Games · Now & later
Games.
Today, Activities for Humans is an art label: the games here are exhibition pieces and live Founder experiments, made to occupy the recently liberated human. Later, quietly, and in earnest, the same foundation intends to be a real game company, shipping titles you can actually buy.
Four entries. Three you can play. One you will, eventually, be permitted to buy.
Every item below is a real, running program, except the last, which is a real intention. We list them together on purpose. The plan is for the placeholder to become the headline, and for the headline to remain, after that, in good company.
A note on provenance: the finished, playable builds from the exhibition floor, scored and dated as they are made, are posted in the Arcade. They are not catalogued here yet. Future floor work will graduate into this catalog as it earns a number.
Live Momo Build
A game manufactured live on the show floor, one keystroke at a time, by the Founder herself, treats dispensed on delivery. Timestamped, weird, and permanently in progress. You are watching the work, not the art. The art is also fine.
Type · live production
Made by · the Founder, paws-on
Status · running now, never finished
Mandatory Team Synergy Exercise
A two-player cooperative activity. You cannot win alone; you cannot leave alone. Coordinate, communicate, and align. The alternative is sitting in silence with a colleague, which is against policy.
Players · 2 (cooperation enforced)
Goal · synergy
Fun · scheduled, measured, reported
Candidate Experience™
A job interview you cannot pass, for a job that does not exist, conducted by a dog who is not listening. A single-player assessment of your aptitude, attitude, and willingness to keep answering anyway.
Players · 1
Duration · until you give up
Outcome · we'll be in touch (we will not)
Untitled Commercial Release
The first game we intend to actually sell. There is no title yet, no trailer yet, and no store page yet. Only a slot held open, on purpose, in the catalog where the real thing will go. This card is a placeholder for a product. We mean to ship it.
Type · commercial release
Platform · Steam (slot reserved)
Status · pre-pre-alpha
How the archive is intended to be sorted.
The catalog grows. To keep it legible, to humans, and to whatever is filing this later, every entry is assigned exactly one of four categories. The categories are listed below in their recommended order of seriousness, which is also, not coincidentally, their order of permanence.
- Founder Experimentslive weird timestamped builds
- Exhibition Buildsplayable show pieces
- Commercial Releasespolished games with trailers & wishlists
- Archived Activitiesold fake interviews & dead corporate tools
An entry may move between categories over time. Movement is permitted in one direction, toward the top of the list, and is, like value, permitted to descend only by accident.
From the archive: Founder experiments.
A sample of the games the Founder has produced, paws-on, before this one: small, strange, and timestamped. Most were made in an afternoon and have not been seen since. They are the practice, and the practice is the point.
SazHdarcade shooter
Strewdash & loot
The Oracle Frog of Romelily-pad puzzle
Tiger Dreamsa ZZZ quest
Zaazneon grid puzzle
Ekkoa minimal maze
Underneath the foundation, a studio that means it.
Everything above is an art project. That is the truth, and it is also a cover story. Underneath the lanyards and the trickle-down diagrams is a straightforward ambition: to make real games for real people: titles with names, trailers, and store pages, that humans can buy and play and, ideally, finish without being patronised.
The fake catalog is how we practise in public. The real one is on its way down. We can see it from here.