Christine Sun Kim's MacArthur brings games one step closer

The MacArthur Foundation named its 2026 fellows on Tuesday, and one of the 20 is Christine Sun Kim, the Berlin-based artist who turns sound and American Sign Language into drawings, murals, billboards and scores. What stopped me was the foundation's own citation. Next to the charcoal Degrees of Deaf Rage drawings, it singles out Game of Skill 2.0, the 2015 MoMA PS1 installation where you walk a Velcro-covered wire holding a device built by Levy Lorenzo, and a recorded text only plays clearly if you move fast without losing contact.

Kim has also made an actual videogame. Up and Away, a browser game commissioned by Hyundai Artlab last year, remakes Up, Up, and Away, a 1980s speech therapy program Kim played as a kid, where your voice steered a hot air balloon over a mountain range. Too loud and it blew away; too quiet and it crashed. In Kim's version, a machine learning model trained on Kim's own vocalizations decides whether your "AAA" or lip smack is right, so hearing players are the ones who have to adjust. Billboards of toxic positivity cheer you on, and flying into one ends the run. Kim told Artlab the game is "a small space where my voice does not get corrected."

Twelve years ago, I asked whether a game designer would ever win a MacArthur. The count then was zero across 918 awards. The near misses have been adjacent: Luis von Ahn's 2006 fellowship cited the Games with a Purpose project, and Camille Utterback won in 2009 for interactive installations. Kim isn't a game designer, and the foundation doesn't call Kim that. But a game made it into the citation, and the grant is $800,000 with no strings. The Times has the full class. My guess is we're one fellow away?

Up and Away runs in any browser with a microphone, with a Tap Mode if you'd rather not use your voice.