anna anthropy

Leetspeak from 123 years ago. Contains a smiley, strange spelling and even an upside down character. Published in Typewriter World, 1897. Found by Koichi Yasuoka.

More info.

Violent Storm, Konami

Use the arrow keys to move…

X attracts fish but also sharks…

Shark bites take you down a level…

Get all the fish to level up! – [Author's Description]

 
Sim Tape Dispenser

SimStapler

From The Flight of Icarus by Georges Schwizgebel, 1974. Watch the full thing here. Thanks to Rico Zerone for finding this gem!

I don’t know if I have “morals”, but I certainly have rules.

And one of those rules is If I pass a Girl Scout cookie table and I have cash, I must buy at least one box. 

It’s not about feeding my appetite or stockpiling for the collapse of the dollar. It’s about supporting an organization I deeply sympathize with. 

I buy a box of cookies. The little girl hands me change. She’s the only girl at this table. Her mother is in the parking lot getting more cookies. 

She deserves some ice cream after this. 

I leave a tip on the table. 

She looks down at it, and back up at me. 

“That’s for you. You can give it to your troop or get yourself some candy. Thank you for the cookies. Someone will really enjoy these.”

A wild Silicon Valley Shitlord appears. 

“You can’t tip Girl Scouts!” 

In his fucking caffeine molecule t-shirt.

“She’s just selling cookies. She didn’t bake them, she didn’t package them.”

His fucking crocs and white socks.  His fucking Tokidoki Thor Hat. 

“You’re teaching her to be entitled, that she’ll get a handout—”

In that moment I wish I could have slapped the taste out of his mouth. 

And then feed him that whole fucking box of tagalongs I bought.

Then make him write “I will never accuse anyone of encouraging entitlement in girls of color” a hundred times on his own skin. 

And then force him to eat another box and describe to me what the cookies might have tasted like if he could taste them. 

But I can’t.

I have a date. 

Another rule I try to live by: don’t hit people in crowded transit hubs if I don’t absolutely have to. 

I improvise. 

“I DO WHAT I WANT, THOR!”

“Yeah! She does what she wants!”

Croc-odile Dundee backs away, seemingly repeled by the combined girl power. 

Then I see her mom has returned from the parking lot. Her arms are crossed. 

That guy will never know, never truly know, how lucky how easy he got off. 

I thank the girl and head to the diner for my date. 

I check my phone. I’m a little early. I sit down on a bench and apply some eyeliner. Gotta look fresh. 

On my way to the diner I see this same fucking guy talking to a pair of women with a “hungry and homeless” sign. 

I walk up behind him, pull out  my box of tagalongs, and hand it to the women. 

He turns around, rolls his eyes, throws up his hands, and walks away. 

Like all good superheroes.

I try to create my own supervillains. 

I’ll be waiting for you, Croc Pot. 

via Cinemassacre:

Have you ever wondered how many times a VHS tape can be copied before the quality gets so bad, you can’t even tell what it is anymore? I actually tried this experiment back in 2002 when I had a little too much extra time on my hands. Using two VHS tapes, I copied the footage back and forth until it deteriorated beyond being watchable. If you’re bored enough, check it out.

I’m not a wallpaper kind of person but this design by Zoe Burnett ever gets produced, I’ll buy it instantly.

In particular, I wanted a game that went into heartwrenching emotional detail about the experience: rather than simply offering a mechanic that simulated dysphoria, I also wanted to portray it narratively and in a way that the player experiences as personal. - [Author's description]

[Play Online]

LumASCII (ZX Spectrum) by Bob Smith (2012). It took 9 months to code it, since there weren’t many tools for the Speccy to work with “colour ASCII” (ANSI? hehe). Longplay version here.
Thanks to Akira and Ilkke  for the heads up.

It’s looking like the next few months are going to be busy — I’m going to be doing more traveling between now and the summer than I have over the past year.

Here are two events that are confirmed:

In a little under two weeks, I’ll be heading down to the bay area for my first Game Developers Conference. I’m not giving any talks, but I’m looking forward to meeting new folks and spending time with friends and sweeties in the area. I’ll be around from the 23rd to the 30th — if anyone’s going to be in town and would like to meet up, please let me know.

In April I’m headed to the Different Games conference on diversity and inclusion in digital games, where my game lim is being shown. I’d heard about this conference months ago and it sounded like something I’d love to attend, but I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to afford the flight to New York City. At the urging of some friends, I put out a crowdfunding call and received the $400 to cover my flight within hours. Once again I’m blown away by the generosity and support coming out of my twitter communities.

And two that I’m waiting to hear back on:

anna anthropy and I submitted a workshop on making games to the Allied Media Conference taking place in June. I’ve heard so much about it in the past and I’d be thrilled if our proposal is accepted to the Imagining Better Futures Through Play track.

Finally, Tobi Hill-Meyer and I submitted a proposal to Gender Odyssey, an annual Seattle conference on gender diversity. Our workshop is going to look at the history of trans representation in games and talk about the ways that trans folks have begun to create our own imagery in the medium.

This weekend I was really excited because NASA was going to host a game jam (on my birthday!) right by where I live. But then it turned out they were sold out of tickets. So instead I set up a “Kicked Out Of Nasa” Game Jam on Glorious Trainwrecks with the suggested theme of “games about being denied access to space”. A bunch of my friends met up at Anna Anthropy’s place to make stuff and it was awesome.

Here are the games that wound up getting submitted:

HOWLER?

I made this one! You can download it here:

• Mac Version
• Windows Version

This was originally going to be something wildly different, but I got so distracted messing with the video-feedback shader effect I was going to use that I just added music to that and made it the whole game. It basically just fills your screen with rainbows. The music is by Liz Ryerson who also did the music for Anna’s game below.

I posted some 6-second demo videos on Vine: Vine 1, Vine 2

Dirty Dishes

This was made by the lovely Amy Dentata, she described it as sort of like Tetris. It issues you a challenge: Carefully stack the dirty dishware in the sink without breaking it. This is REALLY HARD. Amy’s roommates must buy the cheapest dishes. It makes for an interesting challenge tho!

When Amy plays this she pretty much just seems to repeatedly spam the debug button to spawn extra dishware and cover the screen in broken glass.

Download on GloriousTrainwrecks

Typing With Hands

Loren Schmidt made this and he describes it as a simulator that allows you to experience what it is like to type using hands, like maybe in case you’re an alien or something and you have tentacles instead of hands. It puts a picture of some hands on a keyboard up on the screen, and when you press keys it shows the hands typing them. It makes this fascinating body-disassociation effect because you’re typing and you’re watching hands typing but they’re NOT YOUR HANDS (unless you’re Kim in which case they are your hands).

Download on GloriousTrainwrecks

FORBIDDEN SPACE

This was event hostess Anna Anthropy‘s game and probably the most on-theme entry we had. This is the kind of thing I really like to see people experimenting with– in a much more interesting enlargement of what I was trying to do with Shadowland Prophesy, this is a game which takes place outside of “game space” and mostly on your own computer. Aliens command you to never again use the space bar, after which the game minimizes itself and you are left to return to your daily tasks, using Firefox, whatever. Until you press the space bar, at which point the game pops back up and informs you YOU HAVE LOST and THE EARTH IS DESTROYED. This is the other piece Liz did music for yesterday.

Download on GloriousTrainwrecks

PRESS SPACE TO SHINY

Wade McGillis is the maker of a simple but haunting PC/iPhone game called AstroNOT where a little blue pixel person basically gets lost on a gigantic, baffling C64-y planet. Along those same lines he made this little 2-screen thing with an astronaut that jumps around and sparkes. Apparently he meant it to be longer at some point, as it is though it has pretty colors.

Spaaaaaarkle

Play online on GloriousTrainwrecks

Bonkers Space Patrol

Redbone submitted this to the jam over the Internet, I didn’t get to play it (no Mac version) but I watched someone else and it’s actually kind of hilariously chaotic. Anna’s description of the rules were “things from space are sent into space, things from Earth go back to Earth”.

Download on GloriousTrainwrecks

Horrible Mazes 3: No Space For You

Overkill describes this game thusly: “This game is horrible, and has some really uninspired mazes. Enjoy.” The graphics on this one are pretty and it made me laugh. I can’t figure out if I got to the end or not.

Play online on GloriousTrainwrecks

Science Jam

This one’s a Knytt Story. Knytt Stories 4ever

Download on GloriousTrainwrecks

Empty Void of Space

This is the most mysterious of the jam entries, and was the first one submitted. Again because of a lack of mac version I could not play it, but the author describes it as an “EXTREMELY REALISTIC GAME”. I think… I think someone actually made an accurate simulation of the empty, unmoving void of space.

Download on GloriousTrainwrecks

—-
UPDATES

Satellite Destroyer

Eli Brody submitted this a little bit after the jam. I cannot play it because XNA, but the idea is that you destroy actual satellites rendered in realtime from NASA’s publicly available tracking data. That is awesome.

Download on GloriousTrainwrecks

Out of Space

Another late entry by Chigbarg, who actually came to the in-person jam but his monitor got smashed on the drive over so he couldn’t do anything. Anyway after the jam he made this and I am not sure I understand it at ALL but it’s AWESOME and moody and gorgeous. The premise is you need to board the spaceship, but cannot.

Download on GloriousTrainwrecks

It’s 1999 and I need an identity so I declare I’m really into film when I mean to say “I want to make video games” or “I want to be a cartoonist.” A vision of my future self is dying and I can’t admit what it is or why, the impassioned artist and activist, queer, poly kink chick turning a sickly pale purple in her bassinet  The most violent and nihilistic sludge is what I rent, and what could be more nihilistic than the zillion dollar Ed Gein flick that swept the Oscars? I watch it, watch it again, I read the fucking book, it has the elements that make my brain vibrate—queerness plus cannibalism or vampirism, lycanthropy, mass murder as code for my criminal sexuality. In my vicinity at school are queers either out or on the verge and I envy them hard (openly gay H.S. punk boy, I envied you,) but I’m a dyke, not a fag. I’m a dykey, faggy dyke. I’m something I can make no sense of, and that means I’m just insane. Ted Levine tucks his cock for the mirror the way I would when I was 5, feeling something unnameable. Reverberations from a childhood of replicating the poses of women in porn, craving what I interpreted as power and confidence within their bodies. The moths, an appropriation of endless chrysalid imagery like twinkling butterfly .gifs on pastel websites bearing messages of support (or a picture framed in a therapist’s office) converted to a spooky pulp gothic corporate logo.

Contained in this film was a capsule version of my self-image and the process by which I shamed and invalidated it—the tattered human leather ripped from authentic bodies and authentic identities, the girl in the well like the queer cis girl I’d betray and erase simply by existing. I was relieved when Clarice, who was also me, shot the Transsexual Empress. I was a natural born feminist (second wave.) 

X weeks ago I was called Buffalo Bill behind my back, in earshot, in a public yet personal context in which I could do nothing but continue charging forward as though nothing was happening (this man did not make his observation at a glance—my presentation is a mess of boy clothes not yet discarded and feminine touches like glittery nails, probably incoherent and bound to get less coherent in the next months before it gets better. He has known me for a while.) I thought of the moment in which that name, “Buffalo Bill” is invoked in a certain Jean Renoir film, and I thought, also, of the context in which I originally saw That One Renoir Film: a class taught by the professor I liked and respected above all others in the safety of a college campus where I ought to have been connecting with queers, going on hormones, and learning how to exist.

The Goodbye Horses sequence still gets referenced and parodied. It won’t die. Anthony Hopkins’ Freddy Krueger has granted it immortality. Regardless of intent expressed by those responsible, it is one of our culture’s most widely circulated and celebrated images of transfemininity. It was still with me when I, before a mirror, first saw my stubbly face framed by a cheap wig (the first hair of any description I’d had in six years.) I dismissed it. It was there.

This seems to matter less and less as I meet women like myself (more like myself than I ever imagined) and observe their ability to exist casually in a way I desperately need to, with less preoccupation with the process of transition, with perhaps less of a need to endlessly recount personal narratives (such as this one.) It’s 1999 me I wish I could get this movie away from; slap the disc from her hands and (delicately) kick her backward into a bookshelf, from which a copy of Gender Outlaw would tumble and embrace her like a facehugger.

By Megan Farokhmanesh on Mar 10, 2013 at 10:35a

Game developer and father Mike Mika hacked a 2010 Nintendo ROM of Donkey Kong to give his daughter the chance to save Mario instead of playing as him.

Mika posted a video of the new "Pauline Edition," where Mario patiently awaits rescue from the game's original damsel in distress, Pauline.

"My three year old daughter and I play a lot of old games together," Mika wrote in the video's description. "Her favorite is Donkey Kong. Two days ago, she asked me if she could play as the girl and save Mario. She's played as Peach in Super Mario Bros. 2 and naturally just assumed she could do the same in Donkey Kong. I told her we couldn't in that particular Mario game, she seemed really bummed out by that."

To solve this, Mika swapped palettes, redrew frames and replaced Mario with Pauline. Check out the video above to see Pauline hop into action.

Donkey Kong isn't the first game to get a role reversal from a loving father. Last year, Mike Hoye transformed The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker's Link into a girl for this daughter by hand-editing the game's dialogue.

I’ve finally realised what Valve’s Greenlight is.

Yes, it’s a near useless corner of the Internet where games go to never be on Steam for the vast majority of developers. It’s also the place with one of the most embarrassing gatekeeper fees I could possibly name. It’s those things but also something more, something vastly more interesting.

“Looks like a Flash game”, “Looks like a cellphone game”, “Browser crap”, “I always downvote cellphone games”, “Looks like a Unity game”, “This game doesn’t belong on Steam”

“This game doesn’t belong on Steam”

“This game doesn’t belong on Steam”

The question Valve believe they’re asking their users, the expectation of developers paying the fee and going in to Greenlight is that people are being asked “would you buy this game on Steam?” And for many people, that’s the question they answer.

But Greenlight is something else to many. Greenlight is the last stand of the I AM THE HARDCORE. Greenlight is the final battleground of the NO CASUAL SHALL PASS. Greenlight is the last ditch attempt at fighting change with its trusty friend Mr Kickstarter Nostalgia Project in tow to defend its honour.

The question they’re answering isn’t just SHOULD THIS GAME BE ON STEAM (YES/NO/ASK ME LATER), it’s IS THIS GAME AN ABOMINATION IN THE EYES OF THE ELDER GODS OF VIDEOGAMES (1992-2002) AND CAN WE EXORCISE THIS FILTH FROM THE WORLD IN ONE CLICK AND A COMMENT? PS – LOL.

Greenlight is their only defence now. It is Steam Fortress and they’ll hold the barbarians from the gate if it kills them.

The housewife won. We won. The majority of people who play videogames won. The hidden object players, the match 3′ers, the bite size gaming chunksers won. Those who like small arty experiments and those who like nothing more than a Bruckheimer movie made game won. Variety won. There’s more winning to do but there’s always more winning to do.

And all that’s left now for those who covet the videogame from the people is a tiny service on the largest PC digital distributor and a NO vote, their fingers raw from downvoting browser games and cellphone games on site.

It’s not a NO button, it’s a GET OFF MY LAWN button.

Bless.

baby’s first zine

Silhouette is a 2 player, turn based game where one player plays as a victim trapped in a house, and the other as a creepy killer hunting him down! – [Author's description]

ADVERTISING AGENCY

ADVERTISING AGENCY

ADVERTISING AGENCY

ADVERTISING AGENCY

the long awaited english translation is here!

enjoy advertising agency adventures in an advertising dystopia!

get into advertising agency comics at a young age to maintain a life long healthy advertising agency comic consumer relationship!!

tell your kids how sexy advertising agency comics are

ADVERTISING AGENCY

ADVERTISING AGENCY

newhousebooks:

Lights on for safety. From Seven Is Magic, 1969

Super Mario Bros. 3

Game critic John Brindle recently interviewed me for a piece at the New Statesman about political games. We ended up speaking for nearly three hours and most of our conversation didn’t make it into the piece, so he’s also posted the full transcript of the interview at his blog.

I like doing interviews because they force me to make my thinking explicit in a way that I’m otherwise rarely required to do. Here, John confronted me about the intentionality question with reference to lim, an issue I’d been intentionally avoiding commenting on since the game’s release.

A) how much of this stuff was completely unintentional and how much of it became intentional when you noticed it but then thought “fuck it, that kinda works”? B) what responsibility do you feel you and other devs making things like this have towards the unintended consequences of the systems you create? (go litel boke etc)

I’m not going to pretend that Lim represents a perfect expression of my will. It’s the second game I made and I think the results speak to that, in a way. But it’s not just a reflection of my inexperience at the time, I think that systems have a tendency to get away from us. So we intend to portray or produce one thing but the systems we’re creating seem to resist or reshape our intents – at least that’s been my experience. I definitely had some intentions when I started making the game but by the time I released it there had been this back and forth process of trying to map my imagined game onto this system, the system resisting or fighting back or doing something different, my reacting to that, and so forth.

I can’t speak for other devs but for me this quality of systems makes making a game very different from working in some other media, because there’s this wrestling or dialogue with the system as it’s being built that shapes the final direction of the work. Sometimes the unintentional consequences can be illuminating and useful, and sometimes they’re just experienced as bugs. For me the distinction between bug/feature then isn’t what the developer didn’t intend versus what she did, but more of, is this useful or interesting to the player, does it fit within the experience the system has been developing or does it break it. Maybe that’s just me as someone without much programming background speaking – I don’t encounter systems as someone who has command over them, which might be the experience of someone who is a trained programmer.

The interview closed with this exchange, which is a line of thinking I’d like to explore further:

Is there a production difficulty with procedural politics? is it easier to build a big model if you’ve got a fuckload of time and/or resources? Twine for instance is the hyperdemotic medium du jour, but is typically used for quite different things (although I’ve yet to play this new batch of twine jam games that are challenging the CYOA stigma). How feasible is proceduralism for outsiders? 

Yes, good question. So if you check out that latest batch of games, I think you’ll see that quite a few do involve systems (the one I put together does, though it’s not meant to model any specific real-world social system). As scale and complexity increases, so does the difficulty of putting the model together. But I think the barrier to entry is actually not that high. I mean, I don’t have a programming background and Lim was the second game I’ve made, and people have done interesting procedural things with Twine. I think it’s often less a matter of specific coding knowledge and more of an ability to think procedurally or systematically, which can be a very difficult and counterintuitive means of thinking.

Actually, and this just occurs to me, but I think people who have experiences of marginalization are often forced to see things systematically in a way that people who are privileged on particular vectors aren’t. And I think that experience might actually lend itself to an ability to craft more compelling procedural systems, if only the same people weren’t told over and over again that coding/math is something they can’t or shouldn’t do. That’s one reason why tools that abstract code in such a way that they’re less intimidating are so exciting to me.

A cephalopod wealth accumulation sim for two players

sad octopy: wasd | happy octopy: arrow keys

happy octopy uses mouse to control the cursor, sad octopy uses spacebar to place coins/spikes at the cursor

collect five coins to win | do NOT collect spikes

WEALTH IS ALL IN THIS UNDERSEA DYSTOPIA

at game over place cursor over winning octopy and press space to replay

[Play Online]

In crunch mode at work, which is why there haven't been updates here for some time.

However, as of tomorrow, The MIT Press releases my book, Uncertainty in Games.

There are a lot of books that attempt to provide a broad overview of the craft of game design; I wanted instead to take a single important element and go deep on it.

The central argument is that uncertainty, whether of outcome or path, is a central part of the appeal of games. I analyze a slew of very different games to unpick their sources of uncertainty, and provide some ideas for how to use an understanding of uncertainty to guide the design of innovative games.

You can find Uncertainty in Games on Amazon here. Or, of course, order from your favorite independent book store.

Where in America’s Past is Carmen Sandiego?

warning: twine, feelings, linearity – [Author's Tweet]

Will these new consoles finally be able to render trans women in real time?

Are these new consoles capable of portraying police as members and enforcers of morally bankrupt institutions and oppression?

Can Batman games accurately depict Bruce Wayne as the horrible classist bigot he is and the lower class criminals he attacks as victims of a system Wayne is party to?

Will we finally see non-normative romantic and physical relationships represented in the same number and to the same degree of fidelity that we typically see for heterosexual monogamy?

Will developers at last be able to criticize social issues that affect people other than straight, white cis-men?

Because if the answer to these questions is, “All this stuff could have been done a decade ago if the people in charge really wanted to,” then I have just one question in place of these others: What is the fucking point of a new console generation?