Christine Love, Emily Short, Jane McGonigal and Other Indie Female Game Designers I Love

I'm not going to go all french feminist gendered styles of art, but this is a thread for female game designers and particularly the three mentioned above. I played a Jane McGonigal (I Love Bees, Last Call Poker) ARG a few years ago called World Without Oil -- it was a more interesting idea than it was a game. Her new book, tho, Reality is Broken, was really interesting - especially since it's a total deviation from the place video games have been heading. If anything she's the least "video" part of video games out of the bunch and I think she's more interested in using technology to create social spaces that games are played in, rather than say designing a game engine or concentrating on ludic elements (and if I have one major criticism of her is that she doesn't care enough about ludic/mechanics and so I don't always find her stuff fun).

Emily Short is not my favorite IF writer though she's clearly one of the most significant and in addition to a very essential IF blog + website (http://emshort.wordpress.com/) she has written some of the better games in the genre. Especially search out Galatea, Bronze + Savoir-Faire. I don't know her really recent stuff, though I do remember she was involved in designing one of the more recent incarnation of the Inform language.

Christine Love obviously responsible for Digital: A Love Story and the new one (uh - Don't Take It Personally). The new one is kinda creepy, whereas Digital was just beautiful imho. Both are really interesting and do unconventional stuff with narrative structure and "gameplay."

So! Thread for discussing these designers and others.

Roberta Williams obviously also appropriate for this thread. Great interview with her from 2006 here: http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/interviews/198/
Unfortunately I think she's retired from designing.

is this going to become a jade raymond nerdspank thread because thats cool if it does

just starting "reality is broken"

had to google 'jade raymond nerdspank' -- I certainly hope this thread does not become that!

(at the very least bc she's not an indie designer)

i need to buy the new jane jensen game

I can't really describe why, but McGonigal book seems not so good, and might be a bad influence on people thinking about games in that it's substituted one set of constraints on how people should perceive games with another, maybe even inferior set of constraints.

On the other hand, no one else out there has written a better book, and her last name sounds like fictional Simpsons cop McGarnigle.

It might be tough to find the emulators to play this, but this stuff by Amanda Goodenough was pretty charming.
I don't know if such a thing would ever be made today. It very casually violates a lot of "indie gaming" rules by pre-dating them.
http://www.macintoshgarden.org/author/amanda-goodenough
http://www.smackerel.net/black_white_03.html

I am an Emily Short stan to a certain extent - I could never get into Galatea but something about Metamorphoses really & truly clicked with me, the idea of Greece maybe, as a place where the stars were cold and very far away. It's my favourite IF game.

I like her project of reviewing casual games - there's something kinda quixotic about it - like, "I will play all of the bejewled clones as a feminist project and then I will complain at their lack of narrative inventiveness".

about to sit down w/dont take it personally - intrigued and fairly creeped out

i think my biggest issue w/ that game in the end is that she seems really unaware of how creepy it actually is. there's no authorial admission or wink-wink or anything. it's like, 'here's the game, these are the rules, this is the story, no comment.' that might actually be why - when it succeeds at all - it works.

why just indie designers

Better fit for auteur discussions IMHO. It's hard to tell a lot how a lead designer actually impacted the game in any kind of interesting way w big releases. Like I had no idea assassins lead was a woman and now that I know it doesn't mean anything to me

amy hennig is amazingly talented and does like super big blockbuster games but doesn't come up in these discussions for...um...certain reasons i think

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Hennig

she's just such an a+ person too

the old school crystal dynamics was SUCH a hotbed of talent

amy was there
evan wells (current head of naughty dog)
glen schofield (dead space creator/now at sledgehammer for activision workin on call of duty project)
jeronimo barrera (p much heavily involved as producer on every rockstar game since like gta III and even some before that)
mark cerny (cerny games, made marble madness when he was like 14 or something)

as if her first game was chaos in the windy city, that game was way better than it had any right to be

ok so dont take it personally was TERRIBLE btw

http://img41.imageshack.us/img41/333/riverraidiisupergame.gif

River raid was designed and programmed (rather cleverly) by Carol Shaw. I think this screenschot is actually of river raid II, but what's done is done. In my life, I've played river raid about as much as I've played r-type (or almost any game besides nethack).

Leslie Grimm co-produced rocky's boots, robot odyssey and, one of my personal favorites, think quick.

<3 Emily short. Her writing on i-f is almost the only writing on the subject worth reading.

And Janet Murray and Brenda laurel practically invented video game studies, so they get an honorary mention, too.

'don't take it personally' wasn't super appalling or anything but-- really quite boring? i didn't find 'digital: a love story' at all affecting, either, so maybe it's just that i'm missing the right kind of empathy (though i do really like the way you can't exactly control what the POV character says). the characters were recognisably characters! some stuff happened! i didn't particularly care about any of them and the ending was kind of a letdown, but that was okay.

i guess i didn't find it creepy because everything i know about 'visual novels' i learnt from people going o_O on the internet about dating sims and gradually upping the wacky/disturbing otaku ante, and by those inflated standards of wtffery it was really quite benign.

ctrl-f danielle bunten berry

smdh

hennig otm

Like I had no idea assassins lead was a woman and now that I know it doesn't mean anything to me

― Mordy, Wednesday, April 20, 2011 5:33 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

she wasnt - jade raymond's a producer (= not a designer)

http://a6.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/30635_452732344198_602254198_5996848_2021910_n.jpg

ha ade for some reason i was sure you'd be mentioning roberta williams on this thread, though i didn't expect that image, quite

also i guess she doesn't have the greatest of reps, these days? but the colonel's bequest is all time top ten for me, also the only good point and click adventure ever made

Yeah, I don't quite get it either. Was Phantasmagoria really that bad?

Is this where we talk about Don't Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain't Your Story?

I was actually pretty impressed by it. While I had a more personal, real life connection to Digital: A Love Story having done the BBS thing when I was a kid - (and conversely, never having used Facebook) - I found DTIPBIJAYS (ugh) -Babe- to be pretty engrossing. Maybe the Visual Novel format was easier to get into, but it felt like an authentic, if somewhat sad, view of future/current high school drama in the "internet age". Or maybe as an "old man" I sympathized with the main character's mid-life crisis/frustation/disconnection the from the younger tech generation... the kids in the story (and the "hip mom" that pops up towards the end) seem to be completely OK with the lack of privacy - I wasn't sure if the author was taking that side or not, but it's likely considering how lonely, depressed, and unfulfilled the main character is depicted.

At the same time, much like if you had no experience with BBS/IRC going into Digital, without a healthy (or rather, unhealthy) portion of life spent on 4chan and the like this is probably just going to seem amazingly stupid or esoteric. Also, without some experience with the anime/vn genre of this sorta thing, same deal. The fake Facebook/4chan/lingo was quite well done, I think. The excessive metareferencing was amusing and somewhat clever, though far from subtle, that's part of the story's message, isn't it?

I do remember (Mordy?) some folks here not digging it at all? what was up? point me to the right post if you already said this stuff, Sorry i can't remember which thread it was in.

I really loved Digital, and I bought Analogue so I'll be playing that soon. All I remember of DTIP,B is the skeevy stuff between the teacher and the students (not to mention the basic premise was an unhealthy invasion of privacy / fascination with / young people) which I imagine comes from eroge visual novels. But it didn't do enough with that stuff to be critiquing it. Let me dig up what I wrote about it after I played it...

so uh -- there are definitely some interesting parts and i'd say ludically (syntactically?) the game is really interesting wrt to how it's structured (real life narratives running alongside basically digital narratives and you kinda have to flip through both and it can be frustrating and distracting, much like irl!). however: the plot feels really half-baked and the very first plot point is about an underage girl trying to hook up with you (a male teacher). the whole conceit - that you can basically read all the private messages of your students - is pretty disturbing, and the game feels even more on the rails than Digital. Digital was quiet and melancholic. This has a scene where you (the gamer) realizes that a student is going to kill herself long before the PC realizes. And then you're basically helpless to intervene in any way. irl I had a student who I had a similar concern about and I dropped everything to talk to admin/other ppl of authority to make sure there was an intervention before anything actually happened. So it's very frustrating playing this game and realizing that there's basically nothing you can do.

So i'd say there's some really interesting stuff and the designer is - imho - someone worth paying attention to. But this particular game is really uncomfortable to play in apparently unintentional ways and unlike Digital which was really understated, the themes in this one feel WRIT LARGE and super obvious, maybe even cloying.

I'm sure someone could say something interesting about how it's paying homage to all those late 90s Japanese bishōjo eroge without quite crossing into that realm (re: music cues, visual style, that kind of aesthetized sense of longing/youth/etc), but one reason games like True Love worked was bc you were a student (and when I played it, I was a similarly aged student) and this ethical stuff wasn't even present. Here it is and it's really uncomfortable and feels poorly thought out. If the writer is trying to illuminate the ethics inherent in those games -- that seems a little redundant at this point.

Oh, one more thing -- the writing here is much sloppier than in Digital. Digital really caught the voice and tone of BBS's and - like I said - the writing was really understated. This writing makes Braid's look restrained.

I'll grant that the mood and feeling of playing Digital was much more well developed, even if 50% of it was simply the great chiptunes that played as the soundtrack and the ASCII art that greeted you upon entering each board. (Not a slight, those were dope!) But one thing I tend to remember about Digital is not the plot twist or characters, but the constant typing and rechecking of different menus and lists to advance the plot. I view the extra linearity of Babe to be a blessing, since that was eventually my least favorite part of Digital (though I loved it at first, by end of the first hour I was tired of going through the same emails again and again).

Cloying? Absolutely! The game's adherence to those bishojo/eroge games is remarkable, in tone, structure, style, and so on (even the music), as you say. The subtleties in this game were more in the parallel narratives going on, tracking the relationship maps of every student through Amie. Though yeah, I did cringe those times when they called it out SO explicitly, like that Battle Royale bit or the 12chan bit where a bunch of Anonymous argue about a VN being simply pornographic or legitimately affecting in the vein of Kana.

A game like True Love definitely works as an adventure-sim game, where you have this time management part which eventually helps you hook up with one of the girls your after, but it's of course there's no self-awareness to it. Dramatically or emotionally, it's pretty flat, though (a pretty minor complaint, given the genre we're talking about).

I heard about the skeevy stuff in advance of playing, but was surprised when it's really a very small part of the story - it really only takes 1.5 chapters of the overall story. It also didn't seem that skeevy to me, especially since you get a sense that both the teacher is a somewhat desperate, lonely man, and you also get full access to the girl's thoughts on Amie. Not gonna lie, though - when the bit about cock sucking came up I was pretty shocked, even if it didn't strike me as unrealistic.

Babe keeps forcing to check your messages and read your student's wall postings, gameplay-wise is kind of a drag - but I really gotta give Love credit for nailing down those different characters, even if they all start out as pretty standard VN archetypes primarily through dialogue, PMs and wall posts instead of plot action (except for the "bullying" incident). Though sometimes too heavy on the lingo ("Yr a Bro, teach!") it felt as authentic to me as Digital did for BBS talk.

Will definitely pick up Analogue by the end of the Steam Sale, and you're right, Love is definitely someone to follow.

I thought Digital was a cut above. Really enjoyed the writing, plotting and gameplay. I voted for DTIPBIJAYS in the EoY poll, but definitely had reservations about it. Better than other visual novels I've played, but yeah, it doesn't stand out that much in the genre. I missed the skeevy stuff out mostly, as I chose to reject the student's advances - don't know how much of a difference that makes in the grand scheme of the game (not much, it seems).

Would very much like to play Analogue, will keep an eye out in the Steam thread in case it gets particularly cheap.

Huh, so I figured I must have posted in this thread before, but it seems not, so I'll just add: Emily Short is the absolute best.

I rejected the student's advances as well, so I'm not sure if it's a lot skeevier if you choose to go ahead with it. I might try to do a quick run through to see the other endings.

I think Analogue is on sale now, or was on sale when I bought it this weekend.

Oh yeah, it's at 50%. I thought people were saying it would go down more, but £3.50 is certainly not a bad game price. Buying it now.

First Rule of Steam Sale is never buy anything that's not a daily deal until the last day, because it can always go down some more

Ha, well, too late now. But it definitely seemed like a fair price to me.

Oh, and this person is an up-and-coming female games designer you might want to check out.

i feel like if i start talking about christine love i'll end up sounding like the lorax

also, i thought this was a new thread and read it all until i got to my posts earlier and realised it was a year old

http://25.media.tumblr.com/f5b092582fbeb5f5737780ab696d04ed/tumblr_mymsxuFFdU1qzw06jo1_500.jpg

I’d like to announce our new project that I’ve alluded to a whole bunch: My Twin Brother Made Me Crossdress As Him And Now I Have To Deal With A Geeky Stalker And A Domme Beauty Who Want Me In A Bind!! or, Ladykiller in a Bind

An erotic visual novel about social manipulation and girls tying up other girls, by the team that made Analogue. Ladykiller in a Bind will be out in 2015! Please look forward to it~

haha yup.

http://versu.com/2014/05/28/blood-laurels/

this looks really good - new(ish) emily short. has anyone played it?

Versu games only work on the iPad, as far as I have been able to tell. Which pisses me off no end.

are Versu games text-based or graphical? i can't imagine playing an IF game on an iPad but maybe i'd borrow an iPad to play a Short non-IF game...

I think that the gameplay of most Versu games is basically IF, but with more complexity in character-building and NPC interactions? In terms of graphics, I think it's a graphical interface and static illustrations. But I haven't been able to play any of them, so don't take what I say as absolute.

Though actually I just checked the Versu site, and it seems Blood and Laurels is the only game available so far, so there must have been another platform Short was involved with that was also iPad only, as I remember being frustrated by this more than once.