The ante has been upped, my friends. Last month’s participation here at Blogs of the Roundtable was amazing. There were so many great pieces to read about “Nostalgia.” I was both elated by the response, and to be honest, also a little daunted. What a tough act to follow!
Never one to shy away from a challenge, I think I’ve risen to the occasion. Or rather, Kaitlin Tremblay has risen to the challenge! After days of trying to come up with a theme that could follow “Nostalgia,” I had a lightbulb moment. But honestly, the idea was too good for me. I needed to turn to someone with the passion and knowhow to really make it shine. Luckily, Kaitlin is one of the kindest people in the world, not to mention brilliant, and no sooner had I reached out to her than she had agreed to help out. With that, I’ll turn it over to Kaitlin, who wrote the prompt for September’s theme: “Maps”
Maps, at their most basic, order and define spaces. They can provide a path for those who are lost, or they can become symbols of achievements, places visited, stories told, and battles won. They set a boundary to what otherwise feels vast and potentially limitless, a way to compartmentalize and therefore tackle the world. But how do world maps provide a unifying theme for narrative? In what ways can we see the history of cartography as a colonial practice influence narrative? How do level maps help us conceive of game spaces as literal places to explore? What makes a good level map — ease of use and ability to navigate or bottomless depths to explore?
So good! Before you head off to explore maps of your own, I highly suggest checking out Kaitlin’s own work for inspiration. Of particular relevance is her piece “Shaping Worlds” in Unwinnable’s Issue 56.
We’ll be taking your contributions up until September 30. You can see your submissions as they come in right here:
Use this code to embed the links in your blog, if your publishing platform allows iframes:
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Please email us your submissions or tweet them to @TheJoycean or @critdistance with the #BoRT hashtag. Happy blogging!
Rules of the Round Table
- Blogs of the Round Table is not curated. If you write it, we’ll publish it, as long as it’s connected to the topic and has been written specially for BoRT or up to one month prior.
- This BoRT post is the home of the discussion: as I receive new submission blogs, we’ll update the ‘BoRT Linkomatic’ so new blogs are reflected on this page immediately. We’ll also use the @critdistance Twitter account to post regular updates, so follow us!
- Your duty as a knight of the round table is to leave a comment on a blog to which you respond with a link to the response piece, to give them a ‘right of reply’. Keep the conversation going.
- If your work contains potentially disturbing content, please include a suitable warning at the start. Use your common sense.
- You can submit as many articles as you like throughout the month, and it doesn’t matter if they are commercially published, paywalled or available for free. We will need a transcript for paywalled content to be approved.