This Game Beyond the Game, with Esther Alter

Everybody's Talking at Once

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 155.

Esther Alter started out making games like Neocolonialism and No Pineapple Left Behind, which she now describes as “anti-fun.” But her newest game PROĆEMON is unashemedly fun, in addition to being a thoughtful experiment in how far we can push procedural generation, and in what human-machine collaborations can looks like.

Here Esther talks about PROĆEMON in terms of its inspirations, its tech, and how it fits into her broader artistic practice—which spans tabletop RPGs, non-game technical experiments and tools, and short-form fiction (much of it profoundly and unmistakably Jewish).

PROĆEMON: You Must Catch Them is out now on Itch.io and Steam.
You can follow Esther on Twitter, and find a whole bunch of her work on her website.

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• The secondary antagonists who want to liberate Pokémon (those jerks) are Team Plasma from Pokémon Black and White (on the DS).

• It’s true enough that you wouldn’t have read about MissingNo. in Nintendo Power at the time—though a year later, the hundredth issue did cover the Minus World in Super Mario Bros (a glitch that was then about a decade old).

• Here’s Esther’s talk about the life and death and slippery definiton of the indie game.

• Here’s the collectable card game version of Proćemon.

• And here are Other Covenants and “Cultureship.”
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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
Some (genuinely procedural!) music from PROĆEMON: You Must Catch Them by Esther Alter.

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Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Left-click to play. Right-click to download.