SoftMachine inc is a game research creation lab and a game studio at York University in Canada
Lab director: Yifat Shaik
Current Projects: Pixel Passion and the AI Matrix of Love, Unplaces

Email us at: soft @ softmachineinc.xyz.

Lab address
314 Accolade East
83 York Boulevard
York University

As a research lab focused on experimental games, our work is grounded in several interconnected concepts and pillars:

Alternative Game Engines and Obsolete Technologies

We work with non-traditional game engines, obsolete technologies, and unconventional development tools. The specific affordances and limitations of these systems, and the methods through which games are created and distributed, are central to our research philosophy. We aim to demystify computational technologies and challenge the assumption that newer or more advanced technologies are inherently superior for game creation. Our approach is rooted in the belief that any tool can become a game engine when its limitations, aesthetics, and possibilities are understood and embraced.

Feminist Approaches to Digital Ethics

Our games engage with ethical questions surrounding contemporary digital spaces through a feminist lens. We are interested in how emerging technologies reshape social relations, identity, labor, and online participation. Through play, we seek to encourage critical reflection on the political and ethical implications of our increasingly mediated digital lives.

Chaos in the Machine and Glitch Feminism

As a collective of chronically online queer feminists, we are interested in the strange, chaotic, and generative possibilities of digital culture. Amid the noise of the internet, we find moments of creativity, intimacy, humor, and resistance. Our work draws inspiration from Legacy Russell and the framework of glitch feminism, which views the internet as a site for experimentation, disruption, and reinvention. While digital systems often reproduce structures of cisheteropatriarchy and white supremacy, glitch feminism points toward the radical potential of play, misuse, and technological experimentation as strategies for marginalized communities to reimagine identity and agency.

Subversive Humour as Critical Practice

Humour is central to our research-creation methodology. We view subversive humour as a powerful way to communicate complex ideas in accessible and emotionally resonant ways. Through exaggeration, absurdity, satire, and irreverence, humour allows us to critique dominant systems and normative structures while imagining alternatives. It becomes both a mode of resistance and a strategy for engaging audiences with difficult political, cultural, and technological questions.

SoftMachine Inc game lab strives to provide an inclusive workplace in which everyone feels respected, heard and safe and aims to foster a culture of compassion and respect. We are working to build a community of diverse individuals, with emphasis on marginalized and less represented individuals in the game industry, whose experience and identity are a fundamental part of the type of games we make. Like other tech-based industries, the game industry is plagued with issues of inequality and harassment. These issues are amplified by the relationship between the industry and consumers, leading to harassment campaigns, specifically targeting marginalized game developers and fans. We believe the solution to this is not only to increase developer diversity, but also to improve the way the industry treats them. This includes improving work conditions, dealing with harassment, and not devaluing the work of marginalized developers

First Nations peoples have lived on this part of Turtle Island for millennia, stewarding the land, the water and all that contributes to life in this region. Today, the culture and presence of First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples enrich the lands and people of this territory. More than two centuries ago, the Mississauga people welcomed settlers to this territory, providing sustenance and engaging in trade and commerce. Between 1781 and 1820, eight treaties were signed with the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, who opened their territory to settlement. Today, York University’s Keele Campus is located on Toronto Purchase Treaty, No. 13 lands and is situated on the traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat and Haudenosaunee. Treaty history is foundational, and it is our collective responsibility to honour the land, as we honour and respect those who have gone before us, those who are here and those who have yet to come. We are grateful for the opportunity to be learning, working and thriving on this land, and we commit to learn the truth and be active in the process of reconciliation.