Gaming.moe, as the title might suggest, is about being moe for the obscure, the awesome, the weird, and the fascinating elements of gaming. It’s a personal site run and curated by myself, Heidi Kemps, where I talk about the things that inspire my burning game love:
- Interesting creators/people involved in game production
- Obscure but unique and interesting retrogames
- Under-the-review-radar modern games (indies, niche localized releases, mobile titles)
- Interesting bits and bobs of gaming history
- Gaming-related media
So moe’s a Japanese word, right? What does it mean?
Wikipedia defines moe as such:
The word has come to be used to mean one particular kind of “adorable”, one specific type of “cute”… Moe does not have one concrete definition, but rather has a variety of meanings. People use Moe to mean a particular feeling or characteristic. It is a pun derived from a Japanese word that literally means “budding,” as with a plant that is about to flower, and thus it can also be used to mean “budding” … [but] since this word is also a homonym for “burning” pronounced moe (燃え), there is also speculation that the word stems from burning passion.
Moe means a lot of different things to different people, but the feeling is universal: the excited, gleeful rush of joy and giddy, heart-fluttering feeling when you find that thing that trips your moe points. That’s how I feel when I discover a new old game that’s amazingly awesome, when veteran developers share stories of bygone gaming eras, when a passionate indie dev puts together an amazing title that blows me away. Gaming is inherently awesome, and gaming.moe’s primary focus is on the joy of experiencing the wonderful, the weird, and even the worst of gaming.
Hey, why is it called gaming.moe when there are so few articles about moe games?
You see, the reason this site is called gaming.moe is not because it’s about moe games, rather, it’s about being moe for games and gaming. (Though I’ll probably take a look at a few moe games just for kicks.)
So is everything on here related to retrogaming?
Nope! I cover modern stuff that catches my interest as well. I just think retrogames are important and just as deserving of attention now as they were twenty years ago.
What is this ‘kusoge’ stuff I see mentioned?
Kusoge is a Japanese term that literally means “shit game.” Basically, bad games. There’s a whole fascinating subculture in Japan’s gaming scenes around analysis and “appreciation” of kusoge, because there are just myriad ways that a game can be an abject failure at what it sets out to do. I’m pretty unapologetically a kusoge enthusiast, because frankly, some of these games are amazing. Albeit not in the ways most people would consider amazing, but hey!
But there are a few things here that aren’t game-related!
A handful, yes. Every now and then I’ll write about other deeply-rooted passions of mine, things like manga, doujin culture, and figures. The core of gaming.moe, however, is and always will be games. No matter what I write about, I will strive to make it informative and entertaining.
This is great! How can I support gaming.moe?
It’s easy! If you’d like to contribute monthly (and possibly help spur on some cool new features!), please visit our site Patreon. If you’re not comfortable with the whole month-to-month billing business, you can also donate directly via Paypal. Either way, it helps spread the gaming love far and wide!
(And just in case you were curious, the site’s color theme is based on the second model of the Victor V-Saturn, my favorite color scheme for my favorite console.)