Shareware Made Me Trans

IT WAS THE NINETIES

The Sony Playstation and Nintendo 64 were ushering home video games into 3D. But on the personal computer, another revolution was quietly taking place: these machines, designed for Office Work and Productivity, were being slowly taken over by a generation of hobbyist games, marketed via an unlikely new distribution model that would ultimately transform the games industry.

In the house of a pre-teen girl who didn’t yet realize she was a girl – me – that transformation was felt both in my computer and in myself.

This zine is a personal history of shareware for Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS, by way of the following three case studies:

• Sorcerer's Cave (1995), a digital conversion of a tabletop procedural dungeon games with a regressive but game-able gender hierarchy. Boys will be boys and women will be Amazons.
• Wraith (1995), an Ultima fangame with a player-sexual love interest, making for the first sapphic romance I'd ever seen in a digital game at the age of twelve.
• ZZT (1991), a text-based game creation system that I used to explore fantasies of being a captured princess decades before I was able to become one in real life.

SHAREWARE MADE ME TRANS is a zine bridging personal history and games history. It is a kind of sequel to my 2014 book, ZZT, about a single game-making tool and the community it created, but there's little overlap between my coverage of ZZT in the two books besides explaining what text-mode graphics are.

It is about 6,000 words long, plus 20 pictures, across 24 8.5" x 5.5" pages (that is to say, each page of the zine is half of a full letter-sized page). You can print out a copy (using the "booklet" mode) on seven double-sided pages.

I wrote all the words (quotes aside) and took all screenshots and photos myself, except for one of a CompUSA in 2006. Credit for that photo: Coolcaesar at the English-language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Fuck generative AI.

CONTENT WARNINGS: Dysphoria and confused trans feelings, discussion of gender dynamics and sexism in games, institutional transphobia online and in legislation, brief mention of disordered eating; Tim Sweeney.