Megan Condis

The Bitsy Book: An Interactive Textbook on Storytelling for Game Design is a guide for teachers and independent learners interested in the expressive potential of video game narratives and the logic of computer programming. Using Bitsy—an open source, web-based “tiny online game engine” that is especially welcoming to beginner designers—this book explores how digital platforms shape creative works. Drawing from classroom experience and proven practices from the game industry, The Bitsy Book is structured to follow the steps of the game design process, from character creation and world-building to playtesting and publishing. Educators will find the structure useful as the basis of a semester-long curriculum complete with prompts for small-stakes homework assignments and larger projects. Meanwhile, hobbyists and digital artists can follow a self-directed path to assist them as they realize their creative vision. Each chapter provides a theoretical overview of one step in that process as well as step-by-step illustrated tutorials, practice exercises, and examples of games published by the Bitsy community. By the end of your journey, you will know everything you need to be able to write compelling dialog, draw and animate pixel art characters and environments, and devise compelling puzzles and quests. Featuring a jargon-free, conversational tone and a wealth of handy illustrations, this book is a fantastic introduction to the craft of game development that gets you started inventing worlds and stories to play in right away.

In 2016, a female videogame programmer and a female journalist were harassed viciously by anonymous male online users in what became known as GamerGate. Male gamers threatened to rape and kill both women, and the news soon made international headlines, exposing the level of abuse that many women and minorities face when participating in the predominantly male online culture. Gaming Masculinity explains how the term “gamer” has been constructed in the popular imagination by a core group of male online users in an attempt to shore up an embattled form of geeky masculinity. This latest form of toxicity comes at a moment of upheaval in gaming culture, as women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals demand broader access and representation online. Paying close attention to the online practices of trolling and making memes, author Megan Condis demonstrates that, despite the supposedly disembodied nature of life online, performances of masculinity are still afforded privileged status in gamer culture. Even worse, she finds that these competing discourses are not just relegated to the gaming world but are creating rifts within the culture at large, as witnessed by the direct links between the GamerGate movement and the recent rise of the alt-right during the last presidential election. Condis asks what this moment can teach us about the performative, collaborative, and sometimes combative ways that American culture enacts race, gender, and sexuality. She concludes by encouraging designers and those who work in the tech industry to think about how their work might have, purposefully or not, been developed in ways that are marked by gender.