Games
Games and playful experiences
Critical Gameplay [2009-2015]: Art+Design
Critical Gameplay is a collection of strategically designed video games. Each game asks the question, what do common game mechanics teach us? The games in the collection are designed to help reevaluate our perspective on gameplay experiences. Like Critical Cartography changes the way we perceive the world, critical gameplay seeks to offer alternate perspectives on the way we play.
Mindtoggle Games [1985, 2014]: Play
Mindtoggle Games makes casual games for a casual life. The games are designed for mobile devices and lightly employ the alternative mechanics of the Critical Gameplay project. The games are the commercial exploration of critical gameplay.
Play HTML 5/web versions of these games here. These were all originally released for mobile devices, so some glitches may occur. They were also primarily developed between 2012-2017. Click the images to learn more about the projects:
- Penguin Roll
- Bye Bye Birds
- Bikini Beach Zombies (aka Bikini Zombies DaB)
- Black Like Me
- Stolen Kisses
- Art Heist, White Hat ( original demo version)
Game Jam Games (48 hours or less)
Gaming the System
[2020] Editorial Newsgame
Collaborating with Miami Herald reporter Romina Ruiz Goiriena, converted her vision of a game to explain the US immigration system's problems. The game demonstrates the relative ease with which kleptocrats acquire citizenship when compared to asylum seekers and other less well-funded immigrant populations. The game focuses on the unique characteristics of Miami’s populations, demonstrating how money laundering and other practices perpetuate inequalities in the community. Based on the series of the same name . The full list of contributors is here and the Spanish language version may be played here: https://juegodelsistema.journalismgames.com/
COVID-19 Trivia Game
[2020]: Health Communication Game
On April 7th, 2020 I made a tiny little game in 12 hours while under shelter in place in Miami, Florida. This is that game. It's a little trivia game made from COVID-19 fact sheets from the US Center for Disease Control, the Australian Government Department of Health, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the World Health Organization and others. The sources are linked in the game - just click the question.
[2019] Hurri-can
Education/Rhetoric Game
A quick prototype game to explore traditional narrative and hurricane safety.
[2017] Hurl the Harasser
Editorial Newsgame
Developed with Maggie Farley and Joyce Rice the game is an experiential metaphor for the situation of women who have been subjected to sexual harassment. Players remove the bubble of shame by helping victims speak out, eventually tipping the scales of power to catapult the harasser away. Made as part of the Newsjam at the University of Miami in less than 30 hours.
[2016] Rich Raul
Editorial Game
A game made for the Global Game Jam 2016 "ritual" theme in 24 hours. Players evade taxes in 2 levels, first dodging taxes, an later collecting money and incentives at the detriment of the shirtless masses who's score/network is 1/1000th of the player's.
[2011] Nurture Extinction
Editorial / Art Game
A quick procedural rhetoric game about balancing nurture and extinction. The player(s) must keep all the plants alive to win. There are limited resources, so use them wisely. Designed for one player or multiple players on one keyboard. Designed and developed in 24 hours as part of Global Game Jam, Miami University 2011.
[2008] Letter Blaster
Retro-remake
This is a quick game I made for the Games for Helen category of the 2008 Retro Remakes competition. It's a remake of a game I played when I was learning to type.
Traditional Development Cycle
(solo projects, 1-3 months)
Fake News Shooter
Human Computation | Polling Game
[2017-2019] Using data parsed from the web, these 2 games and a toy, ask players to identify fake content from real. Two of the games use the mechanics of a Space Invaders styled shooter to ask players to identify either real domains for fake, or real headlines from fake. The third game asks players to pick all the fake images in 30 seconds or less each round. When the game ends or time runs out, the player can see a list of their performance compared to others. With the toy, they are immediately shown what percentage of times the image was shown that it was identified as fake.
Polyglot Cubed
Language Learning Game
[2008-2012] An educational practice tool and game prototype for learning languages. It is designed to entertain while enforcing language comprehension. Polyglot can be used to improve comprehension of a variety of languages with minimal training.
3rd World Shooter
Educational "DocuGame"
[2008-2009]: An educational game prototype for imparting the history of the PAICV in the 1970s. The game is a prototype for docugame concept Id like to test. The game is a work in progress, completed in a weekend.
Zombie Master
Entertainment
[2006]: Zombie Master is a first-person adventure shooter in the tradition of 1950’s horror films and graphic novels. The player must find his missing daughter and destroy an army of the undead. 10,000+ downloads to date.
Health-E
Educational
[2005]: An educational game prototype meant to interest students in the processes of the human immune system. The game’s player character is a killer-T cell in the blood of an infected body. The player must come in contact with infected cells to cleanse them of the infection, while avoiding bacteria and virulent cells. The game play is analogous to a 3D version of Pac-Man
Rise of the Dead
Entertainment
[2005]: An action-exploration game. It combines the fun of hackand-slash action games with the challenge of solving a maze. The game is displayed in 3D stereoscopic display for the University of Illinois' GeoWall system. The gameplay is modeled after the classic game Gauntlet. (gradaute school project with 3 grad students)
Games for Art Sake / Play Art
The Unbearable Lightness of Being [2018]
A playable adaption of Kundera’s literary work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The game attempts to explore heuristically the ambiguity of meaning presented in making a playful experience through abstraction of meaning and representation. What does it mean to translate literary works into playful forms? How is meaning changed by the ambiguity of symbolic language?
Drift Interruptions [2008]
A project to visualize the structure of story. Version 4 includes a play tool in which the player creates a story by collecting items between multiple dimensions.
An unguided exploration of other people’s conversations within a virtual space. The conversations are emitted from abstract primitives in a 3D environment. The piece seeks to strip the illusion of character avatars, expose bare simulacra, and convey the memory of electronic devices. The goal is to provide the participant an opportunity to explore a world that is an ambiguous cacophony of the fiction and non-fiction memory of this device.
Bounce [2008]:
Description:
Site-specific, motion activated computer vision game where small, anonymous avatars follow the visitor as they traverse the stairs - giggling distinctly upon each movement. The software uses motion sensing, a physics engine, and stereoscopic sound to create an implied augmentation of reality.
Music Box is an artistic implementation of emergent behavior and procedural content generation for (visual) music production. The performance version of Music Box employs a flocking algorithm to display animated notes that rise from a written score, then move to create a distinctive flock-lead musical arrangement. The result is emergent sound; a musical arrangement directed by the visual representation of flocking.
- Conceptual Designer & Content Editor: Maggie Farley
- Lead Artist & UI/UX Designer: Joyce Rice
- Developer & Designer: Chas Brown
- Evaluator and Designer: Kelli Dunlap
- Producer & Designer: Cherisse Datu
- Senior Producer: Bob Hone
- Game Design Guru/ Executive Director: Lindsay Grace
- Editorial Consultant: Amy Eisman
- Original Concept by Maggie Farley
Client: Polygon / VOX Storytelling Studio
- Art director, game designer: Joyce Rice
- Design and Analysis: Kelli Dunlap
- Project Manager, content and development: Cherisse Datu
- Original Concept: Lindsay Grace
Client: ETS
Client: ETS
- Project Manager: Bob Hone
- Lead Developer: Chas Brown
- Developers: Alex Cha, Rehaf Aljammaz
- Artist: Patrick McEvoy
- Creative Director, Concept: Lindsay Grace
Client: ETS
- Creative Director, Concept: Lindsay Grace
- Project Manager: Bob Hone
- Developer: Amir Goudarzi
- Art Direction: Chris Totten
- Artist: Julian Parker
- Creative Director, Designer, Developer: Lindsay Grace
- Lehman, B. Hebert, D., Jackson, T., Grace, L. 2017. Affect and Experience: Case Studies in Games and Test-Taking, 35th Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI - ACM), Denver, USA
- Design and Development: Mike Treanor
- Art: Chris Totten
- Design advising: Josh McCoy
- Project Lead: Lindsay Grace
Miami University Game Center A-Game Studio
2013 Edgar Allen Poe's Tell Tale Heart (role: Design Lead)
- Design and Development: Mike Treanor
- Development: Tristan Carkuff
- Develpment: Steven Harvey
- Project Management and Promotion: Derek Rumpler
- Design: James Earl Cox III
- Project Lead, Creative Lead: Lindsay Grace
Client: ECredable