Angry Birds Star Wars 2 is an unabashed sequel
Behold: the beauty of iteration.
Kyle Chayka
Folded Into Ourselves
One of the iPhone’s simplest ideas makes a difficult proposition on architecture. Kyle Chayka explains why Rem Koolhaas might love Tiny Tower.
What’s Happening?
Installation artists like Yayoi Kusama and Allan Kaprow built interactive worlds decades before Zelda. What can videogames still learn from contemporary technology-based art?
Why Food Isn’t the Point
What can contemporary performance art tell us about Cooking Mama? Kyle Chayka on the unlkely link between cooking videogames and fine art.
Highlights From Kill Screen Dialogues
At the Kill Screen Dialogues, artists and game designers meet to discuss their views on artificial intelligence, touch, and systems. Kyle Chayka reports.
Bring Your Own Game
When are boring games more fun than fun games? Kyle Chayka visits the Play Station exhibition at Postmasters Gallery and finds challenging and rewarding experiences.
Yoshi’s Fauvist Island
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island is a legend among 2-D platformers—but its art design was something to behold as well. It’s intense, vivid and contrasting use of color recalls Fauvism, the 20th century art movement. Just as Fauvism took Impressionism’s abstraction to a wilder, weirder level, so d
Photorealism in Crisis
In the latest of our monthly column, Kyle Chayka explores the search for photorealism in videogames. Once we can perfectly recreate grass in code, where does photorealism have left to go? Where does the search for photorealism fall apart, how does it relate to the struggle between photography and pa
Over the River and Through the Woods
In the third installment of this monthly column, Kyle Chayka explores the relationship between landscape painting and Minecraft. How does one blocky indie game have the ability to create transcendental experiences just as the greats of landscape painting were able to do? And how does Minecraft allow
White Square on Black Ground
Pong, created in 1972 and one of the first arcade videogames, displays two white rectangles and one white square on a black background. These simple geometric structures represent a game of endless complexity, one that is also an ever-changing abstract image whose composition depends on where the ba
Another Legend of Zelda
When Shigeru Miyamoto debuted the latest installment in Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series at E3 2010, he also made an explicit connection between videogames and fine art. The graphics of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, as it turns out, are inspired by the French painter Paul Cézanne and Impressi