#read anna anthropys the rise of the videogame zinesters basically

[thedragonagelesbian]

im gonna hop up on my video game high horses just to say: play indie games. support indie game makers. and i dont just mean the stuff on steam that lucks into getting really popular, i mean go on itch.io and find a weird dating sim or an atmospheric pixelated bitsy game or a twine game that takes maybe half an hour to play but will make you bawl your eyes out. a lot of this stuff is pay what you want and a good bit of it is just free to play in-browser too

i dont think we need to like sound the death knell on video games as a creative medium, but it’s clear that the top of the industry is becoming a very narrow place, and part of the (artistic) defense against that is to keep making and keep playing games that fall outside of that tiny sphere

[tinycartridge]

Twenty Boss Fight Books for $15 ⊟

Not only is the $15-plus tier on this Boss Fight Books Humble Bundle a basically irresistible eBook deal -- it’s almost every book ever published by the company -- but even the $1 tier includes ZZT by Anna Anthropy, one of my favorites in the series.

In 1991, long before Epic Games was putting out blockbusters like Unreal, Infinity Blade, and Gears of War, Tim Sweeney released a strange little MS-DOS shareware game called ZZT. The simplicity of its text graphics masked the complexity of its World Editor: players could use ZZT to design their own games.

This feature was a revelation to thousands of gamers, including Anna Anthropy, author of Rise of the Videogame Zinesters . ZZT is an exploration of a submerged continent, a personal history of the shareware movement, ascii art, messy teen identity struggle, cybersex, transition, outsider art, the thousand deaths of Barney the Dinosaur, and what happens when a ten-year-old gets her hands on a programming language she can understand. It’s been said that the first Velvet Underground album sold only a few thousand copies, but that everyone who heard it formed a band. Well not everyone has played ZZT, but everyone who played it became a game designer.

One of the strengths of Boss Fight (as exemplified in this book) is its synthesis of historical overviews of each game with personal experiences. I know the games I know better, and by reading, I feel like I know the games I haven’t even played.

JOIN CLUB TINY AND OUR DISCORD Support Tiny Cartridge!

[ostoops-blog]

Reading Response, Chapter Three

The third chapter in Anna Anthropy’s Rise of the Videogame Zinesters outlines and describes the fundamentals of games, both folk and authored. She describes how their sets of rules allow for an individual experience to be played out, which creates interest and intrigue within the game. As the chapter continues, she describes the concept of role-playing, which has become a main component of most modern video games. This arose from the tabletops of engineering students, who predominantly played fantasy RPGs and further influenced how they would later create games. At the end of the chapter, Anthropy compares Eastern and Western games and their respective approaches to the concept of role-playing. She argues that Western (predominantly American) video games are tied to a capitalist-based sense of individuality, while Eastern (predominantly Japanese) video games are largely based on assigned class. According to her, character creation in role-playing games “reflect that America is a young country, and a nation that has been capitalist almost since inception. American culture sells the idea of individuality and ego. In Japan, a much older country in which social roles are valued (and connected to uniforms), roleplaying might more easily mean playing the role to which you’ve been assigned.” However, I feel that her argument for this is weak, if not a stretch at best. A few paragraphs before the aforementioned quote, she talks about the video game “Rogue,” an American-published video game that completely does away with character customization and places the player in a set role, with a specific set of stats. This completely contradicts her assertion that character creation is a “fixture of American interpretations of digital role-playing games.” She bases this idea solely on the concept of capitalism in America, and this is extremely frustrating and narrow-minded. Role-playing has the literal meaning of playing a role if you deconstruct the word itself into its most basic and laymen’s terms. And so, why not have the option to choose what role you play? Is this not an integral aspect of Dungeons & Dragons, the forefather and precursor to the modern videogame? Furthermore, take the Japanese game Pokemon as an example: early versions had you play the role of a single character whose goal was to “catch them all,” them being the Pokemon, or pocket monsters. However, later versions of the game allowed the player to customize their character and their respective clutches of Pokemon to suit what style of play they enjoyed. Is this not the same character customization that Anthropy claims Japan has “phased out,” yet is deeply tied to American capitalist individualism? Her argument on this is extremely weak, and is a reach at best.