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SOCIAL SCIENCE / GAMES USA $24.00 / Higher in Canada “I’m a total Twine neophyte and I don’t like nerds, but I love this book. The games—as played by authors—turn tangential, nostalgic, and thinky, but never boring, and the reader is filled with surprises and vicarious aches. merritt is wickedly wise, and it’s a pleasure to gain from her gamesmanship.” —Sarah Nicole Prickett, founding editor of Adult “For ages we’ve been hearing calls for diversity in game making and criticism. Most of these calls only echoed in the windowless, neon-lit conference rooms of academia. As mutant practitioner-theorist, merritt manages to contaminate the living gaming discourse, emerging as a powerful and yet nuanced voice in the indie movement.”—Paolo Pedercini, Molleindustria BEHIND THE fluoRESCENT VEIL OF BIG-BUSINESS DIGITAL GAMES, a quiet revolution is happening, and it’s centered on a tool called Twine. Taken up by nontraditional game authors to describe distinctly nontraditional subjects—from struggles with depression, explorations of queer identity, and analyses of the world of modern sex and dating to visions of breeding crustacean horses in a dystopian future—the Twine movement to date has created space for those who have previously been voiceless within games culture to tell their own stories, as well as to invent new visions outside of traditional channels of commerce. Videogames for Humans, curated and introduced by Twine author and games theorist merritt kopas, puts Twine authors, literary writers, and games critics into conversa- tion with one another’s work, reacting to, elaborating on, and being affected by the same. The result is an unprecedented kind of book about video games, one that will jumpstart the discussions that define the games culture of tomorrow. FEATURING CONTRIBUTIONS FROM Aevee Bee Emily Short Leon Arnott Patricia Hernandez Alex Roberts Eva Problems Lydia Neon Pippin Barr Anna Anthropy Gaming Pixie Maddox Pratt Riley MacLeod Auriea Harvey Imogen Binnie Mary Hamilton Rokashi Edwards Austin Walker Jeremy Lonien & Matthew S. Burns Sloane Avery Mcdaldno Dominik Johann Mattie Brice Soha Kareem Benji Bright Jeremy Penner Michael Brough Squinky Bryan Reid John Brindle Mike Joffe Tom McHenry Cara Ellison Katherine Cross Mira Simon Toni Pizza Cat Fitzpatrick Kayla Unknown Naomi Clark Winter Lake Christine Love Lana Polansky Nina Freeman Zoe Quinn Elizabeth Sampat Leigh Alexander Olivia Vitolo merritt kopas is the author of over two dozen digital games, including Consensual Torture Simulator, HUG- PUNX, and LIM. In 2014, she was named one of ISBN 9780990452843 Polygon’s 50 Admirable People in Gaming. She is from 52400 > southern Ontario and the Pacific Northwest and currently lives in Toronto with her cat Ramona. She’s been using instar books Twine since she started making videogames in 2012. “we publish the darkness” www.instarbooks.com Cover & spine design by Michael DeForge 9 780990 452843 edited by merritt kopas instar books we publish the darkness new york • san francisco • new orleans • everywhere Copyright © 2015 merritt kopas & all respective contributors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, dis- tributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopy- ing, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permit- ted by copyright law. For permission requests or other ordering information, please contact the publisher through their website: www.instarbooks.com Cover and spine art by Michael DeForge Book design by Jeanne Thornton Cataloging-in-publication data to be made available through the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-9904528-4-3 Printed by Bookmobile in the United States of America First Edition 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Table of Contents Introduction by merritt kopas 5 How to Read This Book 20 Rat Chaos by Winter Lake 23 played by Eva Problems Fuck That Guy by Benji Bright 33 played by Riley MacLeod Anhedonia by Maddox Pratt 45 played by Emily Short SABBAT by Eva Problems 57 played by Imogen Binnie Horse Master by Tom McHenry 85 played by Naomi Clark Nineteen by Elizabeth Sampat 135 played by Patricia Hernandez scarfmemory by Michael Brough 143 played by Anna Anthropy Removed by Aevee Bee 157 played by Lydia Neon for political lovers, a little utopia sketch by Bryan Reid 171 played by Avery McDaldno Your Lover Has Turned into a Flock of Birds by Miranda Simon 183 played by Bryan Reid Detritus by Mary Hamilton 189 played by Auriea Harvey There Ought to Be a Word by Jeremy Penner 217 played by Austin Walker 3 Negotiation by Olivia Vitolo 235 played by Katherine Cross reProgram by Soha Kareem 243 played by Mattie Brice Mangia by Nina Freeman 273 played by Lana Polansky Sacrilege by Cara Ellison 317 played by Soha Kareem And the Robot Horse You Rode In On by Anna Anthropy 335 played by Cat Fitzpatrick Electro Primitive Girl by Sloane 361 played by Aevee Bee The Message by Jeremy Lonien and Dominik Johann 373 played by Squinky Depression Quest by Zoe Quinn 383 played by Toni Pizza Even Cowgirls Bleed by Christine Love 427 played by Leigh Alexander 3x3x3 by Kayla Unknown 443 played by Cara Ellison Eden by Gaming Pixie 463 played by Alex Roberts Eft to Newt by Michael Joffe 489 played by Pippin Barr Dining Table by Leon Arnott 507 played by Matthew Burns I’m Fine by Rokashi Edwards 517 played by John Brindle Player 2 by Lydia Neon 553 played by Elizabeth Sampat Notes on Contributors 567 Thanks 575 Introduction merritt kopas 1. me ’ve been trying to think of a way to phrase this that won’t sound over the Itop, but I can’t. So here it is: Twine changed my life. I know, I know. But hear me out. When I first encountered Twine I was a graduate student in my early twenties. I went into grad school right out of college, which I went into right out of high school. It wasn’t totally bad. I liked getting to read so many books, and getting to talk with clever people. But a couple of years in, I was beginning to realize that something wasn’t right. Without sitting down and planning on it, I’d been an academic for my entire adult life. I felt trapped, like I’d gotten on a train and drifted off, and now it was speeding along the tracks of my life so fast that I’d never have a chance to disembark. Listen: I had been dissociating for so much of my life that academia was easy for me, because it let me distance myself from the subjects of my writing. It let me interpose layers of interpretative analysis between my- self and my experience. And those layers functioned as protective barriers, keeping me safe from any unfiltered contact with reality. I wrote paper after paper about queerness and bodies, but I wasn’t writing about myself, not really—at least, that’s what I told myself. I couldn’t write about me, because to do that would mean tearing up boarded-off places in memory and really acknowledging what my life had been like up to that point. 5 merritt kopas And then I discovered Twine. The first time I ever played a Twine game I was confronted with this text: If there’s one thing Encyclopedia Fuckme knows - and this is a hypothetical statement, of course, because she’s actually got a lot crammed in her big fat brain - it’s how to get off! But in addition to her brain, our hero also has a very greedy pussy - one that sometimes leads her into trouble! Such is “the case” today. But if she does what she does best, she just may solve . THE CASE OF THE VANISHING ENTREE. Fuck. This was 2012, and I hadn’t ever seen writing like that in a videogame. I’d grown up with games, but I’d never felt the presence of their authors. Games were, to me, cultural products similar to big-budget films: Obviously there were people involved in their design, but they never came through as individuals. And although by 2012, I was dimly aware of the existence of independent artists who made their presence as individual human beings felt through games, my experience had led me to believe that even those creators were mostly men, telling stories that were maybe interesting but not directly relevant to my life. And then, this: Anna Anthropy’s Encyclopedia Fuckme, a game about a clever lesbian with a submissive streak trying to avoid becoming her seduc- tive cannibal date’s dinner. Maybe it’s tipping my hand too much to say this game spoke to me, but it did. It was everything I had been led to believe videogames weren’t, couldn’t be: funny, hot, relevant to my life. And there were more. There were people writing in ways that resonated with me, about things I didn’t even know I needed to see written about. I started devouring Twine works wherever I could find them, building up a renewed appreciation for interac- tive fiction and digital games. It was a while before I worked up the courage to write my own story in Twine. I was self-conscious, unconfident in my abilities. It was a struggle trying to write something outside of an academic, analytical mode for the first time in years—looking back, even my personal blog posts at the time were intellectualizing. But I fought through it and ended up writing a piece for a partner I was with at the time, a game called Brace, meant for two people to play together and about struggle and perseverance against a hos- tile world.