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This is why we play role-playing games
Don’t sell yourself short on the duck-spotting though.
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.
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Meet Monstrum, creators of the world’s greatest playgrounds
Every neighborhood has one. That one park or school or restaurant that had the playground you never could turn away from. My brother’s school had one — the twisting, wooden spires of his montessori, and the sheer size! It was enormous, with byzantine pathways, ample room to hide, and several walk wa
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Bennett Foddy’s take on sumo wrestling will leave you in stitches
Originally designed for two players on a trampoline (seriously), Get On Top is the newest local multiplayer piece of brilliance from academic-cum-game designer Bennett Foddy. It is also the name of a Red Hot Chili Peppers song, but that is neither here nor there. As someone who loves the stripped do
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What makes a world different from a game?
Virtual world research Edward Castronova reflects on Star Wars: The Old Republic failed to attract enough paying customers, while EVE Online continues to thrive. The secret is context and design: What makes a world different from a game? Well, in a world, there’s downtime and exploration and life. D
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Spaceteam is a thrilling critique of technobabble, also our favorite iOS game of the weekend
I spent a lot of time working through Halo 4 last week and man, there’s a lot of crazytalk. What the Didact, Composer, or “rampancy” actually means is not significant, but it did remind me that we put up with a lot of made-up language when we deal with sci-fi. Ultimately, none of this really matters
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The secret slot machine logic behind your favorite casual game
The new tech-heavy gambling is coldly calculated to be as time consuming and profitable as possible. Are game developers taking notes?
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Appartus demo mixes art school mannequins with Capri-Sun kids
IGF entrants are trickling out over the web; you can start the hype machine ‘a-rolling. (Hype machines have wheels btw.) Anyway, Apparatus is a new platformer tjat pulls from the high art of Scandinavian attic design. You’re a jumble of cubes that falls apart and reassembles at your command. Accordi
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Episode 3 of Kill Screen explains why cars in Forza are just big wind instruments
Last month, I travelled to Redmond to visit the offices of Turn 10, the home of the Forza franchise. I’ve never been a big racing games fan (outside of karts, of course), but much like sports games, I’m interested in the design challenges involved in making games like those. With racing games, espec
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Episode 2 of Kill Screen video series delves into body movement & gender politics of Dance Central 3
Last week, we announced the launch of our Kill Screen show with the Creators Project, a partnership of Vice and Intel. We looked at the cinematic realism of Crysis 3 and why games are now including “crap” like lens flare to make titles look more like film. This week, we travel to offices of Harmonix
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What is the worst game you could ever design? Popcap designer has some ideas.
Scott Jon Siegel made the rounds of the social games bubble at Zynga and Playdom, so he’s no stranger to some strange or terrible ideas. Over the weekend, he started the Bad Games tumblr in an attempt to design the worst games ever. “I’d rather make bad games now than good games eventuall,” he expla
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World of Goo co-creator Ron Carmel on indie success, patent infringers, and "saving gamemakers from publishers."
Earlier this year, the fine organizers at Portland’s XOXO Festival asked me to interview Ron Carmel, principal of the Indie Fund and co-creator of World of Goo. Ron was a lovely intervieweee and the piece above is a great overview/origin story from start to finish of a successful indie title. We tal
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MoMA acquires 14 games to permanent collection. Here’s how Kill Screen helped!
When we started Kill Screen a couple years ago, I used to feverishly check our order queue as the first crop of customers began to file into our web store to order print copies of issue zero. (Still available in ebook form!) It was a daily ritual for me, the way one might check on an herb garden or