Erin Robinson of Ivy Games stops by to discuss Gravity Ghost, her work teaching game design at Columbia College Chicago, talking animals, not-talking animals, and the previously untapped power fantasy of terraforming planets with one’s long, beautiful hair.
I was really taken with Gravity Ghost from the first time I played it and, as I mention in the interview, the ending made me feel the need to snuggle my beloved game-designing dog for quite a while. It’s affecting, this game.
And not to put too fine a point on it, but my hair really is quite stunning.
———
• David Sedaris made that comment about talking-animals-as-shorthand in this Daily Show interview on his book Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk.
• And that BoJack Horseman quote came from this AMA.
• And here’s that interview that Erin did with the Phoenix Examiner.
• Yep, Frozen Synapse is still two-for-one, presumably forever. So that’s neat.
• I’ll go ahead and link that incredible Leigh Alexander talk again.
• For those unfamiliar with Cory Archangel’s Super Mario Clouds. (Seeing a screening of that in a class at UChicago was a surreal experience, to say the least).
• Ian Bogost’s How To Do Things With Videogames contains useful definitions of artgames and prodecuralism, a reframing of the David Carr/Clay Shirky dichotomy, and some helpful, hopeful words on the issue of “gamer identity.”
• Here’s Don Cheadle telling you not to be an actor and Charles Bukowski instructing “young men” not to be poets.
———
“All The People Say” by Carpe Demon.
“Terraforming” / “Flower Girl” from the Gravity Ghost Soundtrack by Ben Prunty.