"Queer Utopian VR" for MVR 2.2 in Brooklyn, 7 March 2017

Next week I'm participating in MVR, an arts-technology presentation series by Pioneer Works and Nancy Nowacek. This particular installment, MVR 2.2, is hosted in conjunction with A/D/O in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, as part of their "Utopia vs Dystopia" series. (Wow so many event series!)

I'll be doing some standard artist talk stuff for an audience largely unfamiliar with my work, but I'll also be trying to speak to the theme a little -- "virtual reality" as a historically utopian project that is quickly descending into dystopia on all fronts. I will connect this to José Esteban Muñoz's idea of queerness as a utopia itself, where we can perhaps use the "horizon" of queer performance to preserve / salvage pockets of utopia in VR.

The other presenters are Jacob Gaboury, Laura Juo-Hsin Chen, and Rachel White, also presenting on their particular practices with art and technology... Jacob Gaboury does cool research with the history of computer graphics and queer computing. Laura Juo-Hsin Chen does playful VR that engages with materiality, like "toilet VR" and physical VR masks. Rachel White explores the fuzzy intersection between internet bots and an internet of cuteness.

It should be a fun night. See you there.

Free / open to public, RSVP requested
Tuesday, March 7, 2017 @ 7 PM
at: A/D/O
29 Norman Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11222
(subway: G at Nassau)

Games exhibitions and talks in NYC and Vancouver, Oct 28 - Nov 2

My new year's resolution for 2016 was to do fewer events and focus more on finishing my projects... so I guess that's why I'm doing 4 different events across 2 different cities over the next week or so:

On Friday night (October 28), we're running the 7th annual No Quarter exhibition, NYU Game Center's free video game party that I curate. The RSVP list just got a few more open slots added, but if you don't register in time, you can always arrive on the tail-end (at like 10-11pm) and hopefully it'll clear up by then. (Free, RSVP required.)

On Saturday night (October 29) the night after, I'll be doing a quick casual artist talk at ArtCade Con, an independent game festival around the East Village in NYC. There'll be lots of cool great games there, some of them fresh from a tour at Fantastic Arcade, so it should be a pretty exciting night. ($5-$16, use promo code 'PANELS' to get 2 for $20)

Then the week after, I fly to Vancouver for, like, one and a half days. It's a very brief whirlwind visit, unfortunately.

That Wednesday (November 2nd) I'll be giving a talk "You Can Have Gay Sex in Video Games And Eat It Too" as part of the UBC Noted Scholars Lecture Series hosted by the Social Justice Institute. I'll be talking about how I view the problem / question of "sex games" in relation to wider video game culture -- like, in a sense, Overwatch is probably the most popular sex game ever made? What does that mean for how games approach sexuality? (Free, RSVP recommended.)

Later that same night, I'll be hanging out at cool hip Vancouver pop-up alt-arcade Heart Projector run by some fantastic alt-games folks, where I've curated a selection of games about "first person drifting". I'll also be on-hand to readily complain about Civilization 6, so I hope to see my Vancouver readers there? (To be honest, I'm not actually sure where the exhibition is, but I guess you should sign-up for their newsletter to find out where and when the show is!)

Phew. Busy busy busy. I'll make time for this urinal game after this week, I promise.

No Quarter 2016, October 28th in New York City

I currently curate No Quarter, an annual games exhibition sponsored by NYU Game Center. We basically pay 4 game designers to make whatever they want (and they keep ownership over whatever they make) and then fly them to New York City for a big fun party.

This year the party is in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the current street art capital of the city, and we've commissioned Brendon Chung, Holly Gramazio, Catt Small, and Stephen Clark to make awesome games for us.

It's going to be a fun night, I hope you can join us. Entry is free and open to the public, but RSVP is required.

Forever BUTT

The cover of BUTT Magazine #18

This doesn't really have anything to do with games, directly, but: I want to talk briefly about a gay mens' magazine called BUTT.

I never realized before how BUTT was such an important influence to me, until a photographer asked me to pick out things from my apartment that informed my work -- so I picked out "Forever BUTT", a best-of compilation book. At first I thought about how funny it would be if the word "BUTT" was literally printed in the photo, but then I realized there was some truth to what BUTT meant to me.

Growing up, my early understanding of gay men consisted mostly of hiding random gay crypto-porn, talking with my mom's fitness instructor, and wondering about Tigger from Winnie The Pooh. I knew abstractly about AIDS, hate crimes, gay bars, musical theater, and mid-century modern art, but I didn't really connect any of those things to my life. All I knew was that I wish Zangief played more like Chun-Li.

And then one fateful day, while walking into an American Apparel store without any intent to ever buy anything, I saw the cover of BUTT issue #18 on the shelf -- a casual portrait of a smirking burly bearded dude printed on milky fuchsia-pink paper. He wasn't a glossy supermodel with perfect cheekbones, he was just some random cute guy somewhere, and so he deserved to be on the cover. It all seemed clearly gay, yet also didn't really fit my young idea of gayness at all.

What... was this... ?

Radiator World* Tour, Fall 2016 Schedule

This upcoming year I'm trying to attend more events and to go places where I haven't before. I'll sadly be missing IndieCade West and also probably GDC 2017! But in exchange, I'm mixing up my usual routine a bit.

Here's my current schedule for this season:

• Living Room Light Exchange, September 13 in Brooklyn, NY. I'll be speaking at this contemporary pop-up salon series, which totally takes place in actual real living rooms around the city. It's been long popular in the Bay Area, but this will be its first time in New York City, and I'm honored to help launch it. (Free, RSVP required)
• Weird Reality: Head-Mounted Art && Code, October 6-9 in Pittsburgh, PA. Me and a bunch of other people are cautiously optimistic about virtual reality -- well, as long as capitalism doesn't fuck it all up -- and I'll be presenting some of my work at this CMU conference as well as mingling with fellow weirdos. (Not free, tickets required. Some travel scholarships and subsidized tickets available, ask me about them if you're interested.)
• Steam Dev Days, October 12-13 in Seattle, WA. I don't really know why I'm going to this, to be honest, considering how uncommercial my games are?... but I hear good things about the signal-to-noise ratio here (no press are allowed and all convos are understood to be off-record) and I'm curious to know what Valve's VR plans are. (Not free, developers only.)
• No Quarter 2016, October __ in Brooklyn, NY. I curate NYU Game Center's long-running annual tradition where we commission original new "public games" from rising and veteran developers, and then throw them a big fun party. We haven't actually announced the date yet, but stay tuned for more specifics soon. (Free, RSVP required)
• Noted Scholars Lecture Series, November 2 in Vancouver, BC. The Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia kindly invited me to speak as part of their lecture series. I'm a bit intimidated because I don't consider myself a hardcore theorist academic. I'm probably less well-read than most of their undergraduate students! But anyway, my talk is tentatively titled "You Can Have Gay Sex in Video Games and Eat It Too", and I'll try to be more sex theory oriented vs game design oriented. (Free, RSVP required)

If you'll be at one or more of these events, feel free to say hey to me.

* this season, "World Tour" means "North America Tour" I guess? but hey at least I leave the USA at some point, doesn't that count for something

Finishing Moses

Me and Eddie now have 12 days (less than 2 weeks!) to complete this Robert Moses city game, so we're now transitioning into a late stage production mode: we're cutting systems and content we won't be able to complete, and trying to finalize the stuff we already have. We're cutting the park-building system to focus on the highway-building system, and we're trying to do a lot of mission design.

The finished prototype we're aiming to deliver will be kind of a "vertical slice" of an Act 2 of a larger game, and will represent Robert Moses' career from around 1934-1936 -- from when he is appointed as the first city-wide parks commissioner, to when he completes the West Side Highway and Henry Hudson Bridge. We're putting a lot of work into interpreting the "spirit" of Robert Caro's book The Power Broker as a very specific and detailed-oriented historical work; the in-game city must reflect the New York City of 1934, with historical streets and district names, and the mechanics must also reflect Robert Moses' real-life historical tendencies.

Progress report: Moses

Now that summer vacation is here and I don't have to teach, I now have a lot more time to put into some projects. Here's one of the new ones I'm doing for the summer:

"Moses" (tentative title) is a collaboration between me and Eddie Cameron for the Power Broker game design challenge. It's kind of like 80 Days plus SimCity / Cities In Motion -- you are famous urban planner Robert Moses and you have to drive around New York City and visit various locations around the map, but to make commuting easier, you can also build public works projects like highways, bridges, public housing, a UN building or two, etc. which all interacts with the traffic simulation and public approval. Maybe there will be little narrative vignettes and conversations along the way too.

Eddie has been doing all the complicated math simulation stuff, while I've been writing a lot of the basic game code and UI. We're still basically in the early prototyping stages, trying to figure out a lot of the game as we go along. Here's some of our thinking...

"Let's Get Lit: How to Light Your Game Like a Strip Club" @ 6 PM, April 30 at IndieCade East 2016, New York City

I'll be speaking at IndieCade East this year about video game lighting -- but to spice it up, I'm also going to talk about hunky dudes taking their clothes off in the seminal beefcake stripper movie Magic Mike (2012). The director, Steven Soderbergh, intentionally went for naturalistic "bad lighting" reminiscent of a strip club. Look at the shot above -- most of the men are in shadow! That's actually a pretty radical aesthetic for something that's supposedly a few steps away from commercial pornography. Plus, lighting can often be a bit of a dry topic, so I felt it was important to pair it with some sweaty studs to help the medicine go down. It'll be fun for the whole family.

IndieCade East 2016 runs April 29 - May 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City, and thank god it's no longer in the dead of winter.

Spring 2016 semester in game development

Hey, what's up, long time no blog -- I've been busy prepping game development classes for the Spring 2016 semester. This season, I'm teaching four (4!) courses across 2 different universities, which is considered a really heavy teaching load in academia. (Full-time professors usually teach maybe 2-3 courses a semester, on average.) So I'm dying a little. But I'll be ok. I think.

Here's a bit about the courses:

Two 2016 NYC games conferences to submit talks to, like, right now

What kind of games conference do you run after an IndieCade conference co-chair confesses that games conferences aren't "working"? Well, uh... let's do a bunch of conferences to try to figure it out!

Different Games is a diversity-focused games conference in the beginning of April, run by organizers based in Brooklyn and Atlanta. DG, in particular, holds a special place in my heart for administering the original arts grant that began my current track of gay sex games, so you could say they were kind of on the bleeding edge of indie sustainability. This year, Different Games 2016 (April 8-9) has several different tracks / themes:

• Affective Play (i.e. feelings, emotions, bodies)
• Video Games in Latin America
• Video Games and Indigenous Culture
• Accessible Game Design (i.e. making the field more accessible to new designers)
• Participatory Game Design (i.e. game design as a workshop process, Freire?)
• Race and Culture in Games
• Player Agency, Mods, and Glitches

DG 2016 session submissions close on January 22nd. They also accept more traditional academic paper submissions, and game submissions for their arcade as well. (Huh, turns out they were all closed already, and only game submissions are open now? That was fast!)

IndieCade East, held in the sinister shadow of the academic-ish NYC games scene, has always been the slightly less chill / more intense of the twin IndieCades. (More ideas! More e-sports! More beer!) Its relatively young age also means that it's more open to experimentation. This year, IndieCade East 2016 (April 29 - May 1) is trying out some very interesting changes with their format:

• It's now in the middle of Spring instead of the middle of Winter. (Yay!)
• The conference chairs are Jennie and Henry Faber, developers and community leaders from Toronto (!) which is in Canada (!!) and NOT in the United States (!!!)
• The three conference tracks recognize a post-indiepocalypse world: (a) design lessons from fields outside of games, (b) economic sustainability for games, (c) future tools and technology.

Of course, you aren't necessarily limited to those themes, and the only real criteria is that you can say interesting things about games -- either way, session submissions close on February 3rd.

* * *

Hopefully you, dear reader, will be at one (or both) of those events? See you in April!

The limits of a conceptual VR student game; and what would a "better" game about 9/11 look like?

The internet has been abuzz about "8:46", "a narrative driven experience designed for virtual reality, which makes you embody an office worker in the North Tower of the World Trade Center during the 9/11 events."

The game itself suffers from a lot of problems. If I were to ignore the politics, there's plenty of production values to critique -- the characters have blobby sculpts, inconsistent lighting, and stilted voice acting -- the particles are really really awkward -- and the one thing I like is the floorplan, especially the cramped corner office you begin in, which feels like a pretty authentic detail of old NYC office buildings.

But who are we kidding, this game is totally a political work, and it is much more generous to the developers to interpret it that way. Most people are just going to talk about this game instead of actually playing it, which is OK, and that's what compels me to write about it: I think this is a very flawed conceptual work, and I want to talk about why that is.

(1) TECHNOLOGY. Using virtual reality was not a good idea for this project, especially in this early generation of VR where it is mostly positioned as a nascent platform and consumer market that desperately needs to prove itself. Anything using VR in these early years is, inherently, saying, "look at me, I'm using VR!"

That's an OK thing to say, but it centers the technology instead of what you're saying with the technology, which is probably not what you want to do for a 9/11 game that's supposedly about respect for the dead rather than how this cool new peripheral? To be clear, I think you could make a game that powerfully critiques Western attitudes toward the dead and who is allowed to talk about the dead; I don't think this is that game.

NO QUARTER, 9 October 2015 in Brooklyn, NY

this amazing poster is by the incomparable Eleanor Davis

No Quarter is an annual games exhibition in NYC that commissions original works from designers. This year, I am stepping up as curator, and we will be featuring some exciting new games by Nina Freeman, Ramsey Nasser, Loren Schmidt, and Leah Gilliam.

Come join us on October 9th from 7-11 PM in DUMBO, Brooklyn at The Dumbo Loft, 155 Water Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

If you'll be around New York at that time, please RSVP so I can get NYU to buy us even more beer. Thanks and see you there!

Some recent exhibitions

Some recent sightings of some sex games out in the wild... approach with caution.

Hurt Me Plenty at Two5Six in New York City. (May 2015)

Stick Shift at "Play Spectacular" at the Wellcome Collection in London. Curated by Holly Gramazio. (July 2015)

Succulent and Cobra Club in the back of a U-Haul box truck (and Stick Shift, in the driver's seat!) at Lost Horizon Night Market in Brooklyn (Bushwick). Curated by Stephen Clark + Babycastles. (July 2015)

Thanks to all the curators and events for having me! There's also a few more shows / appearances lined-up, so keep your eyes peeled...

Pardon the interruption

Haven't had time to write lately -- it's finals week here in New York City, so it's been pretty busy with grading and making sure students turn things in. If you happen to be in the area this month though, I encourage you to check out the student shows at two of the departments where I teach:

• Parsons School for Design MFADT Show Reception. Monday, May 18 at 6 pm. 6 East 16th St, 12th Floor, around Union Square. Wide variety of technological / conceptual / commercial projects, from experimental VR installations to new apps to future fashion to performance.
• NYU Game Center Student Show. Thursday, May 21 at 6 PM. 2 Metrotech Center, 8th Floor, around Downtown Brooklyn. All kinds of board games / physical games / digital games, mostly by the MFA students, but with a few undergraduate projects on display too.

See you around maybe.

"Stick Shift" as activist autoerotica

This is a post detailing my process and intent in making Stick Shift. It has SPOILERS; if you care about that kind of thing, then you should probably play the game first.



(Again, SPOILER WARNING is in effect. Last chance!)

Stick Shift is an autoerotic night-driving game about pleasuring your gay car. It is the last of my recent erotic gay sex game trilogy, alongside its sisters Hurt Me Plenty and Succulent. I also feel like it is a fitting book-end to the past two games, incorporating themes and ideas from both.

Over the past two months, the game has changed quite a bit. Originally, I started from Paolo Pedercini's suggestion to riff off Andy Warhol's film Blow Job (1964).

"Local Level Design" at Different Games 2015, April 3-4 in Brooklyn, New York

"American Corinthian" via
Paolo Pedercini

In about 3 weeks at Different Games 2015 in Brooklyn, I'll be speaking about "local level design", a practice of level design that I setup in opposition to industrial AAA level design methods and procedural level design. Local level design is level design concerned with player community, sustainability, and context; it rejects a top-down formalism that demands game levels exist as territories with strategic affordances orchestrated by an architect, and it sidesteps a technological imperative to engineer and articulate a fixed grammar that a game engine must understand. Instead, local level design is highly conceptual, to the extent that few people actually play these levels at all.

If you'll be around the New York City area in the beginning of April, come hangout at Different Games, and perhaps see me talk! Or if you can't, but still want to support the conference, then know that they do accept donations.

Details and stuff (but no schedule yet) are at their website. See you there maybe!

We are drugs; speculative dev tools and psychedelic hologram futures.

This post is adapted from a talk I gave at Indiecade East 2015, where the theater was way too small for the crowd, so not many people got to see the talk... sorry / oh well. Here's basically what I said:

Our story begins on October 8th, 2014, on a very special episode of the Late Show with David Letterman. He was ending that episode with a musical guest from Japan -- a holographic vocaloid named Hatsune Miku. Pay attention to Letterman's barely-veiled incredulity as he introduces her. He can't believe the words coming out of his mouth:



But what really makes this moment is the ending, after the performance. Letterman doesn't even know what to say, and he knows he doesn't know what to say. The experience was completely overwhelming, so Letterman has to somehow pivot back to interpret it for his audience (mostly moms and dads from Milwaukee) and all he can muster is a facile comparison to "being on Willie Nelson's bus." (Willie Nelson, if you're not familiar, is a celebrity notorious for his drug use, among other things.)

The meaning is both clear and agreeable: Hatsune Miku is drugs.

"We Are Drugs: On New Indie Game Dev Tools for Psychedelic Hologram Futures" @ IndieCade East 2015

Salvador Dali, "Modern Rhapsody"

I'm giving a talk in, like, 3 weeks at IndieCade East 2015 in New York City. I'm going to be talking about art / art-making as a drug, and I'm going to show a clip of Hatsune Miku, and hopefully I'll be coherent and insightful and entertaining? And if you can't splurge for the full weekend pass, then I'd recommend at least attending on Saturday -- not because that's when my talk is! -- but rather because that's when the notorious Night Games takes place. Get your tickets sooner than later, I think there's some kind of "early bird" discount? Either way, see you around in a few weeks!

Different Games 2015, call for submissions / session proposals

Different Games is a fantastic games conference running again in New York City on April 3-4 2015, geared toward diversity and inclusion, and they are actively soliciting game submissions and session proposals due by February 1st. Academics and non-academics, indie and not-indie, cisgender or trans or nonbinary, all are invited and encouraged to participate.

The three suggested tracks are:

Arcade: Designers interested in showcasing their game in the Different Games arcade should submit a brief overview of their game (no more than 500 words) that includes their design vision and concept of the game. In addition, please submit cover art and one or two screenshots of game play. We welcome pieces that will be in (beta) or play-testing phase as well as those further along in the development process.

Paper Presentations and Talks: We invite academics and creative minds alike to share recent work (written or otherwise) as speakers on our conference panels. We encourage participants from every field to submit writing or talks exploring topics pertaining to diversity and inclusion. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to: post mortems, design methodology, reflections on playtesting, analysis/commentary on games content (theme, gender, sexuality, etc.), game reception, and game culture/communities.

Breakout or Workshop Sessions: Topic-related discussions or those exploring challenges and solutions to promoting diversity and inclusion in the broader game community/communities and other pertinent subjects AND hands-on workshop sessions geared towards learning design and development skills are both invited (Your proposal should include an explanation of any equipment participants need to experience your workshop.) If your session will be facilitated collaboratively please include bios and links for all participants.

What are you waiting for? Hurry and submit! I'll be there too, presenting a bunch of games featuring photorealistic gay dudes, as part of the Different Games NEA artist grant. See you there!

"Cheeky Designs: How to Make a Video Game About Spanking The Heck Out of a Dude" at NYU Poly Game Innovation Lab, December 11

I'm giving a short tech talk about making my hunk-spanking game on December 11th at the NYU Poly School of Engineering's "Game Innovation Lab" in Downtown Brooklyn. Here's a description:

This talk will discuss the design development of "On Your Knees" "Hurt Me Plenty", one of the very few video games ever made about spanking men. How do you adapt concepts from BDSM culture into a game? How do you translate the politics of consent and power exchange into game code, 3D animation, and motion interfaces? What if video games imagined sex as an interactive process instead of a cutscene "reward" dispensed by a talking vending machine?

I'll talk how each part of the game works / why I made it the way I made it / interesting questions this kind of work brings up. Hope to see you there if you're in the New York City area!

December 11, 2014 at 7:00 PM
5 Metrotech Center
Brooklyn, NY 11201