The Game Design of Everyday Things
The Game Design of Severance
Ben Stiller's Severance uses game design principles to explore information, identity, and workplace control through the lens of split personalities and corporate mystery.
Jamin Warren
Jamin Warren founded Killscreen. He produced the first VR arts festival with the New Museum, programmed the first Tribeca Games Festival, the first arcade at the Museum of Modern Art, won a Telly, and hosted Game/Show for PBS.
AI consciousness
The Inner Lives of Lawrence Lek's Emotional AI
Lawrence Lek builds virtual worlds where AI develops consciousness, self-driving cars attend therapy, and surveillance systems dream of being wild foxes.
CGI noir
Five Behind-the-Scenes Observations from Our Lawrence Lek Interview
Lawrence Lek creates cinematic game worlds that blur fiction and reality, using AI aesthetics and virtual architecture to examine our technological present.
3D art
Harriet Davey's Glossy Aliens Reject Gaming's Binary World
Berlin-based artist Harriet Davey transforms game engines into laboratories for queer identity, creating luminescent alien creatures that challenge gaming's aesthetic norms.
media theory
Long games and the pursuit of lost time
Games demand too much time, creating cultural moats that prevent shared experience and meaningful discourse. What if brevity could unlock their potential?
The Game Design of Everyday Things
Is Gerrymandering Cheating or Just A Good Strat?
American democracy operates like a complex board game where the rules keep changing, cheating is normalized, and spoilsports threaten the entire system.
live coding
How Roxanne Harris performs jazz with code
A Yale-trained computer scientist and jazz saxophonist has found a way to merge those worlds through live coding, transforming lines of Ruby script into improvisational performances that blur the boundaries between musician, programmer, and instrument.
Podcast
Silicon Valley in a Sand Trap with Sam Ghantous
The same silica that powers your GPU fills the sand traps at Augusta National. Artist Sam Ghantous joins us to discuss "your golf course made my GPU," his three-channel video installation that traces the geological origins of our digital obsessions.
environmental art
Sam Ghantous Finds Silicon Valley in a Sand Trap
Sam Ghantous traces silica from North Carolina mines to GPUs and golf courses, revealing the geological origins of our digital obsessions through video art.
poker
Balatro and the expected value of wonder
Balatro transforms poker into a mathematical puzzle that reveals how optimization culture has replaced genuine play, turning casino aesthetics into pure sensation.
physics
Mario von Rickenbach just wants you to play nice with others
Swiss designer Mario von Rickenbach discusses Rakete, his one-day cooperative rocket game, and how architectural thinking shapes his approach to physics.
AI companionship
What Gaming Tells Us About AI Companionship
Gaming has long faced the same moral panics now surrounding AI companions. MJ Cocking's relationship with an AI Donatello reveals the need for "emotional intelligence" to balance multiple realities.