#personal games

I spent time Re-vamaping Chestnut Ridge into a wild-west world and loved it so much I made a personal decades family to start. I don't have time to do full on storytelling atm with the Doyle Legacy but here are these cuties! Theodosia and Everette.

Bonus Shots of Theodosia before she started working at the hospital and met the lead Doctor Everette♥

Clueless (1995) Friday (1995) The Social Network (2010) Blue Valentine (2010) Gone Girl (2014)

bold the options that resonate with you:

[SOFT.] baby pink | iridescent | glitter is always a good option | no bra | minimalistic tattoos | cherry patterns | sweet scented perfumes | wearing generous amounts of blush | doodling hearts | getting excited to pet an animal | fun nails | rewatching old barbie movies | hair sticking to glossed lips | heart shaped sunglasses | taking pictures of the sunset or sunrise | stuffed animals | protecting nature | stickers everywhere | teen movies | the light rain that falls from a clear sky at the beginning of the night 

[DARK ACADEMIA.] neutral tones | masculine outfits | studying languages | worn down copy of books | grey skies | turtleneck sweaters | loose fitting pants | hair tied with a silk ribbon | trying to remember a cool difficult word you read somewhere to use in a convo | thick belts | minimal makeup | windows fogged by rain | vintage jewelry | blouses with cuffed sleeves | reading a murder mystery and trying to solve it | oxford style shoes | sweater vests | subtitled old movies in a language you don’t speak | leaves cracking as you walk | annotating books to express your emotions about the story

[EDGY.] closet full of dark clothes | fishnet tights | makeup sweating off | neon signs | searching for unknown songs | chokers | band tees | doodling on old converse | finding smoking aesthetically pleasing but not doing it | weird humor | accidentally very dramatic | dim lights | layered outfits | chain belts | chipped nail polish | messy hair | low quality pics | piercings | combat boots | scribbling on desks

[70s.] colorful wardrobe | doodling flowers | wearing short shorts | using a bikini top or bra as a normal top | listening to ABBA | flowers in your hair | DIYing everything | jamming to songs alone in your room | drunkenly telling your friends you love them | patterned bandanas | mid heeled shoes | messy braids | flared sleeves | walking barefoot on grass or sand | bold sunglasses | the good kind of tired you get after doing something you enjoy for hours | feeding stray animals | fun patterned socks | room decorated with succulents and other plants | likes to go roller skating or skateboarding

[PREPPY CASUAL.] collared clothes | drinking juice out of a champagne glass | getting excited to see the met gala looks | thick headbands | small pastel cardigans | making your friends take your ootd pics | plaid mini skirts | tweed two piece | watching reality tv to pass time | frilly tops | watching old hollywood movies | academically driven | long(ish) manicured nails | new year’s eve fireworks | colorful tights | layered gold jewelry | yearns for luxury brand items | decorating your room with fairy lights | cursive and/or neat handwriting | lace details

I don't often talk about my personal games (basically never actually) but I'd like to take this moment to inform you all on what is happening in the game of shadowrun that I play every week.

In order to track down the lieutenant of a BITS mage (that is a mage who is either a Blood, Insect, Toxic, or Shadow mage) We must infiltrate a magical academy for special needs children (high school ages) so that we can find out who "The Spirit" is.

Cue our brilliant plan of having the team leader who is a troll adept focusing on punching shit and my character, the elven team medic/long range/up close killer/pilot infiltrate the school as teachers, specifically as an English and health teacher respectively.

One of the things in video games I'm super excited about right now is simulating certain aspects of the human experience through game mechanics. I'm not talking about epic, hero or fantasy stories, and not even necessarily about stories that are more relatable such as those about our daily lives and the mundane. What I’m trying to get at are highly internal experiences that we can relate to on a personal level, and that many of us are intimately familiar with. I'm deliberately not using the word story, because that sets a whole range of expectations. Here are some examples of games that are about internal human experience, and that encompass this in their game mechanics. They are all very short, ranging from five minutes to two hours.

Gravitation is a game about depression, creativity and parenting.

What Now? shows a subjective experience of sensory overload and emotional breakdown.

Passage muses on life and death, and how our life choices affect our path.

Compass is about overcoming fears and the effects this has on perception.

LIM, a game made up entirely of squares, captures strongly the experience and violence of not belonging.

Depression Simulator is an artistic walking simulator encapsulating a subjective experience of depression.

Journey, larger in scale and length (but still relatively short, at about two hours of gameplay), goes all out at presenting the journey of a lifetime from birth to death, and the magic of experiencing connection with one another.

All of these tiny (and not-so-tiny) video games simulate the mechanics of some aspect of internal human experience. They deal with complex topics of the mind, of the emotions, of the internal experience of things, and they don't necessarily tell a story, though we can build one around them if we want. Importantly, they allow the player to project themselves onto the character to great lengths—the games themselves are vehicles to an understanding of the experiences they are about. They are playgrounds where we can enter, and allow us to safely explore the experience at hand.

How does the character get depressed? What factors play into this? How does this change the behaviour and perception of the character? How does the character get out of depression? Not just depression, but things like happiness, information overload, burnout, mood swings, the joy of a cup of tea, a walk in the forest, effects of exercise on mental health and mental clarity, love, breakup, creativity, self-care, bullying, transitioning, writer's block—all of these sorts of experiences can be translated into game mechanics in such a way that the mechanics themselves simulate those experiences. These mechanics are often metaphorical in nature, with ranging levels of abstraction. If executed well, they encapsulate that meaning and they nudge the player to reflect on the topic, they offer insight, or they simply share a personal experience with the player. They can however be very subjective, personal and specific, and different players will get different levels of satisfaction out of them, since not everyone will be able to relate to the same extent.

In that sense, such games come incredibly close to music and poetry. Sometimes I like to describe them as poetic. It's this kind of content that I crave personally—content that provokes deeper thought instead of challenging my skills—and I know there are a lot of others out there who crave it too, and who are starting to look for it in video games. I've played skill / gameplay-focused games for over ten years of my life. And to be honest, I don’t get much out of them anymore. I want to be engaged in games differently now—I want games to engage me with my own internal world and with that of other people. This is what music and poetry do for me, and this is what I'd like to open up a game for as well.

Luckily, with the rise and democratization of game development tools such as Unity, Construct 2, Game Maker and Twine, and distribution platforms like itch.io and Game Jolt, the prevalence of such auteur games has been steadily rising. I believe this is one reason that this 'genre' of video games is taking solid shape, as more and more people who are looking for outlets to express themselves discover that video games are a viable, highly expressive and accessible medium to do so.

The games mentioned above are just a tiny subset of what's currently out there, and they brush only a tiny set of experiences. I'm pretty excited for what else is out there I haven't played yet, and for what games in this spirit have yet to come into existence. Just like there are many different kinds of musicians and writers (and artists across all other media, for that matter), there are many different kinds of game makers. I'm sure we'll get to see a large variety of auteur games, which I believe we're already starting to see the beginnings of right now. I envision things like personal game albums or game collections to be more common (Memoir En Code is a good example), where instead of listening to a music album or reading through poetry, one might play through a few tiny games, and be engaged in the content they like.

I've talked about portraying the mechanics of abstract, internal human experience in video games. In the wider scope of the medium, this might be considered a niche subset. It isn’t something everyone will appreciate or look for, but it's the same in other media, like literature, music, and film. Not all formats within a particular medium will be for everyone, but having the variety makes for a rich and mature medium.

Moreover, I believe that being able to communicate internal human experience with each other through video games is an incredibly powerful thing. The dimension of interactivity for such content is something we haven't seen before, something which is entirely absent, or at least, less prevalent, in other media. I'm excited for what possibilities this brings us, and in what interesting ways game makers will utilize that interactivity.