Designing Games for Spectators.
Or "how to put on a magic show."
From @magfest.org this year. Full panel with slides.
Rym - Abolish ICE
Host of GeekNights. Dilettante and wanderer. Antifascist. Game design expert. Lectures on games more often than makes them. Opinions are my own.
Rym - Abolish ICE boosted:
Conservatives are so close to understanding what ails society, and yet it still eludes them.
Metacontextual themes in games like 'Slay the Princess' or 'Disco Elysium' include
MIrrors
Death
Rebirth
Transformation
Giants
Disco Elysium
Slay the Princess
Deltarune
Undertale
Night in the Woods
They all have mirrors in context to explore the deeper allegories of their narratives.
If you want to know what kind of person I am, consider that I play games that look like this on purpose.
Art is the sensory organ of society.
It can't see YOU. All it can see is the art you all make.
The East India Companies were the first modern corporations.
Like horrific giant robots, they proceeded to ravage the world, barely controlled by the people who operated them.
An Open Letter to Chuck Schumer on USAID funding: https://microblog.rym.social/2026/02/16/an-open-letter-to-chuck.html
Information disparity makes the world unfair.
Deltarune and Asteroid City are about the same thing.
Write or call your senators DAILY.
“Dismantle the Department of Homeland Security. Investigate and prosecute the leadership of ICE.”
Don’t worry about writing big statements. Your messages are aggregated by aides into simple reports. We want “Dismantle ICE” and “Dismantle DHS” to be at the top.
Slay the Princess is about metacontext
Rym - Abolish ICE boosted:
"The wars we’ve carried out as a nation abroad have come home," writes Cengiz Yar in his ground reporting from Minneapolis for @ProPublica, where he and colleague Peter DiCampo witnessed ICE raids, protestors enduring cycles of tear gas, detentions and regrouping, and more. "I do not have the words to articulate how it feels to watch this unfold in Minneapolis, a city that I have grown to know and love after moving here a few years ago," writes DiCampo. "The journalists who flocked here over the past few weeks are people I have run into while on assignment in hot spots all over the world. Now they were in my home city."
#ICE #Minnesota #Minneapolis #Immigration #TrumpAdministration
Dispatch is a modern ideogame.
Dispatch is a modern ideogame.
The voices in 'Slay the Princess' are context from inside the game.
They're what you the player would think if you didn't know about the outside world.
GeekNights has done 322 panels and lectures at nerd cons since 2002. Here's the complete list, many with links to youtube videos!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NTIzmJAR0KLBxmA2pDEQUvHfoi5g6Yezk04Dlz9UmZU/edit?usp=sharing
Our talk on Tabletop Game Mechanics from PAX is (finally) online, complete with slides!
Videogames are intrinsically metacontextual.
From #magfest
The apocalypse of self in Disco Elysium.
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