Author: Jess Joho

Jess writes about sex and gender in the digital age. She is also part Brazilian, part Swiss, part American, and part lion.
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Gone Home programmer announces a gorgeous game about manifest destiny

“One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless. The tale is the map that is the territory. You must remember this.” – Neil Gaiman, American Gods American roads tell stories. From Huck Finn’s trek across socioeconomic boundaries to Kerouac’s rhythmic ode to a…
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The Ballet game Bound is already sashaying into our hearts

There is a certain ballet to game design. Perhaps not in the visual sense, but in the dedication—the blood, sweat, and tears it takes to pull off even a simple movement. Like a game designer, a ballerina must work night and day, while knowing every aspect of what goes into the beauty of her art, both inside and out. From the high level concepts to the granular, from the emotion of the piece to the soles of the shoes that help her execute it. A ballerina must make a world erupt from the rigid structure of her body, creating by pushing the natural limitations of her canvas. Just…
Deer Lord
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Finally, a card game created exclusively for weirdos

If you have a bunch of weirdo friends who think it’s normal to be weird (and why wouldn’t they?), boy have we got the card game for you. The strategic party game DEER LORD! is basically a trying-to-assimilate-to-society-but-can’t-because-you’re-too-weird simulator. It’s described as being ideal for a group of friends that likes to “deceive, manipulate and confuse each other,” because the basic premise is that you must trick other people into thinking your weirdo tendencies are normal. Each player draws five cards from the deck that give them the option to either “duel” with another player, or instructs them to “do something.” Duels are…
Call of Dudley
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Pick up the strangest call of your life in this videogame labyrinth

You come to, upright, in the middle of a room swirling with color. Quickly, you realize the stripped wallpaper isn’t actually moving. It’s you, swiveling your head around, trying to figure out where and who you are—how you got to this ugly room in the first place. The neon walls overwhelm, but not nearly as much as the number of doors surrounding you. Uncertain but too afraid to stand still in this ugly room, you walk through a door. But in this place, you will discover, only ugly rooms lie beyond the doors that lead into even more ugly rooms. In…
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Immortalize your newborn child by rendering them as a creepy 3D model

One of the various things the digital age has changed forever is how parents show off their kids. Before, the most harm a baby picture could do was embarrass you in front of a date you brought home to meet your parents. But according to the WNYC podcast Note to Self, “the Pew Research Center found that 92 percent of children in the U.S. have a digital presence by the time they turn two.” With the simultaneous immediacy and longevity of a social media footprint, the impulse to show off your cute kid could now have unforeseen consequences. As The Guardian‘s Linda Geddes asks, “is it safe, or even ethical…
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Lonely dwarf planet Pluto finally finds love as Noby Noby Girl arrives

It’s been a rough ride for Pluto ever since it was demoted in 2006 by the no-good scientists who deemed it unworthy of the proper “planet” classification. It lost its confidence, became altogether uninterested in life, and has been revolving in its own sorrow ever since. After the demotion, all of Pluto’s accomplishments were diminished by the “dwarf” planet prefix. No matter what it did—whether completing an orbit around the sun or being visited by a spacecraft—big brother Neptune and his ilk would always outshine him (you know, since they’re closer to the sun). Fear no more the heat of the…
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Go back in time to save time in the adorable Tick Tock Isle

Described as a spiritual successor to the delightful Cat Poke, Tick Tock Isle is a point and click adventure game that doesn’t want to reinvent the wheel—and it’ll charm the pants out of anyone who thinks that wheel is outdated or boring. The demo was originally released four years ago by the duo of Jason Boyer and Ryan Pietz. “We spent an entire summer designing our biggest game yet,” Boyer writes on his blog. “Unfortunately, we didn’t have anyone to program it beyond a demo, so it lingered in our unfulfilled dreams folder.” Finally in April 2015, they decided to “make our dream a reality and…
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How to make soccer more entertaining? Add ragdoll physics

Americans insist that soccer is and always will be boring. And, admittedly, low-scoring games with few opportunities for commercial breaks isn’t the most ‘Murica thing ever. But defenders of soccer might point to the simple elegance of a well-executed pass, or the unparalleled tension of a final battle in the penalty box. Well, all of that—the good and the bad—gets thrown out the window in Footbrawl, a ragdoll soccer game being developed by designer Kevin Suckert. Right now, Footbrawl is just a basic prototype with lots of funny GIFs to show for it. But the potential seems, well, endless. “Its [sic] basically everything what FIFA street…
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A creator of SOMA on the surprising merit of Until Dawn

Sometimes, a big budget game comes along that, despite an almost Duke Nukem Forever-esque level of development redos and challenges, finally reaches your videogame system only to impress rather than disappoint. It’s so rare that it almost feels like magic when it happens. But the question is: how come a game like Until Dawn—originally created for the PS3 and with the expressed intent of tricking you into believing Playstation Move wasn’t useless—transforms into a beautiful butterfly while games like Duke Nukem Forever turn into steaming piles of shit? It must be those fickle videogame gods at it again, arbitrarily deciding who goes to heaven and who is Duke Nukem Forever. Of course that isn’t…