It’s fundraiser week here at The Thoughtful Gamer, and I know that’ll cause a lot of eye rolling and clicking away, but hear me out. I know it’s awkward whenever the media folks you watch, listen to, or read ask you for money, and trust me, I feel awkward too. But here’s the deal: I started The Thoughtful Gamer nearly three years ago in order to review games and talk about them in an intellectual way. Doing that doesn’t come with a lot of money inherently.
You also know that I’m very aware about potential conflicts of interest with publishers. I will never take any money from a publisher for a review, and I’m not particularly interested in doing paid previews at this point. I don’t see what I could add to that, and there are plenty of folks you can go to for that, certainly. As I talked about yesterday, however, I am offering a few new paid services for publishers that better fit my skill set.
But if you’re a board game nerd like me and you’ve enjoyed reading my reviews and/or listening to the podcast, how can you help The Thoughtful Gamer? There are a number of ways, and not all of them involve money.
1. Patreon
A large coffee from Dunkin Donuts is just over $2, and it tastes like spoiled radioactive ash vomited up by a rabid street dog. For $2/month you can instead join the Thoughtful Gamer community by supporting us on Patreon. With that you’ll get an invite to our discord channel, access to podcast livestreams, first dibs at my game trade list (claim anything and only pay shipping!), and other benefits.
Our next goal is less than $50 away, and once we hit that I’ll start doing weekly vlogs/Q&A for patrons where I discuss what I’ve played that week! I’m actually really excited to do that, so perhaps consider contributing?
2. Ko-fi
If you don’t like recurring payments, you can chip in a couple of bucks over on Ko-fi. No extra bonuses for that except eternal gratitude from the deepest parts of my soul. So you could have that going for you.
3. Merch
I’ve got t-shirts! You can get them in all kinds of colors. Personally I’ve got a red one with the white-letter logo and a grey one with transparent letters. I can attest that they’re comfortable and look cool. Here’s Amber in a ¾ sleeve look.
Literally this is the only thing stopping you from becoming a game night fashion icon. Heads will turn.
4. Subscribe
There are so many ways to keep up with The Thoughtful Gamer. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Email (at the bottom of this page), Youtube, Podcast services, BGG guild. I think that’s all of them. I can barely remember all of the possibilities. But if you follow The Thoughtful Gamer you won’t forget to keep up with the exciting stuff planned for 2020!
5. Talk
“Engagement” and “reach” are scary words I don’t quite understand in the precise context of internet marketing, but I’m pretty sure they just mean people talking about your stuff. I know as a result of The Thoughtful Gamer I’ve been trying to get myself to be more proactive in sharing, retweeting, replying to, etc, etc, etc the people I find interesting and worth promoting. Writing something you think is good only to see it fade away into the datastream can be disheartening. If I ever do something you like, tap that share button. It’s easy and and it helps.
6. Feedback
I’ll write more about this tomorrow, but part of what I’m trying to do here is engage in a conversation. Maybe that conversation is between my words and the thoughts you have while reading them. But if those thoughts take solid shape, I’d love to hear about them!
—
Recently a podcast listener emailed me to let me know that he really enjoyed a particular episode, and while this sounds cliche it made my day. The cold planar disconnect between our digital communications creates a kind of malaise. Don’t get me wrong–I’m no luddite, but communicating without the benefit of physical proximity is more difficult, and I think we can all be reminded on occasion that a bit of additional effort can shrink those disconnects.
Of course I would love more financial support for this project, but if the result of this post is a tiny glimmer of more kind, empathetic communication in our little online community, it’ll be worth it.
