Posted by squinky on Nov 21, 2025
Hey there, I wanted to let you all know about a cool new project that Soft Chaos has helped put together: the Trans Games Zine!
From the About page: The Trans Games Zine is a community-based platform to promote hybrid games scholarship and game development by and for transgender, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming people. This platform has been designed alongside the community of authors published here.
Every submission to this Zine has undergone what we call “Queer Review.” This is a peer-led developmental and editorial process: there is no centralized editorial review, no external reviewers, and contributors are met with flexible deadlines that are responsive to the multiple and ongoing crises our community faces. Our work together challenges the central tenets of academic publishing in search of a different kind of rigor - one that centers community care and wellbeing, and one that embraces born-digital and multimodal scholarship on transness and games.
This zine has been in development for quite some time, and I'm so glad it's finally launched. I'm super proud of the retro CRT design we co-created with participants, and I love it when I get to work on a website that's actually fun and reminds me of the joy of making things on the early internet. I haven't yet played all of the projects, but I've really enjoyed the ones I've experienced so far.
My own contribution to the zine is a game called You Don't Have To Go Home, But You Can't Stay Here. I made it in Binksi, a small game engine similar to Bitsy, but with better support for interactive dialogue. Here's how I describe it:
You Don't Have To Go Home, But You Can't Stay Here is a game about visiting your favourite bar one last time before it closes down for good. It's set in a world of anthropomorphic animals whose lived experiences may or may not have anything to do with how queer and trans people are being treated In These Times.
I made this game to process feelings about third spaces I used to visit that don't exist anymore: at this point, there are several of them, across different cities, and they aren't just physical bars or cafes either, but also digital spaces (remember when the internet used to feel like a place?) and temporary spaces where our digital and physical lives would meet, like conferences and conventions. It's also about not being young anymore: I turn 40 this year, and I started my gender transition more than a decade ago. Sometime in the interim, all these younger, fresher faces started showing up; meanwhile, I've been steadily feeling more and more like an Old Person, gravitating towards all the other Old People I know and reminiscing about how things used to be, even though it doesn't feel all that long ago.
Yes, you read that right: I turn 40 this year, and by "this year", I mean literally this weekend. Merry Squinkmas! Please enjoy this game I made about feeling old. (If you're older than me, I'm sorry-not-sorry for making you feel even more old.)
A couple more housekeeping items: Strangers on the 'Net sadly didn't meet its funding goal on Gamefound, but stay tuned for a relaunch next summer and more behind-the-scenes content on this blog! In the meantime, Allison wanted me to share this fundraiser for the IGDN Tabletop Diversity Foundation, so if you can, please chip in and help support a cool sponsorship program for marginalized tabletop game designers!