/gamedev

Below is a list of unpublished games and webtexts written for scholarly, creative, pedagogical, or activist reasons, listed in reverse chronological order (refer to /selfhost for published webtexts housed here). I don’t plan to publish these texts as standalone pieces. Most are “teasers” of longer WIPs I do intend to publish someday.

If to Move a Soul, the Writer © 2024

Avg. Session: 30 min

Content tags: 16-bit tinygame, academic ableism, chronic pain and fatigue, diaspora, digital composition, Oulipo

Inventio: Composed with Bitsy using kolam rhetoric for a webtext WIP monograph and excerpted for a presentation delivered at CCCC 2024. It wasn’t possible to create a pulli (dot) grid with Bitsy, but the white dots gesture at a structure that becomes additionally filled out when the player walks over the blank spaces. The looping pattern that reveals itself, formed by a continuous line, approximates a kolam design.

Summary: Reflections on engaging in diasporic-disabled composition practice as an Eelam Tamil American scholar in academia.

There Is a Reason Why They Call It a Theater © 2022

Avg. Session: 2 hrs

Content tags: Academic ableism, chronic pain and fatigue, diasporic-disabled composition, digital rhetoric, intergenerational trauma, medical gaslighting, near-death experience, Tamil genocide, visual novel

Inventio: Freeware visual novel composed with the ren’Py visual novel engine for Microsoft Windows and macOS for my dissertation. This creative nonfiction game is a prototype of the fictocritical autoethnography I wanted to create but ultimately chose not to out of concern that fictional components would detract from the text’s theoretical rigor.

Summary: You are Vyshali, a twentysomething Eelam Tamil American woman pursuing an M.F.A at Columbia University who suddenly experiences a rapid decline in health and abrupt, nomadic, constant pain and relentless fatigue, leading her into strange, troubling dreams and forcing her to relearn what she thought she knew about society, medicine, and herself as she searches for answers.

What the Nerves Register We Cannot Say © 2022

Avg. Session: 5 hrs

Content tags: Chronic pain, found poem, music playlist

Inventio: Found poem and playlist of 72 songs I frequently listen to, dance to, and sing in diverse settings and bodily states that pertain to the experience of chronic pain and fatigue and/or are by chronically ill artists, composed for my dissertation. I selected songs I listened to frequently while moving with/in/through pain, especially writing pain, and limited my selections to songs in Spotify’s library. The order of the playlist corresponds to the order of the lines in the found poem. In my dissertation, readers meant to listen to each song consecutively while reading the found poem and while continuing with the rest of the webtext. The experience of listening, whether or not it’s distracting, simulates a central aspect of the FMS/ME experience. Securing the necessary permissions to publish this poem would be a grueling (if not impossible) task, even if this literary remixing constitutes fair use. Instead, I’ve made the found poem (and the Spotify playlist of the songs I used) available here.

Summary: Audio analgesia reduces nociception pertaining to acute pain but does not alter perceptions of chronic pain intensity (Linneman et al., 2015); however, fibromyalgic subjects felt they had more control over their pain while deliberately listening to music, especially if they listened to music frequently. Compiling a specific playlist for the purpose of deliberate listening — and composing found poetry from it — transforms familiar artifacts into cumulative signifiers for fibromyalgic subjects, as an analgesic meaning-making process.

Selling Upon Trust © 2016

Avg. Session: 20 min

Content tags: Fabrication, fabulation, gunfire sounds, interactive fiction, journalistic ethics

Inventio: Composed with Twine during a 12-hr gamejam to introduce students in journalism and media ethics courses to ethical dilemmas they tended to struggle with surrounding the interplay of fact and narrative in journalism, SPJ’s code of ethics, and the role of career-related pressures in blurring the boundary between personal narrative and fabrication.

Summary: You are Ali Cornwall, a journalist who is relatively young for the profession but embodies success. You graduated from columnist at The Daily Mail to stringer for Reuters to West Africa war correspondent at the BBC. Your fearlessness in the field, stringent fact-checking, incredibly high standards, and natural storytelling ability has helped your career soar, as viewers can emotionally connect with you, recently landing you the coveted position of anchor for BBC London. “Ali Cornwall” is now a household name, and you think you want for nothing. But there’s new talent circulating, and you can’t help but hear about Giles Hall, the man who filled your shoes as West Africa war correspondent, proving himself through his reporting on Ebola, Sierra Leone, The Gambia. Nothing is certain in this business. And with your upcoming broadcast, everything may be about to change…

Uneasy Lies the Head © 2016

Avg. Session: 20 min

Content tags: Arson, auditory distress, extrajudicial execution, interactive fiction, murder, rape culture

Inventio: Composed with Twine during a 12-hr gamejam to introduce students in journalism and media ethics courses to ethical dilemmas they tended to struggle with surrounding gender, race/ethnicity, global journalism, and threats to journalists’ safety. It was also designed to launch discussions about preconceptions about other countries.

Summary: You are Radhika Mitra, an Indian woman who lives and works in Delhi as the editor-in-chief of The World Daily, and presently the reportage and testimony about a string of local rapes awaits your review and approval before it goes to press. You have been warned numerous times. You have received threats. Your family and friends are supportive but don’t quite understand why this issue is so important to you. “Rape is the baggage of being a woman,” they say. You want to change this view, desperately. You also want to protect those who serve you. You also don’t want to die…