Category Archives: games
Tutorial: Making Games with Twine
Launch the Twine Digital Storytelling Tutorial Set
Learning through Game Design
Launch the Twine Tutorial Set (Tutorials Open in New Window)
Twine is a free, open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories, created by Chris Klimas in 2009.
You don’t need to write any code to create a complex multimodal story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images and embedded video, music and sound effects, CSS, and JavaScript when you’re ready.
Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere – including the New Media Modules Twine repository, or free twine hosting communities.
To upload your Twine project to the New Media Modules, visit our resources pages below.
Twine Version 1.4.2 for Windows and OS X is the version modeled in our tutorial and is ideal for telling complex, multimodal digital narratives and research artefacts.
Download Twine
Additional Twine Resources, Documentation & Tips
Tutorial: RPG Maker
Learning through Game Design
Ever dream of making your own video games? RPG Maker allows you to customize every aspect of your game with an easy-to-use interface, making it perfect for beginners yet powerful enough for experts. Our RPG Maker tutorial set introduces you to the basics of RPG Maker, as well as some of the software’s more complex game-making, simulation, and world-building features.
Use RPG Maker to create adventure games, interactive narratives, simulations, or experimental digital artworks.
Tutorial: GameMaker Studio
Related Elements
GameMaker: Studio has everything you need for games development, no matter what your level or expertise, and our tutorial set introduces you to basics. Learn to code as you create, design, play and share. Making games development accessible to everyone means taking away the barriers to getting started.
Related article: Learning through Game Design: A GameMaker Study
Case Study: The Art of Game Design Kara Stone, Media Artist & Game Designer
Learning through Game Design
In this video, media artist and game designer, Kara Stone, explores her digital game-design practices, and signals how we might think about video games differently – as art, as a form of personal expression, and as a means of critically engaging and (re)designing the social worlds we inhabit.
Kara Stone is an artist creating videogames, interactive art crafts. She achieved an MA in Communication and Culture at a joint program at York and Ryerson University, focusing on mental health, affect, feminism, and videogames. Her work has been featured in Vice, Wired, The Atlantic, and NPR. It consists of feminist art with a focus on gendered perspectives of affect – but it’s much more fun than it sounds.
For more from Kara on digital game design, please see the New Media Modules GameMaker video tutorials.
MakeMe Card Game An Ideation Card Deck Game to Support Game Design, Emily Flynn-Jones
Learning through Game Design
Play the MakeMe Deck
This module component (in two parts) explores socially conscious and critically focused game design. In part 1, we looked at design philosophies, game examples and (in part 2) we participate in a game design exercise, using the MakeMe Card Deck.
Watch the video for a MakeMe Tutorial and download the Make Me Instructions.
Mod the MakeMe Deck to create simulations and games and ideation decks for your own discipline! Coming Soon – A MakeMe Deck for Digital Storytelling (Narrative Ideation Deck)
Author/Creator Bio: Emily Flynn-Jones, PhD is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and game scholar from York University where she works of promoting gender equity in gaming culture. She also makes games based on her research.
Art Design: Monika Krupa
Creative Technologist: Lindy Wilkins
Launch the MakeMe Card Deck!
Filed under games, iconpuzzle, Text, yellow
Theory: Critical Game Design & Critical Play Readings by Critical Game Design by Mary Flanagan & Lindsay Grace
Learning through Game Design
Anxiety, Openness & Activist Games: A Case Study for Critical Play
Mary Flanagan
ABSTRACT: This paper explores the boundaries of social issues or ‘activist’ games with a case study on a popular game released in 2009 which fosters a critical type of play among the audience. We assess the game’s public reception to better understand how contradictory play elements led to an anxiety of ambiguity during open play. Borrowing from the “poetics of open work,” we will demonstrate how the most powerful play experience in activist games result from a new relationship formed between the audience and the player through mechanics, subject position, representation, and content.
Critical Games: Critical Design in Independent Games
Lindsay Grace
ABSTRACT: As a sign of the maturing game medium, critical games have grown to provide meaningful critique. Where once a critic might write an article, some have taken to making critical games. These games critique the conventions of digital experience to provide social commentary, examination of gameplay assumptions or simply create playful design. This paper provides a simple topographical view of critical games, proposing formal attributes for analyzing games made through critical design practices. The result is a formal two axes description. The first spectrum is the dichotomy between social critique and game mechanics critique, described as reflective and recursive respectively. The mechanics of these play experiences are further explained as either continuous or discontinuous, as executed through the rhythmic structure of the game. From this perspective, any critical game can be described by the apex between mechanic and social critique, continuous and discontinuous delivery. The result is a useful framing for game designers and game researchers.
