Our last article was published in September of 2017. Projects like this one (hobbyist, not-for-profit, probably-too-ambitious, near-and-dear-to-someone’s-heart) often just trail off, leaving everyone in a state of limbo and uncertainty. Nobody wants to admit that the project is over, so the project just sort of lingers, quietly ignored, making everyone feel guilty. But I don’t want to do that here. So, a statement: as I assume you have already figured out, The Ontological Geek is no longer publishing new articles, and has transitioned to archive mode.
The Ontological Geek was a pop culture criticism site that ran from 2010–2017. Though it focused on videogames, it published criticism about movies, books, tabletop games, TV shows, and at least one musical. Over its seven-year lifespan, OntoGeek published many people who have since gone on to serious and respected careers in videogames or other media, but some of our best stuff was written by people who, near as I can tell, have written nothing else on the Internet before or since. Though our audience was never vast, I like to think that we occupied a respected-if-niche place in the games-crit blogosphere. We published some articles that were read by tens of thousands of people, and some articles that were read by fifteen people, and though I was never sure which was going to be which, I’m proud of all of them.
It’s my intention to keep the site up indefinitely in archive mode, so that you can still find any article you might be looking for. If you notice that something is broken, please do go ahead and message the @ontologicalgeek Twitter account, and I’ll try to get it sorted out straightaway. (On that note, many thanks to Jesse Porch for straightening out all the weird WordPress borkedness the site developed over the last two years of neglect.)
I’d like to particularly thank Odile Strik and Chelsea Shepard for their hard work as Editors-in-Chief after I quit the position in 2014, and you can go to the Staff page to see a (hopefully?) complete list of everyone who contributed an article to the site. Many thanks to all of you: you made the site what it was, and I always get a little thrill when I see a byline from some OntoGeek contributor out there in the wild. Keep up the good work!
As for you, dear reader, I encourage you to take a look around the OntoGeek archive. The Ontological Geek stood for the proposition that it is worthwhile to think about the games we play and the TV shows we watch. I think that’s as true now as it was in 2010 when I published that first post to a dusty Blogspot site, and named it with a St. Anselm joke that doesn’t really make any sense. Hopefully, you’ll like what you see here, and decide to support some other small publication with the same mission!
In the meantime, enjoy your stay here. There’s a lot of good stuff around!
–Bill Coberly
Editor-in-Chief (2010−2014); Editor Emeritus (2014−2017); Groundskeeper (2017-?)