User:Ffuok/sandbox

Kara Stone (born 1989) is an independent Canadian video game designer, artist, and academic.

Stone has produced a number of notable independent games over the course of her career, including Medication Mediation, Sext Adventure , and Ritual of the Moon. Her work largely focuses on the intersection of game design, disability, and gender. She is also a member of the Different Games collective.

Early life
Stone was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. . She is a graduate of Etobicoke School of the Arts and holds both a BFA in Film Production and an MA in Communication and Culture from York University. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Film & Digital Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Career
Stone's earliest artworks were not in the medium of video games. One notable early work, 2012's Polaroid Panic, consisted of Polaroid photos Stone would capture of her face whenever she experienced a panic attack. Stone's first significant games work came two years later, with Medication Meditation, published in collaboration with Dames Making Games. Medication Meditation consists of an "unwinnable compilation of activities", each of which reflecting an experience associated with living with mental illness. The game was well-received, and saw favorable coverage in outlets such as Kill Screen and The Atlantic.

That same year, Stone released one of her most popular games, Sext Adventure, written by Stone and developed by Nadine Lessio. In Sext Adventure, the player has a sexual encounter with a fictional robot via text message (later expanded to web browsers), that eventually subverts and challenges traditional notions of what a "sexting" conversation looks like. While the game begins like a normal sexting conversation (including real nudity) eventually the sexting robot becomes "confused" and begins to produce errors, including mistaking its own presumed gender and the gender of the player. The game concludes in one of twenty different endings.

Stone's most recent game is Ritual of the Moon, which was released in 2019. Over the course of 28 real-time days, Ritual of the Moon slowly unveils the narrative of a witch who has been exiled to the moon. The art style of the game is composed entirely of scanned and digitally manipulated images. Due to its daily structure, much of the coverage of the game was diaristic in nature, including a full 28-day series on RockPaperShotgun.

Selected publications

 * Stone, Kara (2018). “Time and Reparative Game Design.” Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research. Vol 18, 3. December 2018. http://gamestudies.org/1803/articles/stone
 * Stone, Kara (2019). “What Can Play: The Potential of Non-Human Players”. Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Study and Thought. Vol 7 No 1 (2019): Muddied Waters: Decomposing the Anthropocene. https://pivot.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/pivot/article/view/40291