Molleindustria is officially and primarily on BlueSky. The Twitter account will remain active for the time being. In addition to it there is a searchable static archive of Tweets from 2010 to 2022 (that is until Musk’s takeover). Experience the best possible Twitter.
Author Archives: paolo
Meet me at the Workers’ Club
Watch this video on YouTube Meet me at the Workers’ Club is an interactive reconstruction of Alexander Rodchenko’s Workers’ Club. The original installation was created in 1925 to represent the Soviet Union at the Paris World Expo (aka International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts). The interactive experience offers plenty of commentary on the …
The New York Times Simulator – Release Notes
Watch this video on YouTube The New York Times Simulator is out now, free to play from any browser. It works decently on mobile too. It’s a meta news game about how corporate media manufacture consent for genocide, minimize police misconduct, and serve the ruling class. The content of the game is literally “ripped from the …
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Green New Deal Simulator – Release Notes
Watch this video on YouTube The Green New Deal Simulator is out and free to play on all the main operating systems. It’s a spiritual sequel of the Democratic Socialism Simulator, in that they share the same visual style, simple drag-and-drop interactions, and short-term practical utopianism. When it comes to climate change, we are well …
I Created the Perfect Society in Crusader Kings III
Watch this video on YouTube A 5 minute video about testing the limits of the critically acclaimed medieval strategy game. Can you replace nobles with republics, dismantle the papacy, and create an ecofeminist society in the AD 1200? Yes, yes, and yes.
El Problema es el Capitalismo: the Game
Rules: 1. Start from a random Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random 2. Click on the link that might take you closer to the “Capitalism” page 3. Repeat 2 until you get to “Capitalism” Each click = 1 point. The player with the lowest score wins. Variants / house rules: *A page mentioning capitalism counts even without the …
Gone with a Flash (talk transcript)
This is the transcript of an artist talk I gave about the end-of-life of Adobe Flash, and digital art preservation in general. It was part of “Gone in a Flash”, a series of events organized by the MacKenzie Art Gallery and Neutral Ground Artist Run Centre. You can also watch the video here or check …
Games Without Players
This is the transcript of a talk I gave at the 2020 Play Festival. The festival normally takes place in Hamburg but was moved online due to COVID. It’s a sequel to my previous Indiepocalypse talk. The Google Slides can be found here , a pixelated video recording is here.
Rules & Roberts – release notes
Rules & Roberts is a print-and-play educational roleplaying game to learn Robert’s Rule of Order. Even if it’s a spoof of Dungeons & Dragons, R&R is more of a storytelling game: it’s light on mechanics, there are no dice rolls or complex stats, and the Dungeon Master doesn’t have to prepare any material nor read …
TweeVee / Interactive Movies
TweeVee is an engine for interactive videos built in javascript. You can create a branching movie in the style of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch starting from Twee files exported from the popular hypertext editor Twine. TweeVee source on GitHub TweeVee was created for a LIKELIKE livestream showcasing four interactive movies, from the pioneering Kinoautomat to the …
Two Hundred Fifty Things a Game Designer Should Know
In 2018, architecture critic Michael Sorkin wrote “Two Hundred Fifty Things an Architect Should Know”. The items on the listicle are poetic, thought provoking, introspective, practical, and sometimes even canonical. They all connect architecture with broader social issues. In July 2020, four months after Sorkin’s death due to COVID-19, I challenged my Twitter friends and aquaintances …
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Twitch Plays Bees / Twitch Plays Everything / Twitch Plays MIDI
This Fall, due to COVID-19, I’m teaching a class about online multiplayer games. It’s a great excuse to learn new skills and run some little experiments in these long, socially distanced days. As class material, I put together two Processing templates to facilitate Twitch-powered multiplayer experiences. Every Twitch channel comes with an IRC chat and …
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MUDlike / The end of the WORD as we know it
The third iteration of LIKELIKE Online is a text-only multiuser environment for the exhibition The End of the WORD as we know it. In this Twine-meets-chatroom, you can catch language viruses from other uses. The viruses affect your way of speaking making you siiiiing, SCREAM, or adding other funny affectations. The six curated games are …
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LIKELIKE Online / oMoMA
LIKELIKE, the little game space I run with some friends in Pittsburgh, suspended all programming due to COVID-19. The pandemic is going to have long lasting impacts on the world economy; millions of Americans are suddenly unemployed and entire industries came to a standstill. It’s not a great time for event organizers, but in gaming …
Democratic Socialism Simulator – Release Notes
Democratic Socialism Simulator was released yesterday for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. The Android version is still under review. It’s a casual, single player game in which you play as the first socialist president of the United States. You have to evaluate an endless stream of policy proposals, balance the budget, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, gain …
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Molleindustria’s Highlights from 2019
After a couple of Indiepocalyptic years, in 2019 we finally reached the Sindielarity: the moment in which indie releases outpaced the capacity of both primary audiences and tastemakers to process them. The sheer number of high profile games is unprecedented. Multi-year projects by well respected developers merely break through the noise, hidden gems (presumably) remain …
CAN YOU BE LIKE LIKELIKE?
Can you run a pop-up arcade in your spare time? And if so why would you? A short talk about LIKELIKE I gave at the first Game Arts International Assembly (GAIA), a gathering of game curators and event organizers in Buenos Aires. It’s about game curation from a perspective of a practitioner and about reducing …
Every bee videogame reviewed by accuracy
Bees, particularly honeybees, are often incorrectly characterized in videogames – as well as in other media. Sometimes that’s due to their similarity with with the more aggressive wasps (which make for better enemies), sometimes that is due to the alien-like complexity of their social behavior, sometimes the creators are interested in bees only beecause they …
Site Update
This website just went through a major update! Some notable changes: The Flash embeds, which are now automatically blocked in most browsers, have been replaced with short gameplay videos. The games are still playable via browser following a link and the downloadable buttons are more prominent. The English translations in some old games have been …
Notarizing your Flash/AIR applications for macOS
This guide is meant to help you notarize Adobe Flash and AIR executables for distribution outside of the App Store. Distributing within the App Store requires a few extra steps such as packing icons and setting up specific provisioning profiles as well. Some of the following steps are likely to apply to software developed with …
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