twine succeeded precisely because of its violence–because it was suited to guerilla warfare–a weapon for underdogs
replicating, breeding, virulent–cheap pipebombs and tin can landmines
PORPENTINE
a nightmare drowned in enema
Filed under design …
Free Indie Games: Curating the DIY Revolution
a talk i did with terry cavanagh about cool games, queer creators, diy, curation, and fuck capitalism
the music of porp games: a compilation
pretty much everything i make is based on music
music is my emotions when i have none
my games are music games
they should have a soundcloud.
i listened to many of these songs over and over again (Ke$ha’s Warrior track, 7 hours on repeat) until they become permanent reminders of a certain time in my life, even tear-inducing to relive (the howling dogs tracks especially).
my games are how i get people to listen to music.
that is a big reason why they exist.
Youtube playlist
(or click the jump to listen to them as individual Youtubes + 2 extra tracks that weren’t on Youtube)
the most important architecture of the next x years will be designed by those who were locked outside/inside the buildings
(architecture both physical and virtual)
we who were forced to contemplate these spaces much, much longer than anyone else was, and the permanent effect it had on our psyches
from this principle we derive our unstoppable designs
Free Indie Games: Curating the DIY Revolution
so me and terry cavanagh (who is a wonderful person) did a talk at GDC about some of our favorite lesser known games of 2012, about curation, about making games for humans
we consciously avoided amazing but well-covered games (Dys4ia and Unmanned for example)
we had a powerpoint but we threw it out and made videos instead, some recorded in fraps, others handheld footage with terry’s phonecam.
coverage by Edge with some key quotes
list of games we talked about on screen:
Lim by merritt kopas
Republia Times by Lucas Pope
Game Title and Game Title: Lost Levels by Michael Brough
Goblet Grotto by thecatamites and j chastain
Live Forever by hubol
A Very Pink Game by sheepherds
Coletânea Esses Games Violentos by Pedro Paiva’s 11-Year-Old Students
Tape Dream by Lilith Megiddo
Asphyx by Droqen
Imscared by Ivan Zanotti
At the Bonfire by finny
mentioned as examples of good exoludic games:
Oh My Gorgons! by Alan Hazelden and Sarah Marshall
Blues for Mittavinda by Jack King-Spooner
mentioned as examples of good personal Twine games:
Rat Chaos by j chastain
Kim’s Story by Kim Moss
Nineteen by Elizabeth Sampat
i also referenced marras’ post on games and disability
quotes read during talk:
…Lim is about feeling erased and attacked. That said, I’ve been wary of presenting a one-sided, tragic view of trans experience in my games. I really feel that being trans is amazing, and we get enough tragedy in mainstream stories about trans people. There’s a lot of violence and negative experiences that go along with being a trans person, but it can also be beautiful and powerful.
So what I’ve tried to get across in my games is that being an other can be painful and horrible, but we’re rarely alone — there are others like us, and if we can find each other, we can appreciate and celebrate the unlikely fact of our existence together, in the face of a world that says that we shouldn’t be. – merritt kopas
We view apps different than books or songs, which we do not curate. If you want to criticize a religion, write a book. If you want to describe sex, write a book or a song, or create a medical app. – Apple
I was in a strange old building, seemed like a warehouse-turned-fleamarket. It seemed really big even though I only remember a few rooms.
Most of it was spent in a room with a few supposed B-movie stars that had trashed the space. We were watching a few VHS movies in enromous boxes. I got them from the market area of the building, which took up most of the rooms I visited. Some of which were really cheap and had obscured psychadelic-feeling art. One was $800 and I felt like I remembered the movie, like it was something I had wanted for a long time. It was in a large black box apart from the rest, with neon brush-marks. I couldn’t afford it though.
One of the B-movie stars was a head with his skeleton hanging out and a few organs. I was probably thinking of a leyak? I don’t remember much about the movie but it was focused on rainbow goop, kind of like Street Trash I guess. Each room had a large window, but they were closed so I could only see because there were dim-lit lights some places. – lilith megiddo
i mostly engaged with them in the same brutally stupid way i did with everything else. watching a movie when you’re 8 years old, when you kind of don’t care about a lot of the stuff like dramatic subplots and musical numbers but you accept them anyway as possibly appealing to a kind of phantasm audience that you don’t belong to but which presumably exists, and which has needs and tastes far more defined than yours. – thecatamites
We have a problem, which is not admitting the degree to which we rely on games for anesthesia. They’re disposable alternate lives that slowly devour our real ones. “Gamers” are junkies, games are their junk, and there’s a kind of game criticism that’s primary function is enabling them to deny that. When we don’t ask more from games, it’s because we don’t want them to get better. We’re afraid of the world and we’d rather explore the boundaries of these fake, facile ones. We hate ourselves and we hate our bodies and we’d rather inhabit fake selves, fake bodies.
If we gain anything from playing games nonstop for the last XX years, it’ll be through thinking about them now, finding what’s good in them, and dragging the good out of the life-devouring structures in which it is entombed. – j chastain
There's always a GDC talk that prompts me to reevaluate what my role in this industry is. That was @terrycavanagh and @aliendovecote today.
The fact that anyone said “capitalist death machine” during a GDC talk makes me so happy. @aliendovecote
Yeah, @aliendovecote and @terrycavanagh's talk was basically incredible. Lots to think about. Lots to change about the way I write.
2013/03/25 14:46:59 via web
.@aliendovecote is presenting Lim to the audience of white cisdudes. Fuck. Yes.#GDC13
The idea of using handheld camera footage to show off these very personal games is brilliant. Bravo, @aliendovecote.#GDC
oh no I'm crying in this panel because it made me so happy haha
"I guess we need a takeaway message, right? 'Destroy everything. Just destroy it.'" -@aliendovecote#GDC
Take-away message = "Destroy everything"#igs Cheers from audience.
2013/03/25 14:40:45 via web
This is my 26th week of writing a weekly feature for RPS on free indie games
this week’s picks are so good, i was truly spoilt. many of these games moved me emotionally in one way or another. they are all great. to name a few:
erotica about being trapped inside Anne Hathaway’s mouth
a beautiful body image spin onThe Yellow Wallpaper
PROFANE BEAST SOLDIER THAT FUCKS AND EATS MEN
gatekeeping satire
glitched out matador game
Sailor Moon + cosmic horror + boardgame
added page: Twine resources
added under Ludology, for now
biggest collection of Twine snippets, resources, and jams on the net
Bloody Princess Farmer patch notes
Bloody Princess Farmer Beta 1/16/2013
-Nerfed piss storms by adding higher probability of slime showers
-Set minimum crop threshold for participation in Showdown to 20
-Added Princess Oath to main menu
howling dogs afterbirth
howling dogs won the 18th IFComp’s Golden Banana Award for the highest standard deviation, meaning the most loved and the most hated, which I expected making a feminist game, in a non-parser format.
–
Emily Short’s interview with me about Howling Dogs
the first half talks about intfic culture and Twine, the second half is the meat
–
Here are some thoughts about howling dogs that I liked:
thoughts on the phrase “cut off from the passion of religious women”
it’s like that book “infinite jest” only instead of being the most entertaining film ever, it’s the most depressing and introspective game ever and it has to be outlawed cuz everyone realizes the beauty of the world and refuses to settle for this one
terrorist organizations attempt to get their hands on legendary “howling dogs” software to destroy society – lilith megiddo
It has a quality of… I’ve been thinking about it lately, and I guess I would say being bigger than the computer, or bigger than the player? – christopher whitman
something about art that seeks to contain vs. art that seeks to access
aquarium versus a dip in the ocean
but the most insightful comment has to be:
I’m very happy that people supported me and responded. It means a lot. For people making things on the fringes, that kind of support has nothing to do with ego, and everything to do with emotional survival and health. It is almost impossible to express the vitality others have given me.
–
Howling dogs began from one thing. I was visiting the east coast for a month. Before I got on the airplane I searched through my cardboard boxes (I had just moved to a new place and the few things I owned were in boxes on the floor) for a book. I was afraid of being alone with my own thoughts in the claustrophobic confines of the airplane. I needed a book. Oh, here’s one I have not read before.
The book I found was Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburo Oe. One paragraph stayed with me and when I decided to enter the IF Comp, a week before the deadline, I typed that quote into the first passage of Twine.
–
listening to the entire SchoolTree album over and over again.
thinking about that coffin tank tweet by Leon Arnott, something about coffin tanks sealed before battle, how can you fight unless you accept death…
seeing how erin feels about joan of arc.
The black room contains many natures: a prison, a remotely piloted ship careening through space, an experimental box, a lonely rented room…
The timer is not an arbitrary number: beginning at 367 means you’ve passed the year mark very recently. Someone imprisoned for an unknown period of time and knowing the days of their imprisonment will irrationally hope that a year is when they will be released. Beginning after a year has elapsed disposes of that hope. The days are now free to stretch on because no significant number is on the horizon.
–
The sanity room is from a photograph I saw once of the wall of an Antarctic research base. The wall had this painting of beautiful, verdant nature–meadow, lake, forest, clouds. A lone mural in a vast, icy waste. This wall was for therapeutic value.
–
Interwoven text–the cell in the saint sequence corresponds to the walls of the black room (the northern door that brings confusion), the reference to the living city in the north (with an ivy-encrusted observatory, {*}), and so on.
Howling dogs was good for me because it let me get eight images out of my head, the eight scenes. Each one has lived inside me for a long time–the drop coffin, the moor room with the alcohol fire I saw in my dream, the garden, the leaves hissing in the night which I saw in real life, the passion of a martyr, the black room, the empress who is draped with red ribbons to prepare her for the blood that will one day pour from her body, and the second ending, which came not from a vision of architectural plates but an artificially illuminated lawn at night in front of a palace leading to a river and beyond, dark forest.
I am so glad the images are out of my bed, like pearls or shit that needed to be disgorged. Making things is intensely irritating.
“multimillion dollar war porn war game that soars like Icarus and explodes on the sun of hilarious ragdoll physics.”
the full text of my interview (the one excerpted for the New Statesman article) with john brindle is out
my response and thoughts on Body of Bind–status effects, fear of change, fear of complication
I agree for the most part with what you’re saying. But the game isn’t just about horror of change, it’s horror of how the game treats us when we’ve changed—the most crucial example of this is gaining a percentage value of infection possibility per human limb. For instance, a human arm is 10%, a human hand is 4%. Those parts alone mean that every time you get hit by a Dirty enemy (this usually means an enemy using rust weapons, although some other enemies have that tag as well), you have a 14% chance of being infected.
Let’s look at what infection means in this game. Unlike a conventional RPG where status effects purely affect combat, being Infected has far-reaching ramifications. Most characters won’t talk to you. Some laugh at you, others act disgusted. The reason behind each reaction is interesting—humans think you’re gross and infectious, while robots treat it as a malfunction, you’re marked for the scrap heap, bad program. Either way, progressing becomes painful and discouraging.
In addition, many human zones are blocked off in various ways.
You can actually beat the game while infected.