#Art. Code. Words.
Nicky Case plays with play. They make interactive non-fiction, to help people understand the world, and interactive stories, to help people understand themselves.
website: ncase.me
twitter: @ncasenmare
github: ncase
It's also been a really long time since they've needed to write a résumé, so they're going to assume this pseudo-third-person biography plus the following stuff shall suffice:
##Personal Projects (in totally-not-chronological order)
Parable of the Polygons (Dec 2014) is an interactive essay on systemic bias. It was made in collaboration with popular edu-YouTuber, Vi Hart, and has garnered over 3 million plays and writeups in WIRED, Washington Post, BoingBoing, New York Magazine, The Atlantic's CityLab, and Salon. Parable of the Polygons was also nominated in the Games For Change festival for Most Innovative.
Coming Out Simulator (June 2014) is a semi-autobiographical interactive story about my coming out as bisexual to my conservative Asian parents. A half-true story about half-truths. It's been written up on The Verge & Fast Company, and nominated for Best Narrative in the Independent Games Festival.
I'd Like To Be A Machine (work in progress - ETA End of August 2015), following in the vein of Polygons, will also be an interactive essay. It's about psychological conditioning, how it's used for good and bad, all wrapped up in a personal story of my struggles with anxiety. By combining interactivity with a personal story and real educational material, hopefully this'll have a huge impact.
Explorable Explanations (Mar 2015) is a hub of all the interactive essays that exist so far, including my own. Because there's been a huge movement slowly growing around this idea in the last few months. Carnegie Mellon is hosted a hackathon for explorables on May 2015, specifically citing my Parable of the Polygons as an inspiration! (I also did the opening keynote for them, see below.)
Nothing To Hide (Feb 2014) was a satirical videogame about social media and self-surveillance. I published an hour-long playable demo early last year, and used it to crowdfund ~$40,000 to fully develop the title. I wrote my own crowdfunding software and website, too! Sadly, I had to cancel the project, but I issued refunds to everybody, so I guess now it's all Even Stevens. The game has been written up about on Forbes, BoingBoing, and PopSci.
The Open Bundle (July 2013) was a crowdfunding campaign to release a bundle of game art, music, and code to the public domain. It was successful, raising $12000 for six game artists (including myself), and the assets are now all uncopyrighted. This is further evidence of the power & potential for crowdfunding to help create a post-copyright world, a post-artificial-scarcity economy.
The Public Domain Jam (May 2014) was a week-long hackathon for game developers to make games based off a public domain story, and release their game to the public domain. Give and take! The winning entry (out of 60 entries) won a $1000 prize I put up. Hopefully, this contest-with-prize method can prove to be a repeatable way to incentivize new public domain content.
Sight & Light (Mar 2014) was my first interactive blog post, a gamedev tutorial on how to make the 2D lighting effect in Nothing To Hide. It simultaneously hit the frontpages of Hacker News, Reddit, and Imgur, so that's cool.
Magnificent 2D Matrix (July 2015) was an interactive explainer of 2D matrices. It hit the frontpage of nowhere, but I like it, and it's recent, so it's on this list for now.
Craftyy (2012-2013) was something Jason Church & I worked on a few years ago. It was a tool for people to make HTML5 games right in their browser, remix each other's code, reuse each other's art, and collaboratively build open web games together. Kind of like Scratch + Github + Unity. We even got into the Mozilla WebFWD program with this project! It was a flop, but hey, at least I learnt stuff.
##Talks
Eyeo 2015 Festival: A conference for creative coders. I gave a 45-minute-long talk called Systems, Stories & Shenanigans, interweaving lessons from my art with a personal story of how it changed my life.
Public Domain FTW: A one-day salon organized by Creative Commons and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, about public domain games. The salon also featured two of my public domain games, and I was interviewed on stage by Ryan Merkley, CEO of Creative Commons.
Now I Get It! Jam: I did the opening keynote for Carnegie Mellon University's hackathon for interactive education-y stuff. They specifically cited my Parable of the Polygons as an inspiration, too!
Upcoming Talks: I'm going to be speaking at XOXO 2015, and IndieCade 2015.
##Work And/Or Education, Coz The Two Interwine A Lot.
2013-2015: Was in the Thiel Fellowship program.
2013: Was in the Mozilla WebFWD startup accelerator program.
2012: Software Engineer at Pokki, a San Diego app/games startup.
2011-2012: Software Engineer at Electronic Arts.
2009-2011: Studied Computer Science at the University of British Columbia.