Over the years, these jams have had a few entries that incorporate the players making art as a game mechanic. It’s a fascinating way of bringing a strong creative and tactile element into the gameplay, and it can be used to great effect — but no entry has made it quite so central as Nude On A Yellow Sofa, which has the players creating a whole exhibition’s worth of artworks (as well as that exhibition itself) over the course of a couple hours. And while this could be fun within all kinds of different frameworks, and used to tell all kinds of stories, Nora Katz’s game uses it to weave a rich story about something that has been central to so much art throughout history: creative partnership, and the relationship between artist and muse.
Inspired by Henri Matisse’s 1926 painting of the same name, the game puts two players in the roles of two artists who embark on a creative partnership. Throughout a series of rounds representing periods of the collaboration over time (from The Beginning and The Collaboration, through The Struggle to The Fame, eventually reaching The Ending) each player will create eight unique works using art materials of their choice, while the final round tasks them with assembling a retrospective exhibit of the works set 100 years after their creation. Crucially, the question of who is the artist and who is the muse is left open: perhaps it will become clear throughout the game, perhaps it will forever be in the eye of the beholder, perhaps the question is impossible to answer.
It is in from very uncertainty that Nude On A Yellow Sofa mines its deepest themes: the separation between art and the human story of its creation, the way each can serve as a lens for understanding the other, and the way future generations will form their own opinions as both the art and the story take on lives of their own.
Despite how vast and amorphous these themes and questions are, the game provides ample framework for exploring them, using the pre-defined Periods and a set of Feeling and Image prompts that are randomly selected each round to provide a huge amount of scaffolding and inspiration for players without fencing in their creativity or the many possible directions of the story they are telling. The final round, in which players shed their initial roles and play as curators of an art museum’s exhibit, has them considering the art from new angles both literally (as they are encouraged to think about how the works are presented in relation to each other in a physical space) and figuratively (as they must answer questions about how these future curators view the work and the artists, and what they get right and wrong).
It’s a truly elegant piece of game design, simultaneously open-ended with great reliance on player creativity and agency, and carefully constructed with detailed rules and guidelines that all serve a purpose and enhance the game’s purpose — and for that, it’s this year’s winner for Best Analog Game.
Congratulations to Nora Katz for the win! You can get everything you need to play Nude On A Yellow Sofa from its page on Itch. That’s the end of our series of winner spotlights, but don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! And stay tuned for next year, when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1927.
Throughout these jams, we’ve seen so many different ways of utilizing public domain works. There are direct adaptations (with varying levels of parody and commentary), remixes of individual elements, games designed to foster a deeper understanding of the original work in the players, and more. But there’s also one very direct and personal approach that can be extremely effective in the hands of a good game designer: telling the story of your own engagement with a work. Anna Wu (a.k.a. LadyOrTheTiger) does exactly that in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle DECODED, a straightforward interactive story built in Twine that captivates the player with its subtlety and simplicity.
As the title suggests, the game is about “decoding” Hugh MacDiarmid’s 1926 poem written in the vulnerable Scots language. The title caught the designer’s eye while perusing lists of 1926 works for game inspiration, but preliminary investigation revealed that it would be no easy read: though a sister language to English and full of recognizable words with meanings that can be intuited, Scots is still very much a foreign language to English speakers, and not one readily translated with Google or other tools. But rather than move on to other source works, Anna decided to make a game about the process of understanding this intriguing poem, or at least its first few verses.
I won’t spoil the details of the story, which starts with some self-interrogation about the reasons for wanting to explore the poem and then moves through the difficult steps of trying to do so. It’s mostly told in text, but makes excellent use of audio and visuals that elevate it, as well as some basic interactivity that has the player revealing the definitions of individual words just as Anna did using a translation dictionary.
By the end, you’ll be surprised just how immersed you are in what started out as a very simple and somewhat arbitrary story. The game showcases many things: the creative potential of pacing and structure in an interactive story, the way moments of interactive freedom can subtly enhance a linear narrative, and of course the beautifully recursive nature of art and culture, where one’s engagement with an old story can become a new story of its own which also breathes new life into the original and encourages players to experience it for themselves. It’s also an example of one of the reasons we love these game jams, as it was the search for eligible public domain material for the jam that not only inspired this game but inspired Anna’s curiosity the poem in the first place! For all these reasons, but above all because it is a narrative experience that simply succeeds in drawing the player in, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle DECODED is this year’s Best Digital Game.
Congratulations to Anna Wu for the win! You can get everything you need to play A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle DECODED from its page on Itch, plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with the sixth and final winner spotlight.
There were quite a few entries this year that did ambitious things with their visuals — always a bold challenge to undertake in a 30-day game jam. That’s just not enough time to make something graphically polished, but it’s plenty of time to do something graphically creative, and that’s just what Josh from Dirtbug Games did with Mr. Top Hat Doesn’t Give A Damn! The game mines what is increasingly one of the richest veins of visual assets and inspiration that can be found amidst the material entering the public domain right now: American animation. This art form, burgeoning as it was in the 1920s, had an unmistakable style and irresistible charm, and was most potent when used for comedy. And this is a very comedic game.
You take control of the titular Mr. Top Hat, and must navigate a series of set-piece “challenges” (which are not really challenging, since that’s not the point) built with footage from 1926 cartoons, all under the guidance of an omnipresent AI-generated narrator voice with a cheeky and charming accent. The controls are janky, the art is far from pristine, and the game as a whole is unfinished (ending after the first three sections) — but the style? The style is rock solid, a wonderful celebration of the works it draws from.
As the player guides Mr. Top Hat through each stage, the narrator chimes in with comical encouragement, instructions, and commentary. The actual gameplay is minimal, which frees up the player’s attention to spend their time in each screen taking in all the visual elements and listening to the endless string of jokes.
The game has a surprise or two up its sleeve, too. Just when you think you’ve got an idea of what each scene will be like and how the pieces of 1926 animation will be used, it throws a curveball at you — but the less said, the better. It’s a short game and the best way to enjoy it is to just go play it without knowing where it’s going to go.
From start to finish, Mr. Top Hat Doesn’t Give A Damn! is fun to look at and funny to play, and when you hit the current cutoff point of this unfinished game, you’re sure to wish there was another scene. Josh plans to continue development, and we hope this much-deserved win for Best Visuals offers some encouragement so we all get to find out what Mr. Top Hat is going to do next.
Congratulations to Josh from Dirtbug Games for the win! You can get everything you need to play Mr. Top Hat Doesn’t Give A Damn! from its page on Itch, plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight.
David is our one and only returning winner this year, with his third win in a streak after taking Best Analog Game for Fish Magic in 2021 and for The 24th Kandinsky in 2020. Now, with Dreaming The Cave, he has cemented his fascinating niche: games that teach the player about art. And just like the earlier entries, this isn’t some dry educational tool or an unoriginal game with facts and imagery slapped on — rather, it’s a beautifully conceived experience where the gameplay itself is suffused with the meaning and message of the game.
But unlike the earlier entries, Dreaming The Cave isn’t based on a single painting or series by a single artist. This time, the attention has been turned on the artistic partnership between Czech artists who worked and exhibited together in the early 20th century: Toyen (a genderqueer painter who explored gender issues and sexual politics in their work) and Jindřich Štyrský (a surrealist painter and poet who died of pneumonia in 1942, leaving Toyen to continue their artistic career alone). The game uses the latter’s 1926 painting Jeskyně (The Cave) as a board — and when you look at it, you’ll see why this was such a natural piece of inspiration:
Two players take on roles, not of the artists themselves, but of their dreams, which are explored as a means of collaboration that could continue beyond Štyrský’s death. Throughout play, they will place small cards featuring other works by the duo onto the board, creating a path that represents the dreamworld connection of these two creative minds. As they do so, they will describe “dream scenes” using dream logic, augmenting and building off each others’ imagination.
And this is where Dreaming The Cave distinguishes itself from David’s previous games. Where those each put focus on the individual elements that make up a painting, this game zooms out to look at the larger body of both artists’ work and how the paintings reflect on each other — because ultimately this is a game about the artists and their deep relationship, with the works themselves serving as a conduit to that exploration. The simple rules of play enable the dream narrative to move in different directions, even leaving open the possibility of the game (and thus the artistic collaboration) ending early because the dream connection isn’t made. Dreams are fickle, and unpredictable.
For continuing an amazing tradition of games that explore art, and once again showing that there are many unique ways to do this depending on the art in question, Dreaming The Cave was an obvious contender for a win. And for turning its attention to a pair of artists and a larger combined body of work, and making players physically mix these works together to tell a surreal story that harmonizes so well with them, it rises to the top of the Best Remix category.
Congratulations to David Harris for the win! You can get everything you need to play Dreaming The Cave from its page on Itch, plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight.
Last week, to kick off our series of posts about the winners of the fourth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1926, we took a look at Best Adaptation winner The Wall Across The River. Today, we move on to the winner of the Best Deep Cut category: The Obstruction Method by Jason Morningstar of Bully Pulpit Games.
Best Deep Cut is probably our favorite of all the six categories, highlighting games that make use of 1926 works that are obscure, unexpected, or just plain unusual. For the second time in these jams, the winner mined a particularly big but easily-ignored source of material: scientific studies. The Obstruction Method is based on a behaviorist experiment by Frances Holden, entitled A Study of the Effect of Starvation upon Behavior by Means of the Obstruction Method, in which 803 albino rats were variously starved and put through an electrified maze. You can probably already see the potential for a game based on this study, but Jason Morningstar got even more creative than you might expect.
The Obstruction Method is a live-action roleplaying game in which players take on the roles of Holden and the other people involved in the study and her life in general. What follows is a roughly two-hour play session that sees this crew of scientists and associates bounce off each other, with their interactions proving to be just as much of a study in behavior as the one they are conducting on the rats. The game materials include slips of paper describing the responses of the rodents, which serve as inspiration for the actions of the characters. It’s all presented in a simple, beautiful design that evokes the style of old scientific research papers:
But it’s not just up to the players to make things interesting: Frances Holden’s network of associates includes people with fascinating connections to the world of early 20th century poetry and more, with one of the players even taking on the role of Robert Frost. Their relationships with each other are full of drama, envy, competition, and romance, with each character’s sheet providing plenty of intriguing material to work with:
The game is a perfect example of just how much value the public domain holds. It’s not just cultural touchstones like Winnie The Pooh that are locked away for decades by copyright: below that obvious surface, there is an astonishing wealth of material that is all but forgotten outside specialist circles. By taking one such artefact — a study with a verbose name, by a scientist who doesn’t even turn up much in the way of Google results — and exposing the rich story it conceals, then putting it in the hands of players to explore, The Obstruction Method demonstrates exactly why the Deep Cut category exists.
Congratulations to Jason Morningstar for the win! You can get everything you need to play The Obstruction Method from its page on Itch, plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight.
There are a lot of ways to make a “good adaptation”, and it doesn’t just mean telling the exact same story. When you’re making a game based on a novel — in this case, a game based on Hope Mirrlees’s 1926 fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist — the real accomplishment is to go beyond window-dressing and bring the spirit of the source material into the gameplay itself. That’s what The Wall Across The River accomplishes with its combination of competitive storytelling and a simple, attractive game board:
Lud-in-the-Mist is about the push-and-pull between the rational, down-to-earth inhabitants of the city of Lud and the fantastical land of Faerie that sits right next door. The game puts two main players at the heads of these two sides, with additional players taking on a judge/audience role. As play proceeds, the Mayor of Lud will try to build a wall between the city’s lands and the encroaching mist of unreason (by playing “bricks” onto the border between the two), while the Duke of Faerie tries to overwhelm the city and turn it into an extension of his kingdom (by expanding his fantastical influence over Lud, piece by piece).
But in order to do this, players will have to win a war of stories: in each round, they play cards against each other, representing the imaginative Fancies and intoxicating Fruits of Faerie, or the rational Rules and rock-solid Bricks of Lud. To use a card, a player must describe a scene; to use another card in response, the opposing player must offer a counter-scene that challenges the first. It’s then up to the remaining players, the “Citizens”, to judge the winner as they see fit. The game also supplies an excellent page of optional story prompts — not so long and dense as to be overwhelming, but robust enough to provide lots of inspiration.
The tension between the “normal world” and the fairy-folk is a rich old tradition in fantasy and folklore, and Lud-in-the-Mist is a seminal novel within it. At this tradition’s heart are powerful themes about the potency of storytelling, the conflict and balance between the rational and the fanciful, and the pervasive sense that only a thin and porous wall separates reality from a world of wonder that is both beautiful and terrifying. By immersing players in these themes, making them act out this contest and pursue the goals of both sides, The Wall Across The River shows how games can capture the essence of an existing story and explore it in new ways — and for that, it’s a well-deserving winner of Best Adaptation.
Congratulations to Seth Ellis for the win! You can get everything you need to play The Wall Across The River from its page on Itch, plus don’t forget to check out the other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut! We’ll be back next week with another winner spotlight.
Well, it took us a little longer than usual, but we’re finally ready to announce the winners of our fourth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1926! We asked designers to create games based on works published in 1926 (plus some earlier sound recordings, due to the complexities of copyright law) that entered the public domain in the US this year. There seemed to be a lot of excitement around the public domain in 2022, and that resulted in us getting more submissions than in any jam since the first. There were so many great games, and you should check them all out — but first, here are the winners in our six prize categories for Gaming Like It’s 1926:
Inspired by Henri Matisse’s 1926 painting of the same name, Nude On A Yellow Sofa by Nora Katz is a game about exploring the relationship between artist and muse. We’ve seen games in past years that involved getting the players to create art, but this one takes it to a new level: over a series of eight rounds, each representing a period of a creative career, players will tell the story of an evolving artistic collaboration while each creating eight works of art using a medium of their choice. In the ninth and final round, they assemble a retrospective gallery exhibit of the works a century later. Throughout the game, they are made to confront the joy, vulnerability, and turbulence of an artistic relationship with the help of story prompts and themed rounds. It’s a phenomenally creative piece of game design that uses a single 1926 painting as the core inspiration for exploring a timeless concept, and we’re thrilled to name it the Best Analog Game.
There are many ways to build something new based on an existing work, but sometimes the most direct can be one of the most effective: telling the story of your own engagement with it. That’s what Anna Wu does in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle DECODED, a short narrative game (mostly text-based, with other media judiciously used in various places) about Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid’s 1926 poem. As the game explains at the outset, the poem’s title caught Wu’s eye when scanning lists of 1926 works, and what follows is a personal story about the journey of, well, decoding this epic work written in the Scots language. The game uses its light interactive elements to bring the concept of translating an unfamiliar language into the gameplay itself, and succeeds in immersing the player in the designer’s own experience, as if you were with them on the journey. It is a simple story, extremely well told, and a showcase of how games can bring new perspectives to old works by interacting with them directly and literally. For that, it wins Best Digital Game.
Good roleplaying and storytelling games use their mechanics to provide players with lots of interesting prompts and inspirations; great ones find a way to marry those mechanics with the core themes and aesthetics of the story being told, evoking the desired feeling through the most fundamental aspects of play. The Wall Across The River by Seth Ellis is one such game, adapting Hope Mirrlees’s 1926 fantasy novel Lud-in-the-Mist into a roleplaying board game that forefronts the novel’s central tension: a divide between the rational and the fantastical, between the ordered world and the fairy-land of glamor and magic that clouds the mind. This tension becomes the central mechanic, as two players take up the two sides of this dance (with additional players taking on a judge-like role) and compete: will the rational Mayor successfully wall off the foggy land of the fairy-folk, or will the ethereal Duke conquer the town with ever-spreading mist? As the players lay down cards on the board in pursuit of these goals, they tell twisting stories full of magic and mystery that feel firmly situated in the setting, plot, and tone of the novel, making this a worthy winner of Best Adaptation.
If you’re a fan of the game jam, you probably recognize the name David Harris by now: he won the Best Analog Game category in both the 1925 and 1924 jams with his games Fish Magic and The 24th Kandinsky. This year, he’s back with another entry that continues his tradition of creating exceptionally original games that explore the work of a specific visual artist — or in this case, two artists. Dreaming the Cave is a game about the artistic partnership of Czech artists Toyen (born Marie Čermínová) and Jindřich Štyrský, and it plays out using the latter’s 1926 painting Jeskyně (The Cave) as its game board, and a set of cards depicting paintings by both artists as its game pieces. Through the process of mixing and matching these cards on the board, players are prompted to narrate a surreal dream scene that continues the partnership of these artists beyond Styrský’s death in 1942. Like Harris’s past games, it’s quite difficult to describe, because it is creative and unusual and custom-tailored to suit the specific artwork it explores, with the goal of helping players gain a deeper understanding of it. By using not just one work from one artist but several different ones from across the career of two artists, in a way that explores their original connection while encouraging players to imagine new ones, it takes the award for Best Remix.
When new works enter the public domain, it’s easy to focus on the novels, the paintings, the movies, the songs… but as we all know, copyright covers a whole lot more than that! Not for the first time, this year’s deep cut winner draws its inspiration from somewhere else entirely: a scientific paper. The Obstruction Method by Jason Morningstar of Bully Pulpit Games is a live-action roleplaying game based on Frances Holden’s behaviorist study involving 803 albino rats and an electrified maze. Players take on the roles of Holden and the people around her, and quickly find that their effort to test the rats has become its own experiment in which they themselves are the subjects. The game and its materials are beautifully presented to evoke the aesthetic of a 1920s scientific study, and the story itself spirals out far beyond its source material, as the real people involved had fascinating connections to the contemporary worlds of poetry and more. By taking source material that might seem too dry at first glance, and exposing its fascinating depth while also crafting an extremely clever premise for roleplaying, the game is an easy choice for Best Deep Cut.
It’s an exciting time in the public domain for fans of animation, with new works from the first golden age of American cartoons exiting copyright protection every year. Mr. Top Hat Doesn’t Give A Damn! by Josh of Dirtbug Games is a playful ode to the aesthetics of the era, pulling clips from several 1926 cartoons to create a short, comedic quasi-platformer that tells a story about the titular Mr. Top Hat. The game is unfinished, ending on a note from the designer that there is more to come, but it already crams in plenty of entertainment in its first two stages, which introduce the player to Mr. Top Hat and have them guide him through a few early dilemmas. It’s just plain fun to look at, and the AI-generated narrator commenting on the action throughout elevates it to a new level. Describing any of the jokes, which make clever use of both the narration and the visuals, would spoil them, and it’s better if you go into the short experience without knowing much in advance. By mining this exciting vein of animated visual assets, and enhancing them with some hand-made effects and new assets, then tying it all together in a story that perfectly suits the look, Mr. Top Hat wins the award for Best Visuals.
The winning designers will be contacted via their Itch pages to arrange their prizes, so if you see your game listed here, keep an eye on your incoming comments!
As in past years, we’ll be taking a closer look at each of these winners with spotlight posts in the weeks to come. Also like past years, we’ve got a podcast episode discussing the winners and some of our favorite entries that didn’t quite make the cut! You can listen to the episode now on our feed or via Soundcloud:
A huge thanks to all the designers who submitted games to this year’s jam. There are so many games worth playing, and I strongly urge everyone to check out all the entries. We’ll be back next year with Gaming Like Its 1927, and it’s never too early to start looking at the works that will be entering the public domain, and brainstorming your game ideas! We hope to get even more entries next year, and continue demonstrating why a rich and growing public domain benefits us all and leads to the creation of new, exciting works.
Last night at midnight, we reached the end of Gaming Like It’s 1926, our fourth annual public domain game jam celebrating the new works that entered the public domain this year. At final count, we got 31 entries representing a huge variety of different kinds of digital and analog games!
For the next couple of weeks, we’ll be digging into all the games and selecting the winners in our six categories — but there’s no need to wait before playing! You can check out all the entries on itch.io:
At first glance (and having poked around in a couple of the early entries) I can already tell it’s going to be tough to narrow these down to just six winners — there are lots of games here that do fun and interesting things with public domain works. As in past years, once we’ve selected and announced the winners we’ll discuss each one in detail in a podcast and a series of posts.
Until then, a huge thanks to everyone who participated this year, and also to everyone who takes some time to play the games and give these designers the attention they deserve!
By now, you’ve probably heard about Gaming Like It’s 1926, our fourth annual public domain game jam celebrating the new works that entered the public domain this year. The clock is ticking on the jam, but there’s still time — entries are due by January 31st, which means you’ve got the weekend to put something together if you sign up now and get started!
(If you need some ideas on how to make a game quickly, check out Story Synth, created by our partner in running these game jams, Randy Lubin.)
The jam is open to both digital and analog games (be sure to read over the full requirements on the jam page). There are lots of interesting works entering the public domain this year, including:
Novels, short stories, and poems by Agatha Christie, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, T. E. Lawrence, A. A. Milne, and Dorothy Parker
Art by Alexander Calder, Hannah H?ch, Frieda Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ren? Magritte, and Norman Rockwell
Films including silents Beau Jest and The General plus the first feature length Vitaphone films with Don Juan and The Better ‘Ole
Music by Louis Armstrong, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Al Jolson, Jelly Roll Morton, Victoria Spivey, and Sophie Tucker
Many a great game has started with an individual or a small group of people working hard for a single weekend to make a playable prototype, so don’t let the ticking clock scare you — sign up now on itch.io and get to work!
