Nathalie Lawhead | |
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| 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 [a] 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. [2] [3] Their 2017 project Everything is Going to Be OK was described by Lawhead as an "interactive zine," [4] and combines short poems, games, and animations to express personal experiences with trauma. [2]
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. [5] 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. [6] 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. [6] 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. [3] [6]
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. [4] [7] [8] 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. [7]
In 2019, Lawhead went public with rape allegations against video game composer Jeremy Soule. [9] [10]
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. [11] 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. [11] [12]
| 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. [5] |
| 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. [13] |
| 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. [14] |
| 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. [15] | |
| 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. [16] |
| 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. [17] |
| 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. [18] |
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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.
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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.
He Fucked the Girl Out of Me is a 2022 video game by independent developer Taylor McCue. The game is an interactive fiction title that explores the creator's personal experiences with transgender identity, sex work, and trauma through Ann, the player character, who is convinced to enter sex work by her partner, Sally. McCue stated that the game was semi-autobiographical and dealt with a mixture of personal experiences that were confronting to translate into a game. Upon release, He Fucked the Girl out of Me received praise and discussion from reviewers, who resonated with the game's personal themes and the mature handling of its subject matter. Following release, the game received the Award for Digital Storytelling at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam in 2022, and was nominated for a Nuovo Award at the Independent Games Festival in 2023.
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