Not too long ago, I quit my job as an editor after twelve years in journalism and enrolled at NYU ITP to learn to make new kinds of things. I graduated in May, after two years of nonstop tinkering, coding, and learning. Time moved strangely while I was there; I felt a sort of pre-nostalgia for the experience from the moment I stepped onto campus.

I got to feel truly curious again, and to follow those curiosities down unexpected paths. I got to feel a genuine sense of possibility, which had all but foreclosed itself to me. What would I do with these newly honed skills — game design, programming, electronics — and how would they live alongside my tried-and-true set — writing, editing, handmaking?

I’m still figuring out the answer to that question. I do have a much better idea now, but the scary thing, after a lifetime built on legibility, is that it’s not cohering into a single job. Rather, it’s a handful of pursuits across a collection of industries — writing, teaching, making games and objects and inventions — particularly at the places where those vocations run up against each other.

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Here is what I’ve been up to since graduation:

• Attended the Open Hardware Summit in Berlin, where I exhibited a sampling of electronic textiles — my threadboards, some experiments in soft lamps along with my favorite collaborator Yafira, and a series of knitted clocks.

• Spoke at the AIGA New York Fresh Grad Design Spotlight, alongside a handful of other Masters graduates from design programs around the city.

• Moderated a panel about data as artistic medium for NY Tech Week.

• Began working on a story about video games for Bloomberg Businessweek (print!)

• Taught at my beloved ITP Camp as a counselor once again.

• Went to the Narrascope conference at SUNY Albany to show an even-more-miniature version of my miniature escape room game, The Keeping House, and attended talks by fellow narrative game designers and folks working with interactive methods of storytelling.

• Showed my thesis game, Loose Ends, at Brooklyn Comic Con in its handknitted arcade console. More to come on that project soon.

• Piloted an intro-to-knitting-meets-coding-history class for some absolutely delightful middle schoolers at the Lower Eastside Girls Club; it always strikes me how much more willing children are to be bad at a new skill or activity than adults are.

• Went to the launch for a new fiber arts magazine called close knit nyc, in which I have a featured piece, and finished work on an article for Needlebound Volume III, a textile and technology periodical I’ve long admired.

• Installed my first solo work at Acorn Craft in Brooklyn — an electronic wall hanging called knit.city, and more of the handknitted clocks, which I’ve begun to sell and will be teaching a workshop about making in the fall. I’ll also be giving my first ever artist talk there in August. Stay tuned if that sounds up your alley!

Taken together, it’s a true hodgepodge of activities, some yielding payment and others…decidedly not. Returning to school was a reprieve from (some of) the pressures of real life, and navigating reentry while trying to hold onto the feelings and the lessons and the version of myself I got to be there has been challenging.

Starting in the fall, I’ll be working part-time at ITP as a research resident for the upcoming academic year. My focus is design, a banner under which a lot of my work falls. I plan to use that time to teach, write, and work on my games and textile pieces — a pilot year, in a sense, for the balance I’d like to strike long-term.

I’m in the market for new projects, opportunities and people that might fit into this bizarre tapestry of a career I’m cultivating — and I could use some help from you. If you have thoughts on anyone I should talk to, Substacks I should subscribe to, conferences or residencies or awards I should look into, or collaborations you’d like to explore together in NYC, SF, LA, and beyond, please do drop me a line at alanna.okun@nyu.edu. I so appreciate every connection, note, and signal that what I’m trying to do here isn’t utterly deranged.

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Since I can remember, I’ve been fascinated with miniatures. Not dolls, per se, but what my mom called “setups:” arrangements of tiny furniture and items to create little scenes. As a child I made them from popsicle sticks and polymer clay, received them as gifts from relatives and friends. One year, on my birthday, my coworkers replaced every object on my desk with a miniature version; I still keep the tiny laptop near my real one.

Beyond being generally adorable, small things are almost totemic to me, representations of the infinitely larger and messier whole, rendered in select specifics. There’s certainly an element of control in play — how appealing, to arrange things exactly as you’d like — and also one of possibility, how the smallest corner of the world could be, even if to outside observers it just looks like a pile of junk.

These obsessions led me to create the The Keeping House, a blend of handcraft, electronics, narrative, and game design that I exhibited publicly for the first time last month.

It’s a game set in a dollhouse — a miniature escape room meets IRL point-and-click adventure, (if you play video games, you’ve likely heard about last year’s Blue Prince, a major point of inspiration). Participants are invited to reach in and touch, grab, open, and otherwise interact with the dozens of tiny handmade objects contained inside. Before play, you’re presented with a note from the house’s absent owner (an abstracted version of me), with a request to turn the power back on while they’re away. In order to do so, you must unlock a series of locks to reach the house’s attic, where many of its secrets are contained.

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The primary interface, beyond touch, is a magnifying glass I built containing an inductive coil, which lights up little wireless LEDs placed around the house. About halfway through, many players discover another tool that illuminates further clues. Throughout, little breadcrumbs of information are scattered about the house and its owner, revealing a narrative in fragments about hopes, anxieties, and memories.

I more or less entered a fugue state while working on this thing. I became obsessed with it: how to design it modularly, so that I could rearrange rooms and objects easily; how to make a series of custom electronics that could be swapped in and out; how to make items that struck a balance between feeling precious but not too fiddly, inviting but not indestructible, that could ideally survive hundreds of handlings.

Above all, I wanted to make something that felt like a true experience: not just a cute, static object to pass by and remark upon, but a piece that would draw audiences in and reward them with layers of interaction and discovery. I wanted it to be an actual game.

I was, I think, successful on these counts. To date, nearly 500 participants have played The Keeping House. Almost all playthroughs were completed in around ten minutes. And while some people found the directions too opaque, and others just wanted to look at the little furniture, for most it seemed to land. People gasped at the points I hoped they would, and described it with words like “magical” and “delightful.” Not a single piece was broken or went missing over the course of the two full days it was on public display, a satisfying testament to the game’s sturdiness.

It’s been incredible to show The Keeping House to real people and get their feedback, and I’d like to do more of that. If you’d like to see it (or have ideas for a space that might be interested in exhibiting it), hit me up!

For my next game design project, though, I want more people than the ones who can make the journey to me personally to experience it. So next up, my thesis: an entirely digital game. I want to play around in the possibilities of a virtual space, now that I have a sense of what I can create within the constraints of physicality. Paradoxically, maybe, this game feels like a blueprint for the next — it’s all about building a little world, and inviting players in.

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I took a week off between the end of one summer campus job and the beginning of another. During my vacation, I started The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, a new visual novel (and then some) out from Too Kyo Games. And that’s when time collapsed.

In Hundred Line, you play as a high schooler who’s been whisked away to a mysterious place called Last Defense Academy, where you and your classmates are called upon to use powers to fend off a series of invaders for one hundred days. You know, typical game stuff. The game loop consists of developing relationships and skills for use in battles, which take place in the form of a grid-based tower defense game.

As you progress, you learn more about what’s actually going on with the world and the other characters, and your own place within it. I’m a paltry 60 hours in, so I’ve only seen a fraction of what it’s all about, but so far it hits on the uninhabilitability of Earth, the unseen forces that made it that way, and what the future holds for the human race.

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I picked up Hundred Line because I heard that it’s got strong Fire Emblem: Three Houses vibes overall, a Persona-like approach to characterization, and a 13 Sentinels-y multidimensional narrative; a combination of elements that felt tailored to me personally. It’s often dark and in some moments downright disturbing, but the cast of lovable freaks helps temper anything too intense. In other words, total catnip for me, and maybe for you too. (The games it’s actually most in lineage with, like Donganronpa and 999, I don’t have any experience with, but this has made me want to check them out with renewed enthusiasm.)

Hundred Line also shares a great deal in common with a game that I loved a few years back and still feel is undersung: I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, another visual novel with a layer of battle + exploration that deals with the question of the planet’s tenuous future. Both games (light mechanical spoiler ahead) feature a time travel element, whereby you are explicitly encouraged to go back and replay with different decisions in order to change the eventual outcome.

Video games in general are excellent at this: compressing, reconstituting, and exploding the idea of time. That’s one of their chief fantasies for me as a player, and, as someone who also makes them, one of their primary affordances. You can pass several game-lifetimes in the span of a real-world day or week or month; you can rewind and fast forward and see with scientific precision how one choice might play out in a given situation versus another. Unlike other media, where you’re a relatively passive observer to in-world temporality, in games you’re usually invited to participate in how time is spent, which, when successful, lends an almost alchemical element of weightiness, intimacy, and enjoyment.

The exchange rate fluctuates when it comes to “real” time versus game time. I already mentioned my 60 hours playing Hundred Line over the course of a single week, during which I experienced around 400 in-game days. Some took only a few minutes to complete, while others lasted actual hours. Time, in the architecture of this game’s design, is less a steady measurement or unbroken line than it is a series of discrete containers to be filled with choices: who you spend your days getting to know, which skills you want to develop, and, just as significantly, who and what you deem less worthy of attention.

There’s a deceptive neatness to how it’s all ordered, a tantalizing taste of mastery over the vast and ineffable. It’s easy to be lulled into a sort of productivity-fueled fugue state by the loop of leveling up, fighting, and going about your quotidian activities, even and especially as the clock ticks down, over and over again, to the titular hundredth day.

The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is available on Steam and Switch, and there’s a hefty demo if you’d like to try it out before you buy.

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Hi! I’m Alanna Okun, a writer, crafter, and programmer living in New York City. I recently left a twelve-year career in journalism to pursue a master’s degree in creative technology. I’ve been teaching myself to make games and other interactive work for a few years now; I document that process in this newsletter.

I finished the first year of my graduate program last month. The entire time I was there, I faced the same question, from friends and former colleagues and fellow students: What are you learning? Honestly, it’s been tough to answer!

Everyone in my program — which bills itself as “The Center for the Recently Possible” — comes from drastically different backgrounds. And the spread of academic offerings is intentionally wide-ranging; there isn’t a single person who takes an identical path through as another, so we all wind up with divergent skill sets and areas of focus.

Some people worked as engineers before coming here; others have fine arts degrees; they’ve been teachers, musicians, entrepreneurs, or else they’re hoping to be on the other side of our time here. Some throw themselves into learning 3D modeling, or frontend development, or how to make large-scale kinetic light sculptures. Some combine all of the above.

Two years is a short enough stint that you have to buckle down and focus, or else risk going broad in a bunch of various disciplines without going deep in any. That’s not inherently a negative, but it’s never seemed to me like the most efficient use of the limited time we have.

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After two semesters, I’ve come to think of my “major,” as it were, as Weird Game Design. (That likely won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed my work or, like, talked to me at all in the past few years.) That question — what am I here to study? — became much easier to answer when I looked back, took inventory of what I’ve learned, and noticed where I’d been drawn to apply it.

Every class I took this semester had something to do, either overtly or tacitly, with the creation of gamelike artifacts.

• I worked with a team to create a video game, bespoke controls, and the arcade cabinet it lives inside in a demanding, extremely fun class called The New Arcade.

• I read, played, and created works that employ branching, choice-based, and otherwise nonlinear ways to tell stories in Computational Approaches to Narrative, which some classmates and I affectionately called “English Class for Game Nerds.”

• I learned to make browser games and websites where I can house and enhance the written, playable work I’ve been creating in Web Art as Site.

• I read a 900-page electronics textbook and spent twelve weeks learning to build circuits in Electronics for Inventors, which kicked my ass, gave me a great deal more confidence when it comes to prototyping, and forced me to ask for help early and often.

It was all so much fun. I loved every day. Even when I was cranky or crampy or dizzy from huffing sawdust and solder, I learned something, and I remembered that I could learn something, and I always ended the attempt somewhere further than where I’d started. By the end of the semester, I’d made the thing that best articulated what I mean when I say “Weird Game Design:” an actual, honest-to-God game, that people could actually play.

By far the most difficult and most rewarding project I worked on all semester was for The New Arcade. Along with my classmates K.E. Ding and Haoren Zhong, we made a two-player cooperative game where you try to crack a safe. We called it Pandora, and themed it along the lines of the myth of Pandora’s box.

Here is how it works:

Player A sits on one side of the 20” x 20” x 20” cube, facing a door secured by a combination lock.

Their job is to turn the dial one way or the other, following the spoken instructions of Player B, who is seated on the opposite side of the box, facing a screen.

On the screen are three gears, each “activated” randomly over the course of the game’s 90-second play window; when active, a given gear’s movement is controlled by Player A’s turning of the dial. The goal is to align all three gears so they form a triangular shape between them.

This is where the real gameplay happens: Player A only knows whether, say, to turn the dial clockwise if Player B tells them clearly and quickly, so much of the interaction is between the players cobbling together a sort of linguistic shorthand to give and receive instructions.

If all three gears align within the time limit, the door to the safe opens, revealing a prize inside. (As of now, the prize is Hershey Kisses, but we’ve got some ideas for improvement there.)

I was in charge of fabrication, which meant learning how to build a functioning safe out of plywood in about three and a half weeks. When I asked my professor Mark how to even wrap my head around learning what I’d need to in order to pull it off, he gave me some advice: “Build a box. Then, build another box.”

This is a fundamental distillation of every lesson I’ve learned this year: you learn how to make something by making it. This goes for websites and game design and sculptures and shelving. Just the other week I talked to a friend about how it applies to crocheting a blanket. Often, it means remaking the thing a number of times, prototyping and iterating until you get it where it needs to be or at least close enough.

So I built a box. In the process I learned to use a CNC router, a pocket jig, a belt sander, a drill press, and about half a dozen other tools. I got much more comfortable with CAD software and with Unity. I did cry (twice), when I was overwhelmed or didn’t understand how best to use a given tool. Each time what saved me was the patient guidance of someone who knew more than I did, who broke down each step and put the power back in my hands. It made me want to do that for someone else.

We’ve now had the chance to present Pandora in public a handful of times. By now around 300 teams have attempted it (about 40 successfully, by my count), and the feedback we’ve gotten from those early players — who ranged, also by my estimate, from ages 8 through 65 — has been invaluable.

I was extremely nervous leading up to those events. I have an instinct to keep my work to myself until it’s “perfect,” or at least “finished,” and the pace and demands of school have meant that nothing I make gets the chance to reach that (imaginary) level before it has to hit the air. I find myself making excuses and overexplaining, wanting whomever is interacting with my work to understand that I know it’s not ready, I see the mistakes and the problems too.

At first, I approached the Pandora playtests with that energy. But pretty quickly, something began to shift: people didn’t need us to explain ourselves quite so much. They’d sit down at the box across from a friend or stranger and start to tweak and tinker; they’d turn the dial this way and that, they’d shout at their co-player to give better or louder directions, and they would play. The game wasn’t actually a game, I realized, until they did.

By the end of the gauntlet, I was able to stand back entirely and let players teach each other. I watched them cobble strategies together; I watched groups of friends approach the box pair by pair until they were at last successful, popping Hershey Kisses into their mouths with a genuine sense of victory.

Having that many people play Pandora exposed its weaknesses (it’s too hard, for one thing, and needs to be manually reset whenever anyone wins) but none of them feel like shortcomings so much as opportunities, concrete things to improve upon. We’re likely going to keep working on it through the summer, in hopes of bringing it to some game conferences next year and beyond.

Inviting others to play means giving up, at least in the moment, my own sense of control. It’s so hard, and so rewarding. In many ways, I think that’s what I’ve been after since heading toward this new, diffuse future: a strategic unclenching, a reevaluation of what it is to make meaningful, expressive creations. So much of what happens in games, and in interactive work more generally, is on the other side, in the in-between. That can only be revealed and refined between people, in the messy, vulnerable middle stages when all you’ve got is a draft.

I built a box. Time to build another.

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On the right, the original threadboard, clocking in around 12in x 9in / 30cm x 22cm; on the left, the tutorial threadboard, about 7in x 5in / 18cm x 12cm.

Hi! I’m Alanna Okun, a writer, crafter, and amateur programmer living in New York City. I recently left a twelve-year career in journalism to pursue a master’s degree in creative technology. I’ve been teaching myself to make games and other interactive work for a few years now; I document that process in this newsletter.

In February, I helped out at the ITP Stupid Hackathon at school, where participants are encouraged to make projects no one asked for. I came in with an idea: a hand-knitted, functioning breadboard.

The breadboard is a cornerstone of electronic education and prototyping — a rectangular waffle that conducts electricity in configurations of columns and rows, for determining where wires and components should connect to one another before more permanent measures like soldering. They’re grids, the bare canvas of so many kinds of patterns. Generally made of plastic, I wanted to see if I could make one out of my personal favorite material: yarn.

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In the week leading up to the one-day hackathon, I knitted the body; the day of, I concentrated on making it actually look and work like a breadboard by knitting the face and embroidering the common connections with conductive thread.

Much of my day was spent debugging: figuring out what was going wrong when it didn’t function the way it should, which largely consisted of making sure connections were strong and sturdy enough while keeping them from overlapping with one another.

And so: the threadboard, an extremely literal interpretation of textiles-as-electronics. (Which have a rich history and community of practitioners in their own right.)

I am, to be clear, proud of this thing; mostly it achieves stupidity, per the terms of the hackathon, by way of its frivolity, its scale, and its relative flammability. (Although I took care to use 100% wool, which is about as insulating as you can get from a textile.) I laughed out loud the first time I got what is basically a glorified lumbar pillow to power a tiny toy motor. Either way, I wouldn’t have pursued this line of thinking without the hackathon prompt or the time constraints.

It’s emblematic of something I’ve been thinking about a lot since returning to school: when and how skills or associations I’d picked up previously can be useful (or limiting) when it comes to learning entirely new things. Textiles are, for me, an extremely helpful metaphor when it comes to learning about code and electronics.

This semester I’m taking a class with the irresistible title Electronics for Inventors, which I’m enjoying a lot and also somewhat terrifies me. I spent the first couple weeks feeling basically sub-literate, unable to interpret even the most rudimentary circuit diagrams, let alone finish in-class lab assignments.

What made it all start to gel was seeing the diagrams as what they, at bottom, are: patterns, like in knitting or needlepoint. Row by row, stitch by stitch, the pitter-patter rhythm of the knits and the purls — the 1s and the 0s — adding up to the whole. The breadboard itself, the location of all of these experiments, felt less like a hostile piece of equipment to be tamed and more like an inviting canvas.

As my Electronics professor likes to say about overly pat metaphors, “It’s not exactly like that;” still, the principle is similar enough to give me, most of the time, an entry point, if not the codex to a full translation.

When I finished, I posted some photos and videos of the piece on social media, and was frankly kind of stunned by the volume of the response. (I was un-stunned by the number of replies from men explaining to me how electricity works. Like………………………..I know!)

A number of folks reached out asking for a tutorial / documentation of the build process. This particular set of instructions is for a close-to-IRL-breadboard-sized version; the one I made at the Hackathon is much larger, more seat cushion than coin purse.

It’s intended to be a recipe rather than a prescription, to be riffed on. Feel free to use the materials you have on hand, and to play around with size and scale.

Just use common caution when it comes to electronics — good-quality conductive thread and properly rated components can determine whether the thing actually conducts electricity or not. (Or zaps you!)

You could just use the directions for the face to make a flat panel without bothering with the rest of the body, say, if you wanted to apply it to a sweater or interactive tapestry or musical interface or something.

I’d love to see what you make, and to hear about any spots that might have tripped you up in this documentation, as it’s still a work in progress — get in touch at alanna.okun@nyu.edu or on Instagram at @alannabean.

Materials

• ~50 yards / 45 meters white or cream-colored DK yarn in a natural fiber like wool or cotton (or whatever main color / weight you’d like to use for the body)

• ~Several yards / meters each red and blue yarn (or whatever color(s) you’d like to use for the rails — should be the same weight and fiber type as your other yarn)

• ~50 yards / 45 meters conductive thread (two of these guys should be plenty, for example)

• Size 6 needles, straight or circular (or whatever size matches your yarn; gauge doesn’t matter a ton here but shouldn’t be too tight or loose)

• Sewable coin cell battery holder + appropriate battery (1.5V - 3V)

• Alligator clips

• LED(s) or DC hobby motor (rated for appropriate battery voltage)

• Tapestry needle

• Scissors

• You don’t need a multimeter, especially if you’re like what the hell even is that, but it can be very helpful for troubleshooting

Knitting

Here’s a schematic-slash-colorwork chart (read starting in the upper lefthand corner from left to right and top to bottom) to give a rough idea of how the piece is put together, followed by a written pattern.

The body is constructed as a connected series of flaps whose remaining edges are seamed together at the end.

The face — the breadboard-y part of the threadboard — is knitted last and then embroidered with conductive thread.

BODY

Cast on 45 stitches with main color (MC)

// this is the width of the total piece

Knit in stockinette for 10 more rows

// stockinette = knitting on the “right” side & purling on the “wrong” side

// slip 1st stitch or 2 of each row knitwise for more defined edge

>> don’t worry bc it’s all getting seamed up at the end anyway though

// this is the height of the total piece

With wrong side facing you, knit 1 row

// leaves a line of purl ridges on the right side

>> useful for folding the fabric

>> and demarcating where a given panel ends

At the end of the row, cast on 12 stitches (st)

// 57 stitches total

Knit 12 st (k12); slip 1 st knitwise (sl1k); knit 45 st; slip 1 st knitwise; cast on 12 st

// 69 stitches total

Purl across (p69)

k12, sl1k, k45, sl1k, k12

p69

Repeat these 2 rows for 30 more rows

// this is the depth of the total piece

Cast off 12st knitwise; sl1k; p45; sl1k; cast off 12st knitwise. Break yarn.

With right side facing you, reattach yarn to rightmost knit stitch and k45 across

p45

k45

Repeat these 2 rows for 10 more rows

With wrong side facing you, k45

// this will leave purl ridges on the right side

FACE

k45 (MC). Break yarn.

With wrong side facing you, attach secondary color 1 (SC1); p45; break yarn

With right side facing you, attach MC; p1k1 across

// this is the start of waffle stitch, which forms the holes on the breadboard

p45

p1k1 across

With wrong side facing you, attach secondary color 2 (SC2); p45; break yarn

With right side facing you, attach MC; p1k1 across

p45

p1k1 across

Repeat these 2 rows for 6 rows

p45

k45

p45

p1k1 across

Repeat these 2 rows for 6 rows; break yarn

With wrong side facing you, attach SC2; p45; break yarn

With right side facing you, attach MC; p1k1 across

p45

p1k1

Attach SC1; p45, break yarn

Attach MC; k45

Bind off knitwise

Weave in all ends

Block if needed

// it’s probably not

// but you won’t be able to block the fabric once the conductive thread has been added

// !!if you do, ensure that it's completely dry before you test electronics!!

Embroidery

From top: Scissors, tapestry needle, conductive thread; the “right” side of the embroidered fabric'; the “wrong” side of the embroidered fabric

Thread the tapestry needle with about 48 in / 120cm of conductive thread or yarn. Double it and secure the end with a double knot — this stuff doesn’t always love to stay tightly bound to itself, and it’s fairly easy to tangle, so take extra care.

Starting at the bottom-left corner of the face of the breadboard, whip stitch up the leftmost rail using the purl ridges as a guide — go over, around, and under the purls in order to create a firm path that’s neither too tight nor too loose.

When you reach the end of the rail, turn and whip stitch back over the stitches you just made to reinforce them.

Tie the end of the working thread to the knotted tail on the wrong side, and secure with a double knot. Do not pull too tight.

Trim ends, being careful not to sever the knot nor leave any loose strands that could cause a short-circuit.

Repeat up and down the near left rail.

Repeat up and down the near right rail.

Repeat up and down the far right rail.

Thread the tapestry needle with about 16 in / 40cm of conductive thread or yarn. Double it and secure the end with a double knot.

Starting at the top left corner of the face of the breadboarrd, whip stitch in the same manner from the leftmost edge of the inner body until the center gap.

Turn and whip stitch back over the stitches you just made to reinforce them.

Tie the end of the working thread to the knotted tail on the wrong side, and secure with a double knot.

Trim ends.

Repeat across the gap to the rightward rail and all the way down the inner body on both sides, tying a new knot and trimming any excess from each row.

You may choose to just make every other row conductive; this is probably sufficient for your purposes, but feel free to embroider all or some other combination of them. I chose to do all for the version shown here.

The most important thing to note here is to make sure rows of conductive thread don’t unintentionally overlap; that could cause a short or otherwise uncooperation from your circuit, and it’s why we’re tying all those knots.

Optional: Reinforce knots on the wrong side and/or insulate traces with fabric or superglue. Let dry completely before testing.

Conductivity

To test, attach one end of an alligator clip to the positive terminal of your coin cell battery holder (with functioning appropriate battery) and the other to the “power” rail of the threadboard.

Attach one end of an alligator clip to the negative terminal of your coin cell battery holder and the other to the “ground” rail of the threadboard.

Appropriately place the two legs of an LED, or the two terminals of DC hobby motor, to test conductivity (or use a multimeter).

If the rails are functional, use another pair of alligator clips to test the rows — run power to one and ground to another from each of the rails, and test your components there.

Finishing

Stuff piece with cotton batting, scraps, or other natural fiber fill.

Seam up all loose edges with single crochet or mattress stitch.

Weave in and trim all ends.

Play around with LEDs, a motor, a speaker, or whatever else you’d like to power.

Safety Tips

Use a power supply between 1.5 - 3V.

Always read the data sheets for any electronic components.

Unplug the power supply whenever it’s not in use.

Don’t get this thing wet and then try to turn it on??? I know you know that but this is the internet so just please don’t!

They’re a little family :)

If you want to support my work, please consider subscribing (free or paid) to my newsletter, and share this tutorial with a friend!

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Hi! I’m Alanna Okun, a writer, crafter, and amateur programmer living in New York City. I recently left a twelve-year career in journalism to pursue a master’s degree in creative technology. I’ve been teaching myself to make games and other interactive work for a few years now; I document that process in this newsletter.

For the entire fourteen-week span of the first semester of my graduate program, I never got over the novelty of being back at school.

“Sorry, I can’t, I have homework,” I’d say to friends, setting off the word with a dash of irony to try and disguise my glee.

I’ve spent the past few months in classrooms, remembering how to be in one and how to pace myself when out. Starting to form patterns and habits, trying to break others, acutely aware each day that, to paraphrase a friend I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, it’s all so beautiful and so short.

The first semester here is mostly introductory courses: coding, electronics, software and hardware usage. I came in with a pretty cursory understanding of most topics (I’d encountered a breadboard before but could not have told you how or why they worked), and now I have a much stronger lay of the land in all directions. I have a sense of how to start honing my knowledge and practice in a few given areas, and of what I’m definitely not interested in pursuing (sorry to VR). I just made a bunch of stuff, tried to pick up a new and useful lesson each time, and then made something else

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I know how to do a lot of things now that I couldn’t before classes began. How to wire and program buttons to control lights and motors and speakers; how to make gears and pulleys; how to prototype what can really only be called gizmos. How to build a 3D game world and the objects that go into one. I can talk through every line of a piece of code I wrote and explain why I made each of the choices that I did, even if those choices were silly or inefficient or totally off the cuff. I can solder!

It’s all been so fun, and so humbling and frustrating and exhausting. I’m only just now back on my feet after a wave of sickness hit me when I was too busy, between finals (I had finals) and the holidays, to see it coming. I felt everything so strongly this semester: the headiness of meeting new people, the tug to be on campus as much as possible, the sense that there was never enough time so I had better spend it well. It was a little like being transported back to a version of myself from a decade ago, in ways both welcome and decidedly not.

I’ve spent winter break recovering, reconnecting with my people, and making sense of what I learned last semester before beginning the next one. Here are, from where I stand now, the most important lessons, which I imagine I’ll be relearning, reexamining and reconfiguring throughout next term and beyond.

Descope, then descope again, then probably again for good measure.

In a certain light, everything I made this semester was a failure: a much smaller, simpler version than what I’d initially envisioned, with far less functionality. The poem-art-Gameboy my classmate Yafira and I built for a midterm, for example, originally had about five times the features and number of inputs. (Here’s in-depth documentation on that project.) Without exception, every attempt of every project fell short due to my own limitations of time, resources, technical skills, or focus.

From another angle, though, each piece was a success, because I finished them, and I wouldn’t have if I’d forced myself to stay the course. Much of this had to do with prototyping — accepting that the first version I made of a given thing would almost certainly not be the last, and that I can and should use each iteration as important data for the next attempt. The bulk of the work was in the discovery and fine-tuning of how to do the work, in the ineffable balance between discipline and flexibility.

Do what you can with what you have.

I had a sort of running dare with myself where I tried to make all of my physical prototypes this semester, and the bulk of my final work, with materials I already had on hand or could scavenge from the campus junk shelf. This was, frankly, less about environmental magnanimity than it was about tight-fistedness, the creative push that comes from limiting factors, and how much easier I found it to envision a given project when I had even the roughest sense of scale.

This principle is an exhortation to myself to just start — not to wait for ideal conditions or fret over materials, but to get a draft of something as soon as I can so I can tweak and iterate. Trash has the enormous benefit of already existing, unlike whatever idea might be floating around amorphously in my mind. It provides a clear if clunky bridge to reality.

Everything is just organization.

This idea arose in my Physical Computing class, taught by Tom Igoe (if you’ve ever used an Arduino, you have him to thank). We were talking about methods you can use to exchange information between devices, and why you might choose to use one over another. It comes down, Tom said, to style and use case, to how you choose to organize the system you’re building. This applies, I think, to all programming, all instructions we inscribe for a computer, or fellow human, to follow.

Put another way, it’s all description: how do you break down the pattern, the recipe, the choreography to its most component parts, and indicate how they should work? What do you include, and when, and what do you omit, and why? It’s a series of choices — artistic ones, even — although the process might seem opaque or rote.

I’ve found it useful to consider all these new skills I’m picking up from this vantage point, especially when they’re particularly technically frustrating. I may be terrified of coding directly in the terminal, but I do know how to write a basic sock knitting pattern (for that matter, I know how to arrange a sock drawer) and they’re honestly not all that different.

You don’t have to go it alone.

My final project for the semester, which spanned both my Physical Computing and Fabricating Mechanical Automatons classes, was a solo endeavor. I spent around a hundred hours working on it, from conception to programming to digital and physical fabrication, and I’m extremely proud of the outcome: what I’ve been calling an IRL arcade machine, a semi-autobiographical little interactive world with lights and motion controlled by the user.

Still, I’m ambivalent about having done the project alone. In the last two weeks of the semester, when all of us were spending every waking moment working, I found myself missing having a creative partner, someone to troubleshoot technical problems with and bounce ideas off of, someone with as much of a stake in the thing as I had, someone who would push me and hold me accountable.

Working alone, I was able to get away with what I called in my project documentation “favoring my good leg” — I could sidestep some of the thorny technical aspects that I was less comfortable with, like writing a more complex program to animate the lights, and instead pour all of my time into what I was already fairly good at, like fabrication and decoration. This isn’t inherently bad, but it does run counter to why I am at school in the first place.

Next semester I’ll be focusing more deliberately on group work: the class I’m possibly the most excited and nervous for, called The New Arcade, is all about building a game and a dedicated cabinet for it from scratch, and requires a reportedly enormous amount of work spread across four groups of four students each. I want to figure out how I best function on a team like that, and what I still need to learn when it comes to collaboration.

And even in my lowest solo moments working this semester, I wasn’t actually alone. Again and again, I found myself buoyed by classmates: when my second Arduino blew up in as many minutes, when I couldn’t figure out a code problem, when it turns out I just really, really needed a snack. Being in an environment surrounded by people working on similarly creative and challenging projects reminded me that there’s no reason to turn inward, to preemptively refuse help and insist on solving problems solo.

“It’s dangerous to go alone,” as the poets say. “Take this.”

“You look,” he told me bluntly, “so much happier.”

Happier than who or when, he didn’t say, but I knew what he meant. I’ve had trouble tracing the timeline precisely myself — the funk I slid into is convenient to peg to the onset of the pandemic, yet my malaise and restlessness predated even then. I’d stopped writing almost altogether at that point; I had begun to feel a certain hollowness at work, with no idea how to fill or even name it. I woke up most mornings with a lurch of dread in my stomach that I quelled until I couldn’t, and I waited for each week to pass.

These flutters of existential discontent, perched as they were at the very tip-top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, did not at first command my attention. If anything, they annoyed me. I had weightier, more immediate problems to deal with, and a job I felt lucky to have — lucky enough that I didn't realize when my days became harder, the routines less rewarding. I turned 30 years old that first locked-down spring, and this past one I turned 34, and it feels like only now am I finally shaking off a thick mantle of inertia I didn’t notice had settled.

Now, at ITP, the weeks are going by too quickly. I’m taking four classes — learning software and code and physical and digital fabrication — and TAing two undergrad ones, and even when I’m not required to be on campus it’s pretty much the only place I want to be. I’m learning so much I don’t know where to put it all, and meeting people who I think I’ll know forever. We’re halfway to midterms, which is halfway through the first semester, which is halfway through the first year, which is half of the whole span; more, really, since the second semester of second year is devoted entirely to working on a thesis. I spent almost as long deciding, applying, and preparing to come here as I’ll actually be attending.

That finitude is a good thing; it gives a shape and sense of urgency to what could otherwise be formless. (More to the point, I need to start making real money again sooner rather than later.) Still, it does make me feel a tad nostalgic for something that’s barely underway. I love who I get to be here, inquisitive and energetic and focused, and one of my goals for the next two years is figuring out how to more readily access that state when it feels out of reach.

I guess a simpler word for all of this is “grateful,” or maybe just “happier.”

If you’re interested in the specifics of what I’m studying, I’m keeping a blog for a couple of classes where that’s a requirement (check out Physical Computing and Automatons under the Fall / Winter 2024 tab). There’s a heavy emphasis on documentation here, and I’ve found it helpful to articulate my process as I approach different physical and computational problems. Beyond that, I like having a record of what I knew when, the ability to pinpoint the moment I went from grasping nothing about a given topic to understanding and applying it.

I also spoke with Kyle Starr over on the Y Button podcast about my recent creative and professional journey, and particularly how games have figured in. It was a fun, meaningful, kind of surprisingly intimate conversation! I touched on some similar topics when I guest-co-hosted Into the Aether along with Chase Allhart over the summer. 

Finally: If you too are currently having your life ruined by Fields of Mistria in early access, get in touch. (I’m trying to decide who I should date.)

Some personal news: Today is my last day at Vox, where I’ve worked as an editor for the past seven years. In the fall, I’m going to grad school, to a master’s program in creative technology at NYU. I’m very, very excited; I’m also quite sad. In my experience, that feeling is worth chasing.

I’ve been in digital media long enough to remember when the phrase “some personal news” was met with eye rolls. It was a hacky, faux-modest way to announce you had a new job, most likely in journalism, most likely on Twitter. There were entire weeks when it felt like half the internet was announcing forthcoming employment at Vice, Fusion, Mic, or some other recontextualized noun, a frenzied game of musical chairs soundtracked by the massive VC cash infusions of the mid-2010s. 

I wish “some personal news” were still in wide enough circulation to be annoying. Media has been in a state of crisis for years, the money spigot turned off as promises from platforms never materialized. This past year in particular was brutal. If you venture onto Twitter (I just absolutely can’t say “X,” I’m sorry), you’re far more likely to see a string of posts from media workers seeking, well, work, running the gamut from recent grads looking to land their first jobs to people with decades of experience all of a sudden out in the cold. 

It can feel really dire some days, even though I wholeheartedly believe there will always be journalism, always a need for smart people to tell true stories to the public, always a profession through the contractions and the shakeups. These cuts — at Vox, sure, but also everywhere else — leave publications forever changed. Writers and editors everywhere are wary; the ones with employment qualify every workplace complaint with “I’m lucky to have a job at all,” and they’re a vanishingly small portion of the whole. Any sort of clear career trajectory seems like a thing of the past.

Still, my choice to leave is far less about industry instability than it is just time for me to try something new. Even before these pronounced shifts began sweeping through media, I was thinking about what came next for me, professionally and creatively. I’d been working pretty exclusively with words as my building blocks, my atomic units, for essentially my entire life; at a certain point I started wondering if there might be some way to express myself in ways that aren’t quite so literal. That’s when I began fussing around with making games and interactive projects in my spare time. I realized that maybe this was pointing me towards what comes next. 

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For the next two years, I’ll be getting a masters at ITP, the same NYU program that hosts the creative technology camp I attended last summer. I’ll be digging deeper into coding and physical computing, and figuring out where those skill sets run up against the writing and editing I’ve been doing professionally for the past twelve years. It’s a uniquely hands-on, project-based program, so I’ll be making a lot of stuff: games, apps, websites, electronics, maybe even a textile or two. I’ll be creating things I don’t have a name for yet, alongside people I haven’t met, learning skills I never contemplated picking up, and that unknown invigorates and terrifies me more than anything has since I can remember. 

My career so far has been marked by staggering luck. I’m lucky that I graduated from college in 2012, just when digital media funding ramped up in brief earnest. I’m lucky that I’ve had top-notch bosses (shoutout Peggy Wang and, in particular, Julia Rubin, my actual fairy godmother), who valued and championed me; likewise, an array of colleagues who remain some of my closest collaborators and confidants. I’m lucky that the capricious roulette wheel of media layoffs somehow never landed on me.

I’m lucky to have a wonderful partner, with whom I split uncommonly cheap rent and can rely on for health insurance. I’m lucky to have a network of great friends and creative peers, in New York and beyond, who were the first people to tell me to pursue this path, long before I could see its outlines for myself. I’m lucky to have a family who, even if they don’t quite understand exactly what I’m doing (we’ve landed on “making video games” as the party line for my parents’ friends), love and support me without condition.

There are moments when I feel a pang of shame over all of this luck, all of these people in my corner, like any successes don’t count for as much because they aren’t solely my own. But if I’ve learned anything from working in newsrooms for the past decade, it’s that the best things are built in conjunction with others. And if I’ve learned anything from being alive, it’s that luck changes all the time, without warning. It’s worth trying to grab a couple fistfuls and shape that luck into something more permanent, that moves you forward, that reflects who you want to be and the world you want to live in, when you’re given the chance. 

I don’t have a plan for what I’ll do after school. Whatever happens, I’m going to document it here, as I’ve been doing in fits and starts since I started teaching myself to code two years ago. I’ll be turning on optional payments for this newsletter, since the issue with leaving your job is that you are also leaving your salary, and opening myself up for some project-based work; if you find yourself in need of a resume editor, a narrative designer, a knitting teacher, an essay about video games, a custom embroidery or crossword puzzle or something else you think my peculiar set of interests might be a good fit for, please do hit me up at alanna.okun@gmail.com. 

Mostly, though, I plan to spend the next few months before school starts (my first proper summer break in nearly two decades) resetting my brain and body. I want to remember who I am outside the context of the job, off the endless wheel of productivity, unhooked from the IV drip of Always Online. I want to be still for a moment. Then I want to dive right in.

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Image via Hibernian Workshop

I live in a two-gamer household. My partner and I both play a fair number of video games (although I’m definitely more obsessive about it than he is), and for the most part, this works out just fine; I tend toward single-player games, often on handheld consoles like the Switch or Steam Deck, while he’s more likely to take the TV and gaming headset to play online with his friends. 

It’s anthropologically fascinating to watch him sit on the couch speaking to someone I cannot hear. A not-uncommon interaction: “Yeah, the new job is good, I’ve mostly just - ON YOUR LEFT! SHOOT HIM, NOW! Shit, that was close - yeah, I’m settling in pretty well, how was Mexico?” It’s a complete 180 from how I usually play games, locked-in and solipsistic, with the express intention of shutting out the world as I usually experience it. The thought of having to communicate with someone else — not to mention navigating their play styles and decisions while juggling my own — has always frankly been something of a turn-off to me, an inveterate control freak, and a major reason why I haven’t delved much into mega-popular franchises like Fortnite. 

Lately, though, that desire has begun to shift, thanks to a somewhat under-the-radar game called Astral Ascent. It came out toward the end of last year, and has quickly become one of the games I’m most likely to pick up when I have a spare hour. It’s fun to play alone, but it’s even better in what’s known as couch co-op: with someone else sitting next to you rather than over the internet, the kind of game kids can lose entire weekends to playing with a friend. It turns out that IRL connection, applied to a game as engaging and layered as this one, is what I’ve been missing all along. 

Astral Ascent is a roguelite, a genre of game where you attempt a series of levels over and over again, gaining experience, upgrades, and skill with each run. It’s clearly inspired by Hades, one of the great entries in this genre; Astral Ascent is the first game I’ve felt is a comparable successor since Hades’ release in 2020.

There's a cast of different characters you can play as, all trapped in an Edenic space prison. On each run, you try to escape, fighting Zodiac-inspired bosses until you — most of the time — die and return to space prison, to strategize and try again. Along the way, you gain bits of information about the various characters, your surroundings, and your foes, as well as permanent upgrades like increased health, more in-game currency, and stronger, more varied attack options. The loop is satisfying and addicting, the way the best entries in this category tend to be. 

All of that would make Astral Ascent a clear recommendation in its own right (with the caveat that the systems are a tad complicated for a total beginner to the genre — Hades is considered the best for a reason). What’s made it one of my favorite games in recent memory, though, has been the experience of playing it with my partner, and with a handful of friends — both experienced gamers and not — whom I’ve been luring to my house one by one. 

The gameplay itself doesn’t change much in co-op mode. Instead of one character jumping around and fighting enemies, there are two, arcade-style; instead of one set of available upgrades, there are often (but not always) twice as many to choose from. One player remains the primary character, able to tug the other along onscreen if they lag too far behind, and at the end of a run whatever points you’ve accrued are applied to your stash as they would be in single-player mode. In other words, having a buddy pretty much only helps, and the intention is to assist rather than compete against one another. 

Part of what makes Astral Ascent in couch co-op so pleasurable is that feeling of working together. So far I’ve played this game with people I’m close with — my partner, my best friend — and have been struck by how our gameplay roles coalesce. I, the obsessive planner, the lover of systems and details, call the shots when it comes to making decisions: which spells and upgrades to select, how to allocate money, which room to enter next. My coplayer, invariably more chill and more interested in smashing bad guys, focuses on just that. We both get the gameplay experience we want; mine is, in fact, better for it because I get to interact with (okay, boss around) an actual person I care about rather than solitarily deploying commands to a computer. We get to go through the motions of problem-solving together without the stakes. 

That’s a more interesting proposition to me than direct competition when it comes to couch co-op gaming. I’ve seen glimpses of it in cooperative games like Overcooked 2 and Unrailed, where you and your fellow IRL players must execute a series of timed tasks to keep systems in motion (culinary and locomotive, respectively); honestly, though, I’ve always found those both stressful and repetitive.

Astral Ascent requires alertness and reflexes, but the moments when it becomes overwhelming are rare and considered, not the prevailing tone. It’s difficult, to be sure, yet always clear how you can get just a little bit better next time — a hallmark of a good roguelite, and why this genre in particular feels like such an interesting fit when it comes to two-player games. 

The first and only time I’ve ever beaten the game’s final boss was alongside my partner. We didn’t even realize we’d won at first, two hours after sitting down for what we’d expected would be a quick run. The gameplay had felt good the whole way, the synergies of our particular characters’ abilities melting wave after wave of enemies. It wasn’t the same feeling of seamless flow state I felt when I played on my own; it was more like a dance, a pattern, an if-then statement performed in tandem with this person beside me, who I’d already learned to collaborate and communicate with against obstacles big and small. It felt like a real victory. 

Because of My Whole Deal, there are two questions I’m often asked by friends, colleagues, and acquaintances: how to start knitting, and how to get into video games. A few years ago, I wrote a book to answer to that first question. The second is tougher.

There’s no real cultural analogue for video games. That’s mostly because they have a higher barrier to entry than, say, books, TV, or movies. Consoles (and PCs) are often prohibitively expensive, games themselves can run upwards of $70, and even the simplest, most mind-numbingly repetitive games need you to actually sit down and play them. It’s a different kind of buy-in than watching a show, requiring some exchange of passive viewership for choice and action. This is not what everyone wants from entertainment! 

Still, the question of how to begin is frequent, largely because it’s difficult to find a place to start. The question, too, is a personal one, and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. For one thing, everyone’s experience and comfort level with games is wildly variable. What could constitute intuitive gameplay to one player could prove needlessly complex to another; what’s more, different people want different experiences out of games. I love the back and forth that comes with recommending a first game, where I try to suss out what, if any, their prior relationship to gaming is (Pokémon? Magic: The Gathering? Tamagotchi? Chess?) and what they’re looking for — immersion, escape, satisfaction, amusement, to see what all the fuss is about? What about the all-important *~*~*vibes*~*~*?

While I can’t perform that interlocution with each of you individually (although honestly just message me and I probably will), over the course of the past five years or so I’ve developed what I’ve come to think of as a solid intro syllabus: a list of relatively accessible games for folks who haven’t touched them in years — or ever — and are looking for an entry point. This list doesn’t begin to even scratch the surface of the vast array of possibilities on the gaming market, and that’s on purpose. There are SO many games that it can be overwhelming for someone just looking for something to play today, right now, without a lot of fuss.

Instead, these are seven (plus one bonus) games that meet several criteria: they’re all available on smartphones (and often many other platforms); a solid proportion are free to play, and the most expensive is $9.99; they explain themselves well to beginners; and they each highlight some aspect of what makes games so engaging and special as a medium in the first place. They’re worth your money and, more importantly, they’re worth your time. Try a couple — even if you’ve never picked up a controller in your life, these should all be relatively instinctual — and see if one feels like a fit. I’d love to hear what resonated, and if you’re a seasoned gamer yourself, I’m curious to know what your recs for beginners are, too!

Florence ($2.99 on Apple and Android)

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that I think about this lovely, sub-hour-long game almost every day. That’s largely owing to its plinky, orchestral soundtrack, which underpins the entire experience and which I keep in heavy rotation while I work, but also because of what the game manages to accomplish in such a small, spare space. Florence is a wordless, emotionally resonant glimpse of a relationship, executed in puzzles that feel so natural to complete you don’t even realize you’re doing so in the first place. It’s a game that’s so easy to play it almost feels like reading a great graphic novel, one that shows rather than tells from the second you pick it up, and is worth playing through in a single sitting (ideally with headphones). Practically anyone can play this, and it’s almost guaranteed to make you cry. 

Image via Annapurna Interactive

Oxenfree (free on Apple and Android with a Netflix subscription)

Oxenfree has the most traditional narrative of the games on this list, and it beautifully demonstrates a the fundamental difference between games and other mediums: the importance of player choice. You play as Alex, a teenage girl who recently lost someone close to her, during a weekend getaway with friends on a mysterious island. The action of the game primarily consists of walking around, tapping on objects and talking to other people, discovering their secrets and deciding what you (as Alex) want to do next.

It has the atmosphere of a slightly more mature Stranger Things or a more-than-slightly-less cannibalistic Yellowjackets — dark, stylish updates on the teen drama mixed with mystery and a touch of horror — bolstered by a particularly clever game mechanic where you only have a limited amount of time to make each of your choices. If you choose to do nothing in a given situation, you lose the chance altogether, which the game proves deftly is in itself a choice. There’s now a sequel, also available from Netflix, that I’ve been meaning to check out too. 

Image via Night School Studios

Tender: Creature Comforts ($3.99 on Apple and Android)

Tender is, in so many words, Tinder but a game. It REALLY feels like a dating app — you as the player set up a profile, swipe left or right on the dreamy, cartoony characters you can arrange dates with and, eventually, get to know better as you advance the story. Like a real dating app, Tender takes over your phone. You have to allow notifications, respond to your suitors throughout the day, and show up to dates on time (you get dinged for being late or not showing up).

It’s so realistic that the main criticism I have and hear is that it’s frustrating in the same way the apps are frustrating: you book a date with some momentum and interest, and then by the time it rolls around you’re busy or tired or just don’t feel up to it. And sometimes you think you’re doing everything right, giving a character the best possible responses, and yet they still ghost you or react badly. It could absolutely hit too close to home, but if you’re interested in seeing how a genuinely engaging story could be told in an unusual format tailor-made for a phone game, Tender delivers masterfully.

Image via Kenny Sun

Monument Valley ($3.99 on Apple and Android)

This is the only entry on this list I haven’t actually played much of myself, but it comes so highly recommended by friends (including my fiancé/editor and folks who don’t typically play games) and has become such a metonym for good mobile games that I feel comfortable including it. It features moody, dimensional puzzles that don’t take long to complete — all you need to do is tap on the screen and your character (a young, nameless girl lost in an Escher-like city) walks to that point — and plays with the intimate space of a phone or tablet screen with warmth and cleverness. Kids, apparently, love it too.

Image via Ustwo Games

Slay the Spire ($9.99 on Apple and Android)

Both this and the next game on the list are what I would describe as life-ruiners: games with such fun and satisfying central loops that you could find yourself sinking dozens (or, if we’re getting personal here, hundreds) of hours into them. 

This one is from a genre of games called deck-builders, where each playthrough you cobble together a deck of virtual cards with which to battle against enemies; it’ll instantly feel natural if you’ve ever touched a deck of playing cards, even if all the icons onscreen seem a bit overwhelming at first glance. The card draws are random, so every subsequent attempt is completely different from the last, based on what you draw and how you play them. That variety contributes to the game’s irresistible just-one-more-try propulsion that could keep you up half the night. Slay the Spire is the game on this list I’m most likely to sit down and play now, years after first getting obsessed.

Image via MegaCrit

Vampire Survivors (free on Apple and Android)

In terms of pure lizard-brain fun, Vampire Survivors is probably my top pick here. It has a single input: all you do is move the player character as hordes of enemies approach you. You find randomly generated weapons as the game goes on and the hordes grow larger, automatically firing whatever you’ve chosen to equip in order to fend them off. The longer you survive, the more upgrades you’re able to add to your offenses and defenses, and the more waves of enemies spawn in kind.

It’s insanely addictive, although in a different way than Slay the Spire; while that game makes you feel like a nimble-minded strategic genius when you lock into its logic, Vampire Survivors makes you feel like a Hulk-smash-style badass, mowing through crowds of enemies so thick you can’t even tell what’s happening onscreen. As a bonus for more squeamish folks (of which I am avowedly one), the graphics are all low-res and kitschy enough that it never feels violent or gross.

Image via Poncle / Nintendo

Sayonara Wild Hearts (available for free with an Apple Arcade subscription)

Second only to Florence on this list with regard to banger soundtracks, this arcade-style game nicely straddles the story-vs-gameplay line; it doesn’t have the most explicit central plot, but there’s a subtle narrative tug that makes the whole thing feel urgent and cohesive and, above all, stylish as hell. It’s a fast-paced race through psychedelic environments on a flying motorcycle, all the while racking up points and avoiding enemies. It’s honestly fairly difficult, especially at first, but the gameplay so simple (think: Dance Dance Revolution, for your fingers) and the music is so propulsive that it always feel satisfying. As you watch yourself get better and better, you start to realize that “winning” isn’t really the central goal in the first place.

Image via Simogo

Honorable mention: Stardew Valley ($4.99 on Apple and Android)

I debated including this because it’s just a lot more GAME than the others here, and because there are definitely better platforms to play it on than mobile (I’d personally recommend using a laptop or Switch, if you happen to have access). I’m doing so because while I don’t think it’s the perfect first game for most people, Stardew Valley is absolutely the perfect first game for a certain type of person. If you were really into The Sims or Roller Coaster Tycoon or any sort of simulation game as a kid, and/or enjoy building and maintaining systems, and/or aren’t particularly interested in battling or really even much conflict, that person could well be you.

Stardew Valley is a farming simulator, where you plant and harvest crops, tend to animals, make friends (and lovers!!!!!!!) with local townspeople, and generally just…live. There are layers of mechanics you can choose to engage with or not (including an optional area where you can in fact battle enemies), and the overall atmosphere is cozy, calming, and a touch melancholy; if you’re a fan of Studio Ghibli’s films, this game has some thematic resonance. Never have chores been more fun.

Image via ConcernedApe

Almost exactly one year ago, I started learning to make games.

Really, I started learning how to learn to make games; those first weeks and months were less about creating anything functional than they were about figuring out how, over a decade after leaving school, my brain retains and metabolizes material, and where to start looking in the first place. I had never done any sort of coding, beyond some light web design (yes I mean MySpace), and had decided a long time ago that I was perfectly content to never be a Math Person.

I began completely in the dark, fumbling toward promising pinpricks of light, and now, twelve months later, I’m just starting to see the outlines of something pathlike forming. Honestly, I don’t know if what I’m working on can be called “games,” precisely, anymore, although every other descriptor I’ve come up with has been wildly pretentious (“It’s really more of a poem-dollhouse?” I heard myself say to an innocent bystander, aka my fiancé, the other week). Whatever they are, and whatever all this is, I’ve learned a lot to get here: the fundamentals of programming and digital art, interactive design principles, even some remedial algebra and physics. Mostly it’s made me realize how much more I have to learn.

One question I’ve gotten a lot over the past year is how, specifically, I’m doing this, particularly what resources I’m using. I put this little guide together to document my own process, and ideally begin a dynamic list of useful tips for anyone — especially folks with a non-STEM background like me — interested in exploring this space.

I have to imagine that there are as many ways to learn these tools as there are people. What I want to stress is that’s exactly what they are: tools. They’re for making the thing you want to make, whether that’s a game or an interactive essay or a virtual pet or some heretofore undiscovered combination of adjectives and nouns. Once I’d acknowledged that — that the real work of it all was in the creating, which didn’t have to and in fact shouldn’t wait for me to achieve some far-off level of mastery — it became so much easier to find an entry point, and to play around, and, paradoxically, to pursue topics that might have daunted me in a vacuum.

Choosing an art style, coding approach, and game engine

You could probably research how to start getting into game development forever; there are SO many YouTube channels and guides and well-meaning suggestions about which engines and languages and art styles are the best for beginners. I don’t think it’s a mistake to consume some of this material, but I do think it’s important to remember that doing so isn’t the same as actually doing the work, and that the best tools for making anything are the ones you’ll actually use.

For me, this meant deciding pretty quickly that I was going to stick to making 2D games to start, and would create my own game assets using pixel art. There’s plenty of free and placeholder art available online and no shame in using it, but much of my desire to make games in the first place had to do with getting my hands on all parts of the process; in the same vein, I also decided that I’d have to get some familiarity with code in order to achieve the level of control I wanted.

These factors helped me decide which game engine I’d start out with. I landed on GameMaker Studio 2 after a week or so of research and fiddling around with a couple of options. Its base version is available for free, and it’s the engine behind some 2D games I’ve loved, like Undertale and Hyper Light Drifter. I understand that it’s less commercially popular than more complex engines like Unreal and Unity because of its relative lack of facility with 3D games, but above all I wanted a tool with a gentle learning curve that didn’t come with a million options I wouldn’t need as an absolute beginner. GameMaker, which uses its own proprietary coding language called GML, has been great for that purpose despite its limitations, and I’ve made the majority of my projects in the past year with it; I’ve also found that learning GML set me up well when it comes to learning more widely applicable languages.

Some other options to consider besides the three I’ve already mentioned include Godot, an open-source engine that’s fairly agile with regard to both 2D and 3D games and which I’m considering learning next; Bitsy, which requires no coding knowledge and can be used to make small narrative games with a gentle, retro aesthetic; Pico-8, a similarly intentionally limited engine with more of a coding basis and arcade feel; and RPG Maker, which I’ve never used but I’ve heard has a fairly intuitive drag-and-drop approach for, you guessed it, making RPGs.

There are many, many other engines, plus plenty of game-oriented frameworks and libraries for languages like Python and JavaScript that I’m just starting to dip my toe into. If you want to start with an entirely text-based engine, there are tools like Twine that operate as essentially choose-your-own-adventure writing software — an excellent way to conceptualize branching dialogue and player choice as an absolute beginner, and especially as a writer. I just went to a class last weekend about how to make a game in Google Sheets, so really, truly anything can be a game engine (including good old-fashioned pen and paper).

Finding helpful tutorials and teachers

Once I’d chosen my engine, I began the tutorials. Game Maker comes with a number of built-in how-tos with assets provided, intended to leave you with a full, small game at the end; my understanding is that all of the other major engines do too. The one I followed first was Little Town, which was great for getting a basic handle on how the engine and programming in general worked.

After that, I began to seek out more specific tutorials on YouTube while starting to build some small projects of my own. Peyton Burnham’s intro RPG tutorials provided the basis for some of my first exploratory attempts, and I also got a lot out of his branching dialogue tutorial; Shaun Spalding and Friendly Cosmonaut have extremely helpful beginner tutorials to help get basic features like player movement, inventory management, and textboxes up and running. Each teacher goes through each line of code in order to make it clear why they’re making certain choices, and I found that following along — not copy and pasting code even when that was an option — went a long way toward helping me get the feeling of programming in my hands and head. I began to cautiously improvise, tweaking the techniques I was learning so they’d fit my little wisps of vision.

At this point I started to reach out to other people with questions. A programmer friend sat with me for an entire evening, helping debug my code; I joined a couple of Patreons for tutorial creators I really liked, as well as a handful of Discord channels. I did a creative coding program at NYU and spent the month asking much more advanced programmers than I how they’d approach a given problem. Knowing enough to know how to ask for help, after the months I’d spent working alone at that point, felt like in itself a small triumph.

These online spaces aren’t meant to be dumping grounds for every little bug you encounter, but they are where you can find folks who are delighted to help out a beginner, especially if you can provide clear documentation of the issue and what you’ve already tried to fix it. I’ve been genuinely moved by the helpfulness on display in these communities, the sheer desire to help others make more stuff, and highly recommend finding the ones that relate to your tools and interests as you progress. It’s such a relief to have actual humans to turn to when something inevitably goes wrong, and a joy to have a place where you can find inspiration and show off your accomplishments when everyone else you know is sick of hearing about data structures.

Where to go from there

A year in, I feel like I’ve just finished the pre-requisites for a class I haven’t yet begun to take. I’ve published a handful of small projects, all of which I still consider works in progress, and begun tinkering with a handful of others, which I’d like to continue to release somewhat regularly; I’ve found that just getting something out into the open air, and certainly into the hands of people who can interact with it, is the absolute best way to learn what to do the next time around. It runs counter to my instinct to sit on something forever, tinkering and tweaking until it’s perfect, but that’s a really good way to never finish anything.

Now that I have some basics down, I’ve tried to structure my learning somewhat topically. For the past three months, for example, I’ve been focusing mostly on randomness and procedural generation, learning how to create game levels as well as little pieces of interactive art. I followed Jeremiah Reid’s beginner JavaScript tutorial to make a small roguelike, and have been playing around with the p5.js JavaScript library, a beginner-friendly way to get comfortable with creative programming if you’d rather not take the game development approach in the first place. The Coding Train on YouTube is an excellent resource for getting started with p5.js, and with programming fundamentals generally.

I wrote this years ago, in a book about knitting, but I think it applies here too: “The important thing is to start, even if it’s ugly, even if it’s hard. Even (especially) if you are the sort of person who is used to having everything exactly the way you want it, who worries that the world will end if one stitch is out of place.” I’ve found it so thrilling and so terrifying to decide to learn something new this past year. I hope, truly, that you do too, and I’d love to see what you make.

I spent June at camp, which isn’t something I have had reason to say for the past fifteen years or so.

This one was called ITP Camp, a sort of four-week ad hoc redux of NYU’s ITP1 grad program held at their Brooklyn campus. I wanted to go because it seemed like the sort of place where I could lay out these janky little toolsets of mine — the almost-year of self-taught programming, the decade-plus of writing and editing both professionally and not, the even-more-decades-than-that of crafting and gaming and being a person in the world — and see if they began to add up to something tangible. 

There were about 200 of us who attended, along with a dozen or so staffers; many people had gone to camp before and/or to the school itself and many, like me, had not. Some, like me, already lived in New York (my apartment was a fifteen-minute walk from campus, a true logistical blessing), and others came in for the month or for the summer. I worked in the mornings and early afternoons2 and then would head up for classes; others worked full-time and came only in the evenings, and still others rearranged their contracts and schedules to focus on camp for the entire stint.

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There was a shared calendar where class sessions were listed, and for the most part we could freely choose whichever we wanted to attend. Staffers and campers could teach sessions, and they ranged in structure from low-key discussions to multi-part programming mini-bootcamps. Many of the sessions had tactile components — I took classes on circuitry, laser cutting, immersive theater, arcade controller design, and screen printing, among other topics — and there was a whole host of offerings about physical computing that I’d like to dive into more in the future.

Mostly, I went to sessions on things like interactive and narrative storytelling, and game-making, and some foundational coding topics I’ve missed out on in my patchy autodidactic journey. I joined discussions about creativity and failure and how to make making things sustainable and insight into others’ artistic and technical practices. I managed to bring up Tears of the Kingdom at every possible opportunity. (Despite my best efforts, I did come away with Opinions About AI, which I will maybe write about in a future installment but also might sublimate into abstraction and never speak of aloud.)

What it was all about was making things: what and how and why ranged widely, but that was the central driving force of the month. The directive, both tacit and explicit, was to make a lot of stuff, and accept that it mattered because you did it, and show people, and then make something else.

I found this enormously difficult, and enormously meaningful. This whole last year has been an exercise in relearning how I create, how I learn in the first place, but for the most part it’s been on my own. That’s not to say I haven’t been helped at every beat by friends and strangers, because I absolutely have; it’s more that the work I’ve been doing has been entirely self-directed, at a pace I set, and I’m the sole arbiter over what state anyone else ever sees it in. (Which too often is “never.”)

That wasn’t the case at camp, by virtue of the fact that everyone was working on something and everyone else wanted to hear about it and poke at it and play around with it at every possible opportunity, self included. This forced me to get over myself and any sense that whatever I shared with people had to be “done” or even at all legible, which in turn compelled me to make a whole lot more, to be open to feedback and ideas that pushed me in directions I wouldn’t have considered on my own. There was a silent but strong social contract that we would be open with one another, with no sense of competition, and that openness was repaid with great generosity.

I was startled, honestly, by how many people I met who I think I’ll stay friends with, who I’m excited to get to know better and whose work I want to engage much more deeply with, and then I felt silly for being startled, because I don’t really know how you could achieve the one effect without the other, the openness without the intimacy. The atmosphere was heady and heightened the way a compressed period of time can get with the right social alchemy; by the last week I wanted to spend every free moment on campus, working on my projects and talking with other people about theirs; I went out on more weeknights in a row than I have since I stopped drinking. I anticipated that I’d feel a true loss when it was all over, those familiar but long-forgotten post-camp blues, and I was right.

June was not, by any measure, a stress-free period of creativity and campfire bonding; honestly it was one of the hardest months I’ve had in a long time. Work was manageable but demanding, and a series of high highs and low lows detonated in my personal life at a breathtaking clip. It wasn’t just the sheer quantity of tasks I had to do each day, but the energy required to toggle between mindsets: editor or manager or partner or friend, extruded into the role of student or maker or whatever I was with often just a few minutes’ turnaround time. Most nights I would fall asleep so exhausted I couldn’t keep my eyes open a beat longer; the few instances I couldn’t drift off, despite or because of all of the above, translated into weak, watery panic the next morning. There were at least two distinct moments when I thought about quitting the program, the one truly optional part of my life, but I didn’t, thank God.

There was a showcase the last week of camp during which many people displayed projects, some in mediums they had come in already grasping and others created entirely with skills picked up over the course of June. One friend 3D printed a song; another made an animation with frames plastered all over the city; I helped design a project with another where the user’s cursor rebels in all sorts of increasingly frustrating ways.

My personal final project was sort of a cheat, because I’d had the idea for it before coming to camp. Back in April I kept a series of five journal entries in my beloved Crochet interface for Yarnspinner (basically a node-based text engine), thinking I might want to turn them into some sort of interactive game experiment. That’s what I wound up doing, and the result is here. It’s only available on desktop right now (although a medium-range goal of mine is to optimize it for mobile since I think it would live even better there) and is more of a prototype than anything else. I’m extremely proud of it, though, even while I don’t even really know what “it” is; it’s not quite a game, not quite a personal essay, but contains elements of both that make me so excited to do more. It feels like the first time I’ve allowed the writing to freely operate alongside the game-making, like introducing a new cat to a long-time feline resident after a stint on opposite sides of a door.

That’s sort of a precious metaphor but my cat is right now purring alongside me, and as of this moment the major crises have been dealt with, and it feels so good to have new people and a new resolve and the sense that I’ve been here all along, that I’m coming back to myself, that there are things I will make that I haven’t thought of yet. Not bad for a month.

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Wrong!!! I’m a process-loving bitch and I always have been, especially when it comes to crafting. I’ve knitted literally dozens of sweaters for myself in the past two decades, and plenty I’ve never worn out once. Not because they’re not comfortable or don’t fit well (although there are some lumpen wonders), nor because I’m not proud of them, but because the work was already the best part. I wanted to know I could make the sweater in front of me, and I could, and I did. Sometimes I give those sweaters away; other times I frog them for their yarn; more often than not, though, they hang in my closet as sort of talismans, these sums of my time and my coaxing and my puzzle-solving. I don’t know if this is good or bad, but it’s how I’ve always operated.

Over the past few weeks I improv-crocheted a slutty little top. It’s the first time I’ve done a full crochet project in years, and honestly one of a handful of times I’ve crocheted a garment — I tend to reserve it for more structural or sculptural items, like toys and blankets.

The whole time, I realized, I was refactoring, figuring out the process by which I’d put the entire thing, which was made of individual squares, together, and adjusting and reworking each time I realized something wouldn’t quite work. The actual crocheting, the depositing of stitches one after the other, probably took about half the total working time; the rest was determining how to arrange, where and how to seam for stability and clean lines, if the thing actually fit me in the first place. I had to undo and redo virtually every choice I made, because I was not even attempting someone else’s pattern but instead letting myself feel my way toward whatever this wanted to be. The work was already the best part.

It’s possible to refactor yourself into oblivion, which is what I think I can do with writing. You can tweak and rearrange and polish to the point where nobody ever sees a word, so concerned with precision that you decline to see the alchemy that happens when it hits the open air. I can sense this impulse creeping in as I learn to make games, watch myself spending weeks working on streamlining tools and creative processes instead of just sitting down and making the thing, a thing, anything. But even figuring all of that out has felt so good and so satisfying, and I’m still so new, that I’m trying to be patient and let the shape of the thing, whatever it may be, emerge naturally.

I guess what I want for myself the precision of writing without its sharp edges, the freehand of crafting with far more focus. I’m starting to see what that could look like; I’ve been slamming a bunch of very smart people’s open-source tools and libraries together over the past few weeks and getting very excited about what I’m able to make with them. It feels like when your eyes begin to adjust in the dark, when shapes all of a sudden have outlines and mass.

The top I crocheted, incidentally, might actually turn out to be better as a sort of market bag, but I don’t need to decide that right now.

Learning to make games has been above all an exercise in reimagining my creative process. It’s not quite like writing, which is something I’ve always been able to see the shape of. I didn’t write my books in exactly chronological order, but I always had their final result in mind, and in that way could pretty straightforwardly work toward a finished product. Essays and articles I almost always write from top to bottom, a habit that’s proven somewhat incompatible with my ever-loudening editor brain, which makes me stop at every sentence and polish up three drafts before it allows me to proceed, if I have the energy to at all after that. I don’t know if you can blame the job for it, so much as getting older, more sure in some ways and less sure in most, these last few years, all of it. Whatever the cause, it makes my writing stilted and self-conscious and a nonzero part of why I want to experiment in this new medium for a while is to try to outmaneuver it.

Making games is not like knitting, either, although it’s a lot closer. There, too, you start at the beginning, the cast-on edge, and work through until the end. But sometimes, more often than not, I surprise myself and don’t go the direction I’d originally planned; the last sweater I made, finished in late January, began its life as a sort of anonymous band, cast on years ago for some murky, dresslike reason. By the time I picked it back up in earnest, I’d completely forgotten my original intentions, and after some further knitting and frogging and reknitting in other directions, it’s sort of an Argo of its former self, all the same yarn with not a single original stitch still intact. It’s cute; cropped, made from black merino wool I think Aude took from the free table at her work for me, a somewhat limited quantity in a somewhat thicker weight than I’d ordinarily choose. The final product has almost nothing to do with what I first envisioned, if there had been anything at all, but it feels like a good use of the materials I had on hand; it feels like I did right by them.

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By virtue of its rules and rigidity, knitting gives me some room to play, to experiment, to consider the step-by-step puzzle of what I’ve got and what I’d like to wind up with. If this, then that, if this, then that, all the way from the first stitch to the last. Coding is like knitting with little bits of data, a material whose texture I haven’t yet figured out — it’s finicky but powerful, logical but maddeningly opaque. I don’t think I will ever master it like cotton or comma clauses, yet it’s still very fun to play with.

I know the scale and shape of a writing or knitting project, how they feel when they’re working well and when they’re not. I know none of that so far when it comes to games, and that means that I don’t have a clear horizon to work toward; in turn, I don’t yet know what a proper atomic unit of progress looks like. I don’t know how to build in room for player choice, or how to structure a plot, or which comes first, the logistics or the creativity. I want to have grace with myself here — I’m a beginner! I just found out about the existence of for-loops! Arrays and data structures are something that exists and I sure do know what they do, kind of!! — but I’m impatient, and above all I’m scared that I’ll run out of energy or motivation or just like, JUICE before I get anywhere with any of this. I only just got it back. It’s been making me feel like myself again. I would be so, so sad to see it go away already.

For the last couple weeks I’ve taken a bit of a detour from my main project (which is a misnomer because it’s just like……..a disparate collection of drafts) in order to figure out what amounts to a workflow tool. That sounds extremely unsexy but maybe so does all of this.

The engine I’ve been using to make games (aptly called Game Maker Studio) is great for me in many ways, but it has a pretty cumbersome approach to storing and displaying text. I’ve set up Peyton Burnham’s branching dialogue system, which is as elegant a solution as I’ve found within Game Maker itself at my current skill level; while I think I could build a whole game this way, and probably will, it just doesn’t feel natural to write within, to flexibly accommodate the branching choices and paths that make a game a game, at least to my mind. No matter how far I may want to run from writing, I do want to have an easy-as-possible conduit for it.

After smashing together a couple of tools (turns out “easy-as-possible” still meant learning about the existence of 3.5 new things: the even more aptly named Yarnspinner language and Crochet interface, as well as the Chatterbox and Scribble libraries for Game Maker1) , I think I’ve got something that works. I can reliably feed text from a simple, flexible external system into my game; I can even dictate a fair amount of my game’s flow and logic from within that system. It’s not perfect by any stretch — if anyone wants to help me figure out how to convert the code I have so that the player can select options with the arrow keys rather than by tying each choice to a number key, I would be eternally grateful2 — but it works, and it’s mine, and it’s helping me start to picture how I could possibly ever build this. Just a series of if-thens, stitches, words, one right after the other, until one day there's something there.

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Totally on a whim, I decided to enter* a game jam this weekend — Ludum Dare, where there are a variety of rules and different levels of entry depending on how intense you are, but which at its core seems to be about making an entire game (assets, code, ideation, etc.) over a single weekend.

I really liked this idea, because I’ve stalled a bit on developing my game over the past week or so and had been lightly considering turning my attention to making a couple of minigames to eventually implement inside it; partly for variety’s sake, and partly because I still haven’t actually learned much about the part of game dev where you ‘do mechanics’ and ‘try to make the game fun.’ I liked the idea of getting out of my own way and just seeing how far I could get with what I already know.

The answer is: this far! Which is like, not very, but it is technically an entire game and it was extremely fun to make. I probably spent about 12 hours on it from start to finish (which I am led to believe is a pretty paltry investment for one of these jams but also I am solo, new, and didn’t really plan to do it in the first place.) The idea here is that this will be a small minigame you can play if you interact with the fish tank in the rightmost classroom, and the idea came to me from the Ludum Dare prompt — “harvest.” I’ve been trying to think of ways to basically hide items for players to find around the little world of my game, and I like the idea of the fish as these sort of silent but watchful forces mysteriously harvesting people’s possessions in order to hold them hostage for food. Kind of a stretch thematically, but I’m pretty full up on farm sims at the moment (s/o to my partner, who’s been ripping through Stardew Valley over the past few weeks) and wanted to do something that wasn’t like, my protagonist weeding a pumpkin patch. So far this is very squarely a city game, and I like it that way!

* I didn’t like…..tell anyone or pay any fees or formally do anything, other than telling you now.

I told myself I’d release something playable by the end of the year, and I did it! It’s a barely-even-a-demo for the game I’ve been making for the past few months as I learn GML and pixel art, available for free to play in your browser. (I’d suggest playing on a computer since I don’t know how to optimize for mobile yet, lol).

It’s easy to look at it and think it’s not very much, especially given the work involved in making it — if you do literally everything available in the demo, it amounts to under ten minutes of gameplay, and there isn’t really a story or even an actual game loop in there yet. It’s above all a collection of assets and features I’ve managed to get working to my satisfaction, and that provide scaffolding for narrative and mechanics to come.

Still, I am more proud of this little scrap of a thing than anything I’ve touched in years, and the creative fulfillment it’s brought me has made basically every aspect of my life better over the past season. I wanted to know that I could make something that walked like a game and quacked like a game, and it turns out that I can.

I’ve always been this way with projects, now that I think of it; my first “book” was my undergrad thesis, a 92-page collection of essays that wholecloth did not make it into my actual first book of essays five years later. It wasn’t that the writing or thinking in there was particularly good, but that in writing it I learned how to write it, or, ideally, something like it but better. Same goes for knitting my first sweater; it was a lumpy and unwearable raglan but it was most definitely a sweater, and once I knew the theory of how to construct one, I knew how to make subsequent versions a lot closer to what I’d envisioned all along. It’s a good reminder to myself that the fucking up is the work, which I tend to forget because who wants to be bad at something for even one minute????

Coding, of course, has been a full-on crash course in humility. I am not a natural-born woman in STEM, to put it mildly, and there’s so little room for error that I’ve gone through days of frustration (bordering on despair) while trying to implement or fix the most basic-seeming thing. But, to my continual surprise, programming remains quite possibly the most satisfying and rewarding part of this whole process. It’s a game in and of itself, one that I get to set the pace of. It’s like learning a language and a craft simultaneously, mechanized mundane magic. This week I had to fix a pretty big problem (the inventory system was adding items properly, but deleting incorrect ones) which required what I could think of as nothing so much as frogging, or the knitting term for ripping back stitches, so named for “rip-it, rip-it, rip-it.” Deleting big chunks of code hurt in the same way: the visible discarding of hours of effort, the annoyance that you can’t just isolate the one tiny issue but must instead sacrifice everything that came between the fuckup and your realization of it. It also felt good in the same way, the solid knowledge that you can fix your own mistakes, or at least know where to start looking.

Anyway, I have two resolutions for the coming year: to “finish” this game, whatever that means, and put it out into the world, and to pick my knitting needles back up in earnest. (Also I’m doing Dry January but I reserve the right to stop at any time if it sucks lmao.) Drop me a line if you want to talk about any of this, because I’m really starting to annoy my loved ones with talk of data structures and branching dialogue trees.

First of all, I’m sorry if this is an inappropriate use of this email list; I honestly forgot about this newsletter entirely, and don’t even remember exactly what the meaning of the name signifies, or the logo that Aude graciously drew. I think I might have had some vague idea of combining crafting and games in one place, somehow, eventually, and, haha, it turns out that in a roundabout way I sort of have?

I took two weeks off work at the end of August because I really, really missed my brain and thought I might be able to give it a sort of rigorous creative powerwashing if I took some considered but unstructured time off, to make room (which my colleague Allie recently reported on) for the possibility of spontaneity. It seems paradoxical, yet it turns out this method suits my always-needs-a-plan-ass brain. I spent some of my time shopping and eating and seeing friends; mostly I just sat down and tried to make stuff.

I’d had a vague idea for a long time that I’d like to learn how to make games. Partly, I have to imagine, out of sheer Puritan guilt; I’ve played so many literal thousands of hours of games over the past few years, virtually replacing all previous TV- and movie-watching and converting a large percentage of my reading to audio in order to accommodate. I think in some way I have to believe that investment of time inevitably adds up to something productive.

But mostly I do think my motives are pure. For one thing, I love, love, love games. I think they’re just the best?? I don’t think the concept or pursuit of gaming is for everyone but I do believe there’s a game for everyone, some combination of puzzles and choices and vibes to draw in and hold the attention of every sentient person. It might not actually be worth everyone’s time to try and figure out their own, but it is my hope that as the industry evolves and there are more and more ways to play high-quality, low-barrier-to-entry games, more people are willing to give it a shot.

I didn’t know where to start learning, or even what questions to ask in the first place. I asked a lot of friends to ask their friends, and Googled a lot of proper nouns. Through a bit of trial and error I settled on a game engine (Game Maker Studio) and an art style (retro pixel art); for learning the former, YouTube has been invaluable. I don’t know if these are tools I’ll use forever, or even with which I’ll make a first game. For right now, though, I like their accessibility and tone, and the limitations they both provide are a blessing. I’ve found I can be a lot more creatively nimble when I have a set number of something in front of me (pixels, stitches) in which to execute a project, rather than trying to put the whole octopus to bed at once.

Everything I’ve watched and read stresses the importance of prototyping rather than getting precious with stories and styles and art assets right at the beginning, which is advice so perfectly tailored to counter my instincts that I laughed the first time I heard it. I’ve made a lot of cute little pixel art landscapes, which is not the same thing as making a useable game. I have a couple of concepts, a few ideas for characters and themes and mechanics, but nothing close to a solid idea yet. Still, I’m invigorated by each part of the process (the process chiefly involves figuring out what the process is, at this point), and find that when, say, the coding side is too much, I can turn to figuring out how to make things look the way I want, and vice versa. There’s a cadence that isn’t unlike a gameplay loop in itself.

So I’m learning to code, I guess, and learning to make art and animation and even a little bit of music, and thinking about how gameplay is structured and where (lol!) writing fits in; my other conspiracy theory is that I’m doing all of this because I haven’t been able to write with any fluency in like, years, and thus I must be trying to sneak up on myself. Mostly it’s just fun to be having fun, exciting to be excited about something again. It’s been a while.

I was excited but a little nervous about this trip, about the time and the distance involved. I was nervous I would get bored, or cranky, or sick, or somehow behave badly in front of the people I was going with, whom it was important to me to be my best self around.

I’ve tended to do most of my traveling — most of my big decision-making, really — alone. I’m used to eating when I’m hungry and napping when I’m tired and talking out loud to nobody for whole days, until I’ve recharged enough to resume human interaction. I’m used to planning, to making long lists and knowing exactly where I’ll be at the beginning and end of each day. It’s not a way of living I’d necessarily recommend, but it’s the best way I know to circumvent my anxiety, to cauterize myself against catastrophizing every unexpected thing that comes my way.

For this trip, though, I couldn’t really plan. Instead, I bought a lot of embarrassing things for the plane (including a “foot hammock” that I’ve still never actually used, which is good because my boyfriend said he would not sit next to me if I did) and updated a couple of overdue vaccines (love ‘em!). I also downloaded a pair of games — Oxenfree and Night in the Woods — to which I credit my sanity during those 60-odd hours of flying.

The games have a lot in common. Both are relatively short and highly narrative, where you don’t really “play” so much as read a ton of (very well-written) dialogue and make occasional choices on how to interact; they’re almost like participatory novels or movies. They’re both about heightened periods of time, with you as the protagonist at a kind of crossroads, emerging from a dark period and deciding who you want to be and where to go next. They’re also both SPOOKY.

I played Oxenfree on my phone. It suits the format well, and also cost $5 instead of I think $20 on Switch. (I had just paid for a big vacation; I was in no place to splurge.)

You are Alex, a girl who’s about to graduate from high school and whose older brother has recently died. You’re visiting a nearby island with a group that includes your new stepbrother, your best friend, his crush, and your dead brother’s girlfriend. The situation is…..obviously fraught!

As the story unfolds and it becomes clear that All Is Not As It Seems on this island, you play largely by choosing who to talk to and how to proceed. Arguably, the biggest choice you make throughout is how to conduct yourself. You can be withholding, telling everyone you’re fine when you’re not and ignoring the kind gestures of your new stepbrother; you can be combative and sarcastic, snapping back at anyone who reaches out; you can be open and honest, to the point of making all the others deeply uncomfortable. The way the text appears onscreen contributes to this sense of urgency and immediacy — each time there’s a chance for you to respond to someone, your options appear floating above your head, and if you don’t choose quickly enough, they often vanish entirely.

Oxenfree is an object lesson in how to manage and metabolize grief, and it’s also a pretty gnarly ghost story. It’s not scary enough to deter even the wussiest gamers (hi!) but there are certainly moments worth playing with the lights on, or at least with seven travel companions in the airplane seats beside you.

Night in the Woods, which I played on Switch and did shell out the $20 for, is less noticeably emotional and eerie, but packs a deceptive punch on both fronts. Here, you are Mae, a cat (never explained; your best friends include an alligator and a bear) who’s just dropped out of college and returned to her hometown. She sleeps in her parents’ attic, wanders aimlessly through town, and dreams uneasy nightmares on a flat and frustrating loop. There is a spot of murder and a lot of an addicting mini-game that’s basically a knock-off of Guitar Hero.

No matter how you choose to play the game, Mae is kind of a dick. She’s petulant and moody, and even though you’re also presented with dialogue options as in Oxenfree, there are plenty of occasions where everything you can possibly say is mean or cowardly or ignorant, and there’s no way to just say nothing. It so perfectly mimics the sensation of being drunk, of being angry, of being scared of what’s coming next so you lash out with claws bared. Oxenfree, for its part, captures how it feels to weigh each interaction, calculating to find what will protect you, or bolster you, or just get everyone to leave you alone.

These games, above all, are about coping when something goes all wrong, and picking up the pieces after the fact. The characters couldn’t prevent what’s already happened to them; all they (you) can do now is figure out how to navigate from there, and allow the people (alligators) around them to help.

Lately, for maybe the first time since I’ve been cognizant, I haven’t wondered about how to be or where I should go next, and it’s not because I know. I had a very hard 2018 on many fronts, and spent a lot of my allotted worrying-about-the-future man-hours on shorter time frames than usual — what would the following week hold, or even the following day, and how could I be sure I’d get through it? I didn’t have the room to plan out the broader contours of my life, to think about how a choice might echo over the course of months or years.

Now that I’m on the other side (I think! who knows!!) of those particular difficulties, my future-scope still feels stuck. I’m still largely focused on days and weeks, ferreting out what brings me happiness now, how I can feel useful or satisfied today rather than planning for what’s to come. A not-insignificant part of me worries about this — does it mean I’ve become unambitious? Short-sighted? For all that I’ve always hated my anxiety, it’s also been a powerful and familiar guide. I feel a little like my map has lost a good deal of its markings. It’s not so bad, really; the question is how to adjust, and even that feels muted.

Of course, I know I’ll be back there, in that space of uncertainty, in that pit of depression or mourning, in those sharp feverish moments of only being able to say the wrong thing. And while I don’t think games like these can save us from such inevitabilities (although they are, for what it’s worth, the first ones I’ve ever played that have made me want to write a game of my own), I think they can make us consider them at arm’s length, or at least as much length as you can scrape up in a basic economy airline seat.

The trip was perfect. It was because it wasn’t — some plans swerved sideways, some nerves were frayed, some naps went untaken. But the joy and the beauty drastically outweighed those moments. They felt like proof positive that I could go with the flow, that I could survive 16 hours in a middle seat, that I could find ways to recharge even among a large, loving group of people. It reoriented, however slightly, the story I tell about myself.

Oxenfree and Night in the Woods pair well with: A recent graduation, a recent breakup, a recent loss. Also: the new National album, but not like, concurrently, because you should definitely play both games with sound.

What I’m crafting right now: A ton of very simple hats, for a book I’m working on about how to knit a very simple hat.

It starts in a destabilizing way. You, a lost child of indeterminate gender, are given a tutorial on how to play by a talking flower; this would be fairly par for the course (games are weird!) except immediately afterward, the flower turns evil and attacks you. It’s the first sign that things in this world are likely not what they seem — a sign I should have taken to heart over the course of my first playthrough.

You’re rescued by a woman-slash-queen-slash-maybe-goat? named Loriel. She fusses over you, guides you through the ruins where you’ve found yourself, indicates that she’s going to bake you a pie. She’s funny and nice. She clearly wants nothing more than for you to be safe.

This protectiveness comes to a head once you’ve made it through the game’s initial set of puzzles and battles and find yourself at Loriel’s house. When you try to leave, she blocks you. She doesn’t want you to go out into the underground, she says; you, a human who found yourself there by mistake, will inevitably be killed in this world of monsters. She’s so insistent you stay that she attacks you herself.

And so, like all my years of gaming have taught me to do, I killed her. I felt vaguely bad about it (the writing is really, really sharp) but I figured that I had to. It was what the game was pushing me to do, I thought, and so it didn’t even occur to me that I was making a choice at all. It wasn’t until right before the end of the game, three or four hours later, that I realized with a horrible crunch that I had chosen, and that I had chosen again and again, and that in many ways I had chosen wrong.

It turns out that there is a way to play Undertale where you don’t have to harm anyone. Not Toriel, not the mutant frogs or the sentient airplanes that spring out of the ground and attack you, not even the traditional-seeming bosses that prevent you from passing by. Every creature can be spared, whether you accomplish that by talking to them or bullying them or hugging them. (You can even flirt with a few.) You could fight them all the same way, a series of straightforward hits until their life force runs out, but each one is spared differently, and it’s up to you, through a series of at times fatal attempts, to figure out how best to care for them, should you take that route.

But during my first run, I hadn’t realized any of this. Worse, I had ignored the signals pointing me in that direction; Toriel tells you from the start that it’s possible to show monsters mercy, and there are options on the battle menu to flee from or spare creatures, but using them was too tricky. I was too impatient; I figured the end would be the same no matter how I played, and so I took the route I knew, to hack and slash my way through. I thought I was justified when I amassed EXP and my LV increased; I was gaining, I was improving, so that had to mean I was correct.

In my real life I care a lot about leveling up. I don’t know if it’s why I love games to begin with or what a couple decades of playing them has imbued me with, but I think constantly, childishly, about arriving at a place where I feel solid, and where I won’t have to worry about losing anything. I don’t know, in these fantasies, quite what the whole looks like, but I know it consists of money, of time, of a partner, of creative fulfillment, of a home. I will have worked hard enough and been special enough and made the right choices to merit this arrival, and that’s why none of it can ever be taken away from me.

This is…..very dumb! I have many of those things already, and I’m so lucky to; I already know that they can’t transform me, that they can’t replace my anxiety or my fear. I already know that they can go away, or change, or that I could be the one to go away or change.

But isn’t it a comforting thought? Wouldn’t it be so great if it were all a game, and if we could, one day, complete it?

Undertale refuses to allow this kind of thinking. As you near the end, about to battle the king whose defeat, you’re told, will finally allow you to return home, you’re confronted by a monster you’ve met before. He explains the real meaning of the stats you’ve built up: “What's EXP? It's an acronym. It stands for ‘execution points.’ A way of quantifying the pain you have inflicted on others. When you kill someone, your EXP increases.”  Similarly, “When you have enough EXP, your LOVE increases. LOVE, too, is an acronym. It stands for ‘Level of Violence.’ A way of measuring someone's capacity to hurt. The more you kill, the easier it becomes to distance yourself. The more you distance yourself, the less you will hurt. The more easily you can bring yourself to hurt others.”

At first I felt angry; I felt tricked. I’d followed all the rules! I’d done everything flawlessly! Why was I being punished, rather than rewarded? How was any of this my fault?

Quickly, though, my ire curdled into shame. I’d ignored the vague, needling feeling that what I’d been doing wasn’t quite right in my hurry to get to the end. I didn’t like the version of myself the game so plainly presented.

To be apathetic or unthinking, Undertale seems to argue, to do what you’ve always done without questioning why, is to do harm. To be so focused on the conclusion that you miss the details — talking at length to even the most bizarre monsters, reading library books and diaries, taking in the haunting music — is to not really have played the game at all.

So once I won (or lost, hard to say) I started over. Undertale is built this way; there are some players who have completed runs hundreds of times, never having quite the same experience twice. Instead of fighting, this time I figured out how to spare everyone. I had conversations. I went on dates! I’ve taken many more hours to reach the end, even though I know how to solve all the puzzles now.

The whole run has been tinged with some nostalgia and some melancholy; I can’t talk to anyone without remembering how recently I’d seen them as nothing but my enemy, how easy it had been to strike them down and keep barreling forward. It’s almost like they remember too; the game file stays the same, with certain numbers and names popping up throughout. It knows you’ve been there before. The echoes aren’t erased.

Now I am stuck right before the end. I can’t defeat the king. I have to — there’s no option to spare him, at least not at the beginning of the fight — but I’m so weak that he destroys me every time. When I was tearing through my first run, racking up experience and weapons, it only took a single try, and I felt the usual brief glory that comes from beating any game before it’s eclipsed by reality. But being good, it turns out, is far less easy than being selfish.

Still, I know I’ll win, for real this time. I’ll get to the end of the battle, somehow, and hopefully I’ll be able to show him some mercy, and then I’ll find out what happens next.

Undertale pairs well with: The Good Place, for reasons of morality, personal choice, better to go in knowing nothing.

What I’m crafting right now: A low-back peach shirt that began life as a cardigan before I realized I literally never wear cardigans so I just knitted both panels together and kept on going in the round. Hopefully it’ll usher in spring a little faster.

I’m not a very adventurous gamer. For the last twenty or so years I’ve return to the same classic franchises — Pokémon, Zelda, The Sims — again and again, opting to replay my favorites rather than venturing into new territory. I found comfort in those replays, like visiting a town where I’d spent a lot of time as a child, and I’ve measured my own growth using them as a yardstick.

In the last year or so, though, I’ve found myself drawn to plenty of new games. (New for me, mostly, since I’m always like four years late to all pop culture.) I put in a cool 70 hours on Stardew Valley before it came out for the Switch and I decided to start my pleasant, hypnotically boring farm adventure over from the beginning; I spent plane rides hunched over moving phone games like Florence and Oxenfree. I got a little drunk watching Into the Spider-Verse and marched up to Target to buy the last copy of Spider-Man for PS4 that they had, and have mostly spent my time swinging through New York City and trying to find the buildings where I used to work IRL. In all, I’ve probably started or finished about a dozen new games lately, a dramatic step up from my usual two or three.

I don’t really have a compelling reason for this shift. Buying a Switch helped, of course, as does its insanely ever-expanding catalog. Reading Kotaku and Polygon more regularly, and listening to this delightful podcast called Into the Aether, stoked my hunger for newness as well. There is, of course, the reason anyone claims they’re doing anything lately, which is that the world is as chaotic and draining as it’s ever been and we’re all in search of an escape. I’m sure this is true for me as well — how could it not be? — but I think my desire is more solipsistic. I’m getting older. I’ve lived in this city for a long time. I like staying home more than I used to, and when I’m there, I like burrowing into an activity, whether it’s reading or knitting or (way less than I should be) writing, and playing games has sprung up in that vein. They’ve always been a part of my life; now it’s just that I’m consciously choosing them.

The games I like have a few things in common: they’ve got a strong emotional component, about loneliness or failure or figuring out who you are; their music is beautiful; they are earnest even when they veer into jokey or self-referential territory. They vary in length and scope tremendously, and now that I, nearing 30 and finally achieving my 8-year-old fantasies, own a Switch, a 3DS, a PS4, and an iPhone with a lot of space for impulse downloads, they span all sorts of platforms.

And there are plenty of games I have no interest in whatsoever. I don’t tend to like anything scary or particularly bloody. I don’t like guns, I don’t like maddening puzzles, and I don’t like anything that’s so loud or goofy as to be exhausting. I am very easily frustrated (Hollow Knight has caused me more anguish recently than subway delays and allergies combined) and impatient (no text will ever scroll fast enough for me) but I’m trying to work through those, to get more comfortable with a little discomfort.

What I’m looking for in my games is a place. A warm one, a safe one, to go when I’m sad or sick or bored, when I’m looking for a little hideout from the world. Where even if it’s hard or takes a long time, I’ll be able to get across to the other side, to feel like I’ve accomplished something even if it’s not “real.” Because the feelings games leave me with are real, the same way the things I make are, and I want to articulate them more fully and regularly now that I’ve picked up the controller again.

Graphic by Aude White