harmony corpsepit

I released a new game last week, referred to on the itch page as an “action storygame”.

what i want from vgames is very faint, very hard to put my finger on, it's a desire, but i'm not sure for what. and this thing i want from games seems to be hidden inside the format: it's not whatever games imagine they're about. so to see it you have to…

When I was a kid I remember a big wall mural of a dog in a football jersey.

I’m trying to think of a better analogy.

lately i've been thinking of the cover to thelonious monk's "underground". it shows a barn, a studio made up to look like a barn. monk is at a piano, dressed up like a member of the french resistance. in the background of the shot we see a flag with a swa…

[some posts written fitfully after the announcement that itch.io would be de-indexing and in some cases removing 18+ games, at request of credit-card companies and right-wing lobbyists Collective Shout] congratulations to all the virtual women no longer b…

I feel a little at odds with myself around videogames these days.

A side-scrolling action game in which two main characters (he and her) arrive at the church to have a wedding while defeating a mummy man, werewolf, a thief, a mysterious thief, and a ghost who disturbs you.

am i still qualified to talk about this?

thanks for everyone who came to the indie soapbox in glasgow this month, where i got to give a small talk alongside simon meek. i've copied the intermittently-referred-to text below.

my feeling around videogames is that interactivity is a gimmick. i don't necessarily mean that dismissively - i'm a big fan of the 3d friday the 13th, where every few minutes the movie stops abruptly so that someone can poke something into the camera, rea…

that we cheat ourselves by cheating at a game, fail to "truly engage with the game systems" by robbing ourselves of consequence. if only!!

thinking about em's new piece and the debate on poptimism that prompted it. for me one reason why the high / low art distinction is hard to imagine remaking is that high art itself was partly responsible for erasing it. the futurist assertion that a racec…

all art right now consists of a bet that desire could mean more than an empty form of satisfaction - that faced with a distinction between frozen and inadequate forms of symbolic enjoyment (handing over $60 to participate in new mario game, etc) and the r…

it sometimes feels like the entirety of games criticism is set up to justify doing the thing you wanted to do anyway.

a lot of how we talk about videogames seems to take it for granted that you're making art for a world where no other art exists. i'm more interested in what it means to make work in the full knowledge that so many people are also making work. what's still…

i think what finally depresses me most about videogames is a sense that the way we talk about these things grows ever more nuanced and sophisticated, while the things themselves remain the same old shit. in the wake of political failure, when nothing else…

Platform Studies **VARIOUS DOS GAMES **– Have I had it wrong about platformers this whole time?

MUSEUM MELTDOWN – Outside the museum you will see a burning dumpster.

(backed up from the now-closed gameoeuvre.org group blog) BEAUTYCOPTER: It's hard to be a helicopter - on the other hand, that's how it is.

sprite comic essay about my favourite videogame, “donkey kong city” https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/2155