Nathalie Lawhead | |
---|---|
![]() | |
Known for | indie games, net art |
Notable work | Tetrageddon Games, Everything is Going to Be OK, A_DESKTOP_LOVE_STORY |
Awards | IGF Nuovo Award 2015, A MAZE. Digital Moment Award 2016, Indiecade Interaction Award 2017 |
Nathalie Lawhead is an independent net artist and video game designer residing in Irvine, California.
Lawhead's background is in net art. Their work often invokes the iconography of 1990s-era web design and computing, particularly moments of technical failure, including pixelated lo-fi imagery, glitches, pop-up ads, and error messages. Lawhead's Tetrageddon Games is a compilation of short experimental games that playfully subvert norms of taste in web and game aesthetics. [1] [2] Their more recent project, Everything is Going to Be OK , was described by Lawhead as an "interactive zine," [3] and combines short poems, games, and animations to express personal experiences with trauma. [1]
Lawhead's career started as far back as the mid-to-late nineties, with various pieces of net-art and poetry, culminating in the release of Blue Suburbia in 1999, a project created in collaboration with their mother, Milena Lawhead. [4] Their work often existed in a middleground, adopting various elements from trends in circles that used Adobe Flash, whilst still retaining an HTML focus common with many net-artists, eventually having their work described colloquially as 'games' by critics online. [5] Lawhead's early work has since mostly been lost, due to the ongoing issues with inaccessibility and website death caused by changing technologies, imperfect archival materials, and the removal of support for certain programs such as Flash on the larger internet. [5] This history of ephemeral projects has continued to inspire their current body of work, which often adopts motifs of digital graveyards, anarchic technology, and the fleeting nature of artistic existence on the internet. [2] [5]
Lawhead was subjected to online and offline abuse and harassment following their discussion of their game Everything is Going to Be OK at Double Fine's Day of the Devs event, which increased after they published an article, "YouTube Culture is Turning Kids Against Art Games", on Venture Beat, where they discussed experiences with harassment. [3] [6] [7] As a result, Lawhead further revised and expanded Everything is Going to Be OK to include these experiences and comment on how gaming culture, and culture in general, enables abusers. [6]
In 2019, Lawhead went public with rape allegations against video game composer Jeremy Soule. [8] [9]
Following the release of Everything is Going to Be OK , the title was included in the Museum of Modern Art's 2022 exhibition Never Alone: Video Games as Interactive Design, an exhibit that included a series of 35 different works spanning the development of video games as an art form, and exploring their validity as works of design art. [10] Lawhead's work was eventually inducted into the museum's permanent collection following the exhibition, making the MoMA the first major artistic institution to include Lawhead's game in their catalogue. [10] [11]
Year | Title | Notes |
---|---|---|
1999 | Blue Suburbia | An interactive website consisting of labyrinthine nested pages filled with works of poetry and visual arts, blending various artistic mediums into a single coherent webpage, made in conjunction with Milena Lawhead. [4] |
2016 | Tetrageddon Games | Lawhead's collection of short, humorous, and experimental games which draw on the aesthetics of the early internet. |
2017 | Everything is Going to Be OK | Lawhead's digital zine, which features a series of short interactive and animated vignettes confronting issues of struggle, power, and abuse with anarchic humor. [12] |
2018 | A_DESKTOP_LOVE_STORY | A brief narrative told within a file system, where one file has a crush on another file, and the user is tasked with navigating directories and files in the operating system to facilitate their relationship. [13] |
Electric File Monitor | A satirical 'digital security system' that scans the user's hard drive and charges them with various "transgressions," about which the user can "interrogate" them. [14] | |
2019 | RUNONCE (remember_me) | An interactive digital pet that converses with the user, but can only live one lifetime on the user's computer, after which the program cannot be run again. [15] |
2020 | Mackerelmedia Fish | ARG-like game with tie-ins to many of Lawhead's previous works. |
2021 | Electric Zine Maker | Free open source zine making tool. [16] |
2024 | Blue Suburbia | An ongoing re-imagining of their 1999 project, built in the Unreal engine, exploring concepts of despair and hopelessness through an interactive diary format, framed as a walking simulator. [17] |
Pac-Man, originally called Puck Man in Japan, is a 1980 maze video game developed and released by Namco for arcades. In North America, the game was released by Midway Manufacturing as part of its licensing agreement with Namco America. The player controls Pac-Man, who must eat all the dots inside an enclosed maze while avoiding four colored ghosts. Eating large flashing dots called "Power Pellets" causes the ghosts to temporarily turn blue, allowing Pac-Man to eat them for bonus points.
The Independent Games Festival (IGF) is an annual festival at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the largest annual gathering of the independent video game industry. Originally founded in 1998 to promote independent video game developers, and innovation in video game development by CMP Media, later known as UBM Technology Group, IGF is now owned by Informa after UBM's acquisition.
The Game Developers Choice Awards are awards annually presented at the Game Developers Conference for outstanding game developers and games. Introduced in 2001, the Game Developers Choice Awards were preceded by the Spotlight Awards, which were presented from 1997 to 1999. Since then, the ceremony for the Independent Games Festival is held just prior to the Choice Awards ceremony.
The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is an annual conference for video game developers. The event includes an expo, networking events, and awards shows like the Game Developers Choice Awards and Independent Games Festival, and a variety of tutorials, lectures, and roundtables by industry professionals on game-related topics covering programming, design, audio, production, business and management, and visual arts.
Nathalie Joanne Emmanuel is a British actress. Emmanuel began her acting career appearing in theatre in the late 1990s, acquiring roles in various West End productions such as the musical The Lion King. In 2006, she began her on-screen career by starring as Sasha Valentine in soap opera Hollyoaks, after which she appeared in various British television series until her debut film appearance in Twenty8k.
Anita Sarkeesian is a Canadian-American feminist media critic. She is the founder of Feminist Frequency, a website that hosts videos and commentary analyzing portrayals of women in popular culture. Her video series Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, examines tropes in the depiction of female video game characters. Media scholar Soraya Murray calls Sarkeesian emblematic of "a burgeoning organized feminist critique" of stereotyped and objectified portrayals of women in video games.
The Chinese Room is a British video game developer based in Brighton that is best known for exploration games. The company originated as a mod team for Half-Life 2, based at the University of Portsmouth in 2007, and is named after John Searle's Chinese room thought experiment. In August 2018, it became a subsidiary of Sumo Digital.
Andy Schatz is a video game designer based in San Diego. He began developing video games at a young age and graduated from Amherst College. After graduation, he worked for various video game development companies, including TKO Software, before founding his own independent video game development studio Pocketwatch Games in 2004. Attempting to expand his company, Schatz tried enrolling into business school; all applications were rejected. As a result, he began working on games he was passionate about. Schatz has released four video games under Pocketwatch Games: Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa, Venture Arctic, Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine, and Tooth and Tail. Monaco 2 is currently in development. His design philosophy revolves around taking inspiration from already existing media, such as films, and transforming it into a video game.
Porpentine Charity Heartscape is a video game designer, new media artist, writer and curator based in Oakland, California. She is primarily a developer of hypertext games and interactive fiction mainly built using Twine. She has been awarded a Creative Capital grant, a Rhizome.org commission, the Prix Net Art, and a Sundance Institute's New Frontier Story Lab Fellowship. Her work was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. She was an editor for freeindiegam.es, a curated collection of free, independently produced games. She was a columnist for online PC gaming magazine Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
Sexism in video gaming is prejudiced behavior or discrimination based on sex or gender as experienced by people who play and create video games, primarily women. This may manifest as sexual harassment or in the way genders are represented in games, such as when characters are presented according to gender-related tropes and stereotypes.
Simogo is a Swedish independent video game developer based in Malmö. The company was founded in 2010 and is best known for creating games for mobile devices, including Year Walk and Device 6. Its name comes from the name of its founders Simon (SIM), and Gordon (GO); the 'O' from the Swedish word "och" meaning "and".
The Seumas McNally Grand Prize is the main award given at the Independent Games Festival (IGF), an annual event that takes place during the Game Developers Conference, one of the largest gatherings of the indie video game industry. The award is named after computer game programmer Seumas McNally (1979–2000), founder of independent game development company Longbow Digital Arts. McNally died of Hodgkin's lymphoma shortly after receiving the award, then just the IGF Grand Prize, in 2000 for his game Tread Marks. The award is given alongside a prize of US$30,000.
Gamergate or GamerGate (GG) was a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign and a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture. It was conducted using the hashtag "#Gamergate" primarily in 2014 and 2015. Gamergate targeted women in the video game industry, most notably feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian and video game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu.
The Game Awards is an annual awards ceremony honoring achievements in the video game industry. Established in 2014, the shows are produced and hosted by game journalist Geoff Keighley, who worked on its predecessor, the Spike Video Game Awards, for over ten years. With the permission of Spike, he worked with several video game companies to create the show. In addition to the awards, the Game Awards features premieres of upcoming games and new information on previously-announced titles. The show's reception is generally mixed: it has been lauded for its announcements and criticized for its lack of acknowledgement of events, use of promotional content and its treatment of award winners.
Ape Out is a 2019 beat 'em up game developed by Gabe Cuzzillo and published by Devolver Digital. Financed by the Indie Fund, it was produced when Cuzzillo attended game development classes at New York University. The game was released for Microsoft Windows and Nintendo Switch on February 28, 2019, and has garnered a positive reception.
Daniel "Dan" Golding is an Australian writer, composer, broadcaster, and academic.
The Big Con is an adventure game developed by Mighty Yell and published by Skybound Games. It was released for Windows, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on August 31, 2021. A Nintendo Switch version was released on June 1, 2022. Versions for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 were released on August 31, 2023. Set in the 1990s, the game follows Ali, a teenager who works at a video rental store owned by Linda, her mother. After learning that her mother owes $97,342.18 to loan sharks, she meets Ted, a con artist. They travel across the United States, earning money to save Linda's store. The Windows version of The Big Con received favorable reviews, while the Xbox Series X/S version received mixed reviews.
Everything is Going to Be OK is a 2017 work of digital art by alienmelon, the pseudonym of independent net artist Nathalie Lawhead. Described by Lawhead as an "interactive zine", the work is a vignette of several non-linear and interactive elements informed by Lawhead's experiences with "struggle, survival and coping with the aftermath of surviving bad things". The work received positive reception from publications, with attention directed to the game's use of humor to humanise and relate to experiences of trauma and victimhood, and received several awards and nominations at the Independent Games Festival, IndieCade, and A-MAZE. Following release of the work, Lawhead experienced online and offline harassment when showcasing it at Double Fine's Day of the Devs event in November 2017, prompting a discussion from Lawhead and media publications about the challenges of publishing and exhibiting experimental or art games and the risks of online harassment relating to streaming of these works.
A Maze is an international series of events celebrating independent and arthouse games, immersive media and digital culture. Founded in 2008 by artistic director Thorsten Wiedemann, A MAZE hosts the International Games and Playful Media Festival, held annually in Berlin since 2012, which feature annual awards and prizes for games and digital works.
Tetrageddon Games is an online compilation of video games and digital art by alienmelon, the pseudonym of independent developer and net artist Nathalie Lawhead. First published as a website titled Tetrageddon, hosting web games designed by Lawhead from 2008. Lawhead combined the releases into a compiled form on the website from 2012, receiving several iterations and revisions over time, and released a downloadable desktop release titled ARMAGAD in 2016. Following release, critics praised Tetrageddon Games for its eclectic mixture of aesthetics and gameplay styles. The project received several awards and nominations, including a Webby Award for the website version and a Nuovo Award at the Independent Games Festival.