FURTHER PLAYING - A Game Design Vocabulary - page 195

what kind of violence to inflict on a consenting sexual partner—who says early on that her
goal is to be brought to tears. As the player, the choice of how and whether to go this far, stop
short of the goal, or continue even further is entirely up to you. Consensual Torture Simulator
has three primary verbs, and a system that responds with vivid feedback to the player's actions,
but which doesn't frame the outcome in terms of winning or losing—perhaps because those
sport-like notions don't make as much sense in the context of loving sexual interaction. Instead,
the meaning of the decisions the player makes must reside as much within her own head—a
particularly foregrounded kind of reflective choice that asks, “What does this form of violence
mean to you? How does it make you feel?”
Platform: W e b
Price: US $2 (suggested price)
https://gumroad.com/l/consensualtorturesimulator
Corrypt (Michael Brough, 2012)
Verbs, Scenes, Resistance
For the first half of the player's experience, Corrypt presents a mentally challenging series of
puzzles. Drawing on the tradition of puzzles like Sokoban , which involves pushing crates around
each other in a constrained, grid-based space, the player has to explore a series of caves to
collect mushrooms, keys, and other items. The various scenes of the game develop the verbs of
pushing and pulling in various ways, but in the second half of the game, a new verb is intro-
duced: the player can exchange mushrooms for the limited ability to “glitch” a single tile from
one of the game's rooms. The glitched tile then shows up at the same position in every other
room, replacing what was already there; this allows the player to replace a wall with an empty
space from another room so she can pass through.
All of a sudden, the space of possibilities and resistance in the game becomes dramatically
wider, requiring the player to decide how to spend a limited stock of mushrooms and acquire
more. A constrained verb that lets you edit the world turns out to be a much bigger challenge,
pairing an open space of choice and possibility with rising challenge. The visual context of the
game, combining intricate pixel-patterns and garish colors with a world whose logic often feels
counterintuitive, complements the anxiety that arises from the dizzying freedom of tearing
apart the structure of the game.
Platform: Windows, Mac, iOS
Price: Free (Windows, Mac) or US $2 (iOS)
http://mightyvision.blogspot.co.nz/2012/12/corrypt.html