Pornography for Beginners

For the last couple of days I've been playing around with Puzzlescript, a really lovely tool for making block-pushing puzzle games (and other stuff, but block-pushing puzzle games is what it's mostly intended for). I'm not really a block-pushing puzzle-game person by nature, so it's been quite weird to get to grips with, but it's also been a lot of fun.

I ended up making a game about this month's weird changes in what you can and can't include in pornography in the UK. It was one of those ideas that started as a throwaway joke, but a part of your brain goes "although ACTUALLY...", and then two days later you're saying "yeah I'll be down to dinner in a moment, I've just got to fix this ejaculating penis". The game is therefore as not-safe-for-work as any game whose only graphics are 5x5 pixels is likely to be.

Holly Gramazio11 December 2014

Folk Games I Have Played, 1982-1992

There was a game where we lay back in swings and closed our eyes, me and my friend Summer. When someone made too much noise nearby we'd sit up and yell DON'T WAKE ME UP at them, loud, leaning forward in our swings, top-of-our-lungs anger. We won if we both yelled. If only one of us yelled, then we lost. This is the first game I remember playing.

There was a game where someone was a Hider. The Hider would hide my lunchbox, anywhere in the school, and everyone else tried to find it and get it back to the handball court before the Hider caught them.

There was a game where Summer and I would phone each other after school, and one of us, let's say me, would get a wooden spoon and I'd hit it against things in my loungeroom, and Summer would try to guess what I was hitting. There was a two-metre circle of things around the phone that I could reach - stretching the coiled cord as far as it would go - and after a while Summer could guess them all. I learnt the sound of her spiral staircase bannisters, and her kitchen sink, and her music stand, and her many many books, though I couldn't ever tell one book from another.

Holly Gramazio3 March 2014games, stories, rulesets, lists

My Not-games of the Year

I've been working full-time at Hide&Seek for three and a half years; freelance for a couple of years before that. Since we announced late last year that the company was winding down, a lot of people have asked me what I'm planning to do next.

Well: more games. More play in public space. More "work at the intersection of game design and other cultural forms", that slightly awkward phrase that was the best I could come up with to describe what I did at Hide&Seek.

And I've been thinking, of course, about what type of games I want to make, and why, and what games I most admire. The things I played in 2013 that made me think: oh, this is amazing, I wish I'd made this. (Paying attention to the things you're jealous of is the best way to figure out what you want to do, right? Or at least, it is for me.)

Blog