A Note from the Cmich Press Team
Okay, so umm wow. This is our second monthly newsletter. (See? We did make it!) We have lots of cool updates for you, but the first thing to note is that this newsletter is only happening because of the Amazing Liv O’Toole. She is one of our stellar graduates from the Game Design Thinking Minor program and now a Master’s student in Creative Writing at CMU. This summer, she is also the CLGS Social Media Coordinator and keeping us on track to roll out lots of good news!
Monthly updates will be coming to you in two pieces for the next couple of months. Newsletters will talk about our cool press happenings AND nifty things our current and past students are up to, starting with Liv.
There is so much to tell you about this coming month that we needed to break it into two newsletters! Stay tuned for a round of updates, then read about Liv’s quest to become a game designer.
Updates
The first update for this month is that our next crowdfunding campaign will feature two games: Making History and Witch Hunt 1649. We are stupidly excited about those games! At this very moment, our prelaunch page is live on BackerKit. You can follow it here:
At the last count before publication, it had over 200 followers! (Thank you to everyone who has already jumped on board!)
In case you are new to crowdfunding, here’s how you can help us get these exceptional games off the ground. Before we officially launch the campaign to fund their production, be sure to follow the project’s prelaunch page so you can know when the actual campaign goes live. Then, starting on our launch day, July 8th, you can directly support these games by ordering your copies of Making History and Witch Hunt 1649 (and any other CMich Press games which catch your fancy) on BackerKit. Another great way to support this project is to share the news! Tell your friends about this crowdfunding project and help us bring more games to more people.
If YOU haven’t followed the Making History/Witch Hunt 1649 prelaunch page yet, you should go here and check it out.
Go ahead, we will wait. . . 
At the same time, grass is not growing under Central Michigan University Press. (It can’t, because we are in a basement.) We have many nifty things in the proverbial fire – and here’s another one!
We have moved our Break Our Games (BOG) events to Modern Explorer’s Guild in Midland, MI, for the summer. We will be at their main street location on the second Friday in June, July, and August. That’s right, that means that our next Break Our Game night will be held at the Modern Explorers’ Guild on Friday the 13th.
Come join us, the team from Friendly Skeleton in Saginaw, and any other Modern Explorers to try out games in development from 5:00-7:00 (or whenever they throw us out).
That does it for press updates, at least for the moment. Follow us on our social media channels for more news and exciting events!
Now… on to Liv’s awesome stuff!
Core Loop: Games as Stories, as Play, as Life
By Liv O’Toole, CMich Press
I broke onto the college scene when contagion was on the mind. In the fall of 2021, I moved into Larzelere Hall as a freshman, an aspiring computer science major, and afraid. Despite the lingering mask mandates, I was fortunate enough for the pandemic to flicker largely in my periphery. Many classes were returning to face-to-face modality, and it seemed I had a chance at a “normal college experience” (phrasing that has, four years later, lost all meaning). With the aftershocks of lockdown still informing much of my thought processes, I had little by way of expectations, presuming expectations were generally a waste of time. I figured I would scrap with my roommates, have to swallow less-than-ideal grades, and overall burn my fingers as all first-year students do. Nonetheless, I did not preemptively bother with the details, the very thing the devil is in.
My first semester at Central Michigan featured mostly math and multimedia due to my aforementioned computer science ambitions. The field drew me because of its hair-splitting nature and its demand for focus. As the days naturally grew shorter with the close of Fall ‘21, though, I knew that something essential in me was atrophying away, something that I was simultaneously unwilling to let go and unable to live meaningfully without: writing.
In the marrow of my bones, I have always been a storyteller. Since I could hold a pencil, I was using one to scratch out stories; since I was allotted time on the family computer, I was monopolizing it to type out my imaginings. I gained a kind of notoriety with my articulations and gesticulations, etc., but really, I just loved to tell people stories. When I wrapped my first semester at CMU unsatisfied, it was not a mystery as to what was missing.
My hands shook when I met with my academic advisor to ask about swapping out one of my spring classes for ENG 294: Introduction to Creative Writing. I didn’t know at the time that advisors don’t have a personal stake in what you do, so I assumed that my potentially switching majors (Disclaimer: I hadn’t even signed for Comp. Sci.) would be met with chagrin (false). My advisor merely smiled and shuffled me into the hands of the English program.
Once my coursework began to reflect this change, everything snapped into place. Not only did I find time to write, but I was given it. I got to talk about my process, and processes in general. I got to read what my peers were generating and see in the world what they saw.
On the first day of ENG 294, we all introduced ourselves, along with what prompted us to take the class. One chord was continually struck as the flush of public speaking worked its way around the room: “I’m here as part of the Game Design Thinking minor.” I doubt my ears actually perked up, but spiritually, they did. I made an appointment with my shiny new academic advisor.
In tandem with ENG 294, I was taking ENG 201, which is a general competency class. One of the required texts for that course, taught by Dr. Papazian, was The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall. In his book, Gottschall quotes writer and game designer James Wallis: “Human beings like stories. . .In the same way that your mind sees an abstract pattern and resolves it into a face, your imagination sees a pattern of events and resolves it into a story.” This excerpt simultaneously plugged me into an untapped vein of possibility about what a story could be, and illuminated a new career path: writer and game designer.
One of my favorite pastimes when I’m not writing is playing video games, my favorites being high fantasy RPGs. Like many others, Bethesda’s Skyrim was my first big-kid game, and it’s a comfort I draw from fondly and often. I find in games a new way to engage with stories, one that instills in me a sense of autonomy. Despite the prewritten narratives, stories in games belong to the player, as they are seen, felt, and experienced by them. Games sang to the storytelling animal in me, but before reading Gottschall, I didn’t know that I had one.
With concision in mind, I’d love to say the rest is history, but that is both a disservice and simply untrue (otherwise, I would not be writing what you now read). At the time of my entry into the Game Design Thinking program, there was quite a bit of overlap between that and the Computer Science and Creative Writing minors. It wasn’t until my junior year that I took classes more exclusive to Game Design Thinking, those being HST 160 (History of Game Design) and HST 260 (Games, History, and Conflict).
In HST 160, I completed the prototype for my first game, Dry Springs, Texas. Dry Springs was intended to allow users to “play the past.” It took place during the mid to late 1800s, aesthetically encapsulating the golden age of the Wild West. For the semester, I worked in a group with some of my classmates to develop Dry Springs in Twine, a software for creating hypertext fiction. Players could choose to experience the game as a bandit or sheriff, collecting loot and karma based on the choices they made as they roamed about. The game ended in a classic quick draw on the street outside the saloon, the results of which were determined by the players’ actions.
Being challenged to create a functioning prototype pushed me to discover new ways to do the thing I love: tell a story. Dry Springs is text-based, some might say a story with a little extra pizzazz. Its mechanics are not merely for show, however. Without the bulk of an inventory and the pressures of a karma tracker, Dry Springs would not have achieved for users what it was intended to achieve: a level of investment into what happens to the mythical figures they’ve been piloting throughout the Wild West.
HST 260, which I took alongside HST 160, stretched my vision for what games were, and what they could be. In that class, I was introduced to the “magic circle” metaphor. In game design, the magic circle is the conceptual boundary that separates the real world from the game world. This idea seemed straightforward at first: Players who sit down at a table together to play a game enter into a space where the game rules become the dominating logic system. When gameplay is over, the magic circle is suspended, and players can leave its boundary. What happens, though, when a feeling from a gaming session lingers and crosses over that boundary, following the player into their real life? Perhaps something really funny happened, or maybe a game with serious messaging leaves their stomach roiling. HST 260 let me know that play is everywhere, and that real life flows alongside, over, and under it.
HST 560: Mind Games marked the culmination of my Game Design Thinking minor, and with it came Di Wife—a game I developed with a group of my peers that asked me to write, strategize, and research in equal measure. Set in the fraught, lavish ecosystem of the Ming Dynasty’s imperial palace, Di Wife is a role-playing card game in which players embody either the emperor or a rotating cast of concubines vying for his favor. On paper, it’s a tangle of Action Cards, moral alignments, sabotage mechanics, and poetic prompts. But in play, it becomes something richer: a stage for power, deception, and survival, framed by cultural research and narrative nuance. Every round required concubines to respond to the emperor’s desires not with brute mechanics, but with storytelling. And not just any storytelling—character-driven, stakes-laced storytelling that had to walk the tightrope between tradition and subversion. Di Wife demanded I hold empathy and critique in the same hand, to treat even imagined players with dignity. It’s the first game I’ve made that explicitly challenged what kind of stories games can tell—and who gets to tell them.
Looking back, I didn’t arrive at CMU knowing I’d one day be scripting political drama for concubines or choreographing showdowns in a digital desert. But I did arrive with a pulse for narrative, however, buried beneath credit-hour requirements and early pandemic dread. What I’ve discovered over these last few years is not just that I’m a storyteller, but that storytelling is a practice far broader, stranger, and more supple than I ever imagined. English taught me how to listen to the rhythms of language and the layers of meaning in a well-turned phrase. Game design taught me that meaning can move—that players become co-authors, mechanics can carry metaphor, and that sometimes the most resonant narratives are those that arise not from a single voice, but from a chorus of choices. My education was not a pivot from coding to poetry, but a spiraling inward toward the connective tissue that unites them: structure, pattern, consequence, play.
If there’s a single thread that runs through it all, it’s this: I believe in the intimacy of design. Whether through a poem, a player’s choice, or a bit of emergent chaos at a game night, storytelling remains, for me, a way of reaching out. Of imagining not just what is, but what could be. At CMU, I was able to explore that reach and to let my voice find a space to occupy between disciplines.