Tag: Nina Freeman

Kimmy
News

Nina Freeman’s game based on her mom’s childhood comes out in January

Nina Freeman has announced that her next game, called Kimmy, will be out on January 6th 2017. It will be part of the Humble Monthly Bundle and so the price of the subscription you’ll get Kimmy and some other games. That’s something to look forward to in the new year, then. As Freeman revealed to us before, Kimmy is based on her mom’s experience growing up and babysitting around urban Massachusetts in the 1960s. Specifically, it’s based on her mom’s recount of a certain summer that involved playing lots of street games, as well as babysitting a kid with “kind…
News

Nina Freeman’s next game is based on her mom’s 1960s childhood

Game designer Nina Freeman first rose to prominence with How Do You Do It (2014), a game exploring precocious sexuality based on her own experiences as a child. The following year, her senior thesis project at NYU-Poly was commercially released as Cibele, a game about online gaming, sex, and falling in love on the internet. Interested in themes of sexuality and self-reflection, Freeman currently works as a designer at Fullbright. Freeman’s latest project, Kimmy—made in collaboration with Laura Knetzger and Aaron Freedman—shifts the focus to childhood. Based on her mother’s experiences as a babysitter in the 1960s, Kimmy will explore what it was to be a child before the…
Bum Rush
News

Bum Rush, a racing game tribute to the pursuit of sex in college

Have you ever been sexiled from a shared apartment? I haven’t, but I recall an instance of a friend in college being sexiled while he was away in the bathroom—his roommate had come in during his absence, along with his girlfriend, and left a sock on the door. My friend sat for the next 30 minutes, towel clad, in the lobby of the dorm waiting for them to finish up. Bum Rush, the newest game by Nina Freeman, Emmett Butler, Diego Garcia, and Maxo, is about the experience of sexiling your roommates. The game does this through a combination of combat…
Fullbright
Feature

The story is in the details: A chat with Fullbright’s Nina Freeman and Karla Zimonja

This article is part of Issue 8.5, a digital zine available to Kill Screen’s print subscribers. Read more about it here and get a copy yourself by subscribing to our soon-to-be-relaunched print magazine. /// Fullbright are best known for 2013’s iconic Gone Home. Their particular niche, now being refined with their upcoming Tacoma, is the narrative videogame: an intimate, carefully designed space left for the player to explore and unravel. Nina Freeman, creator of 2015’s Cibele, joined Fullbright last year as a level designer. Karla Zimonja co-founded the studio with Steve Gaynor. We sat down with them in their Portland office…
Feature

Two5six is now The Kill Screen Festival

Join us June 4th, 2016 for our fourth annual festival. The Kill Screen Festival, formerly Two5six, is a weekend dedicated to celebrating creative collaboration between games and other great art. We bring together two speakers, one from within games and one from without, to discuss a topic pertinent to both of their work. The conversations that result are often unexpected but always interesting and inspiring. This festival has a lot to offer everyone from those who play games religiously to those who don’t know Link from Zelda. Our lineup this year features some of the most promising creators in independent gaming…
News

Finals Fantasy creates game design lesson plans anyone can use

As tablets continue to move into schools and games like Minecraft (2011) are repurposed to educate, the idea of gamification, or using games to teach students about the world, has been gaining popularity as of late. However, as an increasingly diverse artistic medium of its own, others are developing new ways for students to learn about games themselves. Described as a series of “speculative projects for game art students,” Finals Fantasy has gathered together a small group of notable artists, educators, and critics to challenge and expand how game design is taught. (Oh, and so you know, Kill Screen founder Jamin Warren…
Article

It’s time to take girl games seriously

If you think girl games matter, help us champion them in our magazine by backing our Kickstarter. /// For generations of women, Judy Blume’s novels are a potent symbol. To the women that read her books in the ‘70s and ‘80s they were symbols of rebellion, offering knowledge that was forbidden by adults. “I knew reading it would be an act of revolt, but I wasn’t sure who I was revolting against,” said my friend Dayna Von Thaer, a young adult novelist, remembering the time that a sympathetic librarian sneaked her a copy of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret…
News

New Cibele trailer is a taste of teen life at the beginning of the digital age

Being a teen during the rise of the internet was weird in too many ways to describe. While you were experiencing all manner of hormonal and bodily changes, the rest of the world was experiencing its own kind of tumultuous transformation. As you matured into young adulthood, attempting to navigate the social structure that came along with it, the rest of society evolved and tried to navigate this new network of online people. While you discovered your sexuality for the first time, the word “cyber sex” sent ripples across many different cultures, introducing the world to a type of intimacy…