Embed with Games: A Year on the Couch with Game Developers

In January of 2014 Cara wasn’t quite making rent but her cultural criticism on games for places like The Guardian seemed pretty popular. On a whim she pledged to her Twitter followers that she would do gonzo journalism and travel each month to stay with game creators she found across the world, if they put a bit of money towards it. Cara put a page up on Patreon and said if it got to $1,000 that would be enough for her first flight. She thought it would never get there … Within an hour this ‘cyberpunk hair-dyed Attenborough’ had kicked herself out of her home and sent herself hurtling across a year of four continents, living on gamemakers’ couches, writing about their cities and creations. Six hundred readers funded her round-the-world trip, from London to Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur to Melbourne. This is a collected work of all the essays Cara wrote along the way, a map of independent game creation as she found it.