21. If Player One is the—-also designed—-
white, cis--, heterosexual, young, abled,
and middle--class male, then Player Two
becomes his counterpart as a mode of
designed identity…the games made for
Player Two appear to be limiting and
limited—-small in scope and absurd in
meaning. These games do not appear to
be about life--and--death issues; they
represent small stories with small
outcomes. And yet these games are
important.
Shira Chess
22.
23. Smaller games with smaller budgets and
smaller audiences have the luxury of
being more experimental or bizarre or
interesting than 12 million dollar games
that need to play it as safely as possible
to ensure a return on investment.
Anna Anthropy
24. Critical Code Studies Working Group 2014
Jeremy Douglass proposes three distinct areas of
code as feminist act: code feminism, which is made
to be used and executed for a feminist purpose;
feminist codework, which is code-like but not
intended to be run; and feminist code, which is
“executable, syntactically subversive embedded
language or new programming [code] languages
affording a fundamentally different feminist
paradigm for software development.
31. He's standing there wondering if he has lung cancer. He's
wondering if anyone would miss him if he died, or whether
anyone would notice. He's wondering what they do with
bodies that they find on the street. He's getting really
dark. I'm staring at him and I want to go over there and
feed him and give him a cigarette and feed his cat -
because I'm a child. It's just a script and blinking lights. I
know better, and I shouldn't have tenderness for these
characters, and part of the game is making it possible to
inflict as much pain as possible on these characters. When
things go poorly for Melanie or Andrus or Vinny, it can get
a little dark and there's pain there. It's necessary for this to
be realistic, for them to be alive - seemingly alive. They
have to experience pain. Players' decisions have to have
consequences. You can play the game and damage these
characters - maybe even by accident. I feel like I'm killing
my babies, but over and over again, infinitely and into
eternity.
Richard Hofmeier on Cart Life
36. “The entire games industry, from AAA to the smallest
bedroom indie, could spend 10 years making nothing but
games about gay dads in suburbia — or queer South
Indian women — and still be a million miles from
encompassing those experiences. The point of diversity and
inclusion, in any artistic medium, is not to be
comprehensive. It is not to render the mysterious
mundane, or to reduce the art of transformation to simply
looking into a mirror. As I play through the lives of the
characters in Butterfly Soup or Dream Daddy, these highly
specific experiences are at times strange, but they are not
estranging.”
Meg Jayanth
https://www.polygon.com/2018/1/12/16878196/butterfly-soup-best-games-
2017-year-in-review
A study by McGill, Settle and Decker (2013) found respondents were 83.3% white, and nearly 90% men, which is consistent with previous studies that average 10% women.
This is consistent with the 75% men in industry self-studies (and a similar percentage white).
In classic point and click adventure games, players were encouraged to interact slowly with the world and probe a range of options through verbs that included an emphasis on the social and exploratory.
The games I am interested in as digital stories fall under the category of games made for player two, as described by Shira Chess
…these games in commercial space frequently reproduce problematic norms, and offer aspirational lifestyles grounded in an endless cycle of consumption.
The future of interactive digital storytelling is being crafted in tools that are designed for solo (or small teams) to streamline the process from concept to playable result.
These are not the tools of the games industry: they are frequently open source tools, developed to provide entry points that are visual rather than procedural
To riff on Lorde: “the master’s code will never dismantle the master’s house”
Eternally Us, love story by Ben Chandler + collaborators
