CHEST SIMULATOR

This prospectus PDF zine / chapbook describes the work in progress CHEST SIMULATOR as of Fall 2023. 

It is a personal arcade game installed in a custom-built ceramic figural arcade cabinet, part 2 of Teddy Max Pozo’s haptic GameBodies project of custom ceramic clay bodies with hollow cavities and conductive elements within which to install video games. 

The work is an example of haptic media: haptic technologies and haptic aesthetics being used together for game art and design, part of process-based research and art making implementing concepts from Pozo’s recurring Haptic Media class at Occidental and Bennington Colleges, with collaborators on the design and teaching of the class including Ryan Rose Aceae, Eugenia Barbuc, Robin LoBuglio, Heather Flowers, Tamara DuPlantis, Eddo Stern, Dietrich (“Squinky”) Squinkifer, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, and Oscar Moralde.

Ceramic artists whose classes influenced the process of the work so far:

• Katherine Tholl [link]
• Adesina [Instagram @adesin.a]

The game CHEST SIMULATOR is a personal game about medical transition steps with multiple queer and trans game inspirations including but not limited to:

Vibratory Doctor (Watling, 1904)

dys4ia (Auntie Pixelante/Anna Anthropy and Liz Ryerson, 2012) [link]

Rat Chaos (Winter Lake, 2012) [link]

All Tomorrow’s Parties (Niamh Schönherr, 2014) [link]

Dominique Pamplemousse (Squinky, 2014) [link]

empathy machine (mattie brice, 2016) [link] 

Bitsy Game Maker (Adam LeDoux, 2017) [link]

The Truly Terrific Traveling Troubleshooter (Jess Rowan Marcotte and Squinky, 2017) 

Almanac of Girlswampwar Territory [...] (Porpentine, 2018) [link]

Bitsy Boutique (candle, 2018) [link]

GENDERWRECKED (Ryan Rose Aceae and Heather Flowers, 2018) [link] 

Secret Little Haven (Victoria Dominowski, 2021) [link]

A playable prototype of the game was not able to be finished for QG Jam 2023, but I wanted to nevertheless release this prospectus/documentation to show the work in process.