The Offworld Collection

by Leigh Alexander (Editor, Contributor, Intro), Laura Hudson (Editor, Contributor), Anna Anthropy (Contributor)

The Offworld Collection features a tremendously diverse roster of contributors, writing about everything from the fascinating world of women's pinball, to the lingo of Chinese games culture, to the small, intimate games that explore how young adults deal with sex and technology. It's a book for anyone with a passion for design, play and criticism.

When editors Leigh Alexander and Laura Hudson relaunched Offworld, our goal was to build a website that focused on the writing and game design work of women, people of color and other marginalized folks. We wanted to create a space that actively welcomed perspectives that are often ignored by mainstream game culture, a place where where we could share our expertise and insight into the art of game creation and the culture of play. After a year of publishing incredible content from an all-star roster of writers, we're publishing a book collection.

Contents

Introduction
Leigh Alexander

We are not colonists
Gita Jackson

Women take a place at the pinball table
Laura Hudson

The divine witches of cyberspace
Leigh Alexander

No girl wins: why women unlearn their love of video games
Juliet Kahn

Playing on ‘Indian time’
Daniel Starkey

Altgames, a punk movement
Zoe Quinn

All the women I know in video games are tired
Leigh Alexander

In Bloodborne’s brutal world, I found myself
Laura Hudson

How to make a truly democratic game design tool
Anna Anthropy

You have 20 minutes before the sun blows up
Laura Hudson

How to play as a spiritual hole
Leigh Alexander

In fantasy worlds, historical accuracy is a lie
Tanya DePass

The many inglorious deaths of my virtual fish
Leigh Alexander

The existential dread of fighting games
Maddy Myers

I’ve been texting with an astronaut
Laura Hudson

This moving game about gravity will catch you
Katherine Cross

What a car is to a girl
Leigh Alexander

The vast, unplayable history of video games
Gita Jackson

Piracy gave me a future
Daniel Starkey

Astonishing comics that ‘save your game’ when you turn the page
Laura Hudson

And maybe they won’t kill you
Leigh Alexander

How hip hop can teach you to code
Shareef Jackson

War without tears
Maxwell Neely-Cohen

Should you kill monsters, or empthaize with them?
Laura Hudson

On being a strange, brilliant clown
Leigh Alexander

Edutainment failed me
Aroon Karuna

Subversive games about waitresses and hairdressers
Laura Hudson

The queer masculinity of stealth games
Riley MacLeod

Meet the secret new horror mistress of video games
Leigh Alexander

I love my untouchable virtual body
Aevee Bee

The millennials are just fine, and so are their sex games
Laura Hudson

The clone that wasn’t
Leigh Alexander

China loves the lingo of games
Christina Xu

Remembering Syberia, an adventure game about a woman finding herself
Katherine Cross

Why Final Fantasy VII matters
Leigh Alexander

Black characters in video games must be more than inhuman stereotypes
Sidney Fussell

The poetry in game-making
Katriel Paige

How card games became cool again
By Kim Nguyen

The Beginner’s Guide is a game that doesn’t want to be written about
Laura Hudson

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is forever
Leigh Alexander

My games are tools of healing and community
Soha Kareem

The other side of Braid
Liz Ryerson

Interactive movies make their glorious return
Leigh Alexander

How should we talk about Final Fantasy VII’s crossdressing sequence?
Sarah Nyberg

A brilliant murder mystery you solve with a search engine
Laura Hudson

Edgy sex games highlight intimacy, not conquest
Merritt Kopas

Creating a spectrum of feelings with only four keys
Leigh Alexander

How we developed a black woman protagonist who mattered
Catt Small

Around a more diverse world in 80 days
Katherine Cross

Shenmue through a prism
Annie Mok

Why Silent Hill mattered
Leigh Alexander

A game studio in Cameroon envisions a new history for Africa
Laura Hudson

Video games without people of color are not neutral
Sidney Fussell

How ceMelusine captures a moment
Leigh Alexander

What games must learn from children’s books
Anna Anthropy

A unique roleplaying game that lets you literally make history
Katherine Cross

The radical games event where the next speaker is you
Laura Hudson

Home is where the future of games is
Leigh Alexander

Genres: Nonfiction, Video Games, Games, Essays

217 pages, ebook

First published September 1, 2016

Reviews

[Kalin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The vast majority of these essays and reviews introduced me to something new, be it an obscure game or a different interpretation of a familiar one or an unusual design philosophy. For that alone, I strongly recommend the collection.

Here're my more specific reasons:

~ Daniel Starkey's "Playing on Indian Time" ignited my curiosity about Ehdrigohr , a role-playing game based on the values and perceptions of Native Americans. Consider that one of its heroes is a wandering peacemaker who "ferrets out the infiltrators and hatemongers who work to break the nations." Funny, where have I heard this before? ;)

(And, seriously now, where do I find these kinds of heroes?)

~

Here’s an idea

from Zoe Quinn's "Altgames, a punk movement" that made me grin from ear to ear:

Let’s promote unusual games outside of the “games space.” Get music bloggers talking about experimental music games, cult b-movie fans talking about campy horror games, and cross-pollinate to break down the arbitrary borders that wall games off from other creative fields. Finding common ground with other media can get more people excited about games in general.

It is exactly what I've been trying to achieve with Националните фантастични награди, an annual award for all things fantastic, whose deeper purpose is to bring various fandoms and subcultures together. As a reader (primarily), it's surprising to find out that gamers feel beleaguered and marginalized too. Just like us. So ... what if we share other traits and grounds besides our fringe status?

~ The following excerpt from Laura Hudson's "In Bloodborne's brutal world I found myself" resonates with a recent conversation I had about the horror genre and its touchstones in gaming:

One of the things I liked the most about Bloodborne—especially as someone who hates horror—was something that I hadn’t expected from a horror game: the way it taught me to stop being afraid, and start being excellent instead.
When you encounter a daunting new enemy that crushes you to a pulp, it’s easy to get scared. But once you fight them enough and figure out how to take them down, you stop being afraid. Now, you can take them apart any time you want. Slowly, the alleys and sewers and shadowy houses that you used to enter with trepidation become your stomping grounds, become yours. You’re not the victim in the horror movie anymore, running from the monsters. You’re the terrifying figure in black, methodically slaughtering everyone in your path.

(Nevertheless, I'd still go for the more psychological, story-driven titles, like Sanitarium or Silent Hill 2. But let me go and check if Bloodborne is more (grotesquely ;) stylish than my favorite The Darkness II ....

... Nope. The Darkenss II prevails.)

~ Anna Anthropy's "How to make a truly democratic game design tool" opened my eyes to WarioWare and Kooltool, two DIY instruments for making games. (And also disillusioned me about Game Maker, Construct and Stencyl. :( ) While WarioWare seems to be in decline, I should keep 'em eyes on Kooltool.

(But don't you worry, Ren'Py Visual Novel Engine: my heart still belongs to you. :D )

~ Laura Hudson's "I've been texting with an astronaut" discusses two game design decisions I find particularly interesting:

While some mobile games intentionally frustrate players with waiting periods to make them spend money, waiting isn’t a coercion tactic in Lifeline, but rather part of the story-telling experience. If you die several times or win the game, you can unlock an optional “fast mode” that allows you to skip the waiting periods, though I wouldn’t recommend it. While it might offer instant gratification, it also shatters the sense of immersion you feel, flattening the urgency and anticipation of those interstitial moments.

And:

“All of the choices in the game are binary choices: you make a choice to go left or right,” says Jokela. “[Gender] is a choice that we asked the player to make without actually asking them to. It’s silent and implicit, but it gives the player ownership over how they view Taylor.”

~ Katherine Cross's "Let go" introduced me to Gravity Ghost . Did you know this relationship between the Earth's and the Moon's size?

Also, the animation of the game, though not technically amazing, touches me on some very personal level. Something about those eyes ....

And listen:

(...) this is a game that compels you to surrender the godlike command that most games treat as our birthright. Gravity is an uncaring force, but it need not be your enemy either. if you work with it, you succeed. If you fight it like some goblin in a dungeon, you will flail in frustration. Your expertise lies not in how quickly or often you can press a button, but how rather minimally and elegantly you can respond and still keep a little girl aloft in the night sky. That is Gravity Ghost’s beating heart and the language it speaks: trusting, adventurous, never dwelling on the fear of failure, just flying.

~ Leigh Alexander's "What is a car to a girl" led to another interesting find: Wheels of Aurelia . It reminded me why, a few years back, I cancelled my driver's licence: I'd rather be the one talking (or reading or writing) than the one driving. And no, I'm not multi-tasky enough for both.

~ Daniel Starkey's "Piracy gave me a future" comes with a simple message, the way a sledgehammer is a simple tool.

And when you recover from its initial blow, sit back (or sit up, as the case may be) and think: how many people has the Internet pulled up from the swamps of "I can't afford this textbook or that work of art, hence I remain perpetually poor--sometimes figuratively and sometimes literally"?

Over the years, I've pirated many, many movies and songs and books. (But not so many games. When I was younger, my family couldn't afford the kind of computer needed for playing the Serious Stuff. Games are what pushes the bleeding edge of hardware, you know? And when I grew up, I haven't been so interested in playing them as in simply experiencing their stories, the emotional or intellectual punch. An online Let's Play usually does the job. Especially if the player doesn't try to outshout the game. ;) Just like Daniel, I've also started paying for them--more when the money flows freely, less when the going gets tough. But I don't think that's my main manner of giving back.

I've given back by passing them forward: the movies and songs and books that have pulled at my soul and keep resonating. I've pushed them onto friends (gomenasai! for all those times I pushed too much :/ ) and recommended them to strangers (ditto, fellow Goodreaders). Many of these people have done likewise; some have bought what they liked. And some of the books I've helped translate and publish and provide the authors with royalties. So now, young friends, you can pirate them in turn.

There's a crucial difference between matter and information. If you take matter from a place, the place will have less of it. You win, someone else loses. If you take--that is, copy--information, the original will remain. You win, nobody loses. Having been both a pirate and pirated, now I'm looking for ways to win on each side. All of us.

(And I'm soon going to have a difficult conversation with a publisher friend of mine, who is more conservative about this. Wish me luck and eloquence, will you?)

~ Just when I thought things couldn't get any crazier ....

[Jason Shiga] sends me one of his latest experiments by mail, an octo-tetraflexagon comic titled The Box. At first glance it’s a square, four-panel comic about a man who finds a sealed parcel on the ground. Each time you make a choice, you open the comic along a vertical or horizontal seam, revealing a new, four-panel comic. All in all, The Box has a total of four endings, all contained within a single piece of intricately folded paper. And because it’s a cyclic flexagon, when you finish you simply have to fold it one more time, and it’ll reset itself back to where it started.

Thank you, Laura Hudson! Now I'm off to look for Meanwhile. *biggrin*

~ Undertale (which is as brilliant as the hype says) is accurately captured in Laura Hudson's "Should you kill monsters, or try to save them?":

Both violence and non-violence are negotiated through the same menu based battle system. If you choose violence you “fight”; if you choose non-violence, you “act.” The terminology feels meaningful. Refusing to attack your opponent isn’t a passive decision, but an active one that requires just as much strategy to execute successfully, if not more.

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

Go and play it. Or at least watch a pacifist vs. a genocide run.

~ In "A brilliant murder mystery you solve with a search engine," about Her Story, Laura Hudson brings home a point that I never considered when I watched the game (then again, I'm not sure which explanation convinced me the best; I remember something about a tattoo that was on Eve's body and not on Hannah's--if my memory is correct, how would that fit with the Dissociative Identity Disorder scenario?):

Most troublingly, Her Story is ultimately a game where an impliedly mentally ill person is portrayed as a murderer. Therein lies the biggest problem with what is otherwise an exceptional game. Mental illness has long been equated with violence and criminality in media and entertainment, where the “insane murderer” trope remains hugely popular. Too often, people with mental illness are the bogeymen we summon into horror stories, murder mysteries or anywhere else we need a one-dimensional bad guy wielding a knife.
The impact of these stereotypes on people with mental illness is significant. Social stigma means that those who disclose their diagnosis are often treated with fear, suspicion and disgust, in ways that can affect their employment, health care, relationships and safety. In a 2008 study by the Canadian Medical Association, 42 percent of respondents said they would stop socializing with a friend who was diagnosed with mental illness. 55 percent said they would not marry someone with mental illness, and 25 percent said they would be afraid simply to be around them.

(I wonder what those numbers would be for Bulgaria.)

I've been bipolar for 14 years, and I've done my best to educate everyone around me about the myths (as well as the genuine dangers) around my condition. I've also tried to learn anything I can about other psychological disorders; the brain is such a fascinating place. I have been ridiculed because of my bipolarity (or "craziness"), but only by a small minority of people, none of which I would call representative of any group or subculture--and absolutely none who really know me. I've also had instances when I've realized that some of my friends are afraid of me--that is, afraid of my potential reactions in a given situation. On lots of occasions, they've had good reasons for that: mood swings and tantrums are an objective problem. (They're also something I've been teaching myself to control, continuously and vigorously.) Sometimes, however, I've caught some of my friends over-projecting expectations onto me: expecting me to be more of a "monster" than I'm inclined to be. ;)

So this thing with Her Story--if warranted--will be something to watch for. Also, I need to start putting more neuroatypical characters in my creative works.

~ I'd like to try ceMelusine's games because:

“People will often tell me that they feel like they ‘don’t know what to do’ when they arrive in one of my digital spaces,” he continues. “For me, this is kind of the point. The system, and the reasons for engaging in the system, obscure themselves, and in the end there usually isn’t a way to play better or faster. Nor is there a right or wrong way to play.”
(...) It feels wonderful to remember that interactive entertainment and play in virtual spaces can be about moments and feelings, not necessarily about instruction and efficiency.

~ Lost Levels, the "unconference" where every game developer can speak freely--and count on the empathy of the audience--sounds just like the kind of space where I thrive best. (Even though I find the 5-minute format stifling; that's why I'd rather write in a forum than appear on TV.)

I also fell in love with their three reminders and Laurа Hudson's elaboration on them:

“Make space for others, watch out for blocking views, be an active listener.”
At their core, all three suggestions pose some very basic questions of courtesy and community relevant to game culture: Are you willing to assess how much space you take up? Are you willing to consider whether it might be disproportionate? And if it is, are you willing to give up a little bit of that space to make room for someone else?

[Connor · Rating 3 out of 5]

The material written by eds Leigh Alexander and Laura Hudson holds up really well, but there's a bit of a gulf between them and most of the rest of contributions (with a few exceptions).

[Jericha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is, no lie, the book of games criticism I have been waiting for: poetic, nuanced, thoughtful, insightful, genuinely representative, often moving, and super inspiring. I'd call this a rare gem of a collection, and entirely worth reading for ANY lover of video games, though especially those who see games as an expressive and emotional form. Superb.