Playing to Lose

A game about gaming, and how we game poorly. Can you learn to game better? Will you be better?

"That's what gaming is all about--sharing games with new people, teaching them the ropes, making friends. The best part is when someone's brand new, then you can see it through their eyes and experience it for the first time all over again."

Originally designed for a course on Video Game Studies, Playing to Lose was heavily revised and polished, including new art and three times as many choices, for the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts 2019 Conference held at the University of California, Irvine. 

The game was presented along with a developer statement, handout, and poster during the SLSArcade. The game is an exercise in showcasing common gatekeeping (and often sexist) behavior in the board gaming community, and offers real life examples of these scenarios from the perspective of a male player performing these gatekeeping and sexist behaviors. In an effort to both highlight examples of this happening in real life and to offer up ways in which these ideals might be challenged (along with potential methods to mitigate this behavior and the troubles that might come with those methods) this game is, while admittedly highly optimistic, open-ended; the various paths, featuring nearly 80 unique scenes, take the player through these different scenarios.