Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Fish Magic

from the gaming-like-it's-1925 dept

Today, we finish our journey through the winners of the third annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1925. We've covered ~THE GREAT GATSBY~, The Great Gatsby Tabletop Roleplaying Game, Art Apart and There Are No Eyes Here, Remembering Grußau, and Rhythm Action Gatsby, and now it's time for the final winner: Best Analog Game recipient Fish Magic by David Harris.

David Harris is our one returning winner this year, having topped the same category in Gaming Like It's 1924 with the game The 24th Kandinsky. This year's entry is at once similar and very different: like that previous game, Fish Magic is about exploring the work of a famous painter, but it takes an entirely new approach to doing so. And that change of approach underlines what makes both games so compelling: their mechanics are carefully crafted to perfectly suit the artworks at their core. Where The 24th Kandinsky was about manipulating the shapes and colors of Kandinsky's abstract art, Fish Magic is about letting the evocative surrealism of the titular painting by Paul Klee spark your imagination. To that end, the painting becomes the game board, and is populated by words randomly selected from a list, poetically divided into the "domains" of Celestial, Earthly, and Aquatic:

The players take turns moving between nodes on the board, taking a word from each one to build a collection, which they can then use to build phrases when they are ready. The goal is to convince the other players that your constructed phrase represents either a type of "magic fish", or a type of "fish magic". Points are gained by winning the support of other players for your fish magic or your magic fish, and reduced according to how many extra words you have sitting in your collection, thus encouraging players to be extra creative and find ways to make convincing phrases with the words they have, rather than just chasing the ones they want.

If you're wondering what exactly makes for a good type of fish magic or magic fish, or what that even means — well, that's kind of the point, and exactly why this approach to the game is so perfect for the source material! Paul Klee's painting is appreciated for its magical depiction of a mysterious and intriguing underwater world, and the way its techniques — a layer of black paint scratched off to reveal vibrant colours underneath, and a square of muslin glued to the center of the canvas — suggest wondrous depths obscured by a hazy curtain. Fish Magic the painting provokes imagination and flights of fancy, and Fish Magic the game adds just enough mechanical scaffolding to make this process explicit and collaborative.

Anyone could slap a board layout on a famous painting, add some rules, and call it a game — but it takes a real appreciation for the painting, and a real intent to do something meaningful with it, to craft such a simple premise that so perfectly aligns with the source material. Like The 24th Kandinsky last year, just a quick read of the rules was enough to make our judges eager to play, and it was an easy choice for the Best Analog Game.

You can get all the materials for Fish Magic on Itch, and check out the other jam entries too. Congratulations to David Harris for the win!

And that's a wrap on our series of winner spotlights for Gaming Like It's 1925. Another congratulations to all the winners, and a big thanks to every designer who submitted an entry. Keep on mining that public domain, and start perusing lists of works that will be entering the public domain next year when we'll be back with Gaming Like It's 1926!

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming like its 1925, public domain, winner spotlight

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Rhythm Action Gatsby

from the gaming-like-it's-1925 dept

We're nearing the end of our series of posts about the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1925. We've already featured ~THE GREAT GATSBY~, The Great Gatsby Tabletop Roleplaying Game, Art Apart and There Are No Eyes Here, and Remembering Grußau, and today we're looking at the third and final game based on The Great Gatsby and the winner of the Best Digital Game category: Rhythm Action Gatsby by Robert Tyler.

From the name alone, you can probably guess what the game is: rhythm action games are a popular genre, and hey, why not make one for The Great Gatsby? The premise is presented as a joke, with the designer describing it as "the way F. Scott Fitzgerald would have wanted his legacy to be maintained" — but the game doesn't just lean on this one bit of amusing silliness, nor does it cut any corners in fulfilling its promise. Rather, it's full of handcrafted original material.

But before we get to all of that, there's another thing that makes Rhythm Action Gatsby stand out among all the Gatsby-based games this year: it's partly based on the book's incredibly iconic cover art. (We wondered if the cover art was even itself in the public domain, but it turns out that unlike most books, that particular cover was actually designed before the writing was done and published along with the first edition, and has an interesting story all its own.) The floating eyes and mouth that almost everyone immediately associates with The Great Gatsby become the target points of the rhythm action game, controlled by the player as they gaze out from the screen. The eyes must be triggered in time with the sparkling fireworks that rise from below and represent the notes of the music, while the mouth must be controlled to speak the words that tumble down from above.

The words are a well-known passage from the novel, dramatically spaced out over the 2-minute duration of the game — and it's all narrated aloud. That's where we get to all the other original material in the game. The narration? Freshly recorded by the designer, with a distinct mood and excellent delivery. The jaunty music that sets the pace of the game? An original piece written and recorded by the designer. And then there's all the details: the color changes and screen flashes that occur throughout the course of a playthrough, linked to both progression and the player's performance. All of this is choreographed so well that when it comes together it makes a rhythm game that, although simple and short, feels surprisingly dramatic and narrative — and that's not only impressive, it's extremely appropriate to an adaptation of a novel, and proves that the initial joke about the combination of genre and subject being silly wasn't quite what it seemed. That's just great, and makes it a worthy winner of the Best Digital Game award.

(Oh, and at the end, your performance is ranked and you get to find out just how great of a Gatsby you are. Several of our judges played it multiple times to try for better results, and maybe you will too.)

Play Rhythm Action Gatsby in your browser on Itch, and check out the other jam entries too. Congratulations to Robert Tyler for the win! We'll be back next week with the final game jam winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming like its 1925, great gatsby, public domain, winner spotlight

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Remembering Grußau

from the gaming-like-it's-1925 dept

So far, we've featured ~THE GREAT GATSBY~, The Great Gatsby Tabletop Roleplaying Game, Art Apart and There Are No Eyes Here in this series of posts about the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1925. Today, we're taking a look at the winner of the Best Deep Cut category: Remembering Grußau by Max Fefer (HydroForge Games).

Of all the entries this year, this game was the one that had the biggest emotional impact on our judges, with words like "moving" and "powerful" popping up repeatedly in their comments. The best description of Remembering Grußau is perhaps to call it a guided reflection on a piece of artwork — specifically, the 1925 painting of the same name by the Jewish surrealist painter Felix Nussbaum — and its meaning within the greater context of history, and the artist's life and eventual murder in the Holocaust. The game is simple, focused, and highly effective in prompting the player to meaningfully engage with the subject matter in a deeply personal way.

A big part of how it accomplishes this is by inventively bridging the gap between digital and physical engagement. The game itself is built in Twine with very basic interactive fiction mechanics, but the player's most important action is taken offline: they are instructed to step away, write a letter to Nussbaum, fold it into an envelope, and keep it nearby for a day before returning to complete the game. When they do, they are asked to indicate the theme of the letter they wrote, and then given a response — but to see what that response is, you'll have to experience it for yourself.

Remembering Grußau is somber and impactful, and it demonstrates that there are many different reasons that a growing public domain is important. We talk a lot about the radical, transformative ways new creators can make use of old material, but there's also great value on using new media to examine and explore old works in their pure, original form, introducing them to new people and uncovering new meaning within them. By focusing so closely and intensely on a single 1925 painting that isn't especially well known, and actively giving the player historical context and emotional prompts followed by a reflective task to complete, Remembering Grußau succeeds in doing this to an impressive degree, and is a worthy winner of the Best Deep Cut award.

Play Remembering Grußau in your browser on Itch, and check out the other jam entries too. Congratulations to Max Fefer/HydroForge Games for the win! We'll be back next week with another game jam winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming like its 1925, public domain, winner spotlight

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Art Apart and There Are No Eyes Here

from the gaming-like-it's-1925 dept

So far, we've featured ~THE GREAT GATSBY~ and The Great Gatsby Tabletop Roleplaying Game in this series of posts about the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1925. Today, we move on the pair of games that were tied as winners in the Best Remix category: Art Apart by Ryan Sullivan and There Are No Eyes Here by jukel.

Both games were obvious contenders for the category, and ultimately it proved too difficult to choose one over the other, because they are so intriguingly similar yet completely different. Both could be described as "art puzzles", and both remix multiple public domain works, but neither clearly rises above the other.

Art Apart is the more straightforward of the two: it's just a plain old jigsaw puzzle game using a series of paintings from 1925 and a fairly unpolished interface. But while this meant our judges didn't expect much from it at first glance, it proved to be a very pleasant surprise: carefully made, easy to use, employing a great selection of paintings complemented by public domain background music, all put together with an elegance that drew people in and had them solving entire puzzles when all they intended to do was poke around for a few minutes. In the process, they got to spend some time closely examining and appreciating five paintings that entered the public domain this year.

There Are No Eyes Here is the more abstract of the two games, which is fitting since it focuses on a single artist: Wassily Kandinsky, the pioneer of abstract art. Kandinsky's works made an appearance in one of last year's winners, which explored a series of paintings he created in 1924, and this game picks up the following year with five Kandinsky paintings from 1925. While Art Apart is a traditional jigsaw puzzle, There Are No Eyes Here is about custom-made manipulations of its subject works: the player finds the elements of each painting that can be clicked to trigger animations in which Kandinsky's abstract shapes and forms begin shifting around, eventually unlocking the next painting in the series. Our judges noted that, to the artistically-inexperienced, the game was a perfect invitation to study this seminal artist's work with a level of attention to detail they might otherwise never have given it.

So there you have it: two games, both remixing multiple paintings and turning them into puzzles, both doing it completely different ways. One more traditional, one more abstract, both successful at making the player take time to admire and enjoy some of the 1925 work that now belongs to us all — and both well deserving of the Best Remix award.

Play Art Apart and There Are No Eyes Here in your browser on Itch, and check out the other jam entries too. Congratulations to both designers for the win! We'll be back next week with another game jam winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming like its 1925, public domain, winner spotlight

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: The Great Gatsby Tabletop Roleplaying Game

from the gaming-like-it's-1925 dept

Last week, we took a look at ~THE GREAT GATSBY~, one of the recently-announced winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1925. Today, we're moving on to our second spotlight, and looking at the winner of the Best Adaptation category, The Great Gatsby: The Tabletop Roleplaying Game by Segoli.

Best Adaptation is always an interesting category in these jams, because every entry is on some level an adaptation, but that doesn't mean they are all truly good candidates for the prize. Some make use of elements of a public domain work in a way that detaches them from their source, others focus so closely on the source that it is more like a study of the original — both those things can be amazing, and both approaches show up among our winners this year. But there's also something special about a game that turns a public domain work into something brand new while also carrying forth and further exploring its original meaning and context. That's the kind of game that is a candidate for Best Adaptation, and that's the kind of game The Great Gatsby: The Tabletop Roleplaying Game is.

As the name suggests, the game follows the contours of a typical TTRPG, with players taking on various characters and participating in a story (in this case, the story of The Great Gatsby, at least to begin with...) aided by a game master and some dice rolls. What makes it especially interesting as an adaptation is how it frames things for the game master: they are given a concise synopsis of the events of the novel, and encouraged to focus on whether their players are making more traditional choices that adhere to the original story, or wilder choices that rapidly diverge from it. Whichever way the players are leaning, the GM is encouraged to act as a counterbalance, throwing in fresh twists to push a traditional story off-course, or adding period-appropriate obstacles that force more divergent players to remember and address the setting. A lot of conventional wisdom says GMs should always try to flow with their players and take the game in the stylistic direction they want to take it, and downplay the idea that the GM acts "in opposition" to the players, but the framing of the advice in this game is actually quite brilliant: it means the players' tastes will shape the challenges they face in a satisfying way, while also keeping the game orbiting around the work it is adapting, and examining that work from different angles depending on the way the players want to interact with it.

Of course, there's another great way to win our hearts here at Techdirt, and that's by putting ideas around copyright and the public domain directly inside a game. The Gatsby TTRPG does exactly that, and it's just great. See, there's something I haven't mentioned yet: while the setting and story is firmly rooted in the novel, the player characters are not. Rather, players are required to be other public domain characters, turning the game into a mashup of Gatsby and any number of other works. And the instructions include a list of possible options, and a whole bunch of great intellectual property jokes that our audience here will surely appreciate:

Please note that several of the characters listed are temporally locked, which means you may not play as them until they enter the public domain in the year listed next to their name. Additionally, keep in mind that copyright law varies from country to country. If you are playing this game in Europe, you may have access to a greatly expanded list of public domain characters.

1. Dracula
2. Mrs. Claus
3. Sherlock Holmes (empathy-free)
4. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
5. Dr. Frankenstein (not the monster)
6. Feral child raised by apes (see below)
7. Bambi (the novel character) (2022)
8. Sherlock Holmes (with empathy) (2023)
9. Walt Disney’s mouse OC (2024)
10. Peter Pan (UK only: the destruction of a specific children’s hospital in London)

Please note that if you are playing as the feral child raised by apes, the trademark to that character's name is owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc., a company located in Tarzana, California. They are extremely protective of their trademark, so you may not refer to this character by name, despite the fact that the character himself is in the public domain. Additionally, please note that if you are playing this game in the UK, you may not play as Peter Pan as long as Great Ormond Street Hospital continues to exist. Elsewhere, he’s free game.

For those not in the know, those are some excellent references that highlight absurd minutiae of copyright. Sherlock Holmes has entered the public domain via earlier stories, but the Doyle estate is trying to assert that portraying him with emotions and empathy is still copyright infringement because he gained those qualities in later stories. Tarzan is a prime example of a recurring problem: the use of trademark law as a backdoor to perpetual copyright. And the situation with the rights to Peter Pan, a character that is nearly 120 years old but still under copyright in the UK, is just plain weird.

As you can imagine, a lot of our judges got a huge kick out of this, as did we. The copyright themes continue into the gameplay, with the difficulty of player actions being partly based on whether they are invoking something from a public domain work or one that is still covered by copyright, and it's just masterful how the game weaves together these themes, and the wackiness of combining all these public domain characters, with a genuine exploration of the original novel. For all those reasons and more, it's this year's Best Adaptation.

Get the rules for The Great Gatsby: The Tabletop Roleplaying Game on Itch, and check out the other jam entries too. Congratulations to Segoli for the win! We'll be back next week with another game jam winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming like its 1925, great gatsby, public domain, winner spotlight

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: ~THE GREAT GATSBY~

from the gaming-like-it's-1925 dept

This week, we announced the winners of Gaming Like It's 1925, our third annual game jam celebrating works that entered the public domain in the US this year. Over the next few weeks, we'll be taking a closer look at each of the winning games from the six categories (in no particular order), starting today with the winner of Best Visuals: ~THE GREAT GATSBY~ by Floatingtable Games.

The first thing that strikes you about ~THE GREAT GATSBY~ is just how robust the graphics are for a game jam entry. It's a platformer presented in a retro pixel-art style — the designer explains that it has the same screen resolution as a Nintendo Game Boy, but one more color in its palette. The player is immediately presented with a beautiful title screen depicting one of the most iconic pieces of imagery from the novel:

From there, the game reveals itself to be more than just the mechanical prototype one might expect from a platformer in a game jam — rather, it's a fully-formed (albeit very short) experience that includes an opening "cinematic", some RPG-style interactions with NPC characters including simple dialogue choices, two main platforming levels (the first of which requires you to retrace your steps, finding the path more challenging in reverse — a classic level design technique — and the second of which feels distinctly different and introduces a new kind of obstacle), and a clear conclusion. In other words, there's some genuine thought put into the game design here, and an effort to make the game "complete" that really paid off. But it's still the graphics that stand out the most, from the detailed cityscapes with parallax-animated skylines in the background and pixelated haze drifting through the air...

...to the interior scene with its own set of unique sprites, the stylish character portraits, and the simple, easily-understood interface elements:

Note the attention to detail — it would have been easy and perfectly acceptable to slap the same simple window graphic from the outdoor scenes onto the interior wall, but instead we get a brand new custom sprite that includes the skyline visible outside in the distance. That kind of extra effort is apparent all throughout the graphics of the game, and that's why it was an easy pick for the Best Visuals award.

Play ~THE GREAT GATSBY~ in your browser on Itch, and check out the other jam entries too. Congratulations to Floatingtable Games for the win! We'll be back next week with another game jam winner spotlight.

Filed Under: game jam, games, gaming like its 1925, great gatsby, public domain, winner spotlight