LookingOutwards – 09

Heather Kelly, who also goes by Perfect Plum, is an indie game designer who currently works as an associate teaching professor at Carnegie Mellon University. She is a feminist and social justice advocate that aims to make video games and coding more accessible to everyone. Many of her programs focus on multi-sensory interactions or alternative methods of gameplay, such as her satiric, indie game “Guilty Smells”, in which the player takes the perspective of a police dog whose job it is to sniff out foreign food that is now outlawed in the USA. This game is connected to a console that emits smells relevant to the game in order for the player to determine if it’s American food or not. Kelly also designed “LikeLike”, a free website for independent game designers and artists to post their work without the hindrance of commodification.