Anti-Games, Fantasy Consoles, and the Rise of Speculative Game Development on Itch.io

Amid the ongoing escalation of anti-worker and anti-player practices across the game industry, the creative practices of developers are shifting: jammers, students, hobbyists, fangamers, and other digital game “zinesters” [3] seek to reclaim game design as a personal art form. This paper examines the emergence and rise of speculative game design communities on itch.io—sites of ongoing creative resistance to corporate encroachment and exclusionary game culture. Specifically, the study documents the activities of “anti-game” jammers and fantasy console development communities on itch.io—two groups that create speculative games (that is, projects that are conceptual, arbitrary, and materially or procedurally unrealizable) to make space for personal play that is divested from mainstream engines, markets, and pretenses of game commodity: 1) Firstly, “anti-game” designers use game jams, zines, and Discord servers to develop and circulate not-games, games that refuse play, and games that cannot be played. These makers create provocative thought experiments, poems, manifestos, and other “unplayable” works that resist hyper-capitalist investment in bigger, longer, more graphically precise, live-service, metaversal, forever-games. 2) Simultaneously, developers on itch build projects for fantasy consoles—such as PICO-8 and Bitsy—and imagine hardware that is mutually-constituted, rooted in community, and decommodified. Ultimately, this paper argues that speculative design practices divest from concerns of “playability,” center unencumbered participation, and allow developers to envision and participate in a post-capitalist imaginary of hardware, software, and play.