Gamer Mom

by Mordechai Buckman
and Kyler Kelly
In this short character adventure, try to help a dysfunctional family connect with each other by convincing them to play the online game World of Warcraft together.
No gaming experience is required to play this game.
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World of Warcraft® and all associated names are trademarks of Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. Gamer Mom is not, however, authorized by Blizzard or any other corporate entity.
If you would like to keep this game on the internet, please donate to help pay for our hosting costs. If you do, you will get behind-the-scenes material like the script we worked from and Kyler's early sketches.
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 Adventure games (named after the first such computer program, "Colossal Cave Adventure") are stories you play through by making choices. There are adventures in many genres: mystery, comedy, science fiction, fantasy. And as with any long-standing medium, a few dominant formats have emerged, each with their own dedicated fanbases.
Text adventures:
The player types in a command (e.g. "open mailbox" or "go west"), and reads a block of prose describing how the story proceeds from there.
"Choose your own adventure" books:
Similar to text adventures, except that rather than typing in whatever the player wants to do, there are only a handful of options to choose from.
"Point-and-click" adventures:
The story is presented graphically, and the player can click on any object on the screen to try to interact with it. There are a limited number of actions given for any object, to avoid overcomplicating the experience.

Typically, adventure game writers are expected to put as much effort into their mind-bending puzzles (like Gamer Mom's puzzle of getting the family to play World of Warcraft) as they are into making compelling characters. With Gamer Mom, using a dynamic interface where the options and how they are presented reflect the character's state of mind, we're pushing the balance farther in the direction of characterization.

If you are curious about the philosophy of character adventures, check out "I Am Not Myself Today", in which I explain my motivations for everything I've done in Gamer Mom. If you have any questions about how to create your own character adventure, write me an e-mail at Mory@TheBuckmans.com.
Mordechai Buckman
For the first 24 years of my life, I was living with my parents - first in New Jersey, U.S.A., and then in Beit Shemesh, Israel. But since April 30th 2012, I have an apartment in my beloved Jerusalem. I do part-time data entry work to pay the bills. The rest of my time I spend on many eclectic hobbies: acting in amateur theater (My favorite role was Robin Oakapple in the Gilbert & Sullivan opera Ruddigore.), composing music, collecting (and often re-editing) superhero comics, writing an experimental blog and screenplays and analyses of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time... but my life is going to be about making games. I used to hang around at the forum of Adventure Gamers (under the alias MoriartyL) and get into arguments about what adventure games should be like. I intend to have that sort of argument with many different parts of gamism. This is the first game I'm making that I actually think people might care about; you can see my earlier gamistic experiments here.

Kyler Kelly
I like complicated things done as simply as possible. I grew up a physics nerd but studied art in university. My interests in art and physics came together in animation.

I enjoy working with a wide range of techniques and passionately obsess over solving the problems that this can cause when animating.

Games have always drawn me in. As art, I feel that only a minuscule portion of the possibility space has been explored in the realm of game design, and the uncharted space is filled with an untold numbers of interesting challenges.

I'm from Canada. I grew up in Calgary, but now live in Montreal where I went to University and currently work as a freelancer. You can find a much deeper history of my life and thoughts at my blog, or see more of my work at www.kylerkellyanimation.com.



We met through the blogosphere in 2008, and stayed in touch due to interest from each of us in the other's blog and work. For Gamer Mom we collaborated via e-mail, instant messenger and Skype. This is the third game we've made together.