For the past eight months, I’ve been running two parallel writing projects. You know about this one: my weekly posts in this blog (this is post 42, by the way). But there has been a shadow project running in the background.

I love video games, and I’ve collected too many opinions on them to keep them to myself.

Meet Rooslawn’s Unmapped Worlds, a blog where I write essays about games. I decided to go for a phonetic spelling of Ruslan in the title, in the hopes I’ll get misnamed less.

Rooslawn's Unmapped Worlds. Hello!

I don’t review games. Instead, I write about game mechanics and tropes, and I love breaking down how digital worlds are constructed. It’s a place where I can complain about my dislike for map markers and quest GPS, or explore the reality that I rarely actually finish the games I play. It is a home for deep dives into immersion, design philosophy, and the specific friction that makes a game memorable. A few of the pieces I’m most proud of include when I didn’t speak the language of games and difficulty sliders are dumb.

Running the project anonymously was a great idea - I was able to be more vulnerable, it allowed me to experiment more with different topics and formats, and find my voice. The voice of Unmapped Worlds can be described as rambly. I’ve been thinking of it as written gumbo. It isn’t clean and corporate, there’s texture, love and care put into it, and you know it’s authentic.

Gumbo is something spicy, authentic, textured, visceral, and willing to take risks that alienate some of the audience. This is unlike slop, which usually comes from the desire for inoffensive predictability and consensus, even if we have to falsify our preferences to achieve it. - The FLUX Review, episode 211

Ultimately I felt like attaching my name to Unmapped Worlds does it justice - who I am is highly relevant to the writing. Gumbo’s flavor is unique to the chef.

If you like video games, see if any of the 42 (so far) essays connect with you, and consider subscribing to my newsletter.