kill design (we are human)

YOU MAY REACH A POINT AT WHICH YOU NEED TO KILL THE UNITY EDITOR THROUGH YOUR TASK MANAGER

kill design (we are human) is a project critiquing ideas of labor, creation, and consumption in the world of games. It began as a class assignment for Queer and Trans Game Studies, in which we had to subvert the affordances of a software under the lens of game design. I chose the Unity editor. Special thanks to Professor Whit Pow.

There are three parts to this project.
1. The Unity Project
2. The Unity Build
3. The Essay

The primary inspiration of this project is Robert Yang's manifesto, KILL UNITY; WE ARE ENGINES

The paper is meant to be a mix of academic ideas and personal experience; a marker of where my head is at, rather than a perfectly crafted argument. If you have feedback, comments, responses, or questions about the essay, send them my way! I really did not have it edited much. These are loose ideas that have been floating around in my head and I wanted to just put it somewhere. No beta, we die like design.

At this juncture of games—and juncture of AI and fascism and surveillance and machinery—kill design. Infuse the keyboard with your blood and bound the framerate to your heartbeat. Make your syntax your poetry and destroy the engine from the inside out. You are human.

Works that informed and inspired this project:

• KILL UNITY; WE ARE ENGINES - Robert Yang
• Time and Reparative Game Design - Kara Stone
• Janky Controls and Embodied Play - M.D. Schmalzer
• Gamer Theory - McKenzie Wark
• The Work of Postcolonial Game Studies in the Play of Culture - Soraya Murray
• The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software - Benjamin Nicoll and Brendan Keogh
• Human After All by Daft Punk