A Killscreen Primer on Game-Based Art

Computer science called games software. English called them texts. Film called them cinema. The art world called them art. We came at it from design — and the work that matters doesn't just talk. It is conversational in form. Eight pieces follow.

The through-line

01 / White Square on Black Ground

Kyle Chayka, 25 February 2011
Two rectangles and a square, moving on black. Chayka declines to ask whether Pong is any good as a game and asks what it is a picture of. The answer runs through Kandinsky and Mondrian.

Good art talks back

02 / Tomo Kihara Will Not Sit Comfortably in One Chair

25 August 2026
A cabinet in Tokyo runs a language model that writes a stranger's life from census data, and its maker is still deciding what to call the work he does.

03 / Why should we treat videogames as archaeological sites?

17 December 2025
Archaeologist Florence Smith Nicholls on "archaeogaming," mapping the digital traces of Elden Ring, and the hopeful act of anticipatory archaeology.

From the vault

04 / Photorealism in Crisis

Kyle Chayka, 17 May 2011
Once the grass is perfect, the goal evaporates and nobody has a second one.

05 / Seeing red

Jon Irwin, 21 August 2015
The Virtual Boy, opened not at a teardown but at Ryoan-ji.

Recently

06 / Keiken's Morphogenic Angels Imagines Post-Human Bodies 1,000 Years From Now

30 October 2025
Keiken — Isabel Ramos, Hana Omori and Tanya Cruz — merge performance, film and game design to build optimistic post-human worlds a millennium out.

07 / Go to Diskokina to See the Future of Live Performance

10 December 2025
A new vanguard of live performance that blends commedia dell'arte and the club, with artists using game engines to redefine what theater can be.

08 / What Happens When You Can Do Nothing in a War Zone?

3 December 2025
Alan Kwan's Scent offers you a role not as a soldier but as a lone dog wandering a desolate war zone. You are simply a witness, without power.

Keep going

Carrie Chen's Digital Avatars Bridge Past and Future
Why P.T. Anderson Gets Away With "Retro" But Games Don't

We have been at this since 2010 — a print magazine, a hiatus, and now a publication that runs artist interviews, criticism and a weekly game recommendation for people who read about architecture and film and performance too.

Most of what we publish is free to read. Membership pays for the part that doesn't scale: commissioning writers, sitting down with artists nobody has covered yet, and keeping fifteen years of archive open. Become a member.