Play This Short Free Text Game Right Now

Laura Ellyn, who previously made a guest comic here about ghosts in video games, has just released a free interactive text based adventure on the twine platform. It's called "The Sparkly Child" and it's a game about a young woman who was born sparkly and shiny, and who has to learn to deal with the fact that sometimes her light exposes things people would prefer to stay in the dark.

It's really engaging, and you should give it a try.

Win a FREE copy of Puzzle & Dragons Z + Super Mario Bros Edition

Friend of the blog, Tiny Girl, Tiny Games, has a cool contest and an even cooler prize! A free download code for the new Puzzle & Dragons Z + Super Mario Bros Edition for the 3DS. Here's the entry for full details, and it has an entry method after my own heart: talking about your favorite dragon (because seriously, you guys, dragons are so cool).

So what are you waiting for? Check out the contest!

Problem Attic: Cure for the Common Code

Title screen image courtesy of Liz Ryerson

(Note: This article was supposed to appear last Friday, but due to technical difficulties with the Blogger backend, did not. It appears today. Thanks for your understanding.)

Brendan Vance, a game developer most famous for his stated mission to advance video games as an artistic medium through analyzing its theoretical underpinnings recently posted about the parts of a game design contributing to the whole, Marshall McLuhan, dissatisfaction with AA gaming, then video games in general... and the game that brought him back: Problem Attic by Liz Ryerson, in an essay titled "Form and Its Usurpers":

I develop video games for a living, but I spent last year really hating video games. I questioned how it was I could consume 60 hours of ‘content’ for Assassin’s Creed 3 yet feel utterly unsatisfied by my act of consumption. I questioned what it was I had consumed, other than my own time. I questioned what it was I sought from the game in the first place. I questioned the nature of the ‘content’ it claimed to offer me; privately I began to suspect it might not even exist. The games I was making and playing seemed more and more to me like empty forms: Puzzle boxes within puzzle boxes, each layer promising ‘content’ underneath it yet in the end yielding an empty centre. I became too tired and bored to care about games anymore. I could no longer see the point in it. I felt as if some enormous detritus had gathered upon my career and favourite hobby; that I could no longer reach through this detritus to claim the enjoyment I had once found underneath. 

I awoke from my yearlong stupor the night I encountered a game called Problem Attic by a person named Liz Ryerson. It was like nothing I’d seen before. Rather than a puzzle box, it was more of a sculpture.

The game Problem Attic itself is a bizarre 2-D platformer about that takes place in a prison, and addresses the idea of both prisons as a physical space and a psychological block. It has a deliberately lo-fi presentation done in a purpose glitch style, and as jarring as it can be visually, I think it feeds into the atmosphere of the game really well. One of the problems with the presentation though, is that it seems to get hung up on the "hellscape" atmosphere and tricking the player and confuses being overtly hostile in the story with being overtly hostile to the player (there is a part of the game where it quite literally tells you to go fuck yourself).

At any rate, Vance's essay covers a multitude of thoughts on being and identity and loss. It's also fairly long. You might want to pack a lunch or something.

Free Game Site ForestAmbassador Shows Gaming's True Potential

Merrit Kopas runs Forest Ambassador, a site that has the mission to introduce video games to wider audiences. According to Kopas, all games that appear on Forest Ambassador are

• free 
• demand relatively little investment of time 
• require little familiarity with game conventions 
• need no specialized equipment

Forest Ambassador is more than just a site that posts three games that are free, short, and easy to start playing. The games also runs the gamut of subjects from false police confessions, feeding ducks, urban zoning policy, shaving your legs, capitalism, and hugging cats-- stuff you wouldn't expect to see video games cover.

The featured games are also more often than not made by marginalized authors. In a welcome touch, you can also browse the over 100 games featured so far by mood! What are you waiting for? Check it out!

Dungeons & Dragons Has Influenced A Generation of Writers & How It Helps Kids Today

Artwork courtesy of James Howe.

From a recent New York Times article:

For a new generation of writers, especially those raised in the 1970s and ’80s, all that time spent in basements has paid off. Dungeons and Dragons helped jump-start their creative lives. 

When he was an immigrant boy growing up in New Jersey, the writer Junot Díaz said he felt marginalized. But that feeling was dispelled somewhat in 1981 when he was in sixth grade. He and his buddies, adventuring pals with roots in distant realms — Egypt, Ireland, Cuba and the Dominican Republic — became “totally sucked in,” he said, by a “completely radical concept: role-playing,” in the form of Dungeons & Dragons.

When you think about it, it's not really too surprising. Speaking personally, while D&D offered an escape from an abusive home life, coming up with character back-stories that fit within an adventuring party was my first taste of collaborative storytelling. There are a lot of skills you can learning playing D&D-  collaborative problem solving, team building, working in groups, spatial awareness, multiplication, plus all of the creative things involved with running or taking part in a campaign, like character and world building.

And the current generation of D&D players are finding ways to use D&D to not just instill a love of the game in kids, but also teach children development skills. One author has even come up with a version for pre-preschoolers!

Laura Petelle has released a free game called Monster Dice Fight, a proto-D&D game for preschoolers that also teaches Early Learning Standards skills. As she describes it:

My husband was eager for our sons to get big enough to play D&D with him, and I suggested they were big enough now -- if we adjusted the game. I had recently been in early learning standard presentations, so that was on my mind as well... Parents can adjust the game in a variety of ways to help their children with specific developmental tasks, and can at the same time create appropriate challenges within the game for children of different ages.

If the kids are a little older and you want to introduce them to D&D, collaborative storytelling and some of the game mechanics, artist Jason Howe has you covered with "D&D For 8 Year Olds". As he explains it:

For my son's 8th birthday party he convinced me to run Dungeons and Dragons for four 2nd graders... I decided to take actual characters made in the DND Insider and simplify them us that the boys could have fun without much of a learning curve. Here are the six characters I made from scratch for the game. I am happy to report it was a huge success, each boy had a fantastic time... and so did I. I would happily do it again.

Howe didn't leave girls out, either, and created a number of boy and girl character sheets in full color, all ready to print out and personalize, which you can check out here.

Free Browser Game Spotlight: Scaling the Sky

Scaling the Sky is a game about ascending by William Felkner, Chelsea Howe, and Michael Molinari. It's a fun little free-form platformer with a very playful sense of movement and few obstacles.

Author’s Notes: "We decided to close out 2013 by posting all our lingering games - here’s Scaling the Sky, a surreal little experience created for the SF Indie Game Jam."

Play Scaling the Sky here.

Free Game Spotlight: Trans Life Simulator

RC released "A Passing Glance" for the QUILTBAG Jam this week. It's a quick and simple text based game where you play as a young trans person trying to buy some underwear. It was made with the intention of showing cis people what it’s like to be trans. You can play as a trans girl, trans boy, or a nonbinary person.

It’s short, so you can play it multiple times for different paths. There are several paths, some better, some worse; if you’re easily triggered by dysphoria or transphobia, you may want to avoid this game. Some paths are safer than others, depending on how well you pass. Trigger warning for homophobic/transphobic slurs, transphobia/transmisogyny, slurs, misgendering, and possible violence.

Free Game Spotlight: Coming Out Simulator 2014

Nicky Case, a games designer who first captured attention with the :the game: trilogy (:the game:, REPLAYING :the game:, and Re-imagine :the game:), and went on to contribute to the Public Game Jam, release The Uncopyrighted Art Bundle and surveillance-critical anti-stealth game Nothing To Hide. This week, Nicky just released a new free browser game: Coming Out Simulator 2014.

Described as a "semi-autobiographical game", the game starts with the narrator in the present day, and after an opening conversation switches to 2010. It's the night after Nicky and his boyfriend have have come back from watching Inception, and Nicky is encouraged to come out of the closet to his parents. The dialog in the game is shown in text message format, and every action and dialog choice is remember and has an outcome on parts of the game.

It's engaging, emotionally affecting, and as short as it is, rewards replay at least once, even if there isn't really a way to "win". In fact, Case describes it as a "game about half truths":

"I realize now, my game is about half-truths. It's that tension between needing to be who you are, and hiding that so you can get by day-to-day. It's about living that double-life, that double-consciousness, always aware what others think of you. It's a mix of truth and lies... 

My game is emotionally authentic, and factually inaccurate. I wouldn't have been able to make something so personal if I didn't also make it somewhat impersonal. Actively acknowledging that all the characters, including past me, are semi-fictional. To get up and close, I needed that distance."

As Nicky Case has done with previous games, the entire source for the game has been released on GitHub.