Nina Freeman: I don't need to hide anymore, I have games A MAZE. / Berlin 2015
107You might be wondering why someone would want to reveal the intimate details of their life in a game. Even just sharing your personal stories with friends can be scary. Talking about love, sex, paranoia, illness, or anything considered "private sphere" or "personal", can make one feel vulnerable, self-conscious and afraid. I have felt all of these ways while making autobiographical games. However, my fears are eclipsed by my desire to feel a connection with other people. I will talk about feeling alone. I will talk about growing up and hiding my feelings. I will talk about the challenge of expressing my emotions clearly in conversation before I started writing. I will talk about how I learned to distill my stories into words so that I could better understand myself. I will talk about how I found games, and how I used them to take my stories and create experiences that people could engage with. The games I work on act as the connection between myself and other human beings that I have always been searching for. Games taught me how to reconnect myself with the world. They taught me not to be afraid of expressing myself to other people. I don't need to feel alone, and I don't need to hide my stories or my feelings. I can be selfish and make games for and about myself. I don't need to hide anymore, I have games.
Nina Freeman is a programmer and a game designer. She is most often making autobiographical vignette games. She worked as a designer on Indiecade Finalist “how do you Do It?” and IGF Student Honorable Mention “Ladylike.” She is currently working on “Cibele,” a game about an online relationship. She is also one of the co-founders of The Code Liberation Foundation (CLF), an organization that offers free development workshops in order to facilitate the creation of video game titles by women. You can find her work at ninasays.so, and you can follow her on Twitter at @hentaiphd.
A Maze. http://a-maze.net
A Maze. / Berlin http://amaze-berlin.de
Twitter http://twitter.com/amazefest
Facebook http://facebook.com/amaze.festival
Video recording by SAE http://sae.edu
Video editing by Iwan Gabovitch http://youtube.com/qubodup