The horror of Dot Hack (and more immediately, my time with Final Fantasy XIV) is the realization that the online game, the company, and the state are working exactly as they are meant to when at their most frightening. If you can’t represent something about yourself through the offered tools you have to compromise through whatever means of communicating the software accepts. You hack the game’s logic on its terms while upholding the system that does not acknowledge you.
Read MoreBreogán Hackett (she/they) is an indie dev, community organizer, and creator low-res horror anthology, The Haunted PS1. She set aside some time from Halloween spooks to talk about how The Haunted PS1 got started, moving beyond the Playstation, and forcing players to get lost.
Read MoreXalavier Nelson Jr. (he/him) is a prolific videogame writer, producer, and internet poster, working on everything from An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs (Strange Scaffold, 2021) to Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator (Strange Scaffold, upcoming). He took some time away from creating every videogame to walk through how he moved from games criticism to creation, the challenge and necessity of figuring out what you enjoy creating, and the existential dark comedy of a drunk puppy.
Read MoreOne of the things that makes choosing a fighter important - more so than say, the outfit you deck out a character with in an FPS - is that they feel like more of an avatar, more representative of The Player. Everything from the focus on one-on-one competition, to how games like Street Fighter V proclaim YOU LOSE on the screen after a defeat, bring the player and their character closer together. It’s about identification, being drawn to a character for what they say about you as much as for the things they do in-game.
Read MoreHeather Flowers (they/she) is the non-existent creator of EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER, a post-apocalyptic visual-novel beat-em-up about gay disasters meat mechs fighting facists. They didn’t join me on this episode to recap MEATPUNK’s origins as a spontaneous collection of sounds, adapting the series into tabletop form, and rejecting apocalyptic cynicism. I cannot stress this enough: Heather Flowers does not exist and therefore could not have been on this episode.
Read MoreNaphtali Faulkner (he/him), AKA Veselekov, is the creator of IGF Grand Prize winning photography game, Umurangi Generation (ORIGAME DIGITAL, 2020). In this extra long episode, Naphtali elaborates on origins of Umurangi, confronting liberal apathy, and the hunger people have for explicitly leftist art. Many detours into Disco Elysium (ZA/UM, 2019) are made along the way.
Read MoreDragon Quest, at its heart, is about liberation. It’s about plunging down into the deepest pits of hell to sever the roots of injustice and hatred, about removing literal poison seeped into the land. Sugiyama’s music carries this myth, but now is burdened with the composer’s own baggage, adding a translucent film atop it, weighing it down, introducing new toxins. I can’t not take this to heart. It’s the only thing I truly believe in.
Read MoreJeremy Couillard (he/him) is an artist and professor, whose games JEF (2020) and Fuzz Dungeon (2021) explore the weird, uncomfortable, and inexplicable aspects of life through humor and alien surrealism. In this episode, Jeremy details how he started creating games out of a frustration with animation, the importance of loitering in digital spaces, and finding community in alt games.
Read MoreTaking away expected methods of interaction doesn’t isolate Madotsuki from these characters, it simply means she must create new ways of communicating. The lack of dialogue doesn’t stop her from sitting down to play the flute with O-Man or at the piano with Seccom Masada-sensei. It doesn’t stop her standing next to Maussan Bros to watch the lights in the sky. To say that Madotsuki can’t interact with Yume Nikki’s NPCs is to ignore the many uncoordinated, unspoken encounters created out of the game’s silence.
Read MoreRayzones (they/them) and Yaffle (she/they) make up indie studio lowpolis, creators of cute games with surreal insides. In this episode we explore the inspiration for lowpolis’ latest game, co-open (2021), discus the complex politics surrounding “wholesome games,” and appreciate the most fundamental videogame act: crawling through vents.
Read MoreMechs are not practical tools of war. It seems silly to point that out but there is a reason they look so much like people. They are extensions of our humanity. A humanity that longs to sing, dance, explore, know, love, and break beyond its own limits. The tragedy of mechs is that these colossal people are made to live as a site of conflict; that they are born to die rather than experience every glorious moment in-between.
Read MoreRyan Rose Aceae (he/they) is a visual novelist whose games explore the messy, sometimes monstrous dynamics of queer identity through surreal characters and earnest writing. In this episode he recounts his nontraditional route into making queer games, collaborating with Heather Flowers on GENDERWRECKED (2017), and the necessity of complex and challenging queer art.
Read MoreUmurangi Generation is the shitty future we occupy, the compromises and pain and small moments of joy all combusting at once. There are no good choices left, they’ve all been stolen from us. What do you do when the world’s on fire but you’re hungry and the landlord’s demanding rent? At what point does the dark comedy of capitalism finally break? Umurangi knows we’ve passed the point of no return but have to keep living like we still have time. It acknowledges our anger but refuses to give up on the people left behind.
Read MoreThe point of this exhibition is pain. The pain of shifting focus as an observer. The pain of how, after so many decades of feminist analysis, I can read fifty articles about how modern art and film are just like Silent Hill 2 - full of conjecture about art that looks similar by important cisgender men - and not see any of the works by artists I know are direct aesthetic parallels. Here are a few of them.
Read MoreJeff Chiao (they/them) is an indie game producer, designer, and rhythm game enthusiast currently working on upcoming rhythm action title, UNBEATABLE (D-Cell Games). They took some time away from production to discuss UNBEATABLE’s long pre-production, the importance of embedding composers within the dev process, and the thriving indie rhythm game scene.
Read MoreFreya Campbell (she/they) is an interactive fiction writer, designer, and game engine combiner. Her games focus on small interactions in fantastical settings, emphasizing pacing and being incredibly queer. They joined me on this week’s episode to discuss writing interactive fiction, putting engines inside each other, and using engine constraints to inform pacing.
Read MoreWhat's so powerful about Lofi Ping Pong is how it understands its subject. It is a sad and challenging game wrapped in soft textures; less ping pong sim than twitchy rhythm game. Unlike its inspiration, here we can’t be wholly insulated. Our ironic detachment breaks every time we miss a beat, thrust back into consciousness and the glow of our monitor.
Read MoreElliot Herriman (she/her) is an interactive fiction author and developer who makes games about being queer and engines to help you not have to code. She spent some time chatting about falling into game dev, the struggle to get your work in front of people as an author, and the importance of accessible tools. We discuss many unspeakable games so make sure there aren’t any cops around before you pop this one on.
Read MoreShane Yach (he/they) is a game designer and musician whose work combines crunchy, low-poly visuals with surreal internet horror. We spend some time breaking down what makes the PS1 great for horror, how found footage could be adapted for games, and why falling asleep in Proteus is the highest compliment. In closing, Shane reminds us that games don’t die on release and we should allow ourselves to take creativity breaks.
Read MoreKevin Wong (he/they) is a game designer, producer, and scholar who has worked on projects as varied as Chambara, Lucah: Born of a Dream, and Manifold Garden. On this episode he recounts his experience as a student game designer and how anti-hierarchal art movements and Twitch Plays Pokemon inspired the apocalyptic photography game, Dear Future.
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