About Us

About Jamin

I'm Jamin Warren, and Killscreen is where I write about the games I think matter most: independent, experimental, distinctly authored work, and the culture that grows up around it.

I've spent more than fifteen years where games meet the other arts. I founded Killscreen in 2009, and later Gameplayarts, which helps cultural institutions work with games. I programmed the first Tribeca Games Festival, the Arcade at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Kill Screen Festival, which Mashable called "the TED of videogames." I've advised MoMA's design department, served as cluster chair for Gaming at the Webbys, hosted Game/Show for PBS Digital Studios, and reported for the Wall Street Journal.

About Killscreen

Killscreen covers independent and experimental game culture. That means games, and also everything games have become away from the console: machinima and engine-based art, games in galleries and museums, live play, and the artists who keep coming back to the form.

The mainstream industry has no shortage of coverage. The work at the edges has very little. It's often made by one person or a small team, and it's released into the same storefronts as everything else with almost no context. That's the work I want to find, explain and argue for.

How I Choose

I care more about sensation and emotion than about mechanics. Beyond that, I look for three things:

• Brevity. A game should be as long as it needs to be, in line with other art forms.
• Distinct authorship. The work should feel like someone made it, rather than leaning on genre tropes to carry its meaning.
• Dialogue with culture. Games should talk to film, music, art and literature, not just to other games.

Where This Comes From

Killscreen started in 2009 as a Kickstarter project, became a print magazine, and has lived online ever since. Early on, we worked with MoMA curator Paola Antonelli to select games for Talk to Me: Design and Communication between People and Objects, and that design lens still shapes how I think about play. The New Yorker called Killscreen "the McSweeney's of interactive media," and Time credited it with helping legitimize the medium through serious criticism.

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