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.
Graphic designer (and KS #0 contributor) Logan Walters wrote to us about a new project. For every 3DS title he buys, he takes a stab at redoing the covers. Clearly, most games are, um, labored in the product marketing dept. so Walters’ reduxes are palette-cleansing. See them all here.
Not that we needed anymore proof of the popularity of the iPhone, but new research continues the trend of us talking about the popularity of the iPhone. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster issued this report: The results of the extensive survey of 5,600 U.S. high school students show that 34% of surv
Game designer and KS contributor Pippin Barr continues his war on orthodoxy with his newest title Pongs. Inspired by his experience playing Painstation (which he documented for us), Barr went on to create a variety of new permutations of Pong including Edutainment Pong (“What is the capital of Mauri
Artist Benjamin Grosser’s project “Variable Mirror” explores our relation to one of the most fundamental units of digital reality: the pixel. He explains: The pixel is the fundamental unit of digital imaging, a square representation of a single color. Pixels are always the same size, and always arra
Video I’m normally loathe to post new Minecraft projects (“Hey, we built Ford’s Theatre….in Minecraft!) but sometimes a project comes along that makes you rethink that policy. Behold the Magic Kingdom in block form. No work if you have to park in an adjacent town and walk over. TheRealDuckie explai
While developers Shock Panda totally jacked Zach Gage’s UI from SpellTower, their Letterbox is a novel permutation on the word game. You’re handed a 10×10 cube that you must deconstruct through THE POWER OF WORDS. But seriously, stringing together letters removes blocks which then makes the interior
Sci-Fi-O-Rama has an long and detailed look at the vector art of games from the late 80s to early 90s. That particular art-style seems both dated and futuristic and with all the talk about the “New Aesthetic,” it’s a thrilling nod to the creative, generative power of machines to both document what w
For decades, the brooding creativity of poets and writers has run hand in hand with mania and depression. As David Dobbs points out in a reading of Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine, prominient British novelists and poets faced psychological illness: Nearly 40 percent of the successful creative people [researc
Video At PAX East this weekend, I ran into Alex Schwartz, chief scientist (?) at Owlchemy Labs, who showed me a demo of their upcoming mobile title Jack Lumber. Why are lumberjacks so mad? Because the trees killed the ones they love and it’s up to you to take action. Somewhere between the pacing of
It’s that time of the year again! Kill Screen is looking for interns this summer for editorial, art, and sales/marketing. If you’re interested, apply here.
How different is writing about games from writing about food or music? We talk to New York food critic Adam Platt and former Pitchfork EIC Scott Plagenhoef about dealing with the internet and what it means to be a critic.
Next weekend Rhizome will be hosting another round of its annual Seven on Seven Conference. Bringing together one artist and one technologist, the conference is excellent model of collaboration in the digital age by bringing together two sets of creators that are not always in conversation. In 2010,
At SXSWi this year, I attended a panel titled “The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Digital Devices” that featured Aaron Cope of Stamen Design, Ben Terrett of the UK Government Digital Service design dept., James Bridle and Russell Davies of Really Interesting Group, and Joanne McNeill of Rhizome. The id
Video Swedish game designer Bertil Hörberg‘s Western homage to the side-scrollers of our youth is lovely little piece of mobile goodness. In the vein of classics like Rolling Thunder, the gameplay is quick and the rhythm is all about timing. It’s available for iOS and Android.
I’ve had a million people send me Sam Anderson’s NYT Mag cover story from this weekend on the allure of “stupid games.” Let’s be clear: I’m not particularly happy that a medium that I love appearing on the cover of one of the world’s most respected and powerful news institutions being referred to as
Not much to explain here. Duncan Barclay designed this mashup of two life obsessions as seamlessly as mac n’ cheese. For Tower Defense fanatics in need of nostalgic realism, Maps TD is right up your alley. (Not to mention it makes good use of Google’s April Fools 8-bit Maps joke.) Defend the Eiffel
Upset by the electronic waste he saw in Phenom Penh, Dhairya Dand was inspired to launch a line of toys built from those abandoned laptops, cell phones, and other digital detritus that is generally considered useless. He calls the project “Thinker Toys“: To begin with I made four of these toys, each
Video Tauba Auerbach and Cameron Mesirow (aka Glasser) created this beast of a pump organ with the intent that no one should play music alone. We think it should feature prominent in a future Rock Band: The instrument cannot be played alone. Each player has a keyboard with alternating notes of a fou
In 1973, after a teacher at Drake High School in North Dakota introduced Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, an over-zealous school board head demanded that all the copies be burned to protest the novel’s “obscene language.” Vonnegut intervened via a letter as pointed out by Jason Kottke. The entir
As part of this past weekend’s Molyjam, a 48-hour game creation competition based on the absurd tweets of Peter Molyneux parody account @Molydeux, Ben Pitt created a hilarious answer to the titular question. YOU ARE THE ROAD. [via Waxy]
Video Daniel Franke & Cedric Kiefer produced this amazing sound sculpture to visualize a dancer’s movements with the use of a Kinect: The basic idea of the project is built upon the consideration of creating a moving sculpture from the recorded motion data of a real person. For our work we asked a d
Is core gaming on the ropes? Jeff Grubb at VentureBeat thinks so in a long essay on the decline of traditional gaming categories. He points the ups and downs of THQ’s uDraw package, a Wacom-like drawing tablet for the Wii. After initial success, THQ doubled down to try and port the tablet to the Xbo
Spurred to action by The Corrections author Jonathan Franzen, Tim Clark takes a stab in the New York Review of Books at unravelling the idea that we need stories as Franzen maintains. Clark shoots for the self and argues that stories bring out a greater understanding of our own identities by locatin
