The Maxwell Collection · Box Set 1-7

The Offworld Collection features a tremendously diverse roster of contributors, writing about everything from the fascinating world of women's pinball, to the lingo of Chinese games culture, to the small, intimate games that explore how young adults deal with sex and technology. It's a book for anyone with a passion for design, play and criticism.

When editors Leigh Alexander and Laura Hudson relaunched Offworld, our goal was to build a website that focused on the writing and game design work of women, people of color and other marginalized folks. We wanted to create a space that actively welcomed perspectives that are often ignored by mainstream game culture, a place where where we could share our expertise and insight into the art of game creation and the culture of play. After a year of publishing incredible content from an all-star roster of writers, we're publishing a book collection.

Contents

Introduction

Leigh Alexander

We are not colonists

Gita Jackson

Women take a place at the pinball table

Laura Hudson

The divine witches of cyberspace

Leigh Alexander

No girl wins: why women unlearn their love of video games

Juliet Kahn

Playing on ‘Indian time’

Daniel Starkey

Altgames, a punk movement

Zoe Quinn

All the women I know in video games are tired

Leigh Alexander

In Bloodborne’s brutal world, I found myself

Laura Hudson

How to make a truly democratic game design tool

Anna Anthropy

You have 20 minutes before the sun blows up

Laura Hudson

How to play as a spiritual hole

Leigh Alexander

In fantasy worlds, historical accuracy is a lie

Tanya DePass

The many inglorious deaths of my virtual fish

Leigh Alexander

The existential dread of fighting games

Maddy Myers

I’ve been texting with an astronaut

Laura Hudson

This moving game about gravity will catch you

Katherine Cross

What a car is to a girl

Leigh Alexander

The vast, unplayable history of video games

Gita Jackson

Piracy gave me a future

Daniel Starkey

Astonishing comics that ‘save your game’ when you turn the page

Laura Hudson

And maybe they won’t kill you

Leigh Alexander

How hip hop can teach you to code

Shareef Jackson

War without tears

Maxwell Neely-Cohen

Should you kill monsters, or empthaize with them?

Laura Hudson

On being a strange, brilliant clown

Leigh Alexander

Edutainment failed me

Aroon Karuna

Subversive games about waitresses and hairdressers

Laura Hudson

The queer masculinity of stealth games

Riley MacLeod

Meet the secret new horror mistress of video games

Leigh Alexander

I love my untouchable virtual body

Aevee Bee

The millennials are just fine, and so are their sex games

Laura Hudson

The clone that wasn’t

Leigh Alexander

China loves the lingo of games

Christina Xu

Remembering Syberia, an adventure game about a woman finding herself

Katherine Cross

Why Final Fantasy VII matters

Leigh Alexander

Black characters in video games must be more than inhuman stereotypes

Sidney Fussell

The poetry in game-making

Katriel Paige

How card games became cool again

By Kim Nguyen

The Beginner’s Guide is a game that doesn’t want to be written about

Laura Hudson

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is forever

Leigh Alexander

My games are tools of healing and community

Soha Kareem

The other side of Braid

Liz Ryerson

Interactive movies make their glorious return

Leigh Alexander

How should we talk about Final Fantasy VII’s crossdressing sequence?

Sarah Nyberg

A brilliant murder mystery you solve with a search engine

Laura Hudson

Edgy sex games highlight intimacy, not conquest

Merritt Kopas

Creating a spectrum of feelings with only four keys

Leigh Alexander

How we developed a black woman protagonist who mattered

Catt Small

Around a more diverse world in 80 days

Katherine Cross

Shenmue through a prism

Annie Mok

Why Silent Hill mattered

Leigh Alexander

A game studio in Cameroon envisions a new history for Africa

Laura Hudson

Video games without people of color are not neutral

Sidney Fussell

How ceMelusine captures a moment

Leigh Alexander

What games must learn from children’s books

Anna Anthropy

A unique roleplaying game that lets you literally make history

Katherine Cross

The radical games event where the next speaker is you

Laura Hudson

Home is where the future of games is

Leigh Alexander