Peter McDonald

GamerAnthro - Twitch PML Gee Awards Finalists!

Dr. Krista-Lee Malone is live streaming with some of the finalists for the GEE! Learning Game Awards on twitch. Tune in here: www.twitch.tv/gameranthro

A true horror; a choice to know, discover, and inspire less. A victory for the reaction. An assault on our youths and future.

The Impossible Reversal Tracing the cultural history of play—from Fluxus to SimCityGames and gamified activities have become ubiquitous in many adults’ lives, and play is widely...

The cover for my upcoming book, The Impossible Reversal, is up on UP Minnesota's website! Super thrilled by this design. (you can pre-order it there as well).

www.upress.umn.edu/978151791622...

I believe they call this "finding out" arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

You can read my testimonial on the KS page, but I *loved* BFF! The Golden Years and I'm so excited to see it in this finely aged version 💖

So Codenames (and thus CGE) has blocked me, a Trans developer and designer, because I had the nerves to send them the two replies you find below. Judge for yourself if these are worth a ban.

This is their way of dealing with empathy and care in this ongoing conversation.

Oooh. Bookmarked

Very helpful comparison. I feel like the opening of Clair Obscur takes it's lessons from Chrono Trigger

The Ceremony is at Hand by Anna Anthropy 10 solitaire role-playing games

Anna makes the best TTRPGs. In addition to this, I want to recommend The Ceremony is at Hand w.itch.io/the-ceremony...

Coldbloods by Anna Anthropy This party sucks!

hi nerds! i released a new #ttrpg today. COLDBLOODS is a 3-5 player game about mercurial vampires. drink the blood of humans to gain their knowledge, be physically changed by your monstrous actions, and maybe - if you're lucky - earn the respect of your ancient family.

I think my assumption is that life in the present is predominantly gameplay (in one way or another)

Yes, totally. Leap Year is what made me start thinking about microvanias.

Well this is embarrassing! A knife made of whispers is from 2015. Oops!

Lastly, @droqen.bsky.social's The End of Gameplay is a series of short game poems that reflects on the medium and on what it means to live honestly in the present moment. It can be played in half an hour, but its been consuming my thoughts for much longer. A really special one. (17/17)

I've talked about Daniel Linssen's work before, and their small offering is A Knife Made of Whispers. You must carry a light through the darkness, in an echo of games like Ico. And Linssen layers the space with an unfolding story of love and regret.

Mechanically, Peppered isn't that strange (though the chair-scooting is interesting), but it is ambitious and generous in a way that feels rare. It aims for the humorous and achieves the zany, like a lost cousin of Sam & Max. And all the component parts speak to one another. (15/17)

An inversion of that dimensional reduction is AtoB, which asks the player to strategically cut out a 2D path from a 3D landscape and then traverse it. The player can upgrade their movement, which means they constantly have to evaluate what they might be able to reach or dodge. (14/17)

And now the more experimental batch! First is a proof of concept called Line: A 1D Platformer. It represents height by color--gray scale for platforms and blue--red for objects and enemies. When you jump you shift hues, which reorients the player to the temporal rather than spatial aspects. (13/17)

Small world right! Are you doing work with GBStudio these days?

Or, the shorter game Raven Star, where you play a bird kicked out of its nest because it lost its wings. You can't jump, and that lack becomes a way of reflecting on your identity and belonging. Nothing too complex, but a ugly duckling allegory made for the GameBoy. (12/17)

I feel some pride in the growing number of platformers made with GBStudio and my tool PlatformerPlus. For instance, Kero Kero Cowboy. So many frog avatars in my lists. This one has Kirbyish spunk combined with levels designed to coherently push one or another aspect of movement.

Symphonia came out in Dec last year, and is a fun if straightforward romp (when it is not throwing precision challenges at the player). In a few rare moments it leans into its musical themes and we see the potential for another kind of game where motion and movement gently coincide. (10/17)

Haneda Girl is an explosion of action with complex and responsive character controls. You dash, slash, turn invisible, and pilot a mech through short time challenges. Like its precursor, Narita Boy, the narrative elements are genre cliques that wear thin, and its levels have little character. (9/17)

There have been a couple of big releases this year. I've been following the Siege and the Sandfox for a while (partly because it uses Unreal). It is a stealth metroidvania with a few really spectacular moments. But ultimately its narrative, visuals, movement play the same note too often. (8/17)

The other game using this design philosophy is Mosa Lina: Second Layer, a big update to the original. It puts you in tiny physics arenas with a random selection of 3 of its 48 weird tools (tentacles, unicycles, bottle rockets) to work out how some solution might emerge in the intersection. (7/17)

A third continuation from last year is a style of design I noted in GoodBoy Galaxy that takes a mechanic from the player for each it gives. Babushka's Glitch Dungeon makes the player select two spells that dramatically transform movement, and asks the player to imagine their combinations. (6/17)

Smooth movement can be challenging in Pico8 games, so platformers often get inventive. Prince of Prussia makes stepping and jumping into turn-based actions, and thus strategic choices where a wrong move can get you shot by a Nazi. (5/17)

Doctor Lind is another micro-vania made in Pico8 where you explore the guts of a whale. It also removes jumping, instead giving the player a hookshot that can flip gravity. There are only 32 screens in total, but the paths are twisted to force doubling back after getting power-ups. (4/17)

There are also an increasing number of micro-vanias: games that try to capture the same feeling in a 10 minute experience. 100 lil Jumps initially seems like a precision challenge, but then starts to branch and twist so that your 100 jumps become a limit to knowledge rather than progression. (3/17)

A couple of micro-trends that I mentioned in my wrap up from last year continue. The momentum platformer had a strong showing in SeaFrog, which elegantly combines skating and traditional platforming. It piles on style, and makes many thoughtful design choices (esp. with enemies). (2/17)