I teamed up with poet, performer, and activist Harry Josephine Giles to put together a collection of games to be played during protests. Casual Games for Protesters is a kind of response to the daunting question “What can game makers do in the age of Trump”. It’s a gesture but also a serious proposition, a …
Author Archives: paolo
Molleindustria’s Highlights from 2016
2016 has been declared *annus horribilis* for months, and there is a good chance it will remembered as the year when everything started going to shit in the Western World. Despite being recently swept by the proto-fascist backlash known as Gamergate, the world of videogames has yet to respond to the new turn. The big-budget …
Weird Reality / VIA
Last week I had the pleasure to participate to Weird Reality and VIA, respectively a conference and an arts+music festival organized by some good friends and colleagues. Weird Reality was a symposium for the VR/AR curious and the VR/AR skeptic which managed to incorporate, in the words of a participant, “an incredible wonderful diversity of …
Top Ten 2015 Games You Don’t Have To Play
2015 was the year gamers were finally relieved from the burden of play. The explosion of streamers on Twitch and YouTube and the rising popularity of eSports legitimized “passive” forms of engagement with the game form. Interactivity – as in mashing buttons, making choices, organizing artfully constructed disorder – has always been overrated anyway: there …
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A short history of interactive music videos and other playthings
I was asked by my colleague Jesse Stiles to give a talk about video games, interactive music videos and other playthings specifically created to promote music. What follows is an incomplete list of projects I found, thematically sorted. Thank you tweeple for all the recommendations, let me know if I missed any good ones.
Bumper stickers for self-driving cars
In a world of self-driving cars, what’s going to happen to the art and tradition of bumper stickers? Will our gaze be ever drawn to these cheeky statements while traveling automatically? Is the car going to be less of extension of the self and more of a family member, with its own personality, affiliation and …
BooFlag
BooFlag is a little game made after reading this article on the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Charleston. It’s also an unofficial sequel/companion piece to Americlap, one of the greatest games ever made.
p5.play
I just released p5.play, a javascript library for the creation of games and playthings. It’s still a beta but it includes features that are common to most 2D games: Sprites with animation support, collision detection and resolution (limited to Axis Aligned Bounding Boxes and circles for now), a camera and functions to facilitate mouse and …
The Great Art Upgrade – DiGRA 2013
This talk was delivered as keynote for the Art History of Games conference, that took place during DiGRA 2013. While the infamous Can Games Be Art? question is now being carefully avoided like an inappropriate text you sent while drunk, some references and questions may still be valuable to the world beyond the small group …
Molleindustria’s Highlights from 2014
2014 has been another great year for indie games, with the long awaited releases of Nidhogg and Broken Age (part 1); the genre-defining Threes (and its unfortunate clones); the outrageously polished Monument Valley and Hohokum; the new chapter of Kentucky Route Zero. What follows is a list of my personal favorites, among the ones I …
Experimental Game Design – Critical Playthings
This year’s installment of my undergraduate course Experimental Game Design went really well. Students designed non-digital games (outdoor and tabletop) for the first half of the semester and worked on digital projects for the second half. You can find course materials here, and downloadable final projects in the student area, mostly Mac only.
VIA GAMES 2014
In the context of Pittsburgh’s music and art festival VIA we showcased two exclusive local multiplayer games: the 2vs2 noby-noby sport Push Me Pull You and Dog Park a low poly dog ’em up by Kevin Cancienne (Slam City Oracles by Jane Friedhoff also made an appearance).
Big Data Manifesto
I took Tristan Tzara’s DADA manifesto from 1921 and replaced every instance of DADA with BIG DATA. Big Data Manifesto
AMC Arcade 2014
This year I had the honor and pleasure to curate, along with Porpentine, a showcase of critical, radical, queer, transformative independent games for the Allied Media Conference. This is the selection, based on a variety of parameters (themes, diversity, available controllers, accessibility…): Love Punks by Yijala Yala project 10 Seconds in Hell by Amy Dentata …
MultipliCITY
This is the introduction and the printable materials for a workshop I gave at the Allied Media Conference 2014 in Detroit. The workshop was centered around MultipliCITY, a basic framework for a city planning board game designed to be expanded and modified by the participants. You can download MultipliCITY here and read slightly edited notes …
To Build a Better Mousetrap – Release Notes
To Build a Better Mousetrap, a long-awaited management game about innovation and labor, is finally out! The game premiered last December at FACT gallery in Liverpool along with the article/talk Videogames and the spirit of capitalism. I tried to describe To Build a Better Mousetrap as “Richard Scarry meets Karl Marx” or “Information visualization without …
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Making Games in a Fucked Up World – G4C 2014
These are the slides and the edited notes from a talk I gave at the Games for Change Festival in New York. The talk was targeted to that specific audience (bureaucrats from the nonprofit industrial complex, TED-style technopositivists, game advocates…). Certain parts such as my take on metrics and social change, which may seem obvious …
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Phone Story Donation Update
Two years ago the first profits from Phone Story were sent to Tian Yu, one of the Foxconn employees who attempted suicide after enduring illegal overtime and abusive working conditions. Due to the infamous ban from the App Store the game is available only on the web and on the Android Market for $1, which …
We Are Videogame Historical Materialists
BUY HERE FOR ONLY $20 Support a good cause and fashionably declare your belief that videogame culture is funded on an economic basis and reflects class relations and struggles! Historical Materialism is less scary than Marxism and can be worn ironically! Started as a joke on Venus Patrol’s We Are Videogame Romantics, this T-Shirt is …
Invisible Walls, Puffy Clouds, and the Unheavenly World Behind Them
This is the transcript of a minitalk I gave at Lost Levels 2014, an “unconference” happening during the Game Developers Conference (maybe a bit too square and academic for that casual environment). It’s a topic I’ve addressed in every single talk in the last 10 years or so, but I thought it could benefit from …
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