Issue 10

RAMI ISMAIL ON THE ROAD, WILLIAM CHYR’S IMPOSSIBLE ARCHITECTURE, ROBERT YANG’S GAMES ABOUT SEX, PALOMA DAWKINS’S GARDENS, AND THE LONG PANIC OVER WHAT GAMES DO TO US.

Columns

Two giant red hands cradle a glowing pixel-art city at night, a suited boss figure standing above it

The Halls of Power

The side-scrolling beat-em-up put a fallen city on the screen and a devil at the top of it. What gave the end boss away was never his crimes. It was his taste.

Two figures seen from behind looking out over a dense field of multicolored neon signs

In the Realm of the Senses

Gaspar Noe's films want your senses open wide, and they get there by borrowing the architecture of games. The drug trip in Enter the Void is Child of Eden without a controller.

Isometric cyberpunk street scene in purple and teal, with market stalls and figures under neon light

Cities of Text

Harebrained Schemes's Shadowrun games are mostly language: the smell of a room, pulp death poetics, fat gobs of dialogue. The words are the city you walk through.

Inventory

Pink illustration of a Game Genie cartridge emitting thought bubbles filled with padlocks, arrows and hearts

Glitch Genie

How the quintessential ’90s game-breaker paved the way for glitch art.

On the Perfection of Books

Could the ideal user interface be the one you’re holding in your hands?

A white unicorn leaping through a pink heart against a rainbow gradient scattered with stars

The Unicorn Variations

The enduring power of Lisa Frank, Trapper Keeper visionary.

A girl in bed beneath an oval portal holding a ladder, flanked by red figures and jellyfish

The Disappearing Girl

On the trail of the mysterious, pioneering altgame Yume Nikki.

Back in the Cockpit

Honest labor in Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri.

A Definitive Ranking of Videogame Dogs

They are all good boys, but which boy is the best boy?

Marginalia

An exploration of four spaces.

Emergents

Tom van den Boogaart

The Dutch developer behind Bernband builds games the way he once built Lego: one funny, physics-bent piece snapped onto the next.

Everest Pipkin

Generative poetry, hacked Roombas and endless glass greenhouses: the artist builds machines whose output they cannot predict.

Features

William Chyr in white-framed glasses and a dark coat, standing before a wall of stacked stone blocks

Theory of Relativity

Twisting traditional notions of videogame architecture

Rami Ismail seated in a leather jacket against a low concrete wall

The Distance

The world is getting smaller, and Rami Ismail wants it to be covered in videogames

Emergent Game Scenes

Four global game development communities Rami Ismail thinks you should watch.

Robert Yang leaning on a kitchen counter with a wine bottle and mug beside him

Walking the Line

Where videogames and sex meet

Paloma Dawkins in a red floral jacket beside a brick wall and painted red pipe

The Organic World

Finding nature in unlikely places

Rows of pale rainbow-tinted figures fading into white, a single pink chair at the front

Do Games Desensitize Us?

Here is the fear: the game seduces.

A Field Guide to Modern Pixel Art

Nostalgia, revision, meta and noise: the four moves by which a new generation of pixel artists is pushing the form past 8-bit pastiche.

The Kill Screen Review

Pen and ink portrait of Shigeru Miyamoto

Wii Music

Reviled, mocked, company-destroying: Nintendo’s notorious flop deserves a reevaluation.

Random Access Memory

Flat cartoon of a purple creature lying in bed under blue covers in a green room

Random Access Memory

No one could find a party with alcohol, so a freshman-year night became a dorm-room run through Pokémon Snap that stalled on a single missing picture.