calls it a “tale of love and loss.”  Sort of appropriate for a day when I was reflecting on my own (blogging) love and loss.

And then I had to post my farewell letter, which I fretted (and cried) over for several days, deleting and rewriting and editing, all while getting progressively more depressed about it all.  I hate saying goodbye, and it was very hard to say goodbye to Kotaku and everything that it meant to me, everything the wider community of people meant to me.  I didn’t have to say goodbye to everyone of course, much to my great relief, but it was shutting the door on one important part of my life – and that’s never easy.  While my Kotaku gig has continued to follow me through the past couple of years (sometimes in very interesting ways), that day I stopped being “Maggie, Kotaku writer” and put on another hat, “Maggie, that girl who used to write for Kotaku.”

I closed the note, which was mostly a link dump with my favorite, most relied upon sites (in the hopes that people who did like my writing would continue following up with the actual authors and their sites), with a few lines from the Lantingji xu 兰亭集序, Wang Xizhi’s “Preface to the Poems Composed at the Orchid Pavilion.”  It was probably the first and only time something dating from the 4th century (Chinese, no less) has appeared on Kotaku & probably will always remain so.  That, too, is probably a telling detail about my blogging career.

向之所欣,俛仰之間,已為陳迹,猶不能不以之興懷;况修短隨化,終期于盡。

What they had taken pleasure in has now passed away in an instant, so how could their hearts not give rise to longing? … A long or short life depends on the transformation of all things: everything must come to an end. (trans. Richard Strassberg)

The Lantingji xu

As a bit of a postscript (though really, how does one follow up on Wang Xizhi?  Not very well, is the answer), Simon Carless invited me to write for GameSetWatch after I left Kotaku.  I realized, after the initial shock of having my weekends mostly to myself wore off, that I was incredibly burned out from the grad school-writing juggling act.  We bandied about the idea, but I shied away from being locked into writing for other people, and within the set bounds of a formal column.  As this blog (young as it is) probably indicates, I’m not very good at “thinking in straight lines.”  It took me a long time to even want to write again (something other than academic papers, that is), and longer to actually start doing it.  And even then, I just wanted it to be on my own terms.

Part II: More indulgent reflection on how I wound up with the niche that I did