80 Days is a game based on the Jules Verne novel Around the World in 80 Days, but with a significant steampunk—and anti-colonial—twist. You play Phileas Fogg’s valet, Jean Passepartout, who must not only plan the sometimes-complex logistics of the journey, but ensure his master's well-being along the way.

The graphics and aesthetic of the game are beautiful; they light sepia-tinted fires to the imagination as one plays, and act as gentle companions to the core act of reading, managing income and inventory, and making choices about how to travel and what to do along the way. But it’s the writing by Meg Jayanth, with a few stories added by director Jon Ingold, that makes 80Days game so memorable and more-ish.

While Jayanth loved the original Verne tale, she says she found his portrayal of Aouda, an Indian princess, to be “infuriating.” Treated like a “conquered territory” and a “prize for Fogg,” the character of Aouda evoked everything wrong with white European portrayals of non-white women in colonized countries. If Jayanth was going to try her hand at rewriting this classic tale, there would have to be an answer to Aouda.

In the process she wound up writing a hundred.

80 Days became a steampunk world where technology was both magical and political, where maps were dramatically redrawn, and where non-white people and women alike had scores of characters expressing a variety of views about this volatile world. Whereas the original Verne tale never left the British Empire, here the boundaries of Victoria’s kingdom are reduced, Asian and African empires have more robustly resisted European colonialism (while perpetrating abuses of their own), and Fogg and Passepartout must go well beyond their comfort zone and the protection of Her Majesty to complete their journey.

When the game first released on iOS, it became an instant classic—interactive fiction games often resist penetrating broader game audiences, but the tablet-friendly beauty and readability of 80Days earned it acclaim in many circles, and multiple media awards. Now the game comes to digital download platform Steam, and with that release comes a brand-new expansion to the game: Canada, the US, and South America have more cities to visit and many more people to talk to—especially Natives, who Jayanth felt got short shrift in the original script.

“To be honest,” she tells us, “the lack of proper representation of native peoples in North America really bothered me when we first released—there are some in the U.S., but not nearly enough. It was always a goal to cover more of Canada and the US, and include more native peoples, but in the end I really didn't want to go in without proper research and time to get to grips with the history.”

The result of that research—writ large in all of Jayanth’s stories throughout 80 Days—is an impressive alternate history of Native North America and a bevy of new and interesting characters.

Assimilationist compromise and vibrant resistance are portrayed in equal measure and with sympathy. A mixed-race gyrocopter pilot who believes the past should be left behind; the Blackfoot Confederacy’s ownership of the Canadian Pacific Railway through creative treaty negotiations; a floating city where pan-Native resistance to settler colonialism rules the day, a proud Native woman Mountie; all have their say and make their mark in Jayanth’s lush prose. The nature of narrative fiction is such that it allows for such capacious characterization, where finely honed descriptions and dialogue can fill in vast spaces that advanced graphics cannot even begin to render. Jayanth extends the quiet triumph of her writing here: she portrays people of color as diverse unto themselves, with different politics and ways of engaging the world.

It’s not just a breath of fresh air, but a whole climate thereof in a medium where we’re used to seeing maybe one character of color burdened with representing their people. Instead Jayanth gives us credible snapshots of civilizations.

The new content pops up all over the globe, but is concentrated primarily in the Americas, where several new routes across its vast terrain have been added, along with a bevy of new characters for Fogg and Passepartout to bump into. It really is more of everything I loved in the original; more dashing, muscular women piloting airships, more clockwork dreams come to life, more transcontinental train journeys, more humanizing speculative fiction.

The Native American and First Nations characters are carefully and elegantly written, many identified by tribe and with various languages represented faithfully; they’re active, diverse, credible participants in this volatile world of brass and steam. This is a throughline of the game: exploring what travel technology means to a crowd of characters from around the globe.

It was a tone that had already been set by the game’s last update, which added the North Pole and a lot of lore about Arctic native peoples. Qausuittuq, a secret city at the Pole, “was founded for one purpose—for the Circumpolar peoples to learn and develop the technologies of steam and oil and automata. To make them our own, before they destroy our homes, our culture, our way of life,” in the powerful words of Ráijá Juho, a Sami engineer.

The new content extends that beautiful conceit down into Canada and the U.S. In addition to making this world’s wondrous technology their own, Native people here militate with stereotypes—alcohol comes up a lot, but primarily as an indictment of settlers. In one fascinating scene, Passepartout and Fogg are mistaken for whiskey traders by a First Nations woman and dealt with appropriately. Meanwhile, the Blackfoot Confederacy leverages its majority stake in the Canadian Pacific to banish alcohol and tobacco from their trains. Others pilot airships or gyrocopters, others convert to Christianity or act as translators for the settlers.

In short: they’re human.

But it’s the way Jayanth weaves this humanity into the fantastical fiction of 80 Days’ steampunk world that really sells the whole thing. My favorite addition to the game has to be Kahwoka Othunwe, the Floating Village: imagine a free Native city held aloft and steered by a rainbow of balloons and dirigibles, where the Sioux, Cree, and Iroquois nations came together to create both policy and foment anti-colonial resistance in secret, their existence confirmed only by rumor and tall-tales.

It’s another wonder that humbles Passepartout and Fogg on their travels. “We are a spark of defiance,” Winona Fire Thunder, an Oglala Lakota tribeswoman, says of Kahwoka Othunwe to her white visitors, “A story to be told in the dark, when all hope seems lost.”

In that moment, my tablet became a candle in the night.

In reviewing the expansion, I tried to take paths that I knew would lead through the new content, but I hit a snag in the form of the game’s best feature.

You see, it can be surprisingly challenging to commit to a specific path in the game. With most cities acting as forks in your long road, the call of adventure, to skip out on your own itinerary, is difficult to resist. I resolve to take the Trans-Siberian Railway and yet find myself on a ferry to Helsinki, and thence to the North Pole. Why? Perhaps breaking one’s own rules is what freedom looks like; often in my real-life travels I’ve wanted to hop off to some other far-flung locale in lieu of returning home. 80 Days lets your spontaneity run wild on primitive cars, majestic ships, dinghies, dirigibles, hovercraft, trains of every vintage, and all modes of transport in between.

Last week, in reviewing Wheels of Aurelia, Leigh Alexander wrote about the particular way women experience the freedom of driving; in a curious way, 80 Days does the same thing for us with almost every other form of transport. Though the game centers on the journey of two men, and does so staggeringly well, the lavish stories that vivify the many women they meet on their travels makes it easy for me to identify with them—especially those that accompany Fogg and Passepartout for a few days or more.

There are a number of examples I could cite from the game’s spiderweb storylines, of mighty travelling women for whom a ship or a balloon or a motorcar is a means of escape and survival. But one story, written by Jon Ingold and new to this update, stands out brightly.

If luck is with you and you find yourself a tad adventurous, you might find yourself in the company of The Black Rose, a nonpareil jewel thief who sets her sights on the mightiest prize this world has to offer. You can catch a fleeting glimpse of her on a train, shove her away from your company for the pleasure of Monsieur Fogg, or make a boon companion of her to travel the world with. The latter option will not disappoint.

For women, especially queer people and women of color, travel is the essence of precarity; it is purposeful, with each mile potentially being our last. Mission weaves a curious helix with spontaneity and adventure; travel washes away our pasts and gives us the illusion of actually being the machines that convey us to far flung destinations. The Black Rose, an elegant and cunning figure embodies this perfectly; she is the only other person in the game who travels as far and wide as Passepartout and Fogg, and who keeps up with the brisk pace of their journey.

You may find, as I did, that her purpose and her longing for the freedom of the open skies makes for much better companion than the dour Englishman who initiated this journey.

I related to her in an odd way; escaping from a hardscrabble upbringing through travel and practised elegance. What else could I do but spread my wings and take flight with her?

The appeal of visual novels usually lie in their wish fulfillment, their ability to transport you into fantasies about dating beautiful boys (and girls), becoming a celebrity or a pop star, or acquiring amazing powers. The the visual novel SC2VN, however, offers you a chance to live out a very different sort of fantasy: becoming a professional Starcraft 2 player in South Korea.

Unexpectedly, I loved it. I know virtually nothing about eSports, and have certainly never fantasized about playing them. But if Friday Night Lights proved anything to me, it's that you don't actually have to give a shit about sports in order to give a shit about the people who play them. Tell the right story, and the specific details of the competition matter a lot less than the fact that it matters to characters you care about—even when the competition happens to be a digital one.

The game (which originally started of as a joke by its creators at Team Eleven Eleven) opens on a competitive match of Starcraft 2, where your character is about to suffer an ignominious defeat. The loss feels doubly painful because you're a foreigner (read: not a South Korean) who just spent your entire savings to fly across the world and take one last shot at achieving your eSports dream. It hasn't been going well.

You have no wins to boast about, no friends to support you, and now you're running out of money. As someone helpfully reminds you after you arrive, "it's been more than five years since a foreign pro-gamer accomplished anything noteworthy in Korea," and the odds are stacked against you as an outsider. And while playing video games for a living might sound like a dream job, it to mention that playing Starcraft 2 isn't even "fun" for you in the traditional sense, and seems to provoke more far more anxiety and self-doubt than it does happiness.

But here you are, risking everything for it anyway. Your character (who can be either male or female) regards Starcraft with something between awe and addiction, a game that "requires the dexterity of a pianist alongside the strategic thinking of a chess player," and one that you just can't seem to quit no matter how punishing it sometimes feels.

But what makes SC2VN so compelling isn't just the fascinating window it offers into a potentially unfamiliar subculture, but the more universal story it tells about passion generally and sports specifically, the dizzying highs and crushing lows of loving a beautiful game.

Your protagonist, who goes by the pseudonym "Mach," has traveled to South Korea not only because it's the country where eSports was born, but because it offers the most opportunities for pro gaming—not to mention the sort of rabid fandom that can fill stadiums and elevate players to mainstream fame. But if you have any hope of rising beyond the amateur matches on your local PC bang, you'll need to find yourself some teammates, get the attention of a sponsor, and start making some waves.

If you're unfamiliar with eSports generally, and the professional Starcraft 2 community in South Korea specifically, SC2VN does its best to catch you up. In the "extras" section, there's a particularly helpful introduction by Day[9]—a popular eSports commentator and former pro—that'll give you a crash course in the history of professional gaming.

You'll have to pick up the finer details on the fly, though it's not that difficult; even if you don't know exactly what it means to "ladder" and "cheese," or exactly what a "one base all-in" strategy involves, you can pick up most of it from context.

At several points, you actually play faux-Starcraft matches in the midst of the visual novel, experiences that feel very tense and intense, especially when your reputation (and your dreams) are riding on the outcome. Most of it unfolds through the narration of your as your character, who explains the backstory and the implications of various choices a bit like a first-person sports announcer. Other times, though, you'll be asked to make strategic choices that could very well determine the outcome of the game. Should you rush in quickly for an early attack, hoping that you'll take your opponent by surprise, or hold back to build up your forces before staging your assault?

The closer you grow to your goal, the more you'll have to deal with the double-edged sword of fandom and online visibility, which can help make you a star—or tear you down. Just like many more traditional sports, a lot of eSports fans become invested in the games because of the personalities and rivalries, and your character even suggests that "most of the people who follow Starcraft know less about the game itself than they do about the people playing it."

Although eSports is still a very male-dominated field, there are a surprising number of women in the primary cast of SC2VN. If you decide to play as a female character, the majority of players on the pro Starcraft team you eventually assemble will end up being women. Unsurprisingly, these players express many of the same frustrations that you've likely heard from women in games before, including how frustrating it is to be objectified and condescended to by the people in your field, rather than celebrated for your ability.

When a teenage boy suggests that women have it easier in eSports because they get more attention, two female players quickly correct his attitude.

If you've ever laughed as eSports or dismissed the concept as absurd, you might reassess your own attitude as well by the end of SC2VN. After watching your character sweat and struggle—and seeing exactly how much work and talent it requires to succeed at such a competitive and complex game—chances are the condescension won't come quite as easy.

Although the game drags a bit by the end and there are moments when it spends a bit too much time explaining things that are perfectly evident on screen, I found myself surprisingly absorbed by Mach's quest to achieve a goal that holds absolutely no personal interest for me. (It's also free to download on Steam and Itch.io, so it has that going for it too.)

If SC2VN taught me anything about competitive Starcraft, it's both how little I know about it and how much there is to know. Even as a semi-professional player, your character has several moments where you realize that the truly elite players are functioning on a level of strategy you can barely comprehend, and for all your efforts, you're just starting to scratch the surface.

Will you ever be able to go head to head with the most competitive players in the world? More relevantly, will you be able to do it before you run out of money and have to admit defeat—to your friends, to your family, to yourself? Ultimately, it boils down to the same rdilemma that so many artists and athletes face when they're trying to turn their passions into a career: If you can't quite make a living at the thing you love, how long should you hold out—and when do you need to admit that you're deluding yourself? How much are you willing to give up for a shot at your dream, even if it's one that the people around you don't understand or appreciate?

While your character gets some unrealistically lucky breaks, there are no rose-colored glasses here, and no fairy tale ending on offer, especially in a field where few people remain competitive beyond their 20s. It's a story that might feel very familiar to anyone who's had to sacrifice their comfort and security for a shot at their dream—no matter how long the odds might be, or how briefly the spotlight shines on them.

In the TIME Magazine article "All the Ways Darren Wilson Described Being Afraid of Michael Brown," the former Ferguson police officer describes the August 2014 confrontation that left the teenager dead: “When I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding on Hulk Hogan.”

Wilson's description of an almost-inhuman rage in in the 18 year-old Brown made headlines across the country:

“...he looked up at me and had the most intense and aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.”

Critic Austin Walker put it best: "When Darren Wilson says he saw Mike Brown as ‘a demon’ the problem isn’t with his eyes, it’s with what America told him demons look like." In other words, Wilson saw Brown's anger not as a valid emotion from a person targeted and harassed by a police officer, but as supernaturally threatening.

America’s “vision” of the Black male body is one of threat, menace and labor. And unfortunately, media representation follows suit: Black men in fiction are imposing, hulking, brutish figures. While many games add Black male characters for the sake of “diversity,” the representation of Black men in games is embarrassingly uniform.

There's Jax from Mortal Kombat, Barrett from Final Fantasy VII, and Cole from Gears of War: All robust, muscular Black men, all above 6'4" with military or athletic experience and loud, brash personalities. Jax and Barrett’s open shirts emphasize their built chests, while their cybernetic enhancements, covering their arms and biceps, further emphasize how dangerous their arms are. Batman: Arkham Knight's Albert King and Street Fighter's Balrog are much the same, just without the armored fists. They wear boxing equipment instead, much to the same effect—highlighting their physical strength.

Jax, Barrett and Balrog all first appeared in the early to mid 90’s: Balrog in ’91, Jax in ’93 and Barrett in ’97. While the contemporary racial anxieties about gangsta rap, gang violence and the War on Drugs no doubt influenced their design, it’s striking how they’re indistinguishable from characters like Cole (2008) or Albert (2015), who debuted decades later. Has our perception of Black masculinity changed at all in the last 20 years?

Consider the design evolution of Tomb Raider's Lara Croft’s design evolution since her debut in 1996. She is continually revisited, and her 2013 redesign—a plausible muscular figure and sensible clothes had replaced the iconic cone-shaped breasts and hot shorts— was celebrated as representative of a shift in the industry’s views on women and women gamers. But the staid design of Black men over more than 20 years illustrates the cementing of tired, racist anxieties.

Lara’s redesign is often credited as a refutation of the “male gaze.” To refute the “gaze” means to articulate how the subject of the gaze is shaped by the misperceptions and prejudices of the spectator. Will the games industry respond to critique of the “white gaze” and evolve designs of people of color, particularly Black men? To see the white gaze in action, compare Wilson’s description of Brown to the first time Heart of Darkness author Joseph Conrad writes about his first time seeing a Black man in 1899:

“A certain enormous buck n----r encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days. Of the n----r I used to dream for years afterwards.”

Conrad and Wilson’s descriptions are united by the notion of inhumanity—Wilson saw a “demon” while Conrad saw a “human animal.” From the white gaze, Black physical strength signified something inhuman: animalistic or supernatural. And so when the image of Black men in games uniformly emphasizes their bodies as muscular and dangerous, we have a problem: In the virtual absence of diversity within and among Black male characters, these physical attributes become definitional to Blackness itself. Part of this is genre—action, adventure and fighting games generally demand combat-ready men. However, white male characters aren’t held under a gaze that views their physical prowess as inhumanity.

Greater diversity among the Black men portrayed in games—diversity of their bodies, their minds, their motives and personalities—is entirely possible, because it already exists. Larger scholarship on Black representation incorporates the concept of the diaspora, or "peoples living outside their traditional homeland," Literature on the African diaspora transcends the routinely linear concept of “diversity” because it globalizes the nuances of Blackness to include African Americans, Afro Latinos, Black Europeans, African and Afro-Caribbean natives. Interestingly, the few Black men who don’t use their muscles to fight—the warlocks, wizards, mages and mystics in games—are often modeled after African and Afro-Caribbean native peoples.

Fantasy RPGs can offer excellent insight into the politics of race and the concept of the diaspora. For example, in Bethesda's 2006 classic Oblivion, the player meets a rare Redguard mage.The Redguards are a race of Black warriors living in the deserts of Hammerfell.

"I'm Trayvond the Redguard, Mages Guild Evoker. Surprised? Yes, you don't see many Redguards in the Mages Guild. We don't much like spellcasters in Hammerfell. Wizards steal souls and tamper with minds. If you use magic, you're weak or wicked. My family didn't approve of my vocation, so I had to come to Cyrodiil for my education.”

Although a white-reading character has very similar dialogue in Skyrim, this sentiment from a Black character speaks to a diasporic cultural divide and thus a plurality of viewpoints from Black characters. This is in stark contrast to the uniformity in design and personality from Black characters for the past 20 years.

“Black magic”—magically inclined, Black-reading characters—have become the primary way for designers to explore less repetitive designs for Black men. Soul Calibur's Zasalamel is an African man who wields a scythe and uses magic as part of his moveset. Insteaed of emphasizing his muscles, his white robes and lunar iconograpy imply a religious figure. He’s later revealed to be an ancient African mystic doomed to endless reincarnation for tampering with powerful magics. Although he initially seeks his own death, he later accepts his fate and becomes a benevolent protector for all mankind. This doesn’t make him “better” than his genre counterparts Jax or Balrog, but shows the many narratives posibilities ignored by routine might-makes-right representations of Black men.

Of course, mystical characters outside the American diaspora don't always get to escape the white gaze. Diablo 3's Witch Doctor is a dark skinned man or woman in tribal garb, summoning zombie dogs and wielding shrunken head fetishes in battle. The Witch Doctor is a caricature of the Afro-Caribbean religion of Voodoo, where reverence for spirits and the ancestors becomes an exoticized ‘oogabooga’ mishmash that decontextualizes a complex religion and uses only the most easily recognized symbols and iconography. The Witch Doctor’s very similar, in terms of aesthetic design and how blatantly it borrows from stereotypes, Street Fighter II’s Dhalsim, an "indian Yogi" character sporting face paint and a necklace of skulls, who debuted to very similar criticism in 1992. Black magic can be an interesting way of exploring the diaspora, but it is no panacea.

Thinking about white gaze and the diaspora when designing Black characters would provoke crucial questions. If a designer is asked to create a "Black" character, they must ask: what does the developer mean by 'Black'? Are they African American? Afro-Carribean? An African native? How can I convey one vs. the other? Are they supernatural in some sense? Are their powers somehow rooted in their ethnicity? Do they have to be? What does my design say about how I view Black peoples? What message am I sending players about people of color in my game’s world?”

Character designs carry both implied and inferred assumption about Blackness. It's crucial that we go beyond just "diversity" to demand genuine engagement and accountability from designers. We must ask them to stop taking for granted the complicated meanings of race and their characters' colors.

When Kiro'o Games first set out to raise money for its debut video game, the Cameroon-based company ran into an unusual problem: investors thought was a scam. "It was really hard to get funding," explains founder Olivier Madiba, partly because of negative stereotypes about African scammers. But if the idea of a Central African game studio seemed implausible, it's also because Kiro'o Games is doing something that simply hasn't been done before. They're the first game developer in the entire country, according to Madiba, and while they might be breaking ground, he says it's still "weird for Cameroonians to make video games."

Maybe not for much longer. While some investors may have balked, the internet at large has proved more open-minded about opening their wallets. Kiro'o Games just successfully funded a $45,000 Kickstarter for Aurion: Legacy of the Kori-Odan, a fantasy-themed action roleplaying game. Unlike most fantasy titles, where European lore and history serves as the backdrop, Madiba's game looks much closer to home for inspiration, drawing on African mythology and culture instead.

The hero of Aurion is Enzo Kori-Odan, the prince of a fictional country called Zama. After his wedding day and coronation is interrupted by a coup, he must fight with his bride Erine to save their country and regain their throne. There are no dragons or elves here, and the hero's power originates not inside himself or a magical object, but rather in the collective energy of his ancestors, a force known as the Aurion.

Like Africa itself, the world of Aurion is diverse and populated by numerous distinct cultures and ethnic groups. But the game isn't just inspired by African history—it actually imagines an entirely new history for the continent, one free of the imperialist aggressions that affected so many of its countries. Aurion's story takes place in a universe where Africa has "had 2,000 to 10,000 years to evolve without colonization," said Madiba. "We don’t just put African clothes on old and classic games. We really tried to put our own signature on it."

Madiba grew up playing video games, and like a lot of kids in the late 1990s, he fell in love with the Japanese roleplaying game Final Fantasy VII. "I finished it six times," he tells me via email. After high school, he decided to study computer science at the University of Yaounde and soon, he wanted to make games of his own. Unfortunately, his classes didn't have much to offer about game development specifically and he didn't know anyone who could help him.

So in 2003, he decided to declare his intentions to the world, and see what the world said back. He wrote an announcement that read, "I am searching for guys who want to make games," and plastered it throughout the streets of Yaounde. Like the skeptical investors he would encounter later, many people found it hard to believe. "Everyone thought it was a joke," says Madiba. The one exception was a young man named Wouafo Hughes, who saw the announcement and called him on the phone; an instant friendship was born. A year later Madiba met another aspiring game creator named Dominique Yakan, and the trio have now been working on Aurion—first as an amateur project and now as a professional one—for over a decade.

It hasn't always been easy. Since Madiba founded Kiro'o Games in 2013 and assembled a team to develop the current version of Aurion, the company has had to deal with persistent power outages, which cut the electricity numerous times during their successful Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight campaigns. ("We lost almost two months of work, maybe more," says Madiba.) But one of the biggest challenges facing the company is that there is simply no history or community of game development in Cameroon, and so they have to build one—socially and technologically—as they go.

"Making video games in Cameroon at this level is still completely new," says Madiba. "Here, there is no school to learn how to make them. You can learn designing or coding, but not oriented towards video games. So our team is completely made up of self-educated designers and coders, guided by their passion for video games. They were hard to find, but they all came because of interest of the project and the challenge it represents."

Despite the lack of formal training available for making video games, Madiba says most young people in Cameroon are very interested in playing them. "For those who don't have consoles, they play at arcades, or in public game rooms with consoles," says Olivier. He also notes that they're starting to see more and more casual game players, including people who transcend the stereotype of the young male gamer. "It is really weird to have your mother ask you to put [The Treasures of] Montezuma on her phone," he says.

Madiba hopes that Kiro'o Games will help pave the way for a broader community of video game developers both in Cameroon and throughout the continent. "Many studios have been emerging these last few years," said Madiba. "We hope that this community grows and evolves together... That’s one of our greater and [more] exciting challenges: building a real entertainment empire [for] videogames and more in Africa."

The Kickstarter campaign for Aurion ends on October 20, and the game is slated for release in April 2016.

Subterfuge is a mobile group battle among submarines, all fighting for might and territory on the bottom of the sea. One game can last around a week, during which you manipulate, negotiate and often betray your friends in an arms race for "Neptunium". You would not believe how consuming and harrowing it is—in my timezone-spanning game with several friends, our relations grew strained, people woke in the night to check the board, and some of us quit from the stress.

I was a quitter. I didn't even properly use the game's "resign" function, but simply erased the app from my phone while capering around the apartment, laughing uneasily. I'm just not very good at strategy games. It's never been my genre. I struggle with number and spatial concepts; I lack a natural confidence. After being wrung raw by Subterfuge I am never going to play it again.

But I think you should, even if you are like me. Everyone should have an experience of play like that just once. And the great thing about Subterfuge—the reason I really wanted to give it a try—is that it understands that my lack of acquaintance with its system is partially the genre's unconscious biases, and it's tried to do something about that.

[caption id="attachment_428733" align="alignnone" width="350"] "The Admiral", from Subterfuge [/caption]

It's thought that strategy games have a mostly-male audience, which is a sensible assumption, given that the player is often asked to play as a battalion of noble old white dudes of history, spreading into conquered territories. When I interviewed Susana Meza-Graham and Sara Wendel-Örtqvist of deep strategy game publisher Paradox Interactive, though, they said one of their titles in particular had a player base that was nearly 40% women, the highest of any of their games at the time—Crusader Kings 2, a game about family dynasties.

Crusader Kings 2 isn't just a game about sending troops to change more chunks of the map into your own color, but instead focuses on the rulers of your territory and their families. Your king has a customizable portrait, you decide who he marries, and you watch your children squabble among themselves, one of them eventually bidding for your own throne. Hopefully they wait until you die first. It adds some color and humanity to what's normally a series of territorial calculations, and it's thought that this helps welcome more women players. Fans have even made a popular mod that breaks the game's "historically accurate" gender succession rules.

[caption id="attachment_428734" align="alignnone" width="350"] Subterfuge's Engineer[/caption]

Subterfuge, too, has gone to great lengths to humanize its chilly subterranean world of numbers versus numbers. It's an aesthetically-beautiful game, with abstract representations of factories, generators and undersea mines in unique colors—the kind of coffee-table style players of tablet and touch-screen games now prefer. But it's also full of frankly-awesome looking people—the game's "specialists" whom you hire for additional perks and abilities feel like fully-realized humans, and they were designed with intention.

Ron Carmel, who designed the game along with Noel Llopis, has said the characters—created by illustrator Shane Nakamura—were designed to intentionally countermand stereotypes. He told me one of his goals for the game was explicitly to create women characters who were defined by non-physical attributes, even in a world where those attributes have to be communicated through a character portrait. "We want the first thing that people think to be something other than 'she's pretty' or 'she's not pretty'," he said.

[caption id="attachment_428735" align="alignnone" width="350"] The General [/caption]

The art you're seeing in this post is Subterfuge's specialists, each one a beautifully-drawn individual. The game is not only made more unique and attractive by its attention to diversity for both its men and women characters, but this extra focus helped invite me into a genre that usually signals that it isn't designed for me. Even though I struggled in a group of friends who play games like these more often, I was able to have a memorable and uniquely-challenging experience of play because Subterfuge made me this invitation.

If you give it a try yourself, be warned: it might occupy your days and test your friendships! You can also play the game with strangers, which seems both more mysterious and less stressful—on one hand, it's tougher to estimate who you can trust in negotiations, but on the other, if you stab someone in the back you (probably) never have to talk to them again. I still haven't spoken to any of my friends since they've invaded me. Hmph!

[caption id="attachment_428736" align="alignnone" width="300"] The Martyr [/caption]

Hey, games are cool, yeah? Check out some of my favorite character portraits from Subterfuge below, and learn more about the game here.

[caption id="attachment_428737" align="alignnone" width="350"] The Minister of Energy[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_428738" align="alignnone" width="300"] The Foreman[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_428739" align="alignnone" width="350"] The Navigator[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_428742" align="alignnone" width="350"] The Helmsman[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_428743" align="alignnone" width="350"] The Princess[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_428744" align="alignnone" width="300"] The Revered Elder[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_428745" align="alignnone" width="350"] The Sentry [/caption]

Join a group forging through the desert in search of a pyramid, as your skin begins to blister mysteriously away. Or explore the ruins of a sigil-painted village as the slick bodies of giant hornets lurk, swollen and sleepy with blood. Wander the suggestion of a mysterious village in continuous rain, urged onward by a pale, sad voice.

These are the delicate, expressive horror games of Kitty Horrorshow, whose works have become some of my favorite discoveries of 2015. Most people acquainted with games have specific ideas of what horror looks like—zombie crawls with scarce ammo, visually-dark psychological explorations punctuated by jump scares, or intentionally-clumsy relics dredged from the Japanese console age. Horrorshow's works—most of which can be completed in less than half an hour—feel delicate and literary by comparison. The fact technical sophistication isn't a primary focus makes the spaces she creates feel like abstract art—like the iconic monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey, forbidding in its plainness.

CHYRZA is a slow meditation among blood-colored obelisks that builds dread toward a striking conclusion, and in Hornets Horrorshow draws incredible imagery with her words. We didn't review the striking Rain, House, Eternity at Offworld, but Kill Screen's Chris Priestman does an excellent job of describing how the restrained, atmospheric game provides a sort of subtle emotional support, both for the creator and for you, and how it represents an evolution on her earlier portfolio.

With each release her works grow in strength and efficacy until they stay with you. If you haven't played any of these games, there's no better time to try—again, you generally need less than an hour, and they are free or pay-what-you-want here.

"I feel pretty hollow if I'm not actively working on creating something," Horrorshow tells me. She'd planned to be a writer, but traditional channels had their limits: "I didn't just want to tell stories, I wanted to frame them with whole worlds the player could explore and inhabit."

Like many modern independent developers, Twine was a "gateway drug" to the design space for Horrorshow, who grew up with games like Myst, EverQuest, Blood, Doom and Thief among her favorites. "I realized that I got a thousand times more satisfaction from creating environments with stories in them than I ever got from writing linear prose," she says. "Finally I decided to take a shot at making actual first-person 3D games, since I've always loved video games and was always most impressed by the ones that made me feel like I existed somewhere."

"After a few flailing attempts to learn Unity I started working on the floating temple in Dust City. I imported a really simple column I'd modeled and quickly realized that if I wanted to, I could make it out of glass or marble or crystal or gold, I could make it the size of a skyscraper, I could duplicate it a thousand times. That was pretty much The Moment."

Although for Horrorshow game development represents an evolution on linear writing, her writing is still the star of her work—to me, her game worlds feel like ideal vehicles to deliver poetry and prose in new ways. She cites Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Clive Barker, Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany, James Tiptree Jr., and Joyce Carol Oates as some influences, as well as Lovecraft ("though not as much as a lot of people think").

"I've spent most of my life being obsessed with Silent Hill, and I still feel like it's Porpentine, whose writing is impossible not to be changed by, particularly if the use of language is important to you."

"I like to watch Thundercats and daydream about Third Earth, because that show is full of really fun, beautiful, imaginative environments. I read a lot about ancient civilizations, architecture, and the psychology behind things like horror and the uncanny, and that's usually pretty inspiring."

Kitty Horrorshow says she explicitly set out to create horror games, which gratifies my own interpretation of her work. "I had fantasies of becoming widely known as some kind of modern Horror Mistress, like the video games answer to Wes Craven or Stephen King," she says. "Anymore though, I try not to lock myself down as much. If I get a story idea that I really love I'll go for it, horror or otherwise. That said, I think I've saturated myself in horror's ideas and motifs for long enough that I'll probably never get away from it completely or very far, which I'm okay with. The bottom line is I really want to create stories that are fantastical and that inspire wonder. Whether or not they do so by being frightening, I figure out at the time."

If there can be said to be a unifying feature about her works, it's the way they all feel like mysteries—what motivates me through her strange and occasionally-surreal worlds is the desire to find out what happened, is happening, will happen. One of the common problems with popular horror is "the ending"—when to reveal a twist, how to conclude the experience thereafter—and I love the structural elegance with which Horrorshow tackles this challenge. "

I suppose I sort of start with the answer and work backwards. When I have ideas, they're usually very broad and blunt ('A huge pyramid shows up in a desert and starts being a jerk')," she says. "As the writer I already know what's happening when the game begins, so as the game designer my job becomes imagining the player's starting perspective and figuring out how to portion out the information that eventually leads to their understanding."

"Luckily for me, this usually isn't much harder than just writing a short story and then dividing it up into a paragraph or two at a time, and as long as the story's properly paced things work out okay," she says. "Every portion just needs to contain one more step, one additional idea or puzzle piece that will eventually paint the whole picture... I imagine I'm creating some kind of ruin or archaeological site that the player's visiting, but then try to work the player into the story of the place somehow, so that they're connected to the setting rather than just a visitor."

The larger themes I've divined from the games I have played—thoughts on faith, community, depression—are "largely accidental", says Horrorshow, who says she never goes into creating something with the intention to deliver a "message or moral."

"That said, I like to think there's an element of subconscious deliberation at work, because a lot of the time I'll get half-way through making a game, and then suddenly its 'meaning' will dawn on me," she says. "I like this approach because a lot of the time it's cathartic and surprising. I didn't realize what Rain, House, Eternity was really about until I had nearly finished it, and it was a powerful, deeply personal moment for me, and it also allowed me to make an ending that was much more appropriate than what I'd planned."

Kitty Horrorshow is currently working on a haunted house story ("haunted houses are my all-time favorite horror idea)" presently titled Anatomy, which she hopes to release for Halloween. She also plans to collaborate with ceMelusine (another Offworld favorite creator) on a project she suggests horror fans will like.

Her work is funded via Patreon, and she's just begun focusing on games full-time, so financial support will help to nurture and sustain Kitty Horrorshow's amazing continued works. Visit her page here and consider becoming a patron. Almost all of her games are available for free or pay-what-you-want from her digital storefront here.

Every 80s baby remembers Bob Ross, the gentle-voiced art instructor whose public television show brought "happy trees" and "almighty mountains" to life before your eyes, often using nothing more than a pallet knife, a fan brush and a little Titanium White. Although Ross's "Joy of Painting" ceased airing in 1994—right before he passed away from lymphoma in 1995—he's being remembered and adored today by a potentially unlikely crew: gamers on streaming service Twitch.tv.

Twitch's audience primarily convenes to watch people play video games live, alternately cheering players on and trolling them with a fascinatingly-specific vocabulary of in-jokes, memes and visual iconography. Sometimes this leads to expansive and delightful cultural phenomena—remember last year's 1.16 million-person Pokemon game, and the rich bank of lore that organically sprouted up around it? Have you heard about the communal machine art of Salty Bet?

In Twitch's latest happy surprise, the world of meme-spouting esports geeks has been drawn into a charming relationship with late painter Ross. The service just launched a "Creative" channel, and celebrated it with a nonstop marathon of all 408 "Joy of Painting" episodes starring the gentle painter and his teaching techniques. The results have been genuinely beautiful: The Twitchers are transfixed by Ross, his warm throwback style and the way he summons lakes and fir trees to the canvas as if anybody, even you, could do it. Though the popular "Let's Play" format often involves lots of yelling—streamers chatting and shrieking while irritable meme jockeys accuse them of cheating— watching Bob "play" gently with color, light and idiosyncratic vocabulary ("don't piddle it too much", he softly warns aspiring painters to the chat's sincere delight) has had a charming effect.

I clearly remember being little, watching Bob scrape misty mountainscapes gently across a pale sky. Suddenly he'd slash the canvas with a knife of Van Dyke Brown, and though he promised it was a tree trunk—and it always would be, quite beautifully in the end—the child-me would be secretly horrified, convinced he had ruined it.

RUINED, the Twitch chat erupts with hundreds of users every single time Bob begins a new landscape feature, a slash of brown or black whose role in the pastoral environment has not yet been clearly established. I can't help laughing along. I want to type RUINED, too. "trust in bob," users urge in response. "have you learned NOTHING," laments another.

Whenever Bob finishes a painting, everyone types "GG", or "good game", a common post-competition sign-off. Relatively-obscure internal video game language becomes wonderful in its new context; chatters praise his "god-tier" skills, or suggest he has "nerfed" an ugly feature by blending it more naturally with the rest of the painting.

With "The Joy of Painting", which aired on PBS from 1983 to 1994, Ross sought to democratize the arcane and elite art world with clear, unpretentious instruction (his biggest tip is to make sure you have enough paint on your brush) and a gentle, playful attitude. "This is your mountain," he might say, hoping to offer the at-home viewing audience an opportunity to feel as if they had the right to make art—and to enjoy it just as much as some fancy-pants painter. Ross sought to challenge the misconception that art had to be gatekept by skill, and that spontaneity and imagination mattered the most.

"Let's have a river," Ross might decide. "There are no mistakes, just happy accidents," he advises. "Let's give this tree a friend," he suggests. "I wish I had a friend," reply several tens of Twitch users, either in ironic unison or sincerely.

This democratic approach, his hypnotic soft voice and the deeply-soothing, ASMR-inducing patter of brush on canvas make Ross a secretly-awaited hard counter to the traditional world of public "gaming" and Let's Plays. Where games culture traditionally prizes "elite" skills and internal knowledge, Ross offers an environment where participants get to watch something rare and magical coalesce—and yet the skills still feel attainable, and the simple spectator always feels welcome and loved.

Lots of the people typing "can Bob respond to chat?" are trolling; some of them might just be young and genuinely hopeful. You can't know, really.

It's rare that we get a chance to remember that sometimes the crowds really are wise. It is easy to develop and to calcify a natural suspicion of "gaming community" online. Which makes experiences like the Bob Ross Twitch collective all the more meaningful—what if the gentle painter posthumously inspired tens of thousands of chat-spamming esports geeks to try making art? What if the parlance of Bob Ross' old democratic, joyful painting program made its way into the cultural vocabulary of competitive video games? It's almost enough to restore your faith in humanity.

If you like to watch people play arcane games while talking softly and serving ASMR keyboard tapping, you might enjoy my Lo-Fi Let's Play YouTube channel, explicating odd 1980s and 90s adventure games.

I often think about the fact we don't really have 'online lives' any more. When I was small, to have a 'handle', to get on the Information Superhighway, was like attending a masquerade ball on a brand-new planet. All of you were suddenly someplace else, strange and new.

(more…)

What if you could learn how to play chess simply by looking at the pieces? (more…)

Talking to the creators of open-world hit game Uncharted on his show, Conversations with Creators, the geek legend praised a feature that helps you guide protagonist Nathan Drake around its vast, sprawling environment: “And I love there's that subtle yellow path," he said. "I never got lost!”

When I heard him, my eyes widened. I'd finished all three games in the series and never had any help from any “yellow path”! Do you have any idea how many hours I wasted wandering off and backtracking? Those are hours I'll never get back, Naughty Dog!

Why didn't I know about the yellow path? Because I never saw it. I was born with an extremely rare eye condition known as achromatopsia nystagmus.

It only affects 1 in 33,000 people. What it breaks down to is:

• near-sightedness
• no depth perception
• extreme light-sensitivity
• color-blindness

In brief, I have to look very closely at things in order to see them, and I only see black and white.¹

At one point during a game, I stood atop a mountain crag, a huge chasm in my way. I know from my decades of playing video games that there must be a way to do it—I just can't figure it out. I don't wanna look it up, because I can sense it's a straightforward challenge.

I go this way. I go that way. I try this jump. I try that shimmy across the rocks. Nothing works. The death sequence plays over and over again. It adds up.

My wife wanders into the living room. “Oh, is this Uncharted?” I let her know that it'll be pretty boring, watching me die over and over. She watches for a second. “Are you supposed to go through the red areas?”

My heart sinks. She explains that there's a not-so-subtle spread of red bricks, reddish dirt, and other conspicuous indicators forming a path through the treacherous landscape. She points out one such area. Red is, incidentally, my favorite color. But here, I could barely make it out.

I crossed the chasm.

Uncharted is a fantastic game series; Naughty Dog is not the only offender. Enter sweet, infuriating Assassin's Creed.

Another open-world game series, it favors stealth over Unchartered's spectacular MacGyvering. I love it, but I don't love Eagle Vision, one of the distinctive features of play, often all-but necessary for your character to make progress.

Where I live in LA, the most reliable way for me to make progress is the bus. The bus sucks, because people don't wash, pick fights, and hate being there—and that's just the drivers. But I don't hate the bus as much as I hate Eagle Vision.

Eagle Vision made me nervous from the outset. It's one of those things that, for we disabled, sounds kinda cool, but comes with a sinking feeling that tells you it's just not going to work out.

The tutorial walked me through it: “Press R2 to turn on Eagle Vision. In Eagle Vision, you use your mad assassin observation skills to observe things other people don't notice.” I pressed R2. The tutorial continued: “Notice targets are in red, civilians are in yellow, potential enemies like guards are in blue.”

I dropped the controller.

“Aw, come on!”

It sucks, because my wife bought me this game for my birthday. I can't tell the difference between any of the people that Assassin's Creed has just helpfully color-differentiated for me. Sure, sometimes, the game zooms in on a character to let me know specifically whom I'm after, but the population at-large, the people I'm supposed to know about so I don't kill civilians, or piss off guards? I've no clue.

Fortunately, progress is still possible, though I imagine it's really handy—a fact attested to by the ridiculous number of times I must start over.

Even worse is Resident Evil 4, Capcom's survival horror epic.

It's hands-down among my top-10 favorite gaming experiences thanks to intense visuals, a creepily engaging story, and the satisfaction of shotgunning zombies and evil cultists. But one puzzle in it almost ended my joyful delirium before things had even gotten cooking: the church puzzle.

Early in the game, you're stuck in a church. To get out, you have to match symbols, each of which is—you've guessed it!—one of three different colors. I stared for a second and realized that this would be impossible. To a normally sighted person, it's a simple matter of organizing red, green and blue symbols in an easily-deduced pattern.

Not for me. I gave it an honest try. I guessed. Over and over. I probably spent close to half an hour trying to randomly get it right. Finally, I gave up and looked up the solution, and was back in action.

Solutions

I know what you're thinking. “Okay, Anton. We get it. Gaming while achromat is tough. Did you have any solutions?” Yes. Yes, I do. And the cool thing is that some solutions are so easy, AAA developers will facepalm for having not considered them before. https://www.youtube.com/embed/ObGmrfeZuxs

In the puzzle game Sparkle 2, you shoot colored balls at other colored balls in an attempt to create combinations that pop away before the advancing mass of balls can overwhelms the player I tried the game fully expecting to fail, but I had a blast because of e a simple check-box: “Accessibility.”

Click it, and there are patterns on the balls! I was now matching patterns instead of colors. The developers, 10tons, didn't have to re-invent any wheels or start any revolutions. All they had to do was replace colors with patterns, and their game opened up for me. https://www.youtube.com/embed/bmptTn_4ooc

This technique can't cure all accessibility ills, but just imagine if the church puzzle had given the symbols texture as well as color? I would've had a fair chance. Admittedly, such a technique wouldn't work as well with Uncharted or Assassin's Creed. But instead of a yellow line, there could be little arrow signs. Or, maybe, a subtle little rumble in the controller when the player's pointed the right way. Nintendo often throws in a help box after you've failed a level a few times: nothing too hand-holdy, but there if you need it.

Assassin's Creed is full of symbols, and more wouldn't hurt, especially if they were optional. Arrows float around pointing to nearby goals and story points, and above characters' heads now and again, so why not have Eagle Vision operate in a similar way? Maybe even give the disabled player the option to make all text and symbols really big so we can't possibly miss them.

None of these solutions would be perfect. But it is possible. It can happen.

1. I've spent my entire childhood, most of my teen years, and some of my adulthood going to eye doctors. In the early days, it was to figure out what was wrong with my eyes. More recently, it's to get official sign-off on government forms so I can get my disabled parking placard and other such necessities. I've learned in all these visits that, medically speaking, I only see black and white. I say “medically speaking” because, and I can't explain why this is, I feel like I see some color. While I am sometimes able to identify some colors, I can't distinguish between colors and groups of colors.

Anton A. Hill is a blind writer, lifelong gamer, accessibility advocate, host of the weekly #GamesExp YouTube chat show, and co-founder of parody gaming journalism magazine Voxol at VoxolMag.com. He lives in Los Angeles.

We're in the midst of the rainy season in Portland, Oregon when a thick, soporific sheet of gray wraps itself around the city like a wet wool blanket and doesn't let go till Spring. The moment I step outside my door, I realize I've made a mistake: the sky has opened up, and raindrops are spilling out so quickly that I instantly abandon my plan to go running, turn on my heel and head back inside.

When I sit down at my computer and open the game Lovely Weather We're Having, it's raining there too. It's not a coincidence. The game is designed to mirror the weather outside your window, mapping the real-life sunshine, rain and snow of the world around you to a surreal neighborhood that looks sculpted from clay and littered with candy-colored trees and geometric shapes.

You begin the game standing outside of a house—your house, presumably—but you can't go inside. That's because this is "a game about going outside," or at least that's what it says on the tin. But I nonetheless think of Lovely Weather We're Having as a game about home, not just because it creates a place for your digital avatar to live, but because it simulates in one of the most pleasurable things about having a home: the moment when you return to it. It encourages you to leave, so that you can have the satisfaction of coming back.

Wandering around your surreal little neighborhood is a very sensory experience: grasses rustle, mushrooms sing at your touch, and stones make satisfying, rubbery thunks when I kick them. There's a puppy that always trails a few steps behind you, whose fur changes color with the temperature. If you wait till evening, shadows will fall over your strange little town, and many of your neighbors will go to sleep.

Admittedly, there's not a lot to do in Lovely Weather We're Having. You can talk to the locals, wander around through the modulating meteorology and see what might have changed along with the weather. That's it. When you tire of it, you stop playing.

But that's also part of its charm. It's not a game designed to be played for eight hours straight; it's one where you check in, see what's new, and check out again. It encourages you to step away, so that when time has passed you can experience the pleasure of the moment of return—the comfort of what is familiar and the novelty of what has changed.

The same could be said of Neko Atsume, the unexpectedly popular cat collecting game where you leave out food and toys on a digital porch to attract a menagerie of digital felines. But here's the catch: the cats won't appear until you leave. You can check back in later, though, and you should, because that's exactly when the kitties will show up to curl up in cardboard boxes and bat at balls of yarn. If you miss them—well, you miss them.

Lovely Weather We're Having has even more in common with Animal Crossing, another neighborhood simulator whose charm comes from its parallels to real life. Your town and its anthropomorphic residents live in real-time, which means that if a llama in the game says her shop closes at 10 PM, then it really does.

If a notice says that a festival is taking place in your town on a specific date, you'd better turn on the game that day, or it'll go on without you. Send a friend a present through the Animal Crossing post office, and it won't reach its destination for hours, or even till the next day. It's not because the game can't deliver it sooner, of course. It's because waiting for it not only makes its eventual arrival feel more gratifying, but also more organic.

Unlike the somewhat nefarious delays of pay-or-wait games that encourage you to drop real-life cash to fast forward through waiting periods—I'm looking at you, Farmville—the passage of time in what I think of as homecoming games isn't an artificial constraint designed to frustrate or manipulate you for profit. Instead, it's a far more natural rhythm coded into your play, and one that implies something important about how we interact with our intimate spaces: that the spaces we create from them each time we leave them are part of what gives them meaning.

There's something comforting about the way these games mirror both everyday rituals of departure and return, the rhythms and cycles of change that thread through our real lives. The sun rises and sets, the weather changes, things and people grow and shift and disappear in the moments when we aren't looking. We measure those changes by holding them up against the yardstick of the familiar, against the backdrop of the physical structures that shelter us and anchor us in the world.

Instead of trying to hold you in their thrall for as long as possible, homecoming games create spaces where time has to pass in order for, well… time to pass. You plant some seeds, send some mail, see what's new with your neighbors, put out food for the cats—and then go back to the real world and live your life. It's soothing and gratifying in a way that a more frenetic life simulator like The Sims will never be, specifically because The Sims encourages you to fast forward through the moments when your character leaves the house or goes to sleep, eliding over any interval of rest or absence. It's easy to feel like your avatar never really stops—and by extension, neither do you. Often, it means you won't want to.

Take it from someone who works from her home, and often finds herself in deeply dysfunctional rhythms: home shouldn't be the place where you spend all your time, because when it is, it's a lot less fun to be there. The pleasures of home—both in games and in life—lie not in it being a place you never want to leave, but rather in being a place you want to leave, because it makes it so much more satisfying to come back to again and again and again.

“They need to get some fucking empathy,” says Tanya dePass, a campaigner for better representation inside game worlds and among those who create them. She curates websites, hosts podcasts, maintains the #INeedDiverseGames tag on Twitter, works as a diversity consultant and speaks at conventions and panels.

Work is steady, but change is slow. For critics and activists, the pushback on inclusion is constant, from other gamers and the industry itself. DePass finds it baffling: “why don’t you all like money?” she asks.

One of many black women disrupting an insular culture, DePass critiques games and offers an alternatives to often-toxic online communities. Hashtag activism this is not. As DePass notes, “change needs to happen from the ground up.”

Lauren Warren is a contributor to Black Girl Nerds, an online community “devoted to promoting nerdiness and Black women and people of color.” In addition to panel appearances, cosplay showcases, TV spots and endorsement by Shonda Rhimes and others, BlackGirlNerds launched two new series profiling women and people of color.

“I hope that the Women in Gaming and Diversity in Gaming series reach people who are interested in pursuing careers in the games industry, but may be hesitant because they don’t “see” themselves fitting into the existing corporate culture," Warren writes. "It’s no secret that our presence is lacking behind the scenes on the game development side, on streaming sites and at major industry events and publications. The larger the community, the more visibility we have and the bigger our impact will be in the future.”

Warren says that substantive progress towards inclusion requires changing corporate culture, but also its perception by prospective employees. It’s cyclical: the more resistant toward change the industry becomes, the less that women and people of color will want to invest their time and energies into a potentially unwelcoming space. This breeds further insularity. The cycle continues—unless it’s disrupted.

Samantha Blackmon is one of the creators of Not Your Mama’s Gamer, a feminist gaming community made up of podcasts, livestreams, critical essays and their latest project, Invisibility Blues, a video series exploring race in gaming.

Blackmon told me that issues have gotten better over time, but many mistakes are still being made.

“When I look at playable women of color in games now I have more hope, but I still cringe at the characters that fall back on old racist stereotypes and add things like “tribal” costumes and “urban” language patterns," Blackmon wrote, "or some clueless writer’s take on what those language patterns are."

Color has meaning. And without people of color involved in the designing process, games are routinely unaware of these meanings. For Black women, this problem arises in a very specific way. DePass used the phrase ‘fantasy-black’ to describe the “not too black” design trope in games. As DePass notes, women in gaming designed to read as “Black” frequently have blue or green eyes, straightened or silver hair, or lightened or red-tinted skin. Preferencing black women who read as biracial or display some otherwise exoticized trait has troubling overlaps with colorism, discrimination based on skin color. Colorism is a serious societal issue, evinced both by the disparity in punishment for black girls with darker or lighter skin and the huge industry of harmful skin-bleaching creams.

So while all women in games are subject to staid metrics of desirability, black women have their blackness negotiated in a way that assumes blackness itself is undesirable. (Conversely, black men in games are almost uniformly depicted as having very dark skin—their color is ostensibly measured according to metrics of threat and physicality.)

“I know the lack of options is often the result of a lack of diversity amongst the development teams and there is no one present to advocate for creating and pushing these choices," writes Warren. "Real change would need to start there and then consumers will ultimately reap the benefits of having more realistic images to choose from in their gaming experience.”

But instead of a robust and dynamic experience, players are instead faced with repetitive, one-dimensional and largely overlapping portrayals of Black women. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the overreliance on the “strong Black woman” trope. This derisive meme limits portrayal of black women in pop culture to, as author Tamara Winfrey-Harris writes, “indefatigable mamas who don’t need help [and] castrating harpies.”

Black women in games are the no-nonsense arbiters of sass, toughness and attitude, but their emotional complexities are elided in order to present them as “strong.” This portrayal, as contrasted with portrayals of white femininity in gaming, is expounded upon in Winfrey-Harris’ exploration of the strong black woman:

"Society remains uneasy with female strength of any stripe and still prefers and champions delicate damsels—an outdated sentiment that limits all women. But because the damsel’s face is still viewed as unequivocally white and female, it is a particular problem for black women. As long as vulnerability and softness are the basis for acceptable femininity (and acceptable femininity is a requirement for a woman’s life to have value), women who are perpetually framed because of their race as supernaturally indestructible will not be viewed with regard."

And although it’s great that characters like Rochelle, Vivienne, or Jacqui Briggs are never damseled, this privileged status belies an assumption that black women never need help or need saving. This double bind is best summarized by Sofia Quintero, creator of the Feminist Love Project, who said the meme of being a “strong black woman” is “a way to practice resiliency and protect myself [but also] allows little space for me to be vulnerable, seek support, and otherwise be fully human.” In video games, where we demand our heroes be independent, both physically and emotionally strong and easily able to compartmentalize their private vs. professional lives, it’s very easy for developers to re-create the superwoman parameters of black femininity rather than challenge them.

So what is gaming’s next step in diversifying its portrayal of black women? Latoya Peterson, Editor at Large of Fusion, recently launched The Girl Gamers Project, a web series interviewing women about gender, womanhood and games.

Peterson says games need to focus not just on strength but on full personhood for black women.

“I don't think it's accurate to paint all black women with [the same] brush of hero - we're complex, and the most fun characters to play are complex," Peterson wrote via email. "Being Mary Jane is a hit because Mary Jane Paul isn't perfect. Games haven't allowed me to explore a black woman in depth - the latest Assassin's Creed is on my list but I haven't played it yet. I think the best way to show the real lives of black women is to dive deeply into backstories. I loved playing as Karin from Shadow Hearts - something like that. Or 355 from Y: The Last Man, just playable. I want to see black women characters focus on their full personhood, the way that Drake, and Max Payne, and Niko get to be funny or quirky or dark.”

Heroes aren’t human. And as Black women continue impacting this industry through criticism and community building, they open more and more spaces and opportunities not just to fulfill a role that counts as “diverse,” but to illustrate the diversity of blackwoman hood. In fact, many have turned to space itself as an inspiration.

Catt Small’s Prism Shell was influenced by Alien, and Sophia Chester’s Cosmic Callisto Caprica Space Detective was influenced by 50’s b-movies and Mad Men. As gaming continues to evolve, hopefully we’ll see more black women as alien hunters, space detectives, wasteland explorers and—at long last—human beings.

Illo: Rob Beschizza

What is a game if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare? (more…)

In this Critical Distance digest, I'm bringing you three little collections of pieces published in the past week about some of the latest hit indie games. We'll be exploring action movie pacing, the awkwardness of interactivity, and how to make the familiar feel terrifying. (more…)

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

The Offworld Collection, presenting the very best features and essays from Offworld, is finally available to buy directly from Campo Santo for $40. I had the pleasure of designing and illustrating this splendid 250-page hardcover volume, but it's the excellent writing, edited by Leigh Alexander and Laura Hudson, that makes it an essential buy. You get the ebook immediately upon purchase.

From Campo Santo's store blurb:

For the first time ever, we're offering something in our store that we didn't make: The Offworld Collection, a gorgeous hardcover anthology of some of the most diverse and insightful writing about video games ever written, a sophisticated but accessible look at a digital landscape where all voices are welcome and small, simple experiences can reflect our humanity. If you enjoy The Campo Santo Quarterly Review, this book is right up your alley.

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It collects the best essays and journalism from the website Offworld, which relaunched under editors Leigh Alexander and Laura Hudson as a space that actively welcomed perspectives ignored by mainstream game culture, and focused on the work of women, people of color and other marginalized folks.

Including original work from:

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P.S. The Campo Santo Quarterly Review is brilliant.

The Offworld Collection [Campo Santo]

What happens when female players slam tilt their way into the bright, loud world of pinball?

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