Nathalie Lawhead is an independent net artist and video game designer residing in Irvine, California. Lawhead's background is in net art, and their work often invokes the iconography of 1990s-era web design and computing, particularly moments of technical failure, including pixelated lo-fi imagery, glitches, pop-up ads, and error messages. Lawhead's Tetrageddon Games is a compilation of short experimental games that playfully subvert norms of taste in web and game aesthetics. Their more recent project, Everything is Going to be OK, was described by Lawhead as an "interactive zine," and combines short poems, games, and animations to express personal experiences with trauma. Lawhead was subjected to online and offline abuse and harassment following their discussion of their game Everything is Going to be OK at Double Fine's Day of the Devs event, and sustained further harassment after publishing an article, entitled , on Venture Beat, which discussed their experiences with harassment. As a result of this harassment, Lawhead further revised and expanded Everything is Going to be OK to include these experiences and comment on how gaming culture, and culture in general, enables abusers.
RUNONCE - An interactive digital pet that converses with the user, but can only live one lifetime on the user's computer, after which the program cannot be run again.
A_DESKTOP_LOVE_STORY - A brief narrative told within a file system, where one file has a crush on another file, and the user is tasked with navigating directories and files in the operating system to facilitate their relationship.
Electric File Monitor - A satirical 'digital security system' that scans the user's hard drive and charges them with various "transgressions," about which the user can "interrogate" them.
Everything is Going to Be OK - Lawhead's award-winning digital zine, which features a series of short interactive and animated vignettes confronting issues of struggle, power, and abuse with anarchic humor.
Tetrageddon Games - Lawhead's award-winning collection of short, humorous, and experimental games which draw on the aesthetics of the early internet. Tetrageddon Games was included in Communication Arts Issue 19, and Communication Arts juror Sophie Henry described it as "one of the most interesting pieces of interactive art I’ve seen."
