So far, we’ve featured Hot Water and Legends of Charlemagne in our series about the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1924. This week, we’re taking a look at the winner of the Best Remix award, for the best game that incorporated material from multiple different newly-copyright-free works: 192X by designer Chloe Spears. Read more
This week, we announced the winners of Gaming Like It’s 1924, our game jam celebrating the works that entered the public domain in the US this year. Just like last year, over the next few weeks we’ll be spotlighting the winners from each of our six categories (in no particular order), and today we’re kicking things off with a look at the game that won the Best Visuals award: Hot Water by reltru.
We never expect much in the visuals department from people who submit digital games to the jam, since one month is hardly enough time to produce elaborate graphical assets for a video game, but canny designers like the creator of Hot Water can surprise us by finding ways to create something visually striking with a combination of pre-made sprites, powerful choices, and attention to detail. The game, which is based on the 1924 silent film of the same name starring Harold Lloyd, has a clear and simple goal in mind: capture the distinct aesthetic and feel of early silent comedies in a retro 8-bit style video game. It’s a beautiful little idea in and of itself, and one that exemplifies the fun of remixing multiple sources from throughout history: each of these two distinct and instantly recognizable visual styles occupies a similar spot in the timeline of its own medium, but they are separated from each other by more than half a century — so what happens when you put them together?
You get Hot Water, with its black-and-white 8-bit scenelets and its pixelated interstitial title cards (though a still image doesn’t do the latter justice):
The gameplay (which is “soft boiled” by the designer’s own admission) is your basic reaction-test obstacle course, tasking the player with dodging and jumping over benches and other obstructions to complete a mad dash to the end. It can be a little frustrating — while it’s no Battletoads hoverbike or anything, the somewhat-sluggish controls and unclear boundaries on the obstacles are enough that I doubt anyone’s getting to the end without a few false starts. But the manic music, and the silly and amusing little story unfolding via title cards, will make you keep trying until you reach the end of the game’s one short level and receive one final little visual gag. And while the game clearly has no intentions of being anything more than the brief diversion it is, some fine-tuning and a few additional levels offering new story vignettes would quickly turn it into a full-fledged (if still simple) game. But either way, as a demonstration of what you can get by combining these two disparate vintage styles, it’s a great success that makes me imagine an anachronistic arcade cabinet in a 1920s jazz club where dappers and flappers line up to play the new tie-in game for the latest Harold Lloyd movie.
You can play Hot Water in your browser on Itch, or check out the other submissions in our public domain game jam. And come back next week for the another winner spotlight!
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Well, here we are at our final spotlight post for winners from our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1923. It’s the winner of the Best Analog Game category: Permanence by Jackson Tegu.
Permanence is probably the most intriguing and unusual of all the submissions we received, and it piqued the curiosity and imagination of many of our judges. It’s also just about as analog as a game can be: it takes the form of a book. Indeed, the instructions advise (somewhat apologetically) that you professionally print and bind the included PDF to create a real book to hold in your hands — but in a pinch, a basic print-out will suffice.
But this isn’t a book of instructions… not quite. Nor is it a book to simply read… not quite. Rather, the book is the instructions, the game, and the story all at once. It is designed to be played by seven people, but not all at once — each player will, on their own time, take their journey through the book. And they won’t leave the book the same as they found it: each player is instructed (poetically) to “free their traveler from the page” with scissors, and then to leave behind their traveller’s “attachments” as small bookmarks between the pages. All this throughout the course of a meditative roleplaying journey based on two 1923 works that have entered the public domain: the painting Metempsychosis by Yokoyama Taikan, and poems from the book The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran.
If you’re still feeling a bit unclear on what exactly Permanence is, don’t be discouraged — it is a game to be discovered via play, not mastered beforehand. Its unique and creative approach made it a shoe-in for Best Analog Game, and the only way to understand it is to print it out and give it a try. You can download it now from its page on Itch!
And with that, we wrap up the series of winner spotlights for our public domain game jam. Once again, a huge thanks to everyone who participated, and who played the games that were submitted — we never expected such a great response, and we’re thrilled with how it went. You can still check out the full list of winners and the collection of other entries at any time, and if all goes according to plan with the finally-expanding public domain, we’ll be back with another edition next year!
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We’re down to our second last winner from our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1923! This week, we’re looking at winner of Best Adaptation for the game that most faithfully and meaningfully adapted its source material: God of Vengeance by JR Goldberg.
One of the great things about remix culture, and one of the reason’s the public domain is so important, is that creators can turn old work into something completely new with a different meaning, or something that subverts or critiques the original’s purpose — but there’s also a lot to be said for faithful adaptations that carry an old work’s meaning forward into a new era and a new medium. And that’s what God of Vengeance does with the Yiddish language play of the same name — which was first translated to English and performed in America in 1923, and led to an obscenity charge, conviction, and eventual successful appeal. Based on that you can probably figure out that this dramatic, improvisational roleplaying game is not for everyone and certainly not for children — but for those prepared to explore its subject matter, including domestic violence, sex work, and a Jewish crime family in Poland, it promises to be an engaging and challenging exercise.
God of Vengeance needs four players who take on the roles in the play, with three playing the main characters and one playing the ensemble of other smaller characters. Each receives a brief description of their character and motivations, such as:
Rifkele is the daughter of Yekel and Sarah. She is in her late teens, of marrying age. She is innocent to the ways of the world. She is scared of her father, who is overbearing and abusive and oppressive. She thinks her mother weak, for always capitulating to her father’s outsize personality. While both her parents speak of an impending marriage, Rifkele is rather cold to the idea. While Yekel and Sarah think is is her shy and demure personality, Rifkele has in fact begun an illicit affair with Manke, one of the young sex workers in her father’s employ. Neither of her parents know. She is smitten.
The play then proceeds through three predefined acts, each of which offers an additional prompt for each player, and tasks them with delivering a monologue. This is made dynamic via a simple mechanic employing the face cards and aces from a deck of cards, which are used to randomly determine the order in which characters will speak and to which other character they will address their monologue (or if it will be a self-focused soliloquy). At the end, all players then discuss each character and their actions over the course of the game to wrap things up. The per-act prompts are designed to keep things on track with the story while still requiring some original ideas:
Sarah – Describe your feeling of your daughter having the opportunities you never did. Do you feel her distance is based in her shy nature, or is she ungrateful? While combing her hair and helping to ready her for a party to commemorate her father’s commission of the scroll, you ask her what sorts of things she wants. A Golden necklace? A pearl comb? She only asks for a new pair of slippers. Describe what you wanted at her age. What are the things you wish you could tell her about yourself?
It could be said that the greatest strength of God of Vengeance — and the reason it won the Best Adaptation category — is also its greatest limitation: though the prompts leave the door open to some creativity, the game clearly aims to encourage players to stay fairly close to the plot and characterizations of the original play, and it feels like replay value with the same group of players would be minimal. On the other hand, there is something immediately and obviously tantalizing about the framework JR Goldberg has designed: it could easily be adapted to other plays, or other stories entirely. But in its current form, it stands tall as a careful and successful adaptation of an old work that made a huge splash a century ago, but is increasingly unknown today. It also raises interesting issues, not just within the play itself: apart from the aforementioned overturned obscenity conviction, in 1946 the play’s author leveraged his copyright to prohibit any staging of the play in any language. The game is a mature and thoughtful take on some very challenging material with a complex history, and a very good example of why it matters to have a robust public domain for modern creators to explore.
You can download the instructions and prompts for God of Vengeance from its page on Itch, and don’t forget to check out our other winners as well as the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut. I’ll be back next week with our final game jam winner spotlight!
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