Anna-Anthropy
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Anna Anthropy invites you to 'A Very Very Very Scary House'
Anna Anthropy, developer of the powerful autobiographical flash title Dys4ia, has revealed a new project: a digital choose-your-own-adventure entitled A Very Very Very Scary House. Built in part with the interactive story tool Twine, the game is available now for $2. "Investigate the scariest house you've ever seen!" the description for the title proclaims, noting the game has 58 unique endings. "This is probably the largest Twine story i've ever written, at over 11,000 words in 197 passages," Anthropy wrote on her blog. A Very Very Very Scary House, featuring original art from Shelley Yu, represents something of an experiment for the creator, monetizing one of her creations for the first time. "Putting games behind paywalls is something I've been extremely wary about – the people I want my games to reach are the ones most marginalized within games culture as it stands, the ones with the least money and the least access," Anthropy told Gamasutra. "Why would I buy a Twine game for two dollars when I can get all of these polished indie games [emphasis hers] for the same amount? This is an attempt at pushback, at establishing a precedent for folks to be able to sell little Twine zines and make some money off their work," she added in her blog post announcing the game's availability. For more on Anna Anthropy and her unique and personal games, be sure to read Joystiq's original feature Games on the Fringe.
On The Fringe, Part Two: Robin Arnott's 'Deep Sea' and Anna Anthropy
On The Fringe is a two-part series from freelance contributor Danielle Riendeau that focuses on games designed to push beyond established boundaries in the video game industry. Read part one now! On top of being Antichamber's audio designer, Robin Arnott is the mad scientist behind Deep Sea, which is perhaps one of the furthest "fringe" experiences – and one of the most truly intense and successful experimental games ever produced. In playing it, players don a light-and-sound-blocking WW1-era gas mask, hold onto a joystick, and descend into a terrifying, sound-only world, where the enemies – a brand of sea monster you never want to meet – are attracted to the sound of your real-life breathing.It's sensory deprivation and physical punishment married to gameplay, and Arnott has called it a "series of uncomfortable choices." It scared the bejesus out of everyone who played it at last year's E3, so much so that Arnott was invited to speak at the prestigious (and never boring) Experimental Gameplay Workshop at this year's GDC."Working on Deep Sea has gotten me into a state of mind where I as an artist, am trying to interface directly with the player's body," he says. It's a direct result of his taking the project to it's full potential, and it has impacted the way he sees everything else in the world."Whatever you devote your mind to over an extended period of time, it's bound to influence the way you think. Deep Sea has taken me towards radical, holistic experiential design ... that thinking has worked its way into my blood, into every project I work on."
Occupy the Joystick: OAK-U-TRON 201X and Keep Me Occupied take DIY games to the people
In a spot usually reserved for household names like Street Fighter or Galaga, the cabinet's title reads OAK-U-TRON 201X, hastily printed on computer paper. Heavy with the hardware and battery required to make it operate on the move, the OAK-U-TRON's creators Alex Kerfoot and Mars Jokela were sweating with the effort of pushing it through a park in the middle of San Francisco. Like a DIY Trojan horse, it contains a collection of indie titles specifically written for the Winnitron software system, all housed in a piecemeal arcade cabinet complete with an old computer monitor and PS2 fight stick controllers.I had spotted them while eating lunch in a park in the heart of downtown San Francisco, and made the decision to throw away my mediocre turkey sandwich in order to jog over and check it out. As we walked along, folks from everywhere in the park had the same idea I did, and examined the moving cabinet. Of course, that's exactly what Kerfoot and Jokela were hoping for.
Excerpt: Rise of the Videogame Zinesters
Anna Anthropy's forthcoming book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters is about the personal potential of games -- how simple tools allow all kinds of people to tell their own stories interactively. But it's also a clever, thoughtful examination on game design, and why the medium is important and interesting. In this excerpt from chapter three, "What is it Good For?," Anthropy examines games as "performances" and discusses the advantages computerized chance gives.THE WORLD'S A STAGE AND WE ARE PLAYERSOften, games -- particularly digital games, with their use of video and audio -- are compared to film, probably because the videogame publishing industry strongly resembles the Hollywood studio system. But I don think this comparison is particularly constructive, in that it gives us little insight into what the game, as a form, is capable of. Film tells a static story; what exciting about the game is that it allows the audience to interact with a set of rules. This doesn't mean the game can't tell a story: in the role-playing genre, the players aren't merely watching a story but playing the roles of the characters within the story.A better comparison than film is theater, which is where a lot of our game vocabulary ("the player," "stages," "set pieces," "scripting") comes from. A play defines the roles, events, and scenes of a story. An individual performance of those roles and scenes will always be different: different actors will perform the same role in different ways. Every performance and interpretation of a particular play is different -- sometimes in minute ways, sometimes in radical ways -- but we consider the play itself and the scene itself to be the same.
Indie party game beats New Super Mario Bros. Wii to the jump
The most identifiable new feature of New Super Mario Bros. Wii is the casually competitive multiplayer. Players are ostensibly competing for coins and score, but the gameplay is designed to encourage a fluid combination of cooperation and competition. The one game we had a chance to try at the IndieCade booth, Octopounce, features almost the exact same friendly-competition between jumping characters -- and it was released two months before anyone knew about Miyamoto's latest.Octopounce, by game designer Anna Anthropy and artist Saelee Oh, allows up to four players to control a little pixel octopus in a hand-painted underwater backdrop. The goal is to jump up and catch as many fish as possible, and each player can bounce on the other characters to reach the fish. Inactive player avatars remain on the screen, sleeping, so they can be used as convenient platforms. There's no real score -- an octopus becomes more opaque as it eats fish, and commentary about the game's progress appears in a text crawl at the bottom of the screen.Of course, NSMB Wii features divergent gameplay elements, like precision platforming and enemies, but in terms of the newest mechanic -- the multiplayer bouncing -- this game, designed for the Game Over/Continue? exhibit during GDC, anticipated that element before Nintendo revealed it. It sort of makes sense, then, that Octopounce is inspired by Super Mario War, a homebrew effort to make a multiplayer Mario experience -- but NSMB Wii resembles Octopounce more closely than it does Super Mario War.
