A Video Game Dynamo With Strange Ideas Always Swirling

In a landscape of repetitive video game sequels, the 26-year-old designer Xalavier Nelson Jr. has built a reputation as a fearless experimenter with a talent for narrative.

An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs, a comedy that uses stock photos of canines, is nowhere near the oddest of the games made by his studio, Strange Scaffold. Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator includes the economics of alien capitalism with bizarre food requests, like the one from a winged being named Gary, who is in need of a “wet and juicy stomach.” Clickolding, a play on the word “cuckold,” asks the player to press a counter 11,000 times as a laser-eyed man with a Joe Camel head eerily looks on.

Are you his nurse? His friend? His prostitute? It’s never revealed. The point is to make players think hard about the game after it’s over. It’s effectively creepy.

Nelson has thrived in a world where the indie studios behind a buzzy game can struggle to create successful follow-ups. He demystifies the gamemaking process in TikTok videos, in which he recently observed that the industry views efficiency and quality as opposing forces — that good games require years of development.

Strange Scaffold exists to challenge that mind-set, he continued. Its motto is “Better, Faster, Cheaper and Healthier.”

“I get my ideas from a wide catalog of experience with a variety of media, life experiences and a brain that craves experiences that subvert and trust the audience,” Nelson said in an interview.

Clickolding was hatched during a late-night conversation at the Game Developers Conference in March and released in July after two months of development time. It received positive reviews, with one critic calling the 45-minute game a commentary on religion, streaming culture and sex work.

James Lewis, who leads the developer acceleration program for Microsoft’s Xbox console, praised Nelson’s atypical agility to move between projects.

“He doesn’t think of any one game as a thing that defines him,” said Lewis, who mentored Nelson on an unreleased game about the 19th-century U.S. marshal Bass Reeves, who had been enslaved.

The biggest success for the hardworking, outspoken Nelson has been El Paso, Elsewhere, last year’s Lynchian indie neo-noir mystery rife with revenge, melancholy and vampires.

A homage to the action-adventure series Max Payne, El Paso, Elsewhere was repeatedly rejected by bigger studios. After it was published by Strange Scaffold, the game sold a respectable 30,000 copies and was nominated for several awards. (Nelson voices the brooding vampire hunter James Savage; the actor LaKeith Stanfield has been connected to the role for a possible film adaptation.)

Emme Montgomery, the voice actress for the vampire antagonist Draculae, said it was a gift to work with Nelson on El Paso, Elsewhere. She called it rare “to work with a talent who has such a strong vision for a project, that knows exactly what they’re putting into it, and exactly what they’re getting out of it.”

A self-described military brat who was homeschooled and is neurodivergent, Nelson was born in Arizona before moving to several countries, including France, Mexico and Australia. He now lives in El Paso, Texas, and appreciates the “sacred and quiet” Franklin Mountains north of the city.

Life in each new place has been a chance to reinvent himself, perhaps one reason he excels at divergent genres and writing styles.

“At each location, you’ve got to really try and find a new version of yourself and a new personality, a new perspective on who you thought you are,” said Nelson, wearing a dark blue and white shirt and gold-rimmed glasses.

Both Nelson’s mother and father looked at video games as artful pieces of culture. He remembers being a toddler, sitting on the couch next to his father as he played games on the original PlayStation. With an unplugged controller in hand — not yet ready to indulge — Nelson was entranced by what he saw onscreen.

Now Nelson, who recently participated in a clown camp “to expand my definitions of interactivity, engaging with an audience and storytelling,” has worked in some way on a staggering 100 titles, including Stranger Things VR and South Park: Snow Day! He is insistent on releasing small, surprising things.

I Am Your Beast, a covert revenge thriller about the military-industrial complex scheduled to release for the PC next month, opens with intertitles reminiscent of the silent film era. With words about the beauty of a bird in flight through a verdant forest, Nelson’s moving story one-ups far more expensive first-person shooters like Call of Duty. When the game’s cynical protagonist becomes seethingly rageful at the bird’s killing, he embarks upon a shooting rampage.

As the creative director of Strange Scaffold, Nelson directs, writes, produces, acts and even sings on his games while entrusting the software code to a core group of developers.

Nelson’s ideas can come at any time, via conversations with friends or from action or dialogue that he has seen in games, movies or books and wants to riff upon. He makes the time to dive into many video games, including blockbusters.

Nelson has noted that the art direction of I Am Your Beast was inspired by “oodles and oodles of comics” and compared the game’s action to Looney Tunes and the John Wick and Jason Bourne franchises.

“It’s important to experience a wide range of art if you’re going to make games that pull off some ambitious stuff,” he said in one video, using an obscenity.

Evan Narcisse, who has contributed narrative for the blockbuster Spider-Man: Miles Morales and the smaller Dot’s Home, about gentrification and housing justice in Detroit, said Nelson was doing something that larger game companies still struggle to do.

“How do we formalize and instrumentalize creative processes in a way that we can quickly iterate and expand the possibilities of the medium?” Narcisse said.

The work does come at a price. Nelson’s doctor recently cautioned that his constant computer work might result in the loss of the use of his left arm. He now wears braces on both arms at night. His family and church help him to endure the industry’s deadlines.

When Nelson received a Black in Gaming award this year, he passionately chided the industry, bemoaning the double talk that underrepresented developers receive when pitching games to larger companies.

“I want to urge my people, the disproportionately talented 2 percent of this industry, to flee the city that starves you,” he said.

For some in the gaming community, Nelson’s speech was somewhat like James Baldwin’s landmark 1969 appearance on “The Dick Cavett Show,” when he pulled no punches about racial inequity.

“Xalavier said what a lot of us feel, which is Black culture’s contributions to the global zeitgeist often get taken for granted,” Narcisse said. He added, “We can find our own accomplishments in that stuff and not wait for other people to acknowledge us, or, you know, pluck us out of obscurity.”

Other Black developers know there is a struggle behind Nelson’s success.

“Every game company says they want new ideas from Black developers,” said Shawn Alexander Allen, who created the satirical fight role-playing game Treachery in Beatdown City. “They’ll talk to you. They’ll say nice things. But they won’t come up with the money.”

Nelson said he based his company upon the concept of a “scaffold,” construction platforms for creative projects that will turn heads. Although the idea is not simply to produce constantly, there is a lot on his plate. But there is no visible pressure, just a stoic serenity to his demeanor.

Nelson will not confirm or deny whether there will be a follow-up to El Paso, Elsewhere. Yet he is already talking about his next endeavor, a co-op kaiju horror cooking game inspired by the “highly modularized rituals” and ghosts in the Book of Leviticus.

“We believe if you set up the human beings who make a video game to survive, they will make your next favorite game eventually,” Nelson said in a recent TikTok video. “And if not, at minimum, they will have brought more things into the world that can say different things than games which have to be blockbusters.”