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Jason Rohrer’s next game is a twisted take on child rearing

Jason Rohrer’s last game, the home defense MMO The Castle Doctrine (2014), revolved around protecting what’s yours: your family, your wealth accumulated through rounds of burglary, your carefully designed web of traps and defense. It was a ruthless world, a merciless place where your measure of success is how good you were at dismantling other’s work and stealing their goods. So it seems ironic that his next game (working title One Life) starts you off as completely defenseless and reliant on the kindness of online strangers. Enter the world in Rohrer’s currently unnamed MMO, and you find yourself birthed to…

The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer
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Jason Rohrer’s personal games get their own museum retrospective

The Davis Museum at Wellesley College is now exhibiting The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer until June 26th, 2016. It’s a retrospective of Rohrer’s unique videogames, exemplified by his earlier works such as the semi-autobiographical 2D sidescroller Gravitation (2008) which explores, in Rohrer’s own words, his own bursts of “mania, melancholia, and the creative process.” Rohrer asserts that he is not a “gamer” per se, which has helped him to view videogames as a non-spatial medium that can be repurposed as another form of art. He says that he does not see the confines of videogames themselves and can better tap…

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Jason Rohrer’s new game involves gambling real money to win amulets

Jason Rohrer is weird with money. Previously, he gave away $3,000 to players of his last game, The Castle Doctrine. You’d think him affluent with a gesture like that, but two years before that he told Paste how his family lived off $14,000 a year while somehow earning less than that. Now, I’m sure with Rohrer being a family man that he is careful with money. But the way he’s treated it in the past gives the impression that he sees cash as a game piece—something to experiment and play with. ritualistic instructions on how to make a husband faithful …

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What is Jason Rohrer, Scarface?

It’s been pretty widely covered that, between now and the 27th, Jason Rohrer is giving away free money, $3000 to be exact, to players of The Castle Doctrine, his MMO about stealing from others while protecting your own home from burglary. This is a lot of money for Rohrer, who once practiced simple living and grew his own food. But he is also giving away a club for clubbing vicious dogs, which he acquired while living in a bad neighborhood in New Mexico, because the pay for creating critically lauded games like Passage isn’t great, apparently. Defenders of bad dogs…

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Jason Rohrer’s MMO of burglary and home defense was inspired in part by spraying Rottweilers with pepper spray

Jason Rohrer makes games about the most peculiar subjects: the West African diamond trade, recursive universes, dying and senescence. Now we can add crime and punishment to the list. The Castle Doctrine, Rohrer’s upcoming MMO about breaking into people’s houses, is truly one of the most seedy strategy games we’ve seen.  – – – In a bottomless two-part interview with Jason Rohrer, always the loquacious conversationist, our chaps across the pond at Rock, Paper, Shotgun got to the bottom of this streetwise-sounding game. Basically, the way it works is that you protect your virtual family’s home with a security system…