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.
Article
More than five years ago, something strange happened in World of Warcraft. A spell gone awry known as “Corrupted Blood” ravaged the millions of players, leaving behind death, mayhem, and fear. That’s where Rutgers epidemiologist Nina Fefferman stepped in, and that’s where the story gets interesting.
Article
Researcher Nicolas Nova thinks a lot about game controllers. Especially as design objects. What do videogame controllers tell us about technological evolution? What does the future holds for the modest controller? And which controllers stand out as ‘paragons’ of design? In this interview, Nova addr
Interview
As part of continuing series into the early lives of videogame designers, we talk to Manveer Heir, now a senior designer at BioWare working on Mass Effect 3. Heir, who’s been outspoken on the subject of race, talks about his early childhood discrimination in a DC suburb, why he’s captivated by the s
Article
Do videogames count as design objects? NYU sociologist Harvey Molotch certainly thinks so as we are prone to think of videogames as another form of entertainment. But much like videogames, design faces the same problems of anonymity, disrespect, and cultural bias. However, design is now ascendant a
Article
Pop artist Jeff Koons has drawn criticism and praise in equal doses over the life of his career, but a Florida art student has decided to express his opinion in a different way—by blowing Koons’ work to pieces. Hunter Jonakin created “Jeff Koons Must Die!” for his MFA thesis show as a first-person s
Article
Lewis Carroll’s protagonist’s take on badges, prizes, points, and balderdash of that sort.
Article
The “games as art” debate has fortunately waned a bit. Good riddance, I say. But a broader interest in videogames as a visual, interactive medium is certainly welcome. At least, that’s how John Sharp, who teaches at the Savannah College of Art and Design, is approaching games. For the last year or s
Article
For more than 20 years, Jayne Gackenbach has been doing research into the depths of our sleeping subconscious as a dream researcher. Over the past decade, the professor of psychology at Edmonton’s Grant MacEwan University has become increasingly interested in the world of videogames after watching h
Interview
This is the first of a series we’re calling the Pre-Game Interview. Profiles of game creators tend to focus on the products themselves and ignore who the people are as creative individuals. We think that looking at their early lives might be a revealing way to think about game developers’ later outp
Article
This article was originally delivered last week as a “microtalk” at the Game Developers Conference 2011. The format dictates that all speakers must also use 20 slides that auto-advance every 16 seconds! So if you dare, attempt to read the following in about five minutes.
Article
We’ve been selected by Kickstarter to create a curated page so we can spotlight projects that we think fit in with the Kill Screen ethos. Without further ado, here are our first picks.
Article
Effing Meteors is a game about jilted love. A very angry god (think Jonathan Edwards-level fury) has decided that he’s no longer pleased with the little planet below, and it now deserves judgment. Punishment, of course, is the domain of the meteors. As this angry god, you desire satisfaction in the