Laine Nooney, an associate professor at NYU and managing editor of ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories, joins Phil Salvador on The Video Game History Hour to chat about the journal’s mission to make game history more than just timelines. ROMchip is an open-access, independent journal that brings together academics, enthusiasts, and industry pros, supported by community fundraising instead of traditional academic publishing. They discuss ROMchip‘s success, its growing community, and dreams of what the future holds for the journal.
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Linktree: linktr.ee/lainenooney
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Website: romchip.org/
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TRANSCRIPT
–Transcript edited by Jeremy Seith
Phil Salvador 00:08
Hello and welcome to the Video Game History Hour presented by the Video Game History Foundation. On this show we sometimes have folks who are studying video game history, or maybe from video game history, or are preserving video game history. Today, we’ve got something kind of different. We have someone who is helping share video game history. Joining us today is Laine Nooney, associate professor of media industries at New York University. But they are here because they are the managing editor of ROMchip, a journal of game histories. We’ve danced around ROMchip a little bit on this podcast. We’ve had folks who have written for ROMchip on before, and we’ve talked about it, but now we’re going to talk about what ROMchip is and why you, the listener at home who is probably not an academic, should give a hoot about an academic game history journal. Laine, thanks so much for coming back to the show.
Laine Nooney 00:57
Amazing. What a warm up. Yes, please give a hoot. Hey there.
Phil Salvador 01:02
So before we start talking about what ROMchip is and all that, I want to zoom out a little bit and just talk a little bit about your work. Because you are a media and communications professor. I assume, when you tell people that you’re a video game history professor, that sounds like a fake thing. I don’t know if people outside of academia know what your job doing game history as an academic involves. So what’s your deal, Laine? What does a semester in the life of Laine look like?
Laine Nooney 01:31
Oh, well, this is a funny time to ask that, because I’m on sabbatical, because I just got tenured. But typically, yeah, so i–
Phil Salvador 01:37
Congratulations, by the way.
Laine Nooney 01:39
Thank you.
Phil Salvador 01:40
For non-academic folks, that basically means you have effective independence? What word am I looking for there? Autonomy?
Laine Nooney 01:47
Preservation of academic freedom is usually how we talk about it. So I theoretically should be able to write and publish things that piss people off without risk of censure from my employer. I am not in a particularly high risk category in that way, right? You can imagine.
Phil Salvador 02:05
I was about to ask if you wanted to piss anyone off right now.
Laine Nooney 02:07
No, I’m good.
Laine Nooney 02:10
For folks who work on, like, more charged topics that’s obviously really important to them. Yeah. So I’m an associate professor in a department called media, culture and communication at New York University. My job is comprised basically of kind of like three sets of activities. One is research, one is teaching, and one is what we vaguely call service. Research is exactly what that sounds like. That is the expectation that I write and publish and circulate historical knowledge. So I think it was last year– God, I’m in such a time warp. It was last year my first book came out, the Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal. So as a historian, writing what we in the biz call a monograph, and what normal people call a book is considered to be, like, that’s kind of the thing you have to do in order to get tenure, right, in order to have job security, to make a meaningful historical contribution to the world, right? Often, and you know, sometimes that means to a small group of scholars, sometimes it means to a much larger community. And I also publish, you know, journal articles, which we’ll talk about a lot, but those are usually papers, formal papers that are somewhere between, you know, 15 to 25 pages, you know, usually around 10,000 words, also putting forward original historical research as well as– I also, you know, I also write for public outlets. So I’ve written for the Atlantic, Motherboard, The Verge as part of what I consider my own commitment to circulating historical knowledge, kind of outside of academia, right?
Phil Salvador 02:10
Okay.
Phil Salvador 03:55
You did a very good article. I think it was for either Vice or The Verge a while ago about the orthopedics of using a computer and how, like, the culture of sitting at a desk and using the computer has contorted our bodies and created pain in new and exciting ways that have not existed in previous centuries.
Laine Nooney 04:12
Yes, that was called How the personal Computer Broke the Human Body. That was a COVID essay. I had been working on that for a long time, and then it got kind of kicked off by this moment where we were all kind of like hunched over our laptop, sitting on top of a box, sitting on top of our dining room table.
Phil Salvador 04:30
Were you not allowed to take your Herman Miller chair home And that was the impetus?
Laine Nooney 04:35
Actually, there was a really, like, in that week where there was shut down. I actually rolled everything I had in my office in a wagon to my apartment. It was a really weird time.
Phil Salvador 04:47
New York, baby.
Laine Nooney 04:48
Yeah, that’s right, public transit. So I also teach. So I teach classes. I teach an undergrad class called Video Game Economies, which is what I call a critical political economy of the game industry, you know, that’s a medium sized lecture class. I also teach a big 240 person lecture on the history of media and communication. That’s kind of like one of those intro history courses for the major. And then I do this thing called service. And service is like, that’s both service to my department that’s sitting on committees, that’s writing letters of recommendation. There’s also what’s called service to the field and ROMchip fits into that. This is a thing I do and I work on to advance the state of game history as a wide ranging body of knowledge, kind of outside my own publishing record and beyond the material interests of my university.
Phil Salvador 05:50
So I’m curious, why start a journal? Because you mentioned you published in other journals. There are places that are publishing video game history. Why did the world need a– you don’t use the word video game, you just say game history broadly. But why? Why does the world need a game history journal specifically the way you’re doing it?
Laine Nooney 06:06
Yes, so, we are– I do want to underscore, we imagine games really broadly. We have a kind of techie title. That was because I already owned that URL and I thought it was good. But
Phil Salvador 06:20
You just registered ROMchip.org on a whim one day?
Laine Nooney 06:23
Yes, back when I was a grad student, I had some weird vision of, like, what if I did a game history version of Kill Screen or something like that? And I was like, ROMchip’s a good name. And so I just, like, bought that URL and camped out on it for a long time. And then when we decided to make this journal I was like, I think this is the name, right? I’ve already got it. I already own the Twitter handle, and I had the URL. I had the Gmail account already set up. But the the reason that we– so why do you need a journal? So to get in– this is a little bit insider baseball for academia, but I’ll try to keep it as brief as I can.
Phil Salvador 07:04
I’ll steer you away from the rocks, if anything, if this goes astray.
Laine Nooney 07:08
Thank you. So you know academia, right? Is pretty it’s organized into fields, right? And you know you could think about whatever your major was in college, right? English, history, art, physics, mathematics, right? Computer Science. When we’re in undergrad, we tend to enter into those with a kind of occupational mindset. We think we’re going to get a degree and we get some sort of job that’s loosely related. But once you start moving up the graduate level for things like that, into master’s degrees and PhDs, the conversations get increasingly more specific, because really who you’re talking to is this narrowing band of experts. And in order for something to be a feel, to be understood within academia as that there even is a collection of experts debating and moving knowledge forward in a specific arena, one of the things you need are places for that conversation to happen. So yes, I was publishing stuff in a variety of, you know, media and game studies journals when I was a historian, but there was really nowhere where dedicated conversations about game history could happen. It just didn’t exist. And so we were always, you know, I think folks in my generation and earlier were always trying to fit our work into these kind of other venues. And, you know, journals, they’re publishing outlets, they have certain ideas about, you know, who their audience is and what’s interesting to that audience. And so they try and shape you to those audiences. And what I really wanted, and my co-founders, Henry Lowood and Raiford Guins, wanted was a place where game history was the conversation. That’s what we wanted to make.
Phil Salvador 08:49
Right. I can speak to that from my own experience too, having been in academia previously that like at my old university, games were split between, like, the communications program had the game design school, and then, like, the literature program had some game studies as part of media study, because they’re like, Oh, games are film kind of, like, if you’re David Cage, like games are films. So, yeah, it’s weird. So yeah, having a place that’s just, No, this is our area, we can get really in depth on stuff. Before we get into how, like, you know, you organize this. When we say, get in depth on stuff, what kind of stuff does ROMchip publish? Because it’s not just like, you know, a chronology of games released by Nintendo. You often go very deep into some specific subjects in ways that even to me, I sometimes I’m like, this is far beyond what I’m able to deal with. But it’s interesting. It’s like, excitingly niche subjects that you are the place for.
Laine Nooney 09:43
Yeah. So, you know, one thing that’s helpful to know is that ROMchip basically has kind of three tiers of content. The first one of those is what we call peer review articles. This is the primary currency of academic publishing, right? In order to get tenured. You have to have peer reviewed articles published in academic journals, right? And those topics, just like any historical field, I mean, man, you think we get niche? How many books and essays do you think exist about the French Revolution?
Phil Salvador 10:16
Just Abraham Lincoln, yeah.
Laine Nooney 10:19
Medieval Europe, right? Yeah, like, just Henry Kissinger, right? I mean, there’s–
Phil Salvador 10:25
There should be as many books about Marble Madness as there are Henry Kissinger.
Laine Nooney 10:29
I mean, I might disagree, but I’m just looking at some of the stuff that we’ve published. So, you know, a few years ago, we did a article called Gaming Families: Therapeutic Board Games and Interpersonal Communication, which was about the use of board games as kind of family therapy devices in the home, right? We did a special issue on eSports and there we have essays about following a single ticket to the DOTA 2 international all around China. We have, you know, history essays, kind of weaving ethnography and history about the development of eSports arenas in Turkey, right?
Phil Salvador 11:13
You had something in there about, like, the history of, like gold farming as, like an economy for like MMOs, right? That’s, that’s– people ask us all the time, like, Can you do, like, oral histories about MMOs? But it’s like, no. The people who are doing that research and documenting like this is a great document of this stuff to have.
Laine Nooney 11:30
Yes. And so all of us, in our own way, are trying to, you know, add to this kind of, I tend to think of particularly computer and video game history. It’s like, standing in front of this giant pile of stuff, and there’s like, 15 of us with a shovel, and so each of us is just trying to, like, chip off the little bit that, like, we’re responsible for. And I’m like, Okay, I’ve got personal computing from 1978 to 1985. I need you to take, like, you know, consoles from 1990 to 1996 if you could. Thank you. And then we’re also trying to bring, we’re trying to do more than a chronology, right? Like, history is not just, it’s not just like a lineup of dates and facts. And this is, I think, one of the real commitments that ROMchip has is in trying to improve and elevate the general conversation around game history, right? In academia, that’s not a problem. But I think our general idea of a lot of game history is that it’s just a timeline. And the problem with the timeline is that it doesn’t tell you anything about why the stuff on the timeline showed up there. It doesn’t tell you anything about its historical context. It doesn’t tell you about why certain things appeared at the moment they did or rose or failed. It can’t situate these technologies into broader themes of, you know, culture, whether that’s you know, culture, economics, technology, gender, race, class, globalization, right? You know, that is the kind of stuff that we’re really trying to put a map together of like, what even happened, and then also, in the way that historians do, you know, we’re interested in having conversations with each other about how we think historical change happens.
Phil Salvador 13:14
Yeah, one of the questions I wanted to ask was about the idea of, you know, what makes this different from a blog? But I think you answered that very well, that like, there’s this commitment, like this deeper type of material. The one I want to focus on that I think we kind of got off the talking about the tiers of ROMchip, but I wanted to mention specifically, you have something called the materials section, where you talk about, like, going deep on a specific game or a specific artifact. And that’s really good, because I feel like so much of that often focuses on, Here’s a thing, and not on, like, What’s the story behind it? Where did the thing come from? But that’s what you’re really drilling down on with ROMchip.
Laine Nooney 13:49
Yes. So our three sections are articles, interviews, materials. We also have a translation section that comes up every once in a while. I could talk about that, but materials and interviews are really envisioned as places where non academic, both readers and writers, could participate in this conversation. I understand that not everyone wants to read an analysis, you know, of you know, this specific game piece from this specific set of years or whatever, and get involved in academic argument, but we wanted to have tiers of reading that were enriching to general readers, right,where you don’t need a PhD, you don’t need to know a bunch of internalist academic arguments in order to sit down, read something and feel like you’ve really had your world blown open. And so what we wound up calling the materials section, I think for a while we called it artifacts, or objects, is really to try and do this sort of object lesson, kind of technique, right? So this was inspired– sort of object analysis has been, I would say, propped up maybe about 10 years ago. You see it in things like, you know, there’s a whole series of books on this from Bloomsbury, the Object Lessons books. Ian Bogost was editing a kind of series of object lessons for the Atlantic for a long time. And we really think there’s value to being able to pick a single thing and go really deep, but without needing all of that kind of academic or intellectual apparatus. So those pieces tend to be anywhere from like 3500 to 5000 words. And we’ve had folks write them who aren’t academics, right? Phil, you have written one.
Phil Salvador 15:33
I did. I did. I should disclose I did publish an article in ROMchip in 2020 that has ended up informing a lot of the work I’ve been doing, which is kind of fun. But that was a fan of my blog sent me this bizarre, homemade CD-ROM game that was only released in Hong Kong, that somehow that he got a physical copy of. And, yeah, and just writing about, like, how do we try to track the production of something like this? Like, a decent chunk of the article is, Wow, this is really weird, but then trying to understand, like, Okay, well, what’s significant about this thing being this weird?
Laine Nooney 16:05
Yeah. We’ve gotten, you know, really beautiful– I think about John Paul Dyson did this, like, close reading of the DataMan, which was this kind of, I think, like handheld game system from South America, right? And he just writes this, like, beautiful cultural essay, right? It’s not making a set of strictly academic arguments, and it should be readable by a wide audience. And what we wanted was a space where that kind of work could live, and we wanted to develop a kind of participatory culture around reading and writing in ROMchip, right? And so this idea that, like, if you’re an enthusiast who wants to take this stuff seriously, like you’re our audience, right?
Phil Salvador 16:46
Yeah, I think about a quote that you said in the panel years ago that I think I quote this back to you every time we interact, like every time a podcast. But it was at the end of your talk where you said that the exciting thing about games isn’t that they lead us back to games, that they can lead us anywhere else. And I love that quote. It’s like, Yeah, this is what you’re finding. What does this say about something bigger, as opposed to just like, Hey, here’s a thing which, there is a place for a Hey, here’s the thing writing, absolutely. But ROMchip is purposely doing something different.
Phil Salvador 17:14
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Phil Salvador 17:15
So to ask more about the history, before we get into the topic of this, which is the future of ROMchip, so I’m curious how you organize something like this. I’m always interested in, like, how these things form, and I don’t know how you start a journal. Like, how do you put a board together? How do you get approval? Like, how does an academic journal get sanctioned? That’s not like, the right phrase, but like, I don’t know if I’ve never been involved in academic publishing. Tell us about this Laine. How does it work?
Laine Nooney 17:44
Yeah, sure. Who gives us a special prize that says we are allowed to be a peer reviewed journal? It’s very funny, nobody does. It turns out so ROMchip came about– God, I think the initial conversations about it started in 2015. We actually, there were three original founding editors. Myself, Henry Lowood, who’s a, you know, head curator at Stanford University Libraries, and Raiford Guinns, who’s a professor of media at Indiana University. Rai was my former dissertation advisor as well. So there’s a bit of, like, academic lineage stuff going on there. And we were all at a conference for the Society for the History of Technology in Albuquerque, New Mexico, maybe a decade ago. And we were talking about, like, what is the future of this field, right? We were at this moment, 2014-2015 you were really just beginning to see, you know, the first dedicated books from academics be written about game history. There had just been the first published special issue of a journal about games focused on game history. And we said, Okay, it’s inevitable, right? It’s inevitable that there’s going to be a game history journal, right? There is in film and radio and television and all these other mediums get to have special venues where their specialists, like talk about the issues that matter to them. And we kind of, I think, had this idea. We were like, if we don’t do it– this was certainly my personal feeling, I was like, If I’m not involved in the founding of this, I’m going to hate what it looks like. Like I had no lack of a sense of mission about what I thought would be cool, you know. And I kind of, you know, we talked about it as an initial idea, and then one of the things that really allowed it to happen was when I was, you know, I was hired at Georgia Tech, and I was given a large sum of research funding, right? You know, I was given several tens of thousands of dollars, and a big chunk of that money went to setting up ROMchip. And by that, what I mean is hiring someone to build out our website. There is a model for– oh so one of the things that was really important to us is that this is web-based, open access. This is a real dividing– this is like a fork in the road moment if you imagine having a journal. The traditional route is to find a publisher, a professional publisher that might be you know, MIT Press, University of Chicago Press. It could be Sage or Routledge, or any of these kinds of–
Speaker 1 20:01
Our friends at Elsevier that have a horrendously large profit margin. Yeah, I seen Laine’s giving a thumbs-down on the camera right now.
Laine Nooney 20:39
Elsevier, yeah. Academic publishers come in many shapes, sizes and profit agendas, and there’s ones that are worse to work for than others. I had worked for a journal called the Journal of Visual Culture for about eight years as you know, I started as an editorial assistant and became a managing editor over time, so I really knew how to do that part of the job. But if you go with a publisher, basically that publisher owns your journal. You don’t own your journal, right? And that your publisher’s goal is to make money with your journal. And the way they make money with a journal is that they bundle the access to that journal. You could probably speak about this better than I can as a libraries guy, but like, basically, they bundle a bunch of journals together and sell them to libraries. And so what this means as an academic is I spend my time writing, creating new historical knowledge. In order for it to be deemed reputable, I have to publish it in a journal, and then the publisher of that journal sells it back to my own institution, right? This is a very, extremely common and also deeply exploitative publishing model, right? That that we sit in the middle of by nature, right?
Phil Salvador 21:57
Yeah, I’ve heard stories from people where it’s like they can’t read their own writing they’ve written because they don’t have access to any to it anymore, because their own university doesn’t subscribe to it. In the library world, it’s called the serials crisis, because what you’re talking about, this sort of consolidation within a handful of publishers, they realize they have a lot of leverage, and they’re often buying each other. So they end up in a place where it’s like, All right, we’re going to increase your budget 20% and the library does not get a 20% budget increase that they have to, like, you know, remove half the chairs from the library, or something like, it’s just this constant squeezing. You made a deliberate choice to not to do that.
Laine Nooney 22:34
Yes. So that is what 95% of anybody who would ever want to start a journal would tend to do. And we took a rowdierroute, which was to say, All right, we want a journal that’s online only. We don’t want to deal with making a physical product. We want a journal that’s open access. And we want to own this journal, right? We don’t want a publisher. Because the other thing publishers do is they come in and they say, well, we want you to publish more copy. We want you to publish more times a year. They don’t really interfere with like editorial agendas, but they do try and accelerate the rate of publication. And you know, we are also– this is a new field we may not have, you know, lots and lots and lots of great copy for a while. We have to wait for grad students to turn into early career scholars, to turn into senior scholars. That’s a 20, 30, 40-year lifespan, right? We’re playing in, like, long timelines. And so, you know, we use a kind of back end system called Open Journal Systems, which is the quote, unquote, kind of, you know, the gold standard for doing open access journals. This mostly services journals in the sciences and Open Journal Systems is its own weird economy. As far as I can tell, all of these journals are serviced by like one man who runs a business servicing these journals. If David Green ever dies, the entire Open Access economy of the globe would, I think, go down. Kind of what, you know, we’re all just like–
Phil Salvador 24:07
If there’s any game developers listening who are used to dealing with open source libraries, I think this probably sounds very familiar.
Laine Nooney 24:12
Yes. But that’s the architecture for ROMchip. And basically, once you’re using Open Journal Systems, the stuff you publish on your site can get hoovered up into things like Google Scholar, right? Or other kinds of– it becomes searchable within academic databases in ways that, frankly, I don’t entirely understand, but like, that’s the route you go, right? So you’re using this kind of very specialized publishing pipeline for this to be legible within and searchable within academic scholarship, right? So that’s how ROMchip.org basically gets established, right? Is that I took a big chunk of that research startup money I had courtesy Georgia Tech, right? To build out the initial infrastructure of the website
Phil Salvador 25:04
Okay, that makes sense, because that’s something I was always curious about, was, you know, when you mentioned the publishers, and having to go through like MIT Press or University of Chicago, or where else, that, to me, is what lends some journals, like, an air of authority. So it’s like, well, how do you become a journal? It’s like, well, there are ways. There’s open tool sets to do it, and it’s really just people recognizing it.
Laine Nooney 25:22
And then the other part of it is the name recognition of the people involved. Unfortunately, you know, academia is a small business. It’s very much based on kind of a reputational politics, and so one of the ways you do this is have kind of identifiable senior scholars involved in the founding so I was super lucky that– you know, Henry and Rai both are also running a game history book series out of MIT Press, right? If you’re interested in game history, these are the guys, you know, these guys are, like, helping kind of platform a lot of that content, and then you build an editorial board, right? And the editorial board comprises the people who are your peer reviewers. That means when an academic sends us an article, we have to send it out to go through what’s called blind review, which means we send it out to at least two people who don’t know who the author is, and they provide extensive, often like two or more single space pages of feedback about that article that then the the reviewer has to respond to. And your ed board, basically is one of the other kind of authorizing features of your journal, you know. So the goal became to get all of the best folks that we could onto the editorial board. Fortunately, game history is a small space, right? And actually, we all have to be pretty friendly with each other because it’s a small space.
Phil Salvador 26:46
Yeah, I’m looking at the editorial board, it’s like 20 people, and I think I’ve interacted with like two thirds of the people on here. It’s like, we all kind of know each other, so that makes it– I will say a decent amount of them have happily been on this podcast or we’ve tried to get them on before, but haven’t made it work yet. That makes sense. The other thing– I want to just talk for a little tangent for a second to make the transition to talking about the future, about ROMchip, which is you mentioned that normal journals, the kind that usually publish in have this sort of closed model where they charge libraries for access. You don’t do that. You are open access. I want to go on a quick tear for a second from a library perspective. There is a, it’s unclear what the scale of the problem is, but there is a problem with what folks are calling predatory journals, which yours is not one of by any means. But it’s the idea that with open access publishing, the way that they get money to sustain it is often by charging the authors, where it’s like, we’ll publish your work, you have to give us $1,000 to accommodate all the cost of that. So you end up with a lot of journals that were like, Oh, we’re the journal of real game history stuff, and we’ll publish your article about a list of games by Konami, but you have to give us $10,000 and it’s like those who’s-who books like sometimes they end up like that. You are not doing that ROMchip is no cost to the reader. Is no cost to the author. Laine, where does the money come from?
Laine Nooney 28:09
It comes from you! I mean, not you, specifically. We are now in our sixth year of operation. For the first five years, we were funded by cobbling together money from our various institutions. For academics who are lucky enough to have research funding, and that is becoming increasingly scarce, increasingly unavailable, right? Increasingly, you know, for all of the reasons that you can imagine, from like, political to economic to geographic, right? Like there’s a lot of you know, you may or may not have any research funding, or research funding has to do a lot of different things. It has to pay for you to go to conferences. It has to buy you books. But you know, the board, which for a while, was me, Henry and Rai. And now Rai has stepped down, and we’ve added two more folks, David Parisi and Soraya Murray, we were able to pay for the base operating expenses of the journal with our own research funds, right? And so really at that stage, the base operating expenses were our server and maintenance costs and our copy editor. Our copy editor was our single biggest expense, right? And that came to about $6,000 right? And so by working together, we were kind of able to, like, patchwork that– you know, I also, when I had started at NYU, I was also given a lump of money. Part of that money went again to ROMchip, and there was a moment where I also went to my department, and I said– I went to my chair, and I said, I think I can really turn this into something. If you’ll give me some additional money to support this journal, I think I can really make– give me some runway, and I’ll turn it into a self-funding enterprise. That doesn’t last forever, of course. And increasingly, deans want to take your research money or they don’t want to fund your weird little pet projects. Or, like, you know, if NYU is paying for some of this stuff is NYU going to think it owns it one day, right? Like, that’s not the situation you want to be in. So we made the, I think we are the only academic journal that does this, that we crowdfund from our readers. So we went to a fundraiser model last year. You know, we had a goal of $6000 which was our base operating expenses, and then we had an $8000 and a $10,000 tier. And what we did was we fed those tiers with our wish list of what we could do, right? Because we’re a hybrid audience journal, because we want people who aren’t academics also writing for us and doing interviews. You know, we in academia, maybe we haven’t explicitly said this yet, but if you are a professional academic, you don’t get paid to publish in a journal, right? So it’s not the kind of economy of a freelance journalist, right? The idea is, I’m paid by my job as a professor, and that, quote, unquote, pays for me to publish things in these journals, right? But if we wanted other sorts of folks writing for us, we kind of needed to be able to pay them. It wasn’t ethical for us to pitch to like, freelance or, you know, lay historians or freelance journalists to write for us or do interviews if we can’t offer them any money, right? Turns out, the credentials of history are not actually, don’t actually put food on the table.
Phil Salvador 31:35
Yeah, I was gonna say that it’s– the economics of academia and how, like, funding works is still kind of a mystery to me. But when you put it like that, it makes more– especially for listeners who don’t understand, like, the faculty model of how stuff works, that that’s how it gets published. But yeah, I guess what I wanted to say is, yeah, the game history itself is such a hybrid field where so much, even, I would say the foundational work is coming out of like the community or journalists or folks like that, because this is such a multi field, multi disciplinary area that ends up in the communications or film schools or anything like that. So you did a fundraiser. This we’re going to talk about, like–
Laine Nooney 32:14
Long story short, we did a fundraiser.
Phil Salvador 32:15
Yeah, long story short, you did a fundraiser back in this last spring, right?
Laine Nooney 32:19
Yeah, last May, 24th. Yes, and we smashed it. It was such a surprise. We got to 97.5% of our tier three goal. And so that means we raised $9,750. The way we do that is we have a fiscal sponsor. So we are not technically a nonprofit. I did make us a LLC, just for kind of, like, ease of tax management, but we have a nonprofit fiscal sponsor. So the money is donated to them. They take a very small cut. They’re called Hack Club. They’re actually great.
Phil Salvador 33:01
Hat Club?
Laine Nooney 33:03
Hack. H-A-C-K.
Phil Salvador 33:04
I heard hat club, and I was like, what does that have to do with hat club?
Laine Nooney 33:09
Hack Club. They got started as a– to help, like, high-schoolers, put on hackathons. And ironically, turns out, high-schoolers had very similar problems to what we did trying to spend our own university money, which is that administrations tried to tell you how you get to spend your money. And so they were like, We developed a workaround for these high schoolers so they could use their funds however they wanted. They’re actually, they’re a great business. I can’t say enough lovely things about them, and they make all of our financial stuff so easy. But, yeah, we take in money through them. And what we really wanted to do was everything we took in over base operating expenses, we wanted to put back into the community. So, you know, our goals were that we wanted to commission original work from freelance journalists. We wanted to commission an original translation of something that, like, perhaps would otherwise never wind up in English. And that’s the kind of stuff we’ve been able to do. It’s like, you give us money over the top, and we’re gonna send it out and make and, like, help make game history more survivable for a lot of people.
Speaker 1 34:16
Yeah, I just sat, just agreeing. Like, yeah, this is good. Yes. More of this. But a couple things I wanted to talk about. First, I did want to talk a bit about the fundraiser stream, because I did participate in that, and that was a heck of a time, but you had a really interesting lineup of guests and content that I think speaks to sort of the broad, interdisciplinary approach you’re taking with this.
Laine Nooney 34:38
Yeah. So we put together a lineup of people who were a mix–
Phil Salvador 34:43
To be clear, this was also, this was a live Twitch fundraiser that– this was taking a page from the gaming community and doing this kind of event. Yeah,
Laine Nooney 34:50
Yeah, it was wild. And I had never done any kind of fundraising thing in my entire life. And I was like, you know, am I really going to hit the floor doing this? But we developed a, you know, we kind of had a sort of one month fundraising period where we did a series of which we called Twitch Talks, which were so successful, we’ve kind of kept them up. And this is where we invite a kind of professional game historian onto Twitch to give a like, extended, 40-minute talk about their research. And then we pull questions from the chat. When we used that as a lineup last year into the fundraiser, and we’re going to be doing that again this year for our fundraiser on February 22, but for the actual 12 hour event, basically we booked, with the exception of everyone but you, I think we booked one person per hour, and it was a real mix of game scholars, game designers, game professors. We had folks like Kishonna Gray. We had John Romero. We had Bennett Foddy–
Phil Salvador 35:49
You had John Romero playing his own Doom mods on stream.
Speaker 1 35:53
Yeah, I mean, he just sat down, didn’t say a word, and just slayed. It was like a virtuosic performance. We had you on there. Jason Scott, right? So, pulling from museums, archives, design and scholarship, to put together this just really fun group of people.
Phil Salvador 36:12
You had, Patrick LeMieux, who didn’t do a– I would say, played a game he, like, had recorded a, like, DJ, electronica set of game soundtracks.,
Laine Nooney 36:21
Yes, and then he did a live mix in response to the audience. Just like a really talented showing. Most of the folks, we gave him a really simple prompt. It was pick a game that’s important to your personal history. So that can be a game you made, it can be a game you remember playing as a kid. And what people brought back was just like, so fascinating. Nina Freeman, you know, played this like, she went back and found these, like Flash games from the, I think, late aughts that were like, really, for maybe the mid aughts that were really formative for her. You know, we had Nicole He playing, you know, Tomb Raider, and Rami Ismail playing Urban Assault. Just this kind of wide range. I gave people, like, total autonomy to like– I was like, pick a thing you want to talk about to an audience for an hour, and the memory lane it took people on. Bennett Foddy played Ski Jump Simulator, which was a game that was really kind of influential on his development of QWOP. And we also recorded this event, put it on YouTube. And so now they can also, in their own weird way, serve as a historical document.
Phil Salvador 37:35
Yeah, you have the creator of Getting Over It playing a game that very much inspired Getting Over It in the long run. Yeah, so good stream. I do want to talk about the Twitch stuff, though, because what I want to go to next is, like, you got funding. You are now an Independent Journal. This is not a thing that usually happens. So now we’re talking about what’s next for ROMchip, and I’ve gotten the sense that I didn’t realize the Twitch Talks were something you were doing as a lead up to the fundraiser. I thought that was a permanent fixture, but it seems like it is becoming a more permanent fixture that you are doing some of the off season as well. How are those going? What kind of talks have you had? Because that’s also, again, academia, I think there’s, you know, an academic talk is you go to a conference that costs $500 and you get the little, like, Bigelow tea packets with, like, you know, the old creamer or whatever, and, like, that’s kind of the format you go to. You are very much meeting people out in the community with Twitch. And so it is kind of a different format to how these things go and what the vibe is.
Laine Nooney 38:33
Oh, yeah, totally. So yeah, the standard idea of an academic conference is that you fly across the country to give a talk to a room of 10 people, and it’s like, well, we can do that on the internet. You know? You know, we don’t, we don’t need–Why have the environmental footprint right? Obviously, COVID was a real game changer in shifting expectations about how we give presentation right, and so making it remote was, I think, much more naturalized for folks. And, you know, taking it to Twitch was kind of a no-brainer in terms of the community. But the thing, you know, the idea of what we call the ROMchip Presents: Twitch Talk was an idea I came up with to build what we might call brand awareness of the fundraiser in the spring.
Phil Salvador 39:19
It sounds so coarse when you say it like that, but it’s true.
Laine Nooney 39:23
And we invited a set of, you know, kind of professional game historians to come and talk about their work. So Aaron Trammell, you know, he gave a presentation about the history of like race in Dungeons & Dragons. Jaroslav Švelch gave a talk about the history of the monster as like a design object in video games, Whit Pow talked about trans game history. And these were really effective. I was kind of, I don’t know, it didn’t occur to me when I first came up with this idea that these would be as popular as they were. And so once you’re done with the fundraiser, I was like, Oh, what if we put out a couple more of these, you know? And so we did one with we invited Chaim Gingold, who wrote Building SimCity. He managed to get Will Wright on the stream.
Phil Salvador 40:20
It was like, a weird, inverted one too. It was Will Wright interviewing Chaim, the other streamer.
Speaker 1 40:25
I mean, Will Wright was just like, he was, like, on one, you know, like, I was like, This man just wants to, like, you know, do what he wants to do, so we all get out of his way. I was not going to try and, like, shape the conversation.
Phil Salvador 40:40
I told people trying to recount that stream that it’s worth going back and watching. I believe it is on ROMchip’s YouTube channel that Will Wright was like a Tom Bombadil trickster god was like his energy. Like the whole stream, it starts up, and you think there’s gonna be questions about city simulations. And there he’s, like, chain smoking Marlboro lights. His first question he says is, So Chaim, if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be? And it’s–
Laine Nooney 41:05
Yeah. That’s about where, yeah, you know, someone in the audience wanted to know what he was smoking. He was chain smoking the entire time. It was–
Phil Salvador 41:12
Yeah, and if you know, Will Wright, I did ask him what his favorite planet was, and he was like, Oh, it’s Proxima Centauri b and then he went on this, like, long tear about why he loved Proximas, like it was– I think what I like about them is there’s a really interesting mix in those because, again, like, you know, it is scholarly content, but Twitch is Twitch. I think there’s a really interesting energy in the crowd, in the chat where, like, it’s on the one hand, there are people not heckling, but just kind of like, you know, commenting, like, lmao, during the presentation, but questions come up. It’s like these really interesting, thoughtful questions about how we structurally approach video game history. And that’s just a really different vibe. You don’t see a whole lot on a place like Twitch. And it’s, I think, that comes out of what you’re doing with like you meeting people where they are.
Laine Nooney 41:58
Yeah, I think that has been a hallmark of my quote, unquote work, for a really long time. I have put together– since I was a grad student, I’ve been trying to put together events that brought together scholars and industry people and enthusiasts. You know, I did this in 2013 co-running a conference called Different Games, which was the first– what was our tagline? The first conference on diversity and difference in games and culture or whatever. And ever since then, I’ve just thought that having more than academics in a room makes a space so much more vibrant. And it’s like, why else would we want to be doing this, right? Like, I of course, find value in having conversations with my deepest historical peers, but like, you know, I think there’s so much to gain from raising the just kind of like intellectual agenda around what history can be. And the way we get there is by just like, bringing history to the town square, right? And kind of setting a model for what this engagement is going to look like. Of course, it means you control. Of course it means you can send dumb emojis and make inside jokes. And also we’re going to ask, like, really thoughtful questions, like those things aren’t contradictory. And as someone who, as a grad student, you know, I was on Twitter and Tumblr. I was like a C-list internet celebrity for a meme I made on– you know, I’ve always, I’ve always been operating at this weird intersection of, like, popular and scholarly interests.
Phil Salvador 43:36
You’re the originator, I believe, of Academic Coach Taylor, right? That was your Tumblr.
Laine Nooney 43:43
That was my Tumblr. That probably doesn’t mean a lot to anyone under the age of 37 but, you know, it really had a moment. And I was on the New York Magazine approval matrix for that. So I think that those kinds of, you know– trying to– I think that practitioners know special things, right? And I think that designers know special things, and I think that enthusiasts and collectors know special things, and academics know special things, that it’s like, how do we get all of our specialness in the same place, right?
Phil Salvador 44:17
Yeah, and with no offense to academia, I feel like it often frustrates me because there– you’re laughing, but like, it frustrates me because there is so much interesting work in academia. And to borrow a phrase I think Jon Stewart used years ago that I still say a lot, is it feels like screaming into a sock and throwing it off the highway sometimes, where it’s just like, how do you make an impact with this? Where it’s like, it often feels like it’s this amazing work that’s being put behind an expensive journal that 8% to 10 people that never surfaces. And so like at VGHF, we often think about like, how do we translate for different audiences as part of that? And it sounds like, you know, the kind of stuff you were starting to expand into, which is the Twitch streams, but also commission pieces from people outside of academia is part of that. And besides the literal translations you do or like you republish articles in other languages, like it is part of that effort of trying to get these different groups talking to each other.
Laine Nooney 45:11
Yes, yeah. And like, developing a respect and nuance for the ways that other people do work, you know. Yeah. Understanding genre is, I think, you know, really important.
Phil Salvador 45:24
Yeah. And so I have my list of things I wanted to ask about, and I have a part, it just as open ended talk about vision, and that’s kind of where we are right now. But this is maybe a loaded question, but this the thing that’s been on my mind is we’ve talked about how, you know, you are starting a new journal, and how part of it is having to, like, build esteem for it and make sure it finds purchase in academia, like, not literally in this case, but metaphorical purchase. But then also talking about trying to find this hybrid audience and having people you know, making jokes in chat and bringing in hobbyists. I’m really curious about how ROMchip is doing within the academic space. I mean that in the sense of, like, I don’t think you know, people who write things for, like, university presses are used to having hobbyists submit things or, like, sharing a venue with that. I’m just curious what that looks like on the academic side, as you’re pursuing this kind of, like, breaking out of the shackles of previous how academic publishing was supposed to work.
Laine Nooney 46:21
Yeah, that’s a great question. Thank you, Phil. You know, I once had a conversation with Henry Lowood about this, and, you know, he’s someone who’s been in the scholarly game scene, but also the collection and curatorial scene, also, you know, he’s in, like, an old school, like, you know, wargamer dude, you know. He’s been at this a lot longer than I have and he said something really interesting to me, which was that when the people interested in games in an academic way, when they first started kind of cropping up, because no one took us seriously within academia, we developed a lot of, I would say, fluency with the communities that we were interested in, right? And so it was always kind of natural, in a certain way, to have buy in with those groups, right? And that we’ve just always had, I guess, a higher tolerance for thinking that that’s part of the conversation. And because, you know, as long as we, like ,publish our peer review journals in like places that other, you know, other scholars thought were serious, we could kind of go about doing what we wanted the rest of the time, you know. And I think that because of that, there’s a historical tolerance among game historians for this kind of behavior, and among game studies people that, you know, doesn’t make us blink at all. And you know, when it comes to writing about someone’s, you know, when someone has to gather their tenure profile, and they’re going to be talking about ROMchip in a document that’s read by their dean, the good news is the dean is never going to look it up, and the dean doesn’t know anything about it. So what you say is, you published your peer reviewed work in the leading journal of game history, which is true, right? We are also the place where like these conversations can happen, and you know that that’s a position we want to continue to hold, is that we really want to be the leading venue for this kind of conversation, while also bringing into the mix all of this other stuff. And so I’m often surprised when I like, I contact somebody, I’m like, Oh, hey, you know, I represent this journal and, you know, would you ever be interested? And often people before I expect it will be like, Oh, my God, I’ve been such a fan of ROMchip for such a long time, I’ve always wanted to publish something in there. I’ve been thinking of this. I think we are visible in ways that, like I don’t even understand academically. I spend a lot– I think I spend probably more time trying to cultivate and nurture that kind of hybrid audience but I think we have a ton of good will. I think people are– other scholars are really excited about people stepping away from the predatory publishing model. We all know it’s bad. There are very, very, very few models for what else you might do and it’s exciting seeing a venue like kind of give a [expletive deleted] to the way things are quote, unquote, supposed to be done.
Laine Nooney 46:22
Yeah, how does it feel to have been running something long enough that there’s now this group that describes it as always is the adverb they use for describing ROMchip. They’ve always wanted to write for, that it’s had that level of clout within certain circles for a while.
Laine Nooney 49:33
I mean, that’s astounding to me. You know, I’m like guys, we’ve only been here for six years, but I think we’ve made a really sizable dent I’m excited about. Yeah, it’s hard. You’re trying to understand, you know, what’s in the heads of people you don’t even know, right? And so all I can, you know, I think the huge success of the fundraiser is an incredible testament to that. I think the fact that we’ve been able to– we’re always growing our audience for these Twitch Talks, for our newsletter, for you know, we’ve gotten off Twitter. We’re now on Bluesky. Also for you know, our fundraiser, like, that’s what tells me something we’re doing is working.
Phil Salvador 50:17
I think something else that tells me it’s working, that’s really reassuring, is the fact that you are getting people from the outside who are interested. Because I think with this kind of thing, and I’m going to get into some of our materials for a second here, I think one of the real risks is that you just kind of have the same circle of people doing things forever, and then you don’t expand it, you don’t find a new audience. I’m not sure if this will be going up by the time our digital library is launched, but one of the magazines we’re launching with is Chris Crawford, the co-founder? Founder of GDC? I forget exactly what his relationship was there, but ran a journal on game studies, and initially did have a very kind of diverse line of people in the gaming community. But as he sort of– aged out of it’s not the right word, but as he became sort of, uh, disillusioned about the community, and distanced himself from events and from various spaces there became fewer and fewer contributors. And so the last couple years of that journal, it’s just Chris Crawford writing about how he hates the video game community, and like every article to him. And he just, like, doomsaying and how, like, everything is bad. Myst is bad. Video games are bad. No one should make video games. He did an article called something like, Computer Games are Dead in like 1995, it was like, it’s fascinating, but that’s the kind of thing I worry about, where it’s like, I mean, we talked about a lot of folks here who you know, folks you’ve had in the talks, and, like, a lot of them are also, like, part of the editorial board for ROMchip, or, like, have you know, people who are on the live stream, but that’s where it starts. And it sounds like that’s not where it’s ending. It sounds like there’s not going to be a heat death scenario for ROMchip where it’s you writing every single article that’s just you griping about how, with respect to Chris Crawford, writing articles about how your friends don’t go to GDC anymore. Like, that’s–
Laine Nooney 52:02
Yeah, I really hope that my, my academic community, would, like, come and, like, put me in a coffin before it ever ever got to be that. I mean, and also I don’t have, like, unilateral control over any of this, right? Nobody at the journal does. In terms of our organizational structure, we have a four person editorial group. We make decisions by consensus. I tend to be the, you know, I think I got a lot of rizz, so I tend to be the spokesman, you know, but, like, I’m just one of, like, a, you know, group of people. So I don’t think anything like that could quite ever happen, but, yeah, I don’t know what our upper limit is. You know, like, what are the dreams and visions I have for game history? [expletive]
Phil Salvador 52:50
That was my last question was, what is 10 years look like for ROMchip?
Laine Nooney 52:55
Oh, my God. Well, we need a bunch of stuff on our website fixed. That’s like, I mean, we’re in this interesting– the fundraiser was such a surprise that it pushed us into this kind of unexpected growth spurt where I was like, Oh, crap. All right, now we have a Discord, and now we have a YouTube channel, and we’re, like, feeding content from one to the other. And so we’ve built some pipelines that, you know, were designed just to get work done at the time and they need some revision, and we’ve realized that maybe our upper limit is higher than we thought it was. I definitely think in the future, like a conference is on the table, I would love to bring our kind of curatorial eye to something like a convening on game history. There are other conferences that, you know, there’s the history of games conference that started in Montreal 10 years ago, has had a few couple iterations, moves around Europe. But I think something more, you know, I think ROMchip has, like a big tent attitude, and that we could bring to the organization of something like that, that would be a lot of fun for us.
Phil Salvador 54:00
It reminds me of like what we did at the video game event MAGFest some years ago, where we had a video game history panel track, where that was technically part of the academic section, but they let us bring in scholars like you, but also bringing in people from the community who have been doing work, or we had, you know, Rachel Simone Weil, friend of the show, talk about, like, making bootleg Pokemon games that Nintendo would send takedowns for, and how that interacts with their understanding of history. But, like, yeah, yeah, not considered a ROMchip event. But as you mentioned that, yeah, there is absolutely room for that kind of hybridized approach. And I think–mean,
Laine Nooney 54:34
I think it’s a no brainer. When I was running– for about five years, I was the conference organizer for this group called SIGCIS, the Special Interest Group in Computing Information in Society. It’s basically where all the historians of computing hung out. And, you know, I was in charge when COVID hit, and we pivoted to online, and we did that super successfully. I think that also informed my ability, my understanding of how we might do things like Twitch Talks right online. I think we could have online versions of something like this. I think I would love an in person one as well, right? That’s a kind of different funding model. But, I mean, you know, what do I want? More copy. I want to be able to, like, put as much of that copy into publication as soon as I can. I want more translations. Like, oh my god. Like, you know, there is so much work to be done on putting together a really globalized understanding of game history and, you know, you have these– there’s very local projects going on which get siloed because of the language translation issue. And I think us being a place, you know, there is no other journal that will just publish something that’s in another language, no other games journal will do that. I’ve never seen it. And because we run our own shop, we can just take risks like that, right? You know, I think for me, it’s like, I want us to not get stale, not get scared, and I want us to find more formats for engagement. You know, I think we do have some long term financial questions, like, I would really love for us to be able to get an endowment, however, the hell you do that. I don’t know who that involves.
Phil Salvador 56:26
Get a football team that’s, yeah, easy.
Laine Nooney 56:30
You know, something where maybe I didn’t have to worry every 12 months about doing a, you know, like a fundraiser to keep our lights on, necessarily, or where some of that money could come in through other streams, right? A lot of this is a big learning curve for everyone in the editorial group, you know. But I envision a world where, like, we are a mental go to for folks, kind of across the spectrum, right? Whether it’s collectors, enthusiasts, archives folks and game scholars, you know, to know that, like, this is where the party is right. That’s the feeling I have about ROMchip.
Phil Salvador 57:07
That is a very good note to end on but I do have one last question that just popped up to me now. Given money, not being an object, and not saying, like, infinite money, but like, if you had a commission, like, one thing for ROMchip that, like, just doesn’t exist where it’s like, I want to throw money at this thing that’s now going to exist in the world because of ROMchip
Laine Nooney 57:26
That’s such a good question. Oh, my God. That’s so hard.
Phil Salvador 57:29
Like an article. I didn’t specify infinite money, because Frank and Iwere joking earlier about, like, what if we could set up a shell corporation that just files endless spurious lawsuits at Nintendo to force them to publish their internal archives through discovery. It’s like that’s an infinite money thing, but that’s, no, absurd. This is just–
Laine Nooney 57:48
I really think I would pour it into translation, I think is the under-loved and under-recognized kind of key to a lot of stuff. There’s whole, you know, like books in Japanese, like, waiting to be translated, right? I mean, one of the translations, the what we funded, and this will come out in our July issue, in 25 we’ve got, you know, we’ve got an original translation of, like the doujinshi, the Japanese kind of anime, kind of comics, which often are kind of talking about historical video game content. You know, I think there is, we don’t even know what is sitting in people’s basements, attics, warehouses, closets, right?
Phil Salvador 58:42
Tell me about it. My God.
Laine Nooney 58:44
I know. I know, right? And like, how do we begin to, you know, I’ve often described the work that, you know, VGHF And ROMchip do is like two sides of a coin, right? And we need each other, right? You guys are out there, like, hoovering up all this stuff, right? And what historians do is we take that content and we like put it in its place, right? We give it a context, and we also take it and try to materialize it in other ways, right? I would love to see a huge extension of our capacity to publish translation. I think that would speed up the project of historical discovery in a really magnified way.
Phil Salvador 59:28
It’s kind of like how VGHF we help pay the bills for Retromags, which is the website that does a lot of retro video game scans. I almost picture something like shmuplations, which does a lot of translations of old– it’s like, could you just be the state sponsor of shmuplations, effectively? Like a scholarly version of shmuplations. But yeah.
Laine Nooney 59:45
Yeah, I would love to be getting what, you know, whether it’s academic work or primary documents, right, just to blanket the world with stuff that’s getting translated in both directions, too. I think that’s so critical, right? I don’t want everything to just dump out into English. You know, we need stuff that’s written across languages, kind of being in circulation with each other.
Phil Salvador 1:00:11
And to do that, you need infinite money and there’s an opportunity coming up soon for ROMchip to get some infinite money. Tell us about that Laine.
Laine Nooney 1:00:19
Oh, my goodness, Phil, thank you for teeing me up for that. So February 22, 2025 we will be doing our second annual fundraiser, 11am to 11pm on Twitch. So it’s twitch.tv/romchip. I’m sure you’re going to dump the links into the show notes. But we are putting together another lineup of folks who are going to be, you know, streaming about games that are historically meaningful to them. We’ve got some returning figures like Jason Scott and Patrick LeMieux and I think Phil Salvador, if we can find some sort of great, wild peripheral to put you on the other side.
Phil Salvador 1:01:01
Not committing myself to this, but since the theme for me doing these seems to be peripherals, I do have a SCSI port connected air guitar pick controller that was used for an Aerosmith themed music game made by IBM.
Laine Nooney 1:01:17
Okay, great.
Phil Salvador 1:01:19
If I can get that to work on Windows 11, then, yes, we can do that, but I’ll figure that out.
Laine Nooney 1:01:24
If we can’t find the 1996 children’s car–
Phil Salvador 1:01:30
Oh, the one Wonder Tools. Yeah, that’s, that’s another–
Laine Nooney 1:01:32
Wonder Tools. Then, this sounds like a great option. But I’ve just been talking so we’ve got Colleen Macklin, Chris Kohler, from Digital Eclipse, Sharang Biswas, Paolo Pedercini, we’re putting together another– Holly Nielsen–
Phil Salvador 1:01:40
Oh [expletive]!
Laine Nooney 1:01:52
She’s the bum. She’s gonna be, like, three weeks out from defending her dissertation. And I was like, Holly, do you want to defer? And she’s like, No, put me in coach. You know, we’re gonna have another really fun 12 hours of, you know, streams, content, historic, you know, folks talking about their own game histories. It’s a lot of fun. You know, I’ll be there, getting increasingly manic as the night goes on. Maybe I’ll smash a pinata again, if we’re so lucky, but yeah, put it in your calendar. Saturday, February 22, 11am to 11pm Eastern. And if you want to follow along with us, we’re also going to be doing ROMchip talks in the lead up to that. We’ve got Rachel Plotnick, she’s going to be giving a talk about the history of gamer energy drinks. I’m very excited for this talk,
Laine Nooney 1:02:45
She’s somehow become the reigning scholar of gamer endurance, or something. She’s a media studies professor out of Indiana University. She wrote her first book was on the history of the button. So this is the fun pivot we’re gonna have Jesper Juul on, he’s gonna be talking about his book about the Commodore 64 and then, you know, we haven’t quite figured out our final slot just yet. You go to ROMchip.org if you want to see just the journal itself, that’s where the actual published content lives. If you go to donate.romchip.org, that’s kind of a scaffolding website for a lot of the other stuff you do, you’ll find links there to our Discord, our newsletter, all of our socials. You’ll find updates about the fundraiser, right? You can link into us a whole variety of ways, including on LinkedIn and, yeah, is there anything I’m forgetting, Phil?
Phil Salvador 1:02:45
What? Oh my God.
Phil Salvador 1:03:44
No, I guess all I want to end on is, you know, I always love emphasizing that, you know, so much work comes out of people who are just dedicated to something, like, just manifest what they want. Like, again, in working at the Video Game History Foundation, I found a way to combine library work and video games in ways that were exciting to me. And I love this inspirational story of a novelty domain name you registered in grad school has now resulted in you broadcasting live to dozens of people the history of energy drinks. Like a really weird domino meme situation that you’ve ended on there. So I want to have Rachel on this podcast. That sounds amazing. Oh my god,
Laine Nooney 1:04:24
Yeah, Dave Parisi on our ed group. Turned to me on to this, and I was like, Yes, this is perfect.
Phil Salvador 1:04:32
That is fantastic. Anyway Laine, I’m going to let you go. Thanks so much for joining us again on the podcast, and we’ll see you in mid-February. Oh
Laine Nooney 1:04:39
Oh my god, Phil, such a pleasure as always. Thank you for everything that y’all do at VGHF. You’re an inspiration and a ton of fun to hang out with.
Frank Cifaldi 1:04:47
Thank you so so much for listening to the Video Game History Hour brought to you by the Video Game History Foundation. If you have questions or comments for the show, you can email us at podcast@gamehistory.org. The Video Game History Foundation is a 501(c)(3), non profit, and all of your contributions are tax deductible. You can support us right now by going to gamehistory.org/donate, or by joining our Patreon at patreon.com/gamehistoryorg, one word. This episode of the Video Game history Hour was produced by Robin Kunimune and edited by Michael Carrell. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
–Transcript edited by Jeremy Seith