When the internet was born the French artist Anne Horel was watching. In fact, I think it swallowed her. She exists now mostly as images stuck in looped emoji dances that are scattered around the web. Where she goes, rainbow fonts and pizza slices follow, spiraling off the screen in a ditz as they m
The scariest part of The Exorcist (1973) for me wasn’t all the bedroom acrobatics and green puke, it was a much subtler scene. In it, Father Karras sits before large spinning reels as they playback the recorded voice of possessed 12-year-old Reagan MacNeil, all of it incomprehensible gurgled groans
“My grandmother is probably the most important person ever to me,” writes illustrator and game maker Florian Veltman. This text appears on the website for his latest game—it’s to be called Lieve Oma, the Dutch for “Dear Grandmother”—which Veltman confirms to me will very much be framed as a letter t
While last month’s That Dragon, Cancer is, itself, an artifact worth discussing on a number of levels, especially in terms of its handle on faith and loss, there is more to the story than what the videogame contains. Some of that story can be found in the documentary Thank You For Playing, which is
No matter how old we get the NES is seen through the same preserved lens—that of our youthful pupils. Our bodies grow hair, stretch, they wrinkle. But that classic grey plastic will remain supple for our entire life span (it will degrade slowly, over the centuries). It remains a steadfast icon for o
Teddy isn’t looking so good. Stood in the freezing cold of Hell, his shawl visibly shivering, a crescent of stubble clings to his jaw and chin. This ex-minister is in search of his daughter, Bo, who has been kidnapped by a “strange entity” that claims to be God. Whether he asked for it not, it seems
DOOM (1993) is known for its hellish bravura and the legacy that followed. On the surface, we tend to think of big pink demon muscles, gnashing jaws, and bloodied grimaces. It’s a stern-faced brute that would be quicker to punch you in the mouth than hold a conversation. Somehow, that aura surrounds
Philip K. Dick may be decades-dead but the extraordinary visions that lined the pages of his fictions are more alive than ever. There is perhaps no better proof of this than Californium—a videogame that weaves Dick’s influential stories with his own drug-fueled delusions into a multi-dimensional tri
The first note of suspicion arises in two boxes sat next to each other on a desk. The label on these boxes is blurred beyond detail by the low-resolution—it’s possible to make out that it depicts a cylindrical instrument, white and red in color. I told myself it must be batteries for the nearby hand
I can’t trust my eyeballs right now. Just typing this black font onto this white space is steeped in something my body recognizes as danger. I think I see snakes wrestling across the gaps between the words. No, it’s worse than that. Oh god. You might laugh, or you might be outright confused right no
Nostalgia for 1990s graphics and the decade’s range of operating systems is hellfire right now. It’s hot as shit and we can’t get enough it. Hence projects like Windows93 exist. Videogames, too, are increasingly incorporating or fully mimicking the early days of consumer-focused computer technology.
Monument Valley (2014) and Lego. It just feels right, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s that the puzzle game’s isometric perspective gives us the privileged view of god games, in which we build and destroy. Or perhaps more simply it’s the attention the game draws towards it brightly colored geometric mazes, ea
Dear Chell, Where have you gone? This is your fault. You chose this path. The Aperture Science testing environment has been proven entirely safe for each test subject. Yet your typical violent behavior towards the equipment has proven that false. I’d just like to point out that you were given every
Malware. Blech! We hate malware. And so we should—deleting files, maliciously clogging up our desktops, turning our browsers into never-ending adverts. But it’s so boring and irritating these days. At least back in the 1980s and 1990s you could take a step back and admire both the technical and arti
“You told no one, right?” This is the language we use when speaking of secrets. Something was found out and it must be kept as unknown as possible. It’s telling that Karachi-based artist NAWKSH uses these words to title his videogame Told No One. For it seems to be a tightly woven secret itself. It’
Memory and videogames is a complicated crossroads. Not least because there’s a minimum of three types of memory meeting at this particular intersection. The most obvious one is personal memory: we remember the games we played over the years and attach emotions, physical locations, the music we were
It’s strange to me that Knights and Bikes is set in the 1980s on a remote (fictional) island off the cold coast of Cornwall, UK. It’s a place where I spent some of my childhood, exploring damp sea caves when the tide was out and mostly being terrified of the pulsating purple jellyfish all around. Th
Be warned, this article contains mild spoilers for the end of The Witness. /// Most of the people I know who have been playing The Witness since it came out a week ago have been doing so in the graces of midnight—”it’s an ideal late night game,” is the consensus. While loved ones are tucked up in be
Who is this fumbling little alien? Looking like the offspring of Kang and Kodos, cyclopean and tentacled, working some dead-end 9-to-5. In space, nonetheless. And without a clue. No, really, who are you little dude? This alien’s job is to not know anything. It’s a tutorial alien that is stupefied by
If you look upon the mournful, decaying figure sat atop that webbed plinth above and don’t immediately think of Zdzisław Beksiński then you aren’t familiar with his work. And if that’s the case then you might not fully realize the appeal of Scorn, the videogame that this concept art informs. Time to
“We’re born naked, and the rest is drag.” – Ru Paul, Lettin’ It All Hang Out, 1995 /// Australian digital media artist Alison Bennett says that Virtual Drag came to her “like a bright flash.” It may not seem obvious at first, the connection between drag performance and virtual reality, but once the
There are moments in adventure game series Life Is Strange (2015), typically once per episode, that encourage you to stop, relax, take in the surroundings. The camera slowly orbits protagonist Max Caulfield as she spends a moment away from the mad throes of her teenage years. She lies face up on her
In “On Dérive,” the titular act is explained through text and your own movements through a virtual environment. To dérive (to drift), is to let yourself wander through the city with no prior aim or destination in mind; a spontaneous journey through the urban stage. The point of it is to demonstrate
Take your fingers out your (p)lugholes and listen up: Etter Studio has let the world know that its “collaborative physics conundrum” Dreii will be drifting onto Steam (for PC), iOS, and Android on February 2nd. This is fab news. To explain, Dreii is the new version of Etter’s European Design Award-w
If someone refuses to paint, all you need to do to fix that is strap tubes of the stuff to the soles of their shoes and send a couple of angry dobermans after them. Don’t question why you’d ever be so desperate to get someone to paint that you’d resort to this admittedly drastic method. This is how
