July 4, 2025 Winter 2025
A Screenshot from Chassidy David’s game Rat Revolution, showing an ascii rat in the subway tunnel in the console window. The rat provides hints for the password used to progress in the game.Reclaiming the web browser as a playful space
With Everest and I as guides, The Browser is Already a Game Engine class collectively addressed and offered alternatives for both game making and website making. Working with the grain of the web, students used HTML, CSS and Javascript to explore various game mechanics, and ultimately designed playful browser based experiences. Over the course of 10 weeks, we reimagined HTML, and wrote our own “handmade” elements. We used the browser console to create creatures, and we explored the use of spreadsheets as game databases.
A screenshot example from the Handmade HTML exercise, which shows the contents of a silverware drawer written as HTML elements.
A screenshot of Andrew Boylan’s console game the Spirit of Music, which shows an offering of an Ascii smoothie to the spirit.
A screenshot of the Google Spreadsheet Database used in Everest Pipkin’s game Drift Mine Satellite.Conversations that bubbled up in the Zoom classroom chat overflowed into our Discord server, where students shared coding tips and tricks, net art, and photos of their familiar friends. On the first day, we discovered our mutual affinity for accumulating small figurines and trinkets, affectionately referred to as “little guys.”
A screenshot of our Discord, showing Eva Decker’s collection of figurines in our dedicated channel to show off curated collections of “little guys.”We kicked off the class with an icebreaker exercise Everest calls “thinkin’ about it ~”
As more and more participants opened a blank Google document, anonymous animals spawned and multi-colored cursors flashed and flanked the single line proclamation, “we are all here.”
Together, we were asked to rapid-fire respond to prompts about where we play, specifically on the Internet. The page came alive as participants populated it with answers that others eagerly added plus signs to, in addition to unheard of or unexpected sites. There’s something thrilling about being able to activate an online space in this way. We were able to complicate a corporate tool by turning it into a multi-player site of play.
This exercise got me thinking about the ways we attempt to be present and to feel the presence of others in online spaces. I often find myself turning to the Internet when I feel most alone, seeking ways to feel connected to others; to feel seen by others. Sometimes this seems rather counterintuitive in an age of single dimension user profiles. I wonder how we might design future experiences for the web that feel more embodied, where we can witness and experience relationships and manifestations of ourselves that grow in real time.
Our class was made up of a diverse range of ages and cultural backgrounds, which made it especially interesting to share early memories of using the computer and being online. We reminisced about the days of Club Penguin, Neopets, and AIM, perhaps a simpler time when screen names and customized avatars made us feel seen in ways that contemporary social media fails to.
Since the era of Geocities, the internet has seemed to digress from maximal personalized pages into a templatized digital marketplace. While social media remains free, users become products. Interactions tend to be more transactional rather than genuine. Even Roblox, the popular web based game making tool, is criticized for turning children into low waged workers.
The internet is often lauded as a tool that allows its users to connect with others across time-zones, languages, and continents. However, its dark history as a tool that came to fruition with funding from The U.S. Department of Defense looms ominously. Although widely used first in academia, it was incubated within the military and intended as a tool to assert global dominance. Despite its original underlying goals, people have always found ways to subvert the Internet, using it in a manner that diverges from the agendas of power and control.
Younès Rabii on using the browser as resistance
Our first guest speaker Younès Rabii, who notably worked on the game Neurocracy, is an excellent example of a game designer who is energized by the opportunities to playfully disrupt and remix websites. “The browser was a place of learning for me, it was also a place of resistance in some ways,” Younès explained.
They shared their journey as a queer Moroccan kid growing up in France. As the eldest of four, Younès became a game designer at a young age to keep their siblings entertained. The browser made playing video games more accessible, but even then, Younès had to go to great lengths to play and make games, such as having to buy e-sims to use in internet cafes.
Younès shared some whimsical code snippets with us. The code doesn’t always work on every page, they warned, but figuring out what the limitations are makes it exciting. Younès showed us how to run code in the inspector console to selectively redact parts of Wikipedia pages in a game which they named Erasure Poetry.
Citing Google easter egg games as a huge inspiration, they shared code that replicates the Gravity easter egg, which gives elements on the page physics, allowing them to free fall and bounce on the edges of the page.
Younès uses the wikipedia name of a relatively obscure album (Horse with No Name) to demonstrate the Gravity code, which makes some of the page content fall to the edges of the page.
Younès demonstrates redaction poetry on a Wikipedia page. Black squares obscure every word on the page.Younès encouraged us to think of the browser as our playground—to open up the console on our favorite websites and to use the inspector tools to insert ourselves into the pages.
Recently when I told my mother I was interested in making games, she genuinely asked me why. Around this time I had just read Angela Nagle’s book Kill All Normies, which references Gamergate as one of the inciting incidents that led to the rise of the online alt-right. The gaming industry is notoriously brimming with toxic masculinity, often depicting violence and hypersexualized women. Game making and game playing used to seem exclusively reserved for “boys,” and while that’s definitely changed, gaming still tends to get a bad reputation.
There are incredible subcultures within gaming that directly respond to the inequities of the commercial gaming industry, and capitalism at large. I think we can look to these communities as inspiration for how we might organize and distribute information in service of broader, intersectional political goals.
Em Reed on reframing abundance on the internet
Our second class guest, Em Reed, provides many good examples of this in their talk, during which they shared a list of niche open-source web based tools for making games. Em is a part of Domino Club, a collective of digital artists that regularly host anonymous game jams. Em’s approach to making games for the Internet is inspired by zine culture, in which artists often hack and re-appropriate tools to distribute art and ideas for free.
The focus of Em’s lecture for our class was about reframing abundance. Em asserted personal art practice as inevitable. The commercialization of culture tells us that the ability to make real art is rare and exclusive. To be able to make art, we’re asked to optimize our creativity and discipline our practices. There’s a culture around curating one’s online presence to appeal to potential funding or job opportunities.
If we were to reframe our creative practices as abundant, perhaps it would encourage more people to flood the internet with the excesses of personalized web pages again.
The ethos present in DIY “zinester” culture is really at the core of the thinking behind The Browser is Already a Game Engine. While commercial game engines such as Unity or Unreal have free options, the barrier to entry can be high. I teach a class at New York University about making games for virtual reality, and every year inevitably a student struggles to even be able to open the software on their personal computers. On the other hand, the Internet allows us to create and distribute art, games and ideas widely and quickly for free. Following this logic, we might think of learning and teaching code with the goal of injecting play into the Internet as a form of resistance against the Internet as a marketplace, panopticon or curated feed.
How might we inhabit the internet in more playful ways?
Examples of websites made in our class where students creatively inserted themselves into the browser.
Evagotchi
This game invites players to applaud or punch the artist, Eva Khoury, eventually revealing personal information, such as their actual checking account balance.
A 3D scan of the artist, Eva Khoury in an A-Pose. Their venmo code materializes when you click the teal “FEED” button. If you press the green Applause button enough times, more personal information will be revealed, such as their current checking account balance.Family Reunion
In Family Reunion by Leandro Waibe, you play as a child whose goal is to speedrun dinner, using your imagination to make time move faster.
A screenshot from Leandro’s game Family Reunion. POV of a dinner plate with digitally drawn salad and a mystery meat. Tiny imaginary creatures hop around the yellow speckled table. The player has a glass of red liquid that’s definitely not wine.Hypertext TV
Eva Decker’s Hypertext TV broadcasts weekly programming of handmade websites and is full of many easter egg mini games.
A screenshot of Eva Decker’s website, HTTV. Mimicking the design of an old school broadcast television guide, the screen shows a schedule of curated web programs by the hour.Woods Walk
Christina Cuneo assembled watercolor paintings in the browser, using the z-axis to create a parallax depth effect. Players can use WASD to walk around the woods and discover creatures, lichen and plants.
A screenshot of Christina Cuneo’s project, which shows a snowy forest with leafless trees, and rocks. The bottom left shows a guidebook where players collect ephemera they find in the woods.Memories of a Postage Stamp
In Vidya Giri’s game, Memories of a Postage Stamp, players restore a stamp collection, based on Vidya’s own family’s stamp collection.
A screenshot of Vidya’s memory game. The left panel tracks the player's progress and shows a list of other puzzles to complete. In the center is a completed stamp from Malaysia that shows a creature hanging upside down on a tree branch. Underneath it is a word bank of label categories, listing different years and countries.Soma Web
Jynann Ong turns the browser into a body in their project Soma Web.
A screenshot of Jynann’s project, Soma Web. A rust colored figure on the left and a lime colored figure on the right against a yellow background. Multicolored orbs symbolizing blood flow back and forth across the page. A breath bar pulses light blue. An audio recording of a breathy meditation. A text box for processing imagination. Sliders that allow the user to input a range of emotion.Showcase at LARPA & a spreadsheet party!
We hosted an in person showcase High On Websites at my studio, LARPA on April 20, 2025. For our remote participants, Kate Compton stewarded a spreadsheet party where you can find some more of the websites made in The Browser is Already a Game Engine.
A visitor playing Leandro Waibe’s game, Family Reunion on the SFPC Desktop computer.
A screenshot of the High On Websites spreadsheet party, featuring screenshots class projects.