i’ve played in two campaigns, both emceed by porpentine (who was basically vat-bred for the role), both with different tones. the first was a violence-heavy campaign where i played a gunlugger named hellen killer (gunluggers are good at violence). the second centered a brothel and its attempt to avoid getting mixed up in the local drug trade (“surge” being the drug in question). in that campaign i played a battlebabe named murder slutfuck who was really good at getting herself and the business into trouble.

here are some reasons i like apocalypse world: first, obviously, is the setting. as a queer person, i feel more at home in the future than the past, making my campfire in the hollowed-out ruins of the institutions that oppress me in the here and now. but more important than the setting is how the game uses it: it’s pulp. in a conversation with my friend andrew recently, i explained one of the reasons i so often reach for pulp settings for my games & writing: because exposition is unnecessary, a hole in the plot can be filled with a hasty invention, snags can be smoothed over with tone and style. you can tell a story without getting hung up on the numbers. a lot of role-playing games get hung up on numbers. why do we have to go after the jackabacka cult? what’s on the other side of the pleasure labyrinth? just make it up.

in fact, as andrew wrote in his own post on apocalypse world, every action, successful or not, moves the story forward. mattie brice’s character, “always” (a psychic sex cult leader) was trying to reach into the psychic maelstrom and touch one person, the surge kingpin, and plant an impulse in her mind. opening yourself to the psychic maelstrom requires a die roll against your “weird” rating – mattie failed (the number on the die was higher than her weird rating). instead of touching this one person, she accidentally planted an impulse in all of her cult members: the impulse to immediately storm the kingpin’s brothel-fortress in a mob.

apocalypse world is always asking questions – the emcee (the master of ceremonies, the overseer, the dream operator) as much as anyone else. what does the psychic maelstrom look like to you? what have you heard about that part of town? what’s the shop owner’s name?  the players are as involved in world-building as the emcee is. that kind of rapport wouldn’t be possible in a game where every new character has to come with a stack of numbers a mile high, but in apocalypse world’s pulp setting a few words is all it needs. it all sticks, adds to the mess on the wall, fits into the frankenstein patchwork that is the post-apocalypse.

misadventure is another game that draws on the unknowable, mythical quality of the glitch. in this game, the glitch represents invaders from another world. and they look it, their spindly arms and weird asymmetries at odds with the perfect square atari world they are intruding upon. but what sells it is the frame narrative, in which the outer layer representing the player sitting in her living room, playing the game at home on her tv, is also increasingly intruded upon.

i am ambivalent about the ending, partly because i accidentally clicked one of those giant ads on the side of the game and was whisked away from it to another game entirely, where i had as much right being as the interdimensional demons visiting mike houser’s version of adventure.

Rooms 59-60 - These rooms comprise the interior of the temple proper. Its vast space is dominated by a stepped dais at the west end on which stands a golden statue of a two-headed serpent, the ancient god Sin.

the above is an excerpt from the computer game HELLFIRE WARRIOR. or, rather, it’s an excerpt from the book that comes with the game. if your digital avatar is standing in room 59 or 60, you might decide to look up the room’s description in the book. the “paragraph book” represents a strategy in digital game storytelling that rose out of the dungeons & dragons pen & paper role-playing tradition: when you set your playing pieces on the square on the map that represents the next room in the dungeon, the dungeon master – a live human emcee – will tell you what your characters see in that room. computers have always been good at displaying squares – when their graphic economy didn’t leave much room for visually describing the contents of one of those squares, game authors like jon freeman, joyce lane and jeff johnson – the writers of hellfire warrior’s “book of lore” – borrowed an idea from the game experiences that inspired theirs.

the book of lore went away as the graphic economy of games grew richer and mainstream games’ focus subsequently shifted toward visual representations of worlds. but i think one of the things the current proliferation of twine games proves is that the economy of text is still wickedly valuable to digital world construction. and then there’s games like lillith’s dungeon lovers dx, which supplements an intentionally flat game world with pages of descriptive text. i recommend opening the game and the guide alongside each other in seperate browser tabs. and there’s thecatemites and j. chastain’s goblet grotto, which features whole branching “choose your own adventure” stories hidden in the paragraph book.

i like the idea of this kind of lore as an additional layer of texture to a game, one that the player navigates differently. the digital space of a game reveals information incrementally – only when i enter this room do i get to see what shape it is. but the “lore” of the game represents a big collection of text that’s all immediately available to the player, though the digital output of the game is required to help the player organize it. it also reminds us that the space for interpreting and internalizing a game is much, much bigger than the digital scope of that game.

the other thing i did while i was in new york was zinefeast at suny purchase. i did a super-exciting panel with annie mok and olivia horvath, who are both super rad, and i met a bunch of other cool artists, like meg powers. we came home with piles and piles of zines! we also brought a bunch of copies of star wench and our own zines to sell (and more often, trade), including my newest zine, D/sphoria.

D/sphoria is a zine i wrote with black dahlia parton, former roommate and inspiration, about being dominant and trans. i wanted to write about how being dominant gave me a framework for establish boundaries in regards to my body for the first time, to redefine intimacy and sex, and ultimately to feel feminine and powerful. black dahlia parton added a lot of amazing stuff, including an essay / how-to guide on centering the mouth as a primary sex organ for trans women that i was fortunate enough to hear her read live once.

the zine’s available in my online store, which is BACK after a short hiatus. other things back on sale: signed copies of rise of the videogame zinesters, notorious skyqueers patches, my other zines. you can also read the entire text of D/sphoria online, for free.

so i was invited to speak at the first-ever different games conference in brooklyn, april 26th and 27th (at the “nyu-poly” campus, WHICH FELT ODDLY APPROPRIATE). let me tell you, first of all, some cool things they did. shortly before the conference i emailed them, concerned about their security policy which required folks to wear badges carrying the names on their government id cards (for a lot of trans people, not the names they go by). probably nyu campus policy. they immediately responded by negotiating with security to have their own printed badges, bearing the conference attendee’s chosen name, count as security passes. also, they converted two bathrooms into gender-neutral bathrooms. see: it’s not hard to make your conference more welcoming to trans people.

the other thing that i really liked about the conference was its use of the word “difference” as a really inclusive, intersectional term, encompassing race, gender, ability, queerness. it made me think about the language i use, how i frame my own work. what also made me think: i realized during different games that no one’s really talking about class and how it affects people’s access to game development tools, and what tools. (fer example: lots of underprivileged queer folks use twine because it’s free and because they never had the opportunity to go to tech school and learn to code.) different games is an academic conference, mostly attended by academics – it’s not really surprising that the class conversation doesn’t come up there, or at similar conferences.

what did i actually say at different games? i was on a panel with robert yang, mattie brice and haitham ennasr, some of my favorite geniuses. we each gave a short talk and then we took questions. my talk was called “how to make games about being a dominatrix.” instead of slides, i had my slut illustrate my talk live using transparencies and an overhead projector. i didn’t let her look at my speech ahead of time. people seemed to like it, though the projector burnt out close to the end. you can watch all four talks and the panel here – that’s another cool thing about different games, they recorded all the talks and put them online for free. anyway, have a transcript of my talk:

as people who spend a lot of time making and discussing games, we talk a lot about the rules of games – we develop a mechanical understanding of them. and rightly so, because we create play by designing rules. tetris’ whole trajectory comes from the rule that only complete lines are eliminated from the screen – mistakes and imperfections remain, making it harder to create complete lines.

the ways that the rules of tetris interact to create a meaningfully stressful experience are fascinating and beautiful, as true an expression of art as anything you’d find hanging in a gallery.

but as a queer game designer i find that most of my work isn’t motivated strictly by a pure abstract desire to play with the form. most of the time, my games are motivated by imperatives to represent aspects of my identity, or to provide criticism, or to interrogate politics.

so i’m going to talk about context: the ways in which we frame our rules and communicate them to the player.

here is the first thing to know about context:

CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING

in 2009 i made a game called MIGHTY JILL OFF. the protagonist of mighty jill off is submissive in a latex suit who jumps really high, and has to jump all the way up a tall tower in order to prove herself to her queen, the recipient of her devotion and lust.

if you’ve played mighty jill off, and if you’ve also played a nintendo game called MIGHTY BOMB JACK, you may have observed that they play exactly the same. the bomb jack games are about outmaneuvering enemies using elaborate in-air acrobatics. jack can stop jumping on a dime, giving him perfect control of the height of his jump. he can hover in mid-air, giving him greater horizontal mobility during a jump. the player can hold UP or DOWN when initiating a jump, controlling the parabola of his jump.

i was really fascinated by these games for a while. when i made mighty jill off, i stole the entire vocabulary of rules for in-air motion from bomb jack. the mid-air break, the hovering – i didn’t keep the holding up and down because it didn’t seem necessary.

so we have two games whose most important rules – the rules from which the play comes – are identical. do we have two identical games?

we don’t. mighty jill off is about the relationship between a submissive masochist and her domme. what i’m talking about, though, isn’t a superficial reskinning: mighty jill off is informed by my person experience, it’s based on my relationship with my collared submissive.

that experience provides a context for the play: the difficulty of a game like that, the trust the player puts in the designer to adequately prepare her for any given challenge, the need to push her limits without breaking them, the player’s desire to prove herself to the game by meeting the game’s expectations for her – these things resonate with my own experience as a domme and a top.

mighty jill off is a game that communicates ideas that mighty bomb jack does not. it does contain a set of rules which interact with one another in ways that are interesting and meaningful to the player, but it frames those rules and their interactions in a way that relates (and encourages the player to relate) to my personal experience.

that’s important in the face of the games culture that brought us bioshock infinite. bioshock is a game that forces you to watch images of racialized violence – there’s a part where you watch a man of color pecked to death by crows, begging for his life. and then a minute later you gain a power-up that lets you have crows peck people to death.

bioshock infinite is an EMPATHY-CHALLENGED game. the culture of videogames is an EMPATHY-CHALLENGED culture. videogames needs stories of racism from people who experience it, not bioshock infinite.

context is everything. in 2011 i made a game called TRANSGRESSION that is essentially a “find the hidden object” game. but what you’re trying to find is a woman who has a penis at michigan womyn’s music festival. this game would be trivial without the context. (and let me add as a disclaimer that i really like where’s waldo books.) but the entire purpose of TRANSGRESSION is to illustrate the absurdity of michfest’s “womyn-born womyn” policy by reducing it to as simple and transparent a system as possible.

do you see what i’m saying? context is a tool we can use for visibility, representation, empathy and satire. as marginalized people, the contexts of our lives are political.

as creators and critics, we have every right to investigate and to play with the friction of rules bouncing off each other, to explore in the abstract the dynamics and systems that the interaction of those rules creates. but as people whose social existence is driven by dynamics and whose lives involve struggle with systems of oppression that are invisible to the privileged, we have a unique opportunity to give our dynamics and systems contexts that are informed by our lived experiences.

in march i made a game called TRIAD. it’s a puzzle game about sliding weird-shaped tiles around to try and fit them in a limited space. but the space is a bed, and the weird-shaped tiles are three people who are trying to sleep together successfully. this is one of the fundamental problems i’ve encountered as someone who is poly – someone who has multiple partners.

the sliding tile puzzle is an old game, but it’s the context, again, that creates a meaning for players that doesn’t exist in games with similar puzzles. i’m not saying that i don’t believe in games as places for abstract mechanical exploration. i just can’t afford it.

to refuse to take a political stance is itself a political stance – it’s to stand with the status quo. and the status quo of videogames is alienating, is racist, is misogynist, promotes rape culture. it is important to me that my games exist in visible opposition to that. and a conversation about games, a criticism of games that is purely mechanical, that erases context, erases my identity.

as a trans woman, i exist in a society that is continuously trying to erase my identity. context, in my games, is the voice through which i speak my name.

context is everything.

(photo via charismaphone.)

here are some avatars i was commissioned to create for the gaymerconnect forums. a friend of mine suggested that the existing avatars that users had to choose from all skewed male – androgynous male, yeah, but as a trans woman she wasn’t comfortable wearing that as an avatar. so, i tried to fill in the blanks with a bunch of feminine, femme and genderqueer identities.

i liked mining the videogames zeitgeist for archetypes that would resonate with queer people. a glitch made immediate sense as a metaphor for a liminal identity. this was a place where the ambiguity of pixels was really useful: i wanted avatars that could be useful to butches, genderqueer or male-identified people simultaneously. i wanted a few of them to have no explicit race, and a few to have no explicit face. the astronaut, the block and the glitch have no explicit body, in the interest of not forcing someone to identify with any specific representation of one.

and there’s carmen sandiego, because i personally identify with her as a queer game icon. the gunlugger is a character class from d. vincent baker’s apocalypse world, which i owe you a post about. the paladin is based on the paladin from the nes version of ultima: exodus, with the pink armor and heart shield. the crystal warrior is inspired by marras’ art. the space pirate’s pose was copied from the title screen of “the adventures of rad gravity,” also a nes game. the block is somewhere between a tetris block and the dys4ia block. the nurse is a zombie. shit happens.

hopefully i’ve made things that people will feel comfortable having represent them. these avatars are available to every forum poster on gaymerconnect, regardless of their level of participation, as per my request. also, you can download them all and use them for whatever.

well, if i’m gonna make one sequel, why not do another.

this one’s the follow-up to put on your make-up in the dark – a game based on a terrifying true story. this time you’re doing your nails. i played with the format a bit – instead of time limits, you’re given ten colors and as much time as you like. but you can’t see what you’ve drawn until you click “done.” the original’s about a face, and everyone knows the vague layout and symmetry of a face. because the pose here is a little asymmetrical, i settled on really blurry forms. hopefully it’s still confusing enough. when you finish, the game will automatically save a picture to “most_recent_disaster.png.”

sounds from mario paint, vincent price, freesound users harri and artifact, and the cure. hands / feet provided by an anonymous wolfmaiden.

download DO YOUR NAILS IN THE DARK here.

the thrilling sequel to FORBIDDEN SPACE – a game i made for my friend andi’s birthday that runs silently on your desktop, screaming at you if you dare to press the spacebar even once. my slut suggested this variation, which i think may be even more interesting: the spacebar is allowed, but the BACKSPACE KEY is not. i like this better: the spacebar is an essential part of most text communication, and a necessity for navigating a lot of programs. the BACKSPACE, however, is pure luxury: it exists entirely to confer the ability to self-edit. and  the results of taking away that capacity are liable to be much more exciting.

download FORBIDDEN BACKSPACE here.

luna announced that she was planning a dating sim jam this weekend. SMART GIRL THAT SHE IS, she never defined what “dating sim” means, leaving it deliberately ambiguous. what she made was a game about her first date ever.

i played it and decided i wanted to make a game about my first date with my slut, my life partner, my favorite person in the world, daphny drucilla delight david. but like queer relationships do, ours doesn’t really fit the established narrative. we were long-distance for a long time, seeing each other every couple months and talking on the phone every night. what counts as our first date? the first time we cruised each other, over some xbox game? the first time we had phone sex? the first time we saw each other in person? i was forced to make a game about all of these.

click here to play AEGIS WING.

so that’s gold, which leaves silver. AS THE RHYME GOES. i wanted to make a game about a series of messages i sent merritt one night, when i was missing her fiercely, about what our life would be like after the apocalypse. she saved the messages: they characterize our dynamic perfectly. i wanted to make that game, too.

click here to play SURVIVAL.

merritt also made a game about her memories of all of her first dates – i cried when i got up to ours at last.

both of my games play around with the idea of “dating” in an obnoxiously literal way. both of them are particularly interested in what the future is going to be like. it reminds me of something i said to my friend andrew when he was asking me about the pulp sensibility of my writing the other week. i told him that more than any other time, the future belongs to queer people.

UPDATE: i’ve uploaded the source files for aegis wing and for survival.

i also gave an improvised talk on thursday at the lost levels unconference which was held in the park next to GDC, for free. my talk was on zines and rethinking game distribution. it was recorded, along with a bunch of other talks, although many of my friends’ brilliant talks weren’t. you can see it near the beginning of this video. lost levels was rad, especially in opposition to a conference that charges thousands of dollars for admission – i want it to happen every year.

DYS4IA POST-PARTUM

this is going to be a post-partum for dys4ia. not a “post-mortem.” i know that videogames are really violent most of the time but your game isn’t dead when it’s finished. in fact, when it’s out in the world being played, that’s the only time your game is alive. before that it’s merely gestating, deaf and blind. only when it is interacting with people does a game possess life.

that’s lesson 1.

LESSON 1
YOUR GAME ISN’T A GAME UNTIL SOMEONE’S PLAYING IT

so what is dys4ia? or

WHAT IS DYSPHORIA?

well, to wrap it in a cute, accessible videogame metaphor- actually, it’s hard to put in videogame terms, because videogames are one of the few places in life we’re asked “what gender would you like to be? what would you like your body to look like?” dysphoria exists where that choice does not: it is seeing the reality that has been shaped around you like a wax coccoon, and feeling utterly helpless to change it.

but i did attempt to put it in videogame terms.

WHAT IS DYS4IA?

dys4ia is an autobiographical game, or “not a game” if you ask someone with a thick enough beard. raph koster called it “a powerpoint presentation.” by his definition, a game is a puzzle to be unraveled. it is a system to be understood. an enemy to be defeated. a country to be conquered. but

DYSPHORIA

is none of those things. what it IS, i need to believe, is a relatable human experience. and what a game actually is is

LESSON 2
A GAME IS AN EXPERIENCE CREATED BY RULES

this is why, if you were paying attention, your game isn’t a game until someone’s playing it. because someone needs to be EXPERIENCING it. well, the experience of

DYSPHORIA

- and the experience of dealing with the gatekeepers one has to go through to start dealing with dysphoria – is one that’s characterized by FRUSTRATION. and i expect i don’t have to prove to anyone in this room that the rules of videogames are capable of creating the experience of frustration.

so to be explicit, dys4ia is a game about the experience of being a transgender woman, which i am, and undergoing hormone replacement therapy, which i have been for over a year. at the time i started making the game dys4ia, i had been on HRT for a few months, and by the time i finished it, i had been on it for about six months. the game became a record of all the different frustrations and transformations i was experiencing, it made sense for the game to be constantly changing scenes, shifting to different facets of the experience. i reached to warioware as a model, because that’s a game that borrows from the player’s existing learned vocabulary of videogames to establish a format that’s in constant flux and yet playable.

so yeah, dys4ia was conceived as a game in the same format as warioware and so, unsurprisingly, it borrows some of the same tricks that warioware uses to be accessible despite its constant flux. here are some of those tricks.

LESSON 3
ESTABLISH BOUNDARIES AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE

every scene of dys4ia is different, plays different, has a different context. one scene is about shaving, another’s about navigating a maze, another’s catching pills in your mouth. but what’s consistent about the game is what buttons are used to play it: just the arrow keys.

the game may have just changed into something completely different than it was a few seconds ago, but the player has some idea of where to start, because the same buttons she used in one s ccene are the same she uses in another. and the arrow keys are buttons that suggest things, because they represent ideas about space that make sense in a two-dimension image.

the arrow keys are established as the player’s means of input as early as the title screen. instead of press ENTER to start, or SPACE, or click the word “START” with the mouse, i put the player’s hand on the place the game needs it to be. if i had used the spacebar as the “start button” game, that would have introduced the possibility that SPACE is part of the game’s vocabulary of input. every screen, the player would try the spacebar before she tried the arrow keys.

if the game involved pressing the spacebar, i’d have opened the game by making the player press the spacebar. if it involved HOLDING DOWN THE SPACEBAR FOR THREE SECONDS, the game would begin with the player holding down the spacebar for three seconds. if the game was about clicking on brightly-wrapped christmas gifts, you can be the game wouldn’t start until the player clicked on a brightly-wrapped christmas gift.

the frame screen, the screen from which the player selects which acts of the game to play or re-play, is also designed to emphasize, and to be navigable with, the four keys that the player uses to play the game. i want the player’s fingers to stay on those keys, remember. i see a lot of games that play exclusively with the keyboard, and then ask the player to remove her hands from the keyboard between stages, to click on the next stage with the mouse. and then to move her hands back to the keyboard. don’t do that. if the game is designed to be played with the arrow keys, let the player advance the game with the arrow keys.

at this point in writing this talk i had to pause and swallow a spironolactone pill, a testosterone blocker. i take two a day, every day: one when i wake up every morning, and one at eleven p.m. every night. i have an alarm set on my phone to remind me.

LESSON 4
PIGGYBACK ON EXISTING GAME VOCABULARY

here’s one of the reasons warioware is as accessible as it is, given that the player has seconds at most to internalize the objective and rules of any given scenario. it’s because it puts those rules in the context of games the player’s already familiar with. that’s why a third of warioware’s scenes are based on basketball and volleyball, a third of them are based on nintendo games like super mario, and a third of them are based on everyday tasks like cutting hair and washing dishes.

the player who comes to your game has expectations and learned knowledge that can be exploited.

the first scene in dys4ia is about fitting a tetris block into a hole in a wall. this is my metaphor for dysphoria, and the reason i use this metaphor is because it’s one that gives the player expectations: about what to do with this block, about where to put it.

the “i feel like a spy when i use the women’s bathroom” scene contextualizes anxiety over using the woman’s bathroom as a stealth game. the player expects that the goal is not to be seen.

in another scene, my nipples are flashing and moving through a field of spiked balls. players know that flashing objects are sensitive and spiky things are dangerous.

the reason you want to communicate the rules of your game as quickly and succinctly as possible…

LESSON 5
FUCK EXPOSITION

…is so you don’t have to resort to exposition. exposition is when you interrupt your game to explicitly tell the player something you could have guided her toward learning yourself. it’s when you have a portrait of THE COMMISSIONER pop up the screen and say “by the way, agent, word’s come down from on high that you can use the UP button to leap over obstacles that might get in your way.”

never explain to the player how to move the story forward if you can lead her toward moving the forward herself. partly this is a matter of choosing stories that you can tell through the vocabulary you’ve established: “cutscenes” mark those places where designers have failed to do this.

on the subject of vocabulary, let me provide an important corollary to my earlier lesson…

LESSON 4
PIGGYBACK ON EXISTING GAME VOCABULARY

…about piggybacking on existing player knowledge, which is: exploiting player knowledge is different than being dependent on it. when the game requires certain knowledge on the part of the player, that makes a game less accessible. and, frankly, i’m sick of games that require twenty years of previous videogame-playing experience in order get anywhere. there are enough games in existence that pander to those people. i’m more interested in making games for the people who who don’t have a master’s degree in strafing while shooting. and on that subject,

LESSON 6
DON’T MAKE FUCKING PORTAL REFERENCES

if you’ve played dys4ia you may have counted the references to the valve software game “portal,” for example jokes about cakes and about deception involving cakes. there are ZERO. when you put a portal “joke” in your game, and hopefully you can hear from my voice that “joke” is in quotes because there’s nothing inherently funny about the phrase “the cake is a lie,” what you’re actually saying is “i want only nerds to play my game.” if that describes you, i suggest you leave because the things i have to say will hopefully be of no use to you.

LIZ TALKS ABOUT GAME AUDIO

I just have a few minutes here, but I wanted to talk about doing the audio for the game, because I believe that audio is extremely important and something that a lot people don’t really take seriously. It’s kind of like an afterthought and a lot of times it’s contracted out. I think it’s important especially in serious games. There’s a tendency in so called “serious games” to be very heavy handed with the audio and try to manipulate people emotionally. I wanted to have something that was very emotionally resonant, and very emotional; but, not manipulative and very true to the experience.

So, I had to take from my own experience as also a trans woman, who has been through what Anna’s been through to some extent. I don’t really want to talk about the original inspiration for the audio right now, since that would take up too much time. But basically, the audio combines Anna’s voice sounds, which are the sounds that bring you through the game, that respond to the actions that you’re doing and then, in the background, there’s a soundtrack, which is a meshed together blob of ambient noises, talking, closing doors, and there’s this tentative melodic thing that starts and then as you move through the game, I treat it as one continuous piece, but it’s split into four parts– five, including the title screen. It’s all part of the same progression, the same instruments.

By the end, when she’s starting to feel more like things are starting to move forward, a melody takes over. This game is sort of a patchwork-like game; it’s very difficult to score something like this. I wanted to just do something that encompassed that patchwork-like feel in the audio. It’s frustrating because this is a game that does something that other games have not done before and because of that people focus on that. But, I think that the aesthetics, both the visual style and audio, are extremely important. It’s always frustrating to me that people don’t really talk about it; don’t really understand how to talk about it in a vocabulary that makes sense. Hopefully, in the end, it really contributed to the experience and made it more emotionally resonant with people, even if you haven’t been through that. Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say.

LESSON 7
DEVELOP YOUR VOCABULARY

think about the rules you introduce in your game as characters. characters develop, characters grow and change, characters face conflicts and are transformed by the experience. we can watch a character develop over the course of a story.

in dys4ia we revisit characters, symbols. try having the player move around your “level select” screen the same way she moves around the levels. the practical benefit of this is that you get to reuse things, and that’s economical. you don’t have to redraw this brick wall, you don’t have to code a new way for the player to move a character around. the benefit to the player is that she’s actually watching the characters and her relationship to them grow.

i could go into how super mario bros. is actually about the developing relationship between mario’s horizontal movement and mario’s vertical movement, but i think i’ll leave that as an exercise for you instead. play the game and notice how the relationship between moving left/ right and jumping develops over the first world alone.

LESSON 8
BE SUCCINCT

dys4ia takes five to ten minutes to play. that’s exactly how long it takes to express the ideas in the game. in a contemporary super mario game, once you’ve figured out how to grab the bomb from over here and carry it all the way back over here and throw it into the boss’s mouth during the short time that it’s open and hurt it, you still need to repeat the same sequence of actions five more times before you can go on with the game.

an eighty-hour game is one hour of ideas padded out with seventy-nine hours of bullshit. i want you to get past the idea that “more play time is more value.” the most valuable thing a player has is time. the most harmful thing a game designer can do is waste the player’s time.

LESSON 9
GO OUTSIDE

and here’s my last lesson. when i started working on dys4ia i was only a few months into hormone replacement therapy. i had no idea how the game was going to end. but i kept taking time off from the game – to spend time with friends, to work on other projects, like KEEP ME OCCUPIED. when i came back to dys4ia, time had passed, things had changed, and i knew how to finish the game.

this industry has unreasonable expectations for the time and labor of all of us. we’re taught that working hours and hours of unpaid overtime without seeing our families is part of the culture – “crunch time,” we call it. but it’s not part of the culture, it’s not a rite of passage or a mark of pride. it is corporations disregarding our human needs. let’s not be naive and let’s not be fooled.

RESIST CRUNCH

the story that i like to tell is when i was working on lesbian spider-queens of mars. the game was almost finished – i had just added the boss and was getting ready to show the game to adult swim. i was so close to getting the game complete. i had work to do.

my partners begged me, pleaded, dragged me muttering and protesting and snapping at them to a beach house on a cliff at sunset beach. the next morning, instead of tweaking numbers on my computer, i was building sand dongs with my loved ones on the beach.

what we need right now are videogames made by human beings, not machines. people care about dys4ia because it’s a personal game that drawns from my personal, human experience. when we lose our ability to be human, we lose the ability to create games that are relatable by other humans. let’s remember to be human beings. don’t let corporations dehumanize us. this is my last advice to game developers: go outside. kiss someone who loves you.