Category Archives: orange

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.

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

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.

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.