Acoli

anna anthropy’s The Hunt for the Gay Planet is a text-based Twine game that uses the medium of Twine to comment more broadly and bitingly on the status of queer representation in videogames. The work takes its premise from a mainstream online roleplaying game, Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, which in 2013 announced they were expanding their romance options in-game to include homosexual options, but only on a single planet in the galaxy. anthropy satirizes this decision with this beautifully retro piece, in which the player is invited to gradually explore the galaxy (looking under rocks and in caves) in search of a lesbian romance. The game serves as a powerful example of Twine’s potential as a platform for commenting on and engaging with AAA gaming, as Twine builds on the traditions of hypertext to allow for complex decision management and choice-driven experience design. (Source: ELC 3's Editorial Statement)

Loss, Undersea is an interactive narrative/multimedia semantics project by Fox Harrell in which a character moving through a standard workday encounters a world submerging into the depths -- a double-scope story of banal life blended with a fantastic Atlantean metaphor. As a user selects emotion-driven actions for the character to perform, the character transforms -- sea creature extensions protrude and calcify around him -- and poetic text narrating his loss of humanity and the human world undersea ensues. (Source: MIT Icelab)

A computer mystery/romance set five minutes into the future of 1988. I can guarantee at least ONE of the following is a real feature: discover a vast conspiracy lurking on the internet, save the world by exploiting a buffer overflow, get away with telephone fraud, or hack the Gibson! Which one? You'll just have to dial in and see. Welcome to the 20th Century.

(Source: Authors's statement, ELC3)

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Christine Love’s Digital: A Love Story is a visual novel set “five-minutes into the future of 1988” and invites the player back into the early days of the Internet through the interface of an Amiga-esque computer. The graphical interface of white text on a blue background accompanies the metaphor of the local BBS (bulletin board system) as a happening space for conspiracy and flirting. All the core interaction takes place through dialing into this system, which has multiple characters and threads that can be explored through sending out replies to advance the story. The work is strongly grounded in early hacker culture and William Gibsen-inspired models of artificial intelligence.

(Source: Editorial Statement, ELC3)

Dietrich Squinkifer’s (aka Squinky) Quing’s Quest VII: The Death of Videogames was created for Ruin Jam 2014, a game jam inspired by tensions over the identity of games and gamers and particularly responding to accusations that feminists and advocates for diversity in games had set out to “ruin” the games industry. Quing’s Quest is built in Twine and takes inspiration from old-school adventure games, including Sierra’s King’s Quest series. The game takes place on a craft called the “Social Justice Warrior” (after a commonly-used pejorative term for those who point out misogyny, racism, transphobia and many other forms of discrimination and hatred online and in gaming culture), and features a character exiled from Videogames after the invasion of the “misogynerds.” This work captures the tension of a historical moment in which only some voices, games and critiques are heard and others are silenced and dismissed. (Source: ELC 3's Editorial Statement)

John, a single father and computer engineer, inherits a collection of arcane objects from Mo, his mysterious Aunt. Over time, the engineer and his daughter Charlotte begin to realise that the objects have unusual physical properties – and that the more they are exposed to them, the more their realities and memories appear to change.

“All the Delicate Duplicates traverses time and alt-realities via a layered character driven narrative world.” – Dr Andrew Burrell

"I could lose myself in this for hours. This feels so new, unlike anything I’ve ever seen." – Beta Tester at the 2016 Game City Festival.

“Played one of the most cerebral walking sims I've experienced yet.” – Michael Nam

Prom Week is a social simulation game being developed at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In Prom Week the player shapes the lives of a group of highschool students in the most dramatic week of their highschool career. Using our sophisticated social artificial intelligence system, Comme il Faut, Prom Week is able to combine the dynamic simulation of games like the Sims with the detailed characters and dialog of story driven games. (source: https://promweek.soe.ucsc.edu/)

The Taro at the Center of the Earth iPad application is a digitized version of the popular Finnish childrens’ author Timo Parvela’s first book about the character Taro (2010). The story is about a little boy and a bear’s journey to the center of the Earth, and is delightfully illustrated by Jussi Kaakinen. Taro makes use of point-and-click adventure game conventions to create an experience which is still quite close to a print book, but it manages to evoke more of a sense of exploring a fictional space than turning print pages by its unusual use of the spatial screen space. The individual panes follow each other either seamlessly in horizontal or vertical directions, depending on the movements of Taro and his bear friend, so there is no strong division between parts of the work, as is the case with book pages. The scrolling illustrations, which are only partially under the user’s control, help the user to identify with Taro in his exciting adventure, perhaps allowing for a tighter experience of emotion and immersion in the story.

Analogue: A Hate Story is a visual novel in the style of many Japanese titles in the same genre . It was first published on the author's website and then on the gaming service Steam. The game tells an interactive story of transhumanism, traditional marriage, loneliness, and cosplay. The journey through the final section of the history of a generation spaceship before its failure. The two major characters you interact with in the story are the ships two remaining AI, an archivist AI named *Hyun-ae and a security AI named *Mute, the two ask the player vastly different questions and give entirely different views on the fall of the generation ship. The player is tasked with finding the truth of the tale by listening to both AI as well as building a sort of relationship with them and can end the story at any time by downloading what data they have and leaving the ship to its final fate, however this presents us with the worst of the possible endings. The choices the player makes throughout the story also affect the sequel of the work Hate Plus continuing the interactive work to show another section of the generationships story and gives more insight into the AI themselves. The game also features more traditional gaming segments where the player must solve puzzles in order to continue the story using a console system similar to modern computers the ending of which locks the player into one of the two AIs paths for the rest of the story, though a third alternate path is possible if the player knows specific keywords to unlock specific conversations early though this would require the player to either have researched the game before playing or have played the game before. The story itself keeps the player engaged by asking questions about the themselves and while the story is primarily about the history of this space ship, some might say the true story is the player and their burgeoning relationship with *Hyun-ae and *Mute

L.A. Noire (pronounced /ˈnwɑr/) is a neo-noir detective video game developed by Team Bondi and published by Rockstar Games. It was initially released for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 platforms on 17 May 2011; a Microsoft Windows port was later released on 8 November 2011. In 2017 it was announced that a remastered version would be released in November for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and HTC Vive.

L.A. Noire is set in Los Angeles in 1947 and challenges the player, controlling a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officer, to solve a range of cases across five divisions. Players must investigate crime scenes for clues, follow up leads, and interrogate suspects, and the players' success at these activities will impact how much of each cases' story is revealed.

L.A. Noire is an action-adventure neo-noir crime game played from a third-person perspective. Players complete cases—linear scenarios with set objectives—to progress through the story. The game also features a mode which allows players to freely roam the open world. In this mode, players can also engage in optional activities. The game assigns players with cases that they must solve. After each case, players receive a rating of 1–5 stars depending on their performance in both interrogations and searching for clues. Suspects and witnesses in a case can be interrogated for information, when the interviewee responds, players are given the option to either believe them, doubt them, or accuse them of lying. If players accuse them of lying, they must submit evidence to prove it. When interrogating two suspects at the police station, players may decide who to charge with the crime; charging the wrong suspect affects players' end rating. 

The game draws heavily from both the plot and aesthetic elements of film noir, stylistic films made popular in the 1940s and 1950s that share similar visual styles and themes, including crime and moral ambiguity. The game uses a distinctive colour palette, but in homage to film noir it includes the option to play the game in black and white. Various plot elements reference the major themes of gum-shoe detective and mobster stories such as Key Largo, Chinatown, The Untouchables, The Black Dahlia, and L.A. Confidential.

(Source: Wikipedia)

“Don’t Panic ” is a simple game created using the Twine platform. As the player, you embark on a journey to get ready to go out with a friend. The catch is you suffer from panic disorder and you must stay calm. The goal of the game is to remain is to make choices that don’t lead to panic attacks and make it out of the house. It’s pretty straightforward. I ’d also like to point out that this is just my personal take on panic disorder and panic attacks. I ’m not speaking for everyone. This is just how things usually occur for me. With that said, Happy playing and stay calm! (Source: Elo conference: First encounters 2014)