It's that time again — the judges' scores and comments are in, and we've selected the winners of our third annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1925! As you know, we asked game designers of all stripes to submit new creations based on works published in 1925 that entered the public domain in…
The Great Gatsby and the winner of the Best Digital Game category:
From the name alone, you can probably guess what the game is: rhythm action games are a popular genre, and hey, why not make one for
The Great Gatsby? The premise is presented as a joke, with the designer describing it as the way F. Scott Fitzgerald would have wanted his legacy to be maintained but the game doesn t just lean on this one bit of amusing silliness, nor does it cut any corners in fulfilling its promise. Rather, it s
full of handcrafted original material.
But before we get to all of that, there s another thing that makes
Remembering Grußau is perhaps to call it a
guided reflection on a piece of artwork specifically, the 1925 painting of the same name by the Jewish surrealist painter Felix Nussbaum and its meaning within the greater context of history, and the artist s life and eventual murder in the Holocaust. The game is simple, focused, and highly effective in prompting the player to meaningfully engage with the subject matter in a deeply personal way.
A big part of how it accomplishes this is by inventively bridging the gap between digital and physical engagement. The game itself is built in Twine with very basic interactive fiction mechanics, but the player s most important action is taken offline: they are instructed to step away, write a letter to Nussbaum, fold it into an envelope, and keep it nearby for a day before returning to complete the game. When they do, they are asked to indicate the theme of the letter they wrote, and then given a response but to see what that response is,