How a game about making zines helped me recapture my creativity in lockdown
When I sit down to play games, I am always more drawn to peaceful, lowpressure environments than high-pace adventure. I like those where I get to make a difference but not necessarily through violence. I spend time on my lush island in Animal Crossing and am rewarded for the aesthetically appealing organisation of my furniture. In the stylised windows of Super Mario Maker, I own the very tools that composed some of the defining games of all time and can do whatever I want with them. The play is in the making.
Creation games aren’t new; they go way back to the original SimCity and beyond. But in autumn 2019, during a period of intense, life-altering burnout, I came across Nathalie Lawhead’s Electric Zine Maker and it redefined what I thought I knew about play, creation and the art that can emerge from video game interfaces. Zine Maker is a clever, accessible tool in the disguise of a joyful toy. I had become sick from overwork and had resigned myself to transitioning careers, leaving writing fiction entirely to move into a more practical realm. I was convinced that the connection between the part of my brain that makes art and the part that produces joy was fried forever. But this game sparked it again.
A zine is a handmade, most often photocopied, short-run publication. The form emerged from correspondences and critiques between readers of sci- fi fanzines in the 1930s, but skirted closer to the mainstream in the time of punk and, later, Riot Grrrl. Zines were a place where fans could chat outside of the editorial gaze of music publications, away from cultural gatekeepers. The medium encourages spontaneity, scrappiness, impulsiveness. Their collaged-together aesthetic was the product of necessity and limitation, but became iconic over time.
With the rise of the internet, personal websites and blogs offered a digital alternative to the zine – as did video games, in their way. In the 2012 book, The Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, author and game designer Anna Anthropy posits that zines and games are intrinsically linked: “It’s the creation of an author and her accomplice, the player; it is handmade by the former and personally distributed to the latter. The video game is a zine.”
Electric Zine Maker gives us a playful way to design and create real, print zines once more. The software streamlines the creation of a one-page zine: an A4 page folded into an A8 booklet. The tools are simple: text boxes, image pasting, some paint brushes and filters. A folding guide tells you how to turn it from a flat page into a 3D object once you print it off. It’s all laid out in bright, roaring neon, reminiscent of a CD-Rom from the mid-1990s. It feels like a piece of time travel, a return to childhood tinkering in The Simpsons Cartoon Studio in 1996.
In the background of the homescreen, a school of goldfish swims by, ambient. A pixelated gif of a potato lives in a corner of the window, chirping encouragement at you if you click it. On some of the creative tool pages, tiny emojis are hidden, offering silly dialogue when you find them. A bacon brush lets you paint ribbons of rashers. A button lets you offer your zine to The Void, scrambling the screen and spewing back a piece of randomly generated glitch art. The software’s bright layout and playful text is disarming – and when our guard is down, we can really make interesting things.
My first run of zines made through this software were printed on bright yellow paper, and featured images of bananas cut to look like dolphins. There was some text inside, detailing a little of how burned out I felt, how exhaustion had drained the laughter out of me, and how these dolphins had brought some of it back.
I was spending hours sitting up at night, planning my route out of the industry I had spent my entire life breaking into. I thought that telling the truth, and juxtaposing it with the pictures I found along the way, might
Woody Allen has rebutted renewed allegations, in the HBO documentary Allen v Farrow, that he sexually assaulted his daughter Dylan in 1992, calling the series “a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods”.
In a statement to the Hollywood Reporter, Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, said that film-makers Amy Ziering and Kirby Dick had “spent years surreptitiously collaborating with the Farrows and their enablers to put together a hatchet job riddled with falsehoods”.
They added: “As has been known for decades, these allegations are categorically false. Multiple agencies investigated them at the time and found that, whatever Dylan Farrow may have been led to believe, absolutely no abuse had ever taken place.”
In a TV interview in 2018, Dylan Farrow denied she had been “brainwashed” or “coached” into making allegations against Allen.
Allen v Farrow, which aired its first of four episodes on Sunday on HBO in the US, is described by Ziering and Dick as an investigation into the allegations, which emerged during the custody battle after Allen’s separation from Mia Farrow in 1992. Ziering also denied their film was “a collaboration … with [Dylan Farrow] or the family”.
There has been no response so far from the Farrows regarding the claims made by Allen and Previn about the documentary.
Allen has consistently denied any allegations of sexual abuse against Dylan Farrow, which were investigated in 1992-93 by Connecticut state police, the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale New Haven Hospital, and the New York Department of Social Services; none concluded that sexual assault had taken place.
Mia Farrow and her son Ronan appear in Allen v Farrow, while Allen and Previn declined to participate. The statement says Allen and Previn “were approached less than two months ago and given only a matter of days ‘to respond’. Of course, they declined to do so.” Dylan’s brother Moses, who has defended Allen from the allegations, also reportedly declined to appear in the film. The Guardian spoke to the documentary’s lead investigator Amy Herdy who claims to have reached out to Allen’s team back in June 2018 but “got crickets back”. She added: “I know that they got my requests because I had an assistant on the phone” who said they were getting her emails.
Ziering and Dick have previously worked together on a string of hard-hitting documentaries about sexual abuse, including the Oscar-nominated The Invisible War, which focused on rape in the US military and The Hunting Ground, about sex assaults on university campuses.