About

Our Mission

The goal of Peanut Gallery is to create rich, memorable interactions between players and video games. We intend to engage players on an intellectual and emotional level while also indulging their sense of play.

Games for Humans

At Peanut Gallery, it all starts with good design. And to us, good design means having respect for the player and for videogames themselves.

Respecting the player

Peanut Gallery does not view the player as a hamster in a wheel, or a rat in a maze. We respect our players as humans, both intelligent and emotional. As such, we feel that games have more of an impact and are more fun when they take the natural curiosities and playfulness of the player into account.

We respect your intelligence.  Instead of telling you how to play the game, we want you to explore and find out, and we want you to have fun doing so. Telling you where to go, how to get there and what to do when you get there is boring for everyone involved. Once you have that information, you’re not playing, you’re simply doing. It’s no fun for you, and it’s not really fun for us either.  Furthermore it shows a lack of respect and confidence in the player that betrays the kind of relationship we would like to establish with players.

Peanut Gallery views our games as a means of communication between the game’s designers and its players. Through our games we want to convey our ideas and pose questions to our audience, and we want players to respond in kind. When you play one of our games, we want you to be thinking about it long after you’ve finished playing it, and we want you to talk about it with your friends.

Most of all, though, we want you to come away with the feeling that we gave you something memorable and thoroughly human. In our games, we want to present worlds that draw you in and engage your inquisitive nature, characters that you can relate to and empathize with, moments that surprise you or frighten you, scenarios that cause you joy or sadness.

In order to get to that point, however, we have to respect you, the player.

Respecting videogames

We want you to feel that your interactions were significant in the context of the game. Interactivity is what makes videogames unique.

A common trend in the videogame industry is to look to constantly strive for “cinematic” experiences. A large reason for this is the relative youth of the videogame industry, and another is the massive cultural impact film has had over the past several decades. Comparisons to film are inevitable as videogames strive for legitimacy as both an industry and furthermore as an art form.

Part of our goal is to establish the aspects that make videogames stand on their own as an art form. Rather than trying to emulate what film does well, we want to explore what games do well as well as things that games could do well but haven’t been tried yet. Ultimately, Peanut Gallery believes in the power of interactivity to make engaging, singular experiences that resonate with players and cannot be replicated in traditional, linear media formats.

Keeping with the spirit of respecting videogames, Peanut Gallery also strives to avoid the use of “game tropes” as fall-back solutions to common game problems. We aim to create “completely designed experiences,” or games that take into account all of the possible player interactions and have designed outcomes for them that retain the game world’s integrity and are satisfying to the player.

We hope that through these efforts, we can make videogames that people across the world can enjoy.

About the team…

Peanut Gallery is a videogame studio and design collective founded by Andre Clark, RJ Layton, John Brennan and Jamie Antonisse in the summer of 2009. The four are graduate alumni of the University of Southern California‘s Interactive Media Division. With diverse backgrounds in classic art, business, marketing, film, writing, and computer engineering, Peanut Gallery’s founding members have worked on a range of commercial, government-funded, and independent projects with topics ranging from physical play to military educational software to political satire.

Some examples of these projects are Minor Battle, Spectre, Hush, UrbanSim, The Godfather: The Game, Frogger (Facebook), and more.

We look forward to growing this list, and we hope you’ll play them and tell us what you think.

Founding Members
Jamie Antonisse John Brennan Andre Clark RJ Layton

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