Wholesome Gaming Club Fanzine

This fanzine is the result of an eight-month-long process involving the Wholesome Gaming Club, which we organised through Resistència Videolúdica at the Santa Mònica arts centre between 2024 and 2025, and which we have been able to share thanks to the generosity and time of all the participants. In this club, we tried to see the wholesome or cozy side of video games, beyond the marketing that surrounds them and their cute and supposedly innocuous aesthetics. Together and within a historical context, we thought about the wholesome (with Stardew Valley), the ideas of playing to work (with The Stillness of the Wind and Diego Freire as guest), extractivism and colonialism (with Summer in Mara and Islanders), antispeciesism and animal representation (with Flock and A Short Hike) and care and mental health (with Spiritfarer, Little Man Has A Day and Deborah López Rivas as guest), with the will to expand the term in a critical and propositional way (with Metamorphabet, Sandcastles and Lucas Ramada Prieto as mediator).

Based on various dynamics and contributions in the form of texts, collages, illustrations and poetry from the participants who contributed to the fanzine, we wanted to take the ideas we were working on together and put them in a format that could exist beyond the Wholesome Gaming Club, so that it could serve as a space in which to reflect on and disseminate these ideas. So we encourage you to read our fanzine and continue the conversation as much as you'd like, to organise other gaming clubs and spaces in which to share your thoughts collectively, and, if the spirit moves you, to tell us what it got you thinking about! You can request a copy from the Santa Mònica, from Resistència Videolúdica (at resistenciavideoludica@gmail.com) or you can read it digitally or download it to print at this link: https://resistencia-videoludica.itch.io/fanzinclubjocwholesome

We would like to thank all the people from the Santa Mònica and especially all the club and fanzine participants for making this possible <3