Images: Upper: Mighty Jill Off title screen featuring the title character – a woman in latex and a horned mask – looking up at a tower. Lower: game screenshot, in which Jill leaps through a maze of spikes.

Mighty Jill Off is a meditation on “Nintendo-hard” platform games, viewed through the lens of queer kink. It borrows the mechanical vocabulary of Tecmo’s 1986 Mighty Bomb Jack, a game with what is now a very atypical approach to the genre. I was interested in the question of what platform games could have looked like if the genre had not taken Super Mario Bros.’ lead, but explored different ideas of what “jump” could look like. With illustrations by James Harvey and music by Andrew Toups.

"There's been dozens of 'impossible' highly punishing games - they're not very interesting. Hell, there's many commercial games which are far more punishing than what Mighty Jill Off asks you to overcome - but the point isn't about just that 'games players are masochists'. It's that 'games designers are sadists', in the sense of a Master/Slave relationship. In that, it's a question of trying to punish your slave in a way which makes it a relationship. True sadism would just involve offing the little shit. The point is to make them suffer in a way which they can endure and - by tickling those desires - enjoy."
—Kieron Gillen, Rock Paper Shotgun

Image: A parody of the "Winners don't use drugs!" arcade screen featuring a blue-haired woman (the spider-queen) shaking hands with a fuschia-haired woman wrapped in spider-webbing and wearing a collar. Text reads, "All power exchange has to be negotiated!"

Created for and first published by Adult Swim Games, Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars marries the aesthetics of 1980s arcade games and pulp science fiction. I felt that much like pulp’s position as “low culture” provided space to explore queer themes and sexuality with less scrutiny than in capital-L Literature, retro video games were ripe with the same potentiality. This is an arcade game about a lesbian spider-woman who shoots enemies with a bondage laser. With music by Amon26 and illustrations by Mariel Cartwright.

Image: An oddly-shaped teal form on a magenta screen. A yellow wall crosses the screen, with a hole the teal shape can almost but not quite fit through.

A finalist for Excellence in Narrative at the 2013 Independent Games Festival, dys4ia is a journal game about my transition and the struggles with medical institutions that it required. It’s made of numerous short, rapid-fire vignettes, using the vocabulary of video game visuals and goals to convey a story that is rife with frustration, failure, and ultimately joy. With music by Liz Ryerson.

“The game works as a series of small sequences that deal with everything from feeling judged in a women’s bathroom to sensitive nipples after a week of estrogen pills. It’s all very honest, and open, and unafraid to be awkward, wrapping up into a narrative that can be inspiring no matter what your personal background....The video game format helps articulate these challenges in a way I've never seen before.”
—Luke Winkie, Salon

Image: Queers in Love arcade cabinet on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

This narrative game about queer love actively resists heteronormative ideas like linear time and “100% completion rate.” There are nearly 200 text passages to explore, but the player can only read for ten seconds before the world is swept away by an apocalyptic event. Queers in Love at the End of the World explores the liminality of queer relationships in a society that rarely affords them space or stability.

“Written by Anna Anthropy using the interactive fiction tool Twine, Queers is a game that evokes an itinerant life better than any other I’ve played. It is effectively an interactive love story, but there’s a 10-second timer ticking away in the corner of the screen, limiting the narrative to quick, stolen moments.”
—Cara Ellison, The Guardian

More of my digital games can be found at w.itch.io.