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 …
Category Archives: games
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 …
Images of Monetization
Around 2010 I noticed the emergence of an iconography tied to the buzzword monetization. Zynga and the Appstore were blowing up and a new parasitical industry began to promise shortcuts to commercial success. Their offers involve selling users, proposing bizantine revenue sharing systems, manufacturing ratings and other sketchy marketing services. One visual trope was dominating …
Experimental Game Design – Alternative Interfaces
Selected students’ works from my experimental game design class at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Art. A hands-on game design course focused on innovative and expressive forms of gameplay. In this installment of Experimental Game Design the emphasis is placed on the interface: inputs beyond mouse/keyboard/joystick/touch, outputs beyond screen/speakers, playing contexts beyond the suburban living room …
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Designing Games to Understand Complexity
This is a transcript of a workshop I conducted together with Liam Burke at the Allied Media Conference in June 2013. The workshop is meant to be a very basic introduction to system thinking via games targeted toward grassroots activists. It uses a simple fishery simulation available here as example.
The Fishing Game
The unimaginatively called “Fishing game” was designed for the 2013 Allied Media Conference. It’s meant to be played, discussed and modded in a interactive workshop context. The companion presentation can be found here. In order to play the game you need: .Exactly 4 players .About 30 money bits – decorative marbles will work .About 30 …
Allied Media Conference Games Lineup
Next week I’ll be in Detroit at the Allied Media Conference. The conference track “Imagining Better Futures Through Play” looks dense and exciting, with a strong focus around DIY gamemaking and inclusivity. You still have 5 days to back our indiegogo campaign, the proceeds will cover travel and lodging costs for the presenters Here are …
Notes on Tax Evaders
Play Tax Evader on the browser I’ve been asked to design and develop a small game for a Space Invaders-themed campaign against corporate tax evasion. The result is Tax Evaders, an iteration of the original arcade classic with excellent Amiga-era pixel art by James Biddulph and sound design by Ashton Morris. The week before Tax …
Videogames of the oppressed vs oppressive games
This is my second post on Empyre, a longstanding discussion list for artists, programmers, and curators of new media art. The theme of the month is “Videogames and Art: Incite/Insight”. You can check the March archive here. Here I talk about Molleindustria in relation to the context in which it started (almost 10 years ago) …
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An old school game for a brave new sport
Don’t expect a political punchline: there’s none. Arcade Bike Polo was created for Fuck This Jam, a friendly game making competition organized by Vlambeer‘s Rami Ismail & Panoramical creator Fernando Ramallo. Gameplay and graphics were completed by the end of the week-long jam but I decided to take some extra time to add sound, menus …