The aim of this project is the development of a new approach to queer formalism in games.

To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, unpolitical art is only that which espouses accepted ideologies. Art which aims to challenge these ideologies risks dismissal from audiences who regard it as political. There is a potential remedy in formalism. Formalist art communicates ideology foremost through the formal elements of a medium. For games, these formal elements include data and procedure. Formalism brings obfuscation, as understanding data and procedure requires extended interaction. Because of this, formalist games can function as ideological Trojan Horses. But this advantage is also a flaw, as the Greeks inside must wait for the audience to open the horse's door. If this never happens, the work fails as a piece of rhetoric. Queer formalist games, for example, risk being misread as participating in heteronormativity.

Two things are proposed. The first is a framework for understanding ideology in art. Ideology can inscribed through formalism, as well as represented through imaging. These are orthogonal approaches. Failing both, it is absent; succeeding both, it is present.

The second proposal is an approach to queer formalism in games called Opening the Horse. This approach seeks to maintain the qualities of formalist work while mitigating misreadings. A game enacting this method at first only inscribes ideology, adding representation at a later stage of interaction. This collapses the distance of metaphor as a kind of failsafe to make clear what the game is speaking to. A series of tabletop games created by the author serve to illustrate this design approach.

Through the lens of ritual studies and playful design, this paper reevaluates past traditions of collecting to reimagine new rituals of offering. { remnants } of a { ritual } is an exploration of memory crystallization and social exchange; a new framework for offering as manifested by a site-specific, autotopographical wunderkammer. This immersive installation is a refraction of my nostalgia for Venezuela, and an invitation to reimagine our relationship to diaspora.

By creating a cycle of offering and receiving, { remnants } of a { ritual } reinterprets the wunderkammer as a site for social healing: subverting hegemonic capitalist structures to serve as a catalyst for speculative play. Pulling from notions of transmutation and alchemy, I examine representations of memory, ritual, immersion, participation, and aesthetics to deconstruct the emergent processes that led to the development of { remnants } of a { ritual }

Wandering is an interactive installation which reflects people's physical and emotional entanglement with the screen devices and the Internet. It uses motion tracking technology and visual art programming to create an addictive experience for rethinking the relationship between human and digital technology. This project consists of three themes: how people use digital tools as a substitute for their own ability, how people continuously respond to and are distracted by app notifications, and how people create and share information in everyday life through screen devices.

This thesis explores the development of the digital game A Place to Be. The project itself is approached as an experiment in exploring two major concepts as applied to the artistic medium of a digital game: non-humanoid player characters and death. A Place to Be is described as a game that tries to build an empathetic connection between players and their non-humanoid character, and capture a sense of the “sublime” qualities of life and death. The project converses with other, similar games along with media and game theorists, testing and challenging notions proposed by both professional game developers and thinkers. Where is a player when they play a digital game? How can you use games to offer new perspectives? Can games talk about death in complex ways? These are the types of questions asked and answered here in this thesis. Finally, the results of this experiment, both as successes, failures, and discoveries are studied throughout, in the hopes of contributing to the success of related future projects.