Stirfire Studios

It began with one Tweet — and then just six weeks later, the first day of LearnDistrict’s Girls Make Games camp began, the first of many programs aimed at giving young girls the opportunity to learn how to make video games.

It’s nice to see positive efforts from the game development community getting attention on mainstream websites like the BBC. In this case, it’s a story about games for blind and visually impaired people. The article focuses on a game called Blind Legend:

The creative technologist is part of a team of three at Dowino studios in Lyon, who came up with the “Blind Legend” game for handheld devices.

"We wanted to put blind and disabled gamers in the same field of quality as sighted gamers. That was our main aim. That was our main challenge," he said.

The situation is just intolerable.

There have been a lot of really insightful write-ups recently. A broader perspective—and I almost cringe to say—catch-all by Molly Crabapple left me gasping for breath. This write up, by Elizabeth Sampat giving her thoughts on an industry that’s very dear to me, delivered the final blow and left me in tears.

It’s really rare that I create from a place of grief. It’s just not how I operate. But it’s largely what I have openly felt for the last few days, and reflecting on it, it’s been there for far longer.

This quote from Elizabeth’s piece— “We should have a war memorial for all of the women we have lost to this. We should lay flowers and grieve and see our reflections in stone.”— struck a very literal chord in me.

So yeah, here it is. A place just for me where I can light a candle and remember all of the wonderful people I probably will never get the chance to meet.  Folks that have been driven away by these horrible fucks that have the audacity to think they know what gaming and community is about.

stirfirestudios's Freedom Fall has been an interesting game so far - I’m on the Android version - there is an iThing version, and a version on Steam for a bit more.