Female voices in games

Several people have asked, apropos of recent Twitter/Gamasutra/Metafilter/Kotaku discussions, for lists of women whose games they should know about.

So here is a short list of female authors whose work I’ve especially enjoyed, recently or in the past, with links to most-recommended works by each. It’s not even a little bit complete or comprehensive, and it skews towards indie game designers and women who work in narrative, simply by virtue of the fact that those are the areas I follow most closely. In no particular order, then:

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Assorted Items

Failbetter is Kickstarting Below, a StoryNexus piece with rogue-like underground exploration and a Viking-flavored backstory. One of the higher-tier rewards is a physical opportunity deck; I have an earlier version of this from their Silver Tree Kickstarter, and it’s a fun piece. Not sure if this sounds like your thing? There’s a playable prototype already online.

If you’d rather write your own StoryNexus game, you might be interested to know that the Winter World of the Season competition is open; the deadline is 31st December 2012, and the entries will be judged by a panel of various interactive storytelling people, including Jon Ingold.

Meanwhile, “To Be or Not To Be: That is The Adventure”, a choose-your-path version of Hamlet (careful not to call itself CYOA for legal reasons) has steamed through to an astounding $139K raised. This is no doubt due in part to the luscious Kate Beaton illustrations accompanying the pitch. Like this:

Which incidentally looks like it might be prototyped in Twine. (Check out 4:07 in the video if you don’t believe me.)

Evolve (Caitlin Lill)

Evolve placed third in the StoryNexus World of the Season competition, after Samsara and Zero Summer. Unlike the other two pieces, it’s a work of educational non-fiction: you begin as a single-celled organism and make choices that allow your organism to evolve. The author has written about her inspiration: she works in a science museum, and saw the StoryNexus platform as a possible way to convey the educational content she’s interested in.

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Tabletop Storygames: Shooting the Moon

Shooting the Moon is a tabletop storygame about a romantic triangle, which I first heard of on Sam Kabo Ashwell’s recommendation (and indeed played with Sam). The two suitor characters compete to get something (probably love and affection, but conceivably something else) from the third, “beloved” character.

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Choice-based Narrative Tools: Twine

The prevalence of Twine in the most recent IF Comp, together with some discussions with Porpentine (author of howling dogs), made me give it another try. For those who aren’t familiar with its output, it’s designed for building CYOA or hypertext; it creates a website output that the author can then choose to customize with standard HTML/CSS tools, or leave as-is.

Twine has been around for quite a while. Some time back, I tried it out and couldn’t get it to run properly on a Mac. This time, I had no difficulty installing and running it, so whatever updates have occurred have resolved at least my problems.

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