i'm involved again this year with the Experimental Game Workshop, the yearly session at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco. we explicitly try to include games of all types and sizes that push the boundaries of games as a medium in some new or compelling way. which means: weird art games, niche one-off experiments, bizarre game mods, even interesting but only tangential-to-game media... and more!

if you're not sure if your game is included here or not - you should submit! it's free! the submission deadline is November 17th.

you can submit and find more info about the session as a whole here:

to get an idea of the types of games we cover, you can also view last year's session for free here.

also i should note that if you're unable to attend GDC due to travel costs or COVID stuff (100% understandable) we are doing some remote/video talks as well

my game Problem Attic turns 10 years old today. thank you to anyone on here who has played it and said nice things over the years! particularly the spanish and portuguese- speaking fans of the game who seem particularly vocal in recent years.

Problem Attic was made at perhaps the peak of a time where small games actually netted discourse around various blogs and places like Rock Paper Shotgun. i certainly didn't expect everyone to like it, but i think i was hoping it'd generate some interesting discourse/reaction

it started as a 72 hour ludum dare game i made that i decided it would be fun to expand upon for the next month and a half. the inspiration partly came from Michael Brough's game "Game Title: Lost Levels" and how it took a bug in his other game "Game Title" and designed around it. the idea was the ludum dare section would be the "intro" of sorts, and then the game proper would start when everything was turned upside down, so to speak. other inspirations were Yume Nikki or Braid, which i talked about elsewhere, and the style of old C64 and Atari games.

i think at the time, i expected it to generate some discourse and perhaps get a little recognition from a game festival. it wasn't out of the ordinary for small experimental games to get that. & it did get a little discourse, tho it definitely was dwarfed by a lot of other things.

one thing i should say here is the game is very much colored by me processing childhood abuse i had suffered for the first time in my 20's, a thing i had only recently started dealing with a few years before that. a lot of things in the game reference that very obliquely. a lot of games at the time made by trans creators were about transitioning, so everything was read through that lens. many people still read the game as a trans narrative. me being trans certainly factors into the game's creation, but it was more influenced by dealing with abuse

when the game came out i think i was frustrated that this incredibly dense abstract game got much less attention than a lot of small games that were more "clickbaity"/easy to cover. especially given how personal it was, and all the stuff i was going through in my life at the time. i was not remotely in a good place in 2013. that combined with the fact that a lot of people i knew didn't seem to "get" the game, or most upsettingly, thought i just liked torturing the player and didn't understand the inspirations behind it, sent me into a huge depression

anyway, the game came and went and a lot of other stuff happened and i got into a really deep depression. but at the end of 2013, Brendan Vance, who i did not know at all, wrote an extremely passionate post making a wider/broader case for the game. even though his close reading of the game doesn't always mesh with what i was feeling, this kind of post is the most flattering possible thing another person can write about something you've done. i credit this post to why anyone at all is still interested in this game now: https://blog.brendanvance.com/2013/11/02/problem-attic/

a few years after release the game did generate more discourse and i later wrote a post mortem of Problem Attic for the short-lived Offworld pub: https://boingboing.net/2015/07/30/the-other-side-of-braid.html. i think i regret that piece a bit. i mean there are intentionally confounding things in the game too along with the deeply personal parts, so i don't want to pretend it can just be fully read as some deeply personal/autobiographical thing which i felt the piece implied. i also don't want to impose one pure reading on the game either, obviously - because it is a very abstract game that is open to a lot of interpretation, which i think is great.

anyway, the years ticked by and flash games are hard to play now so i think the audience never got above a certain point of insiders who had followed my work. it certainly never found the larger cult audience of like Crypt Worlds, a game i did sound fx/music on shortly after. i think my frustrations with how the game was received - that it seemed so massively polarizing, and that it seemed to be totally loved or mostly just sort of ignored and people thought i didn't know how to make a game. which yeah - plenty of aspects of the game are rough around the edges, but a lot of it was designed that way intentionally. and just in general the fact that small experimental games don't even get the engagement they used to unless it's for meme-bait means i never made another game.

in the meantime you can still play Problem Attic here, either as a standalone .exe or if that doesn't work, a .swf that you can bring into a standalone flash player. it's not for everyone, but judging by other people's reactions if you're one of the people who likes it you'll probably REALLY like it: https://lizryerson.itch.io/problem-attic

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i also should officially announce that i'm intending on releasing an album this year featuring a lot of musical threads that started around the time i made Problem Attic. it'll be like a part of a shared universe of sorts.

my timetable here is i that i'm planning to release a 3-song EP to preview the album and garner interest/hype around the first week of July. and then the full release will happen in September or October.

anyway - i know the people who care about games that got minor blog buzz in 2013 is dwindling. but Problem Attic is still to me the most artistically significant thing i've ever done (including writing) and it has lingered over my life since. so it's important to talk about!

the post in question:

the quotes:

there is this desperation of so many who work in the (video game) industry to be a part of a consequentially serious form of art, like film, that has this romantic social purchase and the weight of history tied to it. as (game designer) Chris Crawford said, game developers are very defensive about the sordid reputation of the field they work in. 'Content Creators' fondly reminiscing about a part of Zelda game they played in their youth on their youtube channel for 800k subscribers doesn't have quite the same ring to it as Martin Scorsese writing about how attending Fellini premieres in his youth profoundly changed him as a person. the environment that produced filmmakers like Fellini was shaped by huge upheavals of the social and political order that profoundly changed how film was viewed in broader society. and the fact is: so many of these game industry people who want video games to be a serious, consequential art form are unwilling to commit to what that actually means.

the way the indie space was prepping itself for primetime meant shaving off its own edges in an increasingly merciless manner in order to achieve correct respectability and palatability to the mainstream. if this sounds really at odds with the often highly personal source of inspiration Blow described games from the indie space as coming from, that's because it was. but it felt that whenever this crowd was hit with anything too weird and freaky for them that took this personal game mantra too seriously, they instantly would launch into "finish your game please" mode and hit people with treatises on the importance of polish.

your apparent lack of respectability as an outsider game developer was treated as a threat which endangered their long-term investment in this space - like a father lashing out at his children. you were looked down upon as an unserious joke for not following more conventional industry approaches and modes of presentation. but hey, if you play by the rules maybe one day you'll be called the great new auteur of the space by some journalist from The Atlantic who is hopelessly clueless to the world of games.

games developed by one or two people, especially from more recent years, often challenge the hegemony of industry norms and practices in much greater and more profound ways than commercial games made by larger numbers do. i have long argued that many game design 'rules' now read like the old "180 degree rule" in Hollywood used to read: perhaps there's some practical utility to those rules when putting together a work that a large number of people will experience. but they are also rules imposing a specific mode of artistic creation by companies underestimating the capacity of audiences, and unwilling to take larger risks. that means that many people who work in the industry and internalize these rules, if only out of sheer self-preservation for the sake of their jobs if nothing else, are often unable to see outside of them.

to me, if you are not interrogating more deeply how norms created by the markets that produce these rules, you are just giving the game industry a complete license to define what kind of experience is valid and what isn't. this has much more serious implications when it comes to the ability for experiences to exist that would never be able to be made by large studios.

hello cohost friends! sharing this here because a lot of indie game devs are on here.

i'm involved with this redesign of the Experimental Game Workshop (formerly Experimental Gameplay Workshop), the yearly session at the Game Developer's Conference. we're explicitly trying to focus on including more types of games that were ignored by the solely gameplay-oriented nature of this session in the past. which means: weird art games, niche one-off experiments, bizarre game mods, even interesting but only tangential-to-game media.

i know plenty of you out there doing this stuff who could use more exposure. it's free to submit, so you should! the submission deadline is January 1st. more info about where to submit and the session as a whole here: https://www.experimentalgameworkshop.org/

also i should note that if you're unable to attend GDC due to travel costs or COVID stuff (100% understandable) we are doing some remote/video talks as well