Talk Transcript: Spring 2021 #OSSTA Lecture Series (my talk on tiny non-commercial tools, fantasy consoles, and tools-as-games)

For the past few months the Electric Zine Maker was part of the STUDIO’s OSSTA Residency Program (at Carnegie Mellon).
They have been funding and supporting development of the Zine Maker. They are to thank for the comming UI re-design, and all the new features that have been coming to it. You can follow them on Twitter here (they host some amazing things).

As of writing this I just finished giving my talk in their OSSTA Lecture Series. Speakers included Everest Pipkin (who just published this vital repository of Open Source tools), Marina Kittaka (of Zonelets), and Kate Compton (who needs no introduction). Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are still upcoming (here’s the website with more information). I’m looking forward to A.M. Darke’s talk because their work on the Open Source Afro Hair Library is truly vital.
…So yeah, there’s A LOT going on here.

Bellow is the recorded stream from today. It’s worth watching!

Following is my talk transcript in which I talk about the intersection between game design and tools, tiny non-commercial tools, fantasy consoles… and just the general value of everything happening in that space.

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My name is Nathalie, and I go by alienmelon online and in my work.
I make weird software, tools, net-art, and experimental games. You can find more of my work in this slide. I’ve been making stuff like this since the late 90’s, and very much love everything about weird art on computers.

I’m here to talk a bit about my tool, the Electric Zine Maker, and how I think the intersection between games and tools is really exciting!
There are so many tools out there, built by small developers, many of them free. It’s an amazing space that just keeps growing. I’m constantly watching devs post tools to, and it always surprises me.

“Tool” is a pretty flexible concept here. Each one is different. Many of them explore their own restrictions, or simplicity, in interesting ways. Many of them treat the concept of “tool” more as a game.

I think, if you do anything generative on computers, and don’t know what to do with whatever you just made, turning that into a little tool that people can use to do stuff like tweak values, play around with some visuals, and just export whatever they made, goes a long way.
Coming from more of a game design angle, it’s easy to overthink interactivity, and want to build on systems in ways that get really complicated. If you look at tool design, often the opposite mindset is the most rewarding. Just letting people play, without a set goal or agenda, allows for a really meaningful relationship to develop between the computer and person using it.

Small indie tools are ways to explore art fantasies. It’s kind of how I started viewing all this after building the Electric Zine Maker.

So, for a little context, I’ll show you the Electric Zine Maker…

The Electric Zine Maker is something of a digital print shop, and art toy.
It’s built so you can easily make print-ready zines.

I made it because I needed a way of easily making zines without messing around with templates in complicated art tools. I asked on Twitter if people would be interested in a tiny zine art program (that lets you draw in black and white, and throws stuff in the 8-page fold template)… people were excited about it!
I asked mainly because I wanted to make sure that nobody else made something like this, and that I wasn’t encroaching on someone else’s turf.
The Electric Zine Maker grew really fast because of all the interest. I originally thought that only my close circle of friends would care about it (because it’s so weird and different), but people all over the world got into it.
There was an artist that made a peace zine to protest war and American imperialism in the middle east, with facts and information, as legitimate literature to give to people for awareness.
Other artists made some really beautiful Black Lives Mater literature in it. Many others shared autobiographical work that they created with it.
There’s a lot of art that was really touching. I had no idea people would use it to make such a variety of stuff.

The Electric Zine Maker is really experimental. You have your basic tools like drawing, importing images, and text… then you have all these other weird and silly tools.

Like there’s a brush called the “bacon brush” which lets you paint streaks of lines, or an “Egg brush” that leaves uncontrollable splatters as you draw. Tools like the “Egg brush” let you tweak their values so you can even glitch them and draw with those glitches.

You select a zine template that you want to make (there are a number of these like booklets, or the classic 8-Page fold), and then there’s a menu with a bunch of panels.
These are the zine’s pages. You fill out each page with your art. Once you’re done, you just print it. The art is automatically put into a template for you, so you don’t have to mess with placement and proportions, and all that. It makes otherwise complicated zine formats easy for people to get into.
I view it as a good starting point into zine making because it helps people wrap their head around placement and folding.
Each template comes with fold instructions, and a video. It’s built to be as print ready as possible.

The Electric Zine Maker is a very glitch art centric tool too. There’s lots of glitch capabilities in it that allow you to kind of “break” your art in a more or less controlled way.
Attaining glitch art itself, and just the concept of glitching things, is pretty uncontrollable. I wanted to make something that makes glitching stuff as accessible as possible, and even let you incorporate that as if it was a medium that you can paint with.

Many of the tools here I made because I was inspired by projects like BECOME A GREAT ARTIST IN JUST 10 SECONDS. If you haven’t already, you definitely should check that one out too.
I used to talk a lot about how I think it’s ironic that so many commercial art tools on computers try to mimic physical media like watercolors, pencils… when computers have their own unique visual language that just doesn’t seem to get made accessible enough, or get tapped into enough.
You kind of have to jump through hoops to get stuff like good glitch art to work. Making glitch art usually requires some kind of computer literacy. I really appreciate it when tools try to find ways of making glitching more attainable to people without that know-how.

So when you see these smaller, experimental tools, that focus on computer styles like pixel art, or glitch art, I think that’s really beautiful.
These tools kind of open up potential for exploring other art styles. They let you create your own unique visual language that’s native to computers. These are styles and aesthetics that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for our computer culture…

So the Electric Zine Maker explores a lot of that. You have ASCII art, image glitching, intentionally breaking things, painting with perlin noise or gradient rainbows… The stuff people make in it ends up always surprising me.
Just how people come up with interesting ways to combine all these tools is beautiful to see.

You would think that if a tool is too different, then people wouldn’t know how to apply it. You would assume that it’s useless for how unusual it is. I’ve learned that this is absolutely not the case. If you give people really weird tools, and allow some practical application (like making it print ready, in a template, for zines) people really get into discovering ways to apply those tools. They become important to people.

Links in this slide…
Cool Tools on itch
Electric Zine Maker
Doom in Pico-8 (POOM)

All of that creative philosophy is why I think movements like the Fantasy Console movement are so exciting.
Each one of these tools, these tiny weird or arbitrary platforms, opens up these really unique art styles that are specific to that space.

Bitsy games look uniquely Bitsy. People explore what it means to express themselves in these restrictions that end up not really being restrictions at all. They are the reason why creating for that particular platform is so unique.
I would almost say that there’s a certain therapeutic aspect to building for tools like Bitsy, Pico-8, Twine, and so on… because the restrictions kind of control the scope. You’re discouraged from going overboard. When that happens, you’re placed in this headspace of just playing around. There’s so much need for that, especially with the creative burnout people often experience when using larger tools.

I think an interesting point could be made about Bitsy because the art style in it is SO restricted, and therefore unmistakably Bitsy, that it really doesn’t matter how professional of a game designer or artist you are, or how amateur you are, games made in Bitsy will pretty much all be of the same caliber. By nature, Bitsy is unavoidably egalitarian.

The restrictions of these tools are what makes work made in them so recognizable too. Pico-8 games are unmistakably Pico-8. Then people try so hard to push the boundaries of creating for it and get stuff like Doom ported to Pico-8, and you have this wonderfully weird visual echo of Doom on something that probably never was intended for a game like that. The art we enjoy from these spaces is almost like a fingerprint it’s so unique.

Each of these tools lets us explore a new type of creative expression, and that’s why I think tools from smaller devs are so valuable.

In a similar vein to exploring visual styles that is distinct to certain platforms (or eras of computer history)… The Electric Zine Maker is presently built as an AIR project because it was my undertaking to “preserve” a lot of these old effects that people made in Flash. Each of these platforms has a visual style that’s unique to them. In Flash’s case it represents a creative era on the web. It’s kind of in a prototype stage where I’m trying to save as much of that historic footprint as I can, so that it can live on in the zines people make.
So people use the Electric Zine Maker and get to enjoy what I saved, or re-created, from that era.
To me, the Electric Zine Maker is as much of a weird, arbitrary code preservation project as it is an art tool. I wanted to save a snapshot from that era, and pay homage to it by letting people still experience it.
It’s also interesting to hear how much people pick up on that. They often describe it as very Web 1.0.

Every tool, or platform, lets you speak a creative language unique to it. It sometimes becomes unmistakable and almost something impossible to re-create anywhere else because it’s such a unique type of footprint of that platform.
The aesthetic is kind of an expression of a tool’s history. Flash grew from a lot of different needs, demands, directions, use-cases, so the type of visual style that came out of that is unmistakable to that certain era of internet history.
This is a big reason that I think all technology (languages, IDE’s, creative environments) is beautiful. All of it offers something special.
So, to me, it was important to preserve this specific mode of expression in a tool like the Electric Zine Maker.

Links in this slide…
More on Fantasy Consoles…
How a game about making zines helped me recapture my creativity in lockdown
‘Electric Zine Maker’ Thrives as a Creative Open Source DIY Tool

To me, the intersection between tool design and game design is a really interesting area. Tools don’t really HAVE to be “just tools”, they can be a creative type of expression in themselves.

For example, the Fantasy Console is described as software that simulates virtual hardware, with limited functionality. The limitations are intentional, and pretty much what make them so appealing. They encourage creating and sharing tiny retro-like games, or programs, built in any of these fantasy languages or tools.

In all of this, the arbitrary limitation part is key. It’s so weird to say that, but the fact that any of these tools have such strict limitations is (like I keep saying) what makes them so creatively liberating.
It’s not because people need to be challenged. I think they need the disarming aspect that comes from something that just honestly exists for the sake of play. These tools ask you not to take what you are doing in them too seriously. They’re inviting because they themselves speak to amateurism for how they present themselves and are.
You can’t even say that something like Bitsy or Pico-8 are “like Unity”. They’re not professional commercial software made by a corporation. They are in no way scary for that reason.

For example, I’ve gotten A LOT of feedback from people using the Electric Zine Maker telling me how it helped them through a creative rut, or helped them get their love of writing back.
This slide has a couple of links to these articles.
It was so fun to see that too. Two articles, by two different journalists, that were published on The Observer and The Guardian, very close together… reflected EXACTLY that experience.
Both of them talked about how the tool helped them.
I find that almost humorous because many aspects of the Electric Zine Maker are not that well implemented. Placing an image is harder than it needs to be. You kind of have to fight with it to get it just right… By all accounts this tool is “bad”, if you’re going to compare how features are implemented to commercial software standards.

That is why tho it is therapeutic to people. It doesn’t let you get too professional. Things like this remind you that creativity is play, and that’s why we all fell in love with that to begin with.
I think that’s something that gets lost in professional commercial software.

Links in this slide…

Here are a bunch of interesting ones to examine…

There’s a playful aspect to many of these tools that make them more like games than “just tools”.
Like the Electric Zine Maker, there are many examples of tools that carry with them some kind of fictional, game-like, or playful element to what they allow you to do.

Lovely Composer is a music creation tool that’s reminiscent to things like Mario Paint. The UI is adorable and game-like. The space it places you in for creating music is very playful, in spirit of a game console music editor.

sok-stories is a silly game and story creation tool that lets you assemble elements, and share what you make. The way it presents itself is in this adorable, and silly way, that’s ridiculously disarming.

KateLabs is a small game maker that places you in a 3D space, and you assemble little scenes (stories), and have some interactivity that you can apply to things. I think this one is interesting because the developer basically gave you access to all of the assets from her games, and gave you a creative space to use them in.

There are examples like ART SQOOL which incorporate art creation into the game. You can save what you create in it. The point of it is to create art, and I think it’s really interesting how the the theming surrounding what is basically an art tool with a story applied to it, encourages you to make really silly things inspired by the context it places you in.

Then, completely on the other side of the spectrum, you have classics like Okami (published for the PlayStation 2), where drawing or painting is incorporated as part of the game. It’s often remembered as being a beautiful and therapeutic experience. I think the drawing aspect of the game helps it be that.

So all these, in varying degrees, are playful, game-like, or use creating art as part of the game.
This is a really interesting intersection to look at for how a tool actually can be like, and how creating things can be a game in itself.

Creating art is very personal. When you place people in a unique space for making that art, it’s kind of like giving them a certain “headspace”. The framing surrounding your tool encourages people to be creative in certain ways.

The final example in all this, that I feel really drives the point across, is Library of Babble. This one is kind of like a meandering writing exercise. You are placed in this beautiful abstract landscape that you wonder through. You discover writing left behind by people, and you can leave behind writing.
The way it allows you to be creative, and the space it creates for you to be creative in, strongly informs the type of writing people make in it. It’s moody, introspective, very meditative…

So things like this get really interesting because they all show how tools encourage certain types of creativity.

The Electric Zine Maker kind of has this fictional universe that you discover if you explore the tool. There’s this ARG you can find,, which is a fictional technology that the Zine Maker is supposedly built in.
When people find this, it kind of re-enforces the idea that this tool is something of a fantasy tool. It’s a fictional relic.
Using the tool is like being part of that fantasy world.

Links in this slide…
About desktop pets & virtual companions: discussing the inhabitants that fill the void of our digital spaces collection: desktop pets & virtual companions…

If you look at the push and pull between the personalization of virtual spaces like the desktop, and the corporatization of that, you see how meaningful it keeps being for people to be able to customize, personalize, basically “break” that corporate tone that always hovers over our digital spaces.
Things like desktop pets remain relevant because they kind of humanize that cold, indifferent, professional environment that the desktop is.

There’s this desire for people to make this more of a home than it is a system that we are just working on.
I think it’s interesting how we came from having this really strong Windows 2000 and Windows XP theming community, where people would change things all the way from alert sounds, the startup screen, completely “wreck” the default look… to our current Windows version that seems so coldly corporate with actual banner ads constantly interrupting your experience.
So professional software, like anything coming from Adobe’s Creative Cloud, really feels the same to people. It’s corporate and intimidating in many ways.

This is why nostalgia for things like Kid Pix or Kai’s Power Goo is so strong. There will always be a need for software that runs completely counter to the corporate and capitalist stuff we view as normal.
Photoshop is all about maximizing output, streamlining, productivity oriented… it’s perfect at outputting professional stuff. Constantly being placed in digital environments like that can also wear artists down. Corporate professionalism, when it’s the default, has this aspect to it that can cause creative burnout.

This is why, I think, so many people have said that the Electric Zine Maker helped them re-discover love for creating, or got them out of a creative rut… It reminds people that creating isn’t all about productivity.

Closing thought…

So… All these tools that are just horribly user unfriendly, weird, quirky, different, cute, adorably playful… are a way to encourage people to ground themselves in how creativity is play.
Building games, and creating art, in amateur tools reminds people of that.

I think it’s wonderful that you could build a game entirely out of these quirky free tools that are available on…
The value of these tools is not in the professionalism they offer, but the way they make some weird tiny niche thing accessible.

People often talk about how it used to be easier to just get into game making, because of tools like Flash, that made these otherwise technically complicated things accessible to any kid. Game making has gotten a lot more complicated now, and the bar for entry is much higher.
All of these tools, that you could easily dismiss as amateurish or silly, kind of allow for the same. The simplicity and approachability may be a reason that someone discovers a love for making games, or composing music.

This is why we make these tools. It might be simple and dumb to us, but it may be a creatively healing experience or breakthrough to someone else suffering from burnout. It might also be a reason that someone starts making games. Your tiny tool may end up being a gateway to bigger things for someone.

So, all that said, there is no such thing as a “too small” or “too amateur” tool. All tools bring something very meaningful to the table just by existing.
It always surprises me how some silly dumb tool I made, that I put out there, becomes so important to someone.
This is why tool making is special.