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 […]
Category Archives: games
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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)
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Casual Games for Protesters
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]