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This is an entry to the Manifesto Jam 2026, on behalf of LST Estudio. It is also a contract with ourselves. It will be a constant reminder of the pivotal time in our lives, when we decided to commit to the craft of making games. Not just video games, but games in general. Or rather, games we would like to play ourselves: narrative games, reflexive games, psychological games, board games, card games, resource management games, role playing games, abstract games, surreal games, ambiguous games, and games about DEATH.
Unlike other manifestos, we will start with a FAQ first…
We are MVisual and Pablo Naop, a couple of Mexican creatives with decades of experience in multiple fields. We met in high school and played Vampire: The Masquerade together. After going our separate ways, we reunited in 2011 and have been married and working together for 15 years.
MVisual thought she was a psychologist and a martial artist. She also thought she was an illustrator, a storyboarder, an animator, a photographer, an art director… Ultimately, she discovered she is all of those things and more. She also designs games and has a keen eye for UX testing.
Naop has made games before. In fact, he learned to make them when he was 6 years old, using LogoWriter. But then he got a “regular” job as an adult. He’s a developer, writer, and cultural promoter with far too many ongoing projects.
To be an exile is to have been expunged from your home, for whatever reason. We have other words for it, more or less glamorous: expat, reject, pariah, etc. Exile sounds like a nice middle ground to us.
Some aspects of our exile have been self-imposed, while others have been forced upon us as our livelihood or our family’s wellbeing have been endangered. We cannot conceive children; we are estranged from all our blood relatives; we’re no longer able to live in the city we were born and raised in; we’re no longer able to meet with IRL friends on a regular basis, and we don’t live near any of them.
We also live on a desert mountain, with barely any infrastructure or means of public transportation. No public spaces, no parks, no sidewalks even.
We chose this life of isolation because we make people uncomfortable. Either from what we tell them and how we care for them, or by comparison. Sometimes they hurt us beyond repair, and we need to get away for our own sanity. Sometimes they cast us out, quite explicitly. Sometimes they refuse to avoid public gatherings when a deadly pandemic hits. Sometimes they refuse to keep quiet in the late hours of the night (on a Wednesday). Sometimes the earth shakes and destroys buildings (and the people under them).
Sometimes people in our country look at you funny for speaking up against racial inequity, economic divide, discrimination, ethical consumption, digital literacy, culture, art or education. Sometimes they call you an extremist for standing up against social media addiction, online hypocricy, enshittification or generative AI. After all, all tech products mean progress, they are The Future™.
And finally, people close to us die. Quite frequently, in our case.
We have decided to make games because we like them and we also like stories. We have many stories to tell, and no one to tell them to.
We’ve also been trying to build a successful business for nearly a decade, without much success. We tried to build a platform to help local creative industries, as an alternative to enshittified web 2.0 platforms. We tried to document, to catalogue, to preserve and to spread the word.
We’ve realized that this work is necessary, but it isn’t profitable. And games aren’t profitable either. In fact, NO-ONE IS GOING TO BUY OUR GAMES. But we are tired of spreading the word about other people’s stuff, while having no time left to work on our stuff. And we say “work” because we like work. Work is good, work is also necessary. It challenges you, it requires you to apply yourself to the tasks at hand, it fosters creativity, it forces you to become a professional. Wether or not you work for profit, is an entirely different question.
Henceforth, we bow to make games from exile because…
Many years from now, no one will remember us. Even if we make games, they will probably be lost in time, like indie games on Steam. In fact, it was a video game that taught us that NO-ONE IS GOING TO REMEMBER US. And maybe it’s that very fact that motivates us to face oblivion with courage and determination. To tell one more story, to whoever is willing to listen. Because we like stories, and we appreciate the people who craft them. We can only pay it forward.
Insurmountable odds make for unconventional strategies. We believe that if we connect with like-minded individuals, we might find a new homeland. Not bound to a physical place, a specific time, or a specific group of people. But rather, by empathizing, by making friends with, and who knows… maybe even by inspiring other individuals, one by one. We don’t have wealth, we don’t have a family, we don’t have our full health (or all our organs), and one of us doesn’t event have a formal education. But we have our work, and we are damn good at it.
Money? Money can come from any other place. But only by making games will our minds be free. Our home will be wherever we are able to make games together.
The world of modern board games is evergrowing. After the pandemic, people looked for tangible experiences to help them connect. Long before that, we called them the “counterculture” of the creative industries. While video games push for online interaction and consumption, board games and tabletop games bring us together in a room. They also explore new possibilities and paradoxically, despite their limitations, they have a broader design space. Video games have become too burdened by labels, terms, and genres. So even if we just take board games as an inspiration, a lot of innovation can come from the intersection of the two mediums.
We enjoy a challenge. Stories that put a mirror in front of us. Stories that are not about us, but speak to us nonetheless. We have embraced the fact that what we do and what we say will make many people uncomfortable, and our stories can do no less. We want to tell stories about precarity, confinement, apathy, illness, loss, and broken economic systems and societal structures. But also, stories about empathy, curiosity, adaptability, awareness, and love. We think of it as a responsibility, our little grain of sand.
And this is directly related to the next tenet…
Many cultures can teach us a lot about death. Our own culture seems to have forgotten what our día de muertos traditions mean. People have fetishized it with foreign movies and parades, foreign monsters and costumes. We have not forgotten.
We haven’t forgotten about our many departed loved ones either. And while the living seem to want nothing to do with them anymore, it is our duty to remember them. Even if we don’t write down their story, they will influence everything we do, until it’s our turn to be forgotten.
To understand death is to traverse life, willingly and unapologetically, with our full attention. It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey.
Fill this out if you want to hear from us in the near future.
Δ
