skip to content


90TH HOTTEST QUEER WOMAN IN THE GALAXY

UPCOMING TOUR DATES: JUNE 20-23: allied media conference, detroit, michigan. "making personal videogames with twine," workshop with merritt kopas.

aegis wing & survival

4/7/2013 @ 11:52am

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.

filed in mine, smut | comments (8)

dys4ia post-partum

4/1/2013 @ 1:12am

after friday’s romero’s wives reading, i unwound by delivering a post-partum of my game dys4ia with liz. parham gholami was gracious enough to not only record the thing, but to edit it – my slides weren’t quite working, so there was a little fumbling. you can download the audio recording right here, and the transcript is below. thanks to parham gholami again for creating a transcript of liz’s talk.

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.

filed in design, mine | comments (18)

romero’s wives

3/31/2013 @ 9:32am

the GDC of the past week – the annual game developer’s conference in san francisco, but this year i decided it was going to stand for GIRLS DEMAND CHANGES – has been the most stressful of my life. it has also been the most empowering of my life, the one where i felt the people i care about had the loudest voices, the one where i finally felt i wasn’t alone, token, a novelty or side-show attraction. on monday, porpentine opened GDC by talking about outsider games and the powerful marginalized voices they transmit. on friday, i decided, i would close GDC with my friend cara ellison’s poem, romero’s wives.

i ended up writing my own version of romero’s wives, or rewriting hers a little. being a queer trans woman has given me a slightly different perspective than cara’s, and i wanted what i read to reflect that. every day of GDC gave me a new line to add to the poem. my one GDC regret is not punching cactus when he told one of my best friends she could give him a blowjob, or not punching him a minute earlier, when he snuck up behind me, grabbed my shoulders and screamed. mojang hired women escorts for their party even though it led to a woman being sexually assaulted last year – then denied that they had. brenda braithwaite resigned from the igda after their gross party featuring scantily clad women dancers.

brenda was in the audience for my reading of romero’s wives. she was among the first on stage to hug me afterwards.

slut recorded a video of my reading. CLICK HERE TO WATCH ME READ ROMERO’S WIVES. below, the transcript of the version of the poem that i read.

There comes a time when you’re more angry than tired
There comes a point where sitting in silence is more terrifying than standing and speaking
The games industry is a man in love with his libido
I have a libido

Had to be joked away at conferences
Had to be scrolled past on internet forums
Had to be hissed under your breath
Had to be leant over a keyboard at 3am
Had to be seen in the statistics
Had to be segregated in schools
Had to be guided away from the sciences
Had to be a self-taught programmer
Our apathy and the games industry are in cahoots

Had to be Jenn Frank’s endless patience
Had to be Leigh Alexander on a Bombcast
Had to be Mattie Brice making a game so she could finally be the main character
Had to be Mattie’s game misattributed to Merritt Kopas
Had to be Merritt’s game misattributed to me
Had to be unable to make room for more than one trans game designer
Had to be Lara Croft shipwrecked on an island of rapists
Had to be David Cage’s sex bot begging for her life
Had to be protected by a man
Had to be marooned on Makeb
Had to be games where women moan when they’re shot
Had to be Remember Me rejected because a woman protagonist makes it gay
Had to be Rhianna Pratchett asking “but what if the player’s female?”
Had to be a Mojang security guard asking “what do you expect me to do?”
Had to be the forty hottest women in tech
Had to be fake geek girls

Brenda Braithwaite can’t bring her daughter to E3

Had to be moaned through knees in the bath
Had to be screamed into a pillow
Had to be rewritten a hundred times
Had to be deleted before I clicked “send”
Had to be in fear
Had to be fat, ugly or slutty
Had to be told I’m really a man
Had to be asked why my name doesn’t match my ID
Had to be a feminazi slut
Had to be an attention whore
Had to be obsessed with my own sexuality
Had to be on display
Had to be a torso on a shelf
Had to be mistaken for a booth babe
Had to be told to stop talking about it
Had to be told “this isn’t an intelligent conversation”
Had to be told to get your husband’s permission before posting on the internet
Had to be verbally abused
Had to be clogging Patricia Hernandez’s inbox
Had to be Lana Polansky scared to talk about sex
Had to be Tracey afraid to comment on her own site
Had to be Dani Bunten denied her own name
Had to be the indie game developer who told my friend she could give him a blowjob
Had to be Adria losing her job because she said “no more”
Anita Sarkeesian’s face is bruised

Had to be rage
Had to be fear
Had to be scared to use the bathroom
Had to be silenced
Had to make a rape joke
Had to put it on a t-shirt
Had to get your wife to insist that you’re not sexist
Had to refuse to call Dys4ia a game
Had to deny that Tentacle Bento is a game about rape
Had to leave two hundred comments on an open letter to Destructoid
Had to hate other women because you were taught to
Had to call us “females” like we’re another species
Had to give me a panic attack
Had to push me out of the chair and play the game for me
Had to take away my agency
Had to take away my identity

Had to be John Romero’s wife
Had to be John Romero’s wives
All had to be John Romero’s wives
All had to be John Romero’s wives

filed in mine | comments (27)

triad

3/18/2013 @ 12:11pm

this game began as a conversation with jake eakle about a mutual problem we’ve faced: trying to fit yourself and the two people you’re dating into a bed that’s not designed for three people. in such a way that all three people can actually sleep. my own unhappy solution to the puzzle involved a futon on the floor and one member of our trio having to sleep by herself. it’s not an easy puzzle.

well, why not remake it as a sliding-tile puzzle game? that was just the idea i was looking for – i’ve been writing mostly text-only twine games and books lately, it’s about time i do a graphical game again. so i cut out paper shapes, moved them around a grid, and designed a puzzle. then i opened up game maker to try and code the thing.

download triad for windows or mac

it turns out the reason i’ve been avoiding graphical games is that, in my old age, i no longer have any tolerance for programming. so i got leon to program the thing, and also to make a thousand tiny creative choices that made the game a lot stronger. liz did the music and sound, all of which is ingenious, because she is a genius.

this game is an homage to queers who sleep in funny ways. it’s dedicated to everyone i’ve ever attempted, however foolishly, to share a bed with. at some point i asked slut to name the characters in the game. if you’re curious, their names are riff-raff, boodles, and snippet. also, encyclopedia frown makes a guest appearance.

filed in mine | comments (36)

choose your own death: star wench

3/17/2013 @ 3:58pm

this all started one weekend i was staying over at slut’s house – that’s how long ago this was, we weren’t living together yet. we were lying in bed together, reading a choose your own adventure book out loud to each other. specifically, it was “YOU ARE A MONSTER.” this particular volume begins with a long description of how you’re kidnapped by a mad scientist, imprisoned, experimented on, turned into a hideous creature, and ultimately manage to escape. that’s when the first choice finally happens – when you manage to escape, ten or so pages in. the book keeps directing you: turn to page 54, turn to page 23, but this whole prolonged opening scene is completely linear.

it got us talking about playing with the structure of choose your own adventure books – “art choose your own adventure books,” that was it. what if the entire book is linear up to the very last page, where you’re faced with your one choice in the entire story: a choice between an obvious winning condition and an obvious losing condition, but a losing condition you might take just to assert your control over your own destiny. “or,” slut said, “what about a book where you make your only choice at the beginning, and there are a hundred different endings.”

soon after starting on that book, i realized how perfectly a non-linear story where you “lose” on every page fit my identity, my sexuality, my sadism, my interest in chance in storytelling. i fell in love with the book a little while after. it was my background project: i’d go without looking at it for weeks, then i’d write five more endings. i’d work on lesbian spider-queens, or rise of the videogame zinesters, or dys4ia, then i’d go back to star wench, throw out three pages and write two more. three years later, the book’s finally in print, my debut book of fiction.

buy star wench on amazon!

STAR WENCH always needed to be a physical book. it’s an experiment in letting the reader structure the story: each page of the book represents a fragment of a larger story, the whole of which we’re never shown, but there are recurring characters, recurring places, events that play out in different ways. the reader opens to a page at random and discovers something new, or something connected to a page she read earlier. maybe she reads forward a couple of pages, or backwards. maybe she thinks, i’ve read a lot of the first half of the book, let’s poke around the second. maybe she just skims looking for the pictures.

the book needed illustrations, so i approached j christian, who had previously illustrated my slut’s children’s story, brunhilda. j designed what the characters looked like – star wench, interstellar adventurer and rogue, and the queen of space, her antagonist and obsession – and completed three illustrations, but wasn’t able to illustrate the entire book. so then i talked to rebecca clements, who agreed to do the cover and two more illustrations. then i talked to basically every other artist i know – i ended up with twelve illustrators who each contributed at least one page. i paid them out of my own pockets with lesbian spider-queens money – or in some cases i still owe them.

i got rejected by a bunch of publishers and literary agents trying to make this book real. a borderline-pornographic pulp sci-fi choose your own adventure book about explicitly queer women and eroticized deathtraps is a hard sell. but reba connected me to their friend mary borsellino, who had had some success with a little publishing house called omnium gatherum. kate jonez emailed me back during indiecade – it must have been about the same time jonathan blow was telling my slut “this isn’t an intelligent conversation” and turning his back on her. i was sitting by myself, watching them set up live-action frogger. kate wanted to publish the book.

so thanks, first, to kate, for not only printing my book but acceding to my millions of demands. and, second, to every beautiful queer person whose presence in my life inspired the scenarios on these hundred pages. i’m not kidding when i say this book is the most exciting project i’ve ever had – it stands at the intersection of all the things i care about: play, chance, kink, sadism, pulp, games and queerness.

you can buy it on amazon or check out previews on the star wench blog.

filed in mine | comments (4)

forbidden space

3/9/2013 @ 7:52pm

my friend andi was really excited that nasa was hosting a game jam on her birthday. she wanted to rope a bunch of us in to making games with her thirtieth birthday – then she found out that you had to book tickets months in advance. BULLSHIT. not to be deterred, she had a bunch of friends over to my place for a KICKED OUT OF NASA GAME JAM. (they’re still here. it’s still going on.)

one of the suggested themes was “excluded from space.” the worst idea i could think of was a game that bans the player from using the spacebar. but that wasn’t very interesting to me, until i thought of the possibility of imposing the spacebar ban on the player’s normal computer habits.

you can download FORBIDDEN SPACE here. when you run it, it’ll create a small window that will stay on your desktop. DON’T minimize it – but feel free to slide it into the corner. then use your computer as normal. but DON’T touch the spacebar!

liz is over, so i had her do the sound. happy birthday, andi!

filed in mine | comments (4)

twine bundle, birthday edition

2/27/2013 @ 3:17pm

here are some twine games about feminine empowerment i have played in the past few weeks. OH MY GODDESS, let us pause and reflect on the thing i just typed. here are some VIDEOGAMES ABOUT FEMININE POWER i have played IN THE PAST FEW WEEKS. tomorrow’s my birthday, i’m turning thirty. i can think of no better birthday present than the amazing way twine is transforming the landscape of videogames.

sabbat is a game about transition: from powerless to powerful. it is one of the most euphoric games i have ever experienced. it starts by letting you choose what genitals you have, but that choice doesn’t dictate the protagonist’s gender. that alone is incredible.

all i want is for all of my friends to become insanely powerful is a game porpentine made for valentine’s day as a loveletter to all her friends, to queerness, to our ability to take back our lives and radically change ourselves and the world around us. beautiful.

positive space is an edutainment game merritt made about muffing, a sex act for trans ladies i have not had the courage to explore. it’s text intercut with excerpts from mira bellwether’s crucial “fucking trans women.” i like this format a lot, this educational collage.

at the bonfire is a game by finny, set at a party in the woods. it’s an exploration of a web of emotions, a tapestry of thoughts and feelings and meditations on an event it feels like the author was at – she calls the game “semi-fictional.” she made it for her sister.

filed in game | comments (5)

patches for queer pirates, zines for gay planets

2/14/2013 @ 1:40pm

i updated my online store with some things i’m pretty proud of, and i WANTED YOU TO KNOW ABOUT THEM.

item number one is a sew-on patch of an image i drew for merritt’s game, queer pirate plane, which she made for us to play at our new year’s party because she couldn’t be there. for notorious skyqueers, distance isn’t an obstacle. i’ve been making these patches on spare fabric we have sitting around using iron-on transfers. they’re pretty cool.

item number two is a zine version of my recent twine game, the hunt for the gay planet. i rewrote the game in a choose your own adventure format – make a choice, turn to the appropriate paragraph (there are 81)! i’ve been wanting to make more physical games for a while now. i’m really proud of this. a.e. stokes drew a cute-ass cover for it.

as always, we are struggling with money, and sales really help. the donation page still works, too, if you wanna just dump money on us. either way, my little queer band appreciates it.

filed in mine, site | comments (4)

corporate gate-keeping: a triptych

2/12/2013 @ 3:24pm

google chrome

windows 7

mac osx mountain lion

filed in ugh | comments (25)

and the robot horse you rode in on

2/11/2013 @ 7:32pm

usually for valentine’s day, i draw a picture of some mean lady subjecting a girl to some kind of medieval torture device. this year (because i forgot), i did something different. i made a game about a messy queer break-up. happy valentine’s!

i’ll be honest: i made this whole game just so i could write a scene where a girl licks water off the foot of another girl while buried to her neck in the desert. but then i asked myself: why is this girl buried to her neck in the desert? such questions are the seeds of stories. girls who end up buried to their necks in the desert, i thought, aren’t always the most honest banditas. here was an opportunity to explore a conceit i haven’t really spent that much time with: a dishonest narrator. twine was a perfect fit: thanks to the ambiguity of hypertext, the player character can complete her schemes even if the player doesn’t know explicitly what they are.

click here to play and the robot horse you rode in on.

if you like, you can grab the twine source file.

filed in mine | comments (7)