When I show the card game Android: Netrunner off to my friends, it’s like trying to explain my favorite superhero comics. You play a hacker (that’s the “runner”) fighting a mega-corporation in a science fiction future.

I pull out my favorite runner cards and explain their personas: Chaos Theory, the teen genius with her Dinosaur-shaped computer; Valencia Estevez, the journalist and advocate for the disenfranchised; Leela Patel, the boxer and thrillseeker. They operate out of places like Cayambe, Mumbai, the moon. Like superheroes, they have different specialties that empower them as well as diverse backstories that make them relatable to all kinds of players.

Many of the runners are mixed race, and and almost half of them are women designed to avoid common objectifying tropes. Think of comic characters like Muslim-American Ms. Marvel, or Kingsway West, the Chinese gunslinger in a fantasy western—they’re visible pushes to include different types of people in traditionally “geek” spaces typically dominated by white guys.

When I first got into Netrunner two years ago, it felt like something special, and I’d hoped that its community would look different from that of collectible card games’ old guard, like Magic: The Gathering. I’ve met a lot of other Netrunner players since then who say this community is friendly, welcoming, and yeah, better than Magic’s. Yet when I look at my Netrunner friends, a majority of them are still twenty-/thirty-something white guys. (I’m a 28-year-old Vietnamese-American lady.) To their benefit, they’re with me in wondering why this is the case, why a game with such diversity within its lore doesn’t see it reflected in its player base.

My husband and I have a pattern around our board game play together: I bring home games that sound interesting to me, and he gets to comb through the rules and teach the both of us. When I brought home my first set of Netrunner cards, I remember understanding the basic premise of play: he, as the corporation, fills his servers with secrets, as I, the scrappy runner, gather the right programs to hack past his security measures to steal what they protect. We take turns playing both roles, but we’ve had our druthers from the start.

Netrunner is not a simple game. It’s got a lot of rules, many of which we didn’t fully get until we played with other people. That didn’t matter so much, because we understood the thrill at the core of the game: the run. When you’re hacking a server for the first time, you’re not sure if you’re going to get through. The corporation activates their security programs one-by-one—they can hurt you, stop you in your tracks, or even trace you back to where you live. You can beat the programs with your own or take the damage, persevering until you discover the secret at the heart of the server. More often than not at the end of a run, I release a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding, in either relief at having found a prize or resignation at having sprung a trap.

The tension built into a run is beautiful, and the vehicle for much of the game’s vivid storytelling. In runs, you can sneak into corporate headquarters, pull a bank heist, or be foiled by psychic operatives. There’s a world of scenarios that I want to explore with my friends, but I keep finding the game as a whole a hard sell, especially to other women who don’t have any collectible card game background.

“I think that the initial barrier to entry really is its LCG [living card game] format,” says game designer and critic Mattie Brice. “The people who play those sorts of games and what it takes to play those sorts of games... and some other aspects like heavy math and things.” Other card games like Magic, Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh have their battling monsters, where there’s a lot of number juggling to resolve some kind of combat scenario. To the uninformed, Netrunner looks just like those other games, but with programs instead of monsters, and again, its players look the same.

Brice believes that representation in Netrunner’s lore helps its accessibility a little, but its cyberpunk influences are also a deterrent in a way that parallels its mechanics: “Its lore is steeped in in references to programming and hacking and... Neuromancer,” she says. I try to describe to potential players how Netrunner captures the feeling of programming without requiring any actual coding abilities, but for the people who find tech knowledge overwhelming or intimidating, Netrunner’s rule set feels comparably obtuse. Even after my multiple years of playing the game, there is a flow chart of actions that I haven’t committed to memory, and embarrassingly find myself googling on my phone when I’m trying to teach friends.

I see Netrunner’s storytelling and design as most effective in the kind of values common to the players it draws. Dan D’Argenio, Netrunner’s world champion of 2014 and webmaster for Stimhack, a Netrunner website and community hub, finds Netrunner’s character treatments helpful in drawing and keeping new players.

“There’s very little sexualization. This is a very appropriate game,” he says. “The general feeling is that the vast majority of the players are feminists, and not just feminists: pro-gay rights, not racists or [we] at least try to mitigate our racial predispositions/prejudices.”

When I was eleven, I played the Pokémon Trading Card Game (TCG). I taught myself how to play, and when I realized how quickly it bored my sister, I begged my dad to take me to a comic shop I knew had game nights. When I finally went, I was the youngest player there and sat across the table from a guy who looked twice my age. He spoke to me only as much as the game required and trounced my deck. I went home embarrassed.

My Pokémon experience fell very much in line with what your average person has come to expect, fairly or otherwise, from card game events. People tend to imagine them as taking place in the back of game stores with bad lighting and ventilation, attended by competitive dudes with varying levels of social ability and hygiene. Despite their reputation, these types of meetups are the center of community interaction for all collectible card games, and Netrunner is no exception. Though game stores are still the primary venues, Netrunner players are trying to change the conversation surrounding competitors’ behaviors.

"I think when people talk about Netrunner as opposed to [other communities], they talk about the lack of cutthroat-ness," D’Argenio says. He also posits that another part of the Netrunner community’s general maturity comes from an older average age of adults. “The under-20 presence in Netrunner is pretty non-existent,” he says. “We’ve lived in the real world long enough to interact with girls. We’re just mature enough, liberal enough, to sort of police ourselves in that regard.”

Lately much of D’Argenio’s work has been in helping to organize and acting as spokesman for the Android: Netrunner Pro Circuit (ANRPC), a fan-made infrastructure for supporting regional tournaments. D'Argenio believes in the ANRPC as a means of growing the game's community from the top down.

"The people who are likely to teach Netrunner and the people who are excited to teach Netrunner are...the competitive players," D'Argenio says. He believes that the visibility of high-level play brings more casual players into more focused competitive play, and makes those players more likely to grow their local communities.

Official Netrunner tournament prizes are typically cards and special, limited-edition play mats showing off game art. As the competitive scene has grown, however, cash prizes have started to appear. D’Argenio acknowledges the concern that monetary prizes, like those common in Magic events, invite more aggressive and hostile personalities into the competition scene: "Some people have an impression that it's because it's a larger prize purse, and I think a lot of people have a legitimate concern that ANRPC is a bad thing for the community." He mentions that even though the recent Warren, Michigan regional tournament included cash prizes, the atmosphere remained genial, and he has faith that players in the community can maintain their sportsmanship as the stakes get higher.

Despite these efforts, Netrunner’s competitive events still alienate some players. Brice attended a local store tournament in the San Francisco Bay Area, and has yet to attend another. “People’s turns when they’re competitive, they’re very fast. Like they speed through—they know exactly what to do,” she says. “If you’re newer or play more casually... you feel pressured to also go the same speed. It’s just generally not fun.”

Dominique Peters is a London-based player who’s followed the game for over a year now. She primarily plays with friends at work and with her partner, but went to her first organized event this year, a tournament held at a game cafe and bar. She was the only female participant. Though she didn’t experience any overt harassment, other players’ behavior still made her uncomfortable.

“It was actually the kind of level of, I guess, microaggressions. Just really, really small continuous things that happened all the time,” Peters says. She feels her opponents gave unsolicited deck advice, over-explained the mechanics as they played, questioned her about her gaming background as if to test her geek credentials, and asked if her boyfriend taught her how to play.

She says on the latter, “That’s a tricky one, because yes he did, but that’s not really relevant? Like, did your friend teach you to play? ...It’s kind of a non-question as far as I’m concerned, but it’s asked in a very particular way.” Her partner, another competitor at the tournament, experienced none of that line of questioning and treatment from other participants. By the end of the day, no one had spoken to Peters’ outside of her matches.

Brice experienced a similar wall of silence at her tournament. “People are unintentional about it, but there’s a lot of in-group-out-group type of dynamics that happen with games and gaming circles,” Brice says. “I think that people tend to only want to play with people who are on their same wavelength, and I think if you’re new or don’t look like them...it’s kind of harder for you to kind of be accepted into certain circles.”

My own tournament experiences have been positive in comparison, I think in large part due to the efforts of the store I attend. I started playing Netrunner with strangers at Labyrinth Puzzle and Games, a woman-owned board game and toy shop based in Washington, D.C. that tries to avoid the stigma of the game store by emphasizing an all-ages, family-friendly environment. Labyrinth hosts after-school board game programs for K-12 students and donates money and educational games to local schools.

At my first tournament there, I walked into a warmly-lit space with pastel blue walls, and was welcomed by employees that directed me to the play area. The staff and event organizers kicked off the tournament with some basic ground rules: Play nice. The event space is right next to the store's kids section so attendees should use no language stronger than "butt" or "fart". Have fun! It's a small ruleset, but even that much feels conscientious and thoughtful. Labyrinth's store owner Kathleen Donahue says, “A lot of game stores lately have been saying they’ve been posting their rules on the walls. Our players kind of police themselves.”

Even so, Donahue and her staff enforce a safe space, stepping in when they encounter hostile and abusive behavior. “If someone is a jerk I kick them out,” Donahue says. She cites incidents ranging from racist jokes to a player banging on tables during a losing streak. “When I bring on a new hire, I explain the concept of the store to them. We talk a lot about the history of the store. Generally, I try to hire people who have some sense of acceptance.”

The Labyrinth’s Netrunner events I’ve attended tend to draw 16-24 participants on average, and amongst them, 2-4 women and 3-4 non-white players. My friends from other parts of North America tell me those are great numbers in comparison to their local scenes, and then we’re all sad that we those are considered relatively strong numbers. I’ve been relatively lucky with my local events, and hearing experiences like Peters and Brice’s only reminds me of how much work there’s still to be done.

In the discussion on increasing the Netrunner’s community’s diversity, I find we talk a lot about why there aren’t more women in the game, and not much on the lack of people of color. With this in mind I reached out to Hollis Eacho, one of the few black players in Netrunner’s competitive circles.

Like me, Eacho started his teens with the Pokémon TCG, but his interest in gaming became more tech-oriented as he got into video games and LAN parties in high school. He believes that it was this interest that led to his career as a technical sales supervisor at a web hosting company, as well as his interest in cyberpunk and Netrunner, a passion that took him to 2014’s world championship as a competitor.

In both his career and Netrunner experience, he finds himself one of the few black members of those spaces, and he believes that the real tech world affects those who partake in a fictionalized version. Eacho says, “If the [tech] field is primarily dominated by white men, I would expect a game that is heavily embedded with things in that field, also appeals to the same demographic as the people who are in that field.” He also believes that technology is growing as a universal element of people’s lives, and applauds the Netrunner vision of the future that subverts current tech culture demographics to feature a better balance of genders and races.

Geordie Tait, a prominent figure within the Magic community, once wrote about why people of color may be less visible within that game, and much of his reasoning can be applied to Netrunner. He cites statistics on the income disparity between white, Hispanic, and African-American households and the fact that Magic is an expensive hobby dominated by the people who can afford it. It features a card pool with varying tiers of rarity, predominantly sold in randomized packs. To become competitive and create stronger decks, players must buy more of these packs in the hopes of striking probability gold and acquiring better cards, or pay extra to buy individual cards on a secondary market like eBay or Craigslist.

In contrast, Netrunner operates on a “living card game” model that has no randomized card sets, so there’s theoretically no such thing as rarity and all cards should cost the same. Real talk, though, at this time of writing, this is approximately what a Netrunner collection looks like: 2-3 core sets ($40 each), 3 deluxe expansions ($30 each), and 22 monthly smaller expansions ($15 each) -- and counting, as new cards are released regularly. For players that own complete sets and keep up with the regular new card releases, this amounts to a fairly significant chunk of change. Even beyond the actual price of Netrunner, the pricing structure of older collectible card games have established the genre as a hobby that Tait compares to stamp-collecting, “unruffled by its exclusion of the poor.”

Fantasy Flight Games’ 2015 Worlds Championship has sold out. The fan-run pro circuit features 33 events across the US. Interest in high-level play is strong, but there’s an increasing anxiety over who is being left behind as the community grows. D’Argenio and other organizers of the ANRPC are active on forums and produce online streams of play, working towards greater visibility and outreach to players worldwide. Still, most of the women players I talk to avoid online community spaces, having been already burned by other forums or having little interest in popular discussions of rules minutiae.

I’ve found that a lot of the outreach work has to happen at low stakes in-person events. For example, when Peters emailed the tournament organizer about her negative experience, he apologized and invited her to attend his next event, one created specifically for those new to the tournament scene and again had reserved extra tickets for women.

At the beginners tournament, four other women joined Peters in attendance, and she encountered a much more relaxed atmosphere. "I know he sent out a 'Feminism 101' email before that tournament," Peters said. “I don’t know if it was that or the fact that it was for beginners, but it was definitely easier and everyone seemed more nervous, therefore more friendly.” She believes that other events would benefit from a similar education on microaggressions beforehand.

Brice would like to see more ways to play Netrunner that aren’t so tournament-oriented. “Even just casual play is a kind of store event that is newbie-friendly,” she says. She also suggests events that allow players to compete without buying many cards. “Having things that are constrained and casual and not meant to be getting you better for the tournaments, like only using core decks or only using [certain] packs would be great.”

There’s a sense that, despite tournaments being in-person play events, they are not conducive to socializing. Their scheduling leaves little time to speak to non-opponents, and all components revolve around competition. Brice says that at Netrunner events, “I want to get to know people. I want to have a conversation with them, I want to eat and drink or something. Just something that looks like other social happenings.”

Charlene Putney organized a Netrunner play event at the GameCity Festival in Nottingham, England, and chose a pub over a game store for her venue as she found it an easier space to play as a woman. She says, “At a pub, it’s very open. It’s very casual. You can pop in, and pop out—people aren’t going to look at you coming and out of the pub. You’re just another customer. You’re there with your friends or people you’re going to meet.”

Quintin Smith, a co-founder of board game site Shut Up & Sit Down, organized the two tournaments Peters attended and continues to work towards changing what the world of organized play looks like. In other events, he’s encouraged coming in costume, featured live DJs, and started an inter-city friendly series that required regional teams to play a variety of deck types. Smith says, “We were talking about how to keep the Netrunner community nice. I think one of the ways to do that is... friendly tournaments for prestige, for jokes, and for fun. Tournaments just because. Playing Netrunner just because.”

Netrunner’s designers have already put in the work in creating a future that stars people of all ages, color, and personalities. We can’t just pay lip service to being a different community, expecting the game’s storytelling to create a diverse play environment. Community leaders have to put in comparable efforts to reach out to those who don’t share their experiences, people who are alienated by the current environment.

Peters says, “If you aren’t attracting women and people of color, then you really have to ask yourself why. It’s simple as that. If they’re not there, then something is going wrong somewhere, as far as I’m concerned.”

"He cannot say he has understood all of this. Possibly he's more confused now than ever. But all these moments he's contemplated—something has occurred. The moments feel substantial in his mind, like stones." - Braid's ending

On the evening of Christmas 2009, a damaged young transwoman in a bad situation purchased the 2D puzzle platforming videogame Braid in a sale on the Steam download service for a total of $2.50 with a gift card she just received. That transwoman had just graduated from college broke and without much of any support from her friends, eventually landing herself back in the same abusive home she'd been trying to escape from in the first place. She was deeply confused and broken.

Video games, thanks to the recent financial success of some old acquaintances, had suggested themselves as the one way to escape the hell of her current life. She decided it was time to finally experience this game—this game that had been explained to her as an antidote to her growing apathy towards video games by a former college roommate (who is now no longer with us) a year previous. It was touted as a Big Important Work of Art, the culture's Answer To Mario.

Playing Braid for the first time was like sifting through an eerie memory of hers that came all flooding back in at once. More than anything, the violin melody for the first world was burned into her brain. That Celtic melody, equally joyous and melancholic, over lush, shimmering green fields and the sparkly sounds that indicated she had just picked up a puzzle piece. It was hypnotizing.

It all seemed so familiar, yet now she was seeing it from a completely different perspective for the first time. She could also rewind, and rethink her actions. There was no death. The world was constructed with some kind of empathy—like it wanted her to understand and solve its puzzle. There was consequence, and real emotional weight to that consequence. There was a story about a real-life relationship between two people, something she felt more and more connected to. This was a piece of software that was attempting to poke deep inside of her, revealing something bigger—not just trying to push her along to the end. She hadn't really seen anything like it before.

Several months later, she left home. Only a few days later, her computer bit the dust and she was left borrowing an old, barely functioning laptop. She spent days her alone, in bed, laptop propped up on her bedspread, as if it were her only life support. She was very sad and could barely function. She didn't have many friends in the area and didn't have money to spend on alcohol, the one thing there was to do. She never left the bed most days, her headphones playing the same Björk album (Vespertine) over and over, sitting on IRC channels and struggling to find something that would help her escape from her pain.

She had to beg the abusive parent she was trying to escape from in the first place for rent money after quickly burning through what little she had saved up, and used food stamps to pay for the rest. She felt deeply selfish and broken. Learning all of Braid designer Jon Blow's game design insights through many lectures of his became an effective distraction, in addition to occasionally researching other game designers and critics like Brenda Romero or Ian Bogost. She struggled to understand everything she possibly could about the world so that she could ideally make some kind of basic sense of her own pain. She was also deeply bored and didn't know what else to do. She wanted to make money, and thought game design could be a way to do it. More than that, though, she wanted to be seen as Important and Valued, a powerful new voice.

Later on, many friends of hers would mock what they saw as Jon Blow's oversensitivity to the reception to his work. She empathized: she knew what it was like to have lofty artistic goals that peers met with confusion, disinterest, sometimes even outright mockery from people who weren't engaging from a genuine place. Jon Blow's profound disappointment and hurt seemed wholly reasonable in the face of people calling him pretentious and self-indulgent. It shouldn't be so ridiculous to want to aspire to something greater in your work and be recognized for that, she felt.

She began to think Braid and games like it would herald a new frontier of ways of thinking about game design. She also wanted some way to make money.

Braid, puzzle-wise, was a very clever game. But sometimes cleverness doesn't tell the whole story. As she reads back over Braid's story, an alternate aspect, a profound childishness shines through. The story almost seems as if it's mocking Tim, Braid's male protagonist—his self-assuredness, his inability to perceive the consequence of his actions. She sees that as probably an intended aspect of the game's narrative.

We, as a civilization, have built great technological marvels, from the internet and smartphones to automobiles and airplanes, and yet we still can't really make sense of what we're doing to each other every day, or what we're doing to the Earth. In a sense, that seems to be what Braid is about, more than anything else at least. Yet the game seems to do a profoundly weak job of acknowledging this at its own conclusion.

Braid's ending text does attempt to reveal the grotesqueness behind Tim's actions, at least to some extent - but much of it is missed if one misses the hidden text, which appears with an extended female choral "AHHHH", as if it's showing a universal "her" perspective. It implies that a female perspective being acknowledged for the first time connotes a real truth. It also briefly connects Tim's story to a childhood memory of not being allowed to go to candy store by his mother, in a bit of a hackneyed parallel, perhaps suggesting he sees women this way now—as if they're still holding him back from a treat, from the reward of exploring his work.

He can't quite make sense of this all but decides to build something out of these memories. At the end he puts up a flag to his new castle, in a nod to the first Mario game, but this time each tile of the castle is made up of individual scenes from the game, propelling him forward from a place of enlightenment and higher understanding from where he begun.

All of this is fine, but it makes one wonder—why isn't this theme explored more in the game itself? Why did it take so long for your protagonist to come to this revelation? It's as if the whole game is constructed around trying to find ways to exonerate Tim's wrongdoing. Look at all the stuff he's done, and how smart he is! It’s the most common argument made for successful artists and thinkers who have done bad things throughout history. The game's true hand is only revealed, and only barely, at the end.

Okay, but this broken young transwoman can't stop thinking about the infamous scene preceding that, where Tim tries to rescue the princess. Is it implying he might have raped her? The narrative never explicitly goes there, but there's enough reason to read into it, with Tim having been physically forceful to her before in the past, through the game’s stories. Not to mention the imagery of him creeping into the bedroom of the sleeping princess, and the explosion that immediately follows, as if it's a particularly painful memory he instantly represses. And then he finally sees everything undone as it really was, as it already happened, not as how it was constructed by him in the present. He starts to acknowledge it. But that's really as deeply as the game really gets into those themes.

She can't exactly figure out how autobiographical Braid is, but even if it isn't very much it leaves her feeling a little bit unnerved. Braid ultimately seems to conclude with a revelation, a redemption for its protagonist. When she first played the game back around Christmas 2009, she found that really emotionally resonant—but now she feels she never really understood the true implications of it until now.

The way that it's centering Tim's story, and attempting to rationalize or justify his guilt without really delving much into its source. How it dwells on pretty, idealized landscapes and music, suspiciously absent of despair or fear or conflicting forces until later on. Like he can only really see danger looming when it's far too late, and by that point the damage is beyond done.

Braid's sanitized nature becomes even more disturbing to her when she hears stories about Jon Blow abandoning his female friends at conferences. Or when he takes to Twitter to decry internet feminists as "just as bad as GamerGate". How much of a distance is there really between the man and his protagonist, after all?

Braid helped usher in a culture around polished experimental game mechanics that focus on one central hook. Many of these games either are even more conspicuously absent of ugliness than Braid, or (as is the stereotype of many "indie artgames") take their narrative’s drama to a melodramatic extreme, where all the subtlety is lost and nothing feels real or meaningful anymore.

The culture of independent game-making seemed to become more and more concerned with status and hero-worship and the legitimacy of massive commercial success than with being artists with things to say. She had begun to lose interest in games, and became interested in making games to express her fundamental disinterest with the form, if only just so she had something to show for herself.

She wanted to make something about rape, to do it from a survivor's perspective, because that's all she could think about anymore. But her work would go beyond that: it would be about confronting people’s barriers and constructions around themselves and their identities, and how constricting and suffocating those could be. Years after leaving the abusive nest of her home, she was in California, stuck sporadically dealing with homelessness, and thrust into all kinds of situations she had no way of processing or confronting. If Braid was from the perspective of a white man with a lot of power and resources, her game, Problem Attic, was supposed to be from the perspective of a protagonist with no power, with very little ability to escape or make sense of their situation.

She saw this as the real truth of Braid. The two games were mirrors of each other. The calm, quiet house in Braid is replaced by the highly abstract and disturbing hub rooms of Problem Attic. The smooth visuals and music of Braid is replaced by jagged, abstract solid-color forms that look like a half-remembered old Atari nightmare. It’s Braid problematized, put into a different light. It’s what Braid might look like without the filter and the videogamey shell.

She started to see Jon Blow as a self-parody, meticulously fussing over his puzzles and the details of his projects while seeming clueless and belligerent to the realities around him, just like Tim in his game. She started to see both Blow and Tim's world as fundamentally no different from the perspective of the average "gamer" or tech dude. It was so boring, so common: Desperate, emotional pleading for a dispassionate, subatomic view of the world, while decrying the messy social realities of the earth as less important or less profound. She began to hope for something much different, something more holistic, like one suggested to her in an album by Björk or Kate Bush or The Knife or a film by David Lynch—things which had helped her heal somewhat.

This temple you are violating is my body, she repeated. I am shell, I am bone. I am the earth, and the damage you do to me will be enacted back onto you tenfold. This puzzle universe of yours only functions as well I as I allow it to function for you. These constructions of yours are all so fake, easily destroyed by conflicting evidence and the vast, untamable landscape. You are so easily infiltrated. You will never understand the depth and complexity of what you've done.

Her game took about a month and a half to make. She wasn't sure at the end what to think, but at least she had something to show for it.

In Jon Blow's design parlance, her game was a failure. It was not stripped to its barest elements, it was not palatable in every way except its one challenging central mechanic. It was weird and ugly and hard to parse. It was filled with unpredictable, unanticipated twists and turns, awkward movements, and sudden changes of theme. She had not been thinking about how to make a good video game. She had been thinking about how to express very complicated, seemingly inexpressible feelings through the tools of a 2D platformer, which was what she had in front of her.

She expected complete disinterest from the typical gamer crowd. But it went much further. Even friends of hers couldn't make heads or tails of her game, and she didn't really feel like trying to explain something that wasn't meant to be explained verbally anyway. Maybe this was a testament to just how new and unusual an experience it was for them. The game disappeared quickly, and she began to feel like it wouldn't be too long before it disappeared forever. She fell into a pretty severe depression, aided by many other things. She felt betrayed, and like no one even tried to understand where she was coming from. She began to see herself as that heavily mocked image of Jon Blow hurt by the lack of nuance in the reception of his game, endlessly repeating the line "no one understands me" over and over. She started to feel selfish, like she was just taking up space.

She felt like she needed to be a strong person, to move on from this. But instead she did the opposite - she completely lost faith in herself and her work. She became deeply confused. The hurt was huge, amplified from so many other past hurts. It felt as if those she trusted were really no more trustworthy than the average destructive asshole had been in her life. She figured she should just shut up with her opinions and criticism and let someone else do it, because if those she thought were closest to her weren't even going to listen to her—if were going to lecture her on why she was demanding far too much of other people, she was obviously wrong. She needed to cater herself for other people just to survive, and that left her with a profound sadness.

Her sadness began to look up when a couple people, several months later, began to mount a defense for her game. It was nice but it was too little, too late. It made no real lasting impact. Those few people were meaningful, of course. But like so many other small, non-commercial games of today, Problem Attic went under the radar very shortly after its release and mostly stayed that way.

Video games are broken, she felt. They are pumped too full of ideological baggage to ever really escape from it. When access and production values are all that ultimately defines a success in even many of the more progressive videogame designers’ and critics’ minds, when all the cultural ephemera created by games is set to disappear or become unusable in only a short few years and no one has a sense of urgency about it, why support this ecosystem? Why continue to give so many people so many chances, when they had barely ever considered giving her one?

Part of her feels like the world still doesn't deserve something like Problem Attic. Part of her feels like the world doesn't really deserve a lot of the things that come out of it.

She wants to exist in a different, healthier, space, but doesn’t know where that might be. She knows the internet is the most toxic place to share work, but that it's also the most open and accessible to the greatest amount of people. She knows that every time she openly exists as herself online is a roll of the dice, yet it’s one of the few places where her expression feels unhindered by her flesh world anxieties about her being trans and a woman in public dealing with the baggage of past rape and abuse. She has trouble imagining herself being in a different place, even when it hasn’t always been very nice to her.

So many things have happened since then. Some good, many bad. She can't say she really understands all of it. In fact, she feels more confused now than ever. Sometimes she feels as if every day the world is being thrust further and further into a spiral of darkness and decay. Sometimes she feels like any sincere expression of herself is an invitation for her to be a target, not just from enemies, but also from those she wanted to trust. Sometimes she feels as if dysfunction is the only thing she can see around her anymore. Sometimes she feels like all anyone wants is to take advantage of her. Sometimes she can’t go outside without having an anxiety attack.

But within this sadness, within her suffering and confusion, something occurred to her. All these moments feel substantial in her mind, like stones. They are now made visible to her. She gazes upon the vastness of these stones in these moments and she finally finds, after a great struggle, that she can lift each one. She can begin to pick them up and fit them together to create a foundation, an embankment, a castle.

She can build upon the crumbling walls of those around her. To build a structure of the size she desires, she will need many more stones. And she will need to many more new materials to stabilize and strengthen it. But what she's got now, at least, feels like a decent start.

Jen St. Hilaire playing Attack on Mars. Photo:Gene Hwang

"Are you going to play?" asks Echa Schneider, as I mill around the floor of an espresso bar where a women's pinball tournament is about to begin. She's the founder of Belles and Chimes, the women's only pinball league in Oakland that's sponsoring the event. She knows that I'm a writer here to cover it, but she doesn't think that should stop me.

"You could still play, if you want," she says. I hesitate. At first, I tell myself that it would be better to just observe—you know, for professional reasons—but a half-second later I get honest about the real reason I'm afraid to step forward.

I am bad at pinball.

I look around at the crowd that has gathered to play. The competitors range from young women in their early 20s with killer tattoos to older gray-haired ladies in long, flowing shirts. What the hell, I say. Sign me up.

The tournament is titled "Welcome to Xenon," after the 1980 pinball game Xenon—one of the few machines designed around a female character, albeit a robot one. It's women's history month, and Schneider printed up a series of posters about women who participated in pinball through its history: as mechanical and software engineers, artists, voice actors and composers, even assembly line workers.

Admittedly, there aren't many. It's a disparity reflective of the pinball community as a whole. In her opening remarks, Schneider notes that there are twice as many men named John as there are women in total listed in the international pinball player database. But over the last several years things have been changing, and women in pinball are becoming harder and harder to ignore.

"I am totally blown away at how different the pinball landscape is for women now than when I first started playing competitively a few years ago, or even when I started Belles and Chimes in the fall of 2013," says Schneider. "Here in the Bay Area, participation by women in leagues and tournaments has exploded. She notes that on 2013, pinball tournaments in Northern California had 14 percent female players, on average. A year later—after the creation of Belles and Chimes—it was 24 percent. Since May, Schneider has run three co-ed tournaments where a majority of players were women. "It's something I honestly couldn't even have imagined two years ago," she says.

Like women in so many other cultures and subcultures, female pinball players are also becoming much more vocal about the exclusion they encounter. And with the help of leaders like Schneider, they're pushing back by creating more and more spaces that explicitly welcome women, even—and especially—if they've never played before.

During a break in the tournament, I talk to a young woman named Lianna Lopez. She's hard to miss, in cutoff camouflage shorts and knee-high socks covered in bright pink and blue pot leaves. She's a Belles and Chimes regular, though she plays in competitive co-ed settings as well. The difference between the two, says Lopez, is palpable. "It's all about the points with a lot of the guys. It's a lot more competitive, and sometimes if I win they're not really cool with it. Women can get competitive too, but overall the vibe is really different."

While trading tips with other players is a part of pinball culture, she says that the way men offer advice to women often feels condescending, rather than encouraging.

"There's this sense that they're talking over you, or saying, 'no, you're not supposed to do that!' Or they're in your ear saying, 'shoot for this, do this.' Like, shut the hell up—I'm playing. But at Belles and Chimes, everyone is like, 'you can do it!""

Like a lot of the other female players I talk to, she says she's not much of a video game fan. Although there was an Xbox in her house growing up, Lopez recalls she never really had the chance to get into it. "My brothers would never let me play," she says.

Every woman I meet at the event seems to have a different story about how they found their way to pinball: a partner who liked to play, a machine that just happened to be at their favorite pizza joint, or they heard the word of mouth about Belles and Chimes and wanted to try it out. All the origin stories involve a combination of both opportunity and encouragement—whether or not they stumbled across a place where they had the chance to play, and whether or not they felt welcomed or rewarded enough to continue.

Although most of the people at the event are Belles and Chimes members, I meet one woman who saw the signs and just walked in off the street. Her name is Amy. "When I first came in, I didn't think I was going to sign up," she tells me. "I'm shy. And you know, you don't want to waste people's time. But then I saw the people and they seemed cool."

I try to imagine how Amy would have reacted if she encountered a more aggressive or dismissive crowd around the sign-up sheet—or how I would have reacted. I conclude that most likely, neither one of us would be playing pinball right now. She wins one round, and I win the other two. I'm not sure, but I think I'm starting to get better. When we finish, Amy tells me she's going to come back to Belles and Chimes again.

"I like playing," she says.

Zoe Vrabel, center. Photo: Michael Huntsman

Pinball machines are loud, bright, and hard to miss. Although they're a lot harder to find now than their heyday in the late '70s, if there's one in the room, you'll know it. They're the miniature Vegas strips that line the walls of dark arcades and dingy dive bars, pulsing and flashing with light and color, and singing their MIDI siren songs with the larger-than-life braggadocio of a carnival announcer. Even the scoring feels hyperbolic, awarding you millions of points for even the simplest maneuvers.

There's a certain physical violence to game as well; when the small silver ball lands on your flipper you can feel the weight of it, and hear the crack as you slam it towards the back of the machine. When an experienced player gets into a groove, it's kind of like watching a baseball star in front of a pitching machine. At the precise moment when the ball rolls to the right spot on the flipper, they smash it with calculated fury, hard enough to send it flying up ramps that circle around in rollercoaster loops before dropping back onto the playfield. They repeat these moves again and again for maximum points, hitting their mark every time: BANG, around the loop, BANG, around the loop, BANG, around the loop.

For Zoe Vrabel, a Portland, Oregon pinball player, falling in love with pinball was a very physical experience, even though her first introduction to the game came courtesy of an surprisingly digital source: 3D Pinball for Windows, which was originally bundled on Windows 95 machines along with Solitaire and Minesweeper. As an adolescent, pinball was simply a computer game she liked, and eventually grew out of as her teenage years progressed. But everything changed later in life, when she finally had a hands-on experience with the real deal.

"When I moved to Portland and started going out to bars that had these bright, shiny pinball machines, I was like, oh, these are kind of like that game I used to play!" says Vrabel. "For me, it's very tacile. You move the machine—you're physically touching it and making things happen."

Like a lot of people who have played pinball casually, I don't think I've ever really understood it before, or at least what gets people truly hooked on it. I've put the quarters in the slots, and I've mashed the buttons, but a lot of times it felt more like dropping coins in a slot machine with flippers—more like gambling than skill. It's a question that's often been raised about pinball, not just by callow amateurs like myself, but also the numerous American cities that banned pinball as a gambling game for decades. The ban in New York City was finally overturned in 1976, when Roger Sharpe, one of the elite players of the era, was summoned to a Manhattan courtroom to prove that it was a game of coordination, skill and strategy, not blind luck. In one dramatic and defining moment, he called a shot up the middle lane like Babe Ruth pointing out a home run, and delivered. The ban was overturned.

For Vrabel, enjoying pinball was about learning to see the rules and patterns that elude so many beginners, the ones that really make it a game. Every machine has its own rule set, the specific series of actions—like shooting a ball around a certain ramp a certain number of times—that unlock the special events and big scores. That's what really changes pinball from a button-mashing exercise inside a box of sound and color to a test of skill and strategy.

Most players I talk to describe learning the rule sets of a machine as an interactive, cooperative process, one that involves sharing information with other people—including your competitors. It's a phenomenon I get to see first-hand when Vrabel takes me to a release party for a new pinball game, which is themed around the WWE. Everyone clusters around and watches as each player pokes and prods the machine, shooting the ball up this ramp or around this loop to see what happens. Nobody knows the "right way" to play yet, so all they can do is experiment, share insights, and pool their knowledge.

"A lot of times you just have to talk to people who know more than you," says Vrabel. "That's the biggest thing about playing in tournaments as a new player. I always say, talk to the person you're playing against. There's no defensive 'I'm not going to tell you because then I might not win', because if you don't have the skills to play the game, you shouldn't win. Learning the rules of a new game is very collaborative—it's not about hoarding secrets."

For Belles and Chimes member Sarah Michelle Donovan, who used to be very active in the fighting game community, it's a very different vibe—and a welcome one. "In fighting games, nobody's going to be like, 'Oh, let me show you my combo with [Mortal Kombat character] Mileena!" says Donovan. "Pinball has a different vibe; it's more like the player versus the game, than player versus player."

Zoe Vrabel, center. Photo: Robert Hamilton

The social aspect of pinball comes up a lot, in part because it's a both an analog experience and a public one. It's not something you can do from your couch, like video games; indeed, the experience of leaving the house, grabbing a drink with friends and playing a game is precisely why a lot of players gravitate towards pinball in the first place. "People get more socialization if they play pinball," says Jen St. Hilaire, one of the Belles and Chimes players. "I think that's a lot of the point of it."

Since her transition from Windows 95 to the real deal, Vrabel has become one of five women in the top 500 pinball players in the world, and a member of Portland's famous (and sometimes infamous) Crazy Flipper Fingers gang. "The entire reason there's a pinball scene in Portland in bars is because Crazy Flipper Fingers would patronize you more often and buy more beer if you had pinball machines and kept them maintained," says Vrabel. "That grew the scene to where it is today, where we have more pinball machines than any city in the world."

While pinball culture at large tends to have a bit of nerdy reputation—attracting what Vrabel calls the "white sneaker crowd"—the Crazy Flipper Fingers has a reputation as a tough, hard-drinking crew that's been in its share of brawls over the years. She's one of a handful of women in the 35-person gang, but it's not hard to see how she's carved out a space for herself; she's an imposing presence, a former college rugby player who stands about 5'10 and isn't afraid to talk (or shout) back at anyone who crosses the line. "I'm kind of drawn to male-dominated spaces in general, just in a 'fuck you, I'm gonna do it anyway' sort of way," she says.

It's a familiar story, not just because I hear it in the subtext of so many of conversations I have with women in pinball, but because it's the way I've lived my entire life: pushing or forcing my way in to male-dominated worlds like comic books, tech, and video games, and trying to make my own space to live in it. In my experience, the fewer women there are around you, the better you have be—the harder you have to work than everyone else—to earn that space.

Vrabel takes me out to several co-ed pinball events in Portland to help me get a feel for them, and one night, she invites another female friend to join us, one who doesn't really play pinball either. We sit there for hours, talking about boys and bad relationships; occasionally, Vrabel jumps up to join her Crazy Flipper Finger pals in a game, or invites me to play one with her.

While I wouldn't have felt afraid to come here on my own, I doubt I would have had the guts to roll in solo and fail grievously at pinball in between these rows of experienced male players. I certainly wouldn't have felt comfortable sitting down and blasting girl talk at a nearby table. But Vrabel belongs here, and she knows it, so we get to belong too.

When I ask Vrabel if she's experienced sexism in pinball, she laughs, and tells me a story about rolling in to a bar in Oakland to play a game called Medieval Madness. Pinball machines tend to be loud and bright, especially when you're playing well, and Vrabel was playing very well indeed; by the time she was done, she had claimed every high score on the machine.

"When I left, there this random guy sitting outside who had noticed me playing, and he said, 'don't worry, you'll get 'em next time.' And I was like, 'actually, I got 'em this time.'" Even in retrospect she sounds frustrated, not just by the knee-jerk dismissal of her abilities but by the relative irrelevance of the man who dared to offer it. "I mean, who are you, random dude I've never met? I'm involved enough in pinball to know that you're not even part of the pinball community, so why do you feel this need to think I'm bad at something you don't even care about?"

As with so many other forms of entertainment, the culture around pinball has problems not only with the way it treats real women, but the way it depicts fictional ones. With very few exceptions throughout its history, women appear on pinball games almost exclusively as sex objects. During one of our several visits to local pinball events, Vrabel shows me a flier advertising for the Playboy pinball machine, which allows operators to swap between clothed and nude photo inserts, and notes, hilariously, that "exciting women can be hiding everywhere!"

But the most notable flashpoint for controversy was a game called Whoa Nellie! Big Juicy Melons, a crude breast-themed pinball game that somehow manages to make the Playboy machine look like an exercise in subtlety. After the announcement of the game—which depicts a young woman named "Melony" holding "ripe and ready" melons up to her chest while a man ogles her, literally drooling—a number of pinball fans started pushing back on social media.

The response from Stern Pinball—the only pinball manufacturer left standing since the industry's decline—was less than ideal. "When women commented about it on the Stern Facebook page, their comments would just get deleted without response," says Vrabel. The few criticisms that remain on the page are written by men, followed by responses from the official Stern account admonishing them to "please respect those who enjoy it" or "go play pinball and have some fun!!!!"

For Vrabel, it sent a clear message that she was all too accustomed to hearing: that pinball was a space where men were entitled to feel comfortable and respected, but one where the comfort and respect of women was not a concern. "If people are just going to shout us down when we talk about feeling objectified and marginalized, then it's not really fun to be around that," she says. "You don't feel like a full member of the group."

Last year, Vrabel represented Oregon at the US National Pinball Championships, where she was the only female competitor in the entire state championship series. "It was just so weird," says Vrabel. "No one was actively creepy to me, but I just couldn't help but notice looking around that it was all men, just men."

She says the elite, professional players end up in a bubble, where they don't encounter many—or any—women, so for the most part, they just don't have to think about it. "They aren't doing much to support women because they don't realize it's an issue, because they just talk to the same top hundred players who are all guys," says Vrabel. "There's only one woman in the top hundred, Helena Walter, and she lives in Sweden."

Helena Walter's name comes up a lot when you talk about women in pinball, because as the top female player in the world, she's the clearest exception to the "rule." When I call her at her home in Stockholm, she tells me that while there still aren't many women at the most competitive levels, she sees more women coming out to events, and that the growth of female players in America is particularly impressive.

"It's accelerating so quickly in the U.S. pinball scene. It's really cool," she says. "I wish I lived there, really, because it's an exciting time for pinball." While the shift in the Bay Area has been particularly dramatic, since the 2013 founding of Belles and Chimes there's also been a larger surge of women-only leagues and events around the country, in cities like Seattle, Toronto, Milwaukee, New York City, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles.

"Women are taking up more space, and getting into more activities that they didn't before," says Walter. Although she too has gotten her share of snide remarks about how she plays well "for a girl," she says that she's always felt accepted by men once she proved how well she could play.

That's the Catch-22 of so many male-dominated spaces: if women need to be excellent in order to be accepted, how many are really going to stick around long enough to get good? There will always be some, like Vrabel and Walter, who make their way through sheer determination (and perhaps a little bit of contrariness) but plenty of others won't.

Back at the Belles and Chimes tournament, the world of pinball feels a world away from the frustrations they describe, though of course that's by design. The website for the league is peppered with the kind of language meant to explicitly welcome women, and perhaps tip the scales for people like me who might otherwise end up watching instead of jumping in.

"Our goal is to provide a fun, supportive environment for Bay Area women to socialize and play pinball together. Beginner and novice players are encouraged to join," it reads. "We are always excited for new members, and you can join at any point during the season—all you have to do is show up!"

I think about Amy, the new player I met at Belles and Chimes, and how she announced—after losing a round—that she was having fun and wanted to come back again. I think about how many times I lost that day, how little it bothered me, and how much better I felt like I'd gotten at it by the end.

During one of my interviews with Vrabel—the one where she talked the most about her frustrations—the conversation somehow winds its way back to how much she enjoys being a part of the Crazy Flipper Fingers, and how they feel like family now. She talks about the new online pinball forum her friend made, which has a strict code of conduct forbidding harassment and sexist language. And she tells me how excited she feels every time she sees a woman she doesn't know playing pinball: "I just want to go up to her and say, who are you, please stay!"

At the end of the conversation, Vrabel turns to me and says, "you know, I thought I was just going to end up talking you about the sexism that drives me crazy in pinball, but I actually ended up remembering all of the reasons I love it so much," She pauses for a moment, and then her face breaks into a smile. "That's kind of great."

The next time we're out at a bar surrounded by pinball machines, she invites me to step up and play a two-player game with her. We're two of the only women in the room, but she walks around like she owns the place, and her confidence extends around me like a shield. It occurs to me that this is probably one of the most powerful things you can do as a woman in a male-dominated field, and the same thing Schneider is doing too: carving out a space for yourself, and then widening it so there's room for as many other women as possible.

"Sure, I'll play. But I'm going to do really badly," I warn her.

"That's the only way to start," she replies.

As designed systems, games can create spaces for people to grasp how infrastructures work, to test theories—and often to internalize how the systems of our world may not work, may promote inequality. They can be tools to create empathy and reveal injustice; they can illustrate the often-complicated answers to the "why can’t you just" and "but it’s probably not really" that pervade rhetorical discourse.

As human beings, it is often hard for us to accept that systems are unfair. It is also hard for many of us to want to change unfair systems when their unfairness favors us; we understand logically the disadvantages of others, but we can carry on shrouded comfortably in our denial for as long as we don’t have to be confronted with their emotions.

For example: Black Americans are disproportionately more likely to be killed by police than anyone else; it’s a fact we know statistically and empirically, brought into sharp relief in recent years by the volume and pace of social media and the work of activists online.

But even though black victims of police violence are likely to be unarmed, marginalized, or even already in custody, pernicious myths persist to poison the conversation about justice: the common illusion that if the latest victim "had only" done this, or not done that, or had been wearing something different or walking somewhere else or had spoken up or had not said a certain thing, they would not have died.

This pernicious myth inspired a series of tweets by Ijeoma Oluo highlighting the impossible rules: Don’t reach for your wallet, don’t play with a toy sword, shop at Wal Mart or wear a hoodie, Oluo wrote, "and maybe they won’t kill you."

Akira Thompson is a game designer and programmer studying for his Master’s in Games and Playable Media at the University of California Santa Cruz’s computer science school. He’s also an Iraq War veteran, former Disney Imagineer, and founder of social art creative firm RainBros. Alongside the conversation about police violence, Thompson felt frustrated at these pernicious if-onlys, the insidious idea that black behavior must somehow take the lead to save black lives.

"The day of the verdict of the Grand Jury that was choosing not to prosecute Darren Wilson, I had a couple of friends on Facebook that seemed to place more interest in the fact that there were protests that became riots and property was being damaged, rather than the fact that a young man was killed," Thompson reflects.

"That hurt and frustration that led to rioting didn't appear overnight. I didn't think these Facebook friends were bad people, as much as it hurt to see that they simply didn't get it, on a fundamental level," he says. "They didn't have the experiences to draw from to understand the many circumstances at play. So I wanted to make something that could help those with similar life experiences and common circumstances understand that there are two Americas. Especially when it comes to policing policies."

Inspired in part by Oluo, Thompson designed &maybetheywontkillyou, a live game experience where a player takes the role of a poor black American attempting to go to his corner store and return safely home. Along the way, they encounter microaggressions from strangers to the neighborhood, as well as from law enforcement. These can range from humiliating to lethal.

One player acts as the "Subject", the other as the "System". The Subject moves one theoretical space at a time, and in each space, the System draws for them a random event card—for example, a car you pass has locked its doors on sight of you. Or a police cruiser catches you in its spotlight. For each event, the player may choose to say nothing, or to speak.

Every time the Subject speaks, the System quite literally rolls a die. Whenever the result is higher than "1", the System silently consults the penal code. If the Subject chooses not to speak, their "Frustration" score increases, a number that always gets added to their result against the System. In other words, speaking up for yourself always risks a negative interaction with law enforcement; staying silent just defers that risk to later. The game can end with the Subject making it home safe despite indignities, physically carrying their own Frustration score counter. Or it can end with the Subject dead.

Your words are viewed as disrespectful, the game may decide. "I wonder how someone like you doesn't have any warrants out," an officer says, after searching you and spreading your things on the sidewalk for all to see. The officer believed their life was in danger. The officer's weapon was discharged in self-defense.

"The system is designed to do what I believe our current system does," Thompson explains. "Pushes the victim of discrimination into a place in which they are not allowed to even speak about their injustice. Speaking up may mean that what you are saying is seen as a threat or challenge. You can make it home fine swallowing your pride and frustration by simply meeting the way you are being treated with silence."

There is a digital version of the game here that acts as a basic demonstration of how &maybetheywontkillyou’s systems work. But Thompson’s game design for the live experience incorporates thoughtful elements that enhance its impact: The System always rolls the outcome dice; the player is not allowed to touch them. Neither is the player allowed to touch, hold or look at the "Resolution Penal Code" binder that the System player uses to determine the outcome of the roll. Although the focus of the game is on the experience of the black American, the person who plays as the System has no other choice but to bear power against them; the System player has no option to compromise or assist, only to sit with the discomfort of complicity while the other player suffers. The penal code binder even has the dispassionate, opaque look of a police document.

The Subject player must carry their own Frustration Counter—and the rules say the player must always wear a black hoodie, forcing them to actually inhabit the stereotype of white America’s fears.

"I've had tears, quiet contemplation, disbelief, and even frustration specifically from players that wanted to speak out about how they were being treated yet knew that they would need to remain silent in order to get back home safely," Thompson says. "The main thread that seemed to happen when showing the game publicly though was a conversation about the subject matter after. As well as players really considering what it may be like."

Thompson has been influenced by other game designs that create empathy through their mechanics; on the day of the Darren Wilson verdict, his professor Brenda Romero was talking to the class about Train, an iconic board game she made about the holocaust ("human-on-human violence has a system", she says). Thompson was also influenced by Mainichi, a game Mattie Brice made about her experiences of life as a mixed-race trans woman, particularly the elements of repetitive, harassing events. He also says Dys4ia, a playable diary by Anna Anthropy, helped him understand how powerful a game about experiences entirely other than your own can be.

Thompson continues to apply to show &maybetheywontkillyou at festivals, and says he hopes to teach others the particulars of how to show it. For now the digital version still acts as a basic intro to his game design: "I feel the live action roleplay version is more powerful and successful, as a healthy conversation can follow, but I'd like the ideas to get out there as far as possible," he says.

"My favorite response was from a play-tester that when asked if he wanted to say something said ‘I'd like to say something about this, but I have no idea what to say. I've never had to deal with anything like this,’" Thompson reflects. "So at least from the players that I've been able to run the game with, I feel like it has been very successful thus far in challenging players to see another side of these issues."

Illo: Beschizza. "Boy in hoodie" courtesy Shutterstock.
Portraits of unarmed people of color killed by police compiled by Rich Juzwiak and Aleksander Chan

“Video games are a boy thing,” my sister explains to me. “I feel like it’s a known fact. GameStop is a boy store. The commercials are for boys. It’s just something everyone knows.”

My sister is 17. She runs a One Direction fan Twitter with 10,000 followers. She plans to major in fashion marketing. She’s a cheerleader. She is as close as anyone can get to what gaming’s sweaty fever dreams envision, desire, and shame as "Girl."

Like me, she knows from personal experience that girls play video games, and would hotly defend it if challenged. But a second tenet holds sway, as contrary as it is simultaneous: video games are for boys. The video games we’ve played don’t count. They’re concessions, scraps, snatches at the lucrative attention of little girls. It's not that my sister and I don’t like real games; it's that the games we like aren’t real.

I ask about Style Savvy, Cooking Mama, Super Princess Peach—games she played without fanfare, without self-doubt, surrounded by torn-out Tiger Beat posters. Weren’t those fun? Didn’t she spend hours with friends, swapping Nintendogs? Doesn’t she remember the giggly hours she devoted to Club Penguin?

“Oh yeah, those were fun,” she says. “I don’t know. Maybe I didn’t grow out of video games. Maybe video games just didn’t grow up with me.”

It would be easy to cast my sister and I as opposites. I received a book of essays on The Scarlet Letter for my 16th birthday. She received Our Moment, the One Direction branded fragrance. I went to a college where I devoted myself to post-war politics and anime screenings. She dreams of a higher education experience full of tailgating and adorably slouched cardigans. A teen movie would have a field day: she, the blue-eyed beauty in a LOVE PINK hoodie, blinking blankly as she holds an Xbox controller upside down. I, the frizz-headed harpy, explaining that my half-elf duchess of darkness uses water spells, not fire.

But I nod in agreement. “Yeah. Same.”

I have a Steam account. I have a favorite Soul Calibur title. But fundamentally, we feel the same: not gamers, not welcome, and not interested in most of what we see at GameStop. Those years we spent swapping DS cartridges were, for the both of us, our only experience of games as uncomplicated fun. Then we grew up, and an avalanche of qualifiers buried us.

We’re not gamers. We don’t play real games. We should stay out. My proximity to nerdhood, her proximity to the mainstream—neither matters. Video games did not grow up with us; video games did not grow up for us.

Grand Theft Auto V

I press my sister to explain how she knows games are a “boy thing,” how everyone “just knows this.” “I don’t know,” she answers tentatively. “Y’know, the commercials, and... everything. All of it. You know?” It’s difficult to explain why and how she just knows, in part because parsing the roots of any sociological phenomenon is difficult, but also because it’s just such an immutable fact for us.

For girls who do not fight to be a part of the club, who are not conversant in that world of quarter-circles and Konami codes, it’s as codified as all the other gendered tenets of our lives. Video games aren’t for us the way football and finance aren’t for us: sure, there are girls who break in, and we applaud them for it at a comfortable distance. But where there is a welcome mat rolled out for men, there is only a bloodied stretch of briar for women. And it’s just not something we have in us to brave.

There are girls and women who do not feel this way. Which is not to say they feel at ease in gaming, but they at least demanded a space there, and knew it to be theirs. I understand this: it’s how I feel towards the world of comic books, where I am comfortably ensconced as both a fan and critic. I knew I was not welcome, but I fought for my right to be present, to master the lingo, to insist on entering the conversation. It was a truth I knew in my bones: comics were mine, and no jumped-up fanboy who’d never even heard of Jackie Ormes could obscure my truth.

When it comes to gaming, however, I am bereft of such confidence. I shrug and sound very much like the dozens of women I have known who protest that their love of Raina Telgemeier and Archie Double Digests does not make them a real fan. I don’t get games, I argue. Don’t pass me the controller, I’ll only embarrass myself. It’s not my turf. It’s not for me. I’m a girl, ok?

This is our reality, and that of so many women, one that is silent, vast, yet largely unremarked upon wherever gaming is discussed. How did we learn this, I ask her again. How did our friends learn it? How did our mother? How do so many women, even today, learn that video games are not for them?

“It’s everything,” she says. There is a pause. “And everyone knows it. I mean, there are girls who game. But everyone knows it’s not for them. But... yeah, it’s everything.” Over the following hour, we dissect “everything” as best we can. We find that, broadly speaking, there are three forces at work in teaching girls that video games are not for them.

The first force is disqualification: It takes into account the fact that girls almost certainly have played video games, but then carefully categorizes the games they're most likely to play as illegitimate. It’s not hard to find this attitude wherever games are discussed. A mystery thriller like Her Story, a narrative exploration game like Gone Home, bestselling titles like Animal Crossing and The Sims, all manner of virtual pet sites: Not real games! Walking simulators! Boring! Easy! Dealing with women’s emotions, not having guns, or simply being enjoyed by women en masse—all of these qualities act as disqualifiers. It's not just that women supposedly aren't interested in games; it's that the mere presence of femininity defines the games they like out of existence.

It didn't always feel this way, of course.

“All my friends had a Nintendo DS when we were little,” my sister recalls. “I was really happy to find games related to my interests. Like, Style Savvy—that was my first step into fashion, really, as something I wanted to do.” I remember her unwrapping a DS for Christmas, in fact, her eyes bright, the games beside it in a candy-colored stack. “Remember Elizabeth, across the street? I’d go up to her room when we were like, 9 years old. We’d play Nintendogs and Cooking Mama. All my friends did it. No one was shy about it.”

My early relationship to video games was similarly untroubled. I played Purple Moon games on our stout little Gateway PC, Pokemon and Harvest Moon with a chunky, colorless Gameboy, Neopets during the hottest part of the summer. And for a while, it was something everyone did. A female friend painstakingly pieced together a Pokemon newsletter and disseminated it to our entire third grade class, all of us hungry for rumors of “Pikablu.” Everyone got together for Math Blasters during free time. It was the late 1990s and my friends and I were just young enough, just high enough on Girl Power! to approach video games as we approached books, movies and TVs: as ours, inherently, and may the spirits of the Spice Girls damn anyone saying otherwise.

But something changed during those latter elementary school years, as the boys started huddling together to talk Starcraft and Grand Theft Auto—as their masculinity began to ossify around ideas of not-like-girls, our femininity limited by ideas of not-for-girls. The rules changed as we learned to mold ourselves into pleasing shapes, as the boys began to look at us less like people and more like objects to spurn and/or pursue. We were not they, and our entertainment became as segregated as everything else. And as with everything else, anything on the side of “girl” fell beneath anything on the side of “boy” in worthiness.

“Girl games,” like my sister played—games explicitly intended for that audience, often marked by glitter and pastel colors—are the sole province of those young years, before the chasm between “girl” and “boy” rips open. And in this new light, we learned to look back at them and shrug. They didn’t matter. They weren’t real games. We left them behind as artifacts of childhood: loved, but ultimately relinquished.

Games grow up with boys from that point forward. We are welcome as long as we don’t drag anything that might exclude boys along—as long, essentially, as we are assimilative and quiet about it. And even then, that variety of game—Mario Kart, Angry Birds, Bejeweled—are roundly derided as barely being games at all. Anything without the requisite genuflection to the almighty god of Boy’s Interests is not a real game, it turns out.

“Girl” becomes incompatible with “video games,” just as “boy” aligns with them. “Everyone knows it,” my sister repeats. What about the girls who do play the games that "count," I ask? Surely she knows they exist.

“They exist,” my sister ventures. “But it’s way harder for them.”

This is the second force that teaches girls video games aren’t for them: the social hierarchy of the gaming community, and the narrow, deforming spaces it offers to the women who do persevere. “They have to become one of two types. There’s the one gamer boys think is really hot, and they want her around, and they want to play games with her. But they’re still going to make her uncomfortable and say really explicit shit. I see it happen. If she’s cute, they tell her, ‘oh, I want to fuck you,’ and if she says no, she’s a bitch. She can’t complain.”

And the other type? “The other type,” she says, “is the ‘weird’ gamer girl who sits alone in the cafeteria with her DS while the gamer dudes call her fat and ugly. Both girls get put down by guys. And anyway, gamer boys try to own gaming. They claim it as theirs, as a boy thing. They automatically think girls are doing it for attention. No girl wins.”

My sister’s insight is startling to me. She’s never seen the way online harassment of women in games often centers around a woman’s sex life or looks. She doesn’t know about projects like Feminist Frequency, and the way even its most basic critiques of overt misogyny inspire firestorms of hatred. She doesn’t know about “fake geek girl” jokes. She doesn’t know that something called “Gamergate” swamped everything having to do with games in virulent hatred for months, destroying careers and too many people’s peace of mind, and leaving me reluctant even to write this piece. But she doesn’t have to know these things. The collision of gaming and misogyny is apparent to her from a few cafeteria tables away.

She has come to understand that gaming is obsessed with her as a fuckable object, but not a human being. “It’s all about women’s bodies,” she says. “It’s gross.” Women’s bodies. Not women’s words, women’s feelings, women’s dreams, women entire.

What of those gamer boys, unto themselves? “With the really serious ones, you feel like you don’t even know enough to begin talking to them.” There is the implicit understanding of this litmus test, and of it being exclusively imposed upon girls. “Guys get older and think they’re superior and there’s just this whole other boundary put up. The older you get, the less acceptable it is for girls to play video games.” My sister pauses thoughtfully. “But it’s not like girls grow out of games, exactly... It's that can get away with it. Growing up, I stopped feeling like I could take my DS anywhere, because boys would judge.”

She goes silent. When she speaks again, her words are tentative. “But it isn’t like those games stopped being fun. I didn’t age out of games. I... gendered out of them, I guess?”

I describe games like Journey, Transistor, Life is Strange, and Portal to her: games with female protagonists, created by women, resistant to dominant norms of sex and violence. “I don’t see commercials for those, though,” she demurs. “I see those Kate Upton commercials instead.”

This is the third force: marketing. “There aren’t really any games that seem positive to me,” my sister explains. “They’re all about violence and nudity. I don’t like how the female body is made out. It makes me really uncomfortable. All of the commercials are for guys.”

She doesn’t know about Never Alone. She doesn’t know about Gone Home. But she knows about Kate Upton in a strategically knotted bed sheet. She knows about Booker DeWitt and his face-shredding skyhook. Anything beneath that top stratum of blood and jiggle is invisible to her. So why would she go spelunking into gaming with no clear purpose? Why would she assume there’s anything worthwhile out there for her to discover? Without me, she’d never have heard of all the progressive indie titles I rattle off, and would have no reason to believe they exist. She doesn’t know about Steam; she doesn’t even really know about PC gaming period.

For my sister, and so many girls and women like her, the gaming marketplace begins and ends with these mainstream visions of gaming, and the mainstream stores like Game Stop that sell them. “It’s obviously for boys. The nudity of course, but even the colors. From what I see, they mostly hire boys.” We discuss the posters and cardboard stand-ups we’ve seen in their windows: stubbly white men cradling bricks of oily black weaponry, or half-naked voluptuous women with pouting, glossy lips inviting the onlooker to ogle. Be the hero, over and over again, in a million monochrome worlds: crush the bad guy, fuck the woman, do a whole lot of shooting in between. Games are fantasy and fun, the marketing tells us. Fantasy and fun built upon our backs.

Our phone call falters, mired by my sister’s sad insight. How could the industry and community make this right, I ask? What would make you feel welcome? What could have kept me from a lifetime of fearful distance from gaming—even the games I love?

“Maybe if they developed games for all interests,” she says tentatively. “Stuff like the games I liked when I was little, but... grown up. Games about everything. And if the stores especially were just more friendly? And less sexual. Less violent.” She pauses. “You need to make people want to come in, you know? Girls want to be comfortable there. They don’t want to go in and be surrounded by that kind of female nudity.”

I agree, and we discuss what changes we’d make. We remember breeding Nintendogs, not-quite-swear-words on Club Penguin, Princess Peach’s magical parasol. The fun we had, the adventures we shared, the friends we made. “Cooking Mama!” she exclaims. “I loved Cooking Mama. It was so much fun.” I agree, recalling the tricky stylus technique one mastered over the course of many digital omelets. I can nearly hear her smile travel through the phone. “That’s what I want,” she says, wistfully. “More Cooking Mama games.”

And that’s certainly what we need: more games featuring women, made by women, willing to tell stories about pop stars, witches, and queens, willing to work in palettes beyond army drab. But that will be meaningless if our understanding of what a game is and who a gamer can be does not expand wide enough or visibly enough to reach and include my little sister.

She wants to play games where women make the world beautiful, save the day, make friends, or romance boys. She wants to play games without killing, without rape, without weaponry. She wants to play games that don’t assume you grew up on GameFAQS or have hundreds of dollars to shell out on hardware upgrades. She wants games on her phone. She wants game in her browser. She wants to live in a world where games are just as aligned with girlhood as boyhood, and where no one bats an eye at a girl like her loving video games alongside One Direction fanfiction and scented candles.

In a way, it's simple; she just wants games to be for her exactly what they are for boys and men: easy to love. Why does that have to be so hard?

Illo: Rob Beschizza. Photo: Shutterstock

It was the 90s. Games had their big chance. Personal computers had surged into homes and schools, promising education and entertainment innovations at our fingertips. Iridescent, futuristic CD-ROMs were suddenly everywhere: You could have an entire color encyclopedia on a single disk. You could get hundreds, no, thousands of free America Online minutes on a CD. And you could have a serious, adult computer game with real-world actors and blood and sex and all kinds of grown-up stuff—even if it took 5 discs.

When the Sierra On-Line horror adventure Phantasmagoria (7 discs!) made it into my family home, I had just gotten my first period. On the sight of the package—abstract curtain-wings embracing a beheaded woman—I knew things were about to change. Although I had enjoyed the adventure tales of King Graham and his family in Sierra’s previous King’s Quest game, this, I felt sure, was a game for grown-ups. My best friend and I huddled around it after school, delighted to view such illicit and terrifying material.

It had lots of things we hadn’t seen before up to that point. A chilling lullaby lures you to a rocking chair that moves on its own! Every chapter, the fortune-telling mannequin gets a little bit scarier! It has truly gruesome death scenes, a part where you have to hide in a coffin from your possessed husband, and even a rape scene—to my mind at the time, just more squicky adult stuff to alternately giggle and thrill at.

Phantasmagoria, like many contemporary titles, just seemed to be fundamentally more "mature" at the time thanks to its real-world actors and full-motion video. Replaying those games today, though, you see an ill-fated detour of game history for what it is: an idealistic millstone.

The things that are creepy to me about Phantasmagoria today have to do with its dissonance: The blurry wisp of a video actress hangs numbly greenscreened against gooey computer-generated objects, occasionally repeating idle movements as she waits for your command. You repeat the same letterbox film of her leaving one room, entering the next, every time you want to navigate the house.

You make the actress march around all the screens, tediously, for something that has changed. There is an unsolicited thirty-second video of her looking around, petting the bed curiously. You click on a faucet or a mirror: Usually nothing happens, except you get to watch her use it, self-consciously and dutifully. Later you research the actors and actresses of the FMV game age and find that with the exception of some notable celebrity cameos (recall John Hurt as a comedically-unscrupulous, fourth wall-breaking psychiatrist in the clunkily psychosexual Tender Loving Care), a good many of the performers’ backgrounds are in softcore.

It’s a problem that the video game industry has had for some time: the conflation of "realism" with maturity. The more plausible your graphics are, the more dignified your stupid ghost slime murder boobs story will be. Much as it is today, many of these plays for "realism"—especially the hunger for a legitimacy that might come with expensive Hollywood actors—actually makes worse games out of unsustainable development budgets. There’s a reason that "FMV games" never 'stuck'.

But lots of fans remain profoundly fond of that era, the way we love our teenage selves for trying so damn hard, fumbling for our way. The combination of naivety and ambition, of "adult" aims with clumsy adventure-game interfaces, or the video avatar pulling, say, a fireplace poker out of the thin air behind them when the player clicks the "inventory". Games are a medium young enough that some of today’s fans were around to see the first ones made. We all love our cult stuff, our cheesecake.

And while the use of video might be only dubiously compatible with what we understand to be conventional game designs, there’s nothing inherently frictive or inaccessible about video itself. Recent mystery release Her Story relies on video recordings of an actress partially as a "retro" tactic; the whole game has a pleasantly-textured ‘90s throwback feel. But it’s also about searching a database and reviewing police interviews, and watching videos is the most natural, accessible mechanic to offer a player.

Quirk, nostalgia and ease of use are three decent reasons not to shut the door on the possibilities for video in games, particularly when it comes to the mystery genre, to which video is especially well-suited—it not only conjures the creepy voyeurism of late-night crime television, but the game can use realistic human behavior and movement as a mechanic, engaging the player to read body and facial language to look for suspects’ lying behavior (an entire tech company was sprouted to create the same effect for Rockstar’s dubiously-received L.A. Noire).

I tell an absolute truth: Lately, a video murder mystery served up the best time I’ve had of any computer game recently. Some friends and I spent a weekend at a country house recently, and next to an actual fireplace, we decided for some reason to try Contradiction: Spot the Liar, a video murder mystery we expected to be terrible and hilarious and the perfect thing for us all to shout at while we became persistently less sober on our holiday.

It was all of these things. And it was also particularly impressive because it managed to marry all the things we loved about old FMV adventures—goofy character performances, the beloved awkwardness of some of the conventions—with actual mechanical innovation.

The central convention of Contradiction: Spot the Liar is that to solve the mystery—a student has died under mysterious circumstances in a small town—you must catch the characters you interview in contradictions with themselves. That’s all. While random events may occur that give you further inventory items or information, you mostly unveil the story by interviewing people; the things they tell you become statements you can call them on later, and you’re listening for the times they say two things that cannot both be true.

Someone could be overtly lying to you, but unless they have contradicted themselves, you can’t advance the story. As such there is the repetition people tend to dislike about adventure games—visiting and revisiting areas carefully when you get stuck, looking for what you missed—but there’s none of the infamous pixel-hunting, screen-searching, or combining objects in absurd and frustrating ways. And the constraint can actually be delightful, inspiring creative play—when you can’t call out a liar, you look for other ways to call out the untruth by talking to someone else. It has the expected slow and frustrating bits, but it also has a "cheats" system (we’ve never had to use it) and a "current tip" (we use it liberally).

It’s streamlined and good for groups, especially for parties where people don’t normally play video games. It serves up cheesecake from the moment its gilded logo first comes shimmering onto the screen (is that the Contra font?). You play a hero detective, Jenks—actually, we’re not sure if he’s really a detective. He wears a broad-brimmed hat and shiny shoes with curly toes, and he often phones up a nebulous "chief", but he never shows anyone a badge, and in the brief exposition all we’re told about him is that for some reason he has "until first thing tomorrow morning" to solve the week-old crime.

The actor is wildly expressive and wonderfully anti-charismatic. It’s as if the game knows that any leading man would gain an inherent absurdity, being directed by the player to plod around knocking on doors and windows multiple times per hour, presenting dozens of objects and facts to tolerant strangers. Therefore why not eschew the chiseled detective in favor of casting an incredibly absurd person; his performance is inescapably glib, funny and gleeful—"what would you say… if I showed you this," he will deadpan sincerely, brandishing a flyer or a packet of herbs or, no word of a lie, a set of devil horns, with admirable flourish.

All the other actors carry their weight admirably: They are just ridiculous enough, just suspicious enough, giving facial performances that are alternately vaunted and sincere, believable but also easy to laugh about. Contradiction is just perfect at what it wants to be: A retro tribute with some modern conveniences, all the best and weirdest parts of an ambitious bygone age with none of the impracticalities.

When you become an adult, you learn that "maturity" has little to do with realism, or blood, or salaciousness, or grit. It can mean populism and playfulness; graduating from being kids hushed guiltily around the Night Trap "bathroom scene (content warning for sexualized violence)" to being a party of adults flocked in earnest good humor around an utterly unpretentious "video murder mystery". Try this game, drink a bunch of wine and laugh together about old times. That’s one of the things playing games is really great for.

As a kid, I stole from everyone.

An unattended purse in a restaurant? Easy $5. Pokémon cards at Target? Pocketed. I even marked my best friends, waking up early on days I'd sleep over to rifle through their house to see what I could nab.

"I need this," I'd tell myself.

For a time, that thin justification worked. My family didn't have any money, and when the Pokémon craze hit, I wanted in. Everyone else had massive collections, but all I had was a single starter deck I'd coaxed my babysitter into buying me (it was the one with Ninetails). Ashamed to pull out my paltry collection in front of the other kids, jealousy fueled me.

After each snag, I'd put on airs and feign ignorance long enough for suspicion to drop. I was, after all, just a kid. Few suspected how much I'd taken. Eventually, I stopped stealing, at least in such direct, aggressive ways. I didn't outgrow that class consciousness, though. I knew when others had something I didn't, and I was still jealous.

It was more than just jealousy, of course. Being poor and acutely aware of that fact as a child is a strange experience. You know enough to understand that there's injustice, but you don't yet know why or how it happened. Much less what you can do about it. I had a hard time understanding that it wasn't my fault, and to a large degree not my mom's either. Instead, it left me feeling less valuable than my other classmates. Their access to art, books, movies and games that I couldn't afford left me feeling alone and confused: Was I somehow less deserving? So I exercised the one bit of agency I had in my life. I stole.

Things started to change for me in middle school. I was accepted into a charter school, founded with the purpose of lifting kids up out of poverty with education. We were required to learn Latin and wear school uniforms, but most of us were still from the inner city. Classmates often came from broken homes, and many, like me, didn't know their fathers. I felt comfortable, oddly secure for the first time in my life.

That year was also the same that my mom got her first computer. On the few occasions she'd give up control of the PC, I'd scour the internet looking new things to learn. I had an insatiable appetite for ideas, though I'd spent most of my life with limited ways to feed it. Even before I started stealing Pokémon cards, I would often just sit down and read encyclopedias when I got the chance. I was desperate, starved for knowledge and culture.

The Internet said I didn't have to be hungry; it was a tool that opened up the world. I didn't need money to read books through Project Gutenberg, or search the web for answers to questions I'd always been afraid to ask. And, I soon discovered, I didn't necessarily need money to play computer games either, so long as I was willing to pirate them.

In a way, downloading games didn't feel that different from searching the web for information. The internet held out the promise of free and equal access to information, and piracy seemed like a natural extension of my quest for knowledge. I wanted to experience art and culture that spoke to me just as much as I wanted answers to my questions. And suddenly I could have them all: I was a nameless, faceless entity, free of the chains of my economic class. Piracy was freeing.

A couple years later, my mom had an accident and ended up taking more than a year off from work. Money got tighter than ever, and there was no way she could afford to replace her computer as it aged into obsolescence. Soon it was too out of date to play newer games, and I felt alone again, unable to participate in the culture building and growing around me. I wasn't yet old enough to hold a job myself, and when I asked my mom for an allowance, she responded with a somber look that said, "With what money?" It wasn't that she didn't want to give me more—every parent does—she simply couldn't. So I went back to stealing.

Before too long I had $300 as well as a spare monitor and case, enough to build a basic system. My first pirated PC game was Deus Ex. I'd heard about it a few times, and it sounded interesting. "A game about politics," was how a friend pitched it to me, though it's also been described as a "cyberpunk-themed action role-playing video game." Within a few hours I had it running on my cobbled together PC, and it was a revelation.

Deus Ex

Deus Ex was the first game I'd seen that listed its primary influences, which included philosophers like Hobbes, Voltaire, Locke. They were wealthy men, to be sure, but learning about their work set me on the path to learning about sociology, about history, about how much all media is one long chain of slightly modified ideas, with each new link adding a new twist or perspective. The game's themes also spoke to some of the most personal concerns of my life, including economic class, injustice, about the disempowered fighting against a wealthy ruling class.

It was also a game where actions had serious consequences, and taking the quick, easy path could cause enormous harm to innocent bystanders. It was a message I took to heart. Playing through Deus Ex helped me realize that there are always consequences you can't quite see, and that my thefts over the years had surely left a wake of victims who had suffered—particularly the ones where I had taken physical goods and money. If they worked for minimum wage, even my quick, pilfered fiver could have been an hour or more of their life.

But what I learned from the game also helped solidify my belief that online piracy, at least in the context of my own circumstances, was still justified. Yes, downloading an illicit digital work can cause a sort of a harm to the creators or corporations that aren't receiving revenue, particularly independent developers, but when I weighed it against the desperation of my poverty and the worthlessness it made me internalize, there was no comparison.

Even in independent games, piracy isn't always as cut and dry as it seems. While it can have big impacts on some games, other small developers have discovered counterintuitive benefits to piracy, embraced it, or at least become more empathetic to it.

Some, perhaps most, people in industrialized countries have the luxury of seeking out media they care about and stories that speak to them, and they can afford to support that work with their money. But for others like me, it can feel like a seemingly insurmountable struggle. To live even in relative poverty deprives of you new ideas; it deprives you of the tools and education you need to escape. In the most severe cases, it locks you out of society—out of voting, out of socializing, and out of connecting with others.

Poverty is often cyclical because it traps its victims in intellectual dead zones. We know that without stimulation and without challenge, the mind, like the belly, starves.

I don't pirate games anymore, and I don't support pirating games if you can afford to buy them. But when I needed it, piracy gave me hope. When I considered dropping out of high school, giving up on my future, and damning myself to repeat the cycle of poverty, I was able to look back on the sea of literature and countless games I'd downloaded for answers and inspiration. They not only helped me realize that I wasn't as alone as I thought, but allowed me to develop the fluency necessary to start making informed, critical works of my own.

I wasn't just taking the easy way out by pirating, because the way I had to travel wasn't easy any way you look at it. I was trying to equalize a playing field that I knew was stacked against me. Piracy helped do that, by giving me access to art and books and games that allowed me to better myself, and inspired me to become who I am today.

Piracy gave me a future.

A few years ago, my mom called to ask for my advice on webcams. She explained (in the English-peppered Chinese that's the official language of our Chinese-American household) that some of her friends had started sharing videos of themselves singing karaoke. She thought she could do better. "我想给她们PK一下," she remarked: "I want to PK them a little."

The term "PK" (or "Player Kill") is often used in games like World of Warcraft to describe destroying or killing an online opponent. Although my mom had never played an online role-playing game in her life, the word had somehow made its way into her vocabulary.

Later, I learned that “PK”—like a number of gaming-related terms—had entered more general usage on the Chinese internet, and is now often used to mean “compete against” or “go head-to-head with” in ways that have nothing to do with games. People "PK" their baby photos, recipes, and yes, their karaoke. It's become such a generalized synonym for competition that this American Idol-esque show refers to itself as a "singing PK":

My mom’s casual familiarity with gaming terminology is just one indicator of the enormous influence that gaming has on contemporary Chinese culture, especially the growing part of it that is created on—or at least distributed by—the Internet. This permeation is particularly remarkable considering how fast the gaming industry and market have had to grow in China to catch up. When my family left China in 1995, Sony had just released the PlayStation in Japan, but the most common gaming systems in China were still 8-bit Nintendo-knockoffs like the Subor and the Dendy: a technology gap of more than ten years.

Two decades later, the Chinese gaming market is a behemoth, with an estimated 517 million gamers worth at least $22 billion and growing. The immediately obvious difference from its counterpart in the US is the insignificance of consoles like the various Playstations, Xboxes and Wiis; they were banned entirely from 2000 to 2014, and the last restrictions on their local manufacturing were lifted only a few weeks ago. Instead, massively-multiplayer role playing games (MMORPG) and multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBA) played on PCs dominate the industry. It’s no surprise, then, that "PK" is not alone, and that in-game lingo around PC titles like League of Legends (英雄联盟) and Defense of The Ancients has often made its way into common parlance.

Over the next two months, I'm going to be traveling throughout China for Multi Entry, a Kickstarter-funded multimedia project devoted to telling stories about modern Chinese culture that are centered on the experiences of young Chinese fans and creators of fashion, music, design, and of course, games.

As I prepare for my trip, I've been thinking more about how the influence of games has spread in modern China, and how that's been reflected by the words that cross over from gaming subcultures into the mainstream lexicon. A few of my favorite examples follow; each term is presented as a literal translation, followed by its simplified Chinese form and its pinyin (a system for romanizing the pronunciation and tone of Chinese words).

Weibo

"Blood trough is running empty"

血槽空了 - xue3 cao2 kong1 le

血槽 was once the word for the blood groove or fuller on a knife. In the era of fighting games and MMORPGs, it became the name for a player's health bar, that ubiquitous indicator of how much health you have left in a game. 血槽空了 is a common warning in games, alerting players that they’re low on health; they may then ask their teammates for a 补血, or a heal ("restore blood").

These two exclamations are now used primarily by people who have been overwhelmed by cuteness, love, or other #feelings. It’s the equivalent of the English internet slang "I'm dead"—or at least the way it's used on Tumblr, to signify dying from laughter or being killed by cuteness. In the post above from the Chinese microblogging service Weibo, a user writes: “Crying, my health gauge is almost empty, these starry-eyed boys are too gorgeous.”

"Running an unauthorized plug-in"

开挂 (an abbreviation for 开外挂) - kai1 gua4

开挂 or 开外挂 is the act of running an illegal plug-in on a game, either for practical usability purposes (translating an interface into Chinese) or to cheat (faking in-game presence to accumulate more virtual currency, or even packet modification to make a character move faster in an online game). Outside of gaming, it has become an expression of disbelief, as well as an adjective to mean exaggerated or enhanced. In English, you might say that a particularly beautiful sunset looks Photoshopped; in Chinese, you’d say it was running an illegal game plug-in.

"Live-action Counter-Strike"

真人CS - zhen1 ren2 CS

Counter-Strike, a hugely popular first-person shooter that started off as a mod of Half-Life, debuted in the US in 1999. It found its way to China not long afterwards and became immensely popular at internet cafes, which then functioned naturally as always-on LAN parties.

At around the same time, recreational sports like paintball, laser tag, and a painful-sounding BB gun variant were just starting to take off in China. Lacking an easy explanation for the appeal of these new hobbies, their proponents decided to latch on to the exploding popularity of Counter-Strike and refer to all three simply as “Live-action Counter-Strike.” The name stuck: here it is listed amidst other “rest and recreation” activities on Dianping, the most popular Chinese review app.

"Second-kill"

秒杀 - miao3 sha1

In MMORPGs, "second-kill" is the act of instantaneously defeating an enemy through overwhelming force in online MMORPGs. But around 2009, e-commerce vendors adopted the term to describe a type of flash sale where a small number of items are dramatically reduced in price and then snatched up in an instant. It’s now an activity taken so seriously by its practitioners (“0.01 seconds can be the difference between success and failure,” warns the start of one tutorial) that it may as well be reclassified as an eSport. The term is now so popular, people often abbreviate it to just 秒, used as a verb.

"Full Blood Resurrection"

满血复活 - man2 xue3 fu4 huo2

Originally a term that meant respawn—an action in in an online game where the player’s character is resurrected and restored to full health, the phrase is now used to mean “recover” in a general sense. Remember the adorable, giant inflatable duck in Hong Kong that deflated in Victoria Harbor? Chinese newspapers celebrated its “full blood resurrection” when it was restored to its happy, floating self.

Three years ago I wrote a book called Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, and in the back I listed all the accessible, no-programming-required game-making tools I could. Recently I've been surveying the current landscape of similar tools. Spoiler: They all suck now.

Scratch

"Scratch is a programming language and online community where you can create your own interactive stories, games, and animations -- and share your creations with others around the world." – Get started

Many of the tools I suggested as possible options for a budding game creator with no programming experience—Game Maker, Construct, Stencyl—have shifted towards marketing themselves as professional, commercial game-making tools for Capital I Indie, Capital D game Developers. In today's market, that means accomodating touch screens, mobile games, and filling every tool with so many options that I, who have been making games for ten years, get overwhelmed and lost. How would I teach these to someone who's never made a game before?

Of the other tools I wrote about, Scratch, a free tool designed for kids, is still about perfect. And Twine has blossomed into a beautiful orchid beyond my wildest dreams. But as far as graphical game-making tools go, I find myself wishing more tools were like Warioware D.I.Y. for the Nintendo DS, whose servers finally went offline a couple of years ago. Although it has some painful shortcomings, there's lots to learn from what it got right, in the hopes other toolsets can take those lessons on.

It had lots of shortcuts

Twine

"An open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories, you don't need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories [with code] when you're ready." – Read more

Any obstacle between an idea and the finished game can become be the hill a creator's enthusiasm dies on. Let's say I want to make a game where you try to pet a cat in a park and she hisses at you—but now I've got to draw all the graphics, paint a background and write some music. That's an intimidating amount of work for someone who's never made a game before.

WarioWare emphasizes shortcuts. Tiling patterns for backgrounds and a large selection of reusable stamps for scenery. The music editor lets you hum into the mic, or you can choose a tempo and mood (like "spooky" or "spicy" or "fun") and WarioWare will auto-generate a tune for you. The erasers in drawing mode double as special effects you can harness for your games.

WarioWare's tutorial for beginning authors celebrates "laziness"—doing things as quickly and functionally as possible, paying more attention to the "feel" of things than to polish. The game keeps reminding creators that creativity is more important than perfection. No wonder Warioware D.I.Y. became a mainstay of glorioustrainwrecks.com, the two-hour game-making community.

It gave creators prompts

When you create a new game in WarioWare, you're faced with the most terrifying project-stopper of all: a blank title field, waiting for you to name your unmade creation. It's the same kind of terror a blank page represents to a writer: a cruel and immediate test of your confidence.

WarioWare D.I.Y.

A perfect mini-game compilation and beloved game design tool released for the Nintendo DS in 2009, the platform is now sadly defunct. – Wikipedia

But WarioWare had a solution here, too. Tap the "Auto" button and WarioWare will come up with a random name for you, like "Duck Strike" or "Fruit King" or "I'm...Sad?" You can keep clicking until you find one that spurs an idea.

That's pretty excellent. If you're an artist, you can doodle until you come up with something you could develop into a picture. Game creation needs an equivalent process, a way to play around with ideas until you find something that hits you the right way.

An earlier version of Scratch had a weirdo feature I really loved, which was unfortunately taken out of the latest release: You could press a button to add a random sprite to a game, any character from Scratch's extensive sample sprite library. Click, click: A scuba diver and a basketball. There's your game idea right there. (Scratch, if you're reading this: bring this feature back, please!)

It had a playful interface

In WarioWare's image editor, when you flip a stamp, the tiny caveman holding up the stamp also flips, showing you his back. When you play notes on the keyboard in music mode, tiny faces pop up to sing the notes to you. Each menu has different background music: When you go to set your game's winning condition, the music changes to a celebratory march, like you're in the home stretch.

Mario Maker

Nintendo's forthcoming game design and sharing app is out September 11, and promises all sorts of easy-to-use features. But will you buy a Wii U to get them? – Homepage

These little interactions do more than underscore the effects of individual tools or functions: They make interacting with the interface playful and rewarding and joyful. They make what could have been a cold, intimidating tool warm and friendly. They also encourage discoverability: If all these buttons do cool things, won't you try touching them?

In this essential read on the development of Kid Pix, a Mac art tool for kids, developer Craig Hickman outlines his fundamental philosophy of kid-friendly software: "Every opportunity should be taken to make the program surprising and satisfying to use. The process of making a picture should be as important as the picture produced."

You could actually draw

Thanks to the stylus-and-touchscreen setup of the DS, WarioWare D.I.Y. can boast one of the most accessible interfaces of any creative software: Getting to actually draw on the screen with a plastic pen. Mouse dexterity has to be learned, but many people, regardless of their level of computer fluency, can sketch or doodle with a pen. The stylus is immediately familiar.

Puzzlescript

A game engine designed to create tile-based puzzle games, its versatility has been proven far beyond that simple remit — Homepage

Unfortunately, it's not an easy thing to replicate on most hardware. But drawing is still an activity that most people understand. In Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, I wrote that the most accessible game-making tool will simply lets players draw a game, and Mark Wonnacott's Kooltool is an attempt at making that literal.

Kooltool is still in development, but everything in its world can be drawn upon with the mouse. Draw on a wall tile, and the other tiles change to match it. Draw a background, draw the characters, draw notes for your big ideas directly onto the game world in flashing glowing text. It's pretty cool, alright.

It had manageable scope

The one thing that has killed more game projects (hobbyist and professional) than anything else is unchecked ambition. When I was making ZZT games as a teen, everyone was hacking away at their dream projects, equivalent in size and scope to the Final Fantasy games they loved, 80+ boards (screens) in length. (Today you'd throw around the word "epic.") Maybe five percent of these games ever got finished. Probably less.

Ugh

Game Maker, Stencyl and Construct are now advanced tools with steep learning curves and an intimidating array of options, features and deployment platforms to think about.

Marrying game design tools with the format of Nintendo's WarioWare series was a brilliant move. The WarioWare games are all about quick little games played rapid-fire, one after the other. The games creators make are seconds long.

The genius of having creators design WarioWare games is that they're not allowed to be too ambitious. Feature creep in a five-second game is all but impossible. Maybe you've got a few blocks of graphics left over, so you create an animated bird that flies around in the background. That's it, that's your extravagance. Limitations are the natural enemy of bloat - they work wonders for creativity and invention.

It offered tons of samples

WarioWare D.I.Y. comes with ninety pre-made sample games of all varieties. They show off all sorts of things WarioWare can do. But more than that, they're completely transparent: They show you how they were made.

When browsing the "shelves" of included games (or even game copies from friends), you might play something really neat and wonder how it works. A tap of the nearby "View in MakerMatic" button is all it takes to put the game's innards under glass, so you can examine the scripting, the objects, learn how it all was done. And that's the principal way people learn anything about game-making: By copying, by having an existing model to poke around in.

In fact, WarioWare creators are encouraged to directly modify and remix its sample games. "Sample games," in the sense of sampling. You can import games wholesale into WarioWare's editor, or just lift individual sprites or music tracks for reuse. Originality's for suckers, it's creation, the birth of something new from something old, that's important.

The problem with WarioWare D.I.Y.

"WarioWare D.I.Y. could have changed a generation," I tweeted recenty, "IF." The If is: If only it had had a decent infrastructure for distributing games! As a DS title, WarioWare was forced to use Nintendo's limited and unreliable Wi-Fi service to let players exchange stuff. This was pre-Miiverse: it could only connect to unsecured networks, and only badly and slowly.

Each creator got an online "warehouse" where she could have only two games available for download at any given time. Two games, two pieces of music, and two four-panel comics. The only way to see if a friend had updated her warehouse was to log into the service (this usually took several tries) and to check her warehouse. You could only check the warehouses of folks whose friend codes you already had, of course.

So you got a limited and unpredictable selection of games by a limited group of people. How rad would it have been if Warioware had some sort of website full of playable games sort of like Flipnote Hatena had for animations? A YouTube for WarioWare games, where anyone with a browser could try out your creations. In fact, most creators took to just uploading videos of themselves playing their own games to YouTube, losing the vital interativity of the games.

Game-making tools like Twine, Scratch or Stephen Lavelle's Puzzlescript export finished games as browser-friendly HTML files or simply host them directly online. The distribution angle is almost as important as the game-making itself: That's why I titled my book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters. It's not just the means to make a game that need to be accessible—creators need to be able to get their games to people!

Nintendo will launch WarioWare D.I.Y.'s apparent successor, Super Mario Maker, next month. It's a level creator for Super Mario Bros., and it looks brilliant. It has a playful interface that plays music when you place objects, it has game elements that interact in surprising ways, and it has hidden, discoverable functions: shake a turtle to turn it into a red turtle, drag a mushroom onto it to make it a BIG turtle. Best of all, it has a searchable interface for finding other people's creations that doesn't require you to use an unsecured wireless network.

But the big if for Super Mario Maker might be that it's exclusively for the Wii U, a game platform that Almost No One Has, and will quite possibly go down in Nintendo history as the corporation's worst-selling console. How much better would Super Mario Maker be on the 3DS and 2DS—something lots of kids actually own? Obviously, Nintendo's hope is that people who want to play Super Mario Maker will buy a Wii U which at least quadruples Mario Maker's cost of entry.

Once again, a Nintendo game-making tool will be letting people make great stuff - but in a place where few players can get to it. Nintendo, if you're reading this: Put Super Mario Maker on the 3DS, please.

Condescension drips off the opening screen of Millennial Swipe Sim 2015, a game that purports to simulate the "thrilling world of app-based dating." Much like Tinder, it presents you with photos of potential suitors—albeit pixelated ones—and asks you to swipe right or left to indicate if you're interested.

"But watch out," it warns. "Stop swiping and you might get too bored to live. This is how people meet now!" The contempt is palpable.

You're given a "boredom meter"—which indicates your painfully short attention span—and you're instructed to swipe furiously to stave off your apathy. Inevitably, you fail, and the punchline appears: a gravestone that reads HERE LIES A MILLENNIAL.

Congratulations, young person: you're so shallow that it has literally killed you.

Taking shots at millennials is nothing new. It's become a pretty popular sport in the media, where people born between the mid-1980s to the early 2000s are frequently dismissed en masse as shallow, over-entitled, narcissistic, immature, and fickle. They have been referred to as both "the worst generation" and "the dumbest generation"; even the mere word "millennial" is often deployed as an indictment, oozing with the sort of disdain that an earlier generation once reserved for hippies.

A recent Vanity Fair article put an impressive amount of torque into its hand-wringing about the casual hookups, conquest-seeking and general sluttiness of millennials on Tinder, dubbing it an "unprecedented phenomenon" that it compared, with no apparent irony, to the melting of the polar ice caps and the Sixth Extinction of the Earth.

Forget about the fact these sorts of criticisms about millennials are often leveled by members of the generation that inspired the term "free love," or that online dating is not the exclusive boneyard of the promiscuous (a 2013 Pew Research survey showed that 11 percent of marriages and long-term partnerships that started in the last ten years began online). The pearl-clutching about Tinder ultimately amounts to the same moral panic about declining social values that every generation has leveled at the perceived moral inferiority of the next since time immemorial.

The flaws so often attributed to millennials are, of course, hardly unique to them. As cartoonist Matt Bors wrote in his excellent "Can We Stop Worrying About Millennials Yet" comic, "the supposed problems with millennials are things that people have been worrying about since forever."

Matt Bors

Don't get me wrong; online dating is a dystopian hellscape. But the world of dating has always been full of casual hookups, conquest-seekers, harassment, superficial judgments and bad decisions, whether you're meeting people in bars, at parties, or on apps. Tinder undoubtedly makes hookups more accessible, more codified and (perhaps most damningly) more visible. But please: Let's not pretend that any of this is truly new or that millennials are uniquely shallow, rutting animals because their mating dance has slightly different and more digital steps.

But if you're interested in exploring the reality of modern dating in ways that go beyond reductive stereotypes and punchlines, you're in luck! Millennials themselves have been making games for years that talk about their relationships and sex lives in interesting and nuanced ways.

While many of them deal with the same universal concerns that have thrilled and plagued lovers for all time—finding connection, fearing rejection—they delve into more contemporary issues of sex and intimacy as well: definitions of consent, fluid notions of gender and sexual identity, and yes, how technology influences the way that people connect.

The ones that do it best tend to be small, independent games—often made with easy-to-learn tools like Twine—that focus directly on romance and sex, and allow individual voices and personal experiences to shine through. Mainstream gaming, by contrast, rarely focuses on romance and sex, except to provide heterosexual male-oriented visual titillation or create motivation for heroes. When they do simulate intimacy, it often takes the form of reductive mini-games where physical affection is unlocked by simply pushing the right series of buttons in the right order—a strategy that is rarely applicable in real life, regardless of what pick-up artists insist.

If anything, it's probably more accurate to view Tinder as the ultimate mainstream game about dating, with all the flaws that implies, and critique the ways that it too can engender superficial interactions, or frame intimacy in oversimplified ways, rather than simply mocking its userbase at large.

Millennials have certainly done their share of criticizing Tinder, not only in articles like this tongue-in-cheek game review of Tinder, but in games themselves. One of the sharpest rebukes to the idea of gamified sex is Kindness Coins, where you play as a woman on the receiving end of a paint-by-numbers attempt at seduction. In the end, your "nice guy" suitor demands to know why you're not interested, even though he seemingly chose all the right actions and dialogue responses. Your reply is succinct:

Similarly, the text game Click Click Click by Increpare subverts the neat dialogue trees that scaffold so many simulated romances. You're presented with a series of statements, presumably made by a lover, and have to choose how to respond. This is harder than it sounds, since your dialogue options are nothing but complex, nonsensical equations. Choose one, and you'll receive another response. Did you say the right thing? The wrong thing? Is this just not working out? It's impossible to tell, perhaps because there's no way to reduce the joys and frustrations of interacting with a real romantic partner to a simple equation.

The actual complexity and confusion of negotiating romance is a common subject of independent games made about dating. Some, like Ultimate Flirt-Off and The Moment Is Gone, focus on the awkwardness and anxiety of appropriately showing interest to potential partner, while others explore the emptiness that can calcify around casual hookups or the uncertainty that can persist long into established relationships.

In Tune, Tweed Couch Games

One of the most important and contentious issues currently surrounding sex and dating is consent—or rather, the widespread ignorance about how to define it and practice it. While debates continues to rage in courtrooms and school across the country, a number of independent games have tackled the issue head on and created interactive ways to model expressing and respecting boundaries.

Super Consent by Merritt Kopas both models and celebrates the idea of affirmative consent by asking the player if they want to do something—and recognizing anything less than "yes!" as insufficient to proceed. In Tune takes it a step further by asking players to practice the framework for consent in physical space, by donning "consent bracelets" that activate with skin-to-skin contact and explicitly discussing whether they're comfortable imitating a series of increasingly intimate poses with their partner.

The darker side of sex and dating makes its way into personal games as well, including the terrifying prevalence of rape, harassment and assault. The Day the Laughter Stopped; is particularly harrowing, a text game where the player steps into the shoes of a young woman who is sexually assaulted. It evokes the powerlessness of the experience by offering choices like "run away"—but selecting them will not stop your attacker. Harassment and assault also take center stage in several games by Nina Freeman, including A Dating Sim and Freshman Year.

And of course, there are games that deal directly with the digital contours of modern dating; Freeman's upcoming project, Cibele, is about falling in love and sleeping with a boy she met through an online role-playing game.

Cobra Club

Sexting, another oft-criticized horseman of the millennial online sex apocalypse, is the subject of one of my favorite games about online dating, Cobra Club (NSFW). The entire experience takes place in the reflection of a bathroom mirror, where you can customize the penis of your avatar and then send pictures of your creation to (fake) men on a (fake) gay dating site. It's a fascinating and oddly joyful experience, not only because every photo exchange is preceded by an explicit request—consent!—and because the responses to your own penis pictures are so rapturous.

While I never thought I'd say the words "I love this game about sending dick pics," I do, and here we are. For many women, receiving dick pics is an unpleasant experience in large part because it is often an unsolicited one. But experiencing it as a joyful, consensual act—and as someone sending dick pics of my own—reframed it for me entirely, in a way that felt new and freeing.

And that's the exactly sort of thing that makes these games by millennial creators so valuable: rather than glib punchlines or generational contempt, they offer honesty, horror and hope that illuminate the contours of contemporary dating in far more important ways. They allow people to not only capture their diverse personal experiences with sex and dating, but to reimagine the way that they experience intimacy—and invite others to reimagine it too.

Because this is how people meet now: online and offline, for casual relationships and committed relationships and everything in between, in ways that are complicated and impossible to pin down or sum up in anything less than as many points of view as we can get. How very lucky we are to live in a time where more and more, that's exactly what we're getting. It's a lot of things, but it's never boring.

When I reach the bottom of the subway stairs, three men unpeel themselves from the wall and approach me. They’re appallingly tall, larger than me in all respects, their shoulders hulking around their ears. Words are exchanged; I don’t quite remember what they were. I wait for threats, demands for my money, hate speech, but none of it comes. They just want to be vaguely intimidating, needling me toward some unknown outcome.

I pet my pockets, pretend to have forgotten something, trot back up the stairs and come down again on the flight at the other side of the station. They follow me, tracing my path from underground to reappear in my way, smirking as they poke holes in what I thought was cleverness. It’s a little scarier now, a little more serious, but I still don’t understand what they want.

I think, If I weren’t trans I would know how to handle this. There must be some kind of male choreography in place, some layout of steps I would have learned in childhood if I’d been raised a boy. As is, I have no idea how they’d like me to respond. All they want is to be men at me, and there’s some man thing they want in return. I’m five feet tall, 100 pounds; I can’t imagine they’d be satisfied with fighting me, and they have a laconic air that suggests beating me up would be taking things too far. I stutter, fidget, and then I guess I ruin things: I leave the station altogether without pretense, just turning around and hurrying away. The game breaks at this point, there’s in-group laughter and gay slurs, and I walk several miles to the next station not so much scared as embarrassed, like I failed a test I should have studied for.

Much like in the real world, I don’t understand most men’s bodies in games. Given the option, I almost always play as a girl, a fact that baffled two of my roommates, both trans women, when they caught me playing Shadowrun. They both love character creators, and they spend hours laboring over bodies that feel good to them, while I tend to feel disappointed in whatever options are available to me. The men’s bodies given to you in most games are tall and broadly-muscled, designed with all the elegance of tanks. They’re idealized and innately powerful, adorned with grim faces chiseled onto neckless heads. Apart from games like Saints Row, these bodies come in a limited range of templates, and while I can change brow depth and hair color to my heart’s content, I always end up with the fantasy body of a cis man.

It’s a particular arrangement of shapes that never quite feels right, because it’s not the body I have nor the body I necessarily want. These bodies and their choices lack nuance; they move in a straight line, uncritically applying their will to the things around them via bombs and guns and barks, tough enough to take it and strong enough to dish it back. There can be a pleasure in this, of course, and being seated in the body of a woman in games like this feels like hanging out with a cool friend, but there are no options that feel like me. These bodies are both foreign and too close to home, like I’m tagging at the heels of an older brother who didn’t want to invite me along. Like the men in the subway, these bodies have expectations of me I can’t fulfill, and this brings out an insecurity I don’t usually feel. In my daily life I’m seldom concerned with “how much of a man” I am, but shooter men remind me that however much it is, it isn’t enough.

The bodies in stealth games are different. In most cases the biggest fantasy they embody is having astonishingly reliable knees; otherwise they tend to be smaller, "weaker", not necessarily good at fighting. Sam Fisher has gray hair; Volume’s Rob sounds like an emo teenager pretending to know what band is on stage to impress his friends. Without the bombast of shooter bodies to draw your eyes to explosions, stealth bodies are often adorned with little nuances: Garrett’s hands dance over the edges of paintings and the wheels of safes; Mark of the Ninja’s ninja swoops, dangles, slides, and crouches with luxurious elegance.

Machete arms aside, I’m probably more in love with the body of Adam Jensen in Deus Ex: Human Revolution than any other pre-made video game boy, and sometimes I’ll go into cover just so the camera will switch to third person so I can stare at him. There’s something about his wiry, black-clad frame that makes me feel like I imagine my roommates feel when they craft their perfect avatar. I’m enamored of this body made of unwanted machinery and dystopian tech, potent but fallible, able to run out of power if I use it incorrectly. Within his legible, relatable template there’s room to make his body my own, and I usually put all of my points into stealth upgrades that make Adam and me nonlethal, invisible, computer-savvy. I build a body I can steer silently and gracefully through doors and past turrets, outwitting guards so subtly they never even know I’m there.

In many ways navigating space in a stealth game feels similar to my daily life as a trans man. As someone who spends a lot of time in cis gay male spaces, there’s a ritualized literacy I apply when doing something like entering a new bar for the first time. The biggest focus is usually the bathroom situation—is there a toilet in a stall? Does the stall have a door? Does the door close and/or lock?

Then there’s the people around me, the kinds of men I’ll be asked to encounter. Is this a bar where they will step aside to let me pass, or will I have to push through a sea of elbows and hips? Are they the kind of men who are going to grope me without asking and then get angry at the conversation their hands will introduce? Are the kind of men who will block doorways if I try to leave, who will box me into corners when I put off their advances? I read a space for entrances and exits both architectural and interpersonal, signposts for steering through what should be but never is an innocuous evening out.

I’m always glad when cis allies do some of this for me, but I’ve also surprised cis friends by pointing out things in our spaces they’ve never noticed or thought about before. There’s a certain secret cartography to navigating the world as trans that imbues things with different pitfalls and possibilities, where I’m asked to see the world as a series of puzzles more than a place I get to live.

Stealth games can elevate the everyday necessity of those puzzles into something powerful, something new. The same way knowing the lay of the land at a bar rewards me with a nicer night out, learning the layout of a stealth level rewards me with an experience that feels unique and vivid. Reading a game level’s possibilities and finding its cracks makes me feel skillful and engaged, even if each option has been scripted by developers. There’s something personal in timing that jump to cover just right, an intimacy to learning patrol patterns and using them well. It feels like I don’t beat levels, but rather that I work with them, and the constant scanning and forecasting allows me to utilize what’s around me to engineer the best situation for myself, one that creates the least damage to everyone involved. A stealth level is full of treasure I can plunder, and it helps that the bodies I’m given for this task are ones I can relate to, imagine myself in, just like the possibilities they present.

The male bodies in shooters disrupt, beg for attention, decide how a situation will unfold. They storm in and take what they want, destroying everything in the single-minded pursuit of their desires. They are greedy, unpopular children, behaving in all the ways men are told we have to but can’t, all the ways that wreak havoc, big and small, on ourselves and those around us in the real world. Stealth bodies let me share in what is; they have the dexterity to repurpose what’s provided to my own ends. They let me cooperate with a situation, ask me to take into account all the moving parts and my role in them. The way men behave in stealth games feels closer to what I hope my own masculinity is: thoughtful, adaptable, aware of myself and my effect on the world around me. Shooter masculinities close off possibilities, make an enemy out of the world; stealth masculinities place me firmly in the world and let me nurture it into something new.

Walking to the next station after my subway encounter, I remember wondering what would have happened if I’d simply pointed out the absurdity of the entire situation, thrown up my hands and laughed to the men, “What the hell are we doing?” Nothing good, probably; I don’t think men talk honestly enough about our masculinity often enough to step back and look at how we wield it. We spend so much time looking at masculinity while looking through it, looking at where it’s going and not where it is.

Stealth bodies turn our focus to our place in the world and ask us where we want to go next and how and why we want to get there. They enable us to meet our needs while leaving everyone around us unharmed, paying attention to how we handle others and rewarding us for doing so with grace and care. They hold minimizing damage as a value and sharing space as a success.

Stealth masculinities feel closer to my own; they feel achievable to me, they feel like things I want in bodies I want to live in. Stealth games tell us there are other kinds of men to look like and other kinds of men to act like. They tell us that the world isn’t just a collection of oppositional objects to storm through, that people are more than enemies who output points. Stealth games may be carefully-crafted playgrounds, the things they tell us an illusion, but they give us a set of tools and trust we have the sensitivity, intelligence, and care to do the best we can with them. They tell us we don’t have to equate masculinity with brutality. They tell us we can be someone else. (with thanks to Todd Harper, Kira Breed, and Nick Scratch)

With the release of Super Mario Maker, Nintendo wants to encourage fans and players of all ages to try making their own game levels, opening this art to brand-new audiences.

But a good level is about more than placing familiar objects on the screen. To help you get started, we asked 7 professional game designers for their best level design tips. Whether you’ve never made a level before or you already have some experience making games, their easy-to-understand advice is sure to help you get on the right track.

1. Try structuring your level like a story

Many of the best Mario levels rely on narrative beats for structure. Start by drawing the player in with an inciting incident (a thwomp falling out of nowhere?)—it can include a key mechanic or theme that frames the rest of the level. Then, develop it.

Think of different ways to use the mechanic or theme, and then challenge the player to get better at dealing with it. (Multiple thwomps, thwomps between pits, thwomps on pipes?) Start simple, and only add complexity after the player has proven they understand.

Then, after you've built to the climax, try a third-act twist to cap off the level or turn the idea on its head. Make a joke (Thwomps pestering you all level? Have one fall into a pit!), invert the mechanic (Mario rides on top of the thwomps to the finish!), or try something different to make the last moments memorable.

—Lena Chappelle, game designer/composer, ArenaNet

2. Players should always know where they're supposed to be trying to go

Try using coins or other pickups as "breadcrumbs" to lead the player toward where you want them to go, or to hint at secret detours. Have people play your level often, so you can see exactly where players are likely to get lost or confused.

—Kim McAuliffe, senior designer

3. Use bottleneck moments (door frames, exiting a staircase/elevator, thin hallways, etc) to consider what information you are presenting to the player

These are rare moments where you know exactly where the player will be looking, so use it to your advantage to support the narrative and/or the gameplay objective.

—Beth Beinke-Schwartz, level designer

4. Even if your level is linear, you can never erase the player's feeling of being lost

Give hints and clues about the paths and choices available using things like color, lighting, or positioning in the frame/space. The goal is to make players feel smart because they chose correctly... even if there actually was only one path forward.

—Laralyn McWilliams, senior designer, producer and director

5. Think about relationships between objects, not just the objects themselves

Put some elements near each other, look for a fun interaction, and try to design a way for the player to discover it for themselves.

—Erin Robinson, game designer (Puzzlebots, Gravity Ghost)

6. Your level is probably too hard

You've played it dozens of times and you know the secret to beating it quickly. As you built your level, you might have started getting bored with your puzzles and you tweaked them to make them more interesting to you. By the time you finished designing the level, it's probably gotten too hard for everyone who hasn't already played it 100000000 times.

My old boss used to say, "Reduce difficulty by 30%. And if you think you've already done that, reduce difficulty by another 30%." Some frustration in games is needed, but too much frustration makes people quit. Try starting levels with a win or positive moment for the player—let them take on a few easy enemies, or do a couple satisfying hops that lead to a reward. That way, you earn the player’s trust before you start turning up the heat.

—Dana Nelson, Kinda Sweet Studios (formerly Lead Game Designer at Popcap and Lead Level Designer at Playfirst)

7. Build a lot, and then cull your collection

Become a curator for mechanics. Be prepared to trash about 1/3 of your ideas and content. If a puzzle or level doesn't give the player an "aha!" moment, ask yourself why you have kept it.

—Molly Proffitt, Ker-Chunk Games (PrinceNapped)

Listen, I know this is exciting. You've been playing Super Mario Bros in one form or another for most of your life, leaping hungrily for the fire flowers and invincibility stars that dot its levels like rare treats, each one parceled out with deliberate care. Getting them is like dealing with a parent who takes your bag of candy the day after Halloween and hands out one measly piece a day until it's gone.

But now all of that has changed. Super Mario Maker just came out on the Wii U, and now you can make and play your own Mario Bros levels, adding as many coins and stars and terrifying swarms of koopa troopas as you want. Want to design a level where stars rain from the sky like manna while a long string of coins spells out the word BUTTFACE? Then go for it, friend: You've finally got the key to the candy store, and the first impulse is to binge.

And hey, why not? The whole point of Super Mario Maker is that you finally get to sit in the driver's seat and design a ride that's as wild as you can imagine—and share it with other players around the world. The fan-made levels on offer through the game's "Course World" feel both exciting and even slightly profane compared to the hyperdeliberate worlds that we're used to seeing Mario inhabit, like bizarre video game fever dreams cooked up in the margin of some schoolkid's notebook.

But after spending a decent chunk of time playing Mario Maker levels crafted by fans—and feeling a bit of the transgressive start thrill wear off— I've found myself whispering the same thing over and over again at the fan designers:

Your Super Mario Maker levels have no chill.

Again, I totally get it. It's super fun to create a giant pyramid of Bowsers, for the same reason that it's fun to make 1-Ups mushrooms rain from the sky like manna: because you can. I did the exact same thing the moment I got my hands on the game; after all, this is what the thing I'd been dreaming about since I was a little kid redrawing Mario level maps in long, horizontal strips across the graph paper I got from school, imagining worlds where everything was stars, where nothing was off limits. But wish fulfillment alone does not make for a particularly good video game experience, and if you're actually trying to make an entertaining level as opposed to merely demonstrating your god-like power to make the goombas do your bidding, a better question is whether you should. The driving impulse behind many of the most popular fan levels is relentless overkill: packing every inch of the screen with bulletstorms of projectiles, onslaughts of enemies, and punishing gauntlets that offer almost no room to breathe.

The first few times you play through these sorts of kitchen sink fan levels, there's a fresh pleasure in seeing the familiar logic of Mario subverted, and replaced with joyous excess. Some levels, like Disco Fever, manage to channel the throw-it-all-at-the-wall sense of freedom into a miniature party that feels like a piñata in constantly bursting open all around you:

But not every party can be a rave, and after a while playing level after level of throw-it-all-at-the-wall zaniness gets tiring, and worse, kind of boring. There's a reason that Nintendo has gated some of the DIY goodies in Super Mario Maker, unlocking them for players over a series of days rather than all at once; it knows this is not a good idea.

In fairness, there's another reason for the jaw-dropping density on display in these levels, one that goes beyond the mere thrill of pulling as many toys as you can out of the toy box at once. Unlike the original games, where each level was a link in a much longer chain that could build on ideas, teach new skills evolve over time, Super Mario Maker levels are elevator pitches where you have to get in, wow the crowd, and get out. You're not writing a novel with distinct chapters, you're scripting a one-act play that has to say everything it wants to say before the player reaches the flagpole.

I'm excited to see how the level creating community evolves over time, which it surely will, especially after the initial excitement wears off. I've seen at least one player making levels that intended to be played in sequence (with the familiar labels 1-1, 1-2, 1-3) and particularly if talented fan creators develop followings of their own, there's no reason they can't experiment with longer form experiences.

But if you're creating a single serving affair, consider slowing your roll: throwing everything and the kitchen sink into a level often isn't innovative so much as it is cacophonous and confusing, and has a way of devaluing both challenge and reward. When your level is an endless rain of power-ups or one long parade of Mario's most difficult enemies marching through the level three deep, the thrill dissipates—and more starts to feel like less.

Certainly, there's a special pleasure in subverting the traditional expectations of the Mario games with unexpected twists; you could even argue that it's the whole point of Super Mario Maker. I've seen more than one clever take on the classic 1-1 stage, where all the familiar power-ups are replaced with traps, and Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi made a Mario Maker level of his own that opens by dropping the game's final boss Bowser directly in front of you from the get-go. And, nothing is wrong with the occasional disco.

Some of the best fan-made levels are also the ones that use the building blocks of Mario to do something entirely different: to create a labyrinth, build a impromptu shooting gallery, or design a level that feels like bouncing around in bumper cars.

But if's also worth learning the basic grammar of traditional Mario games so that you can understand exactly what it is you're subverting—and which fundamental elements of the games are probably worth keeping around. We recently collected a series of tips from seven different game developers, and Super Mario World book from the Reverse Design series has a lot of insights into what it calls the cadence of a level, the way challenges are introduced to the player, and how they progress and evolve in difficulty.

Even in levels that feel breathless and dangerous, it notes that challenges tend to "begin and end in safety," offering the player moments to breathe so that they don't get too exhausted and frustrated. Many levels also begin with a "training wheels" challenge that introduces the player to a certain skill or idea very simply before expanding on it in more complex and deadly ways. While the temptation, particularly in the done-in-one context of Super Mario Maker is to turn the volume up to 11 and leave it there, there's a lot to be said for starting more quietly and building to a crescendo.

Some of the most popular levels on Super Mario Maker are auto-play or "press forward" levels, where all you have to do is push right on the gamepad and Mario will automatically be propelled through a Rube Goldberg machine of wild jumps and terrifying threats that seem terrifying to negotiate, but you're catapulted through with ease. Think of them like rollercoasters: you simply strap in and ride the ride. Although they're more like performance art than actual play, they're designed around a very precise understanding of how Mario moves in different contexts, and that's knowledge worth learning.

The more you can learn about momentum and distance, the better; figuring out how fast and how far Mario can run and jump is essential to understanding the grammar of the game. If there's a Mario level you really love, either from the original games or from Super Mario Maker, it's not a bad idea to rebuild it yourself from scratch to get a feel for how it works. How much space does it leave the player to breathe? How narrow can the passages be without accidentally trapping the player? How far apart are the platforms, and how long of a runway does Mario need to make a certain jump? Become fluent in these mechanics, and you'll be able to say all kinds of things with your levels that you couldn't before.

The Mario level design analyses by Anna Anthropy are also instructive, particularly when it comes to analyzing how deliberate design with a small number of resources can be much more compelling than extravagance. Her analysis of the first few screens of the classic 1-1 Super Mario Bros level is fascinating, as is her deep dive into a brief section of a pyramid level in Super Mario Land:

As she notes, the pyramid offers an implicit choice: you can either proceed upward through a safer path as a bigger, powered-up version of Mario, or depower yourself to a smaller, more vulnerable Mario to reach a treasure trove of coins and power-ups. Even the tiny pit at the far end of the miniature treasure trove is carefully placed, threatening to swallow the mushroom that emerges from the question block if you don't grab it fast enough. It communicates all these decisions, challenges and threats in a single screen, using only a handful of the simplest elements in the Mario universe. It builds on the information that the player already has about the world of Mario—the same sort of knowledge we can assume about Super Mario Maker players—and it builds something new on that foundation.

"Good level design often accomplishes several things simultaneously – it does so using a handful of basic building blocks that are already known to the player," writes Anthropy. "Concise design doesn’t introduce new game elements needlessly: an element that the player’s already encountered already has meaning to her, and she understands its implications."

One of the quickest ways to encourage innovation is to limit your options, and chances are the final product will be a lot more interesting—and more fun for the potential legions of other people who may find themselves playing a world of your design.

In poetic terms, Mario Maker is an exercise in free verse, and with almost nothing to constrain you, it's tempting to dump as many bells and whistles as you can on to the page. But try something more like haiku instead: limit yourself to only a small number of items, enemies and ideas, and try to make something elegant within those constraints. If all you want to do is mess around, then none of this really matters. But if you want to make the kind of level that will win the hearts of the Miiverse, then resist the siren song of overkill, start simple, learn the basics—and then get creative.

DAN: Kate! I don't know what they're feeding you in Europe but don't you think it's time that you came home?

KATE: But my mission still isn't finished!

DAN: To hell with your mission! I don't know why you accepted it in the first place!

Throughout her transcontinental train journey, into ever-stranger lands not found on any map, lawyer Kate Walker’s charmingly 90s-style mobile phone keeps her tethered to a less enchanted world. Sometimes that phone is necessary to solve a puzzle, but much more often it’s used to keep her in touch with people, like her fiancé Dan, back in New York who are increasingly distant from Kate and the rapidly expanding boundaries of her world.

B. Sokal’s 2002 adventure game Syberia is about Kate’s metamorphosing mission to find the lost heir to an Alpine toy company, whose signature she desperately needs in order to close a sale to the conglomerate, Toy Co. that’s retained her law firm’s services.

Kate arrives in the village where the small company is headquartered. Briefcase in hand, swaddled in a trench-coat, Kate's surrounded by the curtain of rain dripping from her umbrella. The weather wept for the death of Anna Voralberg, whose death precipitated the change of ownership that Kate Walker was sent to formalise.

But, it turns out, there’s an heir out there—Voralberg’s long-lost brother, Hans. Spurred by this revelation, Kate takes a clockwork train, heading east in to the unknown, with an automaton conductor, Oscar, at her side (don’t you dare call him a robot). They grow close, riffing on each other, a platonic double-act on rails, speeding into the mist.

Along the way, on one of many phonecalls, she tells her increasingly fretful mother: “Looking for Hans Voralberg is what I'm being paid for, but I also just want to find him for myself.”

Somewhere in forgotten lands between the Alps and Siberia I began to realize that the game I was playing was not just an enchantingly obtuse puzzle-based adventure title, but a covert how-to-manual for ending a bad relationship. Indeed, Syberia can be read as an extended parable about women's independence, and it’s through her phone that Kate tells that story.

* * *

If video games could be dusty old tomes, Syberia might well qualify as a discovery on a forgotten bookshelf.

Poverty kept it from me back in 2002, when it was first released. A decade later, however, the urge to recover lost artifacts of a never-happened childhood drove me to download Syberia from Steam. After adjusting to its obsolete standard-definition screen resolution, I was immediately lost in Kate’s adventure. The story is a steampunk fantasy with a bored New York lawyer, dressed in jeans and a windbreaker, heading off to points unknown—and not just to fulfill her demanding boss’ dictates, but to see what lies beyond the horizon.

What makes it so interesting is that it uses its through-the-looking-glass conceit to tell a rare story of a woman’s growth, of Walker shaking herself free of her ossified city life.

In her first phonecall from Dan, he upbraids her for not being able to attend a dinner party with one of his clients because of the sudden extension of her business trip. You are not given the sense that this is a reciprocal relationship, and Walker comes to realise this for herself as she travels.

To progress, you do what you do in any good adventure game: solve complex puzzles and explore. From a decaying university to creaking cosmodromes and rusting Soviet factories, age and desolation flow outwards from the railtracks that guide Walker’s journey. Like a bright, speeding spark, she summons life from each of these derelict calling points. But here the relationship is reciprocal. What Kate gives to the places she visits, she receives in return: vivification, a new lease on life.

This realization—that life need not be entirely about self-sacrifice, and that she can determine her own course while still doing good—drives her on and comprises the throughline fable of the game. In the words of Louisa May Alcott, Kate learns that “liberty is a better husband than love to many of us.”

Reciprocity is the shape of liberty here. Just as Kate helps Helena Romanski, an aged opera diva in a desolate dacha, to rediscover her voice, so too does Romanski help Kate find hers. The Russian soprano is found thanks to Kate placing a phonecall home to her mother and discovering she was “entertaining” another retired opera singer who happened to know Romanski. Here, the need to solve a puzzle intertwines directly with the growth of Kate’s character; even as she begs off details of her mother’s successful date, she seems thereafter inspired by her mother’s adventurous example, which would no doubt have scandalised her fiancé and coworkers.

But for Kate, her rebellion is about freeing herself from her love life; each phone call finds her more distant from home not just in miles, but in spirit as well. She realises Dan has precious little interest in her work and seems to want her back in New York as a fixture of normality rather than anything else. She attempts to involve him in her adventures, describing the beauty of the aged sights on her travels, such as “an extraordinary train station-aviary” in the town of Barrockstadt. “If only you could see it,” she says. Dan hardly cares. It’s not long after a loving description of trees and exotic birds that he says “to hell with your mission!”

To Kate’s credit, she doesn't back down. When Dan follows up his Luciferian wish with a plea to “put yourself in my shoes,” she replies:

“Your shoes? Not only do I have to fit myself into your diary but I’ve got to get myself into your shoes as well? Is there anywhere else sir would like me to put myself now we’re on the subject?”

Her journey to find the mysterious Hans Voralberg, whose automata and clockwork inventions dot the countryside, isn’t even half done at that point.

* * *

What happens in the end, of course, is inevitable. But the breakup is no flaming thing. It sibilates out of existence, a distant echo barely heard, via satellite, across the vastness between her and Dan.

There was a grace and maturity to it that struck me; in the hands of a lesser writer, this subplot would’ve rendered Kate Walker a jealous hysteric. Instead, when she discovers that her best friend Olivia (who also calls her, mostly, to defend Dan) had begun an affair with him in Kate’s absence, she is merely contemplative because she has come to know herself. She recognizes that her feelings have moved on.

Her mission was initially spurred on by the demands of her law firm, but Kate admits that this became a convenient excuse to pursue something greater. Something more than a grubby business deal was pulling her towards Syberia.

By this time she’s brought automata to life, launched a spaceship, rescued both Oscar and Helena Romanski in a daring escape, and finds herself intrigued by the eponymous Syberia—a lost icy island where wooly mammoths still roam. Dan did not want to be a part of that life, the kind of life so rarely lived by women in video games: one where she grows.

Time and again, Dan and Olivia’s phonecalls remark with worry and disgust that Kate seems “changed” by her time in Europe; she’s shed her lethargy like an old coat and her zeal for her railway journey blazes. But the fire she displayed throughout much of the game’s correspondence has now become a tightly focused light leading her into the unknown, and in her final call with Dan, she says to him calmly: “I know this trip has taken me far from New York and far away from the Kate you once knew. And you know what surprises me the most? I don’t miss it.”

“Maybe,” she continues, “we’ve just realized we don’t really love each other, Dan.”

After Kate hangs up she dynamites a mighty, masculine steel giant blocking the train-tracks forward.

Sometimes heavy-handed symbolism is just what the moment calls for.

The clown ambles through a pale, sweet but cheerless city, where residents mope, mourn and preach to the sidewalks, lost in their troubles. The clown wants to give them hugs. They all hate clowns. https://youtu.be/It72E3EbJNk

I've never understood our cultural fear of clowns. From the time I was small I've felt the twang of empathy for the painted, mournful funnymen, the way their bright-colored clothing seemed to contrast with the work of earnest self-humiliation—pies in the face, squirting flowers, falling down—for laughs. My French grandmother gave me a porcelain mime figure whose cheek was painted with a tear. I would stare at it til I felt like crying myself.

The game is called Dropsy, after an old-timey term for heart-related water retention, and stars a large nonverbal clown apparently of the same name, who constantly grins as if he were in pain. Any place he may lie down to sleep, he has strange dreams. It's a "point and click adventure" in the loose sense—you explore the world and resolve problems by coupling objects with destinations or people—but it feels to me more like exploring an emotional landscape, sketched in the colors of sidewalk chalk, at some turns touching and at others grotesque and sad.

When you start the game in Dropsy's tent, you see things set out for the birthday of a girl we assume is his only friend, a crayon drawing he has made her for an annual gift. Your first goal is to bring her present to the graveyard where you're told she can be found. Oh. She's in the graveyard. Right.

There are no words in the game. Even when you think there ought to be, like when there are signs to read or when messages of success and reward flash on the screen, the language is invented and unfamiliar, words and letters like alien balloon-animals twisted together before your eyes. The downcast citizens of Dropsy's town express themselves in visual shorthand that cycles through speech bubbles over their heads: They feel blue, they are lonely, hungry, too hot, bored, stoned. They will often "say" a picture of Dropsy's face with a great DO NOT circle and cross over it. Authority figures ward Dropsy away with angry squiggles and bright, intransible exclamations.

This means figuring out the needs of others is part of the game's gentle puzzle. The music, a sort of unusual pastel jazz (by the wonderful Chris Schlarb), is perfect: It wholly captures the melancholy of having only a simple person's small hope in a big world full of twinkie devourers, expensive prescriptions and do-not-enter signs. The sun also moves across the sky as you explore, meaning sometimes it is dawn or daytime, and sometimes it is evening or late at night. Characters move and obstacles appear and disappear depending on the time period; the lady preacher you find in the church by day can be found smoking lonesomely atop the children's slide in the playground at night.

I keep on hearing Dropsy described as "creepy" or "weird". I think those are generally off-putting descriptors, as they sometimes suggest the "lol so random" school of humor, or the unconsidered "gross for its own sake" aesthetic. But the game is neither of these. In fact, it put me wonderfully in mind of the animation and aesthetics of the early to mid-1990s. The neon slime anxiety of Nickelodeon GUTS, the vivid too-fast-for-grownups headache of Sonic the Hedgehog or the $7.99 mall goth looks of Hot Topic were what youthful rebellion looked like when it was packaged to sell, but much of that decade's art had reasons for intending to offend.

As a child, MTV's late-night Liquid Television animation bloc (recently revived!) was squicky, forbidden viewing. You and your friends were supposed to be in bed, not guiltily watching Beavis and Butt Head hit a frog with a baseball bat, skinny limbs with high socks flailing. The early Aeon Flux cartoons, about a grotesque and non-conforming revolutionary woman, were haunting and silent. The Maxx was a hulking, impenetrable anti-hero in a world where depression, stalkers and the threat of sexual violence were hard-scribbled plot points. In The Head, a pallid milquetoast harbored a socially-defiant and generally-disgusting alien inside his skull.

In each of these cartoons, and in so many of the music videos that aired luridly past midnight among them, the lewd and the gross elements were acts of defiance against what was perceived to be the economic complacency of the 1990s. The stability that Baby Boomers had worked for in the 1980s was rejected by their 1990s children, who used concepts like shopping, self-esteem, the military and good grades as comic launchpads for messages about non-conformity. The hippie teacher who preached positive thinking, the mall-worshipping cheerleader, the career-woman mom, the furious authority figure, were all the butt of the joke.

The era's fashionable anger concealed the mundane truth that most 90s kids were just bored and lacked direction, overwhelmed by all that parenting and the sinister message that You Can Do Literally Anything. The flannel shirts of those days prized their angst and ennui, took a certain enjoyment in being disenfranchised. Characters like Enid Coleslaw of Ghost World or Daria, the star of the cartoon of the same name, were seen as ideologically purer, somehow, than their bubblegum fellow citizens, even when their abrasive personality traits often left them ostracized.

In Dropsy, the vaguely gross clown plays the role of the "pure one"; while others sit on the stoop and bemoan religion and hunger, dream about aliens and prescription drugs (a distinctly '90s thing to do), he earnestly seems to want to solve problems, give hugs, and take pleasure in gentle images.

When Dropsy's shameless farts trumpet from dirty toilets there is a purpose to that grossness; you feel sad for him and the ways that he and his parachute pants stuffed with crayon drawings, flowers and sandwiches to share clearly do not belong in this city full of preoccupied humans.

Are clowns the ultimate emblem of the way sometimes laughing and crying feel like the same kind of thing? Are we scared of them because we're scared of the contradictions human feelings can contain? Whether you like clowns or strongly do not, Dropsy is a strange and delightful space to ask the question.

Dropsy, by Tender Shoot and Jolly Corpse, published by Devolver Digital, is $8.99.

The world is dark save for a faint horizon. You can hear a low, sonorous hum, a wavelength of music lying low, waiting to be born. You gently nudge one single node, and thin spines of light twinkle into being along a rolling hill. With them, color enters the sound you hear; you touch another node, and the suggestions of alien clouds sprout in your sky, bringing with them a low and laughing bass impression. Turn the sparkle up, and the thin spines along the landscape sprout into something like flowers.

To call Panoramical a "music visualizer" would be doing it a disservice. The widely-anticipated new project by David Kanaga and Fernando Ramallo is practically synesthetic, treating sound as a place to explore and customize. Each portal you enter is a different sonic landscape, and you have nine components under your fine control. One might weave a choral hum through your world of bright lights and ticking beats—will it be full-throated or thin, soft or loud?

As you decide on the hue of the tone, visual elements melt and evolve before your eyes; you are traveling through the song you are weaving, or you are painting a picture using complex and beautiful noises. The visuals offer just enough familiar hooks that you always feel essentially like you are looking at a world, a place. There is the suggestion of a storm over the ocean, clouds trumpeting and congesting together. Colored streamers in a garden, or perhaps they are little red fish playing over a pond. It is more than "making music" or "creating your own song", as you experiment with the intensity of different sonic elements. At times it defies description—I reach for words to try to describe the Panoramical "levels" I played, and there are none. Is "played" the right word, or did I "make" or "find" instead?

Musician David Kanaga's game projects generally prefer to defy description. He is perhaps best known for his work on the award-winning Proteus, a simple, sonic procedural adventuring space that produced something like outrage from video game formalists. That game is defined by its gentle defiance; afterward, Kanaga worked on Dyad, a sort of musical tunnel racer that I found as intense and terrifying as a bad trip. Dyad's famous final stage blurs into a shrieking convergence of speed and light, more music visualizer than "video game", and Panoramical, in many ways, picks up where it left off.

Panoramical, too, will instill in you a healthy fear of sound. Sometimes its elements are too intense, overwhelming, dissonant, like the bite of an orange with a strong cheese alongside, and the visuals throb like the aura of a migraine. It feels as if you're always on the verge of tumbling into the center of a star, and in a sense there is a "challenge" there, to use your ear, to forge through those dark places.

But then also comes the delight in being able to command a cream-colored blanket of lunar craters to lie over the sound of jangling nerves—it's all up to you. When you need a break, you can turn down every node but one, watch a single element sparkle mutely.

Although you can take snapshots of your audible lands, it seems there's no formal way to record your creations, which gives these "places" a wonderful, deeply-touching transience. You "enter" each through a pinhole of light on a sort of abstract radio dial, and when you're finished you withdraw— as you watch the world you created pull and retreat away from you, you are aware you will never visit that precise configuration again.

Panoramical, which features levels by renowned collaborators like Baiyon, doesone, Jukio Kallio and others, is available on PC and Mac for a very modest and worthy $9.99. There is also an exclusive edition for DJs who want to use Panoramical's soundscapes and visuals in their performances, and a limited 18-dial controller has also been produced. For purchase and further information go here.

Like a lot of roleplaying games, Undertale asks you to become a child. When you fall down a hole into an underworld populated with monsters, your path seems clear: set off on a brave journey across a hostile land, destroy the evil monsters you meet along the way, and emerge a hero.

Then, almost immediately, you meet a monster who doesn't want to fight. Its name is Whimsum and it is very frightened, ready to burst into tears at the mere sight of you. So it's your choice, hero: do you spare it or cut it into pieces?

Welcome to Undertale, a game where every battle is a choice between the complex morality of compassion, and the simplicity of the sword.

Other monsters you encounter are more aggressive, but just as complicated. One is simply depressed, weeping tears that drip down the screen and wound you drop by drop. One is deeply insecure and just wants someone to laugh at its jokes. One lovingly coats you in lava, believing for all the world that its fiery ministrations are healing you. Another, you're told, simply has a hard life.

Whatever else a monster is in this world, it's also a person, and every foe you encounter has its own fears, anxieties, and dreams. Maybe they're attacking you, as bullies and trolls often do, because they're hurting as well. Or maybe they're attacking you because they've always been told that monsters and humans are enemies, and that they're supposed to kill each other. But hey, isn't that why you're fighting them too?

You can try to talk to them, to understand and defuse the problems that are drawing them into the conflict, or you can kill them. But choose wisely: violence has consequences, and the damage you do as make your way through the world will not go unnoticed; even hitting the reset button may not be enough to wipe it clean. And ignoring the pain of others is its own sort of damage, and will leave its own ripples across the interpersonal landscape of the game.

Undertale was originally funded on Kickstarter, where developer Toby Fox crowd funded over $50,000 for his pitch: a role-playing game where no one has to get hurt. The game is deeply influenced by Earthbound, the bizarre and beloved 1994 Super Nintendo RPG about a team of children who save the world from a malevolent alien force.

Fox, who also wrote the impressive soundtrack, tells me by email that Undertale was inspired by the Japanese roleplaying game Shin Megami Tensei as well. "It always interested me that you could talk to monsters to avoid conflicts," said Fox. "But the conversations were often kind of repetitive, and if you screwed them up, fighting became your only option. I wanted to create a system that satisfied my urge for talking to monsters, more or less."

While Earthbound has a well-deserved reputation for being funny and weird, Undertale is both funnier and weirder; every screen feels packed with new ideas, jokes, and odd little character notes, as though it were was the result of an intense brainstorming session where the outcome was always "screw it, let's use it all."

Despite the retro feel, it's much in a 21st century game, and not just because it's metatextually aware of its predecessors. One of the first items you receive in the game is a mobile phone, which allows the characters you meet to call you throughout your adventure. Later on, you can even receive text messages and read social media updates, which feel so tonally on point that it's hard to believe they weren't ripped straight from Twitter.

Like Earthbound, it's determined to subvert expectations about roleplaying games, taking the established tropes of the genre and turning them upside down with parodies, fakeouts and unexpected left turns. Many, if not most of the puzzles in the game aren't puzzles so much as they are jokes about puzzles, and even the battles often feel like interactive gags; the highlight of the game is a romantic interlude, where you essentially have a battle date with a foe turned love interest.

But beware: there's a surprising depth of feeling beneath the humor, and it can go from rimshots to ruthlessly sad at the drop of a hat. Both violence and non-violence are negotiated through the same menu based battle system; of you choose violence you "fight"; if you choose non-violence, you "act." The terminology feels meaningful. Refusing to attack your opponent isn't a passive decision, but an active one that requires just as much strategy to execute successfully, if not more.

When you defend against attacks, a small screen will pop up where you play a mini-game and navigate a small red heart to avoid a series of projectiles. They're often thematic (a frog enemy might accost you with a swarm of flies) and if you face multiple foes at the same time they combine together in elaborate and deadly patterns.

"Violence is, by nature, a one-size-fits-all solution in most games," says Fox. "For menu-based pacifism to be equally fun, it has to be more complicated."

Shortly before I started playing the game, I watched a YouTube video of a little boy at a party, facing a Spider-Man piñata. Someone has given him a bat to beat it into pieces, but he can't quite seem to bring himself to do it. Instead, after gently tapping the hollow hero a few times with the end of the bat, he finally drops the weapon to the ground and envelops it in a hug. Undertale feels a lot like that. Or at least, it does if you want it to.

You're a child in Undertale as well, and in one town you meet another child—a monster, of course—who becomes your friend and pops up throughout your journey. When he learns that you're a human, and by all rights his mortal foe, he seems unable to muster the xenophobic loathing he knows he's supposed to feel.

"I guess that makes us enemies or something," he sighs. "Can you say something mean so that I can hate you?" He doesn't want to, really. He just doesn't feel like he has a choice.

Many of the battles you find yourself drawn into are consequences of other violent or cruel acts from the past, and if you do choose to kill the monsters you encounter, know that it will have long-lasting consequences as well.

Yes, the monsters who attack you can hurt you, even kill you. But even if you strike back, that doesn't necessarily mean you have to finish the job; once they've been wounded, you have the option to let them run away. Maybe no jury would convict you, maybe you tell yourself it's self-defense. But do you really want to conduct yourself like a walking version of some shitty video game Stand Your Ground law, or do you aspire to something better?

After all, the fundamental premise of the game is that no monster you encounter is so committed to attacking you that they can't be talked out of it. So what do you really accomplish by killing them?

The simple answer is that you gain experience points and levels and power, much as the little boy would gain candy from cracking open the piñata body of his papier maché friend. This is the way most roleplaying games are set up: with systems that demand we destroy the people and things around us in order to accomplish our goals. Maybe they're even on quests of their own, or have their own promises to fulfill.

Fox says that when some people first hear about Undertale, they feel "defiant of this perceived obligation to play non-violently. I have seen a lot of people say 'well, I'm just going to kill everyone anyway! They're just video game characters!'" When they actually play the game, however, their contrarianism doesn't always work out the way they planned, or at least feel as satisfying as they hoped.

Recently, I recommended Undertale to the biggest Earthbound fan I know, though he initially seemed nonplussed by the idea of non-violence. "I want to fight though," he said, "because I am a warrior!" I thought about that a lot as I played through Undertale, a game that seems designed precisely to challenge that notion.

We love stories about heroes because we love to see ourselves as the heroes of our own story; more often than not we define heroism not by how we rise to meet difficult circumstances, but by how many villains we destroy.

And so we create villains—pinatas, rather than people—who are so de facto evil that they deserve no empathy, and we create systems and stories that give us seemingly no choice but to strike them down. We do it in games, we do it in our political and religious and cultural conflicts, and we do it in our lives.

Undertale interacts with its world through a battle system in part to expose the willful, jingoistic lie that stories and systems like this so often conceal: that violence is the only solution to conflict, that committing it makes us stronger, and that the people we attack are worthy of whatever harm we wish to inflict.

During the introduction to the game, we're offered a pithy backstory for the feud that ended with the humans trapping the monsters beneath the earth, one that feels torn from the pages of the victor's history book. We're told that humans and monsters once lived side by side until "one day, war broke out between the two races." It's the sort of passive construction that aspires to objectivity but mostly just conceals agency, at least until you start digging deeper.

Your most persistent antagonist, an imposing warrior named Undyne, hunts you throughout the game because she believes that your life—and specifically, your death—might be the key to the salvation of her people. She might be right. Who's to say her quest is any less noble than yours?

"We all know deep down that freedom is coming, don't we?" muses an anthropomorphic rabbit who runs an item shop, as you peruse her wares. She dreams quietly of the day when the barrier with the human overworld will fall and monsters will finally walk in the sun again.

Who's to say they shouldn't?

Undertale is on sale at Steam for Windows and Mac, and there's a free demo if you'd like to try it out.

A fateful and illicit meeting of the minds in 1945 Leningrad between the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin left a lasting impression on both. So much so, in fact, that Akhmatova dubbed her English colleague her “guest from the future,” a man who brought ideas from a world beyond the stultified hell of the Soviet Union.

There was a gloomy scent to the phrase, one very characteristic of Akhmatova’s unique style, and it seems well suited to a cute blue robot who brings tidings of their own through the medium of a videogame. Turing, the protagonist of Midboss’ newly released Read Only Memories 2064, is a guest from an all-too-credible future— one as layered as Akhmatova’s own thoughts about her time. (more…)

I don't think my mother ever expected to have such a wild daughter as me. She's an accountant, and we have nothing in common. Maybe because of that, I hang onto what little I know of her teen years in the 1970s like flowers pressed in a book: Her summers in a seaside town, hitchhiking along the road at night with her troublemaker friend. The time my grandfather came to pick her up from the rest stop where she'd gone to hang out with boys, and how he thundered with disapproval.

Those are really the only stories I know about her childhood, except for the one where my grandmother forced her to wear a wool dress she despised. I don't know what it would have been like to become a woman right when Summer of Love was ending, with the roulette wheel of the road and strangers' cars your only real way out. Even now our instinct is to think that cars are usually for men. Video games about driving? Always for men.

But there is so much more about cars than driving; maybe it's better to say there is so much more to driving than just the car. I do remember when I got a car of my very own for the first time, and printed out a Google map—how powerful I felt that I could drive down the eastern seaboard to go visit a boy. Because I was a girl, a car meant more than simply an ordinary stage on some common, anticipated ascent to social power, the same way the red eyes of a vehicle slowing on a seaside road at night were more than just lights for my mother. They were a beckoning flicker; they were a secret her daughter would come to know years later. https://youtu.be/KDT6b3RR2AM

Wheels of Aurelia is a driving game that is about that more. You are androgynous, mischief-lipped Lella, driving on the famous Via Aurelia from Rome to the French Riviera in 1978. Along with you is Olga, a femme you met recently at a disco. At the beginning of your trip she asks you why you invited her. You can ask her, if you want, why she accepted.

As the Via Aurelia curls and sprawls, Lella and Olga get to know each other, pick up hitchhikers, and get into road races. You as the player have two tasks: First, abstractly, to drive, which you can mostly do one-handed. It feels like being an adult woman, to drive one-handed, smoothly with the mouse. Most of your attention, the other hand, will be on the dialogue. Everyone, from Olga herself to the patchwork characters you may pick up along the way, wants to talk to Lella—they are drawn to her in the way people tend to seek out the queerest woman in the club—easy to speak to because she is "other", easy to experiment on, the receptacle for the car crash of anxiety and identity politics that come from being "a woman in the Pope's country", as Lella herself sometimes puts it.

Your choices for Lella's dialogue tend to be pleasingly subtle, mimicking the pall of delicate anxiety that can overhang people trapped in the same car for hours. You pick up a man who swears he's seen the Pope in a UFO. Your choices are not merely to "accept or reject" this person, but to make the elegant distinction between cheerfully affirming him and politely nodding along. As his behavior escalates, taking his side begins to feel genuinely radical, like a protest against a flawed mental healthare system, like shouting out the car window—who gets to decide whose strangeness is all right and whose isn't?

After all, you have yet to learn why Lella herself is on the road, what secrets her past contains. You can let this hitchhiker call you "Mamma". You can promise him, gently, that you will not take him back there.

All of Wheels of Aurelia asks you to consider your political attitude. Olga, the girl you like, says she can't be a feminist because she wears skirts. She might only be joking, and you can only joke back—either warmly, or with an unkind aftertaste. Eventually a sexist tough guy (Lella calls him only "prick") challenges your right to the road, and makes you race him. You and your straggling passengers, all of you trying to negotiate a complex, bittersweet and fundamentally unfair condition of life, talk as you press the accelerator. As you literally hurtle at breakneck speed for purchase against patriarchy.

Each session of Wheels of Aurelia is only about 15 or 20 minutes long, and will come to a natural end based on your decisions. There seem to be eight endings, but each session is different from the last, and you can have conversations in some games that feel suddenly new, no way to know how you unlocked them alongside the lawlessness of the road. Sometimes an encounter will interrupt what feels like a crucial dialogue point; you need to learn not to worry about the "flow" of the story, to embrace its risk of accident, of getting lost. Its jazz spontaneity liberates Wheels of Aurelia somewhat from the systematic feel that other choice-driven dialogue games have—last time I chose this, so this time I'll choose that instead—each trip is a brief flicker of curling road, of seawall and revving engine, a cigarette sometimes coming to Lella's lips, a rarely-seen flirtatious look. The wonderful original music—the insistent hiss of clanging drums, rock guitar, horns surging their punctuation—sounds out a life that almost feels like it could have been yours, in another time. If you had only been standing by the road in the right place.

In a nod to driving games of a different sort, you can even choose Lella's car every time you hit the Via Aurelia, and also add your three initials to a classic scoreboard with your completion times. But the driving hardly matters at all. I love Lella. If I'd known her I would have gone to France with her in a heartbeat.

Wheels of Aurelia is developed by Santa Ragione. You have just a few days left to buy it for pay-what-you-want as part of a remarkable Humble Weekly Bundle of indie games. If you do nothing else, vote for it on Steam Greenlight so it can be available there.

The first time I finished The Beginner's Guide, the newest game by The Stanley Parable creator Davey Wreden, I felt furious and sick and sad. I shut my laptop and walked around the block at three in the morning, half in tears, trying to figure out what I could possibly say about this game. When I came home, I wrote over 2000 words about it, and went to bed.

When I woke up, I played it again and came to a completely different conclusion and started over from scratch, which feels fitting. The Beginner's Guide is a game likes to make you question not just what it means, but whether you've been looking for meaning in games in the wrong way altogether.

On its face, this is an autobiographical story about Wreden's relationship with a game developer identified only as "Coda," and the events that unfolded in their lives between 2008 and 2011. If you've never heard of Coda, don't feel bad: no one has. Wreden describes him as a very private, even reclusive developer he met at a game jam in Sacramento, a prolific creator who never posted his games online and shared them only cautiously—perhaps even exclusively—with Wreden.

Although The Beginner's Guide revolves centrally around their friendship, you'll never see either of the men on screen. Instead, you learn about Coda the same way Wreden did: by playing his games. Each time you're dropped into one of Coda's small, strange world, Wreden takes you on a guided tour, narrating his interpretations of what the games mean and what they can tell us about the inner struggles of this enigmatic figure.

Wreden is openly obsessed with Coda's work, supposedly because they were a huge influence on his own games, though that doesn't feel like the whole story. He suggests that there is a grand, unified theory behind all of them, and that only by looking at them as a whole can we really understand their vision—or the man behind it.

This is a story about a game developer told by a game developer through games, so the mechanics of Coda's works matter a great deal. Indeed, at least some of what Wreden does is straight up game criticism, deconstructing the puzzles and labyrinths and long, lonely hallways—why they're designed the way they are, why they feel the way they do, what they signify.

In one game, you ascend a long, white staircase towards a door, but the nearer you get, the more you slow down until you're practically standing still. In another, you find yourself suddenly trapped in a prison cell, and have to wait an entire hour for it to open again. Wreden mercifully intercedes in these moments to modify the game in real-time and make it easier to navigate, observing this is "something we used to argue about a lot: whether a game ought to actually be playable."

There's an unpleasant sense of emotional entitlement that sometimes permeates Wreden's analysis, a sense that Coda's games are neither as accessible or transparent as he would prefer, as though something owed has not quite been delivered. Yes, Coda made these games for himself, and if they seem unwelcoming or unplayable, it's probably because they weren't meant to be played—that they aren't for us. But we're playing them anyway, and when you're contemplating the idea of sitting in a digital cell for an actual hour, it's hard not to feel a little grateful that Wreden is willing to compromise Coda's artistic vision.

It's your choice, of course: if you want to honor the intentions of Coda's games, you can always refuse Wreden's help and attempt things the hard way. Do the games mean more if you do? Does it mean anything at all if you do?

Another game in Coda's oeuvre, titled "This game is connected to the internet," supposedly allows online players to leave tiny messages scattered across the level in little bubbles for other people to find read. But—surprise!—the game isn't connected to the internet at all, and all the messages supposedly left by dozens of people were actually only written by one person: Coda.

To Wreden, these messages represent a sense of false or imagined community, and one that surely conveys a profound feeling of loneliness: he sees them as a personal invitation of sorts from Coda, a way to know him better, and maybe a way for both of them to connect and feel less lonely.

His narration cuts back and forth through each game like a knife through a layer cake, revealing what's happening mechanically, what he thinks Coda's trying to express, and what he believes this means about Coda as a person (and of course, about their friendship). While many of his analyses are very incisive, others arc towards the personal in ways that sometimes feel awfully presumptive.

Wreden says several times that he got to know Coda better through his games than he did by actually talking to him, and indeed, that he might even prefer it that way. "This idea is really seductive to me," he says, "that I could just play someone's game and see the voices in their head and get to know them better, and have to do less of the messy in-person socializing."

But exactly how much can you really tell about a person exclusively from the games or art they make? When is a puzzle a window into someone's soul, and when is just a puzzle—or at least a means of expressing something besides personal pathos?

I've met a lot of creators over the years, and sometimes it's true: there are moments when their fears and anxieties and desires end up mapped pretty closely to their fictional characters and fantastical worlds. Sometimes, if you know them well enough, you can see the shapes of their intimate agonies moving beneath the sheets of their creations, the less-than-subtle reasons why that love interest suddenly betrayed the hero, or why that particular city melted down in a fictional nuclear holocaust.

But it rarely works well in reverse. If you don't actually know someone, trying to reverse engineer a deep inner knowledge of their psyche simply by consuming their art is more akin to reading tea leaves than reading their diary. But we love to do it anyway, because it's a profoundly seductive idea: that every creative work could be a secret map into the heart and mind of someone you admire, if only you know how to read it right.

Wreden describes growing frustrated, sometimes, when Coda won't tell him exactly what the games "mean." Over and over, he inserts himself into the space between Coda and his games as an interpretive conduit, believing that if only he can discern the hidden meaning behind these abstruse worlds, then perhaps he will finally understand his friend. As though a person were a puzzle; as though a person could be solved.

It's difficult to tell at first exactly what The Beginner's Guide is supposed to be: a tribute, a eulogy, a motivational speech. Wreden says several times that Coda stopped making games in 2011 and that he hopes one day his old friend will create again. It's an impulse we see a lot on the internet these days, particularly in fan culture: the desire to write a paean so beautiful that it can bring the things we've lost back from the dead. And make no mistake, Wreden is Coda's number one fan. There are parts of this game that feel uncomfortably grasping, that want very badly to be a resurrection spell of sorts, though it takes a while to figure out exactly what has died—or why.

There's more to say about the game, but I can't say it without venturing into major spoilers, so if you haven't played it yet, stop now.

The first time I played the game, I felt ill, even angry after this revelation. It seemed like the game had made me unknowingly complicit in a huge violation of someone's privacy, one that I had no way of undoing. At the time, I was assuming—wrongly, I think—that the game told a true story, rather than a "true" one, that it depicted people and events in the real world rather than inventing characters plausible enough to make us suspend our disbelief.

The second time through, however, it felt a little different. Rather than a story about the relationship between two game developers, The Beginner's Guide started to read more plausibly as a relationship between a game developer and their audience, and the dangers of projecting too much onto art and the people that create it.

Rather than an estranged friend of Wreden, Coda makes more sense as an elaborate metaphor for every game developer who has to contend with overinvested fans, while "Wreden" represents the players and critics who insist that games conform to their ideas about accessibility, endlessly demand answers about a "deeper meaning," or worse, insist that they and they alone can peer through the window a game supposedly offers into the developer's soul and discover the truth.

But it's hard to look too deeply at The Beginner's Guide for too long without feeling a little self-conscious, because it is built on the sand of semiotic contradictions, and designed to shift beneath your feet. It insists upon being read as a personal story but resists that conclusion; it is intended to provoke analysis and emotional responses, while simultaneously rebuking players for analyzing games too intensely or too personally.

Maybe we're supposed to conclude that it doesn't matter, that by digging for the "truth" about Wreden and Coda as either players or critics, we transform ourselves into the same sort of point-missing voyeur "Wreden" reveals himself to be by the end. Or maybe we're supposed to conclude that saying too much about a game is a way of pinning down the butterfly of art with the needle of analysis, and that something is inevitably violated, or diminished, or lost when we do it. Maybe I'm doing exactly what the game is criticizing simply by trying to figure it out.

I'm still haunted by that initial feeling of complicity the game made me feel when I learned what was "really" going on, the sickening sense that I had harmed someone very deeply by participating in someone else's misinterpretation of a game. Projecting your own ideas onto an artist and a creative work—or seeking answers from them—is depicted as a selfish act, a stifling act, even a destructive one.

But as wrongheaded as it might be to assume that every story an artist tells is secretly the story of themselves, it's equally wrongheaded to assume that the best or only way for art to be understood is inside an echo chamber of its own voice. So much of the pleasure and insight I derived the game came not just from the moments when I played it, but the moments where I sought to interpret it, where I spoke about it with others, where I ultimately projected my own ideas about what it meant to me. While I may or may not be right—and it may or may not be interested in my analysis—The Beginner's Guide is a beautiful, thought-provoking and sometimes elusive piece of work, and one that I'm happy to recommend that people play—even if it might prefer to simply speak for itself.