This is the final post to this blog. Its primary two contributors continue to write — about games, as well as other stuff — elsewhere:
Jason McIntosh blogs at Fogknife.
Andrew Plotkin blogs at Zarf Updates.
I plan to keep all this blog’s posts online, and available at their present URLs, permanently. I reserve the right to edit various metadata and presentational trimmings of this website in the service of preserving twelve years of games writing and videos created by many talented individuals. I shall update this final post whenever appropriate, to best describe the site’s current state.
The Gameshelf began as a public-access TV show in 2005, ostensibly about more obscure video and tabletop games, back when games-focused media largely limited itself to highly commercial magazines and websites. The show’s creation coincided — rather unwittingly — with both the nascency of the indie-games movement, and the rise of technologies and services that would dramatically lower the barrier of entry for those passionate about underreported subjects to create and publish their own videos to the internet. Thus do we have today’s galaxy of independent critics, podcasters, and streamers, quite well covering the whole breadth of games.
I thought that was pretty great, actually, and in 2010 ceded that particular floor, declaring that this website would serve as an independent blog of games-focused essays from a number of writers, pulling talent initially from the TV show’s cast as well as a handful of guest bloggers. And we published some good stuff, that way!
But it couldn’t last forever; this was always and only a passion project, and people’s passions evolve with the years. Zarf’s final post here summarizes the blog’s end-state; by the start of 2017 it had become clear to the two of us still posting here that the time had come to move on to personal platforms. So, we have, as detailed at the top of this post.
I will always be proud of what The Gameshelf accomplished, first as a video series, then as an organized group blog, and finally as a humble essay-platform used only a couple of friends to think out loud about games now and again. I feel happy and fortunate that, by hosting this website myself, I can continue to share all our work indefinitely. I hope that the past contributions found here to the ongoing conversation about games can still serve some small purpose for present and future readers and creators.
— Jason McIntosh (jmac@jmac.org), June 2017
