Artist Spotlight: Nina Stanley
Added 2017-12-08 20:49:37 +0000 UTCHi patrons! I'm really happy to debut the first in a new series that has come from our Writing Fund: an ongoing spotlight on the contributions of women throughout video game history, written by freelance journalist Lisette Voytko. We're starting off by examining the artwork of Nina Stanley:
https://gamehistory.org/nina-stanley-profile/
There are three aspects of this article that really excite me, I hope they'll excite you as well:
1. Diversifying the voices of our past is important. The majority of video game history has come from the perspectives of the men who shaped it, which means our understanding of it is probably skewed toward a male perspective. History is the pursuit of something approaching "truth," and I don't believe you can find truth from just one perspective. Spotlighting women will, we hope, help to fix that.
2. I like Stanley as a spotlight in particular because she's not a typical interview subject for a video game historian. We often talk to designers, programmers, company founders and the like, but it's rare to hear from people in the trenches like an artist or a coder. Spotlighting an artist as an artist is kind of rare in video games, let alone in the study of video game history, so this was a really fun piece for me to edit and help shape.
3. Stanley provided us with tons of her original work, including artwork for games that have never shipped and have never been documented. We were able to take artwork she had stored on outdated media (Zip, Jaz, and 3.5" floppy, for the magnetic media nerds out there) and add it to the VGHF archive. You can see some of it in the article: the rest, we're hoping to put together into a publicly-accessible archive soon (I wanted it to launch alongside the article, but I wanted to also get this out asap).
By the way, these early access posts work on the "honor system"
This article is technically live on the website, but we don't tell anyone but y'all that it exists for a while (in this case, until Monday). This is one of the ways we try to say "thanks" to our $5+ contributors, so we ask that you please not spread the links around...at least, not until Monday!
