grief
Why I Can't Stop Thinking About Grandma, a Game Boy Eulogy
Zhou Yichen's Grandma is a Game Boy-style elegy for his late grandmother—and a quiet argument for interactive media as a native form of mourning.
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.
speculative fiction
Is Project Hail Mary secretly a game designer's novel?
I came to Andy Weir expecting sci-fi dogmatism and found a writer who thinks like a game designer — mystery as mechanic, worldbuilding as a systems problem.
Sound design
Sound Design Is the Most Ignored Art Form in Games. One Researcher Is Changing That.
A new study asks why there are so few sound-first games—and what you'd hear if you finally stopped shooting and started listening.
Playlist
April 17: What to Play This Weekend
Into the unknown
online talk
The Living Archive: Jakob Kudsk Steensen on Art, Ecology, and the Game Engine
In this conversation, we'll trace the arc of that practice through Otherworlds, Steensen's survey exhibition at Centre PHI in Montréal, which gathers five installations across five distinct spaces and spans roughly 15 years of work.
Emergents
Symoné is putting the body back in play
London-based interdisciplinary artist Symoné merges circus, pole dance, and live game design into a production that asks what your body knows that screens never will.
furniture design
Why Don't We Have Better Furniture For Board Games?
Armani Casa's new Borgonuovo games table is gorgeous—but it made me wonder why we don't design furniture for the board games we actually play today.
opera
A New Opera Wrestles With A School Shooting. Could Games Ever?
A review of Innocence at the Met raises old questions about aestheticizing pain—and newer ones about whether games could handle it differently.
events
Building Worlds While the Actual World Burns
On April 17th, I'm bringing together two artists who are both making work about the climate crisis—and both are reckoning with what it means to build within the systems driving that crisis.
Andrei Tarkovsky
Tarkovsky's Stalker taught a geographer how to write about damaged landscapes
Geographer Caroline Tracey credits Tarkovsky's Stalker with teaching her to foreground damaged landscapes—a lesson game designers have been learning on their own.
literary translation
Anna Nygren's poetry book treats language like a multiplayer game
Swedish writer Anna Nygren's blush / river / fox treats language like a game system—where translation gaps become mechanics and meaning emerges from interplay, not definition.
Generative Art
Did Competition Dance Train Us to Perform for Algorithms?
Maya Man's StarQuest turns AI-generated dancers and Dance Moms into a mirror—asking whether commanding digital bodies is an act of cruelty or creation.