December 2011
2 posts
Putting these stupid controllers back in their...
Douglas Wilson is a co-founder of the Copenhagen Game Collective and now a partner with indie games studio Die Gute Fabrik. He is an academic. A PhD candidate at the Center for Computer Games Research at IT University of Copenhagen, but I might describe him as a mad genius.
Wilson designs multiplayer games that barely require technology, usually don’t have graphics, and provide just enough...
October 2011
2 posts
Of course you have five lives
Adam Saltsman, otherwise known as Adam Atomic, is a game designer based in Austin, Texas. He’s most famous for having created Canabalt and Flixel, but he has created an impressive range of games that reveals the mind of a hyper-critical game thinker.
Saltsman was kind enough to speak with me via Skype for over an hour of his time. Though the entire transcript isn’t published here,...
September 2011
2 posts
Everything else we consider nonsense
Vlambeer is a Dutch indie made up of Ramii Ismail and Jen Willem Nijman. Their games include the painfully addictive arcade shooter Super Crate Box and GlitchHiker, an action game that died permanently when played poorly (it was showcased once and has stayed dead). A Vlambeer game is like a Jackie Chan movie: usually silly, often violent, and only made possible by obsessive craftsman.
Today marks...
July 2011
2 posts
The Dirty Rectangles
This post is a break from the usual interviews I post on The Happy Medium. It’s a reprint of an article I wrote for OpenFile about the Ottawa indie game collective called Dirty Rectangles. Keep in mind that it was written for the general public, and not a video-game audience. Check out the Dirty Rectangles site here, and if you’re in Ottawa be sure to check our their monthly...
April 2011
2 posts
For all humans to play
Sophie Houlden’s games portfolio is diverse and explorative. She’s never held down by one style, and her seemingly endless experiments have turned up gems like Linear RPG, Boxgame, and the startling the.domestic (it’s tough to narrow down her oeuvre, as you can see). Most recently, she’s been working on Lottie’s Dungeon, an early version of which is available for...
November 2010
2 posts
A much deeper interface
Jarrad Woods is the designer known as Farbs. He gained early recognition as an independent developer when he left his job at 2K Games accompanied by a video game resignation, and by now he hardly needs an introduction.
His games tend to drop the player into extreme situations to fend for themselves—deep space, masses of fish, glitchy landscapes, or blank canvases—the way that the...
October 2010
2 posts
A little habit over time
Buster Benson—or Buster McLeod, or Erik Benson, depending on how long you’ve known him, I suppose—works independently under his company Enjoymentland, creating apps that help improve lives. Benson isn’t the typical designer I’ve spoken with in the past, but his brand of game (the kind that often exists in interface alone, that adds an extra layer to reality) has been...
August 2010
2 posts
Handmade mallets
Paolo Pedercini is a teacher at Carnegie Mellon University and an urban bike polo enthusiast. You probably know him as the man behind Molleindustria, maker of some of the most politically and socially scathing independent games around, including the Mcdonald’s Videogame, Oiligarchy, Faith Fighter, and Operation: Pedopriest. He’s also behind one of my favourite games, Every Day The...
Continue to bloom
I asked some of my favourite people for two sentences on the future of video games. Anna drops a truth bomb, Rich Grilloti gets Gary-Busey-level zen on us, and Cactus reps for weirdness. Enjoy!
Anna Anthropy “I envision a world where we have as many hobbyist game authors as we do hobbyist writers or artists. The proliferation of tools like Game Maker, Scratch, and Construct—and the...
July 2009
2 posts
A tiny collection of pixels that usually don't...
Noonat’s games are crammed with ideas. Queens (a game made for the Ludum Dare game design challenge based on the theme “domestic abuse”) gives you a new character with a new name every time your avatar dies. It’s a kind of twisted incentive to be better at the game and, in an uncomfortable way, helps you understand the obsessively abusive King antagonist. And then there is...
April 2009
2 posts
I was shown a trap and I willingly sprung it
Anna Anthropy (also known as Auntie Pixelante) is a dyke, a domme, and a game designer. I won’t waste any time extolling the importance and the understated ballsiness of her games and ideas, but I will say that this has been one of the most enlightening interviews I have conducted so far.
THM: Are there examples of mainstream games that effectively communicated queer themes, intentionally...
March 2009
2 posts
There are birds and the birds look like birds
You need to play Jumpman immediately. Either a deconstruction of ancient platform tropes or a literal interpretation of Atari game worlds, designer Andrew McClure has described the idea behind Jumpman as what would happen if the camera in an Atari game was pulled back four feet. The result is a stark, grueling, and visually dazzling perversion of ancient game aesthetics. That it’s fun and...
August 2008
2 posts
Just a kid bouncing a ball
Matthew Wegner is the CEO of Flashbang Studios, editor of physics game site Fun-Motion, an IGF content director, and an avid unicyclist. Though he has carved a distinct niche in the video game world, he reminds me of Will Wright in a lot of ways. Like Wright, Wegner loves games because they are fun. Fun in the way that inventing rules, or using a chemistry set is fun. They each use the medium to...
July 2008
4 posts
Small words and short sentences
Jason Rohrer’s most recent games Passage and Gravitation are deeply personal and unabashedly autobiographical. Like Art Spiegelman or R. Crumb, Rohrer explores the theory of a new medium through truthful, moving glimpses of his own life.
As a game player, not designer, it can be hard to really pin down how great games work. Rohrer and I had a lengthy long phone conversation one evening that...
A pretty calm dinosaur, considering the...
Pixeljam make art in the tradition of Nintendo guru Shigeru Miyamoto and filmmakers the Coen Brothers.
Like Miyamoto, they have a reverent, childish imagination. Their simple obsessions blossom into tight, pure game designs. And like the Coen’s characters, Pixeljam’s protagonists (the hungry Ratmaze Rat, the domestic Gamma Bros., or the Romantic, pastoral Dino of Dino Run) are preoccupied with...