Humans have never been able to reach further, grow faster, impact more. We contain multitudes. Yet none are large enough to contain all the possibilities and responsibilities of being in the world. Our memory is not sufficient for understanding how we got here and where we expect to end up. The past is constantly being remade, and in turn making possible futures.

As we plan our activities at Memory Insufficient in 2017, we consider our job to be making the past and future, consciously, and with care.

We’re ready to start this year, a year of great social and political importance, on the strength of the incredible work writers have donated to us over the past three years that has recentered marginalised perspectives in games and history. We are so proud of that work, and proud that beginning this March, Memory Insufficient will pay a fair rate for that work. To begin, we will commission one piece per month at 300 CAD, and over time we hope to see that rate grow, not shrink.

Editorial Ethos (revised)

We publish documents, interrogations, and resonances. This work is not confined to the traditional boundaries of an essay as a logical argument. Rather, a Memory Insufficient piece is an authored experience. Our writers use text combined with sound, video, games, images etc. to give someone a slow, reflective experience that could last an hour, without giving them one hour’s worth of reading material.

Originally a games history publication, Memory Insufficient is now as much about the future as it is about the past. It is not only about games, but games provide a useful anchor point for us in an ocean of spatial, technological and experimental media.

Memory Insufficient features don’t simply demonstrate a particular way that technology is changing the world, or a particular person who redefined an industry.

We want the material we publish: to empower people to ask how their work and their society could change in the future; to enable them to choose the futures they create with intention; to develop strategies for making those changes happen.

Interrogating our memories and fantasies

We must, at this critical moment, work to reclaim the past from conservatism. Historical stories are fantasies, built to conform to present-day ideas about who we are and how our world functions. Memory Insufficient was founded to expand historical narratives beyond the singular story of technological progress. We see the error message “insufficient” as multi-layered in meaning: it refers to the tendency to forget, ignore, or distort the past, but it also warns that our memory alone (collective or individual) is not enough for us to understand how things come to pass or where we’ll end up.

Documenting digital geographies

Games, social networks, the web, and our computers are places where millions of people spend a large chunk of their time. Cultures are conceived, crafted, and contested in these spaces. To document what is going on in digital space is a political act, and we are responsible for showing the power structures at work in those spaces. Throughout history, we have seen powerful people use different strategies to wrest control of land, attention, and material resources. Our job is to reflect how that has continued and how it has changed.

Tapping resonant structures

In music, people talk about resonance literally in relation to how sounds, bodies, and materials affect each other. In games, architecture, software, storytelling, and social encounters, similar concerns apply, and people have borrowed the concept of “resonance” to talk about it.  In all these cases, we are concerned with things that resonate with each other harmoniously or with dissonance.

Digital experiences can be built to resonate in response to some actions, and remain silent in response to others. Dissonance can be a deliberate technique, using resonance to make a statement about the fractures at work in our own lives. Constructing or deconstructing “resonance” allows us to expand our interests beyond a narrow idea of what a game is, and include spaces, structures, and experiences that are defined by their inter-relatedness, rather than by their medium.