2017 Arcade

We’re happy to announce the 2017 lineup for the QGCon Arcade! The QGCon Arcade celebrates queer works and the work of queer creators; we hope you’ll join us in playing differently.

Anthrotarianthrotari_screenshot_2 (1)

J. C. Holder

Anthrotari is a coming of age visual novel about growing up as a queer furry on the 90’s Internet. Join Alex as they reconnect with now-distant friends, make new ones, and discover a dark secret at the heart of an old computer that threatens all those very friendships. Can you help Alex save their connection to the digital world?


Cactus Blue Motelcactusblue

Astrid Dalmady

Cactus Blue Motel is a piece of interactive fiction where you play as Maria Elena, a young girl on the last road trip with her friends before college. And though they’ve been driving through the American Southwest for days, things don’t begin to change until they pull up to the quiet and lonely Cactus Blue Motel.

It’s a piece about loneliness, about uncertainty, about moving forward. Or maybe it’s about taking a break.


DAPHNEdaphne

Sara Drake, Hannah Hogwood

DAPHNE is a xenofeminist horror game that interrogates gender as it is embedded with increasing frequency into our digital technologies. Play as a user in intimate conversation with your artificially intelligent digital assistant named Daphne and discover a failed disembodied queer utopia and the inhabitants trapped within.


Dominique Pamplemousse & Dominique Pamplemousse & Dominique Pamplemousse in- -Combinatorial Explosion!-
Dominique Pamplemousse in:
“Combinatorial Explosion!”

Dietrich “Squinky” Squinkifer

In this sequel to 2013’s breakout musical hit, Dominique Pamplemousse in “It’s All Over Once The Fat Lady Sings!”, our favourite genderqueer private detective discovers that, through the power of multiple endings from the previous game, they have been cloned! Join the two Dominiques as they traverse surrealist landscapes and interrogate increasingly bizarre characters in order to answer a very important question: which one of them is canon?


Downtown BrownsDTBbanner

Emilia Yang, Tonia Beglari, Allison Comrie, Jazmin Garcia, Luciana Chamorro

Downtown Browns is an interactive web series highlighting the decisions faced by women of color in Los Angeles. Each episode follows a different bright woman through a unique situation, and utilizes interactive decisions to build intimate understandings of the dynamics challenging diverse city life. #DowntownBrowns is an homage to the families separated by deportations, to those villified by islamophobia and to those who hit glass ceilings because of the color of the skin. At the same time, we are inspired by the achievements of dreamers.


Ending the CycleEnding the Cycle

Peter Wonica

Ending the Cycle is a board game designed to teach about abusive relationships, with a focus on storytelling and queer relationships. Players create unique characters caught in abusive relationships. By playing cards, players emulate real life events as they, and their character, try to leave an abusive relationship. The game offers people a safe space to develop a greater understanding on how systems such as socio-economic status, sexuality/gender identity, and social connections affect one’s experience leaving an abusive relationship.


EnthymemaEnthymema

Alayna Cole


Enthymema
is a personal experience designed to be displayed as an art installation. By asking you to write on your skin, the game encourages you to self-reflect and carry your thoughts and choices with you after the game experience ends. Enthymema was originally created as part of the Serenity Forge Game Jam, where it won the Jury Award and received an honourable mention for the Audience Award. The theme of the game jam was ‘health’, and this title explores how self-reflection and decision-making can help us maintain our physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. You can share your experience with the game on social media using ‘#enthymema’.


Glitter Pitsglitterpits

Kat Jones

Glitter Pits is a celebration of the ability of queerness to challenge what is considered “normal” in a given society. While queer is often used as an adjective, it can also be a verb. Glitter Pits is an analog game about actively challenging what we’ve been told is beautiful. It asks players to question dominant assumptions about beauty and their relation to gender, race, ability, class, age, and sexuality. Players begin by compiling a list of mainstream “beauty tips” that reduce beauty to a limited, often unattainable, definition. Players then work together to decide which tips to destroy and which tips to “queer”: changing the tips in some way so that they make people feel beautiful rather than policed and marginalized. Finally the group works together to create new “beauty tips”: things that they do to feel beautiful, that are not necessarily related to physical appearance. This game is meant to be fun, empowering, and political.


Like Campinglikecamping

smolghost

like camping is an experiment, an exploration, and an act of radical softness. like camping is it’s own world, a small collection of forested islands that are contained in their own tentiverse that you move through exploring with a pillow that acts as a touchpad. With experiences that soothe, that will create an atmosphere that gives a place of respite and a chance for those to heal from the world for at least a little while. A digital world that changes for the benefit of the player, to allow for more beauty to be created through curiosity.

like camping, in all its hopes and dreams is an escape. It’s a vacation. It’s the small ways you can leave the world behind for brief moments, and to rest, to play, to get lost in an experience.


L U C A H_QGCon_Arcade_Image (1)L U C A H

melessthanthree


L U C A H is an nightmare action-rpg about finding oneself. Influenced by personal struggles with identity and mental illness, L U C A H draws on horror, songwriting, and arcade action to present a singular experience of struggle and self-discovery.


Mongueramonguera

Gabriela Aveiro-Ojeda

In Monguera, you are making your way back home, but find a fallen warrior on the path. Keep walking and forget her or stop to witness her final moments of life.


Monster Girls Gaynerations: monstergirlsgaynerations
Ghoulfriends For Life

Jennifer Stienstra, Keana Almario, Yani Wang, Shepherd Cameron

In Monster Girls Gaynerations: Ghoulfriends For Life, you are a bartender cursed to be a ghost for all eternity and your only hope to break the spell is the four monster girls who volunteered to help you. Choose between a werewolf, a witch, a slime girl, and a medusa. Make the right choices and perhaps you’ll find true love along the way.


Not CrazyNot Crazy Logo

smolghost

Not Crazy is an autobiographical game that didn’t start out as an autobiographical game but through the process of making became one due to personal and visceral nature of living with mental illness. In Not Crazy you go through the week in the life of someone with mental illness. Completing mundane day to day tasks that range from eating, cleaning, to dissociating. Each day repeats in the same ways, becoming a blur into one another as the simple things that define your illness become the only thing punctuating the differences. Not Crazy is based on personal experiences but through the common experiences of all those that live with mental illness it becomes part of their story too, knowing that they aren’t alone in these experiences.


OTIN squareOn the Internet, Nobody

Matthew R.F. Balousek

On The Internet, Nobody is a tabletop roleplaying game about communities and gatekeeping. One player takes the role of a moderator for a small internet forum, while the other players take on the role of members. Players work together to ferret out the undesirable members of the community as they go about posting on the forum. On The Internet, Nobody is part of the “Opening the Horse” series of games that attempt to communicate queer rhetoric through game systems and concealing fictions.


Queer Quest: All in a Gay’s Workqueer quest

Queermo Games

Queer Quest is a queer-as-fuck point-and-clit adventure game. Inspired by classic gems like Monkey Island, Kings Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry, but set in a queer community in the pacific northwest. You play as Lupe, a long haired butch with a heart of gold. She lives with her babely girlfriend, Alexis, that is until one day when Alexis gets kidnapped! You gotta help Lupe by deciphering clues, talking to lovable weirdos, and navigating self care.


Real Army SimulatorCoverTw

The Really Serious Game Company

Real Army Simulator is the often humorous, slightly satirical and sometime real account of what is really like to be a soldier in the army. Pulled from Yifat and a few of her personal friends real account of their mandatory army service in the Israeli army, Real Army Simulator tries to show a more realistic view of the army and what it’s like to be part of it. The game presents life in the army as being part of a large bureaucratic and mundane machine rather than the glorified heroic experience often depicted in game.


REVISIONSrevisions

Steve Cha
REVISIONS is a series of minigames chronicling the life of the game’s creator, Steve Cha. The first half of the game adheres to vignette-games traditions. The game’s second act revisits the vignettes and enables the player to see past the illusions games employ. Ultimately, REVISIONS aims to show how the illusions used in gamemaking are metaphorical to illusions of memory.


Ritual of the Moonritualofthemoon

Kara Stone

Ritual of the Moon is a 28 day long multi-narrative game exploring loneliness, power, and healing. Once discovering her powers, The Earth’s Council exiles the witch to the moon to live out the rest of her life looking at the earth she can never go back to. The player spends 5 minutes each day over the 28 days reflecting on her experiences on Earth, meditating at her altar, and making a life or death choice.


robo-tea:1cup!cover-robo-tea-1

Josie Noronha
Need a break? Let’s relax with a soothing cup of robo-tea! This dating sim is about consideration and designed for self-soothing. In this all-robot world you’re Galine, a guardbot who’s been given a curious task… Through the path you choose, learn more about the bots around you and go on a cute, calm date!


robo-tea:2ndServing!cover-robo-tea-2

Josie Noronha

robo-tea:2ndServing! is a dating sim about polyamorous relationships and communication. In this game you are Cors, a cute bot who works to make sure the all-robot planet Verdande runs smoothly. This time, xe’s helping out a special event, and is preparing to meet (and date) xir favourite musicians!


SnapshotSnapshot

Alayna Cole

Snapshot is a semi-autobiographical ‘snapshot’ of my personal journey towards realising and accepting my sexuality. This game encourages the player to interact with the bedroom of a teenage girl, with each interaction unlocking the next section of narrative. The game explores the importance of the media we consume in the formation of our identities, even in ways we don’t completely understand, as well as the other internal and external factors that can guide us towards determining who we are.


Squad Force HeroesSFH square (1)

Matthew R.F. Balousek

Squad Force Heroes is a tabletop roleplaying game about squads of transforming superheroes, inspired by shows like Power Rangers and Sailor Moon. Players collaboratively build their crimefighting squad together, and then take turns narrating their actions with each other using a deck of playing cards and a series of simple roleplaying prompts. Squad Force Heroes is part of the “Opening the Horse” series of games that attempt to communicate queer rhetoric through game systems and concealing fictions.


The Great Unfriending: A Player’s Handbook

Josef Nguyen, Andrew Culp

The Great Unfriending: A Player’s Guide challenges the recent popular discourse critical of unfriending practices on social networks. Through the form of a player’s role-playing handbook, The Great Unfriending advocates deliberate and thoughtful management of social media connections, including using the powerful act of unfriending. The handbook frames players as heroic agents tasked to neutralize the dangers of the network by presenting the network as a hostile cyberpunk wasteland rife with fantastic enemies and hazards that are particularly antagonistic, threatening, and vile toward women, people of color, and other marginalized identities. The handbook educates players about the fantasies of public discourse, free speech, and anonymity that actually facilitate flaming, trolling, and other forms of online/offline harassment. The Great Unfriending encouraging players to adopt new heroic roles, powers, and strategies to confront and take down the network.


The Longest Couchlongestcouch

Sean Wejebe

In The Longest Couch, you play as 2 squares carrying each other around through various levels – but you also play as the 2 boys playing the game that you’re playing! In between play sessions, scooch them closer to each other on the long couch that separates them from their love!


trulyterrific (1)The Truly Terrific Traveling Troubleshooter

Handsome Foxes in Vests
The Truly Terrific Traveling Troubleshooter is a radically soft suitcase game about emotional labour and otherness. This physical/digital hybrid roleplaying game for two people fits entirely inside of a carry-on suitcase. One player takes on the role of the Troubleshooter and the other is a customer with a trouble; assisted by the Troubleshooter’s toolkit, the players work together to find a solution. In this game, we speculate about what would happen if emotional labour were valued as it should be — as in, the same way we value other labour.


You Muyoumustbe18oroldertoenterst be 18 or Older to Enter

Seemingly Pointless

From Seemingly Pointless, “You Must be 18 or Older” is an ASCII collage game that investigates the social stigma surrounding pre-teen youth exploring their budding sexuality. You are alone at home, and you heard about this thing called porn at school.