A LIKELIKE show featuring videogames beyond video.
Author Archives: paolo
Guilty Smells
“The Government has taken a major step in opposing foreign influence in our way of life. Starting today, the possession of UnAmerican food is illegal. You are a sniffing dog for the Department for the Enforcement of the American Diet. Approach the suspects, sniff them, and bark if you detect foreign food smell. We’ll take care …
Three Sided Football Arcade
August 2020 update: Three Sided Football Arcade is now available on itch.io for free Wonderville is a new bar, arcade, and event space in Brooklyn. Nostalgia-driven arcade bars are making a comeback all around the States but what makes Wonderville special is its selection of contemporary indie games and handcrafted cabinets. As a director of …
Phone Story 2019 Donation Update
Phone Story, our short game about the dark side of electronics manufacturing, came out 8 years ago. It was immediately banned from the App Store but it has been exhibited in countless of venues around the world, including at a landmark exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London last year. The exhibitions don’t …
Lichenia Release Notes
I published a new game earlier this week. It’s called Lichenia and it’s about creating human habitats amidst climate chaos. It involves reshaping the natural and built environment, reclaiming dead cities, and growing sustainable ones. It’s a sandbox game with some tiny secrets to unlock, and a few obscure mechanics to discover. The simulation is …
Molleindustria’s Highlights from 2018
This year I played more indie games than usual in the process of curating shows for LIKELIKE. And yet, I had some trouble finding my usual top picks in terms of novelty, artistic intent, and social engagement. These indiepocalyptic times are giving us an embarrassment of releases but the most popular development strategy seems to …
THE MEANING OF COLORS
The Meaning of Colors is a tiny “game” about connecting the dots and thinking like a right-wing nut. It was made with flickgame, a tool by Stephen “increpare” Lavelle for the creation of quick, MS painterly, visual hypertexts. The peculiarity (and brilliance) of flickgame is that it forces you to define specific colors as active areas, as …
A Prison Strike
A tiny game poem about the ongoing prison strike. It’s made with bitsy, an accessible tool for the creation of explorable environment. Play it on itch.io (5 min/free)
GlitchScarf
GlitchScarf is a playful performance and a system to mess with knitting patterns in real time. Design or glitch a scarf as it’s being made, wear your artful errors with pride. The project is a collaboration with Tenley Schmida. It was for the most part developed during a 3-day game jam at the Carnegie Mellon University …
The Ills of Woman
The Ills of Woman is a faux Victorian-era board game imagined as a precursor of Hasbro’s Operation. It was co-designed by Molleindustria and Tenley Schmida who came up with the idea after reading about the “wandering womb”, an ancient belief that the uterus could freely move around the body of a woman causing all sorts …
Dogness Release Notes
How would we sort things out? Canid, hominid; pet, professor; bitch, woman; animal, human; athlete, handler. One of us has a microchip injected under her neck skin for identification; the other has a photo ID California driver’s license. One of us has a written record of her ancestors for twenty generations; one of us does …
LIKELIKE
At the beginning of 2018 I quietly started a new project in Pittsburgh. LIKELIKE is a space for independent games and playful arts. Its mission is to expand the audience and perception of videogames, promoting indie culture, giving visibility to experimental and overlooked gamemakers, experimenting with novel ways to present games beyond the white cube …
Top 2017 Games That Waste Your Time Properly
I’ve been interested in the attention economy of videogames lately and in the wicked problem of the duration of play experiences. While AAA companies gamblify their business models and compete for the most repulsive and exploitative monetization schemes, indies generally stick to wholesome premium experiences (in Apple newspeak, the pay once and play forever genre). …
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John O’Neill, Artgame Author
I made a short documentary/Let’s Play about one of the first artgame makers: John O’Neill who, in the early ’80s, created strange videogames about the meaning of life and dolphin communication. It contains material that has never been recorded or put together before. I was doing some research for one of my classes when I …
Indiepocalypse Now. Indiecade Europe 2017 Keynote
This is the transcript+slides of a keynote I gave at the 2017 Indiecade Europe festival in Paris. Attention economy, indie market saturation, and how, why, and for whom we make games. Read it here: http://molleindustria.org/indiepocalypse/index.html
A Short History of the Gaze – Release Notes
A Short History of the Gaze is finally available for free to the few privileged people with access to Oculus Rift and the required high end computing equipment. The piece premiered at the conference WEIRD REALITY: Head-Mounted Art && Code in October 2016 and has been shown at a couple of festivals since then. It’s the first …
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Stranger Playthings: Remaking a VR counterculture
The second coming of Virtual Reality is a convergence of different technological traditions with different aesthetics, goals, and strategies. In this talk given at the A MAZE and Game Happens festivals in 2017 I tried to question the current narratives supporting the idea of VR as a mass-consumer product, and recuperate some of the visionary …
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The right to screenshot
Sometimes I get asked for permission to publish screenshots from my games. It annoys me a bit because all my games are released under Creative Commons and, besides, I don’t see screenshots or video recordings ever falling outside of fair use. Streamers, youtubers, and machinima artists can even make a living out of commenting and …
SimCities & SimCrises
I had the honor to be one of the keynote speakers for the first International City Gaming Conference in Rotterdam last month. The conference, mainly attended by city planners and architects, looked at how games can facilitate more effective and inclusive city-making. Here’s the transcript of my talk (a similar version was presented a year ago at …
Gaming under socialism
In a recent episode of the politics/comedy podcast Chapo Trap House, a listener asked “What can socialism do for gamers’ rights?”. The question was obviously a joke, but the hosts produced a humorous and somewhat thoughtful answer. Thankfully, there is no such a thing as “gamers’ rights” in the sense of something distinct from consumer …