I’m heading off the US tomorrow morning, first Dallas for a couple of days, then New York to speak at Critical Play at the Museum of Modern Art there. It’s exciting times indeed! I’m also off to Paris almost immediately on returning from that trip, too. So, in short, I’m not expecting to write any posts or make any games for the next while. The idea, at least, is that I’ll get started again in June.

Let’s see what really happens!

Since I’ve been obsessing over it for a few days now, I figured I should at least mention that I’ve been playing Trials: Evolution. It’s my first encounter with the series, but certainly not my first encounter with the addictive nature of such Flash-game-esque mechanics. It has super fancy graphics, and some pretty fun backgrounds and effects, but ultimately the game does boil down to very traditional physics simulation joy. Nothing wrong with that. And you can share it with your friends! Well, you can watch them kicking your ass, at least…

(more…)

Racy title eh? It’s because I don’t feel like I have anything awesome to say, so I’m trying to cheer myself up with some title foreplay. But no, I’d wanted to say something about the process of designing a sex game with no sex, and particularly the mapping of sex to coffee making, and the failed attempt to make the game feel gender and sexual-orientation neutral. Heteronormativity, here I come.

(more…)

I spent some time today preparing my (brief) talk for the Museum of Modern Art’s “Critical Play” event. It a really weird feeling for lots of reasons, not least of all being invited to speak at MoMA for goodness’ sake! But perhaps the weirdest part of the whole thing is actually that I’ve been invited to the event as an artist.

(more…)

This evening I finally decided it was time to release Hot Coffee. So now it’s released. Did some final passes through the innuendo levels, and deemed them high enough. Changed some background colours. Added a preloader. The usual. It was a pretty fun game to make, perhaps most fun when I thought of the idea (on the same flight from Athens that I came up with PONGS actually), and when I started drawing the graphics is a faux-ANSI style. I thought I’d say a couple of things about my intentions with it. “Spoilers” ensue.

(more…)