Sobre El Autor
Anna Anthropy is a game designer, author, and educator. She currently teaches game design as DePaul University's Game Designer in Residence. She is the author of many games about cats, and she lives in Chicago with a little black cat named Encyclopedia Frown.
Obras de Anna Anthropy
Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and… (2012) 95 copias
A Game Design Vocabulary: Exploring the Foundational Principles Behind Good Game Design (2014) 18 copias
Game Design Vocabulary, A: Exploring the Foundational Principles Behind Good Game Design (2014) 2 copias
D/sphoria 1 copia
Game Poems 1 copia
Obras relacionadas
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Género
- female
- Nacionalidad
- USA
- Lugar de nacimiento
- New York, New York, USA
Miembros
Reseñas
Anna Anthropy delves into what makes ZZT--as she herself admits, "an obsolete game-making tool"--special. She interviews members of the ZZT community from the nineties, and discusses the whole experience, from playing the original game, to building new levels, to discussing it on Prodigy and IRC.
Anthropy admires the creativity of the fans who made new worlds for the game with its limited tools:
Some created games far outside the original parameters:
Anthropy also muses on the elements of game design as they relate to ZZT in particular and other games in general.
Throughout, Anthropy relates her experience with ZZT to her experience growing up trans:
On the whole, this is an excellent book for anyone who wants a view on this particular niche of nineties gaming or computer culture generally.… (más)
Anthropy admires the creativity of the fans who made new worlds for the game with its limited tools:
Sweeney built these commands, these codewords, into ZZT so he could test out his worlds more easily. He built them for utility. He built them as shortcuts. Authors built whole worlds around them.
Some created games far outside the original parameters:
“Zem! was kind of part of a larger movement of what the community termed ‘engine games,’ making the player control a different avatar through an additional control panel,” Zem! creator John D. Moore tells me. “I got a severe joy out of twisting ZZT to do something that it wasn’t really intended to do, and even something no one had quite thought to do before. I knew I wasn’t making a perfect iteration of Lemmings in ZZT, but I was pretty thrilled to be adapting it to an altogether different medium with concessions to what that system’s limitations were, and further, exploring new territory made possible by those concessions.”
Anthropy also muses on the elements of game design as they relate to ZZT in particular and other games in general.
Throughout, Anthropy relates her experience with ZZT to her experience growing up trans:
I spent my childhood dressing up in ZZT—trying on feminine identities to see how they felt. I was reading, too—fantasy worlds like Sword and Sorceress and The Enchanted Forest Chronicles.
On the whole, this is an excellent book for anyone who wants a view on this particular niche of nineties gaming or computer culture generally.… (más)
If you are thinking about making a game but are intimidated by all the tooling options, or scared that it won't be "good enough," this book is for you. It's a great message that making games is for everyone, along with solid advice on how to get started.
After years of talking about it, I finally made a game thanks to this book. Thanks!
After years of talking about it, I finally made a game thanks to this book. Thanks!
I never played ZZT, but had equivalent experiences with BBSes and door games. MMMmm, IGMs for LoRD.
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Estadísticas
- Obras
- 13
- También por
- 2
- Miembros
- 197
- Popularidad
- #111,410
- Valoración
- 4.1
- Reseñas
- 7
- ISBNs
- 18
Whereas the first book was a beautifully sprawling mess of biography and description, this one is tighter. This befits the narrative architecture of each game.
[a:Anna Anthropy|5181019|Anna Anthropy|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1328825784p2/5181019.jpg] has shown a gift for embedding the autobiographical (esp. pertaining to her personal journey) into her work, and this book is no exception. It really captures the joy of what happens when a well-crafted (accidentally or purposefully) game engine allows someone who isn't a professional game developer (yet) to delve into the act of creation with no real clue to what they are doing.… (más)