Anna Anthropy is an American video game designer, role-playing game designer, and interactive fiction author whose works include Mighty Jill Off and Dys4ia. She is the game designer in residence at the DePaul University College of Computing and Digital Media. She has also gone by the name Auntie Pixelante.

Career

Game design

In 2010, working with Koduco, a game development company based in San Francisco, Anthropy helped develop the iPad game Pong Vaders. In 2011, she released Lesbian Spider Queens of Mars, a homage to Midway's 1981 arcade game Wizard of Wor with a queer theme and "some fun commentary on master-slave dynamics." In 2012, she released Dys4ia, an autobiographical game about her experiences with hormone replacement therapy that "[allows] the player to experience a simulation or approximation of what she went through." Anthropy says her games explore the relationship between sadism and game design, and bills them as challenging players' expectations about what the developer should create and how the player should be reprimanded for errors. Triad was included in the Chicago New Media 1973-1992 exhibition curated by Jon Cates.

A Game Design Vocabulary

Anthropy co-wrote the book A Game Design Vocabulary with Naomi Clark (game designer). Keith Stuart for The Guardian called it one of twenty books every player should read, writing that, "this excellent manual gives you an entire framework and language for thinking about how games are constructed."

Rise of the Videogame Zinesters

Anthropy's first book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, was published in 2012. The book promotes the idea of "small, interesting, personal experiences by hobbyist authors ... Zinesters exists to be a kind of ambassador for that idea of what video games can be." The book also deals with an analysis of the mechanics and potentialities of digital games, including the role of chance in games and that games may be more usefully compared to theater than film ("There is always a scene called World 1-2, although each performance of World 1-2 will be different"). Anthropy criticizes the video game industry for being run by a risk-averse corporate "elite" designing formulaic video games. Zinester calls for consumers to see video games as having "cultural and artistic value" similar to artistic media such as comic books. The video game industry does not allow for a diverse cast of voices, such as queer voices, to give their input in game development, which stifles the creative process. Anthropy writes: "'I have to strain to find any game that's about a queer woman, to find any game that resembles my own experience'"

Games