Dearest ghost friend,

It's the four-year anniversary of starting Weird Ghosts and the two-year anniversary of the nonprofit Baby Ghosts.

Thank you so much for joining us on this journey.

We have so much to celebrate this year, including several games you can play right now!

Weird Ghosts investee and Baby Ghosts peer supports Rocket Adrift just launched their fourth game: Dark Finger Dice: A Billionaire Killing Game. If you like roguelikes, gambling, and eating the rich, then this game is for you!

You can play it on steam for only $6.50 CAD!

But there’s more! Polyvale Studios from our current Baby Ghosts cohort has two exciting announcements:

Their game Diem won Best Overall and Best Aesthetics at the Citizens Assemble! game jam. Diem is a cozy democracy sim about citizens' assemblies you can play now on itch.io for free.

They also developed a game about money laundering called Dark Money, which was a Finalist in Floodlight Gaming's Investigative Journalism jam.

And there's more to come! Our other Cohort 5 studios have been busy developing exciting games full of puzzles, witchcraft, frogs, and grassroots survival that you're just going to have to stay tuned for.

Research & Impact

Behind the scenes, every studio has also been working hard on building structures, developing values and by-laws, and figuring out how to find sustainability in an unstable industry.

Baby Ghosts' mission has always been about creating social impact in the games industry. For more on this topic, check out the book The Game Needs to Change - Towards Sustainable Game Design in which our co-executive director eileen mary holowka and Polyvale member Aric McBay wrote a chapter on "social movement games."

We're also excited to announce that Baby Ghosts is supporting postdoctoral research funded by Ontario Creates and Mitacs Accelerate and led by Michael Iantorno and Jennifer R. Whitson (with thanks to our board member Kenzie Gordon). The research will study the efficacy of incubator, accelerator, and mentorship programs (i.e., support hubs) in cultivating economically sustainable studio structures in the Canadian video game industry.

This includes our pals at the GAMERella program as well as the new Baby Ghosts Alberta cohort!

Annual General Meeting

For those interested in becoming more involved in Baby Ghosts, our Annual General Meeting is coming up on November 24 at 11:00AM PST / 2:00PM EST. You can find more information here. Respond to this email to let us know you'd like to attend!

Support Us

Baby Ghosts is supported by grants and sponsorships. To help us keep supporting studios in this important, developmental time, please consider donating.

We can't wait to keep doing this work!

Yours in ghostliness,

• eileen & Jennie