Level design is its own kind of playful art: part theatre and part architecture, you’re making spaces to challenge and delight other people.Read the rest

Distress casts you as legendary bounty hunter Demetria Barton, in charge of her crew's lives as she explores the mysterious Nova 8. According to the team:

Distress is a branching visual novel inspired by the likes of Silent Hill, Snatcher, and Mass Effect. Trapped in a city filled with deadly creatures and a ruthless militarized task force controlled by a shadowy administrator, you’ll have to use your wits and make tough decisions in order to survive. You’re responsible not just for your own life, but the lives of your crew as well. Make your choices. Live with the consequences. Good luck.

Light Machine, a small three-person team, is seeking a very modest budget on Kickstarter to get Distress made, although there's a charming playable prologue available for you to download now that makes you want to learn more about the characters. I particularly love the illustrations (they're by Ian Laser Higginbotham), and one of the backer rewards is a digital artbook.

The writer and designer at Light Machine is Javy Gwaltney, who wrote the wonderful science fiction horror Terror Aboard the Speedwell, and composer Erandi Huipe will create the eerie, synth-heavy soundtrack.

Consider backing Distress or check out the prologue for free here.

The musical references of this year's most daunting commercial video game are resonating in surprising and brilliant ways. Read the rest

The long-serving independent game maker and author Anna Anthropy was hit by a car over the summer and broke her arm. On her way to see some friends, she decided to walk rather than take the bus, and was struck.

Now recovered, she's just released an autobiographical game called Ohmygod are you alright about her experience—of the injury, the hospital, and the additional challenges treatment poses for a low-income trans woman, as well as the sense of aloneness she experienced after the accident.

She calls it a "direct sequel" to dys4ia, her popular piece about going through hormone replacement therapy. Since its release in 2012, dys4ia's been celebrated in the press as an "empathy game", as it seemed to allow people to feel for Anna in a circumstance that many of the players would never experience themselves. By playing Anna's autobiographical story, players learned more about the experience of transition and dysphoria, and said they felt empathy for her.

But just before her accident, Anna Anthropy held a gallery show in New York City, where, in addition to a tool where you make games out of emoji, she presented "The Road to Empathy": A pedometer, a pair of her old boots, and the provocation for participants to actually walk a mile in her shoes.

That exhibit was pointed. "Empathy games" have formed an important movement in our medium. We've learned that disempowering the player, rather than catering to traditional fantasies of power, leads to interesting experiences.

The rise of "empathy games" has formed a landscape on which players have learned to prize unconventional, anti-capitalist, personal works, and it has been boldly led by women and marginalized people in recent years. But while these games make players glad to feel things, these important works don't usually sustain their creators.

While their names, games, articles and lectures help the press build a narrative that's positive for video games, for Anna, what came after dys4ia and the celebration of her "empathetic" works was that sense of aloneness in the hospital following her accident, worried about how to pay for it. And she's one of the foundational "names" in her "scene"—imagine the case for others.

Ohmygod are you alright is mostly experienced via text, although there is an unsettlingly-cute PuzzleScript rendering of the accident itself. You navigate a tiny Anna—Anna's image of herself—through Frogger-like traffic hazards. You know the game is about her car accident, but you feel the fruitless urge to try to help her avoid it anyway.

Anna Anthropy has written for Offworld about what children's books can learn from games, why Nintendo's Style Savvy: Trendsetter was scary for her, and what kinds of features help make game tools more accessible, with a little help from WarioWare D.I.Y.. You can buy Ohmygod are you alright here for $2, and support her ongoing works on Patreon here.

PataNoir is a neat new interactive fiction game from Simon Christiansen. Although as expected you read text and then type commands on your phone or tablet, there's a twist: if the game makes a metaphor or simile, you can treat it as true. Shadows like pools of oil? There is oil for you to take. Your revolver is like a trusty assistant—no, really, his name is Mr. Smith Wesson.

Christiansen says the game is a tribute to the hard-boiled metaphors of noir fiction, and in the game you play a detective manipulating language to solve the mystery of a Baron's missing daughter. It's great fun for anyone who loves wordplay, but the clear rule structure also makes it appealing for people who find the traditional opacity of other parser-based text games to be a little ruthless.

The mobile app version of PataNoir is $2.99 on iOS, Google Play or Kindle Fire; it adds new illustrations and music. The original text-only version was a 2011 Interactive Fiction Competition entry and can be played on a computer for free if you have the appropriate text game interpreter. Links to all versions can be found here.

Danish developer Step In Books has turned the tablet device into a magical picture book full of wintry Nordic fairytales. After winning lots of regional awards, Wuwu & Co. is at last available in English on the App Store, and proves honestly delightful whether you have kids or not.

It really does feel like a book come to life: With playful music, the crunch of snow and pretty, modern animal illustrations, you tilt and shake the device to interact gently with the stories and characters on all sides of you. The little pane of glass you hold in your hands feels like a window to another world, one you hold up and look through. One of the stories even asks you to light a lantern by using the device camera to find the right color.

I recently met a three year-old who knew how to look up videos of surprise eggs being opened on YouTube using her mom's mobile. I have seen infants reach insistently for television screens, confused about why they don't react to touch. It's wonderful how Wuwu & Co takes the natural magic of these devices and uses it to engage kids in interactive play, reading and storytelling.

Like another favorite family app of ours, Metamorphabet—like all the best children's stuff, really—Wuwu & Co is lovingly-made and intelligent enough to appeal to all ages. We recommend it for playful adults, too.

Our Monday reflection is a regular weekly item here on Offworld, a special satellite transmission designed to highlight our favorite Offworld stories, wonderful trends, and the stories from elsewhere in the galaxy that got us talking. Sign up here to receive this digest each week via email—it's a great way to avoid missing anything.

Latest Features

Anti-millennial sentiment in the media is common, probably led by an older generation's eagerness to distance itself from the socioeconomic challenges it created for the younger ones. Lately this moral panic has centered on the tech young adults use to meet and mate—the condescending and cynical 'parody' Millennial Swipe Sim 2015 envisions a generation as glassy-eyed Tinder zombies incapable of sitting still.

Laura has a heroic go at the misconception that young people are using technology to decimate intimacy, including many examples of the excellent works of design and technology that constituents of the accursed millennial generation are using to express actually quite well-developed and boundary-pushing ideas about sex.

Offworld Games

Do you like the Renaissaince? Come on, everybody likes the Renaissance. That's why we found you Painter's Guild, a charming little sim where you shepherd an art guild of the period, and Masques and Murder, a roleplaying game where you plot revenge while maintaining the appearance of a courtly noblewoman.

Flywrench is the newest gracefully-brutal game from Nidhogg creator Messhof, and we found its punishing repetition oddly meditative. And in a tiny jam game about the lifecycle of the extinct Wooly Mammoth, a team of game developers shared striking thoughts about loss and purpose after their studio's major project was canceled.

We also liked watching two documentaries of sorts: This video on the sinister undercurrent of gamification, and this surprisingly plausible one about the wildlife of Grand Theft Auto V.

Transmissions from Elsewhere

We love Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, a touching and surreal vision of an apocalypse set in a sheltered English country town. In Playboy Ed Smith writes a very personal reflection on growing up in that sort of environment, although in the service of disassembling the game. I think he's right that the writing is the game's weakest element, but that maybe his personal investment makes his critique a bit harsh.

Not Games

People are continually suggesting to me that the public beefs among pop stars are theatre, the way that wrestling is theatre, and the confrontations on Twitter or at MTV awards about worthiness or politics or identity are tactical. I don't know either way, but regardless they seem to be offering an important stage for people to understand, or at least to grow more accustomed to hearing about things like race (via Nicki Minaj) or gender (via Miley Cyrus) in the broadest strokes.

Leaving aside, of course, the fact I don't personally know her and that I might indeed be buying into public theatre, I feel for Nicki Minaj. Every professional slight she receives (she is 'too pop' for serious rappers, she is too black to be in the front of a pop video, and then she is too angry to deserve to be listened to when she wants to talk about it) is a large-scale example of how different the rules are for some versus others.

I know it as a woman in tech and so do lots of my colleagues, especially marginalized women and people of color; no matter what you do, someone will find some reason to discredit you. You shouldn't have said this. You shouldn't have done that. You should have done this thing instead. Your participation is somehow less 'real' than the others. You have to work twice as hard to get half as much, and all of that.

So lately I really like a lot of the artwork people have been doing in response to attempts to discredit the wonderful Nicki Minaj every time she speaks. This Salome-inspired piece, where Nicki bears Miley's head on a tray (her expression demanding Miley, what's good) is my favorite. In this piece, Nicki wears her VMA gown and is rendered as the Justice arcana.

Finally, if you like animation at all, this AV Club piece on the end of Aqua Teen Hunger Force and the era it represented, including the Space Ghost cartoons, Squidbillies and some of the best days of Adult Swim, is a must-read.

The Mammoth is an atmospheric little work, like a cave painting come to life: The great, tusked prehistoric beast is chalked against a tan background, searching for its herd and its children. Against a sparse soundtrack of drums, a soothing voice narrates the movements of your mammoth.

Your job is to protect your children from hunters, an impossibly steep task that I was not able to do. It seemed possible at first, but the spear-wielding figures, dark lines slashed against the world, just overwhelmed me in the end. Without her children, the game says, the mammoth is no longer a mother. Do you want revenge? Would it help? And what will the hunters become when there's nothing left to hunt for?

Jan David Hassel is one of four developers who made this game for the recent Ludum Dare 33 jam. He and his team are veterans of Yager Interactive, a studio celebrated for Spec Ops: The Line. Yager had been at work on Dead Island 2 when the team received word about two months ago that the game would be canceled (reports in the press suggest the indefinitely-delayed game has supposedly been moved to another developer).

"It didn't take us long to realize that most of us would be fired," Hassel writes to me. "So we decided to jam for Ludum Dare 33 to cope with the situation somehow... at its very core it wound up being a game about the inescapability of loss."

The Mammoth is a lovely little game, but it takes on a poignant weight when you think of it as the expression of developers who have lost a project. The work of large-scale commercial video game development is famously disillusioning, often crushing and regularly inhumane, and moreover personal expressions like anger, unhappiness and grief are often frowned upon as violations of the professional code of secrecy.

So it's sad and beautiful at once to see this team (they call themselves Inbetweengames, fittingly) do the work they love most to express the end of an era of their careers. Here's hoping that one was just prehistory, and the next era will be better. Give them an encouraging shout today if you can.

Play the game for free here (HTML version here).

AbleGamers is a long-running nonprofit foundation devoted to advocating for accessibility in game design, and to working on ways to improve the lives of disabled people through games. Now, the group has launched a fellowship for college students with disabilities who want to break into game development.

The AbleGamers Fellowship will offer $10,000 in mentoring and scholarship funds to eligible computer science and game design undergrads and masters' students. The recipient of the fellowship will work on a case study focused on accessibility in video games, and how the medium is beneficial to people with disabilities.

The deadline for current applications is the end of October 2015; to learn more about applying, visit the official site.

Your wealthy father and brother have been killed by distasteful schemers, and now you're to be married off to one of them. Can you plan your brutal revenge without arousing suspicion—while acting like a perfect courtly lady?

Masques and Murder, by James Patton, is part interactive fiction, part statistical role-playing game. You manage the life of the orphaned Justitia, a young woman at court who must prepare for masquerades and music concerts while secretly nursing your fury and winning over your distasteful suitors so they'll be easy to kill.

It's a real delightful concept: There are all sorts of "princess maker"-style simulations about raising a character, often a girl, to grace and success by prizing certain skills over others; the wonderful Long Live the Queen turns this formula on its head, forcing you to keep one step ahead of a courtly world that wants to kill you.

But in this game, the statistics that are used to make a "lady"—your knowledge of verse, theology, music and dance—actually lull your evil suitors into vulnerability to the more lethal trades you study. During the tutorial, the three distasteful nobles are introduced to you after the fashion of a visual novel, a fun subversion of the "which bachelor do you choose to pursue" trope.

The goal is to manage your statistics such that you can quietly kill off all three evil men and avenge your family. The Renaissance setting, full of classical music and maudlin paintings of skulls and roses—all the art the game samples is genuine period pieces—is a wonderful tonal backdrop for feeling like a creature of grace with steel and fire underneath.

You can play Masques and Murder for free, but the developer suggests a $5 donation if you enjoy the game.

In A Heart Between Parts, your first act as a player is to unsnip the thread that sews your lips shut. Some scientist tried to make himself a wife and was unhappy with how you turned out, so you've been locked away.

This brief but piquant point-and-click adventure game by Stefan "leafthief" Srb has the beautiful pixel art that is the creator's trademark, and it's full of beautiful little beats about choosing life, even when you don't know when or why you are. It's another "You are the Monster" 48-hour game from the recent Ludum Dare 33 game jam, which helps explain why it's so little, but its smallness helps it feel delicate and restrained, never too maudlin. The game's puzzles are easy to solve; it's more about the journey of thought and hope you take along the way.

Download A Heart Between Parts for free or donation here.

Gamification is one part of the world of game design that easily excites outsiders: Ideas about how systems and rewards motivate people, and how designed "playfulness" helps make labor more palatable, are easy for people to understand. Finally, game design has a purpose and a use beyond frivolity.

These ideas are appealing to companies, who effectively see means of getting employees to feel a greater sense of reward and happienss on the job without the employer actually having to pay the employees more. And the idea that everything, everyone in the world can be designed and controlled is central to the business ethos of Silicon Valley.

I am often asked if we will be reviewing popular gamification books on Offworld. We won't. While the authors are perfectly lovely people and in some cases are our friends and colleagues, we are only interested in play for its own sake. We think it's dark af otherwise, and this wonderful video, "Games & Gamification: The New Nihilism" by the game designer Katharine Neil showcases this brilliantly.

It was done a year ago but has recently begun making the rounds again: as well-known experts in the gamification field discuss the fickle nature of human motivation and our struggle to feel intrinsically rewarded, historical footage of political movements provides a startling and often funny contrast.

AURA looks like an inventive take on the traditional "twin stick" shooter experience, focused primarily on exploration. It seems really interesting sonic experiences are involved too—the fuel you gather for your tiny flying ship is linked to musical "nodes", and you assemble a song as you go.

I've actually not played it; I think it requires a traditional controller be connected to your computer, and you might not have one just lying around under your desk. I do, but I'm not getting up to go over there right now, to be honest. I wanted to show it to you, though, because I think the trailer is absolutely lovely and musical, and because it's easy to recommend the work of UC Santa Cruz's Games and Playable Media Masters students: AURA was made by Patrick Trinh and Lun Ca for that wonderful and reputable game design program.

$5 will buy you the chance to experience it for yourself.

I might have been part of the last generation to grow up valuing "hanging at the mall" as the ideal pastime. I love abandoned mall photography, and basically any movie from the '90s that employs malls as the backdrop for Gen X cynical anti-consumerism.

Mall Quest is a fun dirge for that age, shuttling you among self esteem-ified pixel goons and chunky graphic renderings of the things you have to buy: Games like NBA Jam 2 and Myst, Silly Putty and movies like Dances With Wolves. It has the glossy Windows 95 look of the "vaporwave" digital art movement, whereby a generation of creators old enough to remember the innocent consumerism of the mall age and the home computer boom but too young to have it for themselves resampled its phrases and imagery.

This game, free or pay-what-you-want, came out a year ago, but I only just heard of it recently. It's gleefully dystopic—and procedurally-generated, giving you a different mall-sprawl and shopping list of forgotten pop culture every time.

All we know of the mythical Bigfoot is a famously-indistinct strolling blur, and as such the legend of the sasquatch remains. In Found Bigfootage, you play as that strolling blur, making sure invasive camera-wielders get anough footage to leave you alone, but that none of it is clear.

Developer BluShine made the "reverse stealth game" in just 48 hours—I love how even with so little time, the developer managed to get the twangly, remote-forest aesthetics any sasquatch-hunter could hope for. Found Bigfootage was made for Ludum Dare 33, whose "You are the Monster" theme has been interpreted in all kinds of ways: You can work for a form letter company, weigh human life as a refugee smuggler, or generally be a misanthrope.

I am an arbitrary silhouette on a wanly-lit hillside. To my right waits a horde of lamp-eyed children. Before me, helicopters drop giant pairs of scissors at ruthless angles. I go and get the scissors and bring them to the kids as instructed, but I'm not sure if I've passed the scissors on or stabbed someone.

Every so often, an enormous fist hovers over me. When it strikes I can see the faint outline of my ribcage flash before my eyes.

Mortimer's Bakery developed Run With Scissors (free to play in browser here or here) for the ongoing and broad Fuck Capitalism Jam. Screenshots promise I might eventually get to "comply or haggle" with needful individuals, but I don't know: I cannot survive the fist for long enough. Maybe you can.

In commercial games, we celebrate beautiful game art, but how often do we think about what it takes to make the really gruesome stuff? Apparently, to create Halo 3's Flood-infested "Cortana" level, artist Vic De Leon immersed himself in images from colonoscopies, and pictures of tumors and lesions, until he'd get nauseated:

"They’d come up when I was least expecting it. Something would just pop into my head -- an image or something -- and for a while there I felt...I wouldn’t say traumatized, but haunted, like when you’re a kid and you see something really disgusting or gory or scary in a movie,” says DeLeon. “I started associating that level with feeling disgusting. Once it was built it took months and months of polishing, and in those months I couldn’t wait to work on something else. The level was so disgusting, and what I thought was neat at first really came to bear down on me."

At Gamasutra, Alex Wawro speaks to game artists and animators who spend their careers elbow-deep in grotesque reference materials, creating the lifelike gore and impact that some players might experience only fleetingly, but that the artist often spends months getting close to. Steve Bowler, an animator on the famously-gory Mortal Kombat series, had this to say:

“The guys I always feel the worst for are the cinematic artists, because they have to make sure that like, each bone is cracking in a realistic way,” he says. “Even the audio guys probably have a bit of like, PTSD, because they have to spent all this time carefully picking out and putting in all these gory, juicy, crunchy, eviscerating sound effects.”

The full article is a really interesting read on a question most people wouldn't think to ask.