TRANSSEXUAL GAME DESIGNER

I am Rosemary, a transgender, sapphic, ace-spec game designer in Chicago, IL.

Ever since I was a little girl, I've wanted to make games. I found so much escapism from my life in games, and grew to love them wholeheartedly. I have memories of wanting to play as the girl in Pokemon Crystal, but being too embarassed to choose her. I let myself get lost in imagined worlds, allowing myself to feel at home in a reality that didn't feel like home until I was much older and learned why.

When I was in my early twenties I played 'dys4ia' by Anna Anthropy, a game about her experiences with gender dysphoria and transitioning. It captured my attention immediately with its strange game design and vulnerable subject matter. Soon after, I would buy and devour her book, 'Rise of the Videogame Zinesters'. It was a beautiful book on making weird, small, personal indie games; something that could convey a vulnerable experience like she had when she made 'dys4ia', or just a fleeting feeling you had that day.

I started making games in Adobe Flash, mostly simple choose-your-own-adventure games where I explored a lot of my anger in my early twenties (these games no longer exist). Later, I moved onto mainly using GameMaker. When I realized I was a woman, and a lot of my anger melted away, I instead began designing games that were about sadness and queerness. Nowadays, in my thirties, I work as a professional cook, and so a lot of my time is occupied and finding the moments to string together to make a videogame have become rare. Recently, however, I have found a lot of creative release in designing Table-Top Roleplaying Games, which I intend to use this website to document the designs of.

WHAT IS A GAME?

To me, what makes art is the conversation between artist and audience through a medium.

On page three of 'Rise of the Videogame Zinesters', Anna Anthropy states "a game conveys what it's like to experience the subject as a system of rules."

If the medium of books is the written word and the medium of music is vibrations, then the medium of games is rules.

A game designer, whether digital or analogue, creates rules that the players interpret. The conversation at hand is how the players follow the rules. Maybe they mistakenly misinterpret the designer's intent, or maybe they do understand but choose to stray.

Either way, a dialogue is being had between artist and audience, and from that you get art.

PROJECT: MARK OF AUGURY

"Your Order of Execution is at hand.
Who will be at the end of the sword?
The monster you seek,
Or the monster you are?"

Mark of Augury (working title) is a gothic horror ttrpg where players are conscripts of the Church, branded with the (currently titular) Mark of Augury and given an Order of Execution that sentences them to death, to be fulfilled either in the line of duty or when they no longer serve their purpose.

The conscripts are tasked with rooting out heresy, abominations, and all forms of devilry. These threats draw heavily from gothic and weird-science fiction, such as the grandmother of science fiction, Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein', Bram Stoker's 'Dracula', Fromsoft's 'Bloodborne', and Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'. I'm intentionally avoiding Lovecraftian or Cosmic Horror in this game, even as I draw from works like Bloodborne, as, while I enjoy it, I find that it dominates much of horror games as of late, and I want to maintain the particular dread I personally enjoy of gothic fiction.

PROJECT: MOLE

Certainly a bit more lighthearted than what I typically design, Mole (working title) is a PbtA hack about spies in a cold war who are working undercover in a foreign country.

Their goals?

My main inspiration is the delightful 'Spy x Family' manga and anime; the idea of a small group of highly-skilled or talented people having to maintain a façade while accomplishing secretive feats was really compelling on top of the adorable story of a fake family slowly becoming a real one.

Design-wise, I'm unsure if I want the players to knowingly be hiding their identities from one-another, though I lean more towards them all being a cooperative unit, the main additional mechanic I want to throw onto the PbtA framework is the Cover Playbook: A separate series of playbooks that represent the group's cover story.

The Cover might be them running a local bakery, which would give them Moves and goals related to that, such as being able to be up extra early without raising suspicion. Players need to maintain their cover, because it also has hit points, and when those hit points run out, their cover is blown and they have to deal with the fall out of that. This means that they might actually need to get good at baking while also surveiling and sabotaging their targets, and finding time to sleep inbetween braiding challah and assassinating a political figure.

This game has the least amount of work put into it so far, but working on this alongside Mark of Augury should be fun!