Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren

Wonderville's new cabinet Step Right Up! crosses a Zoltar machine with vector graphics

Game, cabinet, UI, voice, animatronic head and a custom trackball each get a credit

ONLY SLIME rebuilt their computer-game opera as AFTERLIFE,

Visitors are so far inside the game they're asking for a reset button.

Jérémy Griffaud started a watercolor game built on Shinto animism

A month at Akiyoshidai International Art Village went to game design, Gion Matsuri and an ecosystem the player is in relation with, not in charge of.

Paizley Lee filled DEAD INTERNET THEORY's second LA night with a rainbow of iMac G3s

The response to an internet run by bots turns out to be a room: a Y2K LAN night where salvaged hardware does what the feed no longer can.

What a Rickshaw Knows That a Car Doesn't [Podcast]

I ask Kalp Studio's Mannat Jain why she built a game around the ride between two places, and set it in a 1990s Goa that never existed.

Kara Güt staged a two-person play inside Red Dead Online at a Dutch film festival

Two performers at a desk with controllers, walking their characters toward each other across a server whose weather and respawns nobody in the room controlled.

SFMOMA and ZKM jointly acquire Eden.Garden 1.0, 25 years after its debut

The 2001 net artwork grows a 3D Garden of Eden out of any website's HTML—and it took a restoration at ZKM to make it collectible at all.

Amanita Design built a dystopian city out of real cardboard, then digitized it

Every set in the anti-authoritarian adventure was cut and glued in paper first—a handcrafted city where the Leader rules through loudspeakers.

Playfool built a working bot farm that hands you the controls

Type an opinion into [OP]erator, and100 X accounts post LLM-varied versions of it back

Bonheur Suprême shot Homunculus, a documentary short, entirely inside Skyrim

Seventeen minutes of machinima about cruising as an "Arab" on gay dating apps—premiered at Visions du Réel, built from the mod community's tools.

The Long Way Around

Kalp Studio built Raahi around the thing most games treat as dead time—the ride between two places—and set it in a 1990s Goan town that never existed.

Who Do You Let In: What to Play, August 7

Careful what you let through the door.