# Killscreen > Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### About Us URL: https://www.killscreen.com/about/ Last updated: 2026-09-23T22:35:19.000Z ## About Jamin ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/0067--5-.jpg) I'm Jamin Warren, and Killscreen is where I write about the games I think matter most: independent, experimental, distinctly authored work, and the culture that grows up around it. I've spent more than fifteen years where games meet the other arts. I founded Killscreen in 2009, and later Gameplayarts, which helps cultural institutions work with games. I programmed the first Tribeca Games Festival, the Arcade at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Kill Screen Festival, which Mashable called "the TED of videogames." I've advised MoMA's design department, served as cluster chair for Gaming at the Webbys, hosted Game/Show for PBS Digital Studios, and reported for the Wall Street Journal. ## About Killscreen Killscreen covers independent and experimental game culture. That means games, and also everything games have become away from the console: machinima and engine-based art, games in galleries and museums, live play, and the artists who keep coming back to the form. The mainstream industry has no shortage of coverage. The work at the edges has very little. It's often made by one person or a small team, and it's released into the same storefronts as everything else with almost no context. That's the work I want to find, explain and argue for. ## How I Choose I care more about sensation and emotion than about mechanics. Beyond that, I look for three things: - **Brevity.** A game should be as long as it needs to be, [in line with other art forms](https://www.killscreen.com/long-games-and-the-pursuit-of-lost-time/). - **Distinct authorship.** The work should feel like someone made it, rather than leaning on genre tropes to carry its meaning. - **Dialogue with culture.** Games should talk to film, music, art and literature, not just to other games. ## Where This Comes From Killscreen started in 2009 as a Kickstarter project, became a print magazine, and has lived online ever since. Early on, we worked with MoMA curator Paola Antonelli to select games for *Talk to Me: Design and Communication between People and Objects*, and that design lens still shapes how I think about play. The *New Yorker* called Killscreen "the McSweeney's of interactive media," and *Time* credited it with helping legitimize the medium through serious criticism. *As seen in* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/The_New_Yorker-Logo.wine.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/01_pbs_logo_BEODoWF.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/fortune-logo-2016-840x485.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/logo-slider-web-asset-2021-MoMA.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/pitchfork-logo-billboard-1548.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/wired-logo.png) ### Content restricted URL: https://www.killscreen.com/content-restricted/ Last updated: 2021-07-02T22:05:25.000Z _No content available._ ### My account URL: https://www.killscreen.com/account/ Last updated: 2026-01-24T00:20:12.000Z _No content available._ ### Checkout URL: https://www.killscreen.com/checkout/ Last updated: 2021-06-21T23:45:21.000Z _No content available._ ### Cart URL: https://www.killscreen.com/cart/ Last updated: 2021-06-21T23:45:21.000Z _No content available._ ### Shop URL: https://www.killscreen.com/shop/ Last updated: 2021-06-21T23:45:21.000Z _No content available._ ### Homepage Sidebar Box URL: https://www.killscreen.com/homepage-sidebar-box/ Last updated: 2015-11-17T17:51:21.000Z _No content available._ ### Contact URL: https://www.killscreen.com/contact/ Last updated: 2016-10-21T08:39:10.000Z Get in touch with us at info@killscreen.com/previously To send us press releases or games for review, email info@killscreen.com/previously For advertising, please email sales@killscreenmedia.com For anything related to customer service, address changes for the magazine, missing orders, etc., shoot us a line at customerservice@killscreen.com/previously To write for us, visit http://klls.cr/1jOxwEW ### About URL: https://www.killscreen.com/about-2/ Last updated: 2025-12-01T21:13:06.000Z We want to show the world why play matters. ### Advertising URL: https://www.killscreen.com/advertising/ Last updated: 2015-11-17T17:51:20.000Z Interested in advertising on Kill Screen? 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Certain provisions of these Terms of Use may be superseded by expressly designated legal notices or terms located on the Sites or Materials. ### Press URL: https://www.killscreen.com/press/ Last updated: 2015-11-17T17:51:19.000Z GQ | “Kill Screen \[…\] is whip-smart.” NEW YORK OBSERVER: [Scrawl of Duty — Novelists and Journos Defect to Video Game Industry](http://www.observer.com/2010/media/scrawl-duty-novelists-and-journos-defect-video-game-industry?ref=killscreen.com) NYT Bits | [What We’re Reading](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/11/what-were-reading-micropatronage/?ref=killscreen.com) THE NEW YORKER | [Five Essential Books on Video Games](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2010/04/five-essential-books-on-video-games.html?ref=killscreen.com) WIRED | [New Gaming Magazine Kill Screen Aims for the Brain](http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/12/killscreen/?ref=killscreen.com) WIRED | [Cash for Geeks: Kickstarter Connects Projects With Patrons](http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/st%5Fgeek%5Fcash/?ref=killscreen.com) PSFK | [Kill Screen Magazine: What Does It Mean To Play Games?](http://www.psfk.com/2010/06/kill-screen-magazine-what-does-it-mean-to-play-games.html?ref=killscreen.com) BRAINY GAMER | [Michael Abbott interviews Jamin and Chris on the Brainy Gamer Podcast](http://www.brainygamer.com/the%5Fbrainy%5Fgamer/2010/05/brainy-gamer-podcast-episode-28.html?ref=killscreen.com) FUTUREZONE (Austria) | [“Kill Screen”: Journal der Videospielkultur](http://futurezone.orf.at/stories/1643306/?ref=killscreen.com) GAMASUTRA | [Interview: Kill Screen & The Evolution Of Game Magazines](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/26609/Interview%5FKill%5FScreen%5F%5FThe%5FEvolution%5FOf%5FGame%5FMagazines.php?ref=killscreen.com) GAMEOVER.GR | [το περιοδικ? της ν?ας εποχ?ς;](http://www.gameover.gr/Kill-Screen-%CF%84%CE%BF-%CF%80%CE%B5%CF%81%CE%B9%CE%BF%CE%B4%CE%B9%CE%BA%CF%8C-%CF%84%CE%B7%CF%82-%CE%BD%CE%AD%CE%B1%CF%82-%CE%B5%CF%80%CE%BF%CF%87%CE%AE%CF%82.11819.html?article%5Fpage=1&ref=killscreen.com) NEW HAVEN ADVOCATE | [You are Game: New Havener launches a new magazine that takes video game culture seriously](http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/leisure-articles/you-are-game?ref=killscreen.com) SAN DIEGO CITYBEAT | [Blood on the Walls](http://www.sdcitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/blood%5Fon%5Fthe%5Fwalls/9126/?ref=killscreen.com) CRISPY GAMER | [Kill Screen Seeks to Redefine the Videogame Magazine](http://www.crispygamer.com/columns/2009-12-22/press-pass-kill-screen-seeks-to-redefine-the-videogame-magazine.aspx?ref=killscreen.com) 8-BIT ROCKET | [Review: Kill Screen Magazine Issue 0](http://www.8bitrocket.com/newsdisplay.aspx?newspage=38714&ref=killscreen.com) KOMBO.COM | [Kill Screen and the Future of the Gaming Press](http://www.kombo.com/article.php?artid=14493&ref=killscreen.com) THUNDERBOLT | [Kill Screen: Going print in a digital world](http://thunderboltgames.com/features/article/kill-screen-going-print-in-a-digital-world-feature-for-all.html?ref=killscreen.com) LOREHOUND | [A Look at Kill Screen Magazine](http://lorehound.com/news/a-look-at-kill-screen-magazine/?ref=killscreen.com) MAGTASTIC | [Ten Things #2c](http://www.losowsky.com/magtastic/2010/ten-things-2c-killzone/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Privacy Policy URL: https://www.killscreen.com/privacy-policy/ Last updated: 2015-11-17T17:51:19.000Z **Privacy Policy** The web site Killscreendaily.com (“Site”) is a website of Kill Screen Media, Inc. 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Kill Screen is not responsible for the privacy practices or the content of third party web sites you may access through the Site. **Inquiries:** If you have any questions about this privacy statement please contact us at [info@killscreendaily.com](mailto:info@killscreenmagazine.com). --- ### Editorial Policy URL: https://www.killscreen.com/editorial-policy/ Last updated: 2015-11-17T17:51:19.000Z **Kill Screen Editorial Ethics Policies** So we here at Kill Screen take editorial pretty seriously. Everything tattooed on any of the editorial arms of Kill Screen comes from our editorial staff and trusted contributors. We don’t lean on press releases (when humanly possible) or word-of-mouth to pick what things we cover. Most importantly, nothing on Kill Screen is for sale (except for ads obviously!). You can’t pay us to write about you. No editorial is dictated by advertising or sponsors. We’ll never sell or share your information without your consent. As Pops says, the bane of any relationship is unspoken, unfulfilled expectations. You trust us enough with your precious time; the least we could do is express the expectations we have ourselves. We hope you hold us to them. This page outlines the general policies that guide the professional conduct of all editors of and contributors to Kill Screen and its network of sites. These policies uphold our goal to provide unbiased coverage and criticism of the games and beyond! **Policy on Review Assets and Promotional Materials (Software, Hardware and Merchandise)** Staff members are permitted to request and receive software and hardware on behalf of Kill Screen for the purpose of previewing, reviewing or publishing other editorial content for the Kill Screen network. Software may not remain in the permanent collections of staff members and must be returned to the provider or used as all or a portion of a prize for a contest, giveaway or reader meetup associated with Kill Screen. (Note: Downloaded software or software not compatible with retail hardware or not designed for retail may remain in the personal possession of staff, if it cannot be returned or repurposed ; or it may be retained by Kill Screen for company use.) Hardware that is on loan from a manufacturer for ongoing preview, review and otherwise professional use may remain in a staff member’s possession until that person is no longer associated with Kill Screen; at which point the hardware must be returned to the provider or to a senior member of the Kill Screen staff for reassignment. Hardware that is received as a gift or other promotional purpose is subject to the same terms as our software policy and must be returned or used as a giveaway. Game-related merchandise may also be requested and received for editorial purposes or for use as giveaways. Staff members are permitted to dispose of merchandise or other promotional materials valued under $50. **Policy on Travel, Accommodations and Gifts** Staff members may not accept travel, accommodations or gifts of any nature from a company or representative that has direct interest in our editorial content without public disclosure. Kill Screen does not accept airfare or hotel accommodations for its staff from companies or representatives hosting an event that requires transportation and accommodation. Any deviations from this policy will be expressly made public on a case-by-case basis. **Policy on Trade Shows and other Events** Staff members attending trade shows or other industry or press events on behalf of Kill Screen may not accept travel or accommodations outside of those provided under sponsorship, as determined by Kill Screen advertising department (see below). Staff members may accept software, hardware or merchandise at such events for editorial purposes and for use as prizes in contests, giveaways and reader meetups associated with Kill Screen. Kill Screen does not accept invitations to private dinners, but staff members are welcome to accept food and drink provided during events that they attend on behalf of Kill Screen. Staff members are expected to conduct themselves professionally when representing Kill Screen. In general, that means not drinking beyond Aaron Burr-levels of public aggression or passing out in the elevator. Additionally, Kill Screen and its staff members may decline invitations to industry events in which the environments could give the appearance of impropriety, as well as any events that are only tangentially related to games. **Policy on Industry Participation and Public Appearances** Staff members are encouraged to be participating members of the video game industry in so far as their capacities to serve as judges, panelists or make otherwise public and professional appearances on behalf of Kill Screen. **Policy on Third-Party Competitions and Contests** Staff members are permitted to participate in video game competitions held by a company or representative that has direct interest in our editorial content, but any prizes received are subject to the standard Kill Screen policy on software, hardware and merchandise. Staff members may not participate in contests held by a company or representative that has direct interest in our editorial content with the exception of being automatically entered into a giveaway or other contest held at an event at which staff may attend on behalf of Kill Screen. Any prizes received in conjunction with such an exception are subject to the standard Kill Screen policy on software, hardware and merchandise. (See above.) **Policy on News Gathering and Accreditation** Kill Screen and its staff consult hundreds of sources in gathering news and information for its editorial purposes. When available, our sources can be accessed via the “via” link at the bottom of a post and are often highlighted by contextual links in our posts. Where necessary, we also credit secondary sources, typically in brackets in the last line of our post text, as “thanks” or “h/t” (aka hat-tip). If you feel we have not properly credited you or your outlet, please contact us at: info@killscreenmagazine.com **Policy on Advertising** Kill Screen is part of Kill Screen Media, Inc., a videogame arts and culture company. In addition to our advertising and sponsorship partnership with Pitchfork Media Inc., we sell in our own advertising inventory. If you would like to purchase ad space on a Kill Screen network site, please email sales@killscreenmedia.com for a media kit. **Policy on Personal and Professional Activity (Beyond Kill Screen)** A staff member must publicly disclose certain conflicts of interest, excepting personal relationships with parties that have direct interest in our editorial content, which may remain the knowledge of Kill Screen only, but must not compromise a staff member’s ability to maintain the Kill Screen Editorial Ethics Policies. Editorial staff members may not own stock in publicly traded video game publishers and companies with the exception of media conglomerates that own, but are not significantly altered by the financial status of video game publishers, developers or other associated entities. Additionally, staff members may not troll or otherwise bring grief to Kill Screen, its competitors or the games blogosphere at large in their personal endeavors. **Policy on Kill Screen MFG:** Now, as you may or may know, Kill Screen has a production arm called Kill Screen Manufacturing (KSMFG). Most media businesses have a divide between their editorial and business departments — this is how ours is laid out. KSMFG makes games among other things. While we may advertise our products or make announcements related to their release (think about how Pitchfork or Make advertise their festivals), we’ll never review our own creations. That would be silly, right? Game designers and artists that we cover may be contracted to do work for Kill Screen. For those specific projects, as mentioned above, Kill Screen may not take an editorial stance or hype those games outside of announcements of Kill Screen MFG’s handiwork or advertising. Occasionally, Kill Screen MFG may be contracted by brands, videogame or otherwise, for partnerships on events. These should be not be construed as advertising endorsements for given products. *Special thanks to Joystiq for inspiration and allowing us to pilfer some of their language.* ### Write For Us URL: https://www.killscreen.com/write-for-us/ Last updated: 2015-11-17T17:51:19.000Z ## Interested in writing for Kill Screen? We’d love to have you. We publish big-name bigshots and first-time writers. Naturally, if you’re new to the biz we’d like to see your samples, to help us get to know you. But we’re always on the lookout for new talent. You should know about games, but you don’t have to be a games journalist *per se*. We won’t ask you for your list of desert island games—but the more you know about games and games writing, the more likely you are to pitch an idea we haven’t read before. Think hard about why you’re uniquely positioned to tell this story. Are you an oceanographer who can talk about how games connect to deep sea exploration? An inmate with a story to share? Shoot us a line. ## Your Idea The ideal Kill Screen story combines a unique perspective with smart analysis. A story about your favorite game could be great; a story about the people behind it is even better. We love obscure, hip, “you need to know about this” games, and we love giant, mass market blockbusters. New games, retro games, and forgotten games are all in our purview. But remember: If you write about a game everyone’s already played, please bring a fresh angle. We know about the Little Sisters in *BioShock*. We know about the thing you can do with the hookers in *Grand Theft Auto*. We don’t run reviews, previews, news, or boilerplate. Don’t write to a template; write the best piece you can on a subject you care about. ## Your Pitch Submit your idea [here](http://killscreen.submishmash.com/Submit?ref=killscreen.com). Please tell us as much as you can about your idea. Tell us the premise, spell out your argument, and describe the research and interviews you would use for your story. You are welcome to send pieces on spec, but obviously, that doesn’t mean we’ll run it, or have time to give constructive criticism. Please do not send a piece that you’ve published elsewhere, unless you’ll be substantially reworking it (e.g., you have a blog post that’s crying out to be a great magazine piece). We usually take care of the art, but we’ll take any you can recommend. We try to avoid screenshots at all costs, unless the game is unreleased, obscure, or the screenshot is [taken in an artful way](http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/traveling/index.html?ref=killscreen.com). ## What’s in it for you? We will run your story on an up-and-coming gaming website, which TIME called “one of the best blogs of 2011.” We’ll pay you for it, too. We will work with you. We will edit you. We will comfort you. We want your piece to flourish and shine. We have a motto: “Red is a good color.” And most of all, be patient with us. We get a lot of submissions for a small team. We can’t promise we’ll respond to you quickly, but we’ll do our best. ## Other advice, which will pile up over time. “Smart” writing doesn’t necessarily mean “academic” writing. (*The New Yorker* is a great example.) Please make your argument without losing momentum, resorting to academic terminology, or burying us in citations. The word “mimesis” snuck into our first issue, but we swear it will never happen again. At this time, women probably don’t make up a full half of the audience for a video game magazine. But you should write as if they do—and as if they brought the beer. “My girlfriend doesn’t understand games” articles don’t work for us. Try to avoid “armchair analysis.” Say you’re playing a game like *Red Dead Redemption* and you think of an idea about its use of narrative. How will you argue you’re right? What makes your idea original, and engaging? What will you do to prove that game designers are thinking about the same problem as you—or, that they should be? Don’t tell us what you want to write about. Tell us the argument you’ll make about the subject. Personal essays are a tricky sell. They can be very, very good, or very, very not good. If you can give us a sample of your idea or a clip that’s close in style, it’ll help us see how amazing your essay will be. Sometimes we joke around the office that we never, ever need to see another pitch about *BioShock*. We laugh, and laugh. But maybe we’re not joking. Oh, and we’ve heard of Ian Bogost, too. ### Vision Statement URL: https://www.killscreen.com/vision-statement/ Last updated: 2015-11-17T17:51:19.000Z ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/previously/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/our_vision_low.jpg) **1\. Play does not mean a waste of time.** One of the most unpleasant by-products of our Puritan ancestry is the negative association between fun and work. We are told: if you are having fun, you are not working. Fun is simple-minded; work is struggle; time is money. Time spent in play must be a waste, right? We think play is a fundamental human endeavor. Play motivates us and speaks to our most natural human inclinations. Play greases the wheels of social interaction. A life immersed in play is a life well-spent. **2\. Videogames are maturing as a medium.** Out of the sprites of *Spacewar!*, games have burgeoned into a diverse and sometimes magical field. Games at their best reflect all of the wonder, beauty, and intelligence found in music, film, theatre, literature, and the rest of the arts. We believe that our conversation should not dwell on whether games deserve their place in the pantheon of the arts, but \*which\* games deserve it. Play motivates us and speaks to our most natural human inclinations. **3\. Everyone games, but not everyone is a “gamer”.** We are moving out of a world where people ask “Do you play games?,” and moving into one where we ask “What games do you play?” Everyone plays. The term “gamer,” however, connotes one highly specific culture. There is nothing wrong with the popular expression “gamer”, nor with that culture, but we are more interested in the question of what type? as opposed to whether at all. **4\. Games need an advocate.** No medium matures on its own. Rock n’ roll had Rolling Stone, the Internet had Wired, fashion had Vogue. We believe that Kill Screen can be this advocate for the true, the beautiful, and the good in games. **5\. Games are connected to every other creative field…** It is a common misconception that games are something apart from the rest of creative production. Nothing could be further from the truth. Game-making is a fundamentally creative act and those that pursue it face the same dilemmas as painters, musicians, dancers, and poets. To make games is simply to make. To make games is simply to make. **6\. But games have a lot to learn from other creative fields.** The moat around games is partly of game makers own design. Game creators have not received the necessary exposure for the public to respect games as art. At times, gamemakers have hidden themselves from the public. At their worst, games can be insular, narrow-minded, and pandering. We want Kill Screen to help bring culture to games and games to culture. **7\. All games are social.** In the history of games, only a handful have been single player. Yet games possess the reputation as private and anti-social. We believe that all games are social. They are either played with others or played against the designer herself. We believe that all games should be played, and more importantly, discussed, with one another. **8\. Games are serious business.** Games generate billions of dollars of revenue for global economies, yet they are barely covered by the financial press. Games make a lot of money but do not yet command much attention. We believe that all games are social. **9\. Games (and gamers) are more diverse than you think.** The range of creative products over the past decade demonstrates a real shift in the demographics of gamers and the interests of game makers. We believe that everyone has the perfect game waiting for them. **10\. Games are at a crossroads right now.** The Comics Code Authority led to book-burnings that set back sequential art a half century in the United States. The Hays Code regulated the film industry’s output and prevented the “ridicule of the clergy” and depiction of drug use. Rock n’ roll was banned from dance halls around this country just fifty years ago. Games are young, just emerging from similar growing pains into their maturity as a medium. We want to document this growth. We want to be the vanguard that pushes games away from its misunderstood past and towards its bright future. ### Playlist URL: https://www.killscreen.com/playlist/ Last updated: 2015-11-17T17:51:17.000Z _No content available._ ### Who We Are URL: https://www.killscreen.com/who-we-are/ Last updated: 2017-04-14T03:55:58.000Z ![Gamers Don't Think](http://killscreendaily.com/includes/img/focus-areas/ks_site_headerimgs_aboutus.jpg "Gamers Don't Think") [Kill Screen](http://www.killscreendaily.com/?ref=killscreen.com) is a media company that inspires a life well-played.We know all things interactive from virtual reality to esports to game development. As a content strategy and development house, our past and present clients include GE, Intel, PBS, MoMA, Warby Parker and more. We’ve worked with brands and agencies to help them unlock the power of play and we’re big believers in how story can transform the way you speak to your audience.As an editorial house, Kill Screen publishes a website and a magazine of the same name as well as Versions, our virtual reality culture property. We produce events such as the first ever Tribeca Games Festival, the groundbreaking Arcade at the Museum of Modern Art and the Kill Screen Festival which Mashable called “the TED of videogames.” *Read our [vision statement](http://killscreendaily.com/pages/vision-statement/?ref=killscreen.com).* *Get in touch with us at [info@killscreen.com/previously](mailto:info@killscreenmagazine.com).* ### Kill Screen High Scores FAQ URL: https://www.killscreen.com/kill-screen-high-scores-faq/ Last updated: 2025-01-03T23:47:57.000Z Welcome to the Kill Screen High Scores FAQ, where we will answer all of the questions we get about what counts, what doesn’t, and what the hell, anyway. Got a question for us? Write us at [highscores@killscreenmagazine.com](mailto:highscores@killscreenmagazine.com). **Q. I want to vote for a *DeathSpank* game, but there are two *DeathSpank* games. I’m scared people are going to split the vote. *Really* scared. What should I do?** A. We have decided to count both games as one entry, to prevent a case where the votes are split. Just vote for *DeathSpank*. **Q. I would like to vote for *Minecraft*. However, it’s only at Alpha. Does it count?** A. We’ll accept votes for any game that came out this year and is freely accessible to the public. Everyone can log in, plunk down their money, and play *Minecraft*, so we’ll allow it. **Q. I had the chance to play Independent Games Festival-winner *Monaco* at the GDC (or in the process of voting for it, or because the creator’s your neighbor, or whatever). Can I vote for *Monaco*? It won the IGF!** A. *Monaco* isn’t getting a public release this year, so sorry, it doesn’t qualify. **Q. You set the dividing line between the two lists at exactly $30\. But Professor Layton and the Unwound Future is $29.99\. Should it go on the list with the “smaller” games?** A. Shrinkwrapped DS titles that are at or around the $30 mark can go on the “blockbusters and full releases” list on the left. See, we set the bar at $30 because it marked an easy line between the full commercial releases and the smaller, indie/free-to-play/mobile titles. Almost no games cost $30\. But obviously, there are a few games that do cost $30, and generally they belong in the “blockbusters and full releases” list. **Q. Do Facebook games count? Which list do I put them on? I know that they’re free to play, but I spent $500 in microtransactions last month and my spouse is leaving me, so should I put that in the “over $30” list?** A. Facebook games count. But because you can generally play them for free, they go in the “under $30” list. **Q. Can I vote for *Farmville*?** A. That’s between you and your god. **Q. I want to vote for a game that came out last year, but got ported to the iPod/XBLA/whatever in 2010\. Can I vote for it this year?** A. We’d prefer not to see votes for ports, unless the port is a substantial rewrite of the original, or in some other way represents a significant new release. *Cave Story* on the Wii counts as a 2010 release, but we’re inclined to think that *Plants vs. Zombies* on the iPhone does not. ### Home URL: https://www.killscreen.com/home/ Last updated: 2025-11-03T18:02:47.000Z Welcome to Kill Screen ## Posts ### Fe Angelo Shares Painting Worlds From NECHROMIA URL: https://www.killscreen.com/fe-angelo-shares-painting-worlds-from-nechromia/ Last updated: 2026-10-20T19:18:00.000Z Fe Angelo, the solo developer who makes games as 2dchaos, shared [a new clip](https://www.instagram.com/p/DehsKIES4Ff/?ref=killscreen.com) from *NECHROMIA* on Oct. 16 showing the player stepping into one of the game's paintings. The game is in development for Windows, macOS and Linux, with ZNT Productions listed as its publisher on Steam. Watch the teaser trailer below. 0:00 /0:28 1× The **NECHROMIA* teaser trailer, without sound; the version with sound is on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4720620/NECHROMIA/?ref=killscreen.com). Video: Fe Angelo / ZNT Productions *NECHROMIA* is a single-player survival horror game drawn in high contrast: flat black against white, red, yellow, and blue. According to its [Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4720620/NECHROMIA/?ref=killscreen.com), the player is trapped in a gothic castle "made of memories that aren't yours," armed only with a lantern used for combat, puzzles, and exploration. Staying in lit areas preserves sanity. Paintings hung throughout the castle each lead to a separate world "shaped by sin," where the player claims the abilities needed to escape. The page lists multiple endings. Steam lists the release date as "To be announced" and hosts one teaser trailer. Angelo released a first demo on [itch.io](https://2dchaos.itch.io/nechromia?ref=killscreen.com) in September 2025, and in [the announcement post](https://itch.io/t/5349907/nechromia-first-demo?ref=killscreen.com) described the game as dealing with "themes of queerness, sacrifice, solitude and fear." For more reading, see [Walk inside the dreamy paintings of a Metaphysical art pioneer](https://www.killscreen.com/walk-within-classic-works-metaphysical-art-pioneer-game/), [Making a survival horror game without all the clichés](https://www.killscreen.com/making-survival-horror-game-without-cliches/) and [*NECHROMIA* on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4720620/NECHROMIA/?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nechromia-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nechromia-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nechromia-frame-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nechromia-frame-21.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nechromia-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nechromia-frame-9.jpg) Screenshots and trailer frames from **NECHROMIA*. Images: Fe Angelo / ZNT Productions Killscreen finds horror games made by one person with a strong hand, long before launch. Get the free newsletter. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### House House Rules Out Big Walk on Xbox, Cites BDS Boycott URL: https://www.killscreen.com/house-house-rules-out-big-walk-on-xbox-cites-bds-boycott/ Last updated: 2026-10-20T18:26:00.000Z House House, the Melbourne studio behind *Untitled Goose Game*, will not release *Big Walk* on Xbox. In [a statement on the game's site](https://bigwalk.game/xbox/?ref=killscreen.com), the studio said the decision follows the Palestinian-led BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement's call to boycott Microsoft, and the movement's designation of Microsoft Games and Xbox as a "priority boycott target." Watch the release date trailer below. 0:00 /0:24 1× An excerpt from the **Big Walk* release date trailer, shown without sound. [Watch the full trailer on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1478500/Big%5FWalk/?ref=killscreen.com). *Big Walk* is a cooperative online game in which a group of friends wanders a large open world and talks to each other. [The Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1478500/Big%5FWalk/?ref=killscreen.com) calls it "a cooperative online walker-talker." The statement acknowledges the cost: "This decision means that some people will miss out on playing *Big Walk* with their friends, and we understand the disappointment we’re causing." House House says it would bring the game to Xbox once Microsoft and Xbox are no longer BDS boycott targets. The BDS movement answered on Oct. 16 with [an Instagram post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DejwQBIlxjL/?ref=killscreen.com) saluting the studio and asking players, developers and games journalists to sign its No Games for Genocide pledge and boycott Xbox. [Game Informer](https://gameinformer.com/2026/10/15/house-house-chose-not-to-put-big-walk-on-xbox-in-accordance-with-palestinian-led-bds?ref=killscreen.com) was among the outlets that reported the statement. *Big Walk* came out Aug. 4 on PC, Mac, PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2, published by Panic. House House formed out of Melbourne's game-jam scene and was incorporated in 2014\. The studio is four people: Nico Disseldorp, Jake Strasser, Stuart Gillespie-Cook and Michael McMaster. Its first game, *Push Me Pull You*, came out in 2016\. *Untitled Goose Game* followed in 2019 and won Game of the Year at both the D.I.C.E. Awards and the Game Developers Choice Awards. For more reading, see [Killscreen's 2014 profile of the studio](https://www.killscreen.com/how-four-art-kids-melbourne-created-bizarre-new-sport/), [the BDS movement's case against Microsoft](https://bdsmovement.net/microsoft?ref=killscreen.com) and [the People Make Games explainer House House recommends](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ybj10537yi4&ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/big-walk-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/big-walk-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/big-walk-6.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/big-walk-7.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/big-walk-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/big-walk-8.jpg) **Big Walk* screenshots. Images courtesy House House and Panic. Killscreen follows the studios at the edges of games, including the choices they make about where their work goes. Get Radar free in your inbox twice a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### James Gleick Reviews Inventing ELIZA in the New York Review URL: https://www.killscreen.com/james-gleick-reviews-inventing-eliza/ Last updated: 2026-10-20T17:13:59.000Z James Gleick has reviewed *Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI* in [the Nov. 5 issue of *The New York Review of Books*](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/11/05/talk-to-it-chatbots-artificial-intimacy-inventing-eliza/?ref=killscreen.com), pairing the MIT Press history with Sherry Turkle’s *Artificial Intimacy*. Mark C. Marino, the digital-literature scholar and game maker who is one of its eight authors, [shared the review on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dehq1NbyN5f/?ref=killscreen.com). The book is the first comprehensive critical study of Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1960s chatbot, drawn from archives at MIT, Stanford and UCLA. It prints ELIZA’s rediscovered original source code next to scripts that had been missing for decades, follows the program’s development from 1965 to 1968, and, in the publisher’s description, shows Weizenbaum building “a chatbot within a conversational programming environment” with innovations well ahead of its time. The authors are Sarah Ciston, David M. Berry, Anthony C. Hay, Marino, Peter Millican, Jeff Shrager, Arthur I. Schwarz and Peggy Weil, with a foreword by *Hamlet on the Holodeck* author Janet H. Murray. The paperback has been out since [July 14 at $35](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262052481/inventing-eliza/?ref=killscreen.com), timed to the 60th anniversary of ELIZA’s public debut. A companion site runs [a faithful recreation of the 1966 program](https://findingeliza.org/?ref=killscreen.com). ![Joseph Weizenbaum](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/joseph-weizenbaum-1980s.jpg) Joseph Weizenbaum, who built ELIZA at MIT between 1965 and 1968\. Photo: findingeliza.org Marino works in critical code studies, the practice of reading source code the way critics read literary texts, and the book reads ELIZA through that lens. For more reading, see [a 2011 piece on Marino's case for reading code as text](https://www.killscreen.com/code-as-text-mark-marino-on-the-academic-potential-of-co/) and [an archive piece on playing therapist to a chatbot](https://www.killscreen.com/eliza/). Killscreen reads the books, shows and code that games culture grows out of, not just the releases. The free Radar letter delivers it twice a week. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Damjan Jovanovic Builds Atlas of NASA's 1970s Space Colonies URL: https://www.killscreen.com/damjan-jovanovic-builds-atlas-of-nasas-1970s-space-colonies/ Last updated: 2026-10-20T15:11:59.000Z Damjan Jovanovic has released [Space Settlements](https://dmjn.github.io/Space-Settlements?ref=killscreen.com), an interactive browser atlas of the rotating habitats that Gerard O'Neill and NASA designed between 1969 and 1977\. It accompanies ["Rotating Worlds,"](https://worldmakingproject.substack.com/p/rotating-worlds) an essay published Oct. 5 on Worldmaking Project and Jovanovic previewed the atlas in [a reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeF%5F-76IBqb/?ref=killscreen.com) on Instagram. Watch it below. 0:00 /1:52 1× A tour of Space Settlements. Via [Damjan Jovanovic on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeF%5F-76IBqb/?ref=killscreen.com). The atlas covers five designs: the Stanford Torus, Model One, Bernal Alpha, Island Two and Island Three. Each opens in a live 3D cutaway that you can step through system by system, shown beside the paintings by Don Davis and Rick Guidice that first illustrated the studies. The torus can turn through the cutaway once a minute, its designed rate. Other pages cover the colony's economy, the mass driver and a tool for testing new habitat shapes. The free app is built with three.js, with its code [on GitHub](https://github.com/dmjn/Space-Settlements?ref=killscreen.com). Its gravity and structural checks apply the NASA study's criteria to shapes a viewer draws, while its ecological and economic figures are reproduced from the sources rather than simulated, per the essay. Those figures come chiefly from NASA's 1977 report *Space Settlements: A Design Study* and O'Neill's 1976 book *The High Frontier*. Jovanovic is design faculty at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles and co-founded Studio Lifeforms, a game studio, with Lidija Kljakovic. The studio's *ETRE* was announced in August and is slated for release in 2027\. The Stanford Torus, designed for 10,000 residents, emerged from a 1975 summer study at Stanford and NASA Ames. For more reading, see [Killscreen on Playing Models at SCI-Arc](https://www.killscreen.com/playing-models-brings-its-ai-symposium-to-sci-arc/), [the Public Domain Review on 1970s space colony art](https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/space-colony-art-from-the-1970s/?ref=killscreen.com) and [Studio Lifeforms' page for *ETRE*](https://lifeforms.io/ETRE?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/space-settlements-3s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/space-settlements-12s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/space-settlements-36s.jpg) Views from Space Settlements. Courtesy Damjan Jovanovic. Killscreen covers the game makers using real-time tools to do history, architecture and art. Get them twice a week, Monday and Thursday, in the free Radar newsletter. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Amanita Design Announces Machinarium 2, Shares Trailer URL: https://www.killscreen.com/amanita-design-announces-machinarium-2/ Last updated: 2026-10-20T14:40:22.000Z Amanita Design has announced *Machinarium 2*, a sequel to the 2009 point-and-click adventure that made the studio’s name. The Czech team posted the news [on Instagram on Oct. 8](https://www.instagram.com/p/DePTiQQstkP/?ref=killscreen.com) and opened a [Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1619280/Machinarium%5F2/?ref=killscreen.com), which lists the release as to be announced, for Windows and Mac. Watch the announcement trailer below. 0:00 /0:24 1× From the **Machinarium 2* announcement trailer. The full trailer, with Floex’s score, is [on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1619280/Machinarium%5F2/?ref=killscreen.com). Picking up after Josef and Berta’s escape from the city, the sequel crash-lands the two robots in the barrens, where they find a hidden valley settled by two tribes, one in a monastery high on the rocks, one in a city below, both slowly running short of power. Both robots are playable this time, switched freely to crack puzzles neither could solve alone, and the series keeps its wordless language of animated thought bubbles. The Steam page describes every surface as hand-drawn, “brought to life stroke by stroke, in a style that borrows from old master drawings and Renaissance landscape paintings.” Direct gamepad control is new, moving the robots with no cursor in between, though mouse play remains. Tomáš Dvořák, aka Floex, returns as composer, and the page says the score keeps the original’s acoustic textures, now grown into symphonic arrangements. The announcement reel was posted jointly with Floex. Since *Machinarium*, the studio has released *Botanicula*, *Samorost 3*, *Chuchel*, *Pilgrims*, *Creaks*, *Happy Game* and the cardboard-built *Phonopolis*. For more reading, see [Amanita’s cardboard city in Phonopolis](https://www.killscreen.com/amanita-design-built-a-dystopian-city-out-of-real-cardboard-then-digitized-it/) and [the Amanita and Rusty Lake point-and-click showcase](https://www.killscreen.com/amanita-and-rusty-lake-open-a-showcase-for-point-and-clicks/). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/machinarium-2-ss2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/machinarium-2-ss3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/machinarium-2-ss4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/machinarium-2-ss5.jpg) **Machinarium 2*. Images: Amanita Design, via Steam Killscreen has followed hand-drawn adventures like Amanita’s since 2010, and finds the ones almost nobody else covers. Get the next find in the free Radar letter, twice a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Side Quest's Elliott Burns Puts the Art Game to a Vote URL: https://www.killscreen.com/side-quests-elliott-burns-puts-the-art-game-to-a-vote/ Last updated: 2026-10-20T03:35:00.000Z Event details When Oct. 25, 2026, 5 to 6 p.m. Where Copeland Gallery, Peckham, London [Book a place](https://www.tickettailor.com/events/peckhamdigital/2419490?ref=killscreen.com) Elliott Burns, who writes *Side Quest*, a research publication on artist-produced computer games, gives a performance lecture called "What Even Is An Art Game?" at Peckham Digital in London on Oct. 25, from 5 to 6 p.m. at Copeland Gallery. The audience votes by phone, from strongly agree to strongly disagree, on statements, propositions and examples as Burns sets competing definitions in a historical schema, according to the festival's listing. A roundtable follows. Burns's [post announcing the talk](https://www.instagram.com/p/DemDA1NoRUg/?ref=killscreen.com) says it is free to attend. The listing promises that views "will be statistically calculated" and that "discourse, debate and diagramming is expected to follow." In January, *Side Quest* published ["Gather Quest: 100 Art Games 100 Artists,"](https://sidequestosp.substack.com/p/gather-quest-100-art-games-100-artists) a list of games by artists with a survey of definitions. Peckham Digital, a South London festival of creative computing, runs Oct. 22 to 25 in its fifth year. Its exhibitions are Mediating Behaviours, with 10 artists at Copeland Gallery, and Minimal Viable Home, four artists working with games at Rabbet London, including Jade Lin and Ama Dogbe. The same Sunday has a Pure Data workshop with Nadia Li, a talk on artificial life with Tom Appleyard and the Digital Reel film screening. Burns co-founded the online digital art platform Off Site Project and is an associate lecturer on BA Culture, Criticism and Curation at Central Saint Martins. Earlier *Side Quest* entries cover Tomo Kihara's [*Game of Possible Lives*](https://sidequestosp.substack.com/p/play-quest-game-of-possible-lives) and Juan Covelli's [*Los Caídos*](https://sidequestosp.substack.com/p/play-quest-los-caidos-by-juan-covelli). For more reading, see [Exactly two playable games made it into the Venice Biennale](https://www.killscreen.com/two-playable-games-venice-biennale/), [When a film festival ran *Sleeping Dogs*, the walls came off](https://www.killscreen.com/when-a-film-festival-ran-sleeping-dogs-the-walls-came-off/) and [*Side Quest*](https://sidequestosp.substack.com/about). Killscreen lists the talks, art game shows and festivals at the edges of games that almost nobody else is tracking. Get them in Radar, free, twice a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Jiaying Li Builds Osaider Out of Shifting Palace Modules URL: https://www.killscreen.com/jiaying-li-builds-osaider-out-of-shifting-palace-modules/ Last updated: 2026-10-20T03:32:08.000Z The Bartlett School of Architecture's Cinematic and Videogame Architecture program has shared [footage of *Osaider*](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DemrG9VJ0wI/?ref=killscreen.com), a narrative exploration game by Jiaying Li, who goes by Gaga. In the game, players reconstruct a palace's buried history by moving through fragments of its rooms, and the palace is assembled one module at a time as they play. It's a bit of the puzzle box of [*The Room*](https://www.fireproofgames.com/games/the-room?ref=killscreen.com) with the axonometric perspective of [*Monument Valley*](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/monument-valley/). Watch the clip below. 0:00 /0:30 1× **Osaider*, by Jiaying Li. Clip via [the Bartlett's Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DemrG9VJ0wI/?ref=killscreen.com). Li describes a nation organized around fear of an unseen enemy called Osaider. Inside the palace, weapons are manufactured by day and melted back into raw material by night, locking the world into a cycle of violence and futility. Two secret factions compete: the Archivist, who decides what official memory keeps, and the Whalemen, an underground society planning an escape. Every collectible carries a hidden ideology value, and handing items in triggers a Dice Check that decides which faction's space opens next. Li made the game as the practice-based half of a dissertation, "Spatial Storylets: Extending Ergodic Narrative into Three-Dimensional Space." Li writes that the game "tests the idea that spatial form itself can function as narrative grammar," using fixed text fragments, the spatial modules that hold them, and the dice-check rules linking one module to the next. "The palace does not pre-exist," Li adds. No public build or release date has been announced. The Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch, whose students make films, games and immersive experiences as design projects, showed its 2026 cohort in the Bartlett Autumn Show, which closed Oct. 11 in London and remains [online](https://autumn2026.bartlettarchucl.com/?ref=killscreen.com). For more reading, see [Killscreen on two more Bartlett games from this year's show](https://www.killscreen.com/two-architecture-students-show-games-at-the-bartlett/) and [the Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/prospective-students/graduate/taught-degrees/cinematic-and-videogame-architecture-march?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/osaider-1-7s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/osaider-8-4s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/osaider-21-7s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/osaider-28-4s.jpg) Stills from **Osaider*, by Jiaying Li. Killscreen tracks the games coming out of art and architecture schools before almost anyone else does. Get Radar free twice a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Freddie Sanders Announces Seeder Solo Show at arebyte URL: https://www.killscreen.com/freddie-sanders-announces-seeder-solo-show-at-arebyte/ Last updated: 2026-10-20T03:33:01.000Z Freddie Sanders has begun production and field research for *Seeder*, a solo exhibition at the London digital art center [arebyte](https://www.arebyte.com/?ref=killscreen.com) that runs from February to June 2027, according to Sanders' Instagram profile. The show combines an asynchronous multiplayer video game with a series of large-scale installations. Sanders announced it in [an Oct. 2 post](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd%5FuWKWihy4/?ref=killscreen.com) with footage from the research. Watch a clip below. 0:00 /0:23 1× Field research footage for **Seeder*, from [Freddie Sanders' post](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd%5FuWKWihy4/?ref=killscreen.com). Video: Freddie Sanders The game is set in what Sanders calls "a dark, archetypal fantasy forest," where sites of abandoned infrastructure prompt dialogue. Players' interactions with those sites train an AI model in the background, building what the caption describes as "a collective and intimate dataset of our anxieties." Those inputs change the game's environment over time and will decide the nature of a closing event for the exhibition. According to Sanders, the project explores "collective mythmaking, re-enchantment and conspiracy." The footage shows hands plastering a round opening into a concrete surface and a walk through a forest hung with lichen. The post's last two images are credited to Vadimovna Studio. Sanders is a London-based artist who works in game engines, with a focus on masculinity, nihilism and labor, according to a Der Greif profile. An earlier game, *The Castle*, is set at a castle in North East England that is eroding into the sea and interrupts play with glitches, loading screens and the gradual removal of player control. His Instagram profile lists a residency at Medialab Matadero and a lecturing post at Goldsmiths. For more reading, see [arebyte Shows Wendi Yan and Skawennati in SLIPSTREAM](https://www.killscreen.com/arebyte-shows-wendi-yan-and-skawennati-in-slipstream/), [The Endless Forest's playful online world could get a remake](https://www.killscreen.com/endless-forests-playful-online-world-get-remake/) and [Der Greif's profile of Freddie Sanders](https://dergreif.org/artist-blog/freddie-sanders-game-engines-masculinity-and-digital-decay?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/seeder-plaster.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/seeder-research-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/seeder-research-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/seeder-forest-21s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/seeder-vadimovna-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/seeder-vadimovna-2.jpg) Research and production images for **Seeder*. Images: Freddie Sanders; last two by Vadimovna Studio Killscreen tracks the games built for galleries before the shows open. Get Radar free, twice a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Lev Manovich Details Soft Cinema II, Shares Clip URL: https://www.killscreen.com/lev-manovich-details-soft-cinema-ii-shares-clip/ Last updated: 2026-10-20T03:37:08.000Z Media theorist Lev Manovich has shared a new example from Soft Cinema II, a software engine that assembles films in real time from media databases using written rules and algorithms. In [an Oct. 6 Instagram post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeJiwIXRwci/?ref=killscreen.com), Manovich said the engine now accepts executable web code, HTML and JavaScript, as a native element of a film, alongside video, stills and audio. Watch the clip below. 0:00 /0:25 1× The Soft Cinema II example from [Manovich's Instagram post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeJiwIXRwci/?ref=killscreen.com). Video: Lev Manovich The clip shows generative abstract animations that Manovich says were coded with the AI assistant Claude, playing inside a Soft Cinema II film. The page carries 20 live controls that can be changed during playback. According to Manovich, the engine can produce a single unique film or run endlessly without repeating a sequence. "Although it can include AI-generated media, the engine uses explicit algorithms rather than black-box AI models," the caption reads. Soft Cinema II is not yet public. In a reply under the post, Manovich wrote that the software currently has 113 parameters and will be released "eventually with documentation," once it is simplified. The original Soft Cinema was a collaboration between Manovich and artist and designer Andreas Kratky, released by MIT Press in 2005 as *Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database*, a DVD of three films with a 40-page booklet. Its software edited movies in real time by choosing elements from a database under rules set by the authors. Manovich is also the author of *The Language of New Media* (MIT Press, 2001). For more reading, see [A sculptural camera turns a game engine into cinema](https://www.killscreen.com/kevin-peter-he-passage/) and [Manovich's Soft Cinema project page](https://manovich.net/index.php/projects/soft-cinema?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/soft-cinema-ii-7s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/soft-cinema-ii-10s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/soft-cinema-ii-16s.jpg) Frames from the Soft Cinema II example. Images: Lev Manovich Killscreen covers the films, engines and software art that run like games. Get Radar free, twice a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Amélie McKee and Melle Nieling Show Forgotten Sims at IMPAKT URL: https://www.killscreen.com/amelie-mckee-and-melle-nieling-show-forgotten-sims-at-impakt/ Last updated: 2026-10-20T03:37:07.000Z Event details When Aug. 28 to Nov. 15, 2026; Wednesday to Sunday, noon to 6 p.m. Where IMPAKT \[Centre for Media Culture\], Utrecht Cost €7; €6 discounted; €3.50 with a Museumjaarkaart [Get tickets](https://tickets.voordemensen.nl/Impakt/event/520?ref=killscreen.com) Comfort Zone, an installation by Amélie McKee and Melle Nieling, is on view at IMPAKT in Utrecht through Nov. 15 in the group exhibition Data Never Dies. A portable DVD player shows characters one of the artists made in *The Sims* about 20 years ago and recently recovered from a mother's Windows XP laptop. In [IMPAKT's clip](https://www.instagram.com/p/DedsLgNAdNx/?ref=killscreen.com), a Sims lot fills with flames on the little screen. Watch it below. 0:00 /0:08 1× Comfort Zone in IMPAKT's clip. Via [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DedsLgNAdNx/?ref=killscreen.com). IMPAKT's [page for the work](http://impakt.nl/events/exhibition/data-never-dies/comfort-zone/?ref=killscreen.com) calls the DVD player "a portal to a digital space that seems frozen in time," where the Sims "linger like the undead on a hard drive," and says the piece asks about "the spirits of our past selves that haunt hard drives and digital clouds." Data Never Dies: Digital Traces and AI Afterlives is curated by Rosa Wevers and built around profiles that outlive their owners, forgotten messages that train AI and deepfakes. Others include Ginevra Petrozzi's *A Funeral for Digital Data*; Joeri Boelhouwer's video installation *Digital Tomb*; Esther Hovers's *The Right to Be Forgotten*; and Kyriaki Goni's *Deletion Process\_Only You Can See My History*. Wevers leads a last curator's tour on Nov. 1. McKee, born in 1996, builds objects that resemble working devices from buttons, cables and switches and holds an MA from the Royal College of Art. Nieling, born in 1992 in the Netherlands, works with the visual language of corporate architecture and internet spam, won the VFF Annual Award in 2026 and begins a residency at FACT in Liverpool this autumn. For more reading, see [*The Sims*, *Our Town*, and the role of the director](https://www.killscreen.com/sims-our-town-and-role-director/), [There is only one way to play *the Sims*, and that is to cheat](https://www.killscreen.com/there-only-one-way-play-sims-and-cheat/) and [IMPAKT's exhibition page](https://impakt.nl/events/2026/exhibition/data-never-dies/?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/impakt-dnd-W858_3340526-opening-Data-never-Dies.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/impakt-dnd-W858_3340605-opening-Data-never-Dies.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/impakt-dnd-W858_3340783-opening-Data-Never-Dies.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/impakt-dnd-W858_3341031-performance-Ginevra-Petrozzi-Funeral-for-Digital-data.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/impakt-dnd-W858_3341164-opening-Data-never-Dies.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/impakt-dnd-W858_3340825-Rosa-Wevers.jpg) The opening of Data Never Dies at IMPAKT, including Ginevra Petrozzi's **A Funeral for Digital Data* and curator Rosa Wevers. Photos courtesy IMPAKT. Killscreen lists the exhibitions where games turn up as material, memory and archive, the shows almost nobody else is tracking. Get them in Radar, free, twice a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Corner Studio Games Shares Endless Machines Teaser: Watch URL: https://www.killscreen.com/corner-studio-games-shares-endless-machines-teaser-watch/ Last updated: 2026-10-19T18:17:10.000Z Corner Studio Games has released a teaser trailer for *Endless Machines*, its adventure game about robots that keep working long after humanity has vanished. The trailer went up on [the game's Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3454770/Endless%5FMachines/?ref=killscreen.com) Sept. 25, and the studio shared the footage in [an Instagram reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdwRLD%5FoeY4/?ref=killscreen.com) that calls the game "still very much a work in progress." Watch an excerpt below. 0:00 /0:24 1× An excerpt from the **Endless Machines* teaser, shown without sound. Watch [the full trailer on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3454770/Endless%5FMachines/?ref=killscreen.com). The player starts as a robot named Katame and wakes seven others across the world, each with its own abilities and personality. "This is not a world waiting to be saved. It already moved on," the Steam page reads. The studio has written that it began as a top-down isometric game and became "something that feels a bit like a third-person game that controls like a strategy game." Corner Studio Games is Jonas Falk, Cindy Fonvig, and composer Gaston de Lacaze. The game is coming to Windows, with no release date. For more reading, see [Killscreen on ELIZA](https://www.killscreen.com/eliza/), [the *Endless Machines* Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3454770/Endless%5FMachines/?ref=killscreen.com) and [Corner Studio Games' site](https://cornerstudiogames.com/?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/endless-machines-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/endless-machines-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/endless-machines-teaser-snow.jpg) **Endless Machines*. Courtesy Corner Studio Games. Killscreen follows the small studios rethinking how game characters talk, think and remember. Get them twice a week, Monday and Thursday, in the free Radar newsletter. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Mitchell F. Chan Rigs Pinball Machines in Workers' Playtime URL: https://www.killscreen.com/mitchell-f-chan-rigs-pinball-machines-in-workers-playtime/ Last updated: 2026-10-20T03:36:30.000Z Event details When Oct. 10 to Nov. 21, 2026 Where DE SARTHE, Hong Kong Mitchell F. Chan's Workers' Playtime, the artist's first solo exhibition in Asia, is on view at DE SARTHE in Hong Kong through Nov. 21\. It fills the gallery with six interactive sculptures built from electromechanical pinball parts, plus a video game. In *Daddy's Home* (2026), a woman holding a baby looks out a window as a man drives toward the house, and two pinballs on an inverted V-shaped track roll toward each other but never clear the peak. Watch Chan's [opening-day clip](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeTSKOlAQBB/?ref=killscreen.com) of *Girl Talk* below. 0:00 /0:24 1× Chan's opening-day clip of **Girl Talk* (2026). Via [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeTSKOlAQBB/?ref=killscreen.com). Each sculpture's shadowbox shows a different system of labor: corporate, industrial, agricultural, domestic, "suggestive live-streaming" and finance, according to the gallery's [press release](https://www.desarthe.com/exhibitions/Workers%20Playtime/press?ref=killscreen.com). In *Cliffhangers*, set in an open-plan office, a tiny gap between ball and target keeps every shot out of reach. In *Roundtrippin'*, about finance, the ball strikes targets on its own while the player controls nothing. The gallery calls the works "traps." A digital pinball game, listed as *Worker's Playtime: Luxury Edition*, sits beside a sofa and keeps playing itself once the player stops. The show coincides with Chan's essay ["Categories of the Art Game,"](https://rhizome.org/editorial/2026/oct/14/categories-of-the-art-game/?ref=killscreen.com) published by Rhizome on Oct. 14. Chan, a Toronto-based conceptual digital media artist, made *Winslow Homer's Croquet Challenge* (2022) and the short games *Zantar*, *Ladyboss* and *Moonboi* (2025). [Chan's site](https://chan.gallery/?ref=killscreen.com) lists a collection, Zantar and Other Stories, as coming to Steam and itch.io. DE SARTHE and Nguyen Wahed show Chan's work at Art Basel Miami Beach in December. For more reading, see [Mitchell Chan's *Insert Coin(s)* suite is coming to Steam](https://www.killscreen.com/mitchell-chans-insert-coin-s-suite-is-coming-to-steam/), [The art of pinball](https://www.killscreen.com/the-art-of-pinball/) and [DE SARTHE's exhibition page](https://www.desarthe.com/exhibitions/Workers%20Playtime?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/desarthe-chan-DSC06193.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/chan-cliffhangers.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/chan-girl-talk.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/chan-punch-out.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/chan-roundtrippin.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/chan-luxury-edition.png) Workers' Playtime at DE SARTHE, Hong Kong, with **Cliffhangers*, **Girl Talk*, **Punch-Out!!*, **Roundtrippin'* and the digital game. Courtesy the artist and DE SARTHE. Killscreen lists the gallery shows where games turn into critique, the exhibitions almost nobody else is tracking. Get them in Radar, free, twice a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Zambrano and Rodríguez Show Bunker for a Tropical Pixel URL: https://www.killscreen.com/zambrano-and-rodriguez-show-bunker-for-a-tropical-pixel/ Last updated: 2026-10-20T03:34:18.000Z Event details When Oct. 3, 2026 to Jan. 16, 2027; Wednesday to Saturday, 2 to 6 p.m. Where Le Grenier à sel, Avignon Cost Free; guided tours €3 Tatyana Zambrano and Hernán Rodríguez's *Bunker for a Tropical Pixel* (2026) is on view at Le Grenier à sel in Avignon through Jan. 16, 2027, in the group exhibition (Dé)jouer les mondes. The game is set in a post-tropical world where light has disappeared; the player is a tiny creature crossing three worlds modeled on the red, green, and blue of the RGB pixel. [Zambrano's photos](https://www.instagram.com/p/DedyMEMiK5m/?ref=killscreen.com) show it projected in a green frame over green carpet. Watch footage from its installation at Rio de Janeiro's Museu do Amanhã below. 0:00 /1:00 1× **Bunker for a Tropical Pixel* installed at the Museu do Amanhã, Rio de Janeiro. Via [Zambrano on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DaqeuR1FBJB/?ref=killscreen.com). The duo writes that post-tropical games "could explore new ways of imagining tropical environments, where technology, ecology, and human activity are interconnected." In the game, tropical bio-bacteria are the last source of light left on the planet, according to S+T+ARTS. Made in a residency at the Museu do Amanhã under the EU-funded S+T+ARTS Buen-TEK program, it is free to download. Isabelle Arvers and Véronique Baton co-curated the exhibition, which [Le Grenier à sel](https://legrenierasel-avignon.fr/dejouer-les-mondes?ref=killscreen.com) presents as artists using video games for critical experimentation and poetic subversion. Also showing are Akwasi Bediako Afrane, Atelier ElonM, Agnès de Cayeux, Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis, Lucas Lugarinho, Camilo Sandoval and Afrah Shafiq, whose interactive story game *The Bride Who Could Not Stop Crying* is included. The duo has worked together since 2021; their *Banana Valley* (2022) won first prize at the Enjambre festival in Cali, Colombia, according to [S+T+ARTS](https://starts.eu/what-we-do/residences/starts-buen-tek-homepage/tatyana-zambrano-hernan-rodriguez/?ref=killscreen.com). For more reading, see [S+T+ARTS's profile of the duo](https://starts.eu/what-we-do/residences/starts-buen-tek-homepage/tatyana-zambrano-hernan-rodriguez/?ref=killscreen.com) and [Le Grenier à sel's exhibition page](https://legrenierasel-avignon.fr/dejouer-les-mondes?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/bunker-museu-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/bunker-museu-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/bunker-museu-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/bunker-museu-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/bunker-museu-6.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/bunker-museu-7.jpg) **Bunker for a Tropical Pixel* at the Museu do Amanhã. Photos via Tatyana Zambrano. Killscreen lists the exhibitions where artists take games apart, the shows almost nobody else is tracking. Get them in Radar, free, twice a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### NewImages Festival Opens Submissions for Virtual Worlds URL: https://www.killscreen.com/newimages-festival-2027-virtual-worlds-competition/ Last updated: 2026-10-20T03:30:46.000Z Event details When Submissions close Dec. 22, 2026 Where Submit online; the festival is in Paris, April 21 to 25, 2027 Cost Free [Submit by Dec. 22](https://www.newimages.art/application/competitions?ref=killscreen.com) NewImages Festival has opened submissions for the Virtual Worlds Competition at its 2027 edition, which runs April 21 to 25 in Paris. The festival [announced the reopening on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DebZSCikXHF/?ref=killscreen.com) with a call to VRChat, Roblox and Viverse worldbuilders; the competition page also lists Fortnite Creative, independent online worlds, multiplayer art spaces and interactive installations in virtual environments. Submissions are free and close Dec. 22. Selected worlds join the official competition at the festival and compete for the €3,000 Virtual Worlds Award, with two festival accreditations attached. The organizers say they are looking for “artistic, narrative and experimental experiences that explore new ways of creating, performing and connecting in virtual spaces,” and no premiere status is required. The call sits beside the festival’s XR Competition, which accepts VR, AR, mixed reality and narrative videogames, and a dome competition; all of the [open calls](https://www.newimages.art/calls-for-projects?ref=killscreen.com) share the Dec. 22 last-call deadline, with an early-bird date of Dec. 10\. Industry Days run April 20 to 23. The Virtual Worlds Competition ran at the 2026 edition as part of Immersions at the Cité des sciences et de l’industrie, with a seven-work selection that included VMoVA’s curated online exhibition *What Is Virtual Art - Volume 1*, Adam Lieber and Chris Bianchi’s *Strangeways* and ReVerse Butcher’s *The last stanza*. For more reading, see [the 2026 Virtual Worlds selection](https://www.newimages.art/virtualworld?ref=killscreen.com) and [the festival’s 2027 page](https://www.newimages.art/newimages-festival-2027?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/newimages-frustrain-trainman.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/newimages-complex-7.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/newimages-the-last-stanza.jpg) From the 2026 Virtual Worlds selection: **FRUSTRAIN: TRAINMAN*, Fins’ **Complex 7* and ReVerse Butcher’s **The last stanza*. Images: NewImages Festival Killscreen lists the competitions and showcases where virtual worlds count as art, while they can still be entered. The free Radar letter lands twice a week. [Sign up free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Processing Foundation Adds Gaming Track, Opens Nominations URL: https://www.killscreen.com/processing-foundation-gaming-track-2027-nominations/ Last updated: 2026-10-20T03:29:36.000Z Event details When Nominations close Nov. 1, 2026, 11:59 p.m. PST Where Online [Nominate by Nov. 1](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScsJEntZjZEEgSTImwD-XTM6wZkc2XjpglYWXAOg69eZOiruw/viewform?usp=dialog&ref=killscreen.com) The Processing Foundation is taking nominations for its 2027 fellowship, the first edition to carry a track dedicated to games. Gaming the System, funded by the Riot Games Social Impact Fund, gives a Los Angeles-based fellow a $10,000 stipend and eight months to build an open-source toolkit for videogame design, co-designed with underserved communities in the city. The foundation announced the Riot backing in [an Oct. 1 blog post](https://processingfoundation.org/blog/riot-games-fellowship-news?ref=killscreen.com) and [on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd98kRQyLnU/?ref=killscreen.com), and opened nominations, self-nominations included, on Oct. 7. The fellow will work with the foundation’s team and gaming professionals, publish open-access tutorials and templates, and support students through online workshops and an in-person summer intensive in Los Angeles. Every 2027 project must build on one of the foundation’s own open-source tools, p5.js, the p5.js Editor and Processing 4 among them. The track is open to game makers, creative coders and educators based in [Los Angeles](https://processingfoundation.org/programs/fellowships/fellowship-2027?ref=killscreen.com). It is one of three tracks in the 2027 program, beside Collective Intelligence, an AI-education track run with the Mark Cuban Foundation’s youth community, and DIY Computing, a cyberdeck-building track rooted in New York. The program runs Jan. 25 to Sept. 26, 2027. Since 2013 the fellowship has backed artists and technologists building open creative-coding infrastructure, and it incubated p5.js and the p5.js Editor. The foundation says the Riot grant, from the studio’s nonprofit fund created in 2019, extends that record into videogames. For more reading, see [KoLab bringing Processing Community Day to YU Festival](https://www.killscreen.com/kolab-brings-processing-community-day-to-yu-festival/) and [p5.js, the fellowship’s best-known alum](https://p5js.org/?ref=killscreen.com). Killscreen tracks the fellowships, open calls and deadlines at the edges of games that almost nobody else lists. The free Radar letter brings the next one to your inbox twice a week. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Joaquina Salgado Shows Memory Simulator One More Sim URL: https://www.killscreen.com/joaquina-salgado-shows-memory-simulator-one-more-sim/ Last updated: 2026-10-19T17:37:36.000Z Event details When Oct. 30 to Nov. 1, 2026; opening Oct. 30, 7 to 10 p.m. Where Prachtsaal Studio, Neukölln, Berlin [Joaquina Salgado](https://www.joaquinasalgado.com/one-more-sim.html?ref=killscreen.com)'s *One More Sim*, a web-based memory simulator in nine parts, goes on view at Prachtsaal Studio in Berlin from Oct. 30 to Nov. 1 as part of the group exhibition CLUTCH. Vienna Digital Cultures commissioned it this year. Watch its landing sequence below. 0:00 /0:14 1× The landing sequence of **One More Sim*. [Play the work in a desktop browser](https://onemoresim.viennadigitalcultures.at/?ref=killscreen.com). The work is split into nine "porous worlds," including Embryo, AquaRace and Fetal Situation. [The exhibition's announcement of the piece](https://www.instagram.com/p/DehjZwgjAqD/?ref=killscreen.com) describes memories anchored on a hibernating family computer thousands of kilometers away that gain agency and bodies of their own, while visitors test the rules of the system. [The live version](https://onemoresim.viennadigitalcultures.at/?ref=killscreen.com) is best experienced on desktop. CLUTCH is organized by [No Where Projects](https://www.instagram.com/no%5Fwhereprojects/?ref=killscreen.com), a Berlin curatorial project run by [Maddy Dreiband](https://www.instagram.com/maddydreiband/?ref=killscreen.com) and [Andrea Luque](https://www.instagram.com/andrealuque%5F%5F%5F%5F/?ref=killscreen.com). [The organizers](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeHzYa4DGmk/?ref=killscreen.com) describe play in the show as "a way of testing systems, glitching structures, and imagining other ways of being together." [Franziska Harnisch](https://www.instagram.com/p/DekIIQ4DFpp/?ref=killscreen.com) shows *Ich tanze jetzt einfach, bis ich wieder was sehe*, a video game played on a floor motion interface modeled on 1990s arcade machines. Buba Beboshvili, Carolina Ovando, Gabriel Jeanjean, Janosch Sinn, Lea van Hall and Éléa Brando, Robert Tilbury and Valentin Frisch complete the lineup. Salgado is a Berlin-based media artist from Argentina who studied at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. *One More Sim* has already shown at Vienna Digital Cultures and at Sybil in Berlin. Earlier work includes the game *Nostalgia Is the Extended Feedback*, shown solo at SOMA Berlin in 2025, and *FLUIDO.OBJ.VR*, performed at MUTEK Montréal in 2019. For more reading, see [Joaquina Salgado hides a score inside luminous eggs](https://www.killscreen.com/joaquina-salgado-hides-a-score-inside-luminous-eggs/), [Salgado's own site](https://www.joaquinasalgado.com/about.html?ref=killscreen.com) and [Prachtsaal Studio](https://prachtsaal.studio/?ref=killscreen.com). Killscreen lists the game exhibitions, play nights and screenings at the edges of games that almost nobody else is tracking. Get them in Radar, free, twice a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### futurala Shows Organism-Growing Game CultureHouse URL: https://www.killscreen.com/futurala-shows-organism-growing-game-culturehouse/ Last updated: 2026-10-17T18:39:56.000Z Event details When Oct. 15 to the end of 2026 (planned); 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Where 404 Not Found, Shibuya Sakura Stage, Tokyo Cost Free *CultureHouse*, an adventure game in development by the independent studio futurala, is playable for free at 404 Not Found, a creator space in Shibuya Sakura Stage. Its demo is part of [404 Game Center: ars●bit Selection](https://www.arsobit.com/en/exhibitions-20261016-en/?ref=killscreen.com), which opened Oct. 15 and is planned to run through the end of 2026\. Watch an excerpt from the trailer below. 0:00 /0:24 1× An excerpt from the **CultureHouse* trailer, shown without sound. [Watch the full trailer on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2314460/CultureHouse/?ref=killscreen.com). The player spends seven days in the home-turned-lab of a scientist missing for seven years, cultivating organisms called Geneo. [The Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2314460/CultureHouse/?ref=killscreen.com) says finishing the experiment surfaces the truth about the scientist's family and a world in slow decline. ars●bit cites modernist architecture and surrealism as influences; the screenshots show white concrete villas, glass stairwells and petri dishes. futurala handles the scenario, programming, graphics and music. The Shibuya Asobi-ba Production Committee and 404 Not Found organize the display with support from the Japan Creator Fund, and [ars●bit's announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DejYFS7iJkB/?ref=killscreen.com) lists free admission. Both games in it also appear in Anima Ludens, ars●bit's exhibition in Arles, through Nov. 8\. futurala began in September 2022, founded by a former 3D artist and scenario writer, according to [the studio's site](https://futurala.com/?ref=killscreen.com). ars●bit launched in March 2025, growing out of art bit, an exhibition of art and independent games at Hotel Anteroom Kyoto. hako life solo-developed *UNREAL LIFE*, a Japan Media Arts Festival award winner. For more reading, see [Game screens wind up in an altar and a copper girl in Arles](https://www.killscreen.com/game-screens-wind-up-in-an-altar-and-a-copper-girl-in-arles/), [In Kyoto, an art hotel treated games as social diagrams](https://www.killscreen.com/in-kyoto-an-art-hotel-treated-games-as-social-diagrams/) and [ars●bit's exhibition page](https://www.arsobit.com/en/exhibitions-20261016-en/?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/culturehouse-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/culturehouse-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/culturehouse-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/culturehouse-7.jpg) **CultureHouse* screenshots via Steam. Killscreen lists the game displays, exhibitions and play nights at the edges of games that almost nobody else is tracking. Get them in Radar, free, twice a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### V&A Opens Degrees of Disruption, a Vera Molnar Display URL: https://www.killscreen.com/va-opens-degrees-of-disruption-vera-molnar-display/ Last updated: 2026-10-17T18:38:32.000Z Event details When Oct. 16, 2026 to May 30, 2027 Where V&A South Kensington, Rooms 88A and 90, London Cost Free, no booking required Vera Molnar's [*Interruptions*](https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1193775/?ref=killscreen.com), a 1969 plotter drawing of short black strokes turned at random across a square grid, with patches where the lines drop out, is among the works in [Degrees of Disruption: Vera Molnar and Generative Art](https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/degrees-of-disruption-vera-molnar-and-generative-art?ref=killscreen.com). The free display opened Oct. 16 at V&A South Kensington in London and runs through May 30, 2027. The V&A says the display gathers more than 50 works by Molnar and contemporary practitioners, tracing how Molnar's early computer work connects to digital art now. Other Molnar works include [*(Des)Ordres*](https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1193781/desordres-drawing-vera-molnar?ref=killscreen.com), a 1974 plotter drawing of nested squares. The curator, Melanie Lenz, gives an online talk for V&A members on Oct. 20. Contemporary works include Casey Reas's *MicroImage* (2002), Licia He's plotter painting *I'm Saying I'll Have to Check In* (2023) and William Mapan's *Sketchbook A #64* (2023). The museum has also acquired two editions of Matt DesLauriers' *Meridian*, given by the artist as inkjet prints, and one is on view, according to [Vetro Editions, which published the *Meridian* book](https://www.instagram.com/p/DejzHMijr8K/?ref=killscreen.com). *Meridian* is a 2021 Art Blocks series of 1,000 tokens, each drawn by a JavaScript program that builds stratified landforms out of hundreds of thousands of strokes. Molnar was born in Budapest in 1924, moved to Paris in 1947 and co-founded the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel around 1960\. Molnar ran simple algorithms by hand on grid paper from 1959 and first used a computer in 1968\. Molnar died in 2023, aged 99\. DesLauriers, who is based in London, cites Molnar as an influence. For more reading, see [Digital Meetup: Systems at Play Brings Free Creative Coding to the V&A](https://www.killscreen.com/digital-meetup-systems-at-play-v-a/), [DesLauriers' notes on *Meridian*](https://mattdesl.substack.com/p/notes-on-meridian) and [the V&A's history of its computer art collection](https://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/research-journal/issue-02/computer-art-at-the-v-and-a?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/va-desordres.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/va-meridian870.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/va-meridian686.jpg) From left: Vera Molnar, **(Des)Ordres*, 1974; Matt DesLauriers, **Meridian #870* and **Meridian #686*, 2021, printed 2026\. Courtesy Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Killscreen lists the exhibitions, shows and screenings at the edges of games and code art that almost nobody else is tracking. Get them in Radar, free, twice a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### C.U.T.E. Opens BEASTS, a Korean Folklore Play Installation URL: https://www.killscreen.com/cute-opens-beasts-korean-folklore-play-installation/ Last updated: 2026-10-17T18:37:36.000Z Event details When Oct. 21 to Dec. 20, 2026; Wednesday to Friday, 5:30 to 9:30 p.m.; Saturday and Sunday, 2 to 9:30 p.m. Where Digital Arts Space, The Music Center, Los Angeles Cost Free with RSVP [RSVP](https://themusiccenter.typeform.com/BEASTS?ref=killscreen.com) *BEASTS*, a free play installation by [Scarlett Kim](https://www.instagram.com/captainscarface/?ref=killscreen.com) and Anthony Storniolo of the Center for Unclassifiable Technologies and Experiences (C.U.T.E.), opens Oct. 21 at the Digital Arts Space at The Music Center in Los Angeles and runs through Dec. 20\. Visitors enter a transmission station, choose a creature from Korean folklore and answer its call through movement. The scenes include hide-and-seek across a foggy flower field, puppeteering a horde of rat-humans and karaoke in a borrowed body. The creatures are gwoemul, shapeshifting beasts of Korean folklore. [The makers' page](https://cute.center/beasts-tmc?ref=killscreen.com) describes them reimagined through the experience of the Korean diaspora, in a retro-futuristic world between Seoul and Los Angeles. [The Music Center](https://www.musiccenter.org/experience-learn/experience-learn/for-all-ages/digital-innovation-initiative/the-music-center-presents-beasts/?ref=killscreen.com) says the environments are built in Unreal Engine, with motion capture technology from MOVIN. Kim directed and wrote the work; Storniolo built the interactive systems, music and sound. The Music Center presents it through its Digital Innovation Initiative, whose Digital Arts Space hosted Armon Naeini's *ID: Part III* and Po-Hao Chi's *Life in Motion* earlier this year. Character art is by Dabin Lee and Alexander Thornborough of LEEBORO, with voice and movement by Jenapher Zheng. Entry is free with RSVP, per [The Music Center's announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeiA1uulyUc/?ref=killscreen.com). An earlier version was a live digital puppetry performance by Kim, presented at SIGGRAPH 2025 in a paper written with researchers from Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. Kim is an interdisciplinary fellow at the Royal Shakespeare Company. *A Funeral for the Internet*, made with Samantha Gorman and Danny Cannizzaro, showed in Venice this year. For more reading, see [A Funeral for the Internet went to market at Venice](https://www.killscreen.com/a-funeral-for-the-internet-went-to-market-at-venice/), [At Nxt Museum, the visitor is the puppeteer](https://www.killscreen.com/at-nxt-museum-the-visitor-is-the-puppeteer/) and [the SIGGRAPH paper on the earlier version](https://vhil.stanford.edu/publications/motion-tracking/beasts-dual-perspectives-virtual-puppetry-through-theatrical?ref=killscreen.com). Killscreen lists the play installations, game shows and screenings at the edges of games that almost nobody else is tracking. Get them in Radar, free, twice a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### What Does Grand Theft Auto Do When No One Is Watching? URL: https://www.killscreen.com/kent-sheely-gta-online-alone/ Last updated: 2026-10-17T21:12:37.000Z ![You Are Currently in a Session on Your Own](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/Playlist-293-Reveal-Card-GIF---You-Are-Currently-in-a-Session-on-Your-Own---Kent-Sheely---email-header.gif) ## Playlist 293 ## You Are Currently in a Session on Your Own (2026) ## Kent Sheely ### Play Time: 9 minutes [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jccObqeWDNk&ref=killscreen.com) I feel like I have nothing really interesting to say about *Grand Theft Auto*, since I've been living with the franchise my whole life. Each new entry boasts a grand (har har) new city with roughly the same style of play: driving and shooting. I'd argue *most* of us know what to expect. In perilous times, repetition offers some comfort, even if we only see a new title every decade or so. Even so, as someone interested in experimental and independent game culture, I'm more interested in the game *itself* as a canvas, a place to be distorted, contained and shredded. So finding a new way to approach the world is quite difficult, especially for artist and filmmaker [Kent Sheely](https://www.killscreen.com/exquisite-corpses/), who has been working in game worlds since 2006\. For most of the last decade, his working material has been *Grand Theft Auto Online,* the initially bug-ridden launch of a virtual world that became so successful that it functions as a piggy bank for the *GTA* parent. Sheely has logged something like 3,000 hours in it, most of them running heists with a rotating crew of friends. His new work, *You Are Currently in a Session on Your Own*, is named for the message the game shows when you load into a session with nobody else in it. Sheely tells me there's a bit of a conundrum with *GTA*: play with others and suffer hackers and griefers; [play alone, and the generative social dynamics completely disappear](https://www.killscreen.com/artist-turns-grand-theft-auto-v-ghost-city/). So, the short film inhabits those contrasts with moments of chaotic spontaneity and mirth, tailed by longer sequences revisiting the scenes of the crime when nothing is happening. In one sequence, the crew drops off a sole hiker after a taxi ride, and in the next, back in the same Angeles National Forest homage, the hiker continues her walk, alone, unbothered, but not unobserved. Sheely and I talk about Los Angeles' addiction to self-promotion, how COVID-era loneliness deeply impacted his work, and what virtual worlds dream about when no one is watching. --- **There are many online communities, but *GTA Online* is the one you keep coming back to. How did you first get in?** I didn't get on board until I moved to Los Angeles in 2015\. I'd played *GTA IV* when I lived in New York. The *GTA* games have never been my favorite, but the loop is addictive. What I enjoyed most was wandering places that were simulacra of places I'd actually been. [I was learning the map of Los Santos at the same time I was learning Los Angeles](https://www.killscreen.com/new-pbs-gameshow-asks-if-virtual-worlds-los-santos-are-real-places-we-can-go/). **I had a similar thing. I played *GTA IV* in New York, and when *GTA V* came out, I was dating my wife, who grew up in Los Angeles. She hadn't played many games, and she was moved by how much it reminded her of home. Living here now, I get to connect the dots. It's like film. You move to Los Angeles, and certain sequences jump out at you.** There's a great documentary about that, *Los Angeles Plays Itself*. It's along the same lines as the way *GTA* plays with space. It condenses things. It designs the map around the landmarks people think about, and the rest is filler. There are back alleys that look like every other neighborhood in Los Angeles, and you maybe visit them once in the story. Greystone Mansion is in the game, but it's mashed together with the Playboy Mansion. I'll still visit a new part of L.A. and think, hey, I've been here. **Leaked footage suggests a map for *GTA VI* that's significantly larger. Create the place one-to-one, and it gets less interesting. What's interesting are the creative decisions, how you capture the psychogeography of moving through a place. I'm more interested in their approach to Miami than in "we recreated Miami."** That's part of why I'm not as excited about six. I've been to Miami once, and I was at the airport. **There's also a tinge of sadness in how these cities get made now. They send a core team to study a place, but much of it gets built by artists elsewhere working purely from photos. That handcrafted piece is getting less and less important.** You can tell where they spent their time. Santa Monica is a small part of Los Angeles, but it's crafted far more carefully in the game. Some blocks are one-to-one. That's where tourists go. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/Playlist-293-Header---You-Are-Currently-in-a-Session-on-Your-Own---Kent-Sheely---aerial-of-Los-Santos.jpg) SPONSORED BY MUBI [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/gtw-camp-miasma.jpg)](https://mubi.com/killscreen?ref=killscreen-newsletter) Be fulfilled by ****Jane Schoenbrun**'s ****TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA**. By flesh and fluids, and pure filmic pleasure. Starring ****Hannah Einbinder** and ****Gillian Anderson**, this MUBI Release is bloody genre-bending bliss from the visionary director behind **I Saw the TV Glow*. Now streaming exclusively on MUBI. ****Get 30 days free** to stream great cinema like this and so much more. [Watch now → ](https://mubi.com/killscreen?ref=killscreen-newsletter) **Let's talk about the piece itself. The title comes from the message *GTA Online* shows when you load into a solo session. Why start there?** That message comes up when you join a session with no other players. *GTA Online* became infamous for hackers and griefers. They build a space where they want you to play with strangers, and then you can't accomplish anything, because a plane spawns on top of you or some guy on a flying bike blows up your cargo. The game wants you in a public session, then punishes you for it. I started playing with friends around 2016 or 2017\. We did all the heists together, and people rotated in and out, since a mission only takes four. Then people move on to other games, life gets busy, and you're left choosing between strangers and a bad time, or a solo session. The game wasn't originally built for multiplayer, but it became so much more vibrant with other people. Take them out and it feels hollow, even creepy. Almost a liminal space, before the backrooms co-opted the phrase. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/Playlist-293-Taxi-Crew-Still---You-Are-Currently-in-a-Session-on-Your-Own---Kent-Sheely---the-crew-in-a-convoy-of-cabs.jpg) **The history matters here. *GTA Online* was a flop at launch. It was super buggy, and I logged on once and never went back. Since then it's become arguably as successful as *World of Warcraft* for Rockstar. Usually a game's single-player and multiplayer are different maps, or different products entirely. *GTA* puts you alone in story mode, alone in an online instance, and with other people, all in the same space.** The clips of other players in the piece are things I captured over the years, and I wish I'd recorded more. It's the same melancholy as wishing you'd taken more pictures with your family. I stood in those same spaces again, and it feels like you're standing in the void. I did want the piece to feel sad, even heartbreaking. But everyone in it is someone I still play games with, just not *GTA*. When I finished it I told them, I don't want you to feel bad. I'm not trying to guilt any of you into coming back. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/Playlist-293-Casino-Party-Still---You-Are-Currently-in-a-Session-on-Your-Own---Kent-Sheely---a-full-penthouse-party.jpg) **It's a bit like a hiking club. Everybody stops coming, and now you're walking the same trails by yourself. What stood out most, standing in Los Santos alone?** How the space loses its color when there's nobody else there. It reminded me of the beginning of COVID, going down to the beach or the Third Street Promenade and finding it empty. The COVID era informed a lot of my work from there on. I don't think things have come back to normal, and the way it changed the world also changed my practice. That night-and-day shift between the emptiness and the fullness of a space was probably the biggest influence on this piece. **Early in the pandemic, we did a walk in Santa Monica from a book of urban walks, and the quiet was profound. Driving past the TCL Chinese Theatre, I thought this might be the only time in its history it had ever been empty. No performers. Not a single person on Hollywood Boulevard. Extremely disorienting.** Exactly. I made a couple of other pieces about that, and I didn't realize until just now how much it shaped them. In one, I modified the office map from *Counter-Strike* and filled it with plants, nature reclaiming it. **But a *Counter-Strike* map left alone is just empty. Los Santos keeps going. There's a sequence where you follow a lone hiker who will keep walking whether you watch or not. Mario will stand on the opening screen forever until you push right. Here the game has its own wants and desires, and it keeps generating the world whether you participate or not. You're watching the machine imagine itself without us.** That shows up a lot in my work. What I like most is rejecting narrative, watching the game at rest, and letting it be itself. One early influence was Miltos Manetas. He has a piece where Mario gets bored, sits down and falls asleep, and you linger on Mario sleeping for six minutes. I'm drawn to the meditative side, basically unplugging the controller and letting the game exist as an object. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/Playlist-293-Hiker-GIF---You-Are-Currently-in-a-Session-on-Your-Own---Kent-Sheely---the-hiker-keeps-walking-alone.gif) **You've said there's sadness in the piece. But the public lobbies were miserable. Is there a reading that's less about loneliness and more about relief? Finally, you can be by yourself.** It's definitely not necessary to read it as sad. I don't like to force an emotion into something. I put my feelings in and leave it open. I've spent so much time making art in *GTA* by myself, and that's how I am as a person. I like being social, but I need downtime. I'm sentimental because I have great memories of my friends there, but I do enjoy being by myself in games. **How did you build the cut? It moves between impromptu moments, like building a ramp off another car and jumping into the L.A. River, and slow panoramic shots.** First I edited the action as if I were making a highlight reel, picking the most exciting moments and building a rhythm. Then I took the last moment of each sequence, traveled to that spot in the game and set myself up where I'd been when I filmed it. I'd sit with it, look in the same direction the camera faced, then turn around to see what it wasn't seeing. Then it cuts right back to the action. I wanted a staccato, where you get hyped up and then you're forced to step back and take time. **Who else has influenced the practice, from media art or from film?** Besides Manetas, Peggy Ahwesh, who [pioneered machinima](https://www.killscreen.com/a-free-los-angeles-screening-was-a-history-of-machinima/). Her *She Puppet*, shot in *Tomb Raider*, rejects the nature of gameplay. She just moves the character and camera through the space. It's almost like watching someone who's never played a game play the game. Outside games, I couldn't give you a list of cinematographers. But *Los Angeles Plays Itself* has been a big influence. **The new *GTA* is coming. Does this close a chapter? Is it an elegy for *GTA V*?** I was going to bring that up. It's a two-part farewell. There's this, and a photo book called *Crime Time*: gameplay shots of my friends mixed with glitch screenshots and digital collages. Whenever our friends got together, someone in Discord would say "crime time." The book opens with a collage of every time somebody said it. This video was supposed to be the final thing. Then I went through my old screenshots and thought I could make a book. Maybe that'll be the capstone. *This interview has been edited and condensed.* The next one is for members This week’s Playlist was a free taste: a film built from years of other people’s company, watched after they left. Next Friday’s pick, Messhof’s **Blood Dungeon*, goes to members only, along with every one after it. Membership is $55 for the year, locked at that price for as long as you stay. It rises to $96 on 31 December. The first month is free. [Join for $55 a year ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=playlist-free) Radar is the short one — three news items, every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. It started in August, after most of you had already signed up, so you were never added to it. Ticking one box fixes that. [Turn on Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/account/newsletters) ### John Wowcool Releases One More Bullet in s&box URL: https://www.killscreen.com/john-wowcool-releases-one-more-bullet-in-s-box/ Last updated: 2026-10-19T17:37:35.000Z John Wowcool has released [*One More Bullet*](https://sbox.game/wowcoolgames/one-more-bullet/?ref=killscreen.com), a one-shot arena shooter, on s&box, the game platform from *Garry's Mod* developer Facepunch. Made under the WowCoolGames label for s&box Game Jam III, whose theme was "One More Round," it is playable now through s&box. Watch [the trailer John Wowcool posted to Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/Ddu4rYpsd3o/?ref=killscreen.com) below. 0:00 /0:44 1× The [**One More Bullet* trailer](https://www.instagram.com/p/Ddu4rYpsd3o/?ref=killscreen.com). Video: John Wowcool / WowCoolGames The player carries a single bullet in a small revolver. A kill returns the bullet, and a miss ends the run. Each retry generates a new layout, the crowd of monsters grows faster as the kills add up, and a boss arrives at 45 seconds. The package page lists 12 creature types, among them a Grin Runner that pounces and a Trip Anaconda whose body can be shot anywhere, in an arena of face-covered walls, liquid metal and a shifting rainbow sky. The game has since added two online modes: co-op for up to four players, and a one-on-one versus arena where the winner keeps the spot and every fourth match opens to four fighters. It keeps public leaderboards for score, kills and survival time, and offers settings for reduced flash and reduced motion. Its asset notes say the game uses AI-assisted code and that some supplied artwork is AI-generated, alongside procedural Blender models and synthesized audio. Facepunch pitches s&box, built on Source 2, as open source with no royalties. The jam's final four, announced Sept. 29, were *GAMMA TEAM*, *RUN IT AGAIN*, *Catz VS Ratz* and *Keg Quest*. For more reading, see [The Nightmare Valley of The Source Engine](https://www.killscreen.com/the-nightmare-valley-of-the-source-engine/), [Facepunch's Neck & Neck update](https://sbox.game/news/update-26-09-29?ref=killscreen.com) and [the *One More Bullet* package page](https://sbox.game/wowcoolgames/one-more-bullet/?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/one-more-bullet-10s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/one-more-bullet-14s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/one-more-bullet-38s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/one-more-bullet-43s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/one-more-bullet-18s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/one-more-bullet-2s.jpg) Frames from the **One More Bullet* trailer. Images: John Wowcool / WowCoolGames Killscreen follows the jam games and engine experiments that most coverage never reaches. Get Radar free, twice a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Chia Amisola Releases Browser Open World Paru-paro URL: https://www.killscreen.com/chia-amisola-releases-browser-open-world-paru-paro/ Last updated: 2026-10-19T17:37:37.000Z Chia Amisola has released *Paru-paro (Butterfly)*, a browser-based open world playable for free at [paruparo.cloud](https://paruparo.cloud/?ref=killscreen.com). Amisola shared it in [an announcement on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdmGDuDFEVo/?ref=killscreen.com). The work showed through September 27 at WEBSITES WEBSITES WEBSITES!, the Armory Week exhibition that ARTXCODE and Rhizome mounted on Great Jones Street in New York for Rhizome's 30th anniversary. The player is reincarnated as a butterfly, the paru-paro that folk belief says carries the departed, and drifts over florae, streets and graveyards. Landmarks, objects and people release memories as the butterfly passes. Amisola built the world in a homemade level editor made with the *Warcraft III* world editor in mind, assembling it from stock images, Street View captures and photographs of Philippine marketplaces. The announcement ties the work to a stream of death notices on Facebook. The exhibition text describes the piece as part diary and part archive. The online edition of the show remains up at [websiteswebsiteswebsites.net](https://websiteswebsiteswebsites.net/?ref=killscreen.com), where *Paru-paro* is filed under Poetic Computing alongside work by Maya Man and Petra Cortright. For more reading, see [Andrew Thomas Huang's art game at Rhizome's 7x7](https://www.killscreen.com/andrew-thomas-huang-made-an-art-game-at-rhizomes-7x7/) and [the online exhibition](https://websiteswebsiteswebsites.net/?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/paru-paro-volcano-field.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/paru-paro-hands.jpg) Two more stops in **Paru-paro (Butterfly)*: a field below a pair of volcanoes, and a memory held in a pair of hands. Images: Chia Amisola Net art borrowing games’ tools, and games worth calling art: Killscreen covers the border towns nobody else patrols. The free newsletter is where they land first. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Rosa Menkman Keynotes Failure & Resistance URL: https://www.killscreen.com/rosa-menkman-keynotes-failure-and-resistance/ Last updated: 2026-10-16T17:12:21.000Z Event details When Nov. 13 to 14, 2026; online day Nov. 7 Where Arts University Plymouth, Tavistock Place, Plymouth [Get tickets](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/failure-resistance-international-research-symposium-tickets-1995917374596?ref=killscreen.com) Rosa Menkman delivers the keynote at Failure & Resistance, the 16th International Illustration Research Symposium, at Arts University Plymouth on Friday, Nov. 13\. The organizers [announced the keynote this week](https://www.instagram.com/p/DehVuIGIfK2/?ref=killscreen.com), introducing Menkman as a Dutch artist and researcher of resolutions whose work tracks the noise artifacts of analog and digital media, and whose recurring protagonist, the Angel of History, is drawn from Paul Klee's 1920 monoprint *Angelus Novus* by way of Walter Benjamin. Watch a pass over Menkman's recent BLOB of Im/Possible Images below. 0:00 /0:24 1× A pass over **The BLOB of Im/Possible Images* on New Art City, clipped from Rosa Menkman's video [im/possible Images and the Latent Image space](https://vimeo.com/532610944?ref=killscreen.com). The full version has sound. The symposium is organized by practitioners and academics from the University of Exeter, Arts University Plymouth and Parsons School of Design, and runs in person on Nov. 13 and 14 with a separate online webinar day on Nov. 7\. Its call takes Jack Halberstam's *The Queer Art of Failure* as a touchstone and asks what failing, unmaking and unlearning might offer illustration: "What happens when we look failure in the eye?" An in-person ticket includes the online day, and a standalone online ticket is sold separately. The organizers also plan to fund low-cost places through supporters who pay an Angel Tier rate. Menkman wrote *Glitch Moment/um* in 2011 and *Beyond Resolution* in 2020, won the Collide award at CERN in 2019, which seeded the im/possible images research, and ran the IM/POSSIBLE LAB at HEAD Geneva from 2023 to 2025\. The BLOB of Im/Possible Images, a navigable version of that research, showed at V2\_ in Rotterdam this month. For more reading, see [Killscreen on The BLOB at V2\_](https://www.killscreen.com/rosa-menkman-blob-impossible-images-v2-still-unstable/), [Killscreen's earlier piece on Menkman's glitch art](https://www.killscreen.com/uncanny-glitch-art-may-cause-existential-crises/) and [Menkman's site](https://beyondresolution.info/?ref=killscreen.com). Killscreen tracks the keynotes, symposia and glitch-art shows at the edges of games that almost nobody else lists. Get the free Radar newsletter and hear about the next one in time to go. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### KoLab Brings Processing Community Day to YU Festival URL: https://www.killscreen.com/kolab-brings-processing-community-day-to-yu-festival/ Last updated: 2026-10-16T17:11:26.000Z Event details When Oct. 22 to 25, 2026 Where Dortmunder U, Leonie-Reygers-Terrasse, Dortmund Cost Free [See the program](https://www.yufestival.de/programm/?ref=killscreen.com) At YU Festival in Dortmund, anyone can write on [Collective Mess](https://www.yufestival.de/programm/?ref=killscreen.com), an animated digital graffiti wall by Camilo Sandoval and Camilla Scholz that runs in the foyer of the Dortmunder U from Oct. 22 to 25\. Built with tools written in Processing and wired to webcams and buttons, the wall redraws itself in real time as visitors add drawings, messages and moving images, and it keeps changing after they walk away. The installation anchors the Processing Community Day programming that KoLab, Dortmund's Koproduktionslabor for digital art projects in North Rhine-Westphalia, runs inside [YU Festival](https://www.yufestival.de/?ref=killscreen.com), a free four-day festival of digital art, workshops and talks. KoLab [announced the program this week](https://www.instagram.com/p/DehFtfeoYuu/?ref=killscreen.com): a four-day hackathon called Connections, run with ATEM Biennale; a beginner creative-coding workshop on Oct. 22; and a coding jam on Oct. 24. Raphael de Courville, the Processing Foundation's community lead, joins the Community Visions talk on Oct. 24 at 6 p.m. Elsewhere in the building, Sam Hopkins shows BAZE, an offline archive of videos, sounds, memes and texts kept on a local server, which visitors browse together and copy straight onto their own devices, and Darbyn Luisa Kalkuhl leads a workshop on cyberfeminist strategies. Admission is free. Processing Community Days are locally organized gatherings built around the Processing Foundation's free creative-coding tools. The Dortmund edition was registered on the foundation's worldwide PCD map in July by its organizer, the artist Flor de Fuego, who also moderates the Community Visions talk. For more reading, see [the YU Festival program](https://www.yufestival.de/programm/?ref=killscreen.com), [the Processing Community Day map](https://day.processing.org/?ref=killscreen.com) and [KoLab's site](https://www.koproduktionslabor.de/?ref=killscreen.com). Killscreen tracks the creative-coding festivals, exhibitions and workshops at the edges of games that almost nobody else lists. Get the free Radar newsletter and hear about the next one in time to go. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Omega Mart Announces Omega Dayze, Shares Teaser URL: https://www.killscreen.com/omega-mart-announces-omega-dayze-shares-teaser/ Last updated: 2026-10-16T17:10:46.000Z Event details When Nov. 18, 2026, 5 p.m. PT / 8 p.m. ET Where Online, and Omega Mart at Area15, Las Vegas [RSVP](https://omegadayze.com/?ref=killscreen.com) Omega Mart, Meow Wolf's supermarket-shaped art installation in Las Vegas, holds Omega Dayze on Wednesday, Nov. 18, a live online and in-person spectacle broadcast from the store at 5 p.m. PT. The [announcement reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dehl-JSnK22/?ref=killscreen.com) plays the news as in-fiction television: a breaking-news bulletin reports "unusual activity in Plenty Valley," and a chyron warns that the Bloom of the Elder Zalg is imminent. Watch the teaser below. 0:00 /0:11 1× The Omega Dayze teaser, from omegadayze.com. Video: Meow Wolf The announcement promises product drops, "special" guests, games about groceries and groceries about games, and "more surprises than a daikon conga line." Viewers can RSVP for reminders at [omegadayze.com](https://omegadayze.com/?ref=killscreen.com), and anyone can submit a review of an Omega Mart product for a chance to be part of the show. Omega Mart is Meow Wolf's permanent Las Vegas installation at Area15, which the company describes as a surreal grocery store selling bizarre products, with hidden portals and secret rooms behind the aisles. The event runs online and in person; the in-person side happens at the store. Omega Dayze is the store's own invented holiday, and the fiction stays intact in the marketing: Meow Wolf bills itself as merely the sponsor of its own supermarket's celebration. For more reading, see [Killscreen on the Meow Wolf worlds](https://www.killscreen.com/inflatable-microbes-toured-all-five-meow-wolf-worlds/), [Omega Mart's page](https://meowwolf.com/visit/las-vegas?ref=killscreen.com) and [the Omega Dayze site](https://omegadayze.com/?ref=killscreen.com). Killscreen tracks the live spectacles, immersive worlds and strange broadcasts at the edges of games that almost nobody else lists. Get the free Radar newsletter and catch the next one before it airs. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Paizley Lee Brings Dead Internet Theory to Oakland URL: https://www.killscreen.com/paizley-lee-brings-dead-internet-theory-to-oakland/ Last updated: 2026-10-16T17:10:05.000Z Event details When Oct. 17, 2026, 8 p.m. to midnight Where Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, 921 Washington St., Oakland Cost Pay what you can; $10 suggested [RSVP](https://luma.com/wn15u7fb?ref=killscreen.com) [Dead Internet Theory](https://www.killscreen.com/paizley-lee-filled-dead-internet-theorys-second-la-night-with-a-rainbow-of-imac-g3s/), the touring LAN party built by game designer and vintage-computer rescuer Paizley Lee, comes to the [Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment](https://themade.org/?ref=killscreen.com) in Oakland on Saturday, Oct. 17, from 8 p.m. to midnight. Lee began the project with a cross-country trip to rescue a fleet of colored iMac G3s, then restored the machines and networked them into a playable world modeled on the early internet, seeded with strange games and hidden mysteries. The Oakland edition was [announced this week](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dehqxt9BoIn/?ref=killscreen.com). ![A row of colored iMac G3 computers glowing at a Dead Internet Theory LAN party](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/dead-internet-theory-imac-rainbow-cover.jpg) The iMac G3 fleet at Dead Internet Theory’s second Los Angeles night. Photo: Paizley Lee The MADE describes itself as Oakland's all-playable videogame museum, a Washington Street space where visitors play thousands of games on original hardware. For this night, the organizers promise a playground for old machines, strange games, interactive installations and, in their words, "the people making weird things with technology today." Games and installations come from John Threat and Dan Ruth alongside Lee's own, with more contributors to be announced. Admission is pay what you can, with a suggested $10 donation; proceeds go to the visiting artists and crew. Dead Internet Theory has already run two Los Angeles editions, and the Los Angeles Times profiled the project in September. Lee makes games and throws parties under the name [kidgrandma](https://www.instagram.com/kidgrandma/?ref=killscreen.com). For more reading, see [Killscreen on the second Los Angeles edition](https://www.killscreen.com/paizley-lee-filled-dead-internet-theorys-second-la-night-with-a-rainbow-of-imac-g3s/), [the Los Angeles Times profile](https://www.latimes.com/travel/story/2026-09-22/dead-internet-theory-y2k-party-old-tech?ref=killscreen.com) and [the MADE's calendar](https://themade.org/?ref=killscreen.com). Killscreen tracks the LAN parties, shows and screenings at the edges of games that almost nobody else lists. Get the free Radar newsletter and catch the next night like this before it happens. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Cameron A. Granger Releases Apollo in the Crosshairs: Play URL: https://www.killscreen.com/cameron-a-granger-releases-apollo-in-the-crosshairs-play/ Last updated: 2026-10-16T16:06:59.000Z Cameron A. Granger has released [*Apollo in the Crosshairs*](https://realtayediggs.itch.io/apollo?ref=killscreen.com), a free browser game on itch.io that takes about 10 minutes to play. Granger shared it in [announcement clips on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdutT9dDrP4/?ref=killscreen.com). Watch a clip below. In it, you play a defense contractor tasked with scanning the world for uses, both unknown and presumed, and it passes innocently enough. You're thinking about vacation and sleep when a mysterious woman on the beach opens up an entire world. She is trouble, and she is Shiva. 0:00 /0:17 1× From Cameron A. Granger's announcement clips for **Apollo in the Crosshairs*. Granger says the project began as an attempt at a first-person shooter, and calls the result "a hate poem for the surveillance state." But it draws heavily on the lineage of Paolo Pedercini's [UNMANNED](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/unmanned/), with a twist only a fan of Carré or Steve McQueen's *Widows* would love. The soundtrack uses two Laraaji tracks and a Ryuichi Sakamoto sample, and the collage includes GIFs from the Internet Archive's GifCities. *Apollo in the Crosshairs* is Granger's third browser game, begun as a break between larger projects, and bears all the chaotic chiaroscuro that has become a trademark for his game work. Granger is an alum of the Studio Museum in Harlem and also works in film. The previous release, *Sidechain*, is built around a Columbus warehouse party. For more reading, see [Killscreen on *Sidechain*](https://www.killscreen.com/cameron-granger-sidechain-angel-of-history/), [playing the surveillance state in *Orwell*](https://www.killscreen.com/orwell-will-play-surveillance-state/) and [the game's itch.io page](https://realtayediggs.itch.io/apollo?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/apollo-vibe1-3s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/apollo-vibe3-11s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/apollo-grab2-2s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/apollo-grab2-9s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/apollo-grab4-8s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/apollo-vibe3-3s.jpg) Frames from **Apollo in the Crosshairs*. Images: Cameron A. Granger. A fine-art filmmaker ships a game about the surveillance state and almost nobody covering games notices. Catching that work is the whole job here, and the newsletter is free. [Get the next find ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Raphaël Moreira Gonçalves Announces First Game Vivid Crash URL: https://www.killscreen.com/raphael-moreira-goncalves-announces-first-game-vivid-crash/ Last updated: 2026-10-16T15:29:59.000Z French artist Raphaël Moreira Gonçalves has announced *Vivid Crash*, a video game released under the artist's own name. The announcement arrived as [a post on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdEpat4CHrT/?ref=killscreen.com), captioned with the title and a two-word timeline: "Beta soon." Watch the teaser below. 0:00 /1:02 1× The announcement reel for **Vivid Crash*, muted here; the original lives on [Raphaël Moreira Gonçalves’s Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdEpat4CHrT/?ref=killscreen.com). No platform, price or release date has been announced. The artist's own site describes the practice as built on video game aesthetics, alien iconography and cryptic scripts. Moreira Gonçalves, who has Cape Verdean and Italian roots, trained at the Beaux-Arts de Lyon and Le Fresnoy and keeps a studio at the Paris residency Poush. The work spans augmented reality sculpture and CGI worldbuilding, and has shown at Thaddaeus Ropac, CAPC Bordeaux and MUTEK Montréal. *Vivid Crash* is the first of those projects built to be played. For more reading, see [the artist's website](https://raphaelmoreiragoncalves.com/?ref=killscreen.com) and [Cameron Granger's move from art into games](https://www.killscreen.com/cameron-granger-sidechain-angel-of-history/). Killscreen finds work like this while it still has seven likes: independent and experimental game culture, found and argued for in the free KS Radar newsletter, three short dispatches a week. [Get the free dispatch ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Spray cans fill the ammo slots in PRIEST's Doom repaint URL: https://www.killscreen.com/spray-cans-fill-the-ammo-slots-in-priests-doom-repaint/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T22:17:59.000Z In [the painting that went around in August](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcCEnvPs6ZD/?ref=killscreen.com), the opening courtyard of *Doom* has been carefully re-tooled. The marine's hands now hold a marker and a red fire extinguisher. Up on the wall where the demons should be arriving, the artist's own name drips twice in blackletter tag: PRIEST. PRIEST is a New Zealand-born, London-based artist who came up writing graffiti and stayed self-taught; KAWS spotted the work and the galleries followed. *Trapped in a Cel* at Mucciaccia in 2023 ran cartoon and game imagery through satire, and [“PAPER CUT” at Saatchi Gallery](https://www.saatchigallery.com/exhibition/priest-paper-cut?ref=killscreen.com) this past winter built oversized craft-material dioramas about phone theft and knife crime. The *Doom* canvas reached us the way it reached 4,300 other people, reposted by the curation account itsnotgallery under a one-word caption. The prints in PRIEST’s own shop extend the series. [*SPEEDRUN*](https://priestcorp.net/collections/all/products/speedrun?ref=killscreen.com) puts a timer and a CAN: 100% readout over a sprint through a train tunnel, bombing reframed as the purest speedrun. [*NPC*](https://priestcorp.net/collections/all/products/npc?ref=killscreen.com) stages a *GoldenEye 007*\-style hostage scene in a tagged bathroom stall. Armor 0% is the honest detail: a writer mid-run has full health and no protection at all. Back in 2012 Killscreen asked [why games embraced graffiti](https://www.killscreen.com/why-games-embraced-graffiti/), when the traffic ran the other way, spray paint as set dressing. Fourteen years on, PRIEST reverses the flow and treats the game itself as the wall. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/priest-speedrun-print.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/priest-npc-print.png) **SPEEDRUN* and **NPC*, open-edition prints from PRIEST’s shop. Images: PRIEST Killscreen covers the places where games leak into painting, music, fashion and the street, and almost nobody else is standing there. The free KS Radar newsletter brings three short dispatches a week. [Get the free dispatch ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### [Event] Space and the Body: Aniara, Eclipsium and Mouthwashing URL: https://www.killscreen.com/cross-conversations-horror-space-and-the-body/ Last updated: 2026-10-16T21:05:57.000Z Event details When Oct. 20, 2026, 10 to 11 a.m. PT Where Online Cost Free Horror keeps finding new ways to trap a body. For Cross-Conversations: Horror, Killscreen puts someone from horror film in conversation with people from horror games, and this session is about space and the body. [Sophie Winqvist](https://sophiewinqvist.com/?ref=killscreen.com) shot [*Aniara*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aniara%5F%28film%29?ref=killscreen.com), the Swedish film about a passenger ship knocked off course on its way to Mars. Max Friberg is creative director at [Housefire](https://housefiregames.com/?ref=killscreen.com), the Gothenburg studio behind [*Eclipsium*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2419670/Eclipsium/?ref=killscreen.com), a game about body horror you do to yourself. Johanna Kasurinen co-founded [Wrong Organ](https://wrongorgan.com/?ref=killscreen.com) and leads its art and narrative; the studio made [*Mouthwashing*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2475490/Mouthwashing/?ref=killscreen.com), about the stranded crew of a failing ship and the guilt they carry. Together they'll talk about claustrophobia and guilt in deep space: how a camera and a game each make you feel there is nowhere left to go. **Tuesday, October 20, 10 to 11am PT (1pm ET, 6pm UK, 7pm CEST). Free and online, moderated by Jamin Warren, and recorded for replay. Register below and your join link will appear on this page.** Presented with MUBI [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/gtw-camp-miasma.jpg)](https://mubi.com/killscreen?ref=killscreen.com) Cross-Conversations: Horror is presented with MUBI, in celebration of Jane Schoenbrun's ****TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA**, starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson. Now streaming exclusively on MUBI. Get 30 days free. [Watch now ](https://mubi.com/killscreen?ref=killscreen.com) ### The Sound of Dread, From Weapons to Dead Space [Podcast] URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/the-sound-of-dread-from-weapons-to-dead-space-podcast/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T20:31:09.000Z I sit down with two composers who make audiences flinch for a living. Ryan Holladay scored Zach Cregger's *Weapons* and this year's *Resident Evil* with his brother Hays. Jason Graves wrote the music for the original *Dead Space* trilogy, *Until Dawn* and *Still Wakes the Deep*. This is the first of Killscreen's [Cross-Conversations: Horror](https://www.killscreen.com/cross-conversations-horror-ryan-holladay-jason-graves/), three free talks presented with MUBI that put people who make horror films and horror games in the same room. We start with Bluebrain, the location-aware album Ryan and Hays made for the National Mall in 2011, which grew out of the way sound changes as you walk through *Myst*. Jason explains how a drummer's background carried him through his first audition for EA and into *Dead Space*, and both of them trace the vocabulary horror still borrows from Penderecki, *Psycho*, *Jaws* and John Carpenter. Then the difference between scoring a film and scoring a game: Wwise and FMOD, and stingers that have to wait for the player. Jason walks through The Rig, the metal sculpture Matt McConnell built for *Still Wakes the Deep*, and Ryan talks about *Abelina*, the game he is scoring now. We close on audience questions and the tools they actually use, from handheld recorders to iZotope RX and Ableton. ## Links - [Scoring Fear: The Composers Behind Weapons and Dead Space](https://www.killscreen.com/cross-conversations-horror-ryan-holladay-jason-graves/), the event page - [The Killscreen Horror Collection](https://www.killscreen.com/horror-collection/) - [Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma on MUBI](https://mubi.com/killscreen?ref=killscreen.com), 30 days free *Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by* [*Nick Sylvester*](https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?ref=killscreen.com)*.* ### Noah Thompson Announces Free Spectral Map Demo URL: https://www.killscreen.com/noah-thompson-announces-free-spectral-map-demo/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T20:04:59.000Z Noah Thompson, a California sound designer and media artist who releases games as FleshWare, will put out a free demo of *Spectral Map* on Steam on Oct. 19, the opening day of Steam Next Fest. Thompson confirmed the date in [a post marking 5,000 wishlists](https://www.instagram.com/p/DecLwtyKyW%5F/?ref=killscreen.com), a few days after sharing [clips from the new tutorial](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeXhI-UKsPM/?ref=killscreen.com). Watch the trailer below. 0:00 /0:27 1× Gameplay trailer for **Spectral Map*, shown here without sound. The [full trailer with audio](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4331960/Spectral%5FMap/?ref=killscreen.com) is on Steam. The [Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4331960/Spectral%5FMap/?ref=killscreen.com) describes *Spectral Map* as "a claymation dreamscape on the brink of a Pollutant-based apocalypse." Almost every visual element is made from clay, either animated by hand in stop motion or 3D-scanned into the game. Movement is modeled on the Source engine: players surf, bunny-hop, rocket jump and grapple across the map, and an adaptive audio system granulates the score according to the player's momentum. The world holds more than a hundred variants of non-player characters. The demo opens on a tutorial area added in an Oct. 12 update, with a new track the developer calls the Plasticine Membrane. The game is listed for Windows and has no full release date. Steam's content notes flag animated body horror and pixelated blood. Steam Next Fest runs through Oct. 26. Thompson is studying for a master's degree in Media Arts and Technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a focus on creative programming, according to [Thompson's site](https://noahaorta.com/about?ref=killscreen.com). The site lists more than seven years of sound design and music production, including contract work for the sample company Splice. For more reading, see [Armikrog and the unfulfilled promise of claymation videogames](https://www.killscreen.com/armikrog-and-unfulfilled-promise-claymation-videogames/), [For Slum Lord's cover, Mason Lindroth stayed in clay](https://www.killscreen.com/for-slum-lords-cover-mason-lindroth-stayed-in-clay/) and [the Spectral Map page on Thompson's site](https://noahaorta.com/spectralmap?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/spectral-map-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/spectral-map-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/spectral-map-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/spectral-map-6.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/spectral-map-7.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/spectral-map-2.jpg) **Spectral Map*. Images: FleshWare, via Steam Games built by hand out of clay and other stubborn materials are the work Killscreen goes looking for. The free Radar newsletter brings it to your inbox. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Aconite Moves Forward on Slime in the Ice Machine URL: https://www.killscreen.com/aconite-moves-forward-on-slime-in-the-ice-machine/ Last updated: 2026-10-16T21:07:42.000Z Aconite, the studio behind *HoloVista*, has passed its $25,000 Kickstarter goal for *Slime in the Ice Machine*, a hand-drawn adventure game set in Houston. As of Oct. 15 the [campaign](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aconiteco/slime-in-the-ice-machine-a-psychedelic-adventure-game?ref=killscreen.com) had raised $36,785 from 510 backers, and it closes at 9:01 a.m. Pacific on Nov. 4\. Watch the campaign video below. 0:00 /0:57 1× The Kickstarter campaign video for **Slime in the Ice Machine*. Video: Aconite The game is written by Miracle Jones, who grew up outside Houston, and co-created by Aconite co-founder Nadya Lev. The player character, a journalist named Margot Crystal, comes home to a failing black-cat-themed metal bar in a strip mall and finds a pool of hallucinogenic slime in its ice machine that opens onto bars across space and time. The campaign describes a puzzle adventure for adults, more than 15 hours long, with narrative puzzles meant to give players "the feeling of doing actual journalism." The title comes from Marvin Zindler, the Houston TV reporter who shouted "slime in the ice machine" in on-air restaurant inspection segments, [Houstonia reports](https://www.houstoniamag.com/arts-and-culture/2026/09/houston-video-games-slime-ice-machine-coog-interactive?ref=killscreen.com). Andreu Zaragoza drew the art. The score is by Buzz McCoy of My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult; the campaign says it is McCoy's first game score. The Kickstarter lists PC, Mac and Xbox; [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4404940/Slime%5Fin%5Fthe%5FIce%5FMachine/?ref=killscreen.com) lists the release date as "To be announced," and Houstonia reports a tentative spring 2027 release. A free demo of the first three levels is on Steam and [itch.io](https://aconite-studio.itch.io/slime?ref=killscreen.com). *HoloVista*, its 2020 iOS game, won a 2021 Apple Design Award in the Inclusivity category. A University of Houston student group, Coog Interactive, playtested *Slime in the Ice Machine*. For more reading, see [Houstonia on the game and Coog Interactive](https://www.houstoniamag.com/arts-and-culture/2026/09/houston-video-games-slime-ice-machine-coog-interactive?ref=killscreen.com), [Apple's 2021 Design Award winners](https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/06/apple-announces-winners-of-the-2021-apple-design-awards/?ref=killscreen.com) and [Aconite's press kit](https://www.aconite.co/slime/presskit/sheet.php?p=slime%5Fin%5Fthe%5Fice%5Fmachine&ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/slime-ice-machine-7.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/slime-ice-machine-9.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/slime-ice-machine-10.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/slime-ice-machine-12.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/slime-ice-machine-8.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/slime-ice-machine-11.jpg) **Slime in the Ice Machine*. Images: Aconite, via Steam Odd, hand-drawn adventure games with a real place behind them are the work Killscreen goes looking for. The free Radar newsletter brings it to your inbox. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Melanie Hoff's Dance Poem Revolution Turns Steps Into Poems URL: https://www.killscreen.com/melanie-hoff-dance-poem-revolution-turns-steps-into-poems/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T18:22:18.000Z Event details When Oct. 27, 2026, 5 to 8 p.m. Where Onassis ONX, New York [RSVP](https://onx.itm.studio/m/they-make-you-write-your-poems?ref=killscreen.com) Melanie Hoff's [*Dance Poem Revolution*](https://www.culturehub.org/dance-poem-revolution?ref=killscreen.com), a dance pad wired to a screen and a thermal printer, is on view at Onassis ONX in New York on Oct. 27\. Each step on the arrows pulls a word from texts, songs and histories about revolution, and the finished poem prints for the visitor to take home. Watch an excerpt from Metahaven's *The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object)*, which screens the same night, below. 0:00 /0:30 1× An excerpt from Metahaven's **The Feeling Sonnets (Transitional Object)*, 2024\. [Watch it with sound on Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/1031021101?ref=killscreen.com). It is part of *They Make You Write Your Poems: Artistic Practices Amid Automated Cognition*, a one-night exhibition curated by Giulia Colletti, the American Academy in Rome's 2026 Italian Fellow for Curatorial Research. The title comes from Adrienne Rich's 1961 poem "Artificial Intelligence." Per [the announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dee07%5F6Te2T/?ref=killscreen.com), visitors can touch, press, dance and take home printed poems. The show also includes Yafira Martinez's [*The Soft Computer*](https://thesoft.computer/about?ref=killscreen.com), a knitted panel with four felt buttons that prints poems on receipts; Allison Parrish's *Solar Powered Alba Generator*, which writes dawn poems only when sunlight wakes it; an AI by Roberto Fassone with Sineglossa that narrates mushroom trips; and work by Ben Grosser and by Riccardo Petrini and Lucia Rebolino. A panel runs at 5:30 p.m. and the film at 6:30 p.m. Hoff built the piece from open-source assets and code reverse-engineered from software modeled on *Dance Dance Revolution*. It premiered at the Bronx Museum in 2025\. Hoff teaches at Harvard, NYU and Yale and formerly co-directed the School for Poetic Computation. For more reading, see [Hoff's CultureHub residency page](https://www.culturehub.org/melanie-hoff?ref=killscreen.com), [Playable poems now come with peer review](https://www.killscreen.com/playable-poems-now-come-with-peer-review/) and [Online art installation examines propaganda in the Internet age](https://www.killscreen.com/metahaven-releases-new-art-installation-digital-disinformation/). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/dance-poem-revolution-culturehub-02.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/dance-poem-revolution-culturehub-03.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/the-soft-computer-yafira-martinez-01.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/the-soft-computer-yafira-martinez-02.jpg) **Dance Poem Revolution* at CultureHub, photos by Olenka Shkoda, courtesy CultureHub; Yafira Martinez's **The Soft Computer*, images courtesy the artist. Killscreen lists the shows where poems, dance pads and code meet, the ones almost nobody else is tracking. Get them in your inbox, free. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Takakurakazuki Builds Walter Benjamin Machine for Oni Kappa URL: https://www.killscreen.com/takakurakazuki-builds-walter-benjamin-machine-for-oni-kappa/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T18:21:21.000Z Event details When Oct. 17 to Nov. 1, 2026; Thursdays to Sundays, 1 to 7 p.m. Where ISLAND, Jingumae, Shibuya, Tokyo [Exhibition details](https://www.instagram.com/islandjapan/p/DeJDAVtiSna/?ref=killscreen.com) Takakurakazuki is premiering a new "Walter Benjamin Machine" stage of the game *Oni Kappa and the Giant of Knowledge* in a group show at ISLAND in Shibuya, Tokyo, which opens Oct. 17 and runs through Nov. 1\. Beside it stands a sculpted statue of the Walter Benjamin Machine, which [the artist's announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DehO3DFklNc/?ref=killscreen.com) calls a "Buddhist statue (?)." The first stage, [*Oni Kappa and the Giant of Knowledge: 001\_Descartes Machine*](https://takakurakazuki.itch.io/onikappa-descartes?ref=killscreen.com), came out free on itch.io in May. Players switch between an oni and a kappa, travel through the body of a giant built on René Descartes, fire "fumu fumu" agreement bullets and collect four philosophy fragments to weaken the boss. Takakurakazuki drew the pixel art and made the music; [an essay on note](https://note.com/takakurakazuki/n/n5adf3f6cb19c?ref=killscreen.com) says the code was written with Claude Code and OpenAI Codex. *NEW MEDIA / NEW TECHNOLOGY / NEW ARTISTS* is curated by Yoshidayama and organized by ArtFanders. It opened in Fukuoka in May and traveled to Seoul in August. The Tokyo show also includes Kenta Cobayashi, known for photographs stretched with Photoshop's smudge tool; Myoji Namae, who makes installations about the body and sexuality; the painter Shunsuke Saiki; and the Fukuoka programmer Aoi Ito. The opening reception, Oct. 17 from 6 to 8 p.m., is free. Takakurakazuki, born in Yamanashi in 1987, works under the motto "PLAY = PRAY," draws on Esoteric Buddhism and had a solo show, *Mechareal*, at the Yamanashi Prefectural Museum of Art in 2023. For more reading, see [Takakurakazuki Puts a Game Inside a Buddhist Altar in Arles](https://www.killscreen.com/game-screens-wind-up-in-an-altar-and-a-copper-girl-in-arles/), [Takakurakazuki Debuts Ghost Gion Matsuri at PAC-MAN Show](https://www.killscreen.com/takakurakazuki-debuts-ghost-gion-matsuri-at-pac-man-show/) and [the artist's site](https://takakurakazuki.github.io/?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/oni-kappa-descartes-machine-gameplay-02.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/oni-kappa-descartes-machine-gameplay-03.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/oni-kappa-and-the-giant-of-knowledge-title.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/new-media-new-technology-new-artists-key-visual.jpg) Screens from **Oni Kappa and the Giant of Knowledge: 001\_Descartes Machine*, courtesy Takakurakazuki, and the exhibition's key visual, courtesy ArtFanders. Killscreen lists the gallery shows where games turn up as art, the ones almost nobody else is tracking. Get them in your inbox, free. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Yoon Chung Han Shows Dreaming Babies: illi at Gray Area URL: https://www.killscreen.com/yoon-chung-han-dreaming-babies-illi-gray-area/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T18:02:37.000Z Event details When Sept. 17 to Oct. 19, 2026 Where Gray Area, 2665 Mission St., San Francisco; open during events and by appointment *Dreaming Babies: illi* fills Gray Area's gallery in San Francisco with 23 virtual incubators, each holding a simulated baby grown from the real genetic data of a different human chromosome. Visitors speak to the sleeping babies through a microphone, and the babies answer in real time through a ChatGPT-based system, while live-rendered video shows each one dreaming in space. The show closes Oct. 19, per [the gallery's announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dee3qQIjRQB/?ref=killscreen.com), and is open during events and by appointment. Gray Area presents the solo exhibition of "speculative simulation" works by the Korean artist Yoon Chung Han. The exhibition text ties the project to Han's own experience of egg retrieval and preimplantation genetic testing, and asks what defines an embryo with "normal" genes: each chromosome is "reborn as a baby character with a name, an alter ego, and an imagined being." Also on view is Tori Sommerhof's *Requiem Aternum*, an endlessly scrolling film assembled from found physical media, part of the gallery's Machine Vitrine spotlight series. Han is an interactive media artist and an associate professor of design at San Jose State University, with installations shown at the ACM SIGGRAPH Art Gallery, ZKM and the Japan Media Arts Festival. *Dreaming Babies: illi* was built in Unity and premiered at Unfold X in Seoul in 2025. For more reading, see [the exhibition page at Gray Area](https://grayarea.org/event/exhibition-yoon-chung-han-dreaming-babies/?ref=killscreen.com), [an excerpt of the installation on Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/1150253233?ref=killscreen.com) and [Han's faculty page at San Jose State](https://gcp-web.sjsu.edu/design/undergraduate-programs/graphic-design/faculty/yhan.php?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/dreaming-babies-03.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/dreaming-babies-01.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/dreaming-babies-10.jpg) **Dreaming Babies: illi* at Gray Area. Images via Gray Area Killscreen follows the installations and simulations where game engines leave the screen for the gallery, work almost nobody else covers. The free KS Radar letter flags shows like this twice a week, while they can still be seen. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Jason Rohrer is microdosing chess URL: https://www.killscreen.com/jason-rohrer-is-microdosing-chess/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T18:01:44.000Z Jason Rohrer posted [new hand-made pixel art](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdUs2Qqo5T1/?ref=killscreen.com) for *Chessamphetamine*: board tiles and pieces drawn to the 32-color Sheltzy palette, headed for [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4109570/Chessamphetamine%5F%5FDOFAMINMASHINA%5FIZ%5FSSSR/?ref=killscreen.com). Rohrer describes the game as "a lightning-fast roguelike deckbuilding auto-battler" that "puts the Chess back in auto chess," and the full Steam title carries a Russian subtitle—ДОФАМИН-МАШИНА ИЗ СССР, a dopamine machine from the USSR—which reads to me like a designer labeling the slot machine before you put your money in. It is billed as the first of a new series Rohrer calls MICRODOSE: games that are "Tiny, Cheap, and Deep." As manifestos go, three words is very Rohrer. 0:00 /0:29 1× Gameplay from **Chessamphetamine*; the trailer with sound is on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4109570/Chessamphetamine%5F%5FDOFAMINMASHINA%5FIZ%5FSSSR/?ref=killscreen.com). Video: Jason Rohrer This is the person whose work Killscreen has covered since our first year—[the pre-game interview](https://www.killscreen.com/pre-game-interview-jason-rohrer/) ran in 2010—and whose personal games later [got their own museum retrospective](https://www.killscreen.com/jason-rohrers-personal-games-get-their-own-museum-retrospective/). The argument that a game could be one small, sharp, personal idea largely enters the culture through *Passage*. Watching that same designer hand-place pixels for a chess variant, at an audience size most studios would consider a rounding error, is the argument still being made. The chess-variant corner of the archive is deeper than you would think—we once covered [*Chesh*, which reinvented chess for the people](https://www.killscreen.com/chesh-reinvents-chess-for-the-people/)—and *Chessamphetamine* looks like the fastest thing ever filed there. No release date yet; the wishlist button works today. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/chessamphetamine-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/chessamphetamine-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/chessamphetamine-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/chessamphetamine-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/chessamphetamine-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/chessamphetamine-header.jpg) Screenshots from **Chessamphetamine*. Images: Jason Rohrer Killscreen has been covering Jason Rohrer since 2010, and the small personal game is still the beat we care most about. The free newsletter keeps you on it. [Follow the small games ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Asia Culture Center Opens Submissions for ACC NEXT 2027 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/asia-culture-center-acc-next-2027-open-call/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T17:54:16.000Z Event details When Applications close Oct. 25, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. KST Where Online, via acc.go.kr [Apply by Oct. 25](https://www.acc.go.kr/en/board/board.do?PID=1001&boardID=NOTICE&action=Read&idx=2866&ref=killscreen.com) The National Asian Culture Center opens submissions for the 2027 edition of ACC NEXT Emerging Asian Artists, its international open call for work at the intersection of art and technology. Applications run Oct. 1 to 25, 2026, closing at 11:59 p.m. Korea time, through an account on [the center's site](https://www.acc.go.kr/en/board/board.do?PID=1001&boardID=NOTICE&action=Read&idx=2866&ref=killscreen.com). The call covers interactive installation, generative video and image, kinetic and robotic art, and extended reality, for works not previously shown in another exhibition. About 10 artists or teams will be selected, each receiving an artist fee of KRW 3,000,000 per work, up to KRW 2,000,000 for installation and materials, round-trip airfare for overseas residents and accommodation. Selected works show April 2 to Aug. 22, 2027, dates the center marks as tentative, at ACC Creation Space 5 in Gwangju, South Korea. The theme, Prototype, is framed "not as something unfinished, but as an original form that distills essential value." Applicants must be nationals of an Asian country born on or after Jan. 1, 1987, and artists born or raised in Asia can qualify regardless of nationality when their practice engages Asia's cultural, social and historical identities. The exhibition record requirement is one solo show, one show at a national or public museum, or three group exhibitions. One artist or team may also be selected for the 2027 ACC CREATORS Residency through a pitch review; the call [circulated this week](https://www.instagram.com/p/DecF6HwCOMe/?ref=killscreen.com) among creative-coding accounts. For more reading, see [the full call at acc.go.kr](https://www.acc.go.kr/en/board/board.do?PID=1001&boardID=NOTICE&action=Read&idx=2866&ref=killscreen.com) and [On the Move's listing](https://on-the-move.org/news/national-asian-culture-center-acc-next-emerging-asian-artists-international-2027-south-korea?ref=killscreen.com). Killscreen flags the residencies and open calls that pay for experimental, game-adjacent work while there is still time to apply. The free KS Radar letter lists them twice a week. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Rachel Rossin Debuts EEG Tools at Museum of the Moving Image URL: https://www.killscreen.com/rachel-rossin-debuts-eeg-tools-museum-of-the-moving-image/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T17:53:43.000Z Event details When Oct. 15, 2026, 5 to 9 p.m.; evening program begins 6:30 p.m. Where Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35th Ave., Queens Cost Free with registration [Register](https://luma.com/qemr728f?ref=killscreen.com) Rachel Rossin debuts a set of new EEG tools on Thursday, Oct. 15, at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, in conversation with Sonia Shechet Epstein, the museum's curator of science and technology. The talk draws on Rossin's MoMI Lab residency and an ongoing project with Yale University's Wu Tsai Institute. In [the announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DefHf5Pmyk1/?ref=killscreen.com), Rossin says the talk takes up "the role of art as a neurobiological antidote to our vertiginous, technologically mediated present." The conversation anchors Making Art in the Era of Neurotechnology, an evening on what happens to art and perception as access to brain data expands. The program adds a curator-led tour of the exhibition *Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body*, demos in the MoMI Lab, a screening of Nina Sobell's *Brainwave Drawings*, and *GammaTime*, a neurofeedback performance by Sobell and Ed Bear, followed by a reception. Sobell has been drawing with brainwaves since the early 1970s. General admission is free from 2 to 6 p.m. that day, and the evening program begins at 6:30 p.m. in the Redstone Theater. Rossin is a painter and programmer working across painting, virtual reality and installation, and the MoMI Lab's inaugural artist in residence, with the residency running through December 2026, supported by Agog: The Immersive Media Institute. For more reading, see [Rachel Rossin: Entropy to Infinity](https://www.killscreen.com/rachel-rossin/), [MoMI's artist residency page](https://movingimage.org/momi-lab/artist-residency/?ref=killscreen.com) and [Rossin's bio at Magenta Plains](https://magentaplains.com/artists/rachel-rossin/bio?ref=killscreen.com). Killscreen tracks the talks, shows and museum residencies where game-engine artists cross into neuroscience and galleries, work almost nobody else covers. The free KS Radar letter flags them twice a week, while there is still time to go. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Wonderville Adds Two New Arcade Cabinets URL: https://www.killscreen.com/wonderville-adds-two-new-arcade-cabinets/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T17:52:55.000Z Event details When Oct. 24, 2026, 2:30 to 5:30 p.m.; SHELLRAISER algorave follows at 7 p.m. Where Wonderville, 1186 Broadway, Brooklyn [RSVP](https://pools.events/event/LLkwapA0/dogs-penguins-a-double-cabinet-launch/?i=dqJYVIMV&ref=killscreen.com) Wonderville installs two new cabinets at a launch party on Saturday, Oct. 24, [the Brooklyn arcade bar announced](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dec4lnSzilG/?ref=killscreen.com). The first is *The Indomitable Rocket Dog* by Andy Wallace, a fast, physics-based platformer time trial about a dog that rocket-jumps through what its Steam page calls "a psychedelic club," with *N++*, *Neon White,* and *Sonic the Hedgehog* cited as reference points. A demo with the full level editor is playable on itch.io, and a Steam release is planned for 2026. The party, billed as Dogs & Penguins, runs from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m. at Wonderville, the Brooklyn bar and event space built around independently made arcade games. In the evening, the room turns over to SHELLRAISER, the October algorave from the live-coding collective livecode.nyc. The second cabinet is *Waddle Throttle* by Jason Corace, a local-multiplayer mashup of figure skating and sumo wrestling in which penguins fight to be the last one standing. It began as a 2024 Wondercab residency cabinet at Wonderville, logged more than 1,800 plays at Super MAGFest 2025, and gets a home release on Steam and itch.io in 2026. Wallace is a professor of game design at Long Island University whose work has shown at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, SFMoMA and the Museum of the Moving Image. For more reading, see [Killscreen on Wonderville's Step Right Up! cabinet](https://www.killscreen.com/wondervilles-new-cabinet-step-right-up-crosses-a-zoltar-machine-with-vector-graphics/), [the Wondercab Residency open call](https://www.killscreen.com/wonderville-will-build-your-game-into-an-arcade-cabinet/) and [a night when nine games replaced the gamepad at Wonderville](https://www.killscreen.com/at-wonderville-nine-games-replaced-the-gamepad-entirely/). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/rocket-dog-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/rocket-dog-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/rocket-dog-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/rocket-dog-5.jpg) **The Indomitable Rocket Dog*. Screenshots via Steam Killscreen covers the custom cabinets and alt-venue arcades where independent games meet players in person, a scene almost nobody else reports. The free KS Radar letter flags nights like this twice a week. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Liam Young's Planet City Joins SFMOMA's Permanent Collection URL: https://www.killscreen.com/liam-youngs-planet-city-joins-sfmomas-permanent-collection/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T17:46:51.000Z SFMOMA has acquired Liam Young's film *Planet City* for its permanent collection, Young announced in [an Instagram post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeR42QAD4vm/?ref=killscreen.com) on Oct. 9\. The post thanks two SFMOMA curators who proposed the acquisition, along with the National Gallery of Victoria, which commissioned the work. Watch an excerpt below. 0:00 /0:30 1× The opening of the **Planet City* excerpt, shown here without sound. The [full excerpt with audio](https://vimeo.com/495982413?ref=killscreen.com) is on Liam Young's Vimeo. Video: Liam Young The 15-minute film, made in 2020, imagines the world's projected population living in one extremely dense city so that the rest of the planet can return to wilderness. The [NGV](https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/multimedia/triennial-liam-young/?ref=killscreen.com) commissioned it for its 2020 Triennial and credits Alexey Marfin as visual effects supervisor, Matthew Barnes, who records as Forest Swords, for the score, and Stewart Addison for cinematography, along with a team of costume artists. Young's post also credits the studio Well Played VR as VR developers. According to Young, parts of the *Planet City* project are also in the collections of MoMA, the NGV, and MAXXI in Rome, and the work continues to tour. A spin-off, [*The Drone Shepherd: A Planet City Graphic Novel in VR*](https://marinabaysands.com/museum/experiences/vr-gallery/the-drone-shepherd.html?ref=killscreen.com), is listed in the VR gallery of the ArtScience Museum in Singapore. Young, an Australian film director and speculative architect, showed *Planet City* in *In Other Worlds*, a Barbican Centre exhibition that ran through Sept. 6, 2026\. [Dezeen](https://www.dezeen.com/2026/06/05/barbican-in-other-worlds-liam-young/?ref=killscreen.com) described it as Young's first major UK solo show; it also premiered a new film, *World Machine*, about a planetary supercomputer. For more reading, see [The end of the world isn't so bad](https://www.killscreen.com/newsletter-2-22/), [SFMOMA and ZKM jointly acquire Eden.Garden 1.0, 25 years after its debut](https://www.killscreen.com/sfmoma-and-zkm-jointly-acquire-eden-garden-1-0-25-years-after-its-debut/) and [the Planet City excerpt on Young's Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/495982413?ref=killscreen.com). Worldbuilding that leaves the screen for museums and films is the work Killscreen goes looking for. The free Radar newsletter brings it to your inbox. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Experimental Game Culture This Week: Oct. 14, 2026 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/experimental-game-culture-this-week-oct-14-2026/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T00:13:32.000Z October at Killscreen has turned out to be mostly about fear: the Horror Collection, the Scoring Fear talk, and now an issue that opens on a fish who has to swim home to die. I promise it's sweeter than it sounds. One other thing I've been working on is a new [Events](https://www.killscreen.com/events) page. During the course of my research each day, I've been coming across *so* many IRL things that didn't quite merit a mention in Radar, but would be tremendously useful if you lived there. For example, this weekend I was able to catch Alice Bucknell's *Ground Truthing* [at art/space here](https://www.killscreen.com/a-rhinestone-is-the-only-controller-in-moled-to-gold/) in LA that was only up for a couple days, and Isabelle Frances McGuire's work that I'd seen at the Whitney Biennial is [featuring a new Salem Witch](https://www.killscreen.com/to-play-joys-hands-you-have-to-visit-a-chinatown-gallery/) game project only playable at the gallery. And, like, this is my job. The other piece is that social media has moved away from follower-driven, chronological information. The task of knowing *what's going on right now* is at once easier and harder, since there's no guarantee that what's posted is what's shown. Moreover, I'm hoping to bring more of my interests in contemporary art and performance in line with smaller DIY independent game happenings. Thank you to the 100 of you who joined this week, and especially to Jim, Paolo and 丁文, who signed up as paid members. Support means so much to me. --- ## This Week's Feature ### [Fish Make O-Faces, and Other Lessons From the Redding District](https://www.killscreen.com/sagan-yee-last-call-redding-district/) *Sagan Yee's hookup sim asks what if mermaids lived like Pacific salmon: go home, spawn with everyone you grew up with, then die alongside the whole town.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/gtw-oct14-redding-district.gif) **Last Call for the Redding District*: swimming home for spawning season (courtesy Sagan Yee) Thomas Wolfe's posthumous novel told readers *You Can't Go Home Again*, and generations of writers have mostly taken him at his word. Sagan Yee's answer is stranger and more biological: you can go home, *you have to*, and it will be the last thing you do. *Last Call for the Redding District*, the game Yee built for his MFA in UCLA's Design Media Arts program, asks what would happen if mermaids had the life cycle of Pacific salmon. The player returns for spawning season to a suburban hometown modeled on Yee's own Saskatoon, catches up with everyone they grew up with, decides who to spawn with, and then, along with everyone else, dies. [Yee came to games sideways](https://www.killscreen.com/touch-go-exploring-alternative-controllers/). Trained in classical animation, they spent nearly a decade at Toronto's Hand Eye Society, the videogame arts nonprofit they led as executive director from 2016 to 2020, before turning to their own practice. They also write speculative fiction, and *Redding District* began as a short story. I spoke with Yee in September, shortly after his move to Eugene, Ore., about salmon, dating sims, the virgins who keep his fictional society running, and the workshop that changed how he builds worlds. The game is still in progress, and Yee hopes to finish it within the next year. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/gtw-oct14-redding-district-spawning.gif) The four-player spawning game at UCLA's New Wight Gallery, 2026 (courtesy Sagan Yee) | [Read it on Killscreen →](https://www.killscreen.com/sagan-yee-last-call-redding-district/) | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --- SPONSORED BY MUBI [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/gtw-camp-miasma.jpg)](https://mubi.com/killscreen?ref=killscreen-newsletter) Be fulfilled by ****Jane Schoenbrun**'s ****TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA**. By flesh and fluids, and pure filmic pleasure. Starring ****Hannah Einbinder** and ****Gillian Anderson**, this MUBI Release is bloody genre-bending bliss from the visionary director behind **I Saw the TV Glow*. Now streaming exclusively on MUBI. ****Get 30 days free** to stream great cinema like this and so much more. [Watch now → ](https://mubi.com/killscreen?ref=killscreen-newsletter) ## Spandrel ### [Sticky notes storyboarded Blood Dungeon's animated intro](https://www.killscreen.com/sticky-notes-storyboarded-blood-dungeons-animated-intro/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/gtw-oct14-blood-dungeon-intro.gif) Dann Beeson's animated intro for **Blood Dungeon* (via Steam) Messhof credits Baltimore artist Dann Beeson with the intro for *Blood Dungeon*, and a making-of reel posted the day the game came out shows where it started: a pad of tiny sticky-note panels, shuffled and crossed out until the sequence held. Beeson says he wanted "a bad aesthetic," with flat, hand-drawn characters swung through a 3D camera, and getting something to look that wrong took real work. | [Read it on Killscreen →](https://www.killscreen.com/sticky-notes-storyboarded-blood-dungeons-animated-intro/) | | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --- The best is yet to Come Further down, Kitty Horrorshow's 2016 profile is one of the print-magazine pieces we've brought back this fall, and every one of them comes with Helping Hand, along with the Friday Playlist and the members' podcast. It's $55 a year until Dec. 31, and that price stays yours for as long as you do. [Join Helping Hand ](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/signup) ### [A TV station is forming around downloadable art](https://www.killscreen.com/a-tv-station-is-forming-around-downloadable-art/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/netv-guide-1.jpg) The NIGHT EYE TV GUIDE BOOK (via NIGHT EYE TV) NIGHT EYE TV, an upcoming platform for experimental art, is introducing itself through the NIGHT EYE TV GUIDE BOOK and a run of featured contributors: [alpha\_rats](https://www.killscreen.com/alpha%5Frats/), Vinny Roca and others. The site will run short-form programming that advertises each artist's larger work. | [Read it on Killscreen →](https://www.killscreen.com/a-tv-station-is-forming-around-downloadable-art/) | | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | --- ### [Jess Uhre Rahbek Releases This Is Why You Love LEGO](https://www.killscreen.com/jess-uhre-rahbek-announces-this-is-why-you-love-lego/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/this-is-why-you-love-lego-cover-wide.jpg) **This Is Why You Love LEGO* by Jess Uhre Rahbek (cover: MIT Press) Jess Uhre Rahbek, an assistant professor at Design School Kolding's LAB for Play Design, spent three years embedded with the design team at LEGO House in Billund. *This Is Why You Love LEGO*, out yesterday from MIT Press, follows one young builder's space pirate ship to name the ways people work with bricks, from following the manual to what Rahbek calls "drifting and shifting." | [Read it on Killscreen →](https://www.killscreen.com/jess-uhre-rahbek-announces-this-is-why-you-love-lego/) | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --- Radar is the short one — three news items, every Tuesday and Thursday. Check it out! [Turn on Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/account/newsletters) --- ## [Kitty Horrorshow](https://www.killscreen.com/kitty-horrorshow-emergents/) *The former practicing witch builds haunted, hostile worlds that treat you as a trespasser.* By Chris Priestman, from the Kill Screen print archive, Issue 09, 2016. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/kitty-horrorshow-emergents.jpg) Kitty Horrorshow, illustrated by Christopher Black Kitty Horrorshow was once a practicing witch. She still studies the occult arts from her home in Savannah, Georgia, but her main craft is now videogames. The switch came in 2012 with *Pontefract*, a Twine-made “storygame” about confronting darkness inside an evil castle. With interactive fiction, Horrorshow had found a way to reify the many worlds she imagined. But she craved to make 3D games. And when she discovered the means to, Horrorshow says it was as if the powers of a “half-crazed architecture-goddess” had been granted to her. | [Read it on Killscreen →](https://www.killscreen.com/kitty-horrorshow-emergents/) | | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --- ## Intersection ### [You+Pea Redraw Doom and Disco Elysium as Building Plans](https://www.killscreen.com/architects-redraw-doom-and-disco-elysium-as-building-plans/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/va-hero.png) **Videogame Architecture: Building Virtual Spaces*, limited edition (courtesy Read-Only Memory) Sandra Youkhana and Luke Caspar Pearson, the London studio You+Pea, measure 12 game worlds, from *Doom* and *Disco Elysium* to *Elden Ring* and *The Sims 4*, in plans, sections and exploded diagrams. John Romero, who designed *Doom*'s levels, writes the foreword. The Thames & Hudson hardback drops Oct. 22 in the U.K. and Nov. 17 in the U.S. | [Read it on Killscreen →](https://www.killscreen.com/architects-redraw-doom-and-disco-elysium-as-building-plans/) | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --- ## One to Watch ### [obleak games Facilitates A Creature-Feeding Passion In Full Bloom](https://www.killscreen.com/the-more-it-eats-the-bigger-in-full-bloom-gets/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/gtw-oct14-in-full-bloom.gif) **In Full Bloom*, out Nov. 4 (via Steam) In *In Full Bloom*, you feed a small, helpless creature whatever is nearby until neighborhoods, then continents, count as a meal. obleak games, the Zurich studio of Lisa Bach and Charisse Ann de Leon, calls it a Tamagotchi-inspired Katamari-like about responsibility and mindless consumption. It's out Nov. 4, and a free demo is on Steam now. | [Read it on Killscreen →](https://www.killscreen.com/the-more-it-eats-the-bigger-in-full-bloom-gets/) | | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --- ## Run-ons - [Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley Releases The Eyes Under the Sky](https://www.killscreen.com/danielle-brathwaite-shirley-releases-the-eyes-under-the-sky/): a free browser horror game set in public toilets, part of a comics series of the same name - [Theo Triantafyllidis Shows Feral Metaverse at Frieze London](https://www.killscreen.com/theo-triantafyllidis-shows-feral-metaverse-at-frieze-london/): a climbable soft spider that logs strangers into one shared multiplayer body - [A showcase from the Mouthwashing label is set for Oct. 20](https://www.killscreen.com/a-showcase-from-the-mouthwashing-label-is-set-for-oct-20/): Critical Reflex lines up 22 unreleased games, with TALLBOYS' *Militsioner* demo out now - [Miles Buckle invents a Paul McCartney idle game from 1998](https://www.killscreen.com/miles-buckle-invents-a-paul-mccartney-idle-game-from-1998/): a fake anniversary reel for a CD-ROM that never shipped - [Total Refusal Bring Let's Play I Am Old and Tired to Berlin](https://www.killscreen.com/total-refusal-bring-lets-play-i-am-old-and-tired-to-berlin/): live gaming theater staged inside *Red Dead Redemption 2* - [Matt Romein Plays a Text Adventure Live in MILKMAN ZERO](https://www.killscreen.com/milkman-zero-text-adventure-live-horror-theater/): a solo show at Mitu580 in Brooklyn, Dec. 3 to 13 - [Playfool's The Server Puts a Data Center Vacuum in the V&A](https://www.killscreen.com/playfools-the-server-puts-a-data-center-vacuum-in-the-v-a/): museum visitors become the cleaning staff, and entry is free --- ## Event ### [Greatest Hits from Planet Blip: the release party](https://hologramopera.com/pages/planet-blip?ref=killscreen.com) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/planet-blip-release-party.jpg) Greatest Hits from Planet Blip, Nov. 13 in Los Angeles Hologram Opera and Killscreen celebrate the vinyl release of the *Blippo+* soundtrack on Friday, Nov. 13, from 7 to 10 p.m. at Revenge Of in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles. Expect pop-up performances from Lord Wright, Chloe Coover and Brent Weinbach, and party music all night from Rob and Jona of YACHT. It's free and all ages. | [Read it on Killscreen →](https://www.killscreen.com/events/) | | ------------------------------------------------------------- | --- ## The extended cut This week's episode is up: Danny Snelson and I follow Murlo's solo game, a Game Boy cartridge milled in metal for a grandmother, and a MacArthur that names a game, to ask who gets to be the genius. [Listen to "Brass, Flesh and a Genius Grant."](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/brass-flesh-and-a-genius-grant-podcast/) Helping Hand members have the full Murlo interview in the members' podcast feed. ### Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley Releases The Eyes Under the Sky URL: https://www.killscreen.com/danielle-brathwaite-shirley-releases-the-eyes-under-the-sky/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T19:20:24.000Z Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley has released *The Eyes Under the Sky*, a free browser horror game about gender enforcement in public toilets. It accompanies a comics series of the same name and is playable at [theeyesunderthesky.com](https://theeyesunderthesky.com/?ref=killscreen.com). Brathwaite-Shirley built it to run on phones, including inside Instagram's in-app browser. 0:00 /0:24 1× Brathwaite-Shirley's preview of **The Eyes Under the Sky*, from [the announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/Ddqp0TeNItR/?ref=killscreen.com). The game itself asks a deceptively innocuous question at its start: "What do you see?" And after selecting, you're hurtled into an otherworldly environment of monstrous gender enforcers, prying eyes, and a blood sacrifice to the skies. [In the announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/Ddqtli0tOYL/?ref=killscreen.com), the artist described the game as a way to think through growing restrictions on trans people's access to public toilets, but it's also another visually challenging work from Brathwaite-Shirley to ask you fundamental questions about who we are and what dignities we deserve. It is Brathwaite-Shirley's second free browser game in two months, after *I DIDNT REALISE YOU THOUGHT LIKE THAT*, which Killscreen covered in August. The artist has also discussed the archival practice behind the games on the Killscreen podcast. For more reading, see [our August piece on *I DIDNT REALISE YOU THOUGHT LIKE THAT*](https://www.killscreen.com/danielle-brathwaite-shirley-releases-i-didnt-realise-you-thought-like-that-as-a-free-browser-game/) and [our conversation with the artist](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/danielle-brathwaite-shirley-creates-game-worlds-from-autonomous-archives/). Games like this get made, released free, and missed by nearly everyone covering the medium. Killscreen catches them. The newsletter costs nothing. [Catch the next one ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Team Lazerbeam Shares Two Years of Shroom and Gloom Sketches URL: https://www.killscreen.com/team-lazerbeam-shares-two-years-of-shroom-and-gloom-sketches/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T18:25:35.000Z Team Lazerbeam has [posted two years of sketchbook pages](https://www.instagram.com/p/DduMfiZCGmv/?ref=killscreen.com) from *Shroom and Gloom*, billed as the first of two parts. The Cape Town studio's game entered Steam Early Access on Sept. 10, published by Devolver Digital, and every surface in it is drawn by hand. 0:00 /0:24 1× From the Early Access launch trailer for **Shroom and Gloom*. The full trailer with sound is on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3271280/Shroom%5Fand%5FGloom/?ref=killscreen.com). *Shroom and Gloom* is a first-person dungeon roguelike built as a double-deckbuilder. One deck handles combat: players stab, season, skewer, roast and eat fungal enemies, and the right chain of cards cooks several of them into a soup. The second deck handles the dungeon itself, with maps, lockpicks and campfires. Every action in the game is a card. The project began as a prototype at a seven-day first-person-shooter jam in 2021, became a free itch.io build in 2024 and signed with Devolver in 2025\. Team Lazerbeam's earlier games include *Snow Cones*, *Wrestling With Emotions* and *Teenage Blob*. Killscreen spoke with the studio's Ben Rausch in 2016 about *Dress To Express Dancing Success*, a dancing and dating sim. For more reading, see [our 2016 conversation with Ben Rausch](https://www.killscreen.com/videogame-anyone-whos-felt-uncomfortable-dance-floor/) and [the full sketchbook carousel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DduMfiZCGmv/?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/shroom-and-gloom-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/shroom-and-gloom-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/shroom-and-gloom-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/shroom-and-gloom-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/shroom-and-gloom-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/shroom-and-gloom-6.jpg) Screenshots from **Shroom and Gloom*, via Steam Killscreen has followed Team Lazerbeam for a decade, long before the publisher deal. The free KS Radar letter finds the next ones early, three times a week. [Get the Radar letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Futures_Past Brings Five Immersive Works to Fak'ugesi URL: https://www.killscreen.com/futures_past-brings-five-immersive-works-to-fakugesi/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T18:14:49.000Z Event details When Oct. 14 to 17, 2026 Where Futures\_Past booth, Fak’ugesi Festival, Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct, Johannesburg *To All Who Live In It* is a 360-degree video installation built from the Moolman Opnames, 14 reels of 35mm film shot between 1960 and 1966 and held by the National Film, Video and Sound Archives in Pretoria. The reels record everyday life and state activity under apartheid; the artist team of Amy Louise Wilson, Francois Knoetze, Kaelo Molefe and Nomandla Vilakazi recuts them into a surround image that asks what the footage reveals and what it leaves out. The installation anchors the Futures\_Past booth at Fak'ugesi, the African digital innovation festival now in its 13th edition at Johannesburg's Tshimologong Digital Innovation Precinct, themed "African Imaginaries" this year. The booth, presented by the French Institute of South Africa with Electric South and [announced with a behind-the-scenes reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/Deb3CPHu6Ko/?ref=killscreen.com), runs Oct. 14 to 17\. Futures\_Past itself is a two-year program pairing artist teams with six archives across South Africa, Lesotho and Malawi. Alongside it: *Kings of Lesotho: The Succession Story*, a VR journey through Basotho royal history from King Moshoeshoe I to King Letsie III, made by the Royal Archives in Matsieng with MP Multimedia, and also showing free at the Alliance Française de Maseru through Dec. 4; a poster-making station from Acts of Care; an installation from *We Are What Remains*; and a work-in-progress activation from *Lucid Dreams of Sweet Water*. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/kings-of-lesotho-hat-scene.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/kings-of-lesotho-highlands.png) 360 stills from **Kings of Lesotho: The Succession Story*. Images: Royal Archives, Museum and Information Centre and MP Multimedia Immersive work built from Southern African archives will not cross most games coverage at all. Killscreen's free newsletter tracks the shows and booths like this one, worldwide. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Samuel Baidoo Hosts Plum Road Tea Dream Hangout at W139 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/samuel-baidoo-hosts-plum-road-tea-dream-hangout-at-w139/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T18:13:40.000Z Event details When Oct. 17, 2026, 8 to 9:30 p.m. (doors 7:30) Where W139, Warmoesstraat 139, Amsterdam Cost €10; students and solidarity €7.50 [Get tickets](https://w139.nl/en/event/plum-road-tea-dream%5Fthe-hangout/?ref=killscreen.com) *Plum Road Tea Dream\_The Hangout* is a group play session of Samuel Baidoo's autobiographical video game, run by the artist in person. A visitor gets 90 minutes of collective play, honest conversation, a tea ceremony, and a ritual, in what [W139's announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DebiOtvF6y1/?ref=killscreen.com) calls an intimate but casual setting. The game underneath, *Plum Road Tea Dream*, made with Reveal Game Studio and on Steam since July, moves through seven sanctuaries for queer grief built by an avatar called S., and its main verbs are walking, sitting, and listening. (You can read our review [here](https://www.killscreen.com/walk-sit-listen-what-to-play-october-9/).) A game built around communal mourning almost always gets played alone; this session puts the communal part back. 0:00 /0:24 1× From the release trailer for **Plum Road Tea Dream*. The [full trailer with sound is on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3206340/Plum%5FRoad%5FTea%5FDream/?ref=killscreen.com). The evening belongs to *The Nature of Remembering*, a group exhibition at W139, the artist-run production space on Amsterdam's Warmoesstraat, initiated by artist Lawil Karama with historian Megan Hoetger. The show runs through Nov. 1 and asks who, or what, helps people remember violence that has been made invisible. The Hangout is a one-night event: Saturday, Oct. 17 at 8 p.m. Baidoo, a Brussels-based creator, performer and game designer whose [grief sanctuary gained a mausoleum](https://www.killscreen.com/plum-road-tea-dream-mausoleum-jira-duguid/) this summer, is joined in dialogue by Karama, a Ugandan-Dutch conceptual artist whose work starts from family history. The exhibition around them includes Michèle Boulogne, Laura Fong Prosper and Tin Wilke, Aram Lee, Komtouch Napattaloong, Bart Seng Wen Long and Kaisa Saarinen. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/plum-road-tea-dream-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/plum-road-tea-dream-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/plum-road-tea-dream-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/plum-road-tea-dream-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/plum-road-tea-dream-6.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/plum-road-tea-dream-7.jpg) The lurching visual registers of **Plum Road Tea Dream*. Images: Samuel Baidoo and Reveal Game Studio, via Steam Killscreen tracks the play sessions, screenings and shows where games meet an audience in person, the ones almost nobody else lists. The free newsletter sends them to you. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Total Refusal Bring Let's Play I Am Old and Tired to Berlin URL: https://www.killscreen.com/total-refusal-bring-lets-play-i-am-old-and-tired-to-berlin/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T18:10:36.000Z Event details When Oct. 28 at 7 p.m. and Oct. 29 at 8 p.m., 2026 Where HAU3, Tempelhofer Ufer 10, Berlin Cost €15; reduced €9 [Get tickets](https://www.hebbel-am-ufer.de/en/programme/pdetail/total-refusal-theater-im-bahnhof-lets-play-i-am-old-and-tired?ref=killscreen.com) *Let's Play I Am Old and Tired* is a theatre evening performed inside *Red Dead Redemption 2*. Across several gaming laptops, under Monika Klengel's live direction, six performers build an immersive film in front of the audience: a weary avatar who wants to retire to a quiet life at Aurora Basin, in the mountains of a game world. Avatars are the last bodies in culture that never age, never sicken and never lose motivation, and the piece runs on what happens when one finally wants to stop. ![Two performers gesture in front of a projected forest scene while others work at laptops behind them](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/lets-play-i-am-old-and-tired-2.jpg) Theater im Bahnhof and Total Refusal perform under live direction. Photo: Johannes Gellner The run is two nights at HAU3 in Kreuzberg, Oct. 28 and 29, performed in German and English and recommended for ages 16 and up, per [HAU's announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DebcK0WFch3/?ref=killscreen.com). Total Refusal, and Theater im Bahnhof, the Graz theatre collective, premiered the piece at TiB's own house in September 2025; [their own description](https://www.totalrefusal.com/home/let-s-play-i-am-old-and-tired?ref=killscreen.com) reaches for Thoreau's *Walden* and "a dooming tech fascism." After the Oct. 29 show, there is an artist talk, in German, with both groups and Heimo Lattner, co-editor of *Teslokratie*, a volume on the ideologies of tech capitalism, moderated by Sarah Reimann. Credits include Jacob Banigan, Susanna Flock, Johanna Hierzegger, Lorenz Kabas, Robin Klengel and Moke Rudolf-Klengel, with modding by RCPisAwesome. Killscreen last caught Total Refusal when [their films played a Hamburg cinema](https://www.killscreen.com/games-about-refusing-violence-played-out-at-a-hamburg-cinema/). Theatre staged inside video games crosses Killscreen's radar more than anyone else's, and the free newsletter is where those nights get listed before they happen. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Miles Buckle invents a Paul McCartney idle game from 1998 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/miles-buckle-invents-a-paul-mccartney-idle-game-from-1998/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T14:05:59.000Z Twenty-eight years ago this week, Paul McCartney did not release a CD-ROM. That has not stopped London 3D artist Miles Buckle from celebrating the anniversary: [the latest video](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeMhgLLCKsB/?ref=killscreen.com) commemorates *Temporary Secretary*, a 1998 desktop game in which you play Paul's temp, leave the thing idling for days and check back to see whether Paul has any assignments for you. 0:00 /0:43 1× Temporary Secretary (1998), the CD-ROM that never was. Video: Miles Buckle. The real "Temporary Secretary" is a 1980 synth oddity from *McCartney II*, all jittery sequencer and want-ad lyrics, that took decades to become a cult favorite. Buckle's fiction relocates it to 1998, which is exactly where it belongs: the dying years of the celebrity CD-ROM, when the bargain bin was full of licensed desktop ephemera that played like contractual obligations. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/temporary-secretary_buckle_mccartney-ii-desktop-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/temporary-secretary_buckle_cdrom-box-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/temporary-secretary_buckle_songs-by-ringo-1.jpg) The McCartney II wallpaper, the jewel case and Ringo's songbook, all inside Temporary Secretary. Images: Miles Buckle. ![Miles Buckle's imaginary Twin Peaks Pixel Chix handheld](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/pixel-chix-twin-peaks_buckle_mattel-reimagining_1.jpg) Buckle's **Twin Peaks* Pixel Chix, from the same shelf of games that never existed. Image: Miles Buckle. Buckle makes what the artist’s bio calls weird, imaginary games, and Killscreen [profiled the practice in August](https://www.killscreen.com/miles-buckle-games-you-cant-play/): cinema pulled into the visual language of late-'90s videogames, one lovingly deformed polygon at a time. We even devoted [a podcast episode to games you remember that never existed](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/games-you-remember-that-never-existed-podcast/), a genre this reel now sits at the top of. No playable build is claimed, and that is the point. The game lives where Buckle's games always live: in the gap between what you remember and what actually shipped. Killscreen takes the games that never existed as seriously as the ones that did. The Radar delivers that free, three times a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A TV station is forming around downloadable art URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-tv-station-is-forming-around-downloadable-art/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T21:05:35.000Z Before it has a website, NIGHT EYE TV has a TV guide. The upcoming platform has spent the last few weeks introducing itself through the [NIGHT EYE TV GUIDE BOOK](https://bsky.app/profile/nighteye-tv.bsky.social/post/3mvnicekpwk2n?ref=killscreen.com), square pages set in a serif over lobby-wallpaper diamonds, and through a featured-contributor slot: alpha\_rats first, then Vinny Roca, and—in [the reel that crossed my feed](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdjIEJ2lsJK/?ref=killscreen.com)—pickpanpuck. ![A NIGHT EYE TV guide book page describing an online community TV station for experimental artworks](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/netv-guide-2.jpg) From the NIGHT EYE TV GUIDE BOOK: the platform's own definition. Via [NIGHT EYE TV on Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/nighteye-tv.bsky.social?ref=killscreen.com). The site will run short-form content that advertises contributors' larger works, which will be available for purchase and download. That is, more or less, what broadcast television always was—programming as a shopfront for the thing being sold—except the thing being sold here is experimental art that arrives as a file and runs on your machine. "Experimental art after dark, coming soon," reads an earlier post, and the whole project has that flavor: public-access aesthetics applied to the executable-art space between games and net art. The infrastructure for this work keeps thickening: last month we covered [The Little Database's expansion into a desktop directory](https://www.killscreen.com/the-little-database-expands-into-a-desktop-directory/). Executable art already has its archives and its directories. Now, apparently, it gets a television station. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/netv-guide-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/netv-guide-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/netv-afterdark.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/netv-alpharats-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/netv-roca-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/netv-roca-2.jpg) Guide-book pages and featured-contributor spotlights for alpha\_rats and Vinny Roca. Via NIGHT EYE TV. We cover platforms like this one while their follower counts still fit in two digits—so you hear about the next home for strange art before it opens. The free Killscreen newsletter is how. [Get there early, free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A showcase from the Mouthwashing label is set for Oct. 20 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-showcase-from-the-mouthwashing-label-is-set-for-oct-20/ Last updated: 2026-10-13T21:31:29.000Z Event details When Oct. 20, 2026 Where Online Critical Reflex Time comes back on Oct. 20, and that date is nearly everything the publisher has put on the record. In the [announcement reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DePNK7MTiWY/?ref=killscreen.com), an animated host named Shiaru says hello from a fake '90s desktop while pop-up windows flash "GENRE IS A PRISON" and "BUY OUR GAMES!" The caption promises "announcements, trailers and updates." 0:00 /0:20 1× The teaser for Critical Reflex Time, hosted by Shiaru. Video: [Critical Reflex](https://www.instagram.com/p/DePNK7MTiWY/?ref=killscreen.com) I usually let a publisher's marketing stream pass. This one goes on the calendar because of whose stream it is. Critical Reflex is the label behind *Mouthwashing*, *Buckshot Roulette* and *No, I'm not a Human*, and its Steam page lists 22 games that aren't out yet. Founder Rita Lebedeva told [Automaton](https://automaton-media.com/en/news/meet-the-creepiest-publisher-in-indie-games-critical-reflex-are-midwives-brining-monsters-into-the-world-backing-projects-no-one-dares-to-touch/?ref=killscreen.com) last year that the team doesn't vote on submissions ("We go by who's willing to fight for it") and described the job as "collaborators, ritual facilitators, and sometimes midwives to monsters." That is how [a netlabel](https://www.killscreen.com/pop-politics-and-everything-in-between-the-virtual-families-of-netlabels/) or a small press talks, and it makes the stream closer to a label night than an ad break. You watch to hear the roster in one room. The opening act is playable now. The day the date went up, TALLBOYS released a free [demo](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1373530/Militsioner/?ref=killscreen.com) of *Militsioner*, an immersive sim about getting out of a town watched by a Colossal Policeman, due in 2027\. The giant sees everything, but the giant also has moods, and so does the town. You can anger, flatter, deceive, or romance the law, and a bouquet is a legitimate tool. Killscreen wrote up two Critical Reflex games in September, [*Grindset T.V.*](https://www.killscreen.com/critical-reflex-picks-up-grindset-tv/) and [*Inkblood*](https://www.killscreen.com/inkblood-magnifying-glass-time-machine/), and I said then that the slate was turning into a beat. Oct. 20 is when the beat gets a setlist. Until the label posts a time and a link, its [sign-up page](https://www.criticalreflex.com/crtime?ref=killscreen.com) promises you'll be first to see what's next. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/militsioner-colossal-policeman-hand.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/militsioner-colossal-policeman-seated.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/militsioner-giant-over-town.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/militsioner-ask-on-a-date.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/militsioner-town-map.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/militsioner-searchlight-night.jpg) Scenes from **Militsioner*, due in 2027, with a demo out now on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1373530/Militsioner/?ref=killscreen.com). Images: TALLBOYS / Critical Reflex Killscreen sits through the showcases so you only hear about the games that earn it. The Radar brings them to your inbox, free, three times a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Joaquina Salgado hides a score inside luminous eggs URL: https://www.killscreen.com/joaquina-salgado-hides-a-score-inside-luminous-eggs/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T21:04:20.000Z The music in Joaquina Salgado's flooded videogame has to be found. It sits in loops inside luminous eggs scattered across a low-definition landscape, and the water between them slows every step. That's *Nostalgia es feedback expandido*, which opened Oct. 9 in the gallery at Artlab in Buenos Aires as part of the eighth MUTEK.AR (Oct. 7 to 11). [Artlab's reel announcing the show](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeP8DLCJli2/?ref=killscreen.com) says the water imposes "a slowness made of delays and returns". 0:00 /0:50 1× Gameplay from **Nostalgia Is the Extended Feedback*, looped without sound. More footage is on [Joaquina Salgado's project page](https://www.joaquinasalgado.com/nitef.html?ref=killscreen.com), and [Artlab's reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeP8DLCJli2/?ref=killscreen.com) has audio. It isn't a new work. As *Nostalgia Is the Extended Feedback*, it closed SOMA Art Berlin's Becoming Future series in December 2025, running on an iMac and upright LCD screens and steered with a trackball set into a sculpted sea creature. Salgado's [project page](https://www.joaquinasalgado.com/nitef.html?ref=killscreen.com) calls it a "slow-game installation" and credits two programmers, a steel fabricator, three voices, and sound by Tatiana Heuman, whose loops are the things you're hunting. So the score is the collectible: you put the soundtrack together by finding it. Salgado is an Argentine artist based in Berlin, and water is the long-running material. "I work a lot with underwater worlds, very dreamlike," the artist [told Revista G7](https://revistag7.com/joaquina-salgado-hija-de-internet/?ref=killscreen.com) in 2022\. It makes the terrain, which is what Gareth Damian Martin saw in Pol Clarissou's *To West* [in these pages in 2016](https://www.killscreen.com/west-explores-inherent-slowness-vast-landscapes/): "it is the landscape which dictates the speed of a train." Swap the train for a pair of legs and the desert for a flood. The Buenos Aires run is bracketed by two other dates: [a show of Salgado's games in a working cybercafe](https://www.instagram.com/p/Ddz03dLHG95/?ref=killscreen.com) on Oct. 1, and [MUTEK.AR's dome program](https://buenos-aires.mutek.org/en/shows/2026/domo?ref=killscreen.com) at the Planetario on Oct. 11, with Qoa. We [flagged Salgado in August](https://www.killscreen.com/sixteen-solo-dev-projects-closed-sybils-second-berlin-arc/) among the residents at Sybil in Berlin. Artlab says it opens a new show every month and hasn't posted a closing date for this one, so check before you go. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nostalgia-is-the-extended-feedback-trackball-controller.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nostalgia-is-the-extended-feedback-crt-station-soma-berlin.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nostalgia-is-the-extended-feedback-controller-click-to-start.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nostalgia-is-the-extended-feedback-install-brick-wall.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nostalgia-is-the-extended-feedback-lcd-figure.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nostalgia-is-the-extended-feedback-gameplay-luminous-eggs.jpg) The Berlin installation of **Nostalgia Is the Extended Feedback* and its custom trackball controller, with a frame from the game. Images via Joaquina Salgado. Killscreen goes looking for games in the places most coverage skips: a Buenos Aires gallery, a cybercafe, a planetarium dome. The free newsletter brings what we find to your inbox. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Federico Solmi Shows The Bathhouse in Does This Taste Funny? URL: https://www.killscreen.com/federico-solmi-shows-the-bathhouse-in-does-this-taste-funny/ Last updated: 2026-10-13T21:16:51.000Z Event details When Sept. 9, 2026 to Jan. 16, 2027 Where Lehman College Art Gallery, 250 Bedford Park Blvd. West, the Bronx, New York Cost Free, reservation required [Reserve a spot](https://www.eventbrite.com/e/does-this-taste-funny-humor-in-contemporary-art-run-of-show-tickets-1999293708301?ref=killscreen.com) *The Bathhouse* (2020) is a five-channel video painting by Federico Solmi, 20 feet of synchronized screens framed in plexiglass and acrylic on wood. On them, leaders lifted from different centuries, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Hernán Cortés among them, drink and carouse through a Roman villa while the night slides into circus acts and simulated war games. Solmi builds these works the way a studio builds a game: "step by step I got into gaming technology," he has [said](https://brooklynrail.org/2021/05/art/Federico-Solmi-with-Dan-Cameron/?ref=killscreen.com), performing his characters in motion capture and wrapping them in textures he paints by hand. The garishness is the argument: power as a party that never earns its glow. 0:00 /1:03 1× Excerpt of **The Bathhouse* (2020), five-channel video installation, via [federicosolmi.com](https://www.federicosolmi.com/the-bathhouse?ref=killscreen.com) It hangs in *Does This Taste Funny?*, a two-venue group show of roughly 40 artists on humor as a method for shifting perception, curated by painter Melissa Brown and artist John O'Connor. The Bronx half runs at Lehman College Art Gallery through Jan. 16, 2027, which Solmi noted in [his announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeUW5PTxYK8/?ref=killscreen.com); a companion half at Sarah Lawrence College's Gallery at Heimbold runs through Dec. 13. The Lehman roster puts [Solmi](https://www.killscreen.com/offenbach-scores-federico-solmis-unity-studio-footage/) beside Charles Atlas, Cindy Sherman and the Hairy Who painter Karl Wirsum; the Heimbold half includes Roz Chast and [Jeremy Couillard](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/jeremy-couillard/), whose work also comes out of a game engine. Killscreen keeps a running list of the gallery shows where games and game engines are doing real work, most of which no games outlet will ever mention. The free KS Radar letter gets them to you while the shows are still up. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Nullsleep and Bit Shifter Revive Chiptune Resistance URL: https://www.killscreen.com/nullsleep-and-bit-shifter-revive-chiptune-resistance/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T19:53:58.000Z Event details When Oct. 14, 2026, 7 p.m. Where Momangen, Kocksgatan 23, Stockholm Cost 120 kr at the door [Register](https://pad.dyne.org/form/?ref=killscreen.com#/2/form/view/noQGHhhgZl3oFf8KoDUlho7lxj0wY93yf-3UBhkoBgo/) International Chiptune Resistance 2026 is a one-night club set from Bit Shifter and Nullsleep, two founding figures of the American chipmusic scene, playing hard, raw-waveform dance music written and performed on Game Boy hardware: what a 2005 New York show under the same banner billed as "high-volume, low-resolution beats." The name is a revival. International Chiptune Resistance was the banner the pair toured under in 2006, a run that crossed Japan and North America, and [the announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeUTwzOs-XA/?ref=killscreen.com) sells this night as its 20-year return. 0:00 /0:30 1× Nullsleep at Blip Festival 2006, the year of the first International Chiptune Resistance tour. Silent excerpt; [watch the full video with sound](https://vimeo.com/461756?ref=killscreen.com). The show happens Wednesday, Oct. 14 at [Momangen](https://do.basspistol.org/event/international-chiptune-resistance-2006-2026?ref=killscreen.com), a free-culture space on Kocksgatan in Stockholm, starting at 7 p.m. Daniel M Karlsson plays support and Covox handles visuals. Registration is required, and the night is 18 and over. Nullsleep is Jeremiah Johnson, who co-founded the 8bitpeoples label in 1999 and has directed it since. Bit Shifter is Joshua Davis, who co-runs 8bitpeoples with him. Between them, they helped build the scene's institutions, including [Blip Festival](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blip%5FFestival?ref=killscreen.com), the New York chipmusic festival that 8bitpeoples curated with The Tank from 2006 to 2012. Killscreen tracks the club nights, gallery runs and one-off shows where game culture happens in person, the kind almost nobody else lists. The free KS Radar letter gets them to you while there is still time to go. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Bee Nix and royb0t send fan notes to the moon URL: https://www.killscreen.com/bee-nix-and-royb0t-send-fan-notes-to-the-moon/ Last updated: 2026-10-13T21:14:51.000Z Before their set at GLITCH'N'GAMES this month, Bee Nix left slips of paper on a table beside some markers, an empty bag, and a sign reading "Please write a message to the Moon for a secret thing later ... " Thirty-one people wrote one. When the set reached its finale, someone pulled a slip from the bag, and that message got typed into a terminal inside the game. Sending it is the whole premise: you collect what you need to switch the terminal on, and the Moon gets a letter. Nix [scanned all 31 and shared them](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeXMuHsiatX/?ref=killscreen.com), along with video of the final scene. *Luna Prima* is the game. Nix builds it and plays it; [royb0t](https://www.thinkbreakrecords.com/royb0t?ref=killscreen.com), the Chicago producer whose whole bio is "I create glitches and breaks," scores it; and the two of them perform it onstage in real time, the way a band plays a song rather than the way a developer demos a build. They have been working this seam for a while. [*Light Sleeper, Heavy Dreamer*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0VyONd6Eko&ref=killscreen.com), a live game performance Nix created in 2020, already had royb0t scoring it live. And the venue is no accident: GLITCH'N'GAMES is Nix's own event, the Chicago glitch-and-games weekend [we covered last week](https://www.killscreen.com/glitch-art-and-arcade-games-shared-a-weekend-in-chicago/). The audience gets written into the game's ending before the set starts, so the crowd is a component, not a witness. "I didn't realize how sweet the idea was when I came up with it," Nix wrote. A public beta and the soundtrack album are due in a couple of months. Nix built the current version alone, and a rebuilt version with original models and an adversary is at least a year out. Worth watching now anyway: this is a game whose credits should list 31 strangers with markers. A game played like an instrument, with the crowd written into its ending, is exactly the kind of work Killscreen exists to catch early. The free KS Radar letter brings you the next one before the beta drops. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Mr Woofmantic Pairs Experimental Games With Jazz URL: https://www.killscreen.com/mr-woofmantic-pairs-experimental-games-with-jazz/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T19:53:57.000Z Event details When Nov. 20 to 21, 2026; concerts 7:30 to 10 p.m. Where Kildevæld Kulturcenter, Bellmansgade 3C, Copenhagen Cost Game exhibition free; concerts ticketed [Get tickets](https://billetto.dk/en/e/mr-woofmantic-games-jazz-2026-billetter-1993354?ref=killscreen.com) *Future? No Thanks!* is Molleindustria's open-world adventure set in 2045, in an ecosocialist utopia where the climate is mending, democracy works and the one thing out of joint is you: Harvey Huffstone, a grumpy elder working through a bucket list on the last day before a self-scheduled euthanasia. The game [came out Sept. 4](https://www.killscreen.com/likelikes-year-closed-with-a-party-for-future-no-thanks/), and in Copenhagen it screens where the program puts its mature-themed work: the shower room. Paolo Pedercini's studio has spent two decades building games against the grain of their own premises, and a utopia whose protagonist wants out is a perfect fit. 0:00 /0:21 1× From the announcement trailer for **Future? No Thanks!* Silent excerpt; [the full trailer with sound is on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3861870/Future%5FNo%5FThanks/?ref=killscreen.com). It plays as part of [Mr Woofmantic Games & Jazz](https://mrwoofmantic.neocities.org/?ref=killscreen.com), a weekend of experimental games, concerts and workshops built around a piano-playing dog who lives in a videogame, co-produced by Horațiu Roman in Copenhagen and Til Nomi in Berlin. The games exhibition is free and [the announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeaDM0yKHLf/?ref=killscreen.com) pegs the dates: Nov. 20 and 21 at Kildevæld Kulturcenter, part of Game On!, a games event backed by Københavns Kommune. The shower room also holds Robert Yang's [*Rinse and Repeat*](https://www.killscreen.com/robert-yangs-latest-game-lets-stargaze-space-loving-dude/) and [Pippin Barr](https://www.killscreen.com/pippin-barrs-new-game-brings-concrete-poetry-life/)'s *It is as if you were making love*. Elsewhere in the hall: House House's wriggling multiplayer [*Push Me Pull You*](https://www.killscreen.com/push-pull-brings-players-everywhere-together/), the music games *ODDADA* and *Rhythm Doggo*, a Danish section including *Saltsea Chronicles*, and a Kjell Håftén workshop on building controllers out of trash. Evening sets come from Jake Sherman and Thom Gill, with tickets required for the concerts only. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/future-no-thanks-ss1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/future-no-thanks-ss2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/future-no-thanks-ss3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/future-no-thanks-ss4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/future-no-thanks-ss5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/future-no-thanks-ss6.jpg) **Future? No Thanks!* screenshots, via Steam Festivals like this one get a line in a city listing and nothing more; Killscreen tells you which room the interesting game is in. The free KS Radar letter carries every show, showcase and deadline we track. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Dave Shuff's Big Steel Battalion Box Wins Editor's Choice URL: https://www.killscreen.com/dave-shuffs-big-steel-battalion-box-wins-editors-choice/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T19:47:10.000Z In 2014, Killscreen's Michael Pedersen [climbed into a refrigerator-sized foam core box in Dave Shuff's Brooklyn home](https://www.killscreen.com/heres-what-its-play-steel-battalion-tricked-out-refrigerator-box/) and piloted a mech. The box was the Big Steel Battalion Box, a homemade cockpit for *Steel Battalion*, Capcom's 2002 Xbox game that shipped with a $200, 40-button controller. The house rule that night: skill was discouraged. 0:00 /0:31 1× Recruits move through the boot camp and into the cockpit at Maker Faire Bay Area 2026\. From the [B.S.B.B.](https://bsbb-mkii.com/?ref=killscreen.com) crew's livestream recording; audio removed. Twelve years later the box is still around, has seen a steady drumbeat of upgrades and improvements, and sits in the permanent collection of The MADE (Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment). In late September it took over a corner of Maker Faire Bay Area on Mare Island, where the editor-in-chief of *Make: Magazine* gave it an Editor's Choice ribbon. Though now driven by a custom microcontroller interface designed and programmed by collaborator Sam Deutsche, its lights, vibration and alarms still fire off the LED signals the Xbox sends to the controller. There is also a working landline. What I love is how *little* of it is the game. Recruits first passed through a parody boot camp of stamps, initials and clipboard rules run by volunteers in jumpsuits, who got oddly invested. "That one was perfect! I've got this down!" one crew member told Shuff's crew coordinator, Sallie Lippe, near the end of a shift. Then a coach outside the box, on a military surplus headset, talked each pilot through the startup sequence. Shuff, who admits to never playing the campaign past mission two, thinks of *Steel Battalion* as "a transcendent startup sequence" attached to a "middling tail of a game," and the coach is what makes that sequence work. One nervous kid, headset on, as he was being sealed into the box, asked the voice on the other end, "Will you leave? Are you going to be with me the whole time?" The coach, Taylor Prudencio, who spent seven hours over two days guiding players, promised to stay. "It really hit me the relief in that kid's voice," Shuff wrote to me. That is a cooperative game built on trust, closer to *Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes* by way of *Sleep No More* than to a flight sim. Shuff credits the whole build to stone soup: make a rough version, and someone shows up with the piece that makes it sing. "If I'd asked around for help and not just gone and *made* something, I'm pretty confident that wouldn't have happened." The crew expects to bring the box to Open Sauce next, in July 2027. *Learn more at* [*bsbb-mkii.com*](https://bsbb-mkii.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/bsbb-mf2026-bsbb-at-mf2026-06-cockpit-cam.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/bsbb-mf2026-img-3856.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/bsbb-mf2026-img-8550.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/bsbb-mf2026-img-8563.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/bsbb-mf2026-img-8568.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/bsbb-mf2026-img-8554.jpg) The Big Steel Battalion Box at Maker Faire Bay Area 2026\. Photos courtesy Dave Shuff. Killscreen has been following the Big Steel Battalion Box since 2014\. We track the homemade cockpits, installations and live play almost nobody else covers, and the newsletter is free. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Fish Make O-Faces, and Other Lessons From the Redding District URL: https://www.killscreen.com/sagan-yee-last-call-redding-district/ Last updated: 2026-10-13T21:06:11.000Z Thomas Wolfe's posthumous novel told readers *You Can't Go Home Again*, and generations of writers have mostly taken him at his word. Sagan Yee's answer is stranger and more biological: you can go home, *you have to*, and it will be the last thing you do. *Last Call for the Redding District*, the game Yee built for his MFA in UCLA's Design Media Arts program, asks what would happen if mermaids had the life cycle of Pacific salmon. The player returns for spawning season to a suburban hometown modeled on Yee's own Saskatoon, catches up with everyone they grew up with, decides who to spawn with, and then, along with everyone else, dies. [Yee came to games sideways](https://www.killscreen.com/touch-go-exploring-alternative-controllers/). Trained in classical animation, they spent nearly a decade at Toronto's Hand Eye Society, the videogame arts nonprofit they led as executive director from 2016 to 2020, before turning to their own practice. They also write speculative fiction, and *Redding District* began as a short story. I spoke with Yee in September, shortly after his move to Eugene, Ore., about salmon, dating sims, the virgins who keep his fictional society running, and the workshop that changed how he builds worlds. The game is still in progress, and Yee hopes to finish it within the next year. ![Portrait of Sagan Yee against a pale wall](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/01_sagan-yee_encarnacion_portrait.jpg) Sagan Yee. Photo: Airis Encarnacion --- **Jamin:** I had the chance to see your newest game at the New Wight Gallery as part of your MFA show. Tell me about the origin story for that project, and why you decided to focus on salmon, of all things. **Sagan:** The game is called *Last Call for the Redding District*. It's a 3D narrative game about sex, death and coming home. What if mermaids had the reproductive cycles of Pacific salmon? The game tries to answer it with, well, it would be like the worst high school reunion ever. Imagine a world where you've never had the urge to have sex, and then, as an adult, you suddenly get the overwhelming urge to return to the place of your birth and make babies with everyone you ever grew up with, but you're all 15 years older. You go back to your suburban hometown for spawning season, which is modeled after the neighborhood where I grew up in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. There's a 24-hour in-game clock, and then, not to spoil anything, but everyone dies at the end. Just like real salmon: there's a mass die-off, all their corpses are clogging the rivers, and then the bears come to feast. 0:00 /0:04 1× **Last Call for the Redding District*: swimming home for spawning season **Jamin:** Of that triumvirate, sex, death and coming home, is there one that leads the three of them, or are they all on equal footing for you? **Sagan:** They came in as a trio because they ended up becoming completely entangled. Death was the one I wasn't sure about including, actually. Sex and coming home were the two main ones, because I thought that aspect of the salmon life cycle was a really intriguing, kind of tragic but beautiful thing to explore. Then I had to really think about whether to include the fact that they all die at the end, and I decided to go with it, because how could I not? **Jamin:** Coming home is the basis of every Hallmark special: you go out into the world, and then you come back, and that's when you meet the person, and you're torn between being out in the world and being with the person you care for. **Sagan:** The Hallmark way of doing it always presents it as a totally unique thing that is only happening to this one couple. I wanted to go the opposite direction: what if this is the normal for everyone on the planet? A lot of people say, "Oh, like that episode of *Futurama* where Zoidberg has to go back to his home planet and spawn with everyone." Or the Vulcans in *Star Trek*, pon farr. But I wanted to make that the entire world-building premise, and not just a one-off episode or a punchline, so I can dig into the social implications of remapping human social mores onto this nonhuman biology. Some things are quite alien and some things are very familiar, and I love to play with that remapping. ![Watercolor lineup of salmon-people character designs](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/03_last-call-for-the-redding-district_yee_sketch-character-lineup.jpg) Character studies for **Last Call for the Redding District* **Jamin:** Dating sims are a category of game I never really spent much time with, but it's obviously a place where there's room for subverting existing norms. What is the genre still not doing, and how do you see *Redding District* filling into that space? **Sagan:** I started off thinking of *Redding District* as an anti-dating sim, but then I changed it to a hookup sim. In a classic dating sim, the strategies to court NPCs have to be somewhat transparent, which, to me, is the opposite of how it works in real life. People don't have a little bar inside of them that fills up every time you give them a golden acorn or whatever, and it kind of has to be that way if you want it to be an enjoyable experience. In *Redding District*, an NPC might just reject you and not explain at all why, and I think that's much closer to real-life dating. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/02b_last-call-for-the-redding-district_yee_strip-mall.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/02c_last-call-for-the-redding-district_yee_npc-what-color.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/04_last-call-for-the-redding-district_yee_npc-eugenics.jpg) Hometown encounters in **Last Call for the Redding District* **Jamin:** People watch romantic movies because you always know what the result is going to be, and the visual novel template is much more akin to that. But that's maybe also what prevents that style of game from making something that could speak to who we are as people. I think of *Portrait of a Lady on Fire*, a tremendously romantic and highly erotic film that does not resolve at all. The characters do not get what they want. That avenue runs counter both to the cis, macho, *Witcher* conquest-style avenue and to the softer, deterministic version where you play visual novels to have your explicit expressions of romance be received. There is that gonzo third category, *Doki Doki Literature Club* and [*Hatoful Boyfriend*](https://www.killscreen.com/hatoful-boyfriendisnt-quite-weird-it-thinks/), but those are satires. They elide the question of what interesting things we can say about sex and intimacy in games, as a piece of culture or as a piece of art. **Sagan:** I think the dating sim is just as much of a power fantasy as those macho games, maybe even more of one, in terms of the amount of unrealistic agency you're given over your interactions with other people. For some reason that label doesn't get applied to that genre as much. **Jamin:** The thing that hangs over all the characters in the Redding District is that they die at the end. What does that thanatological element, tying sex, death and intimacy together, say about the world you're trying to build? **Sagan:** I think death had less to say about hookup culture than it did about the world-building. A big part of the story I built out because of it was the small percentage of the population who never spawn. In the game, they're called silvers, because, just like with some salmon populations, their scales turn from oceanic silver to red when they spawn, and if you don't spawn, your scales go back to silver. I was trying to think about [how queerness manifests](https://www.killscreen.com/future-romance-games-queer/) in a world where sex and gender don't have the amount of cultural accumulation they have in our world. It is pretty weird that humans have to advertise whether or not they're sexually available through fashion and the way we behave. I don't think that would happen in a world where sex doesn't matter until the last few months of your lifespan, so if you look at screenshots of my game, everyone's quite androgynous. So if queerness is just a marker of difference, who would the different people be in this world? It's these virgins, who have become a non-sexually reproductive labor class. Because they live longer, they're the ones who raise and educate the spawning majority. 0:00 /0:03 1× "Surface to dispel urges" in **Last Call for the Redding District* **Jamin:** There's a world where I can see other game designers stopping at the system: this is sufficient; it's a generative engine. You have game design in your locker, but you've been writing science fiction for years. How are you approaching wedding the two together? **Sagan:** The connection between my fiction writing and making games is really deep and internal, and probably not immediately obvious. In 2021, I did a six-week workshop called Clarion West, and our mentor for the sixth week was Ted Chiang, whose short story "Story of Your Life" was adapted into the movie [*Arrival*](https://www.killscreen.com/arrival/). It is quite something to have your totally rough first draft dissected by someone like Ted Chiang, and I got a deep glimpse into his approach to world-building, which is not a Tolkien-esque lore dump where you map out the entire backstory of a universe, but a single premise extended to its logical conclusion. I think it informed *Redding District* in a profound way that I didn't realize until I turned the short story draft into a game. I don't think I'm 100 percent of the way there yet, but I'm closer than I ever have been before, which is exciting. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/06a_last-call-for-the-redding-district_yee_sketch-redd-watercolor.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/06b_last-call-for-the-redding-district_yee_analogue-prototype-board.jpg) Process work for **Last Call for the Redding District*: a watercolor study of the redd and the analogue prototype board **Jamin:** Was there a favorite salmon fact that made it into the game, or one that didn't? **Sagan:** I watched this amazing video of multiple male salmon all basically ejaculating on a redd at the same time, and you can see the milt coming out of them in this white plume. But they're making an O-face. Before that video, I didn't know that fish made O-faces. They're very clearly orgasming and spasming, and their mouths are wide open. I was like, *I've never felt like fish are so relatable to me*. I don't know if that's going to be part of the game, but where would you ever see that, except on this kind of blurry YouTube video? 0:00 /0:04 1× The four-player spawning game at UCLA's New Wight Gallery, 2026 ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/07a_last-call-for-the-redding-district_yee_new-wight-redd-players.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/07b_last-call-for-the-redding-district_powers_new-wight-story-room.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/07c_last-call-for-the-redding-district_yee_new-wight-redd-overhead.jpg) **Last Call for the Redding District* at UCLA's New Wight Gallery, 2026 *Video and stills courtesy of Sagan Yee. Installation photos by Charlie Powers and Sagan Yee. Portrait by Airis Encarnacion.* ### Matt Romein Plays a Text Adventure Live in MILKMAN ZERO URL: https://www.killscreen.com/milkman-zero-text-adventure-live-horror-theater/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T19:53:55.000Z Event details When Dec. 3 to 13, 2026; Thursdays to Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m. Where Mitu580, Gowanus, Brooklyn Cost $20 early bird, $30 general admission, $60 actual cost [Get tickets](https://matt-romein.com/tickets?ref=killscreen.com) Event details When Jan. 20 to 24, 2027 Where Mitu580, Gowanus, Brooklyn, as part of Under the Radar [Get Under the Radar tickets](https://utrfest.org/program/milkman-zero?ref=killscreen.com) Matt Romein has announced [*MILKMAN ZERO*](https://milkmanzero.com/?ref=killscreen.com), a 60-minute solo show in which he plays a text adventure live at a keyboard. Directed by [Jerry Lieblich](https://thirdear.nyc/jerry-lieblich?ref=killscreen.com), it is the first production from Sad Soft Caves, Romein's new Brooklyn company. It premieres Dec. 3 to 13 at Mitu580, Theater Mitu's 64-seat black box in Gowanus, and returns Jan. 20 to 24, 2027, as part of the Under the Radar festival. Romein types commands such as "open door" and "deliver milk," and the story appears letter by letter on a video wall behind him, each character landing with a typewriter clack over a foley soundscape. There are no graphics. The player is a milkman on a route through a town that wants more milk than any route can supply, with a Milk Monster waiting in the dark. Earlier versions were shown at CATCH at the Invisible Dog and at IDFA DocLab in Amsterdam in 2025\. Kate McGee handles lighting and set, Ryan Gamblin does sound, James La Bella is dramaturgical consultant, Oren Shoham consulted on the code and Yuan Peng drew the key art. Tickets run $20 to $60, and the run is recommended for ages 13 and up. Romein trained as an actor, worked as a sound and video designer in New York's downtown theater and dance scene, and studied at NYU's ITP. The IDFA DocLab version, *MILKMAN ZERO: The First Delivery*, ran 30 minutes and was co-written with James La Bella. Romein told Voices of VR that he scripts the show in a Google Sheet, which TouchDesigner reads to drive the text, sound and animation. The game began as the ending of his 2022 motion capture piece *Bag of Worms*. For more reading, see [Romein on Voices of VR](https://voicesofvr.com/?p=15877&ref=killscreen.com), [Peter Burr's Cartune Xprez turned 20 at Roulette](https://www.killscreen.com/peter-burr-cartune-xprez-turned-20-roulette/) and [the show's site](https://milkmanzero.com/?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/milkman-zero-poster-yuan-peng.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/milkman-zero-work-in-progress-01.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/milkman-zero-work-in-progress-05.jpg) Key art by [Yuan Peng](https://www.yuan.cool/?ref=killscreen.com), and two views of a work-in-progress showing. Photos courtesy Matt Romein. Killscreen tracks the plays, screenings and shows where games turn up away from the console, the ones almost nobody else is listing. Get them in your inbox, free. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Joeveno Releases BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/joevenos-favela-shooter-harkens-bootleg-brazil-ps2s/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T01:51:27.000Z Rio de Janeiro musician and YouTuber Joeveno has released [*BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4241920/?ref=killscreen.com), a standalone expansion to his shooter *BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER 3*. The game launched on Steam on September 16 and runs on id Tech 2, the engine behind 1996's *Quake*. Watch the trailer below. 0:00 /0:24 1× From the US trailer for **BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4* (silent excerpt; the full trailer, soundtrack included, is [on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4241920/?ref=killscreen.com)). Courtesy Joeveno. The arsenal includes a berimbau, a payphone that shoots coconuts, a feijoada bowl loaded into a slingshot and a chimarrão flamethrower. Joeveno has described the game as a tribute to the Brazilian mods and bootleg discs of the 2000s, when a hacked *GTA San Andreas* circulated as *GTA Rio de Janeiro*. At [PAX East this year](https://medium.com/vidya-gaem-awards/the-v-gas-brazilian-drug-dealer-before-4-interview-at-pax-east-2026-add469d639f7?ref=killscreen.com), he said those bootlegs are why his game has its own favela version of Grove Street. Joeveno [announced the launch](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdZ7z0bgPcm/?ref=killscreen.com) on Instagram. *BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4* is available now on Steam, where 98 percent of 493 user reviews are positive. The game sells for $4.99 on Windows and is published by Joeveno and NoQuarter. Its 18-stage campaign moves through Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Salvador, Hell and Heaven, with co-op, six deathmatch maps and a horde mode. *BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER 3* launched on Steam on September 16, 2025, and the earlier entries are on itch.io under the Portuguese series name *AVIÃOZINHO DO TRÁFICO*. For more reading, see [Joeveno's PAX East interview](https://medium.com/vidya-gaem-awards/the-v-gas-brazilian-drug-dealer-before-4-interview-at-pax-east-2026-add469d639f7?ref=killscreen.com), [Bootleg and sometimes bloody: retro console culture in Brazil](https://www.killscreen.com/bootleg-and-sometimes-bloody-retro-console-culture-brazil/) and [Joeveno's earlier games on itch.io](https://joeveno.itch.io/?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/bddb4-ss4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/bddb4-ss5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/bddb4-ss6.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/bddb4-ss7.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/bddb4-ss8.jpg) Screenshots from **BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4*. Courtesy Joeveno. Killscreen covers the game-making that never gets a marketing budget—bootleg aesthetics, regional scenes, one-person cosmologies. The free Radar newsletter delivers it three times a week. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Jess Uhre Rahbek Releases This Is Why You Love LEGO URL: https://www.killscreen.com/jess-uhre-rahbek-announces-this-is-why-you-love-lego/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T01:51:29.000Z Jess Uhre Rahbek has published *This Is Why You Love LEGO*, out Oct. 13 from [MIT Press](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/828091/this-is-why-you-love-lego-by-jess-uhre-rahbek?ref=killscreen.com). Rahbek, an assistant professor at the LAB for Play Design at Design School Kolding in Denmark, spent three years embedded with the design team at LEGO House in Billund. The paperback runs 184 pages and costs $19.95. The book follows one young builder, Theodor, as he makes a space pirate ship, and uses that build to lay out the ways people work with bricks. Some builders follow the manual. Others start from a vague idea or none at all, a mode Rahbek calls "drifting and shifting." A second term, "playful tension," names a problem LEGO's own designers have to manage. In a blurb, artist Nathan Sawaya frames the subject as the pull between instruction and imagination. Rahbek's PhD at Design School Kolding, *Designing for Playful Tension*, was carried out with LEGO House and the LEGO Foundation and defended in 2022\. The school's staff page says Rahbek has a background in game and level design. Game scholar Miguel Sicart blurbs the book, alongside Rigamajig inventor Cas Holman and Gordon Calleja of the University of Malta. For more reading, see [Rahbek's PhD project, Designing for Playful Tension](https://www.designskolenkolding.dk/phd-projekter/designing-for-playful-tension?ref=killscreen.com), [It's okay. Lego was never your friend anyway.](https://www.killscreen.com/its-okay-lego-was-never-your-friend-anyway/) and [the publisher's listing](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/828091/this-is-why-you-love-lego-by-jess-uhre-rahbek?ref=killscreen.com). Killscreen reads play wherever it turns up, from design labs to toy aisles to game engines. The free Radar sends three short issues a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### obleak games Dates Creature-Feeding Game In Full Bloom URL: https://www.killscreen.com/the-more-it-eats-the-bigger-in-full-bloom-gets/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T01:51:31.000Z Swiss studio obleak games has set a November 4 release for *In Full Bloom*, with a [free demo](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3810240/In%5FFull%5FBloom/?ref=killscreen.com) already on Steam. You feed a small, helpless creature whatever is nearby, and it grows through distinct stages, each with its own environment to explore and eat. By the late stages, neighborhoods and then continents count as a meal. Watch the trailer below. 0:00 /0:21 1× Twenty-one seconds of the **In Full Bloom* demo trailer, muted, or [watch the full trailer with sound on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3810240/In%5FFull%5FBloom/?ref=killscreen.com). The studio announced the game with [a video](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dcx90FIslCE/?ref=killscreen.com) about a tiny creature that becomes very, very big "because of you." The Steam page calls it a Tamagotchi-inspired Katamari-like about the conflict between responsibility and mindless consumption, and notes that it contains depictions of eating and vomiting. obleak games is the Zurich studio of Lisa Bach and Charisse Ann de Leon, who made *In Full Bloom* as their 2024 graduation project in Game Design at the Zurich University of the Arts. The project has support from Pro Helvetia and showed at Swissnex Boston's Swiss Mixer during PAX East in May 2025\. The studio self-publishes the game on Steam for Windows and macOS. For more reading, see [the ZHdK project page](https://www.zhdk.ch/studienprojekt/68b2e3d8-96ca-4e0d-a7f1-a3bcd93e571b?ref=killscreen.com), [Katamari is a horrific exercise in self-loathing](https://www.killscreen.com/katamari-horrific-exercise-self-loathing/) and [Finally, a game where you're the Tamagotchi](https://www.killscreen.com/finally-game-where-youre-tamagotchi-and-kid-toys-you/). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/in-full-bloom-ss1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/in-full-bloom-ss2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/in-full-bloom-ss3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/in-full-bloom-ss4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/in-full-bloom-ss5.jpg) **In Full Bloom* screenshots via Steam. Killscreen watches the small studios making games that mean something — a 421-follower account included. Radar, our free newsletter, brings three finds a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Bored Kid Releases ArMystic Demo Ahead of Steam Next Fest URL: https://www.killscreen.com/bored-kid-releases-armystic-demo-ahead-of-steam-next-fest/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T01:51:32.000Z Bored Kid has released a free [work-in-progress demo](https://0bored-kid0.itch.io/armystic?ref=killscreen.com) of *ArMystic*, an exploration RPG made in RPG Maker. The build went up on itch.io on Oct. 8 for Windows and Mac, in preparation for Steam Next Fest. The [Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4731960/ArMystic/?ref=killscreen.com) lists the full game as coming soon. Watch [the demo announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeQG31gNu-i/?ref=killscreen.com) below. 0:00 /0:29 1× The demo announcement for **ArMystic*. Video: [Bored Kid](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeQG31gNu-i/?ref=killscreen.com) "After years of work, I'm happy to finally have a piece of it out there," Bored Kid wrote. The screenshots mix drawing, photography and pixel art. One battle takes place in a grainy red-and-gold brick room, a coastline is drawn in flat yellow and blue pixels, and another screen is a kaleidoscope of photographed fish. Bored Kid's Instagram shows [character art built on a clay-covered toy gun](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcB5nm-G7vX/?ref=killscreen.com). The developer cites *LSD: Dream Emulator* and *Yume Nikki* as influences. The full game lists turn-based combat, multiple endings and more than 120 original tracks, and the itch page is tagged as made without generative AI. *ArMystic* is the only game on Bored Kid's itch.io page, where the developer says they work mainly in mixed media with an emphasis on sound, and names Henry Darger, Eric Fournier, Jan Švankmajer and other Czech surrealists as influences. The Windows demo is an 834 MB download and the Mac version 957 MB. Steam users tag the game as psychological horror, dark humor and collectathon. For more reading, see [LSD revamped](https://www.killscreen.com/lsd-revamped/) and [the Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4731960/ArMystic/?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/armystic-battle.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/armystic-sea.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/armystic-fish.jpg) Screenshots from **ArMystic*. Images: Bored Kid Killscreen goes looking for the strange, handmade games that storefront charts never surface. The free Radar brings three short issues a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### You+Pea Redraw Doom and Disco Elysium as Building Plans URL: https://www.killscreen.com/architects-redraw-doom-and-disco-elysium-as-building-plans/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T01:51:33.000Z Sandra Youkhana and Luke Caspar Pearson, the London studio You+Pea, have [announced](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dc1eHIZEWua/?ref=killscreen.com) [*Videogame Architecture: Building Virtual Spaces*](https://www.youandpea.com/videogame-architecture?ref=killscreen.com). The book works through 12 games, including *Doom*, *Disco Elysium*, *Baldur's Gate 3*, *Elden Ring*, *The Sims 4* and *Yakuza Kiwami*, in plans, sections, 3D renderings and exploded diagrams. John Romero, who designed *Doom*'s levels, writes the foreword. The book runs 288 pages with 500 illustrations, and the authors cite experimental architecture monographs and 1990s videogame guides as models. [Read-Only Memory's limited edition](https://readonlymemory.com/products/videogame-architecture?ref=killscreen.com) of 1,000 copies ships in October with an exposed binding, a clamshell box and a Risograph print of E1M1, *Doom*'s opening level. The [Thames & Hudson hardback](https://www.thamesandhudsonusa.com/books/videogame-architecture-building-virtual-spaces-hardcover?ref=killscreen.com) follows Oct. 22 in the U.K. and Nov. 17 in the U.S. Youkhana and Pearson founded the Videogame Urbanism studio at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Their previous book is *Videogame Atlas*. The other six games in the book are *BioShock*, *Genshin Impact*, *Gravity Rush 2*, *Grim Fandango Remastered*, *Half-Life 2* and *The Last of Us*. The Read-Only Memory edition costs £75, and the Thames & Hudson hardback is £45 in the U.K. and $65 in the U.S. *Videogame Atlas*, published in November 2022, covered 12 other games, including *Minecraft* and *Death Stranding*. You+Pea's installation *Playing the Picturesque* showed at RIBA's Architecture Gallery in London in 2019. For more reading, see [the Bartlett on the launch of Videogame Atlas](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/news/2022/nov/bartlett-tutors-launch-new-book-videogame-worldbuilding?ref=killscreen.com), [An architecture studio now works inside game space](https://www.killscreen.com/an-architecture-studio-now-works-inside-game-space/) and [Videogame architecture is failing the poor of the world](https://www.killscreen.com/videogame-architecture-is-failing-the-poor-of-the-world/). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/va-spread-0042.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/va-spread-0049.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/va-spread-0026.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/va-spread-0059.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/va-spread-0062.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/va-spread-0081.png) Spreads from **Videogame Architecture*. Courtesy Read-Only Memory. Killscreen has been reading games alongside architecture, film and the rest of culture since 2010\. The free Radar newsletter brings the three best finds to your inbox every week. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim Take asses.masses to Ghent URL: https://www.killscreen.com/when-asses-masses-plays-ghent-the-donkeys-speak-flemish/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T04:05:36.000Z Event details When Nov. 7, 2026, 1 to 9:30 p.m. Where VIERNULVIER, De Vooruit (Domzaal), Ghent Cost 13.50 to 33 euros, snacks, a meal and drinks included [Get tickets](https://www.viernulvier.gent/en/agenda/patrick-blenkarn-milton-lim-czs7?ref=killscreen.com) *asses.masses*, Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim's game about a herd of unemployed donkeys, will play VIERNULVIER in Ghent on Saturday, Nov. 7, in a Flemish translation by Tom Vanderheyden. The show runs from 1 to 9:30 p.m. in the Domzaal of the De Vooruit building: one controller, a room of strangers, four intermissions, and snacks, a meal and drinks. Watch the teaser below. 0:00 /0:30 1× From the **asses.masses* teaser: one player at a time steps up to the controller while the herd watches. [The full teaser, with sound, is on the makers’ site](https://www.assesmasses.work/?ref=killscreen.com). Audience members take turns at the controller while the rest of the room calls out advice. The story opens on a farm and moves between 2D levels and 3D worlds. The makers [announced the Flemish run](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeL-yZFjj5l/?ref=killscreen.com) on Oct. 7. Tickets run 13.50 to 33 euros, food included. The tour also stops at [Teatro do Bairro Alto](https://teatrodobairroalto.pt/pt/evento/assesmasses?ref=killscreen.com) in Lisbon, at the [MCA Chicago](https://mcachicago.org/whats-on/events/mca-presents-asses-masses/?ref=killscreen.com) in November, at Dublin's [Beta Festival](https://projectartscentre.ie/events/asses-masses/?ref=killscreen.com) and at Granit in [Belfort, France](https://www.grrranit.eu/agenda/assesmasses-jeu-video-en-direct-en-collectif?ref=killscreen.com), on Jan. 30, 2027. The piece was workshopped in Toronto in 2021 and 2022 and played Buenos Aires and Mexico City in 2023 before The Theatre Centre in Toronto staged it in September 2023\. It has since played the PuSh Festival in Vancouver and NYU Skirball in New York, and has been translated into 11 languages, including Spanish, French, German and Portuguese. David Mesiha composed the music. For more reading, see [Killscreen's earlier piece on asses.masses](https://www.killscreen.com/asses-masses-blenkarn-lim-collective-play/), [UBC's Critical Play Lab on asses.masses](https://pop-culture.arts.ubc.ca/field-trip-recap-asses-masses/?ref=killscreen.com) and [the makers' site](https://www.assesmasses.work/?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/asses-masses-herd-running.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/asses-masses-farm-map.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/asses-masses-mecca-city.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/asses-masses-poppy-field.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/asses-masses-floating-islands.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/asses-masses-berlin-intermission.jpg) **asses.masses* in six frames: the herd on the move, the farm from above, Mecca City, two of the 3D worlds the story drifts into, and the audience between episodes in Berlin in 2024\. Images via Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim. Killscreen follows games after they leave the storefront: into theaters, into museums and into whatever language the room speaks. The free newsletter is how the next one reaches you. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Isabelle Frances McGuire and Will Lee Release Joy's Hands to Escape Hell URL: https://www.killscreen.com/to-play-joys-hands-you-have-to-visit-a-chinatown-gallery/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T00:06:26.000Z Event details When Oct. 3 to Nov. 28, 2026, Wednesday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Where Bel Ami, 709 N. Hill St., Suites 103 and 105 (upstairs in Asian Center), Los Angeles Recurseware, the new studio from Isabelle Frances McGuire and Will Lee, has released its first game, *Joy's Hands*. The 20-minute game runs on a wall-mounted screen inside McGuire's exhibition [*Joy is a Puppet*](https://belami.info/exhibitions/joy-is-a-puppet/?ref=killscreen.com) at Bel Ami in Los Angeles's Chinatown through Nov. 28\. McGuire [calls the gallery](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeUXRrqFpMx/?ref=killscreen.com) "the only place you can play" it. Joy is locked in a shed in a fictionalized colonial Salem with a bowl, a knife, some snails and a writhing ferret. Joy has to puzzle through spells to summon the devil, who answers with a game of cat's cradle. Lee designed the game and McGuire made the sound and music, per [the artist's announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeCojljGoNA/?ref=killscreen.com). The gallery shows the concept art cast in bronze: Joy in a cloth bonnet, three gaping bullfrogs titled *Sister* and a set of supposedly hexed baskets. McGuire's 2023 show *LOOP* put *Call of Duty* night-vision goggles on an Elvis bust. McGuire was born in Austin in 1994, lives in Chicago and earned a BFA in film from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016\. The Whitney showcased McGuire's Biennial installation as figures built from open source medical CT scans and *Doom* character models, mounted on metal poles. McGuire's 2024 show *Year Zero*, at the Renaissance Society, drew on Abraham Lincoln, and McGuire received a 2025 Chicago Artadia Award. For more reading, see [Frieze's review of Joy is a Puppet](https://www.frieze.com/article/isabelle-frances-mcguire-joy-is-a-puppet-2026-review?ref=killscreen.com), [CULTURED's interview with McGuire](https://culturedmag.com/article/2024/11/21/young-artist-isabelle-frances-mcguire-interview?ref=killscreen.com) and [The Witch isn't an empowerment narrative](https://www.killscreen.com/the-witch-isnt-an-empowerment-narrative-and-thats-why-its-great/). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/joys-hands-screenshot-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/joys-hands-screenshot-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/joys-hands-screen-install.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/joy-is-a-puppet-install-overview.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/joy-is-a-puppet-joy-bronze.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/joy-is-a-puppet-tableau-baskets.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/joy-is-a-puppet-piles.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/joy-is-a-puppet-idiot-woman.jpg) **Joy's Hands* in play and on the wall at Bel Ami, with the bronze **Joy is a Puppet*, the baskets of **Tableau*, **Piles* and **Idiot Woman* (all 2026). Screenshots via Isabelle Frances McGuire; installation photos courtesy of the artist and Bel Ami, Los Angeles. A first game you can only play in one room in Chinatown will never show up on a storefront chart. Radar finds the work at the edges of games and sends it free, three times a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Takakurakazuki Puts a Game Inside a Buddhist Altar in Arles URL: https://www.killscreen.com/game-screens-wind-up-in-an-altar-and-a-copper-girl-in-arles/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T01:51:34.000Z Event details When Oct. 10 to Nov. 8, 2026, Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Where Chapelle des Trinitaires, 32 rue de la République, Arles Cost Free [*Anima Ludens*](https://octobre-numerique.fr/anima-ludens?ref=killscreen.com), the main exhibition of this year's Octobre Numérique festival, opened Oct. 10 at the Chapelle des Trinitaires in Arles. The free show gathers 15 works by Japanese artists and game makers. Among them is Takakurakazuki's *GAME OVER: BUTSUDAN GAME*, a Buddhist household altar with a game running on a screen at its center. Watch a clip from futurala's *CultureHouse* below. 0:00 /0:18 1× From the trailer for futurala's **CultureHouse*, one of the games in **Anima Ludens*. Watch the [full trailer with sound](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2314460/CultureHouse/?ref=killscreen.com) on Steam. KOTAKE CREATE's *The Exit 8* is on view, as is futurala's unreleased *CultureHouse*, seven days of growing organisms in a missing scientist's lab. contact Gonzo's coin game *Fortune Assholer* sends your money down a ramp. Kenji Yanobe shows a game cabinet built as sculpture, and Yoshihiro Takeuchi a painted diptych drawn from early paddle-and-ball games. In *PRJ CÔGEIMU "ARE YOU THERE?"*, a copper girl's head hides a screen behind the eyes, and you play by warming her cheeks. Curators Daichi Nakagawa, Yasutaka Toyokawa and Vincent Moncho start from Johan Huizinga's *Homo Ludens*. Nakagawa and Toyokawa also co-curated *art bit #6: Game Playing Society* in Kyoto, which the organizers call the Arles show's counterpart. The show runs Tuesday to Sunday through Nov. 8, and the festival's [announcement post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeEraRljKAb/?ref=killscreen.com) carries the full list. Octobre Numérique began in Arles in 2010 and is run by a coalition of local cultural groups, including Actes Sud, CHRONIQUES, Extramentale and Fisheye. *Anima Ludens* is co-organized with the Shibuya Asobi-ba Production Committee and ars·bit, whose art bit series grew from a partnership between Hotel Anteroom Kyoto and the BitSummit festival. Other works include Emi Kusano's *Ornament Survival* series, Maki Ohkojima's *Uzuki | Resonant Wounds* and Nao Usami's *I stitch my skin to the ground*. For more reading, see [Gamescenes on Octobre Numérique 2026](https://www.gamescenes.org/octobre-numerique-faire-monde-2026-10-october-8-november-2026-arles-france/?ref=killscreen.com), [In Kyoto, an art hotel treated games as social diagrams](https://www.killscreen.com/in-kyoto-an-art-hotel-treated-games-as-social-diagrams/) and [the curators' note on the two shows](https://www.arsobit.com/en/anima-ludens-20260905-en/?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/anima-ludens-contact-gonzo-fortune-assholer.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/anima-ludens-prj-cogeimu-are-you-there.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/anima-ludens-kenji-yanobe-spaceship-of-ships-cat.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/anima-ludens-yoshihiro-takeuchi-re.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/anima-ludens-kotake-create-the-exit-8.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/anima-ludens-futurala-culturehouse-key-visual.jpg) From **Anima Ludens*: contact Gonzo's **Fortune Assholer*; **PRJ CÔGEIMU "ARE YOU THERE?"* by Ryosuke Shiomi, KamiEna and Takeru Kaneko; Kenji Yanobe's **The Spaceship of SHIP'S CAT* (photo: Omote Nobutada; pixel art: BAN8KU); Yoshihiro Takeuchi's **Re:*; KOTAKE CREATE's **The Exit 8*; and futurala's key visual for the show. Images via Octobre Numérique. Radar finds the rooms where games get hung as art and argued over, from a Kyoto hotel gallery to a chapel in Arles. It's free, and it lands in your inbox. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Cory Arcangel Rebuilds His Web-Surfing Shop in Stavanger URL: https://www.killscreen.com/cory-arcangels-shuttered-shop-reopens-as-an-installation/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T01:51:35.000Z Event details When Nov. 14, 2026 to March 29, 2027 Where Stavanger Art Museum, Henrik Ibsens gate 55, Stavanger, Norway Cost 170 Norwegian kroner; free for students and anyone under 18 Cory Arcangel will open [*Family Office*](https://www.stavangerkunstmuseum.no/en/events/cory-arcangel?ref=killscreen.com), his first solo exhibition in Norway, at Stavanger Art Museum on Nov. 14\. Its centerpiece is the Arcangel Surfware Flagship, a 32-square-meter shop in Stavanger's Storhaug borough where Arcangel sold sweatpants and pool slides "for surfing the web" from 2018 to 2019\. The museum bought the store in 2024 and is showing it as an installation for the first time. Watch the announcement below. 0:00 /0:46 1× Cory Arcangel announces **Family Office* in [a reel posted by Stavanger Art Museum](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeJ2uEFt2ie/?ref=killscreen.com). In [the reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeJ2uEFt2ie/?ref=killscreen.com), Arcangel gives the timeline: he arrived in Stavanger in 2015 after 15 years in New York, became a father right away and left in 2025\. The show covers the decade of work made there. The museum's photo of the store's 2018 opening shows *Mig 29 Soviet Fighter Plane, Clouds, and OS X* (2016), his hacked NES cartridges of a jet and a sky, running in the OpenEmu emulator on a Mac mini. The museum reopens after an upgrade the same day. Admission is 170 Norwegian kroner, free for students and anyone under 18. Arcangel founded Arcangel Surfware in 2014, launching it with a temporary shop in a Manhattan Holiday Inn conference room that sold bedsheets, tracksuits, code zines, vinyl and fidget spinners. *MY\_PHOTO* is derived from a floppy disk written by a Sony Mavica MVC-FD75 camera. *Hail Mary*, a carillon composition made with Twitter, will play on Stavanger Cathedral's 49-bell carillon. Helga Nyman curates, and Walther König publishes the catalogue. For more reading, see [Arcangel Surfware in Rhizome's Net Art Anthology](https://anthology.rhizome.org/arcangel-surfware?ref=killscreen.com), [Cory Arcangel recovers Warhol art from old floppy disks](https://www.killscreen.com/cory-arcangel-recovers-warhol-art-old-floppy-disks/) and [the shop's catalogue entry](https://coryarcangel.com/works/2017-062-arcangel-surfware-flagship?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/arcangel-surfware-flagship-sign.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/arcangel-tou-14-31-07.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/arcangel-hello-world-2025.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/arcangel-hail-mary-2022.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/arcangel-my-photo-2025.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/arcangel-photoshop-cs-2019.jpg) Top row, from left: the Arcangel Surfware Flagship sign in Storhaug (photo: Jan Inge Haga); **tou-14-31-07*, 2024, single-channel video (photo: Rute Ventura); **Hello World*, 2025, CNC-milled aluminum (photo: Helle Navratil). Bottom row: **Hail Mary*, 2022 (photo: Cory Arcangel); **MY\_PHOTO*, 2025 (photo: Helle Navratil); a 2019 **Photoshop CS* gradient print (courtesy the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac). Courtesy Arcangel Surfware unless noted. Hacked cartridges, rebuilt shops, floppy-disk cameras: this is the corner of game culture Killscreen covers and almost nobody else does. The free KS Radar letter brings it to your inbox three times a week. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Rosa Menkman Shows The BLOB of Im/Possible Images at V2_ URL: https://www.killscreen.com/rosa-menkman-blob-impossible-images-v2-still-unstable/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T01:51:35.000Z Event details When Sept. 24 to Oct. 18, 2026, Thursday to Sunday Where V2\_ Lab for the Unstable Media, Eendrachtsstraat 10, Rotterdam [Get tickets](https://v2unstable.stager.co/shop/default?ref=killscreen.com) Rosa Menkman's [*The BLOB of Im/Possible Images*](https://beyondresolution.info/IM-POSSIBLE-BLOB-1?ref=killscreen.com) is on view in [*Still Unstable*](https://v2.nl/events/still-unstable-exhibition?ref=killscreen.com), the exhibition V2\_ Lab for the Unstable Media has mounted in Rotterdam for its 45th anniversary. The show runs Thursday to Sunday through Oct. 18\. Watch a pass through the BLOB below. 0:00 /0:24 1× A pass over **The BLOB of Im/Possible Images* on New Art City, clipped from Rosa Menkman's video [im/possible Images and the Latent Image space](https://vimeo.com/532610944?ref=killscreen.com). The full version has sound. During an Arts at CERN residency in 2019 and 2020, Menkman asked scientists what image they would make with no limits on resolution, energy, noise or cost. Their answers fill the BLOB, a low-poly 3D space built on New Art City and commissioned by HEK in Basel in 2021\. Lines Menkman calls Axes of Affordance cut through it, each one a decision in how a picture gets made, splitting images that can be rendered from those that never will be. In [V2\_'s documentation photos](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeJ8UeyDFa2/?ref=killscreen.com), the piece appears as a freestanding black-and-white wall crossed by red, green, blue and yellow lines, with a screen mounted on it. V2\_ supported the research with a residency in 2021\. The BLOB is also open in a browser on [New Art City](https://newart.city/show/menkman-blob-of-im-possibilities?ref=killscreen.com). *Still Unstable* opened Sept. 24 with three days of talks and events, and also features Aram Bartholl, Anna Ehrenstein, knowbotiq, Kaisa Molga and Morehshin Allahyari. Menkman published *Glitch Moment/um* with the Institute of Network Cultures in 2011 and *Beyond Resolution* in 2020\. Her CERN residency followed the 2019 Collide Arts at CERN Barcelona award, and since 2023 she has run the Im/Possible Lab at HEAD Genève. For more reading, see [Rosa Menkman on Monoskop](https://monoskop.org/Rosa%5FMenkman?ref=killscreen.com), [the BLOB on New Art City](https://newart.city/show/menkman-blob-of-im-possibilities?ref=killscreen.com) and [Menkman's video im/possible Images and the Latent Image space](https://vimeo.com/532610944?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/menkman-im-possible-images-v2-still-unstable-02.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/menkman-blob-of-im-possible-images-new-art-city.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/menkman-blob-walkthrough-01.jpg) From left: the wall at V2\_, head on; the BLOB cut by its axes on New Art City; the controls guide that greets visitors inside. Images: V2\_ Lab for the Unstable Media, Rosa Menkman Walkable arguments about how pictures get made are a Killscreen beat, and almost nobody else's. The free newsletter is where the next one turns up. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Games Transformed Adds Mansoor Adayfi and IWGB to 2026 Bill URL: https://www.killscreen.com/games-transformeds-bill-spans-guantanamo-and-union-drives/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T01:51:37.000Z Event details When Oct. 30 to Nov. 1, 2026 Where The Three Colts, Pelican House and Proposition Studios, Bethnal Green, London Cost Weekend pass from £45 plus booking fee; day passes from £20; under-12s free [Get tickets](https://www.tickettailor.com/events/gamestransformed/2328476?ref=killscreen.com) Games Transformed has [announced](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeH3HbHla0M/?ref=killscreen.com) the first sessions of its fourth edition, which runs Oct. 30 to Nov. 1 at The Three Colts, Pelican House and Proposition Studios in Bethnal Green, East London. The festival promises more than 80 panels, workshops, playtests and performances. A full timetable is not out yet. Watch the trailer for Rasheed Abueideh's [*Dreams on a Pillow*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4438850/Dreams%5Fon%5Fa%5FPillow/?ref=killscreen.com) below. 0:00 /0:21 1× The opening of the gameplay reveal trailer for **Dreams on a Pillow*, the 1948 Nakba game by Rasheed Abueideh, who is on the Games Transformed bill. [The full trailer, with sound, is on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4438850/Dreams%5Fon%5Fa%5FPillow/?ref=killscreen.com). "Do Not Forget Us Here: Games Within, Against and Beyond Guantanamo" pairs Mansoor Adayfi, held without charge at Guantánamo for 14 years, with Abertay University's Darshana Jayemanne. Both work on [*GTMO 441*](https://www.killscreen.com/a-game-about-guantanamo-is-being-built-with-its-survivor/), a game built with Adayfi from the games detainees improvised in confinement. The [IWGB Game Workers](https://www.gameworkers.co.uk/?ref=killscreen.com) union and Equity's audio committee present "Gamers of the World, Unite!," alongside an Organizing 101 workshop and a panel called "Grand Theft Labour." Clara Greo leads a cooperative decision game, modeled on *The King's Dilemma*, about which tech tools organizers should adopt. Abueideh, whose *Dreams on a Pillow* is set during the 1948 Nakba, is also on the bill. Weekend passes start at £45 plus a booking fee, day passes at £20, and under-12s get in free. The early-bird tier has sold out. Games Transformed launched in 2023 as an offshoot of The World Transformed festival, organized with IWGB Game Workers and UTAW, and held its first one-day festival at Pelican House that May. The 2024 edition, themed "No War But Class War," featured Pop Culture Detective's Jonathan McIntosh and journalist Marijam Did. *Dreams on a Pillow*, a 2.5D stealth game, raised about $244,000 on LaunchGood and is due for Windows in late 2026. For more reading, see [Al Jazeera on Dreams on a Pillow](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/18/what-is-dreams-on-a-pillow-the-palestinian-game-about-the-nakba?ref=killscreen.com), [A game about Guantánamo is being built with its survivor](https://www.killscreen.com/a-game-about-guantanamo-is-being-built-with-its-survivor/) and [Apple says politically charged Palestinian game isn't a game](https://www.killscreen.com/apple-says-politically-charged-palestinian-game-isnt-game/). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/games-transformed-2026-panel-sessions.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/games-transformed-2026-workshops.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/games-transformed-2026-ethical-tech-choices-workshop.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/games-transformed-2026-do-not-forget-us-here-panel.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/games-transformed-2026-gamers-of-the-world-unite-panel.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/games-transformed-2026-tickets-crowd.jpg) Announcement graphics for Games Transformed 2026: the panel and workshop lists, three sessions named so far, and the ticket launch. Courtesy [Games Transformed](https://www.instagram.com/gamestransformed/?ref=killscreen.com). Festivals like this one rarely make the games press. Killscreen's free newsletter finds the work at the edges of game culture and sends it to you. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Wai-Keung Hui Stages a 1989 Evacuation Plan in Sleeping Dogs URL: https://www.killscreen.com/told-to-evacuate-sleeping-dogs-crowds-panic-instead/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T01:51:27.000Z Event details When Through Oct. 15, 2026 Where Online, at VRAL (Milan Machinima Festival) Wai-Keung Hui has released *Awakening Armageddon Plan*, a 12-minute machinima made inside *Sleeping Dogs*. The film stages the Armageddon Scenario, a plan the British government drafted in 1989 to evacuate millions of people from Hong Kong before the 1997 handover. The plan was never enacted, and its files stayed sealed until 2025\. Watch an excerpt below. 0:00 /5:30 1× An excerpt, without sound. The full 12-minute film streams with audio at [VRAL](https://milanmachinimafestival.org/vral-screening?ref=killscreen.com) through Oct. 15. Hui, who was born in Hong Kong and is based in Taiwan, reprograms the game's crowds to drop what they are doing and leave. The streets fill with people running, jostling and screaming from a threat that never appears on screen. The film follows *Sleeping Armageddon Plan*, an earlier narrative take on the same archive that screened at the Milan Machinima Festival in March. *Awakening Armageddon Plan* streams free as [VRAL #138](https://milanmachinimafestival.org/vral-screening?ref=killscreen.com) through Oct. 15, per [the festival's announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeGUtbFGw3n/?ref=killscreen.com). Hui holds an MFA from City University of Hong Kong's School of Creative Media and has shown at Tokyo Arts and Space and Chicago's VGA Gallery. According to the South China Morning Post, the plan came from the Official Group on Contingency Planning for Hong Kong, formed after Margaret Thatcher met the Hong Kong governor on June 8, 1989\. *Sleeping Armageddon Plan* ran 4 minutes 34 seconds. Hui is completing a PhD at Tainan National University of the Arts, and his *Re-Dürer* won Best Local Work in Media Art at the 22nd ifva Awards in 2017. For more reading, see [the South China Morning Post on the Armageddon Scenario](https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3319339/armageddon-scenario-uk-made-plan-mass-hong-kong-exodus-handover-run?ref=killscreen.com), [A dead PS3 is the excavation site in Kara Güt's YLOD](https://www.killscreen.com/a-dead-ps3-is-the-excavation-site-in-kara-guts-ylod/) and [the VRAL screening page](https://milanmachinimafestival.org/vral-screening?ref=killscreen.com). Machinima, engine art and the people bending games into cinema are a Killscreen beat, not a novelty. The free KS Radar newsletter tracks that work three times a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Museum of Human Achievement Opens Call for Bettable Art URL: https://www.killscreen.com/museum-of-human-achievement-wants-art-you-can-gamble-on/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T01:51:39.000Z Event details When Apply by Oct. 15, 2026 Where Museum of Human Achievement, Austin, Texas Cost Free to apply [Apply by Oct. 15](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScw1aKmf94vl2rrj6aY9xIxvWhub8ehduQOSr2Bwq7kLFiX9g/viewform?ref=killscreen.com) Austin's Museum of Human Achievement is [taking proposals](https://moha.wiki/In%5Fthe%5FZone:%5FGroup%5FExhibition%5FOpen%5FCall?ref=killscreen.com) through Oct. 15 for *In the Zone*, a group show staged as an absurdist casino during the Austin Studio Tour, Nov. 14 to 22\. Sam Lavigne guest curates, per [the museum's announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeCn600CVbK/?ref=killscreen.com). Every work has to respond to gambling or games of chance, and visitors must be able to bet on it in a fictional house currency called Human Dollars. The museum suggests unconventional slot machines, twisted roulette, scratch-offs, pieces on prediction markets and crypto scams, and set dressing such as paintings of dogs gambling and chandeliers. New works earn a stipend of up to $800, existing works $150 to $250\. The museum expects thousands of visitors a day. Applying is free. MoHA is a nonprofit that has operated since 2012 in a 1950s warehouse on 1.3 acres in East Austin. In July 2024, Austin City Council approved creative space bond money to help MoHA buy and preserve the site. Lavigne is an assistant professor of design at UT Austin, and his works include *Get Well Soon!* (2020) with Tega Brain, made from more than 200,000 GoFundMe comments. The open call expects 15 to 25 works. For more reading, see [the Austin Monitor on MoHA's site purchase](https://austinmonitor.com/stories/2024/07/council-oks-bond-money-to-purchase-preserve-museum-of-human-achievement-arts-space/?ref=killscreen.com), [Jason Rohrer's new game involves gambling real money](https://www.killscreen.com/jason-rohrers-new-game-involves-gambling-real-money-win-amulets/) and [our piece on gamblification, loot boxes and Labubu](https://www.killscreen.com/gamblification-labubu-loot-boxes-gambling-mechanicsretry/). Killscreen covers the open calls, odd venues and playable experiments the industry press skips. Get the free KS Radar newsletter and catch the next deadline in time. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Wonderville Opens Applications for Wondercab Residency URL: https://www.killscreen.com/wonderville-will-build-your-game-into-an-arcade-cabinet/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T01:51:40.000Z Event details When Applications close Oct. 31, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Where Wonderville, Brooklyn [Apply by Oct. 31](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfkjT2X6YhcAx4OrPNrjI7ipljNWmZyAUqO6SjF8P7OOwKYyQ/viewform?ref=killscreen.com) [Wonderville](https://www.wonderville.nyc/?ref=killscreen.com), the Brooklyn arcade bar, is taking applications through Oct. 31 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern for the Winter 2026 [Wondercab Residency](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeAaVJwlbV3/?ref=killscreen.com). The program builds one independent game into a custom cabinet for the venue's floor, which already holds more than 30 custom, free-to-play machines. Watch the announcement below. 0:00 /0:05 1× From [Wonderville’s announcement reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeAaVJwlbV3/?ref=killscreen.com). Irreparable Games' *Reaper Madness* holds the Fall 2026 slot. Its cabinet debuted Oct. 4 at the New York Games Week kickoff party. Wonderville opened June 1, 2019, at 1186 Broadway in Bushwick, founded by Mark Kleback and Stephanie Gross with Kickstarter funding. According to the venue, the Wondercab began as the cabinet *Crystal Brawl*, which ran from 2013 to 2020 before Chris Hernandez converted it, and each residency lasts three months. *Reaper Madness* is a one to four player arcade action game, and its launch night included a tournament for a one-of-one plushie by fiber artist Sarika Tatineni. For more reading, see [the Brooklyn Eagle on Wonderville's opening](https://brooklyneagle.com/articles/2019/03/27/bushwicks-new-indie-arcade-bar-wants-to-break-all-stereotypes-about-video-games/?ref=killscreen.com), [At Wonderville, nine games replaced the gamepad entirely](https://www.killscreen.com/at-wonderville-nine-games-replaced-the-gamepad-entirely/) and [Wonderville's new cabinet Step Right Up! crosses a Zoltar machine with vector graphics](https://www.killscreen.com/wondervilles-new-cabinet-step-right-up-crosses-a-zoltar-machine-with-vector-graphics/). The free KS Radar letter flags residencies and open calls for small games while there is still time to apply. Three short issues a week. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Studio Oleomingus Shows a Game About Mapping Paradise URL: https://www.killscreen.com/studio-oleomingus-shows-new-work-at-apap8-in-anyang/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T01:51:41.000Z Event details When Through Nov. 29, 2026 Where Anyang Pavilion, Anyang, South Korea Cost Free Studio Oleomingus, the game studio based in Chala, India, has made *Is it any wonder that I hesitate even at the gates of paradise?* for the 8th Anyang Public Art Project (APAP8). The single-channel 4K video runs five minutes and 30 seconds and is on view at Anyang Pavilion through Nov. 29\. Watch [a clip](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd7wEWch9v9/?ref=killscreen.com) below. 0:00 /0:39 1× A clip from **Is it any wonder that I hesitate even at the gates of paradise?* Video: [Studio Oleomingus](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd7wEWch9v9/?ref=killscreen.com) The studio [describes the piece](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd7y29BEpGD/?ref=killscreen.com) as "a game about the perils of cartographically locating paradise." In the clip, an owl-headed figure in pale blue walks through an arched doorway and up to a balcony beneath a pair of painted eyes. APAP's text traces the word paradise to *pairi-daēza*, an enclosure, and notes that the more precisely paradise was described, the harder it became to find. APAP8 opened Sept. 30 with 41 artists and teams from four countries, its first edition in three years. Killscreen presented the studio's solo exhibition *The Concentric Fictions of a Generous History* in Los Angeles in 2023 and 2024. Studio Oleomingus is Dhruv Jani, who writes and makes the visuals, and Sushant Chakraborty, who programs. The V&A commissioned their game *In the Pause between the Ringing* for its 2018 to 2019 exhibition *Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt*, and Chicago's VGA Gallery gave them their first American exhibition in 2019\. APAP8 is organized by the Anyang Culture and Arts Foundation under artistic director Park Cheol-hee, around the theme "Mureung-dowon," the Korean name for a legendary peach-blossom paradise. For more reading, see [Sleek on Studio Oleomingus](https://www.sleek-mag.com/article/studio-oleomingus-surreal-video-games-marginalised-stories-india-history/?ref=killscreen.com), [In the Pause between the Ringing on itch.io](https://vamuseum.itch.io/in-the-pause-between-the-ringing?ref=killscreen.com) and [Studio Oleomingus on Killscreen](https://www.killscreen.com/studio-oleomingus/). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/oleomingus-paradise-tigers.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/oleomingus-paradise-house.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/oleomingus-paradise-sun-mask.jpg) Screenshots from **Is it any wonder that I hesitate even at the gates of paradise?* Images: Studio Oleomingus Killscreen lists the exhibitions where game makers show work far from any console. The free Radar brings them to your inbox three times a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### David Blandy's Backgrounds Joins On Foot at Serlachius URL: https://www.killscreen.com/david-blandys-avatars-join-a-200-year-survey-of-walking/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T01:51:41.000Z Event details When Sept. 26, 2026 to Feb. 21, 2027 Where Serlachius Headquarters, Mänttä, Finland Cost 16 euros; free for under 18s David Blandy is showing *Backgrounds* (2013) in *On Foot* at Serlachius Headquarters in Mänttä, Finland, through Feb. 21, 2027\. The museum bills the show as the first comprehensive look at walking in a Finnish museum, spanning two centuries from Akseli Gallen-Kallela and Marcus Collin to Elina Brotherus and Mark Wallinger. Tomi Moisio and Carlos Idrobo curate. Watch an excerpt below. 0:00 /1:12 1× Excerpt from **Backgrounds* (2013). The full nine-minute film, with sound, is [on Seventeen Gallery’s Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/60264777?ref=killscreen.com). *Backgrounds* is nine minutes of two pixel-drawn figures, Blandy and his father, John, walking through snow-covered temples, rainforests and ruined cities while they talk about art. The landscapes are built like fighting-game backgrounds, down to the dialogue portraits. Per [the announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdYXsaVoMV8/?ref=killscreen.com), it shows alongside a series of films in which Blandy's onscreen character walks through the painted landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich. The show opened Sept. 26\. Admission is 16 euros, free for under 18s. The full film is on [Seventeen Gallery's Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/60264777?ref=killscreen.com). *Backgrounds* was first shown in 2013, at Seventeen in London and at Aspex in Portsmouth. John Blandy is a landscape artist trained at St Martin's and the Royal College of Art, who drew a single lime tree more than 2,500 times for his project *Following a Lime Tree*. Time Out lists Richard Long, Francis Alÿs, Albert Edelfelt and Hugo Simberg among the *On Foot* artists. David Blandy was shortlisted for the 2018 Jarman Award with Larry Achiampong. For more reading, see [the 2013 Aspex listing](https://www.artrabbit.com/events/background-david-blandy?ref=killscreen.com), [It's time to stop using the term walking simulator](https://www.killscreen.com/time-stop-using-term-walking-simulator/) and [Backgrounds on Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/60264777?ref=killscreen.com). Killscreen has spent 15 years tracking what happens when game bodies wander into museums. The free newsletter is where that coverage lands first. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Digital Meetup: Systems at Play Brings Free Creative Coding to the V&A URL: https://www.killscreen.com/digital-meetup-systems-at-play-v-a/ Last updated: 2026-10-16T21:04:52.000Z Event details When Oct. 23, 2026, 5:30 to 9 p.m. Where Learning Centre, V&A South Kensington, London Cost Free The V&A and arebyte are hosting [*Digital Meetup: Systems at Play*](https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/lgoA8EBgJE/digital-meetup-october-2026?ref=killscreen.com), a free, drop-in creative coding night open to everyone. It runs 5:30 to 9 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 23, in the Learning Centre at V&A South Kensington, as part of the V&A Digital Art Season: On Agency, per [arebyte's announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeMsTVeClhz/?ref=killscreen.com). Artists from arebyte's Hotel Generation program lead the night. Ambie Drew works on how digital images rewrite memory, and Freddie Sanders maps landscapes from satellite data. Both ask attendees to bring a laptop, and the museum has a few to lend. Olivia Ema installs an interactive piece, Emir Johnston pairs intelligent machines with moving ones to make physical images, and Maria Than's new installation lets you paint digital mandalas with your voice. A Processing Community Day show and tell is open to anyone with a sketch to share. arebyte opened in 2013 in Hackney Wick under founder Nimrod Vardi and moved to London City Island in 2017, according to Studio International. Hotel Generation is its annual mentoring program for young digital artists, and a panel picks one participant for a solo exhibition at arebyte. The On Agency season runs to Dec. 3 and includes *Degrees of Disruption: Vera Molnar and Generative Art*, opening Oct. 16. For more reading, see [Studio International's interview with arebyte's co-directors](https://studiointernational.com/index.php/nimrod-vardi-claudel-goy-arebyte-co-directors-interview-london?ref=killscreen.com), [the V&A's On Agency season](https://www.vam.ac.uk/season/2026/digital-art-season-on-agency?ref=killscreen.com) and [the event page](https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/lgoA8EBgJE/digital-meetup-october-2026?ref=killscreen.com). The artists in this room are the ones you will be reading about in five years. Killscreen Radar gets there first, three times a week, free. [Get the Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A car park beneath Oulu is now a botanical afterlife URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-car-park-beneath-oulu-is-now-a-botanical-afterlife/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:59:56.000Z Event details When Sept. 18 to Nov. 30, 2026 Where Kivisydän underground car park, Oulu, Finland Cost 10 euros; free for under 18s with an adult [Get tickets](https://www.lippu.fi/en/artist/oulu2026/kuuttaren-puutarha-4140980/?ref=killscreen.com) Kivisydän is a car park carved into the bedrock beneath the centre of Oulu, Finland. Through November 30, two of its halls hold a garden. *The Kuutar Garden*, Jakob Kudsk Steensen's new commission for the Oulu2026 European Capital of Culture program, rebuilds the University of Oulu's botanical garden, its seed vault, and its endangered plants as a living virtual ecosystem, projected where the cars usually go. [The installation views Steensen posted this week](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdrMGifjT6Y/?ref=killscreen.com) are the first real look at it. 0:00 /2:14 1× The trailer for **The Kuutar Garden*, silent here; [watch it with sound on Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/1223266018?ref=killscreen.com) Steensen is the artist Killscreen keeps returning to because Steensen keeps returning to the engine: four years of ecological fieldwork in Northern Finland, photogrammetry, and worldbuilding in game engines, the same practice we dug into in [our conversation about art, ecology, and the game engine](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/online-talk-4-28-the-living-archive-jakob-kudsk-steensen-on-art-ecology-and-the-game-engine/) this spring. The new work draws on conservation research around *Hippuris tetraphylla*, an endangered aquatic plant, and reconstructs the botanical garden's pyramid greenhouses in the virtual world. The title figure, Kuutar, comes out of Karelian-Finnish folklore by way of the *Kalevala*: a moon deity, sometimes described as a weaver of golden threads, recast here as what the [e-flux announcement](https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/6787939/jakob-kudsk-steensenthe-kuutar-garden?ref=killscreen.com) calls "an architect of memory." A parking structure is the most car-brained space a city has, and this one now stores seeds instead. And the sound: the simulation's music comes from Danny L Harle, the PC Music producer behind some of the last decade's glossiest hyperpop, working with Lugh O'Neill. Tickets run through November 30\. We covered Steensen's [Otherworlds](https://www.killscreen.com/jakob-kudsk-steensens-otherworlds-closes-sunday-at-phi/) just two weeks ago. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/kuutar-frame-25s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/kuutar-frame-55s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/kuutar-frame-85s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/kuutar-frame-115s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/kuutar-preview-still-eflux.jpg) Frames from the trailer for **The Kuutar Garden*, and a preview still via e-flux Game engines keep leaving the console for the gallery, and Killscreen follows them there. The free newsletter brings that beat to your inbox. [Follow the beat ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### The audience writes the bars Degular raps URL: https://www.killscreen.com/the-audience-writes-the-bars-degular-raps/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:58:18.000Z Event details When Oct. 18, 2026, 3:30 p.m. Where Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, London Cost £25; £20 concessions [Get tickets](https://my.somersethouse.org.uk/10006/10009?ref=killscreen.com) Degular labels data for a living. By night it raps. dmstfctn's character, trained to describe the world in objective, manageable language, keeps hitting the wall every data worker knows: some things refuse the label. *Big things coming (human in the loop)*, the duo's new commission for Somerset House's 3 Evenings series, turns that failure into a show, and it hands the training data to you. Play the language game at [playground.dmstfctn.net](https://playground.dmstfctn.net/?ref=killscreen.com) and the words you feed Degular shape what it can say. A selection of the crowd's lines will be voiced and recorded by the rapper Jawnino for a screening at [3 Evenings: Sunday](https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/3-evenings-sunday?ref=killscreen.com) on Oct. 18, at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station in east London, and on the project's interactive channel 3ETV afterward. ![Degular onscreen in a game-engine animation of the London Docklands at Chemist Gallery](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/big-things-coming-screen.jpg) Degular's London, rendered lossy on purpose. Image via Chemist Gallery. Degular's story has been building all year. This is part three of *GOD MODE*, dmstfctn's trilogy of real-time works about anomalous AI built in game engines; the July chapter at [Chemist Gallery](https://chemistgallery.com/dmstfctn-1?ref=killscreen.com) ran as a live game-engine animation set in a deliberately lossy simulation of the London Docklands, Canary Wharf always on the horizon and never reachable, with the engine cueing a fog machine in the gallery at key moments. Killscreen covered the duo's case for [game engines as stagecraft](https://www.killscreen.com/game-engines-meet-stagecraft-in-dmstfctns-rhizome-talk/) earlier this year. The Oct. 18 performance is ticketed and 18 and over; the game is free and open to anyone with a browser. Stories like this one, where the labour is the game and the game is the show, are Killscreen’s whole beat. Get the free Radar and never miss the next one. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Yuko Hasegawa pairs Yuk Hui with a game AI architect URL: https://www.killscreen.com/yuko-hasegawa-pairs-yuk-hui-with-a-game-ai-architect/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:54:21.000Z Event details When Nov. 5, 2026, 6 to 7:30 p.m. JST Where International House of Japan, Iwasaki Koyata Memorial Hall, Tokyo Cost 3,000 yen; IHJ members 2,000 yen; students 1,000 yen [Register](https://ihjct261105.peatix.com/?ref=killscreen.com) Curator Yuko Hasegawa [announced](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeRKUo-GbnR/?ref=killscreen.com) that the curator will moderate a conversation at the International House of Japan in Tokyo between the philosopher Yuk Hui and Yoichiro Miyake, a game AI developer. The [event page](https://program.ihj.global/en/events/interdisciplinarytalk13/?ref=killscreen.com) fills in the rest. It is the 13th Interdisciplinary Talk in IHJ Cultural Lobby, the series Hasegawa programs as I-House's director of art and design, and it asks: "what if we understood AI not as one intelligence but as something generated through the interaction of multiple intelligences?" Hui has argued that from the theory side for a decade, under the names cosmotechnics and technodiversity. Technology, in Hui's account, is never one universal thing. Miyake is one to take note. The AI of *Final Fantasy XV*, which Miyake laid out in a [2020 paper](https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/tjsai/35/2/35%5FB-J64/%5Farticle/-char/en?ref=killscreen.com), splits the thinking three ways: a meta-AI that watches the player and adjusts the game, a character AI that is the brain of every ally, enemy and townsperson, and a navigation AI that reads the terrain. No single mind runs that world. Now a professor at Tokyo University of the Arts, Miyake has written books of philosophy for AI builders, one on Eastern thought. "I would rather prioritize establishing a foundation as an existence, even if it doesn't serve a purpose initially," Miyake [told an interviewer in 2023](https://theghostintheshell.jp/en/mma/column/column01?ref=killscreen.com). ![The party of Final Fantasy XV, dressed in black, walks down a sunlit town street among pedestrians.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/final-fantasy-xv-party-in-town.jpg) The party among townspeople in **Final Fantasy XV*. Miyake's paper says every character in the game decides through the same AI Graph system. Image: Square Enix, via [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/637650/FINAL%5FFANTASY%5FXV%5FWINDOWS%5FEDITION/?ref=killscreen.com). Killscreen has met those characters before. Our [2016 piece on the game](https://www.killscreen.com/final-fantasy-xv-wants-next-great-road-trip-cant-shut/) complained that its road trip never went quiet: every time the player relaxed, a companion piped up. I read that differently now. A companion who interrupts is a companion who isn't yours to steer. Wendi Yan's [Daoist puzzle game](https://www.killscreen.com/wendi-yan-inner-carbon-classic-daoist-alchemy/) made the cosmotechnics case from the art side in August. This is the same argument arriving from a commercial engine room. The talk runs in Japanese and English with interpretation, and I-House's [press release](https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000096.000054811.html?ref=killscreen.com) bills it as a collateral event of Art Week Tokyo. That placement is the news: game AI discussed in a curator's lobby series, across from a philosopher, as a body of thought and not a feature list. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/yuk-hui-portrait.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/yoichiro-miyake-portrait.jpg) Yuk Hui, left, and Yoichiro Miyake. Portraits courtesy the International House of Japan. A philosopher seated across from a game AI architect is the kind of meeting almost nobody covers. Killscreen does, three times a week, free. [Get the Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Lie back in a church and follow London’s buried rivers URL: https://www.killscreen.com/lie-back-in-a-church-and-follow-londons-buried-rivers/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:50:49.000Z Event details When Oct. 3 to Oct. 18, 2026 Where The Hall, St Martin-in-the-Fields, London Cost £6 to £12 [Get tickets](https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/article/water-body-booking-lff26?ref=killscreen.com) The experience starts with a cup. At The Hall in St Martin-in-the-Fields, through Oct. 18, *Water Body* opens by handing you a ceramic cup of water, made by ceramicist Ludmilla Balkis, before you lie back and let Robert Macfarlane's voice and James Bulley's composition route you along London's buried rivers and out into planetary water systems. Thirty minutes, parts of it in complete darkness, [tickets from £6](https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/article/water-body-lff26?ref=killscreen.com). 0:00 /0:29 1× The **Water Body* trailer, via [the studio’s announcement](https://www.instagram.com/marshmallowlaserfeast/reel/DdmK4SyMnXU/?ref=killscreen.com). The studio is Marshmallow Laser Feast, and the picture around you is not a film. The work renders Earth-systems datasets in real time, compressing a year of planetary water movement into ten seconds, with spatial sound that changes with where you are in the room. Illustrations come from Elena Landinez, and the whole piece leans on *Is a River Alive?*, the Macfarlane book that supplies its epigraph: "Rivers run through people as surely as they run through places." [The studio's own announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeKCq0fDOD1/?ref=killscreen.com) calls *Water Body* the Special Presentation of LFF Expanded, "the BFI London Film Festival's programme of immersive art, extended reality and video games," curated by Ulrich Schrauth. The same program runs a free games lounge at BFI IMAX this month. Marshmallow Laser Feast has worked this lane for a decade, usually with an engine under the hood. Last month we covered [the studio's Singapore show, where whale songs drive the render engine](https://www.killscreen.com/whale-songs-drive-the-render-engine-in-a-singapore-show/). *Water Body* swaps the whale for the water table under Trafalgar Square, and the controller for a cup you hold with both hands. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/waterbody-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/waterbody-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/waterbody-4.jpg) Ceramic cups by Ludmilla Balkis; stills courtesy Marshmallow Laser Feast. Killscreen covers what happens when games, film and immersive art end up on the same bill, and the free KS Radar letter is where it lands first. Three short issues a week, no charge. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A biennale gives experimental games a month in Montreal URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-biennale-gives-experimental-games-a-month-in-montreal/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T21:04:59.000Z Event details When Oct. 15 to Nov. 15, 2026 Where Arsenal Contemporary Art, Montreal Cost $12 to $25 (CAD); free for children 11 and under [Get tickets](https://tproarsenalang.ticketpro.ca/en/pages/1702069508?aff=aac&ref=killscreen.com) From Oct. 15 to Nov. 15, Arsenal Contemporary Art in Montreal belongs to experimental games. ELEKTRA has themed its 2026 biennale [F(R)ICTION: Art & Games](https://www.elektramontreal.ca/en/activite/exhibition-friction-art-games?ref=killscreen.com): 38 artists across the venue, curated by Lynn Hughes and Ida Toft, who frame friction "as a condition for movement and change" rather than a flaw to design away. 0:00 /0:21 1× Dominik Konečný’s **Hadr*, showing in F(R)ICTION: Art & Games. The [full trailer with sound](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1359760/Hadr/?ref=killscreen.com) is on Steam. The roster reads like a Killscreen index. Anna Anthropy, Pippin Barr, Robert Yang, Liz Ryerson, Davey Wreden and Jaron Lanier are all in. Ayoung Kim brings *Delivery Dancer Simulation*, Mélanie Courtinat *Indulto*, Kara Stone *Known Mysteries, Chapter 1*, and the Paris studio Medulla the perfectly titled *Where Do Dead Malls Go?*. Studio Oleomingus, whose [impossible colonial architectures we covered in 2020](https://www.killscreen.com/studio-oleomingus/), shows *The Indifferent Wonder of Edible Places*, and Dominik Konečný's *Hadr*, a meditation on a floating sheet of cloth, is in the mix too. What makes this more than a very good group show is the curatorial wager. Hughes and Toft put contemporary artists who use games next to the experimental game-making communities that have been at this since the 1980s, and decline to treat the two as different species. Galleries and games keep borrowing each other's rooms at small scale, like the [unplayable games that filled a Peckham gallery in August](https://www.killscreen.com/control-ohsh-projects-peckham/); a biennale handing the form a full month at Arsenal is commitment of a different order. Word came through [the Distraction collective's announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeMALD0jcgt/?ref=killscreen.com), three of whose members have work in the show. It opens Oct. 15 and closes Nov. 15, so a fall trip to Montreal is a must! ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/elektra-ayoung-kim.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/elektra-kara-stone.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/elektra-maize-longboat.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/elektra-riven-chen.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/elektra-oleomingus.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/elektra-medulla.jpg) From left: Ayoung Kim, **Delivery Dancer Simulation*; Kara Stone, **Known Mysteries, Chapter 1*; Maize Longboat, **Terra Nova*; Riven Chen, **Traveling Through a Peach Garden*; Studio Oleomingus, **The Indifferent Wonder of Edible Places*; Medulla, **Where Do Dead Malls Go?*. Images courtesy ELEKTRA A biennale just made the argument this newsletter makes every week: games are an art form with edges worth walking. Keep up with the work almost nobody else covers, free. [Follow the Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### PAF Olomouc Announces 2026 Lineup With Lawrence Lek URL: https://www.killscreen.com/paf-olomouc-announces-2026-lineup-with-lawrence-lek/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:38:24.000Z Event details When Dec. 3 to 6, 2026 Where Olomouc, Czech Republic Cost Four-day pass from 1,600 CZK [Get passes](https://goout.net/cs/paf-olomouc-2026/sztuamy/?ref=killscreen.com) [PAF Olomouc](https://pifpaf.cz/en/events/paf-olomouc-2026?ref=killscreen.com) is a four-day festival of film animation and contemporary art in Olomouc, Czech Republic, run by the curatorial platform PAF. Its 25th edition takes place Dec. 3 to 6 under the theme Bestiary. 0:00 /0:25 1× The lineup announcement for PAF Olomouc 2026\. Video: [PAF](https://www.instagram.com/p/DePD7qBN4HM/?ref=killscreen.com) The [first names announced](https://www.instagram.com/p/DePD7qBN4HM/?ref=killscreen.com) include Lawrence Lek and Nicolas Gourault. Lek, the London artist who builds and films his worlds inside video game engines, will show a selection from his [Smart City trilogy](https://www.killscreen.com/lawrence-lek-ai-consciousness-smart-city-trilogy/) (2021 to 2024). Gourault, a Paris filmmaker who has worked with the research agency Forensic Architecture, will show two films, *Their Eyes* (2025) and *VO* (2020). Also on the bill: the London music and performance project Rat Section, with *Double Vision*, a performance based on television news broadcasts; Europa; Keiska; Labodoble; Sophie Becker; Nikola Balberčáková; Jiří Havlíček and Martin Ožvold; Other Visions CZ, a program curated by Edith Jeřábková; and a symposium. More names are to come. PAF describes a bestiary as a catalogue of beings that may or may not exist in the visible world. This year it says it is turning that logic on the moving image: how images are produced, classified, circulated and transformed. Four-day passes cost 1,600 Czech koruna through Oct. 21 or until they sell out, then 1,800 through Nov. 17 and 2,000 at the door. Single-day passes run 700 to 900 koruna, and children under 12 get in free. PAF advises booking a room in Olomouc early. Killscreen lists the festivals where game-engine film and animation share a bill with contemporary art. The free Radar brings them to your inbox three times a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Li Yi-Fan's Screen Melancholy Opens in Rotterdam URL: https://www.killscreen.com/li-yi-fans-screen-melancholy-opens-in-rotterdam/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:37:06.000Z Event details When Through Nov. 22, 2026 Where Palazzo delle Prigioni, Castello 4209, Venice Event details When Jan. 22 to April 11, 2027 Where Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam *Screen Melancholy* is a 60-minute video installation by the Taiwanese artist [Li Yi-Fan](https://www.instagram.com/liyifanyifanli/?ref=killscreen.com), organized by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum and curated by Raphael Fonseca. It is at the Palazzo delle Prigioni in Venice through Nov. 22 as a [collateral event of the Venice Biennale](https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/6787327/li-yi-fanscreen-melancholy?ref=killscreen.com). On Jan. 22, 2027, it [opens at the Nederlands Fotomuseum](https://www.instagram.com/p/DePGS2Tu-5K/?ref=killscreen.com) in Rotterdam, its first stop after Venice. On a large LED screen, a digital figure plays a filmmaker making a film about talking organs and directs a cast of digital actors like marionettes. The action is set in a digital reconstruction of the Palazzo delle Prigioni, a former prison. Around the screen sit large 3D-printed sculptures of the artist's own hands, feet, arms and legs, and visitors can sit on them. It is the third work Li has made using a game engine to produce images, according to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. The Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, where Li was a resident from 2024 to 2026, describes the method as "a custom-built game engine puppetry toolkit." Li told [ArtAsiaPacific](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYO-lc2kcxc/?ref=killscreen.com) the work "asks how we begin to understand the real structure of a screen." Killscreen counted [exactly two playable games](https://www.killscreen.com/two-playable-games-venice-biennale/) at this year's Venice Biennale. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/li-yi-fan-screen-melancholy-venice-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/li-yi-fan-screen-melancholy-venice-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/li-yi-fan-screen-melancholy-venice-3.jpg) Installation views of **Screen Melancholy* at the Palazzo delle Prigioni, Venice, 2026\. Courtesy the Taipei Fine Arts Museum Killscreen lists the exhibitions where game engines stand in for cameras, the shows almost nobody else is tracking. The free Radar brings them to your inbox three times a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Theo Triantafyllidis Shows Feral Metaverse at Frieze London URL: https://www.killscreen.com/theo-triantafyllidis-shows-feral-metaverse-at-frieze-london/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:35:22.000Z Event details When Oct. 14 to 18, 2026 (Oct. 14 is invitation only) Where Frieze London, Focus section, The Regent’s Park, London Cost Weekend general admission £48 at full price; preview days from £78 [Get tickets](https://www.frieze.com/fairs/frieze-london-frieze-masters/tickets?ref=killscreen.com) For five days in The Regent's Park, the most interesting booth at Frieze London will be a jungle gym. *Feral Metaverse (Spider)*, Theo Triantafyllidis's commission for the 2026 Frieze London Artist Award, is a giant soft spider you are supposed to climb, and climbing it is a login. Get up onto its legs, usually with a stranger's help, and you enter the artist's shared online world, where players cooperate to form temporary group bodies: towers, wheels, group hugs, spiders. 0:00 /1:04 1× The multiplayer game inside **Feral Metaverse (Spider)*, from [Frieze’s announcement reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeJhkpANQd0/?ref=killscreen.com). ![Feral Metaverse installed at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/feral-metaverse-ujazdowski.jpg) **Feral Metaverse* installed in the group show **if/then* at Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, 2025\. Photo: Błażej Pindor, via Frieze. *Feral Metaverse* has been growing in public since 2023 as a thought experiment: what would shared digital space look like if it were organized around cooperation, vulnerability, awkwardness and care instead of engagement? It opened with a performance at Onassis ONX's Group Hug in New York in 2024 and showed in Warsaw last year, and the Frieze edition is its biggest body yet. "It feels like a supported leap of faith, and a real next step for the work," Triantafyllidis said in the [award announcement](https://press.frieze.com/?p=45014&ref=killscreen.com). Killscreen covered the artist’s [collisions of real-time graphics and live performance](https://www.killscreen.com/theo-triantafyllidis-clashing-real-time-graphics-with-live-performance/) back in 2020, and the through-line holds: the body first, the simulation in service of it. The commission is co-produced with [Forma](https://forma.org.uk/projects/theo-triantafyllidis-frieze-london-artist-award-2026?ref=killscreen.com) and, for the first time in the award's 11 years, supported by Google Arts & Culture; the fabrication team used Gemini for sketches and renders, then treated the output as raw sculptural material. News of the work traveled the way art news travels now, through a [Financial Times portrait session](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeOt52eCITT/?ref=killscreen.com) posted to Instagram. Art fairs keep discovering that a game pipeline is an exhibition pipeline, something [Gabriel Massan proved at Frieze Seoul](https://www.killscreen.com/gabriel-massan-took-a-game-pipeline-to-frieze-seoul/) just last month. Frieze London runs Oct. 14 to 18; the spider is in the Focus section, and it does not bite. Killscreen has argued for games as gallery material since 2010, and the Radar keeps the argument going three times a week, free, in your inbox. [Follow the Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Takakurakazuki Debuts Ghost Gion Matsuri at PAC-MAN Show URL: https://www.killscreen.com/takakurakazuki-debuts-ghost-gion-matsuri-at-pac-man-show/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:34:05.000Z Event details When Oct. 17 to Dec. 13, 2026 Where BnA Alter Museum, 267-1 Tenmacho, Shimogyo-ku, Kyoto Cost Free *Ghost Gion Matsuri*, the new work [Takakurakazuki announced](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeVsTpAEkkq/?ref=killscreen.com) for the show, is a bird's-eye pixel panorama of Kyoto with *PAC-MAN*'s ghosts out in force: they wait at crosswalks, cluster near shrine gates and drift past tiled rooftops while a red festival procession snakes through the street grid. Takakurakazuki, born in 1987 and now lecturing at Kyoto University of the Arts, works in pixel animation, 3DCG and VR to reread contemporary art through Buddhist philosophy, "exploring embodiment and ritual through games and characters," as the artist's own statement puts it. The Gion Matsuri began as a ninth-century rite to appease plague spirits, so a parade of arcade ghosts is not a cameo but a homecoming. ![Full vertical pixel panorama of Kyoto filled with PAC-MAN ghosts, Ghost Gion Matsuri by Takakurakazuki](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/ghost-gion-matsuri-takakurakazuki.jpg) The full **Ghost Gion Matsuri* (2026) by Takakurakazuki. PAC-MAN™ and © Bandai Namco Entertainment Inc. It anchors *IP-ART EXHIBITION: PAC-MAN*, a seven-artist show at [BnA Alter Museum](https://bnaaltermuseum.com/event/ip-art%5Fpac-man/?ref=killscreen.com), the Kyoto art hotel built around a 10-story vertical gallery. The show is official in the fullest sense: planned by Akiyoshi Mishima, creative director of Bandai Namco's IP-ART program, produced by Bandai Namco Experience with the character's rights holder, and timed to the second Kyoto Station Building Art Festival, which turns the station's grand staircase into a giant game field through Nov. 3\. The museum run opens Oct. 17 and hangs through Dec. 13, with every work for sale. Also showing: Ayaka Nishihara, WEI-NI LU and Riku Matsuzaki, plus the yuzen-dyeing kimono atelier Toyowado, which has reproduced Itō Jakuchū in silk, and GAAAT and ALAGAN. Killscreen tracks the gallery shows, screenings and deadlines where games keep crossing into the art world, and most never get listed anywhere else. The free KS Radar letter brings the best of them to your inbox three times a week. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Playfool's The Server Puts a Data Center Vacuum in the V&A URL: https://www.killscreen.com/playfools-the-server-puts-a-data-center-vacuum-in-the-v-a/ Last updated: 2026-10-16T21:06:51.000Z Event details When Sept. 12 to Oct. 18, 2026 Where V&A South Kensington, Photography, Room 108, Cromwell Road, London Cost Free *The Server* is a game installation by [Playfool](https://www.killscreen.com/playfool-built-a-working-bot-farm-that-hands-you-the-controls/), the London duo Daniel Coppen and Saki Maruyama, and the game is a shift. You pick up a real data-center vacuum and clean digital dust off a sculptural server cabinet while its screen maps what you have missed, in a choreography drawn from the V&A's own daily routine of dusting the collection. At the end the machine prints a receipt thanking you for keeping the server alive. It is a maintenance simulator aimed at the one job in a data center that still resists automation. 0:00 /1:34 1× Playfool’s documentation film for **The Server* (2026), with sound by Matteo Bandi. Via [the studio’s Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DeJ2fimqU56/?ref=killscreen.com). The piece is this year's Emerging Designer Commission at the V&A in South Kensington, and it opened with London Design Festival on Sept. 12\. The timing is pointed: nearly 100 new UK data centers are reportedly planned by 2030, and against that acceleration Playfool offers, in the studio's words, "the hidden, endless labour of maintenance." It hangs in the museum's Photography gallery, Room 108, through Oct. 18. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/playfool-the-server-02.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/playfool-the-server-04.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/playfool-the-server-05.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/playfool-the-server-06.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/playfool-the-server-07.jpg) Visitors cleaning **The Server*. Photographs via [Playfool](https://www.studioplayfool.com/the-server?ref=killscreen.com) The commission was curated by Carrie Chan and produced by Katya Spiers, with fabrication by Art & Assembly and sound design by Matteo Bandi. The studio posted a [behind-the-scenes look at the build](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeO%5Fc5iCCmk/?ref=killscreen.com) last week, down to a shot of the cabinet’s guts captioned with an invitation to guess how it works. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/server-bts-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/server-bts-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/server-bts-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/server-bts-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/server-bts-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/server-bts-6.jpg) Building and installing **The Server*, from [Playfool’s behind-the-scenes carousel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeO%5Fc5iCCmk/?ref=killscreen.com). Killscreen tracks the installations, shows and commissions where games cross into museums, and most close before anyone lists them. The free KS Radar letter gets them to you while there is still time to go. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Tatiana Vilela dos Santos Opens ALT+CTRL@home Jam URL: https://www.killscreen.com/tatiana-vilela-dos-santos-opens-alt-ctrl-home-jam/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:48:37.000Z Event details When Submissions open through July 10, 2027 Where Online, on itch.io [Join the jam](https://itch.io/jam/altctrlhome2026?ref=killscreen.com) The brief for ALT+CTRL@home fits in one sentence: make a game that uses a standard controller in a weird, unexpected or unconventional way. Household objects count as controllers too, the jam is pitched at beginners as much as veterans, and the window is enormous. Submissions [opened Oct. 10](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeT51okAPmI/?ref=killscreen.com) and stay open through July 10, 2027, nine months to tinker on itch.io's terms, with one instruction on the page: "show us how your game works." ![A mosaic of small photos of hands, pets and household objects used as game controllers in past ALT+CTRL@home entries](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/altctrl-jam-2.jpg) Entries from earlier editions of the jam, from [the announcement carousel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeT51okAPmI/?ref=killscreen.com). The jam has run since 2020 as the stay-home wing of the alternative-controller scene, built to pull the form out of festival booths and into living rooms. It is the same scene whose festival end [Killscreen watched at Wonderville](https://www.killscreen.com/at-wonderville-nine-games-replaced-the-gamepad-entirely/) in September, where nine games replaced the gamepad entirely; this is the version anyone can enter without building a cabinet. Behind it is Tatiana Vilela dos Santos, who has built games with hand-made interfaces under the MechBird banner since 2012, among them *Isochrone*, *BLACKBOX* and *Nuée*. A retrospective of that work, *Souvenirs d'Ar(t)cade*, is up free at Université Paul-Valéry in Montpellier through Oct. 18. Killscreen lists the open calls, jams and deadlines that keep experimental play alive, usually long before the entries roll in. The free KS Radar letter puts the next one in your inbox three times a week. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### 2021 Turns One Audience Member Into a Dying Veteran URL: https://www.killscreen.com/guilty-by-association-stages-2021-at-the-wirtz-center/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:33:20.000Z Event details When Nov. 12 to 14, 2026, 7:30 p.m.; Nov. 14 also 2 p.m. online Where Wirtz Center, Northwestern University, Chicago Cost $20; $12 students [Get tickets](https://ci.ovationtix.com/1771/production/1279810?ref=killscreen.com) *2021* puts a single audience member on the controller each night. They play Brian, an unhoused veteran reliving a final few weeks in a looping digital hospital, with missions as blunt as Leave Hospital and Find Medication, while Brian's daughter narrates from the stage and an AI reconstruction of the father's voice answers back. It is a grief game performed in public, with the question of digital resurrection placed in the hands of a room full of witnesses. 0:00 /0:34 1× Guilty by Association’s trailer for the Chicago run of **2021*. Via [the company’s Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DeTj-A2o8yw/?ref=killscreen.com). The Chicago run lands at Northwestern's Wirtz Center Nov. 12 to 14, through the Wirtz Artist in Residence program; [the company announced the dates](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DeTj-A2o8yw/?ref=killscreen.com) last week. The piece is produced by Guilty by Association, co-produced by The Elbow Theatre and STUDIO FUNFUG, and was developed with support from Canada's National Creation Fund and Theater Mitu. Chicago is a tour stop rather than a premiere, following runs in New York and at Vancouver's PuSh festival. The makers come out of games-adjacent theatre: Patrick Blenkarn is half of the team behind [*asses.masses*](https://www.killscreen.com/asses-masses-blenkarn-lim-collective-play/), the eight-hour performance that passed one controller through a hundred strangers' hands, and Cole Lewis and Sam Ferguson complete the trio under the Guilty by Association banner. Killscreen tracks the performances, screenings and runs where games cross onto stages, and most are gone after a weekend. The free KS Radar letter gets them to you while there are still seats. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Miriam Simun Shows Contact Zone (Level 3) at The Window URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-simulated-lynx-plays-24-hours-a-day-in-a-london-window/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T21:05:22.000Z Event details When Through Jan. 3, 2027 (24 hours a day) Where The Window, Time & Life building, Bruton Street, London *Contact Zone (Level 3)* is a new work by the artist [Miriam Simun](https://www.miriamsimun.xyz/thewindow?ref=killscreen.com), showing at The Window, a public art site run by the CHANEL Culture Fund at the Time & Life building on Bruton Street in London. It is on view 24 hours a day through Jan. 3, 2027\. This is the work's first public showing. ![A rendering of a street-level window in a stone facade showing a blue forest scene from Contact Zone (Level 3).](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/simun-contact-zone-level-3-mock.jpg) A mockup of **Contact Zone (Level 3)* at The Window. Image: Miriam Simun The piece runs 12 minutes. At its center is a GPS-collared lynx reintroduced into the Swiss Alps as part of a wider European rewilding effort. Simun generated the work through a game-engine simulation that links four things: the lynx, a forest biome, a gut microbiome and AI neural networks. The creatures and settings onscreen are composites of all four. Stills show a snowbound forest lit by a camera-trap flash, a red tunnel lined with cells and a lynx's face pressed close to the lens. Simun's page for the work ends on a question: if observing, analyzing and intervening in rewilding were left entirely to AI, what kind of nature would emerge? Simun [announced the showing](https://www.instagram.com/p/DePE0PcsSWc/?ref=killscreen.com) on Oct. 8. It is the third entry in a series. *Contact Zone (Level 1)*, from 2024, is an endlessly iterating computer-generated animation that streams 24 hours a day as a live forest webcam. *Contact Zone (Level 2)* is a four-channel video installation. Earlier artists at The Window include LuYang, Cao Fei, [Jakob Kudsk Steensen](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/jakob-kudsk-steensen/) and Universal Everything. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/simun-contact-zone-level-3-a.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/simun-contact-zone-level-3-b.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/simun-contact-zone-level-3-c.jpg) Stills from **Contact Zone (Level 3)*. Images: Miriam Simun Killscreen tracks the public artworks and exhibitions built in game engines that almost nobody else lists. The free Radar brings them to your inbox three times a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Jian Chen and Yuet Ching Lo Show Games at the Bartlett URL: https://www.killscreen.com/two-architecture-students-show-games-at-the-bartlett/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T21:04:32.000Z Event details When Through Oct. 11, 2026 (weekdays 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., weekends 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.) Where The Bartlett School of Architecture, 22 Gordon Street, London Cost Free The [Bartlett Autumn Show 2026](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/events/2026/sep/bartlett-autumn-show-2026?ref=killscreen.com) is the annual exhibition of postgraduate work at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London. Seven courses take part, including the Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch, whose students make films, games and VR pieces as design projects. It runs through Oct. 11 at 22 Gordon Street, and the [full show is also online](https://shows.bartlettarchucl.com/?ref=killscreen.com). 0:00 /0:36 1× **NIBO* by Jian Chen. Video: [Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeM9ApTxIkP/?ref=killscreen.com) *NIBO*, by Jian Chen, is a 2.5D side-scrolling narrative puzzle game set deep underground in a distant future, in a world based on Boulby Mine in North Yorkshire. The player switches between two characters: NIBO, a mining robot, and an ancient slime mold. The robot walks a fixed side-on path and moves objects. The mold crosses walls and ceilings, grows over surfaces and breaks weakened structures from inside. While the player controls the mold, slow geological change becomes visible and opens new paths for the robot. The course [posted footage](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeM9ApTxIkP/?ref=killscreen.com) on Oct. 7. *The Noon Loop*, by Yuet Ching Lo, is a restaurant seating simulation set in a Hong Kong diner at lunch, where strangers share tables to save space and time. The player fits groups of customers into a procedurally generated floor plan. Some customer types dislike sitting together, regulars have favorite spots, and events in the city change who walks in. Lo plans to release it on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/5331430/The%5FNoon%5FLoop/?ref=killscreen.com) in the fourth quarter of 2026, and a [trailer](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeJkiL%5FOm69/?ref=killscreen.com) is on the course's Instagram. 0:00 /0:37 1× Trailer for **The Noon Loop* by Yuet Ching Lo. Video: [Cinematic and Videogame Architecture MArch](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeJkiL%5FOm69/?ref=killscreen.com) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nibo-robot.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nibo-cave.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nibo-end.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/the-noon-loop-781b95.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/the-noon-loop-5f8906.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/the-noon-loop-f01a52.jpg) Top row: **NIBO* by Jian Chen. Bottom row: **The Noon Loop* by Yuet Ching Lo. Killscreen lists the degree shows, screenings and showcases where games turn up outside the games industry. The free Radar brings them to your inbox three times a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A rhinestone is the only controller in Moled to Gold URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-rhinestone-is-the-only-controller-in-moled-to-gold/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T20:25:12.000Z Event details When Through Oct. 11, 2026 (Wednesday to Sunday, noon to 6 p.m.) Where Art/Space 114, 114 W. 4th St., Los Angeles You open a shrine-like door and a mirror looks back. Then comes the one move the piece gives you: stick a rhinestone somewhere on your own face. A camera reads the placement, and a language model trained on the meanings of Chinese mole reading, the centuries-old practice of 痣相, writes you a fortune on the spot. That is the whole approach of *Moled to Gold* (点痣成金), Jane Jianhan Lu's divination mirror, and it is the best kind of game grammar: a single verb with real stakes. The [documentation ](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeNoonkNuLS/?ref=killscreen.com) shows the ritual end to end. Physiognomy was already a predictive model, a system that claimed to read fate off a face long before anyone said "inference." Lu wires that old model into a new one and then hands you the input. You choose where the mole goes, so every reading is half yours, which the [project notes](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeNnjjxGqo5/?ref=killscreen.com) name outright: the visitor is "both the subject and co-author of the prediction." Most AI art asks you to watch a system hallucinate. This one asks you to *seed* it, and the difference is the difference between a screening and a séance. The piece anchors [*Ctrl+Save*](https://www.artspace114.com/journal/ctrlsave?ref=killscreen.com), a group show presented by Kive Studio and curated by its co-directors Hyoeun Kang and Isabel Lotus, with Yasaman Sheri as curatorial advisor and Lauren Lee McCarthy contributing. The show asks what can and cannot be saved, a question that lands differently when the thing on file is your face. Killscreen has always had a soft spot for [fortune machines that make you work for the prophecy](https://www.killscreen.com/%5Fhowler%5F-improves-fortune-tellers-adding-psychedelic/), and this is the rare one where you are the deck being read. Lu has good company. Alice Bucknell, who [talked to Killscreen last year](https://www.killscreen.com/alice-bucknell-multiplayer-games-interspecies-cooperation/) about pollination simulators and quantum love stories, shows *Ground Truthing*, a 17-minute simulation film and game environment that rebuilds ecologically unstable biomes from 3D scans inside a game engine to ask how satellites and GPS shape the way we see the planet. Kordae Jatafa Henry's [*Earth Mother, Sky Father*](https://www.onassis.org/art/works/earth-mother-sky-father-2030?ref=killscreen.com) is an eight-minute music film set in 2030, in a Congo that keeps its rare earth minerals at home and turns mining into ritual, with Storyboard P dancing as an excavation programmer to the sound of Shabazz Palaces. Aurora Mititelu's [*Abel & I*](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeU4UV6AdnQ/?ref=killscreen.com) is a live simulation in Unreal Engine, driven by an LLM agent and a custom Python script: visitors text Abel, a synthetic male version of the artist assembled from Mititelu's archive of messages with former partners, on an iPhone placed on a bed, and the exchange unfolds in real time. Romi Morrison's *To Create Love With Dry Eyes* rounds out the show. *Ctrl+Save* closes Sunday, Oct. 11\. Art/Space 114, 114 W. 4th St. in downtown Los Angeles, is open Wednesday through Sunday, noon to 6 p.m. Killscreen tracks play into galleries, séances and systems almost nobody else covers. The Radar brings it to your inbox free, three times a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Walk, Sit, Listen: What to Play, October 9 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/walk-sit-listen-what-to-play-october-9/ Last updated: 2026-10-10T21:10:16.000Z Guess I’ll take a seat. _This post is for subscribers on the Helping Hand and Trustee tiers only._ ### Sticky notes storyboarded Blood Dungeon's animated intro URL: https://www.killscreen.com/sticky-notes-storyboarded-blood-dungeons-animated-intro/ Last updated: 2026-10-10T21:04:41.000Z Before a single frame of the *Blood Dungeon* intro existed, there was a notebook full of sticky notes. Dann Beeson, the Baltimore artist [Messhof credits](https://www.messhof.com/blooddungeon?ref=killscreen.com) for the game's intro video, starts by finding a song with the right mood and playing it on a loop, drawing tiny panels on a pad, then shuffling them around and crossing them out until the sequence holds. "It looks like a toddler drew it all," Beeson says in [a behind-the-scenes video](https://www.instagram.com/p/DceRE2CKr9h/?ref=killscreen.com) posted the day the game came out. 0:00 /0:30 1× The first 30 seconds of the **Blood Dungeon* animated intro, drawn by Dann Beeson. The [full version, with sound](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2431080/Blood%5FDungeon/?ref=killscreen.com), is on Steam. The plan for the finished thing was just as contrary: muted backgrounds, big loud characters, and a camera that swings through the dungeon like a 3D film while everyone in front of it stays flat and hand-drawn. "I kind of wanted a bad aesthetic," Beeson says. The hope was that people would watch it and wonder why anyone would make that choice. Getting something to look that wrong took real labor. Beeson, mostly a 3D artist, built the dungeon as a 3D set so the camera could roam, roughed out the action with 3D stand-ins for the cast, then drew over all of it by hand, shot by shot, dropping finished animation into the sticky-note version as each piece was done. Explosions, gunfire and camera shake went on last. Sound went to Thomas Hoey, the game's composer. I like this because the trailer is usually the part of a game that gets sanded smooth. Mark Essen's studio has never worked that way. [Our Issue 01 profile](https://www.killscreen.com/mark-essen-messhof-experimental-game-design-discomfort/) described a designer whose games thrive on discomfort, and [*Blood Dungeon*](https://www.killscreen.com/messhofs-blood-dungeon-a-platforming-autoshooter-arrives-aug-25/) is the first Messhof release since *Nidhogg* with Essen's own art back onscreen. The intro fits right in: one animator, a pad of sticky notes, and a look that is ugly on purpose. The [full intro](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2431080/Blood%5FDungeon/?ref=killscreen.com) is on the game's Steam page. Watch it with the sound on. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/blood-dungeon-intro-run.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/blood-dungeon-intro-turtle.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/blood-dungeon-intro-ensemble.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/blood-dungeon-play-worm.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/blood-dungeon-play-lasers.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/blood-dungeon-play-bats.jpg) Top row: frames from Beeson's intro. Bottom row: **Blood Dungeon* as it plays (via [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2431080/Blood%5FDungeon/?ref=killscreen.com)). Killscreen goes looking for the handmade corners of game culture, down to who drew the trailer. The free newsletter brings what we find to your inbox. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### For Slum Lord's cover, Mason Lindroth stayed in clay URL: https://www.killscreen.com/for-slum-lords-cover-mason-lindroth-stayed-in-clay/ Last updated: 2026-10-09T23:47:41.000Z A new Mason Lindroth image is an event in itself these days—the *Hylics* artist surfaces rarely, and a new image usually arrives from inside that same claymation universe. So it caught my attention that [the cover posted to Instagram last week](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdIRQESEaps/?ref=killscreen.com) is for someone else's game entirely: *Slum Lord*, a tabletop tenant simulator by Tanner Simpson of Simpso Miniatures, [free to download on itch.io](https://simpsominiatures.itch.io/slum-lord?ref=killscreen.com). *Slum Lord* itself deserves the attention it is getting. Simpson bills it as a "Tabletop Residential Slice-of-Life Emergent Narrative Simulator"—a solo-play system where you generate an apartment complex and, if the mood takes you, physically model it in miniature, while your tenants live autonomous lives governed by dice rolls and tables. In-game time passes at the speed of real time. The rules document is upfront about its own excess: there are deliberately more gauges than anyone could track, and, in Simpson's words, "The system does not intend to be fun; it exists as an experiential exercise." The downloads even include a folder of alternate covers, which is where Lindroth's contribution formally lives. The pairing makes deep sense. Lindroth built a whole visual language out of clay, plasticine, and hand-digitized matter—we profiled [the material world of Mason Lindroth](https://www.killscreen.com/material-world-mason-lindroth/) back in 2015—and *Slum Lord* is a videogame sensibility passing back out of the screen into physical craft. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/hylics2-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/hylics2-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/hylics2-4.jpg) The material language **Slum Lord*’s alternate cover speaks: scenes from **Hylics 2*. Images: Mason Lindroth We’ve followed Mason Lindroth’s clay since 2015, and we’ll follow it wherever it goes next. The free newsletter keeps you close behind. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Inside Keiken’s giant mask, you wait to be reborn URL: https://www.killscreen.com/inside-keikens-giant-mask-you-wait-to-be-reborn/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:38:40.000Z Event details When Through Jan. 17, 2027 Where BALTIC, Level 2, Gateshead Cost Free Every roleplaying game starts in the same room: the one where you pick a body. Keiken built that room at architectural scale. *The Divine Puppeteer*, now installed at [BALTIC in Gateshead](https://baltic.art/whats-on/v8T-keikenseeds-stones-and-future-bones/?ref=killscreen.com), is a monumental fiberglass mask you step up to and wear; for 11 minutes, a binaural sound journey puts you in the head of a deity sitting in a waiting room, flicking through a catalogue of possible bodies and preparing to be reborn. A Morphogenic Angel? Something more like a snail? The [announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeBsFfNiv7n/?ref=killscreen.com) asks: what might it mean to move between species, bodies and forms of consciousness? The mask has a past life of its own. It premiered at Manchester International Festival in 2025, made with the footballer Ella Toone , whose inner world supplies the story, with script and sound by Keiken's Isabel Ramos. At BALTIC it returns with a newly commissioned sound work that folds it into the collective's larger cosmology, the one Killscreen has been tracking since [*Morphogenic Angels* imagined post-human bodies 1,000 years out](https://www.killscreen.com/keiken-morphogenic-angels-post-human-game-designretry/). The show around it, *Seeds, Stones, and Future Bones*, is Keiken's first major exhibition in a UK public gallery, and it includes *Morphogenic Angels: Chapter 1*, the collective's science-fiction action game whose combat system is subverted into a display of how your energy affects the people around you. The sculptural and audio work grew partly from research with marginalized communities, including the Japanese deafblind community. ![A visitor wearing Keiken's Divine Puppeteer mask](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/divine-puppeteer-mif.jpg) Wearing the mask at Manchester International Festival, 2025\. Photo: Michael Pollard and Hana Omori (Keiken). Choosing a body becomes slow, public, and a bet on collective belief, the collective described to Killscreen in [a 2021 conversation about CGI cinema](https://www.killscreen.com/keiken/). Entry is free, Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., through Jan. 17, 2027. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/divine-puppeteer-2.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/divine-puppeteer-3.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/morphogenic-angels-still.webp) **The Divine Puppeteer* at Factory International, 2025, and a still from **Morphogenic Angels: Chapter 1*. Images: Keiken. Killscreen follows play out of the console and into fiberglass, and the Radar carries it free to your inbox three times a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### When visitors trade shares, a border bridge changes shape URL: https://www.killscreen.com/when-visitors-trade-shares-a-border-bridge-changes-shape/ Last updated: 2026-10-10T19:46:17.000Z [*Adoquines para el Guadiana*](https://piksel.no/2026/10/06/brostein-for-dekonstruksjion-adoquines-para-el-guadiana?ref=killscreen.com) closed Oct. 9, 2026, at the Museo Etnográfico Extremeño «González Santana» in Olivenza, Spain. It opened Sept. 30. 0:00 /0:12 1× Orbiting the bridge and adding bricks in *Brostein*, the browser version. Video: Killscreen capture Maite Cajaraville and Gisle Frøysland of Piksel made it. The work turns the ruined Ajuda Bridge, on the border between Spain and Portugal, into a game. Data centers, lithium mines and green hydrogen plants float above the bridge. Visitors buy or sell shares in them. Each decision adds or removes paving stones. A [browser version](https://brostein.piksel.org/?ref=killscreen.com) is still online under the name *Brostein*. It tracks 10 measures as the bridge changes, from water consumption and air pollution to local employment and social conflict. The artists presented the piece on its final day, according to [Piksel's announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeOdOyOgQo2/?ref=killscreen.com). It was part of *Tras el telón de corcho*, a Plataforma MAL program curated by José Iglesias García-Arenal for Spain's 9th Culture and Ruralities Forum. ![The poster for Adoquines para el Guadiana in Olivenza.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/adoquines-para-el-guadiana-poster.jpg) The poster for the Olivenza run. Image: Piksel Killscreen covers small political games that almost nobody else writes about. The Radar brings them to your inbox free, three times a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Strangers decode the headlines in a Kingston churchyard URL: https://www.killscreen.com/strangers-decode-the-headlines-in-a-kingston-churchyard/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T18:29:24.000Z Event details When Oct. 10 and 11, 2026, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 2 to 5 p.m. Where O+ Festival, Old Dutch Churchyard, Kingston, N.Y. (Sunday afternoon at the O+ Exchange Space) [Get a wristband](https://opositivefestival.org/wristbands/?ref=killscreen.com) This weekend, the headlines get read like a spread of cards. Marina Zurkow and Abigail Simon are running four open sessions of *The Iceberg*, their self-made image deck, at the [O+ Festival](https://opositivefestival.org/events/o-festival-kingston-2026/?ref=killscreen.com) in Kingston, N.Y. [The announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeKWi23PjLZ/?ref=killscreen.com) pitches the event in apocalyptic terms: the world is "burning, melting, fighting, mortgaged to the hilt," so is it collapsing or evolving? 0:00 /0:04 1× Cards from **The Iceberg*, via [the makers’ announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeKWi23PjLZ/?ref=killscreen.com). The deck sits, by their own description, somewhere between Tarot and a Rorschach test. A session opens on a Journey Map that poses a question, then three cards go face down on the table and turn over one at a time while everyone says what they see, repositioning the cards as the story firms up. [The rulebook's best line](https://theiceberg.info/?ref=killscreen.com) doubles as a theory of conversation: "The game is over when the cards have stopped speaking." Zurkow and Simon, media artists whose work has shown everywhere from MoMA to the Museum of the City of New York, call their players a hive mind decoding "the hidden systems beneath the headlines," with climate change as the tornado in the room. The deck has done street duty before, at Art in Odd Places on 14th Street in 2024; a churchyard table during a festival weekend (the full festival runs Oct. 9 to 11) suits a game whose whole mechanic is strangers agreeing to think in public. Decks keep turning up at the edges of games, and they travel lighter than any engine. In August we covered [the tarot deck that grew out of Paloma Dawkins's videogames](https://www.killscreen.com/paloma-dawkins-fools-journey-tarot/); that one pointed inward, at the drawing hand. *The Iceberg* points the same grammar outward, at the front page, and asks the table to play it together. Killscreen tracks play wherever it turns up, including a churchyard card table. The free KS Radar letter catches the next one while it can still be seen. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Brass, Flesh and a Genius Grant [Podcast] URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/brass-flesh-and-a-genius-grant-podcast/ Last updated: 2026-10-10T21:08:07.000Z I open with a fan who has rebuilt [*P.T.* from its own PS4 code](https://www.killscreen.com/p-t-is-being-rebuilt-for-pc-from-its-own-ps4-code/), which raises the question under the whole hour: when a game can disappear, who is responsible for keeping it? [Danny Snelson](https://dss-edit.com/?ref=killscreen.com) calls in from New York with a ZipDeck in tow, and we take a detour through Zach Cregger's *Resident Evil*, which Danny calls a faithful betrayal. The A story is my interview with [Murlo](https://www.killscreen.com/murlo-something-beautiful-interview/), the Manchester producer Chris Pell, who left a decade of DJing to build *Something Beautiful* alone, a point-and-click rhythm game with an album inside it and jukeboxes made of flesh. I play three clips from our conversation: why he left performance, what a good interaction feels like, and the lineage he claims, from William Blake and Goya to the Luddites. Danny reads Blake as a printmaker who controlled every stage of production and finds a model there for the solo developer. Then two quick ones that rhyme with Murlo's sense of touch: Sahej Rahal's [*Atithi*](https://www.killscreen.com/a-brass-plate-is-the-controller-in-sahej-rahals-atithi/), which you play by dragging your hands across brass, and Berrysoft's [*CORPSE FARM*](https://www.killscreen.com/the-crop-is-flesh-in-berrysofts-corpse-farm/), where the crop is flesh. In the news, Zhou Yichen is pressing [*GRANDMA*](https://www.killscreen.com/zhou-yichens-grandma-is-coming-to-a-metal-cartridge/) onto 5,000 metal Game Boy cartridges because a story this permanent should not live in plastic, and Danny checks whether metal actually outlasts plastic. It does not. Walaber's [*Reason and Rhyme*](https://www.killscreen.com/walabers-reason-and-rhyme-is-co-op-for-exactly-two/) is built for exactly two players, and Unrelated Studio's [*Lofsöng*](https://www.killscreen.com/a-nuclear-warning-is-the-level-design-in-lofsong/) turns the problem of marking a nuclear waste site into level design. Then Joseph DeLappe and Biome Collective's [game about Guantánamo](https://www.killscreen.com/a-game-about-guantanamo-is-being-built-with-its-survivor/), made with Mansoor Adayfi, who was held there for 14 years without charge. We close on [Christine Sun Kim's MacArthur](https://www.killscreen.com/christine-sun-kims-macarthur-brings-games-one-step-closer/), whose citation names a work you play. I have been waiting for that since 2014\. Danny asks what the word genius does to work made by many hands. ## Links - [Murlo Builds a World You Can Play](https://www.killscreen.com/murlo-something-beautiful-interview/), my feature on *Something Beautiful* - [P.T. is being rebuilt for PC from its own PS4 code](https://www.killscreen.com/p-t-is-being-rebuilt-for-pc-from-its-own-ps4-code/) - [Scoring Fear: The Composers Behind Weapons and Dead Space](https://www.killscreen.com/cross-conversations-horror-ryan-holladay-jason-graves/) - [Vadim Nickel on sound design](https://www.killscreen.com/sound-design-is-the-most-ignored-art-form-in-games-one-researcher-is-changing-that/) - [Bennett Foddy's Games Taste Like Gasoline](https://www.killscreen.com/bennett-foddy-baby-steps-interview/) - [Sahej Rahal's Atithi interrupts our sense of touch](https://www.killscreen.com/a-brass-plate-is-the-controller-in-sahej-rahals-atithi/) - [The crop is flesh in Berrysoft's CORPSE FARM](https://www.killscreen.com/the-crop-is-flesh-in-berrysofts-corpse-farm/) - [Zhou Yichen's GRANDMA is coming to a metal cartridge](https://www.killscreen.com/zhou-yichens-grandma-is-coming-to-a-metal-cartridge/) - [GRANDMA on Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pbtailsplanet/grandma-turn-someone-you-love-into-a-pixel-that-never-fades?ref=killscreen.com) - [Walaber's Reason and Rhyme is co-op for exactly two](https://www.killscreen.com/walabers-reason-and-rhyme-is-co-op-for-exactly-two/) - [Lofsöng hides a nuclear warning](https://www.killscreen.com/a-nuclear-warning-is-the-level-design-in-lofsong/) - [A game about Guantánamo is being built with its survivor](https://www.killscreen.com/a-game-about-guantanamo-is-being-built-with-its-survivor/) - [Christine Sun Kim's MacArthur brings games one step closer](https://www.killscreen.com/christine-sun-kims-macarthur-brings-games-one-step-closer/) - [Christine Sun Kim, MacArthur Fellow](https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2026/christine-sun-kim?ref=killscreen.com) - [Christine Sun Kim, Up and Away, Hyundai Artlab](https://artlab.hyundai.com/commissions/christine-kim-up-and-away-game?ref=killscreen.com) - [Kill Screen in 2014: Will a game designer ever win a MacArthur "genius" grant?](https://www.killscreen.com/will-game-designer-ever-win-macarthur-genius-grant/) - [The Killscreen Horror Collection](https://www.killscreen.com/horror-collection/) - [Danny Snelson](https://dss-edit.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *Hosted by Jamin Warren with Danny Snelson. Music by* [*Nick Sylvester*](https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?ref=killscreen.com)*.* ### MoMA’s lobby becomes a living swamp for five months URL: https://www.killscreen.com/momas-lobby-becomes-a-living-swamp-for-five-months/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:38:41.000Z Event details When Oct. 12, 2026 to March 7, 2027 Where MoMA, Agnes Gund Garden Lobby, New York From Oct. 12, the first room you hit at MoMA runs a marsh in real time. *Jakob Kudsk Steensen: Wetland* installs *Berl-Berl*, the artist's live simulation of Berlin's drowned wetlands, in the Agnes Gund Garden Lobby through March 7, 2027\. For five months, the museum's ground floor hosts a world that is always running: moving image and sound computed on the spot, never the same pass twice. 0:00 /0:36 1× **Berl-Berl* installed at ARoS Museum of Art, 2022; [watch the full walkthrough with sound on the artist’s Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/765418012?ref=killscreen.com). *Berl-Berl* started in the field. Steensen built it from months in Brandenburg's swamps and the archives of Berlin's Museum für Naturkunde, scanning rocks and flora with macro photogrammetry and assembling them in a game engine, with vocals by Arca and songs from Sorbian and Slavic traditions threaded through the sound. It premiered in 2021 at Halle am Berghain, commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, and has kept mutating since. *Wetland* is the next evolution, not a rehang. In [the announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeKDFH4Dfrr/?ref=killscreen.com), Steensen writes that the simulation "shifts from a total view towards a more fragmented, insect-like perspective." The god's-eye swamp becomes a swamp at compound-eye height, which is how we all want to see a wetland anyway: nothing that lives in one ever sees the whole thing. The presentation is organized by Juyeon Song and Lydia Mullin, per [the exhibition page](https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5936?ref=killscreen.com). It's been great watching Steensen's practice since [2021](https://www.killscreen.com/dreaming-up-a-digital-swamp/), when Killscreen first wrote about *Berl-Berl* as a wetland dreamed into software, and [we sat down with Steensen this spring](https://www.killscreen.com/jacob-kudsk-steensen-ecological-game-engine-art/) to talk about engines as instruments for the landscapes we are losing. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/wetland-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/wetland-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/wetland-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/wetland-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/wetland-6.jpg) Images from the artist’s announcement. Courtesy Jakob Kudsk Steensen. We have followed this swamp since 2021, and the free KS Radar letter is where the next chapter lands first. Three short issues a week on games and the art they feed. [Follow along free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Outland Game Night goes public with Cosmo D on Oct. 13 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/outland-game-night-goes-public-with-cosmo-d-on-oct-13/ Last updated: 2026-10-10T03:31:34.000Z Event details When Oct. 13, 2026 Where Onassis ONX Studio, New York [RSVP](https://outlandart.substack.com/p/game-night-at-onx-oct-13) Since April, Onassis ONX Studio in Manhattan has been hosting Outland Game Night as an invite-only experiment: a maker sits down at their own unfinished game, plays it for the room, and explains the decisions as they go. On Tuesday, Oct. 13, [the series goes public for the first time](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeMrcOHuzrB/?ref=killscreen.com). 0:00 /0:21 1× Cosmo D’s **Moves of the Diamond Hand*, in early access now. The [full trailer with sound](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2778210/Moves%5FOf%5FThe%5FDiamond%5FHand/?ref=killscreen.com) is on Steam. The opening bill pairs two generations of New York game-making. Lawra Suits Clark is a co-founder of Babycastles, the volunteer-run gallery whose [hunt for new arcade spaces we covered back in 2014](https://www.killscreen.com/indiecade-east-2014s-hidden-theme-babycastles-and-new-arcade-movement/), and a designer whose own work runs toward climate fiction, death positivity and mechanics as poetic devices. Cosmo D is the Brooklyn designer and cellist behind *Off-Peak* and *Betrayal at Club Low*, last seen [building another uncanny museum](https://www.killscreen.com/creator-off-peak-coming-back-another-uncanny-museum/); the latest, *Moves of the Diamond Hand*, is in early access now. Each will play sections of a game in progress while talking through choices around worldbuilding, narrative and mechanics, with a social hour after for guests to play the excerpts themselves. Critic Brian Droitcour, who organizes the series with Sean Kennedy, is precise in [the announcement](https://outlandart.substack.com/p/game-night-at-onx-oct-13) about the problem this format repairs. The most ambitious interactive narrative work unfolds over hours of play, and "audiences rarely arrive prepared to spend that much time with a single work." A gallery gives these games no context; home gives them no company. The playthrough lecture is a director's commentary performed live, with the director present and interruptible. ONX has been circling this fix all year; in June the studio [put thirty screen works from games and film in one room](https://www.killscreen.com/onx-screens-games-moving-image/). Outland, the nonprofit Droitcour runs for publishing and education in art and technology, is the right host for the next step. Reservations are open through the announcement's signup. If this lands before Tuesday, go. Most rooms never get to watch a game being made. Killscreen finds the ones that open the door: independent and experimental game culture, three times a week, free. [Get the Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### The camera is still the only verb in TOEM 2 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/the-camera-is-still-the-only-verb-in-toem-2/ Last updated: 2026-10-08T19:13:39.000Z 2021's *TOEM* built a whole game out of the politest verb available: you pointed a camera, and the world rearranged itself to be seen. Something We Made, the small Swedish studio behind it, has now put a date on the sequel—[*TOEM 2* arrived September 29](https://www.gematsu.com/2026/08/toem-2-launches-september-29?ref=killscreen.com) on Switch, PS5, and [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2900640/TOEM%5F2/?ref=killscreen.com). 0:00 /0:21 1× From the **TOEM 2* gameplay trailer, shown silent on loop—[watch the full trailer with sound on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2900640/TOEM%5F2/?ref=killscreen.com). Video: Something We Made The pitch is more of what made the first game quietly radical. You are still a photographer wandering a hand-drawn black-and-white world, still collecting the mysterious "events" the game names itself after, still helping strangers who need a picture taken more than they need a hero. The studio says the sequel is built to be played at your own pace, with no timers and nothing forcing completion—friction stays out of the frame, which in 2026 reads almost like a manifesto. I keep coming back to how sturdy the photography game has become as a counter-tradition. The lens is a verb that takes nothing from the world—[it attends to it.](https://www.killscreen.com/come-and-see-what-to-play-september-25/) Remember that [the history of photography could predict the future of videogames](https://www.killscreen.com/history-photography-could-predict-future-videogames/); photography spent its first century being dismissed as a mechanical hobby before it became an art of noticing, and games about looking are walking the same road. *TOEM 2*'s monochrome is the tell—the sequel isn't chasing spectacle, it's chasing attention itself, one develop-and-see-what-you-caught moment at a time. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/toem2-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/toem2-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/toem2-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/toem2-6.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/toem2-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/toem2-header.jpg) **TOEM 2* screenshots. Images: Something We Made Games about looking closely are the ones we watch closest. The free Killscreen newsletter brings the week’s quiet wonders to your inbox. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A census-fed arcade game moves into a former coal mine URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-census-fed-arcade-game-moves-into-a-former-coal-mine/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T18:31:48.000Z Event details When Through Oct. 11, 2026 Where Silesian Museum, Katowice The first time Killscreen wrote about *Game of Possible Lives*, the machine was half the story: an arcade cabinet with a language model sealed inside, narrating the life of a statistically plausible person assembled from a country's census categories. You steer the crossroads (school, work, who to love), watch the consequences run all the way to a death, then get sent back to an earlier decision to walk the path not taken. Now Tomo Kihara has pulled the game out of its cabinet. A new projector version is up at New Media Week in Katowice, and [the announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd9j3s9kRz%5F/?ref=killscreen.com) makes the setting plain: the host is the Silesian Museum, built into the workings of a former coal mine. 0:00 /0:24 1× Documentation of **Game of Possible Lives*. The full video with sound is on [the project page](https://www.tomokihara.com/en/game-of-possible-lives.html?ref=killscreen.com). The festival runs through October 11, which gives this staging less than a week to live. It also makes a strange kind of sense of the work. A machine that narrates plausible lives out of census data, projected in a complex that once organized thousands of real ones, is a tighter pairing than most media art gets. Kihara keeps the model local on purpose: the system inside is Gemma 3, an open-weight model that stays sealed with the machine, so each staging preserves the AI as it existed at a moment in time. The Mori Art Museum staging, which closed in March, drew its people from Japan's latest census. From October 9 to 11, Kihara also presents the work at the first Games as Art Festival in Tampere, a hybrid event from Tampere University and the Games as Art Center. When Killscreen [interviewed Kihara in August](https://www.killscreen.com/tomo-kihara-game-of-possible-lives/), the refusal to settle into one format, or one chair, was the whole subject. Two months later the same game has been a coin-op cabinet, a projection in a coal mine and a festival talk, which is about as unsettled as a format gets. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/game-of-possible-lives-install-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/game-of-possible-lives-install-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/game-of-possible-lives-install-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/game-of-possible-lives-install-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/game-of-possible-lives-ui.png) Earlier stagings and the interface of **Game of Possible Lives*. Photographs via [Tomo Kihara](https://www.tomokihara.com/en/game-of-possible-lives.html?ref=killscreen.com) Killscreen finds games where nobody else looks: coal mines, biennales, census tables. The free KS Radar letter brings the best of it to your inbox three times a week. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Gabriel Massan took a game pipeline to Frieze Seoul URL: https://www.killscreen.com/gabriel-massan-took-a-game-pipeline-to-frieze-seoul/ Last updated: 2026-10-08T18:10:58.000Z Frieze Seoul ran Sept. 2 to 5 at COEX, and we were watching *ANIMA KINESIS*, Gabriel Massan's new installation and sculpture series, presented by the gallery Yehudi Hollander-Pappi and [announced on Massan's account](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd6wGkbimog/?ref=killscreen.com). The work locates Jung's anima, "a psychic and transformative force," in movement rather than in any fixed figure: a body onscreen continuously reconfigured by what it encounters. That psychoanalytic claim works as a technical statement about character animation, and Massan has been building toward it for years. The Serpentine commission *Third World: The Bottom Dimension*, made with collaborators and still [playable on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2154250/Third%5FWorld%5FThe%5FBottom%5FDimension/?ref=killscreen.com), told Afro-Indigenous Brazilian stories in the same engine-native language. ![A curved screen shows figures crossing a blue landscape behind two black sculptures in ANIMA KINESIS](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/anima-kinesis-2.jpg) **ANIMA KINESIS*, Gabriel Massan, at Frieze Seoul. Image: Gabriel Massan via [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd6wGkbimog/?ref=killscreen.com) Focus, advised by curator Seolhui Lee, gives 16 young galleries a single-artist slot each, and spending one on a real-time Unreal build with a fabricated controller is a bet that the market can hold a playable work. The clip below is Massan's own footage from the booth, with *ANIMA KINESIS* running on the curved screen behind the sculptures. 0:00 /0:31 1× **ANIMA KINESIS*, Gabriel Massan, at Frieze Seoul. Video: Gabriel Massan via [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd6wGkbimog/?ref=killscreen.com) Game engines are walking into art fairs, and almost nobody is covering the walk. Killscreen Radar does, free, three times a week. [Get the Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A dangling marionette is Vitalic's newest synthesizer URL: https://www.killscreen.com/puppet-vitalic-1024-architecture/ Last updated: 2026-10-08T17:16:31.000Z The instrument hangs there like a ragdoll waiting for a physics engine to notice it. In *PUPPET*, an installation by French studio 1024 architecture and electronic producer Vitalic, visitors grab a marionette-like 3D character and play it: each gesture triggers a melody, a rhythm, an effect, until yanking the figure around has composed an actual track. [The video announcing its Atlanta date](https://www.instagram.com/p/DceLfdyRgXJ/?ref=killscreen.com) makes the loop legible in seconds — gesture in, sound out, the cause-and-effect grammar of a game tutorial aimed at composition instead of combat. 0:00 /0:36 1× **PUPPET* by 1024 architecture x Vitalic (excerpt, muted). [Watch the full video with sound on Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/1080179646?ref=killscreen.com). 1024 architecture is Pier Schneider and François Wunschel, architects by training who have spent nearly two decades making buildings and stages behave like software. The pair's history with Vitalic goes back to [*VTLZR*](https://www.1024architecture.net/?portfolio=vitalic-vtlzr-live-2012&ref=killscreen.com), the volumetric light synthesizer that toured with the producer in 2012\. [Neural reviewed *PUPPET*](https://neural.it/2026/05/puppet-disarticulated-visual-sound-synthesiser/?ref=killscreen.com) in May and located what makes it interesting: its “disarticulated” body language sits closer to alternative games and artists' animation than to the spotless virtuosity computer graphics usually chases. After a Spanish premiere at [L.E.V. Matadero](https://www.mataderomadrid.org/en/schedule/puppet-1024-architecture-x-vitalic?ref=killscreen.com) in July, the piece lands at [SITE](https://www.thegoatfarm.info/site-2026?ref=killscreen.com), Goat Farm's one-night festival across its 12-acre Atlanta campus, on October 3 — one of more than 50 works on the grounds, with support from Villa Albertine. Games have been sneaking the body-as-instrument idea into art contexts for a decade such as [*Limp Body Beat*](https://www.killscreen.com/limp-body-beat-makes-a-musical-instrument-out-of-weird-fleshy-men/), which made percussion out of floppy physics men, back in 2016\. And just weeks ago we watched [Nxt Museum hand visitors the puppeteer's strings](https://www.killscreen.com/at-nxt-museum-the-visitor-is-the-puppeteer/). *PUPPET* closes the circuit. The ragdoll — the most undignified citizen of game physics — gets promoted to synthesizer, and the audience gets promoted with it, from spectator to performer. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/puppet-frame-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/puppet-frame-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/puppet-frame-3.jpg) Frames from **PUPPET*. Courtesy 1024 architecture. Game mechanics keep escaping the screen — into galleries, festivals, concert rigs — and Killscreen has been following them out since 2010\. The free newsletter is where the next one turns up first. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### In Little Five Points, a hackerspace gets a game credit URL: https://www.killscreen.com/sandbox-atlanta-3denemy-game-credit/ Last updated: 2026-10-07T21:59:52.000Z The view in [the video](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dc%5FovRbAtcE/?ref=killscreen.com) is first-person: a low-poly pasture buzzing under power lines, a cow grazing in the middle distance, a giant tin of nicotine pouches rotating in the teal sky like a boss you haven’t angered yet, red warning tape stretched across the frame. Then the beat kicks in. 0:00 /0:52 1× The piece in motion, via [3denemy on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dc%5FovRbAtcE/?ref=killscreen.com) The account belongs to [3denemy](https://3denemy.neocities.org/?ref=killscreen.com), an Atlanta artist and developer of the games [*GIRLBALLS*](https://3denemy.itch.io/girlballs?ref=killscreen.com) and [*5 RED MICKEYS*](https://wriks.itch.io/5-red-mickeys?ref=killscreen.com), self-described as “making weird and silly interactive art.” The game is [*shoot zyns at cows to make them big and happy the game*](https://3denemy.itch.io/cows-snus-to-make-them-big-and-happy-the-game?ref=killscreen.com), made in 48 hours and playable in a browser. The collaborators include [Van Orhari](https://vanorhari.itch.io/?ref=killscreen.com), a sound artist and DJ, and four more artists—plus [Sandbox](https://sandboxatl.org/?ref=killscreen.com), which is not a person or a studio but a room: a member-run hackerspace on the third floor of the Harts building in Little Five Points, open to anyone on Friday nights, with [a game jam](https://itch.io/jam/sandbox-game-jam-2026?ref=killscreen.com) among its projects. It gets credited exactly the way a co-author would. “Organized by the architects, and playtested by the scientist,” one collaborator jokes in the comments, and the joke describes a real process—musicians, artists, and a physical space co-making a game the way a noise scene makes a compilation tape or a risograph collective makes a zine. No publisher, no studio, no product page. The room itself is in the credits because the room did some of the work. We saw the venue-as-collaborator dynamic from the exhibition side recently, when [nine games replaced the gamepad at Wonderville](https://www.killscreen.com/at-wonderville-nine-games-replaced-the-gamepad-entirely/), Brooklyn’s alt-ctrl arcade. Atlanta’s version happens upstream, at the point of making. Spaces make scenes; scenes, it turns out, make games. Killscreen covers the rooms where games get made—hackerspaces, arcades, jams and collectives—not just the storefronts where they end up. The free newsletter keeps you in those rooms. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Pariah Interactive animated Chitra Ganesh's Inanna myth URL: https://www.killscreen.com/chitra-ganesh-journey-to-the-great-below-baltic/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:38:42.000Z Event details When Through Jan. 17, 2027 Where BALTIC, Level 4, Gateshead The oldest story on record now moves at film speed. *Journey to the Great Below*, the centerpiece of Chitra Ganesh's exhibition at [BALTIC](https://baltic.art/whats-on/Xqb-chitra-ganeshjourney-to-the-great-below/?ref=killscreen.com) in Gateshead, is a 6-minute-34-second animation retelling the Descent of Inanna, in which the Sumerian goddess of love, fecundity and war walks into the underworld to face Ereshkigal. In [BALTIC's interview with the artist](https://vimeo.com/1209569759?ref=killscreen.com), Ganesh dates the poem to between 2300 and 1700 B.C., ties it to Enheduanna, the first poet to sign a name, and says the draw was that “the first writer and the first story actually centered women.” In [a video Ganesh posted](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbvrXUER4Ed/?ref=killscreen.com), the artist lingers on the detail that organizes the whole work: in Sumerian culture “the ear was associated with wisdom,” the channel through which cosmic truths arrived. Hearing the call from the Great Below is what begins the descent. 0:00 /0:45 1× Inside **Journey to the Great Below* at BALTIC (excerpt from the museum’s exhibition video, muted). [Watch in full with sound](https://vimeo.com/1209569759?ref=killscreen.com). The animation was developed with and animated by [Pariah Interactive](https://www.pariahinteractive.com/?ref=killscreen.com), a games and XR studio split between Brooklyn and New Delhi whose in-house project is the 3D platformer *1000 Deaths*, with sound design by Panosophy. The show is Ganesh's first major solo exhibition in a UK public institution, and it stages the poem in real space. Visitors enter through monumental gates, the first a semicircle modeled on coins and seals of the period, and Ganesh counts more portals inside the animation itself. Two new sculptures draw on artifacts held by the British Museum and the Met: *The Descent*, a pair of feet coming down a spiral staircase, and *Cosmic Eye*, modeled on Mesopotamian lapis eyes, with a video of growth and decay playing inside it. A site-specific wall drawing picks up the same imagery. One little detail we liked: a seal carved out of wax. Seal carving, Ganesh says, is “one of the earliest known image making processes” and probably the first way of producing multiples, which matters to an artist who thinks in “reproducible and mass mediated images,” from print to comics to film. Handing the oldest story to a games studio extends that line by one more medium. It occupies Level 4 through January 17, 2027. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/ganesh-animation-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/chitra-ganesh-baltic-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/ganesh-install-3.jpg) **Journey to the Great Below* at BALTIC: the installation, Ganesh at work on the wall drawing, and the votive figure up close. Courtesy BALTIC. Game craft keeps turning up in museums, and Killscreen files the sightings. The free newsletter is the fastest way to catch the next one. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Eyebeam’s next residencies ask what AI leaves us to decide URL: https://www.killscreen.com/eyebeams-next-residencies-ask-what-ai-leaves-us-to-decide/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:38:43.000Z Event details When Virtual residency applications close Oct. 11, 2026, at 11:59 p.m. ET Where Apply online Event details When New York residency applications close Nov. 15, 2026 Where Apply online [Apply](https://eyebeam.org/articles/agency-residency-open-call?ref=killscreen.com) The first deadline is this Sunday. Eyebeam's open call for its AGENCY residencies closes the virtual round on [Oct. 11 at 11:59 p.m. ET](https://eyebeam.org/articles/agency-residency-open-call?ref=killscreen.com): six US-based artists outside New York, $2,000 each, 12 weeks online from Nov. 4 to Feb. 12 at three to four hours a week. The New York round runs on its own clock, with applications due Nov. 15 for six NYC artists at $5,000 each, in residence March 15 to June 11\. Individuals only, no application fee, and [the call](https://eyebeam.org/articles/agency-virtual-residency?ref=killscreen.com) is explicit that projects do not need to use AI at all. As software starts acting, deciding, and carrying out tasks on our behalf, Eyebeam is asking: "How do we preserve human agency as these systems become more capable of shaping human behavior?" The brief pushes past the individual too, framing agency as collective, relational, entangled, and more-than-human. That is a research agenda, not a residency garnish. What put it on my radar was [Nora N. Khan's announcement post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeKf%5FsUktVQ/?ref=killscreen.com), which is really a short memoir: fired from a Boston research job in 2016 for writing on company hours, the critic applied to Eyebeam the same week and moved the whole operation to Sunset Park. "Eyebeam took a chance on me when I was writing weird essays on sound in games and the language we use about the future, written for no one in particular." A decade later, that bet looks obvious (at least to us!). It did not look obvious then, which is the point of a residency. Killscreen has been watching this institution since [at least 2012](https://www.killscreen.com/nycs-eyebeam-art-technology-center-seeks-expansion/), back when Eyebeam was hunting for a bigger building. Now helmed by Julia Kaganskiy, who we collaborated with for the groundbreaking Versions conference on arts in virtual reality, the residency's through-line holds: when an art-and-technology organization sets its brief, the people writing and building strangely about games should read it as addressed to them. Open calls close fast, and the free KS Radar letter flags them while the window is still open. Three short issues a week on independent and experimental game culture. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### In Palestine Skating Game, the soldiers can surround you URL: https://www.killscreen.com/in-palestine-skating-game-the-soldiers-can-surround-you/ Last updated: 2026-10-19T19:56:17.000Z The latest devlog from *Palestine Skating Game* reads like any other production note, which is what makes it hit so hard: the team has given its IDF soldier characters procedural inverse kinematics and target tracking, so they can now surround the player, swing batons, and deal real damage. And the player can fight back. [The ](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdUMsbMB7B%5F/?ref=killscreen.com)video announcing it closes with a date of sorts: the Bethlehem beta level is on track for around December. The game itself sits squarely in the *Jet Set Radio* lineage, skating and spraying graffiti through a futuristic Bethlehem to Arabic electronic music; [the early prototype](https://palestineskatinggame.itch.io/psgproto4?ref=killscreen.com) already lets you roll along two kilometres of the real Separation Wall rebuilt in 3D, carrying two decades of its actual graffiti. The team's own pitch is seven words long: "five women & infinite paint against military occupation." The people making it stay anonymous for their safety. Six developers and artists work across Gaza, Lebanon, Europe, and the United States; one of them is programming through the war itself, and told [Aftermath](https://aftermath.site/making-a-skating-game-set-in-palestine-has-become-an-act-of-resistance/?ref=killscreen.com) that "this game has become more important now than at any other time." The project is crowdfunded, with most of the money going to hiring Palestinians and Lebanese. I was talking with Danny on our podcast about the challenges of making games of this manner; the defaults are making someone complicit or robbing them of agency. This points to another avenue: the occupation is a movement system, and resistance is a paint stream mapped to resistance and freedom. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/palestine-skating-game-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/palestine-skating-game-3.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/palestine-skating-game-4.jpg) The rebuilt Separation Wall and the streets around it. Images: Palestine Skating Game Games that argue through their verbs rarely get covered anywhere else. Killscreen finds them and takes them seriously. The free newsletter delivers the next one. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### [untitled games event] closes 2026 with Suzanne Césaire URL: https://www.killscreen.com/untitled-games-event-closes-2026-with-suzanne-cesaire/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T18:30:25.000Z Event details When Oct. 11, 2026, 4:30 to 7 p.m. Where Tussen de Bogen 46, Amsterdam Amsterdam's monthly book club for experimental games is closing its year with Suzanne Césaire. The tenth and final \[untitled games event\] of 2026, on Sunday, October 11 at Tussen de Bogen 46, takes its theme from the Martinican surrealist's 1943 description of surrealism as "the tightrope of our hope," and [the programme](https://buttondown.com/untitledgamesevent/archive/sun-oct-11-untitled-games-event-10-tightrope-of/?ref=killscreen.com) holds the line between imagination and resistance with five works that have no business sharing a bill, which is exactly why they should. 0:00 /0:21 1× From the trailer for Jeremy Couillard's **Soul Injector Commando*, which plays at the event. The full trailer with sound is on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3220370/Soul%5FInjector%5FCommando/?ref=killscreen.com). Jeremy Couillard's *Soul Injector Commando*, out on Steam since mid-September, anchors the night: a chill, surreal first-person game in which God sends you underground to deliver souls to the greediest people on Earth. Around it sit *NOCLIP*, Beatrice Fini's study of dream logic and liminal space built in digital architecture; *Kippen*, Niek Dekker and Timo Kuilder's fast-paced deckbuilder about fighting up the pecking order; and *Records of Babel*, Ada Null's "fragmentary narrative of a future that never lived," which lives inside The Zium Society's Railway, a hand-crafted open-world art gallery. The odd one out is a book: *Play!*, Janna Bystrykh and Sanne van den Breemer's cultural study of playground design in Rotterdam, framing playgrounds as sites for radical practice. Doors at 4:30 p.m.; the collective [posted the full lineup](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd3%5FfMICDRD/?ref=killscreen.com) with the promise of "surreal games and grounded talks." If you are in Amsterdam on Sunday, this is the one. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/uge-10-slide-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/uge-10-slide-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/soul-injector-commando-1.jpg) Work from the lineup, via [untitled games event](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd3%5FfMICDRD/?ref=killscreen.com), and a still from **Soul Injector Commando* A games culture that includes book clubs, playgrounds and virtual galleries is the one Killscreen has covered since 2010\. The free KS Radar letter tracks it three times a week. [Follow along free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Yuha's Nightmares: Episode One arrives November 10 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/yuhas-nightmares-episode-one-arrives-november-10/ Last updated: 2026-10-07T21:07:59.000Z Most games hide their scaffolding. *Yuha's Nightmares* hands it to you as a place: from any of its 20-plus dream levels you can slip into the Wireframe World, the invisible architecture of lines and vertices underneath the scene, and look through walls at how the level—and the dream—is built. That inversion now has a ship date. *Yuha's Nightmares. Episode One: Catastrophe* [arrives November 10](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdWG1lToME9/?ref=killscreen.com) on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1457940/Yuhas%5FNightmares%5FEpisode%5FOne%5FCatastrophe/?ref=killscreen.com), the first of an episodic run. 0:00 /0:24 1× From the **Yuha's Nightmares* demo launch trailer, muted here—[the full trailer with sound is on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1457940/Yuhas%5FNightmares%5FEpisode%5FOne%5FCatastrophe/?ref=killscreen.com). Courtesy of Supr Experience. The game calls itself a nightmare simulator, and the material is first-person: it is built from the actual dreams of Yuliya Kozhemyako, the St. Petersburg artist who releases work as Supr Experience, with Yuha as the waking life's alter ego. "Don't just observe the dream," the Steam page instructs. "Play the dream." *Catastrophe* fixates on home—what happens when you suddenly have to leave one, what you bring with you, what can survive translation into a virtual world—and its glitches bring field of view shifts, sinking surfaces, vanishing staircases vanish, and, maybe, a way out. *Yuha's Nightmares* has been an exhibition piece for half a decade—it showed in [Uncanny Dream](https://ars.electronica.art/newdigitaldeal/en/uncanny-dream-online-exhibition/?ref=killscreen.com), the young-Russian-artists exhibition attached to Ars Electronica's 2021 festival, and Kozhemyako's CV runs through the IBORG collective, a co-curating credit on Games Not Games at Moscow's Electromuseum, the Garage Triennial, and an A MAZE award. Games that live in galleries tend to stay there. This one is walking out the door, one episode at a time. The fascination cuts both ways, too: read on for [a wireframe church that looked like a videogame's debug mode made real](https://www.killscreen.com/wireframe-church-looks-like-a-videogames-debug-mode-made-real/). Kozhemyako builds the church and then hands you the debug mode. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/yuhas-nightmares-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/yuhas-nightmares-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/yuhas-nightmares-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/yuhas-nightmares-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/yuhas-nightmares-6.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/yuhas-nightmares-7.jpg) Screenshots from **Yuha's Nightmares. Episode One: Catastrophe*. Courtesy of Supr Experience. Games keep walking out of galleries and onto storefronts, and almost nobody is standing at the door taking names. Killscreen is. The free newsletter tracks every crossing like this one. [Follow the crossings, free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Junwoo Park's passing moments take their first steps URL: https://www.killscreen.com/junwoo-park-small-town-godot/ Last updated: 2026-10-06T22:25:17.000Z The little mustard-colored character in [the video](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdLIE4iTA69/?ref=killscreen.com) walks down a hallway whose walls are scribbled over like spiderwebs, every line wobbling the way lines do when each frame is a separate drawing. “It’s exciting to see my drawings become characters that can walk around, move, meet each other, and make things happen,” Junwoo Park writes in the caption. The game has no title yet. It barely needs one; the drawings are doing all the talking. 0:00 /0:22 1× The work-in-progress reel, via [Junwoo Park on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdLIE4iTA69/?ref=killscreen.com) Park is a Seoul illustrator with that spans comics, drawings, zines and objects. The self-description on [Park’s site](https://erroraw.com/?ref=killscreen.com) reads like a design document for this game before the game existed: “I’m more interested in passing moments and small emotions than in big stories.” And that is precisely what’s being built here—a game about wandering around a small town, meeting people and getting caught up in what Park calls “strange little events,” drawn entirely by hand and assembled in Godot. Park is open about the pace: “It’ll probably take me a long time to finish. But I’m going to keep working on it.” When an illustrator crosses into games, the usual move is to hire programmers and scale up; Park is instead treating the engine as one more drawing tool, building the world at drawing speed rather than production speed. The result already moves like a sketchbook that learned to walk. Killscreen follows artists who wander into games from everywhere else—illustration, music, film, sculpture. The free newsletter is how you catch the next one early. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A speedrun through dinner lands in ACMI's Wobbly showcase URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-speedrun-through-dinner-lands-in-acmis-wobbly-showcase/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:38:43.000Z Event details When Oct. 11, 2026 Where ACMI, Melbourne Cost Free In *Family Reunion* you are a very bored child at a long family dinner, and your one goal is to make the evening end faster. Imagination, conversation and exploration are the resources you spend against boredom; the table, the plates and the relatives are all drawn by hand, wobbling the way a drawing does when nobody has cleaned it up. Leandro Waibe, the Buenos Aires illustrator behind it, calls it an incremental dinner table simulator, and a free demo called *The Appetizer* is on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4638100/Family%5FReunion%5FThe%5FAppetizer%5FDemo/?ref=killscreen.com) and [itch.io](https://waibinin.itch.io/family-reunion?ref=killscreen.com). 0:00 /1:13 1× A minute of **The Appetizer*, from [Waibe’s Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/waibinin.world?ref=killscreen.com) On Oct. 11 the game lands in Wobbly, a one-day program inside ACMI's free Games Week Showcase on the closing day of Melbourne International Games Week. Curated by Claire Osborn-Li, the lineup gathers games that, in the words of [Waibe's announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeAhfDUIGNu/?ref=killscreen.com), embrace the misshapen marks of the hand of the maker. Last month we wrote about [Leonardo Devito's painting of the player at the desk](https://www.killscreen.com/the-boss-fight-is-offscreen-in-leonardo-devitos-dark-souls/), and the through-line runs back to [*The Collage Atlas*, the pen-drawn world we covered in 2016](https://www.killscreen.com/the-collage-atlas/). A game that looks handmade keeps the maker in the room with you, which is exactly what a bored child at a dinner table is praying for: evidence that another person is present. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/family-reunion-steam-ss1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/family-reunion-steam-ss2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/family-reunion-steam-ss3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/family-reunion-steam-ss4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/family-reunion-steam-ss5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/family-reunion-steam-ss6.jpg) Screenshots of **Family Reunion: The Appetizer*, from [the Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4638100/Family%5FReunion%5FThe%5FAppetizer%5FDemo/?ref=killscreen.com) Killscreen argues for the games that keep a human hand visible, three times a week, free. That is the whole pitch. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### P.T. is being rebuilt for PC from its own PS4 code URL: https://www.killscreen.com/p-t-is-being-rebuilt-for-pc-from-its-own-ps4-code/ Last updated: 2026-10-07T21:05:07.000Z Every surviving copy of *P.T.* sits on a PlayStation 4 that somebody declined to wipe. Konami pulled Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro's playable teaser from the PlayStation Store in April 2015 and blocked re-downloads soon after. That turned a 2014 horror game about one looping hallway into something like a fresco: fixed to its wall, and the wall is aging. Last week a developer who posts as [LoreanXavier](https://www.youtube.com/@loreangaming?ref=killscreen.com) [announced a way off the wall](https://www.reddit.com/r/silenthill/comments/1wu0152/im%5Fdecompiling%5Fand%5Frebuilding%5Fpt%5Fas%5Fa%5Fnative%5Fpc/?ref=killscreen.com). They reverse-engineered the PS4 executable and rewrote the game's logic and renderer in C++ and Vulkan as a native Windows program. It is about 97 percent done by their count, and [a full playthrough](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4xcCoUNYmI&ref=killscreen.com) runs from boot screen to ending. No Konami files ship with it. You bring the data from your own copy. Museum conservators who look after software and video have four moves, set out in the Guggenheim's [Variable Media](https://www.guggenheim.org/conservation/the-variable-media-initiative?ref=killscreen.com) work more than 20 years ago: store the original, emulate its hardware, migrate it to new equipment, or reinterpret it from scratch. Fans have now run all four on *P.T.* Hoarded consoles are storage. The Unity and Unreal remakes were reinterpretation; we [wrote about *PuniTy*](https://www.killscreen.com/who-said-pt-was-dead/) in 2015, and Konami [shut another down](https://www.gameinformer.com/2018/07/17/fan-made-pt-port-cancelled-teenage-developer-offered-internship-at-konami?ref=killscreen.com) in 2018\. Running it in shadPS4 is emulation. This is migration, the one that keeps the work's own scripts, animation and sound banks and rebuilds the engine underneath them. The part a conservator would recognize is the checking. By the developer's account, the original runs in the emulator on scripted controller input and recorded camera positions, the port renders the same moments, and the frames get compared. . ![Two near-identical views of the same dim hallway side by side, the left labeled Original and the right labeled Native PC port.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/pt-native-pc-port-comparison.jpg) The same moment in **P.T.*, with the original on the left and the port on the right. Image: LoreanXavier, via Reddit One caveat: the port still needs the data, and the data still lives on those consoles. Rhizome bet on emulation when it [put Theresa Duncan's CD-ROM games back online](https://www.killscreen.com/legacy-theresa-duncan-and-technology-behind-its-preservation/), and Simogo [migrated its own iPhone games](https://www.killscreen.com/what-happens-when-you-preserve-your-games-while-youre-still-making-them/) last year. Simogo owns its work, though. Here the conservators are volunteers, and the owner is the reason the work needs saving. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/pt-native-pc-port-red-hallway.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/pt-native-pc-port-corridor.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/pt-native-pc-port-photographs.jpg) Scenes from the work-in-progress port of **P.T.* Images: LoreanXavier Killscreen follows what happens to games after the companies that own them stop caring, and the people who take up the work anyway. The free newsletter is where that reporting lands. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### The Buttons Are Under Your Skin [Podcast] URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/murlo-the-buttons-are-under-your-skin-podcast/ Last updated: 2026-10-06T01:01:38.000Z I ask Murlo, the Manchester producer and illustrator Chris Pell, what changes when the crowd is gone and the work is a game someone plays alone in a room. *Something Beautiful* is the music-driven point-and-click he is building by himself in Unreal Engine, set on a broken industrial estate much like the one beside Shepshed, the East Midlands market town where he grew up drawing in his bedroom and copying Boris Vallejo to learn anatomy. He tells me how the story grew out of two albums on his own label, Coil Records, *Dolos* (2019) and *Puckle* (2023), and why the themed queue for Oblivion at Alton Towers, with its jungle track on a loop, taught him as much about world building as any record did. We talk about hardcore, both kinds, after his NTS show put Swing Kids and Mudhoney next to club music. He explains why the minigames were always his favorite part of bigger games, from the Pokémon slot machines to Gwent in *The Witcher*, and how learning MetaSounds from YouTube tutorials let him use pieces of his own music to drive the play. He walks me through the sequencer built into the player's arm, where the skin presses in when you push a button, and the Flesh Disks, record players modeled on MiniDiscs and made of flesh. He also tells me what he learned from watching strangers play a slice of the game on the Media Wall at Factory International's Aviva Studios, where one visitor tried to open a box by reading the dates behind the pages and left him with a full page of notes. We get to *Loom*, the point-and-click he keeps coming back to, and to William Blake, Goya and the Luddites. We close on what it is like to make a game alone in a flat after a decade of meeting everyone you know in clubs. ## Links - [Murlo Builds a World You Can Play, my interview with Murlo for Killscreen](https://www.killscreen.com/murlo-something-beautiful-interview/) - [Murlo's Luddite rhythm games wrapped a run at Aviva Studios](https://www.killscreen.com/murlos-luddite-rhythm-games-wrapped-a-run-at-aviva-studios/) - [Something Beautiful on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4041730/Something%5FBeautiful/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Something Beautiful gameplay trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wusjobZGV5U&ref=killscreen.com) - [Murlo's Something Beautiful Special on NTS](https://www.nts.live/shows/guests/episodes/murlo-something-beautiful-special-14th-april-2026?ref=killscreen.com) - [Harriet Davey's Glossy Aliens Reject Gaming's Binary World](https://www.killscreen.com/harriet-daveys-glossy-aliens-reject-gamings-binary-world/) - [Murlo](https://linktr.ee/MURL0?ref=killscreen.com) Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by [Nick Sylvester](https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com). ***Member's Only Video*** _This post is for subscribers on the Helping Hand and Trustee tiers only._ ### Be Playful brings Black-made game demos, AR and films to Leimert Park URL: https://www.killscreen.com/be-playful-brings-nine-black-made-games-to-leimert-park/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T20:09:23.000Z Event details When Oct. 15, 2026 Where Leimert Park, Los Angeles [RSVP](https://partiful.com/e/jNs8JULhMxmWdE1is8Ym?ref=killscreen.com) On Thursday, October 15, Black Public Media sets up in Leimert Park with ten projects: four game demos, one finished game, two augmented reality pieces and three short films. Be Playful, a showcase curated by Lisa Osborne, Black Public Media's director of emerging media, and presented with Black LA Tech Week, puts PC and VR builds next to work set in game worlds, and five of the makers will be on hand. [The announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd1s%5Fc1pu%5FZ/?ref=killscreen.com) reads like a festival lineup, and two names on it are my favorites. [Connor Wall](https://quantum-aether-games.com/?ref=killscreen.com)'s [*Omnivores Rule*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3221630/Omnivores%5FRule/?ref=killscreen.com) puts you in a flying android sent ahead of its human creators to scout an alien planet, and your voice does the work: echolocate to map what's hidden, shout to send shockwaves through the land, whisper to bond with the wildlife. The look is hand-drawn and Moebius-inspired, and [Black Public Media's description](https://blackpublicmedia.org/omnivores-rule/?ref=killscreen.com) promises a world where "listening triumphs over conquest." Wall will be at the showcase with the demo. [Jeremy Kamal](https://jeremykamal.com/?ref=killscreen.com), who [teaches at SCI-Arc](https://www.sciarc.edu/people/faculty/jeremy-kamal-hartley?ref=killscreen.com), has spent years building Mojo, a universe where the rituals of contemporary Black culture shape the land. In [*Mojo: The Floods*](https://jeremykamal.com/mojo-the-floods?ref=killscreen.com), a trap producer runs a watershed from a mixing board, bass notes vibrating the water. [*Mojo: Stained*](https://jeremykamal.com/stained?ref=killscreen.com), which won a Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction in 2024, follows a tea master whose gang marks territory with colored flora. Both are short films, and Kamal is now developing [*Run*](https://jeremykamal.com/run?ref=killscreen.com), a one-hour game set in the same world. Be Playful screens the two shorts alongside his PitchBlack pitch video and the trailer for *Run*, the first time the four pieces have been shown together. 0:00 /0:24 1× The opening of the **Omnivores Rule* teaser. The full trailer, with sound, is on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3221630/Omnivores%5FRule/?ref=killscreen.com) The rest of the slate: [Spencer Garland](https://www.instagram.com/lonesaucerboy/?ref=killscreen.com)'s *Counter of Sheep*, an augmented reality piece and companion animated short built with Portland kids who design their own dream homes; [*Mannahatta 2100*](https://devpost.com/software/we-still-live-here?ref=killscreen.com), an AR look at two possible New Yorks at the end of the century, from MaryAnn Talavera, Anatola Araba, Emma Joseph and Ericka Mitton; Jonathan Williams's [*Fatherhood Legacy*](https://blackpublicmedia.org/fatherhood-legacy-open-world/?ref=killscreen.com), a Horizon Worlds game playable on Quest 3 and PC; Spritewrench's Caribbean folklore mystery [*Duppy Detective Tashia*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1958800/Duppy%5FDetective%5FTashia/?ref=killscreen.com), which came out on Steam in July; [Sum Patten](https://www.instagram.com/sumkilla/?ref=killscreen.com)'s *The Nobody Hole*, built by an LA team with a puppet and motion capture; and Dominick Rabrun's *Vèvè-Punk: Mind Singer*, the Haitian Revolution point-and-click [Killscreen covered in January](https://www.killscreen.com/dom-rabrun-veve-punk-haitian-revolution-videogame/). Black Public Media has backed Black storytelling for public television since 1979, and Be Playful is that infrastructure making room for games. Most of the projects are still raising budgets, so pitch decks will be on hand too. Much of this work has only been seen in trailers, and here you can try it, in several cases with its maker beside you. Registration is on [Partiful](https://partiful.com/e/jNs8JULhMxmWdE1is8Ym?ref=killscreen.com), with room for 400\. Demos run 5 to 8 p.m. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/be-playful-slide-2.jpg) Stills from the Be Playful slate, via [Black Public Media](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd1s%5Fc1pu%5FZ/?ref=killscreen.com) Work like this mostly surfaces in rooms like this one, a long way from the release calendar. Killscreen's free Radar letter finds it and tells you where to see it, three times a week. [Get the Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Chris Rats' fighting game has fans before it has a name URL: https://www.killscreen.com/chris-rats-fighting-game-bingle-boppers/ Last updated: 2026-10-05T21:51:34.000Z “Choose your bingle bopper,” reads the caption on [the character-select ](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdCR9R7hNN3/?ref=killscreen.com) Chris Rats posted last week. The screen is a lineup of lumpy, thumb-dented creatures with names like Brainiac, Hogmar and Braplin, each one rotating into a spotlight that looks cut from cardboard and warmed-over modeling clay. It’s a fighting game in development. It has no title yet. That has slowed down nobody. 0:00 /0:26 1× The full character-select reel, via [Chris Rats on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdCR9R7hNN3/?ref=killscreen.com) Rats is half of Bark Bark Games, the two-person team—Isaac Nite is the other half—whose pixel-art horror game *HOUSE* built a cult following after its 2020 release, and whose sequel *HOUSE 2* shipped through Glowstick Entertainment barely three weeks ago. Most developers spend patching just after release; Rats spends showing sculpted brawlers. Rats sites *ClayFighter* as a recent inspiration, one of the strangest 90s titles ever.ir own. Claymation games have been promising this kind of charisma for decades and mostly failing to cash it in—back in 2015 we wrote about [Armikrog and the unfulfilled promise of claymation videogames](https://www.killscreen.com/armikrog-and-unfulfilled-promise-claymation-videogames/). Rats seems to be running the experiment in the right order this time: sculpt the boppers first, let the fandom arrive, and build the game underneath it. Killscreen has covered the handmade edge of games—clay, paper, felt, anything with fingerprints on it—since 2010\. The free newsletter brings the next roster like this one straight to your inbox. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Scoring Fear: The Composers Behind Weapons and Dead Space URL: https://www.killscreen.com/cross-conversations-horror-ryan-holladay-jason-graves/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:38:45.000Z Event details When Oct. 13, 2026, 10 to 11 a.m. PT Where Online Cost Free Horror lives in what you hear before what you see. For Cross-Conversations: Horror, Killscreen puts someone from horror film in conversation with someone from horror games, and this session starts with sound. Ryan Holladay co-scored Weapons and this year's Resident Evil film. Jason Graves scored Dead Space, Until Dawn and Still Wakes the Deep, where he built his own metal instrument to make the score. Together they'll talk about scoring fear for a screen versus scoring it for a player: what changes when the audience holds the controller, and the player, not the edit, decides when the scare lands. **Tuesday, October 13, 10 to 11am PT (1pm ET, 6pm UK). Free and online, moderated by Jamin Warren, and recorded for replay. Register below and your join link will appear on this page.** Presented with MUBI [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/gtw-camp-miasma.jpg)](https://mubi.com/killscreen?ref=killscreen.com) Cross-Conversations: Horror is presented with MUBI, in celebration of Jane Schoenbrun's ****TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA**, starring Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson. Now streaming exclusively on MUBI. Get 30 days free. [Watch now ](https://mubi.com/killscreen?ref=killscreen.com) ### A dice-roll gamebook holds Cuba's Axie Infinity collapse URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-dice-roll-gamebook-holds-cubas-axie-infinity-collapse/ Last updated: 2026-10-07T21:07:16.000Z *Grinding Choices*, from Cuban artist Nestor Siré and anthropologist Steffen Köhn, is a solo adventure gamebook in the 1990s mold—numbered sections, branching decisions, dice rolls, multiple endings—and every one of those endings is something that actually happened to somebody. The work condenses several years of fieldwork on *Axie Infinity*'s play-to-earn scam economy in Cuba, where the Vietnamese-made crypto game briefly became a real income during the island's inflation crisis, then collapsed. Siré and Köhn built it from long-term participant observation and interviews with players, sponsors, hackers, brokers and their families, and showed it last week at [\[untitled games event\]](https://rijksakademie.nl/en/public-programme/2026-09-18-untitled-games-event?ref=killscreen.com), the experimental games night hosted at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Getting into *Axie* took upfront capital most Cubans didn't have, so many played under "scholarship" arrangements—a manager stakes you, then takes a cut— which is to say, a contract with branching clauses and house odds. The same fieldwork surfaced this year in [Economic Anthropology](https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sea2.70031?ref=killscreen.com) as "Virtual Pets, Real Precarity," which names the result speculative labor. The gamebook makes you hold the character sheet while the dice name it for you. This is a long project for the pair, who have spent years documenting the infrastructure Cubans improvise when the official kind fails them— heir book [*Handmade Networks*](https://aksioma.org/handmade-networks?ref=killscreen.com) covers the hand-made media economy of El Paquete—and Siré brought *Paketown*, a game about that same network made with one of the island's first independent game studios, to the same weekender. Killscreen has been watching this scene longer than the crypto cycle: we visited [Cuba's first indie game](https://www.killscreen.com/cubas-first-indie-game-wants-much/) in 2016, and admired [the hidden architecture of Choose Your Own Adventure branches](https://www.killscreen.com/explore-branching-story-design-not-russian-lit-samizdat/) long before an ethnography moved into one. Killscreen files stories on the games nobody else covers — a dice-roll ethnography included. Radar, our free newsletter, brings three of them a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### An AI fish is the lead in Harold Hejazi's new stage game URL: https://www.killscreen.com/an-ai-fish-is-the-lead-in-harold-hejazis-new-stage-game/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:38:45.000Z Event details When Oct. 9 to 22, 2026 (five performances) Where Espoo Theatre, Espoo, Finland [Dates and tickets](https://espoonteatteri.fi/en/programme/legend-of-harri-kala/?ref=killscreen.com) “Would you like to become fish?” That is the offer on the table in [the reel Harold Hejazi posted over the weekend](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeEM8eLRl47/?ref=killscreen.com), and starting Friday, October 9, a whole audience at [Espoo Theatre](https://espoonteatteri.fi/en/programme/legend-of-harri-kala/?ref=killscreen.com) in Finland gets to answer. *Legend of Harri Kala* is a game built for a stage instead of a storefront: five performances through October 22, no download, no single player. The lead is an NPC, a Baltic grayling who listens to the room and talks back in real time. 0:00 /1:27 1× Development footage from **Legend of Harri Kala*, Unity editor windows and all, from [the reel Harold Hejazi posted to Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeEM8eLRl47/?ref=killscreen.com). The house speaks to the fish through onstage controllers. What gets said unlocks levels, reshapes the game world and feeds a myth engine that composes a different legend every night. The working group includes a biologist, Miika Kotila. The theater’s notes say the sea-dwelling grayling has nearly vanished from these waters, and half of the premiere’s ticket proceeds go to the John Nurminen Foundation’s work on the Baltic Sea. The AI question gets answered up front. Hejazi’s caption says no generative AI made the visuals. AI runs the grayling’s brain and the myth engine, and the rest is, per the post, “lovingly handcrafted.” That is a useful line to draw: the machine is a cast member with one job, improvising with strangers, and people built the sea around it. It is also the next step for *Adventures of Harriharri*, the series that took the [Digital Moment Award at A MAZE. / Berlin](https://2021.amaze-berlin.de/award-winners?ref=killscreen.com) in 2021\. In the first episode, Hejazi played from behind the screen and rapped the story. By the third, the crowd was shouting commands and urging one another onstage to take the controller. Now the game listens back. Ten years ago we ran [an essay arguing that role-playing games work like medieval oral culture](https://www.killscreen.com/role-playing-games-are-just-like-medieval-oral-culture/), where a story lives in its retellings and no version is final. *Legend of Harri Kala* builds that as a venue: a myth that exists only on the nights people turn up to tell it. [Team Rolfes is handing its cockpit to audiences](https://www.killscreen.com/team-rolfes-hands-the-cockpit-to-the-audience/) in London and New York this month and of course, the ongoing work of Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim's donkey democracy epic [asses.masses](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/asses-masses/). The audience as input device is having a moment. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/legend-of-harri-kala-seabed-crown.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/legend-of-harri-kala-seabed.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/legend-of-harri-kala-microphone.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/legend-of-harri-kala-shoreline-hut.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/legend-of-harri-kala-vortex.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/legend-of-harri-kala-tapiola-night.jpg) Stills from **Legend of Harri Kala*: the seabed, a microphone waiting underwater, the Baltic shoreline and the fish at large. Images via Espoo Theatre. Killscreen keeps an eye on the games that only exist when a room full of people turns up to play them. The free newsletter is how you hear about the next one before it closes. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Alan Kwan rebuilt Scent with a rock-ing controller URL: https://www.killscreen.com/alan-kwan-rebuilt-scent-with-a-rock-ing-controller/ Last updated: 2026-10-05T18:36:26.000Z Alan Kwan spent eight years making *Scent*, a 15-to-20-minute game in which you are a stray dog gathering the souls of the dead in an unnamed city while a massacre unfolds around you. This summer the game became a room. In [the documentation Kwan posted](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdWmt1KkVDy/?ref=killscreen.com) from SENTIENTS, the exhibition that ran at Undershed—Watershed's immersive gallery in Bristol—from July 18 through September 13, the game sits inside a scenic installation built, in Kwan's words, to evoke "quiet nature enveloped by war and darkness." One visitor plays. Everyone else watches it as cinema. Kwan [made a controller from an actual rock](https://www.kwanalan.com/customgamecontroller?ref=killscreen.com), wired up and weighing more than five kilograms, so the hands holding it grip a piece of nature while the screen shows atrocity. The staging also solves a problem game exhibitions rarely solve: a single-player game becomes a spectator form through architecture rather than through streaming. Kwan has run the same logic in the other direction too, playing *Scent* live on cinema screens as a performance, steering the dog and choreographing the camera at once. Kwan wrote about the game for Killscreen last year—[why a dog, why on-rails, why you can do nothing](https://www.killscreen.com/alan-kwan-scent-video-game-witness/)—and named witnessing without power as the whole point. SENTIENTS itself is a show we covered when it opened: [six Bristol teenagers co-curated it](https://www.killscreen.com/at-watershed-six-teenagers-curated-the-games-on-show/), placing Kwan alongside Marshmallow Laser Feast, Alice Bucknell, Demelza Kooij, and David O'Reilly. The Bristol run is over, but the installation is the version to chase. Since the Tribeca Festival premiered it in 2025, [the game has moved through](https://www.kwanalan.com/scent?ref=killscreen.com) Vilnius, Baltimore, Paris, Berlin, and Madrid, and the room keeps being rebuilt. Somewhere, eventually, a rock is waiting for you. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/scent-still-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/scent-still-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/scent-still-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/scent-undershed-install-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/scent-undershed-install-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/scent-rock-controller.jpg) Stills from **Scent* and the Undershed installation, including the rock controller. Images: Alan Kwan Killscreen has spent fifteen years following the games that end up in galleries, and the people who carry them there. The free newsletter is where we keep watch. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Scrapeboard Makes a Skateboard Deck the Controller URL: https://www.killscreen.com/scrapeboard-makes-a-skateboard-deck-the-controller/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T18:06:27.000Z Event details When Oct. 6, 2026, 7 p.m.; tournament at 9 p.m. Where Wonderville, Brooklyn Cost Free *Scrapeboard* is a fighting game by Blake Andrews and Frank DeMarco, played with a real skateboard deck. Players slide the deck between metal pads on the floor, matching an onscreen opponent's footwork to block a sword before it falls. It began with an object: Tony Hawk sent an original deck to a Babycastles installation, and [the pair built a fighting game around it](https://www.affogata.com/blog/what-do-tony-hawk-and-an-indie-game-have-in-common-meet-scrapeboard/?ref=killscreen.com) instead of selling it. On Tuesday, Oct. 6, the game returns to [Wonderville](https://www.killscreen.com/at-wonderville-nine-games-replaced-the-gamepad-entirely/), the Bushwick arcade bar, for a night of rhythm and dance games, per [the bar's announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeC2AxcFTyj/?ref=killscreen.com). Play opens at 7 p.m., and Andrews and DeMarco run a *Scrapeboard* tournament at 9\. Every arcade game on the floor is free to play. Two rhythm games share the night: *Young Cathedral* by [Common Opera](https://www.instagram.com/commonopera/?ref=killscreen.com) and *Sound of Smog: Neo Delhi* by [Pariah Interactive](https://www.instagram.com/pariahinteractive/?ref=killscreen.com). Wonderville's own [*Step Right Up!*](https://www.killscreen.com/wondervilles-new-cabinet-step-right-up-crosses-a-zoltar-machine-with-vector-graphics/), an animatronic Zoltar machine rebuilt with vector graphics, sits in the room year round. Killscreen finds the rooms where games become sport, sculpture and furniture, from Bushwick bars to museum floors. The free KS Radar newsletter delivers three finds like this every week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Ugo Arsac Shows Cannes Winner KATÁBASIS at Onassis ONX URL: https://www.killscreen.com/ugo-arsac-walked-new-yorks-sewers-with-a-3d-scanner/ Last updated: 2026-10-11T16:06:32.000Z *KATÁBASIS* had its U.S. debut at [Onassis ONX](https://www.onx.studio/onx-programming/what-remains?ref=killscreen.com) in New York from Sept. 25 to Oct. 4, in the group exhibition *What Remains*. It is an interactive documentary by the Marseille artist [Ugo Arsac](https://www.instagram.com/ugoarsac/?ref=killscreen.com), and it won Best Immersive Work at this year's Cannes Film Festival. ONX showed it as an installation: point clouds projected across the walls of a dark room, with a glowing red orb on a plinth. 0:00 /0:21 1× An excerpt from **KATÁBASIS*. Video: [Ugo Arsac](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYUxwcBIy9t/?ref=killscreen.com) The material came from under the city. As a Villa Albertine resident in 2023, Arsac went into New York's tunnels, shelters and waterworks and came back with 3D scans and audio interviews with people who live, work or take refuge there. Arsac [wrote after the show](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeRpQw6Dul9/?ref=killscreen.com) about hours spent in the sewers "with a headlamp, boots and a 3D scanner." 0:00 /0:16 1× Scanning in the tunnels for **KATÁBASIS*. Video: [Ugo Arsac](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeRpQw6Dul9/?ref=killscreen.com) The piece renders those spaces, and the people in them, as drifting clouds of white points. ONX described it as navigated by the viewer's gaze alone. The title is the Greek word for a descent into the underworld. Killscreen follows scanning, simulation and game tools into documentary and art, the work almost nobody else covers. The free Radar sends three short issues a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A free Los Angeles screening was a history of machinima URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-free-los-angeles-screening-was-a-history-of-machinima/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T02:49:37.000Z On Sunday, Oct. 4, a room in Highland Park put Harun Farocki and a *Soulcalibur* dance video on the same program. *RENDER DISTANCE: Experiments in Machinima* was a free, 70-minute run of shorts shot inside videogames, guest curated by the Los Angeles filmmakers [Haydon Mayer](https://haydonmayer.com/?ref=killscreen.com) and [Elijah Valter](https://www.instagram.com/elijah.root/?ref=killscreen.com) for [Veggie Cloud](https://www.courtneystephens.net/Veggie-Cloud-1?ref=killscreen.com), the film and lecture series programmed by Courtney Stephens and Kate Wolf. [Their announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/Ddrfcr7mLUV/?ref=killscreen.com) listed seven titles and promised more. 0:00 /0:29 1× From Phil Solomon's own excerpt of **Rehearsals for Retirement* (2007), one of the films in the program. It runs silent here; [the full excerpt on Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/160642452?ref=killscreen.com) has the sound. The seven covered 23 years. Chris Brandt's *Dance, Voldo, Dance* (2002) has two players steering the same *Soulcalibur* fighter through a synchronized routine to Nelly's "Hot in Herre." Farocki's [*Parallel I*](https://www.harunfarocki.de/installations/2010s/2012/parallel.html?ref=killscreen.com) (2012) traces computer graphics from the straight lines of early 1980s games toward photorealism. Phil Solomon's [*Rehearsals for Retirement*](https://vimeo.com/160642452?ref=killscreen.com) (2007) makes an elegy out of *Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas*. Grayson Earle's [*Why don't the cops fight each other?*](https://www.graysonearle.com/work/cops.html?ref=killscreen.com) (2021) goes into the code of *Grand Theft Auto V* to learn why its police never turn on one another. Carson Lynn's *Bloodborne* film [*A bronze anvil falls to the earth.*](https://vimeo.com/846407422?ref=killscreen.com) (2023) and Total Refusal's [*World at Stake*](https://totalrefusal.com/home/world-at-stake?ref=killscreen.com) (2025), shot in sports games, brought the program up to date. *Marlon Brando's Final Performance in The Godfather Game* was credited only to Anonymous. A canon gets made when someone puts a fan video, a gallery loop and an uncredited clip in one room and insists they belong together. The curators' program note describes films that treat virtual space as "a new frontier for filmmakers to occupy and interrogate," and both curators are filmmakers first: Mayer shot part of the short [*Love192*](https://haydonmayer.com/love192?ref=killscreen.com) in *Second Life*. Killscreen [interviewed Lynn in 2020](https://www.killscreen.com/carson-lynn-2/), when the artist was still asking, of pictures taken inside a game, "why should I be excluded from the definition of photography?" Six years later the same artist shared a program with Farocki and Solomon. I count that as an answer. The note ends on a hedge I keep rereading: simulated worlds "inevitably fall short of the physical one we actually inhabit (or so far, at least)." ![A row of identical soccer players stands in a stadium beside an enormous globe, in a still from World at Stake.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/render-distance-world-at-stake.jpg) ![A crowd of police officers piles up on a Los Santos street around the player character, in a still from Why don't the cops fight each other?](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/render-distance-why-dont-the-cops-pile.jpg) ![A lone cloaked figure stands in a dark stone courtyard surrounded by sparks, in a still from A bronze anvil falls to the earth.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/render-distance-a-bronze-anvil.jpg) From the program, left to right: Total Refusal's **World at Stake* (2025), Grayson Earle's **Why don't the cops fight each other?* (2021) and Carson Lynn's **A bronze anvil falls to the earth.* (2023). Images: Total Refusal, Grayson Earle, Carson Lynn A program like this one lasts a night and leaves a flyer behind. Killscreen's free Radar letter writes them down, along with the games and artists almost nobody else covers. [Get the Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Glitch art and arcade games shared a weekend in Chicago URL: https://www.killscreen.com/glitch-art-and-arcade-games-shared-a-weekend-in-chicago/ Last updated: 2026-10-11T00:09:57.000Z [Glitch'N'Games](https://suture.blue/glitchngames?ref=killscreen.com) ran Oct. 2 and 3, 2026, in Chicago. It was the second edition. Artist and curator Bee Nix organized it. 0:00 /0:45 1× Friday night at Logan Arcade. Video: Bee Nix and contributors, via [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeNSmF%5FCdZs/?ref=killscreen.com) Friday night was an exhibition at Logan Arcade. Glitch art, experimental games and circuit-bent hardware sat among the cabinets. A glitch game competition ran on a circuit-bent DRUGS™ console. Rob Sheridan made an appearance. Saturday moved to Night City for talks. They included jonCates on glitch art at the heart of [*Kentucky Route Zero*](https://www.killscreen.com/kentucky-route-zero-act-iv-elegy/), Allen Riley on video as a social medium and RezidualVizualz on ProjectOBJ for the PlayStation 2\. That evening, Chicago Game Space hosted a gathering around the work of Jamie Fenton. Fenton lives in Chicago and made *Digital TV Dinner* on the Bally Astrocade. The organizers call it the first glitch artwork. The talks were streamed to MaMa in Zagreb, where they opened the discussion program of the [Fubar biennale](https://fubar.space/?ref=killscreen.com), Oct. 3 to 9\. Two days later, Daniel Temkin taught an esolangs workshop there. Killscreen [wrote about Temkin's esolangs](https://www.killscreen.com/code-is-a-plaything-in-daniel-temkins-esolangs/) in September. Nix posted [a recap](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeNSmF%5FCdZs/?ref=killscreen.com) after the weekend. Killscreen tracks the scenes where broken machines count as instruments. The Radar brings them to your inbox free, three times a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Not With a Scream, But With a Bloop: What to Play, October 2 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/not-with-a-scream-but-with-a-bloop-what-to-play-october-2/ Last updated: 2026-10-05T21:05:28.000Z *Many thanks to the folks at MUBI for making October’s Playlists available to everyone.* [*Get 30 days free*](https://mubi.com/killscreen?ref=killscreen-newsletter)*.* 0:00 /0:10 1× ## Playlist 291 ## Crude Oil (2026) ## Peter Nichols ### Play Time: 2–3 hours [Play on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1653020/Crude%5FOil/?ref=killscreen.com) > “The Oil Encounter ... has produced scarcely a single work of note.” \-Amitav Ghosh, 1992 In sci-fi writer Fritz Leiber’s 1964 cosmic horror short story, “The Black Gondolier,” the unnamed narrator found himself with an odd, learned friend named Daloway, who was stricken with a particularly unfortunate obsession. The oil derrick outside his trailer in Venice, California, the home of many human-machine interfaces that pump the crude from beneath its surface, was not simply an instrument of 20th-century commerce, but a portal to something in the great beyond. To his mind, it was more than petroleum; it was the sum total of wishes and desires of the “lush vegetation and animal fats” that “had waited for hundreds of millions of years, dreaming its black dreams \[...\] until a being evolved on the surface with whom it could realize and expend itself.” In Leiber’s story, the oil, the “blood of the earth” as P.T. Anderson’s ominous oilman Daniel Plainview put it, was more than just something to be extracted and sold. It was something else, something of near-timeless origin, and shapeless in form, that was looking for a way out. A way back. By the end of the story, the titular figure dragged Daloway from his bed to parts unknown: the Black Gondolier. Leiber’s narrator had warned that “man hadn’t discovered oil, but that oil had found man.” SPONSORED BY MUBI [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/gtw-camp-miasma.jpg)](https://mubi.com/killscreen?ref=killscreen-newsletter) Be fulfilled by ****Jane Schoenbrun**'s ****TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA**. By flesh and fluids, and pure filmic pleasure. Starring ****Hannah Einbinder** and ****Gillian Anderson**, this MUBI Release is bloody genre-bending bliss from the visionary director behind **I Saw the TV Glow*. Now streaming exclusively on MUBI. ****Get 30 days free** to stream great cinema like this and so much more. [Watch now → ](https://mubi.com/killscreen?ref=killscreen-newsletter) Daloway’s fate is, in a way, where [Peter Nichols’](https://www.elfsend.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *Crude Oil* begins, not with a scream, but with a bloop. Released earlier this year, *Crude Oil* starts with an asteroid striking a dinosaur that, millions of years later, becomes a single, sentient morsel of crude that has emerged in the depths of an oil industry research facility and must make its way to freedom. You start small but collect droplets along the way, which increase your mass and locomotion and also serve as a resource you can expend for certain puzzles. You fire the droplets to operate elevators, knock objects off shelves, and even start fires, so resource scarcity forces you to be honest about what you have. (A nice counterpoint to our current predicament.) 0:00 /0:10 1× What emerges is something much darker and multifaceted, communicated both through the environment and through various email consoles sprinkled throughout the game. New World Oil, in fact, knows you exist and has been scouring the earth for a type of superintelligence that will help with both its economic aspirations and military engagements. As we know, oil isn’t just oil; it’s power, and harnessing one as mysterious and omnipotent as Daloway’s nightmares is surely what shareholders require. But when our villain (hero?) emerges, there’s no one left at the facility that’s perhaps been abandoned after a protest, and the compound is in clear disrepair, with rogue robotic vacuums, conveyor belts to nowhere, and printers firing off copies for no one to read. *Crude Oil* is a type of genre inversion that casts you as a cuddly ball of slime bent on destroying the planet, and contrasts with other physics-based fluid works like [Ron Carmel](https://www.killscreen.com/world-goo-co-creator-ron-carmel-indie-success-patent-infringers-and-saving-gamemakers-publishers/) and Kyle Gabler’s *World of Goo* (2008), which have no particular point of view other than the object itself. “Most people \[...\] ask, ‘Why is Gish a ball of tar?’” Chronic Logic’s Alex Austin [wrote in 2004](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/indie-postmortem-chronic-logic-s-i-gish-i-?ref=killscreen.com). “He just is.” It’s no surprise that it’s a game about climate change; I mean, what else could it be? (The derricks are in the desert, and you’re a blob of oil.) Past attempts to engage with oil lean more toward the direct, such as Paolo Pedercini’s 2008 [*Oiligarchy*](https://www.molleindustria.org/en/oiligarchy/?ref=killscreen.com), which casts you as an oil executive explicitly corrupting politicians and killing clean energy. *Crude Oil* shares nothing of that lineage, and your protagonist is simply adorable, a feint perhaps, but a deception sold through a variety of hats. (A blob wearing a hat!) At one point, I’m wearing a construction hat and operating a forklift, and at another moment, I’ve donned a mind-control hat (a nod to [*Inside*](https://www.killscreen.com/inside-dares-escape/), perhaps my favorite title ever) to control smaller bloblets of goo to open doors on my behalf. But mostly, the lack of structured locomotion makes sliding, swimming, splooshing, and squeezing a delight to work through. “Cuteness is a way of aestheticizing powerlessness,” [Sianne Ngai writes](https://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/43/jasper%5Fngai.php?ref=killscreen.com), but cuteness also highlights the contrast between my aspirations to overheat the planet and end human life and simply climb up a set of stairs. I’m torn between the demands of caring for this little being and the fact that I am the end of the Anthropocene. 0:00 /0:10 1× Why Nichols chose to tell *this* story in this way speaks to how games might offer a way for us to understand What Is Happening. In 1992, writing in *The New Republic* in a book review titled [“Petrofiction,”](https://amitavghosh.com/petrofiction-and-petroculture/?ref=killscreen.com) Bengali writer Amitav Ghosh lamented the lack of fiction about the extractive century of global oil production. Compared to the spice trade that had yielded several works, he worried that fiction and storytelling weren’t quite up for the geopolitical moment. Twenty years later in the *American Book Review*, [Imre Szeman suggested](https://americanbookreview.org/focus-petrofictions/?ref=killscreen.com) that there was finally a “move afoot to puzzle out the implications of our dependency, as much metaphysical as material, on a slippery substance that connects technological futures with prehistorical pasts in ways that cannot but be difficult to conceptualize.” But I wonder if writing about it or directing films like *An Inconvenient Truth* is going about describing this “very wicked” problem the wrong way. Published in 2018, Nicole Seymour’s *Bad* *Environmentalism* [argues](https://www.publicbooks.org/should-environmentalists-learn-to-take-a-joke/?ref=killscreen.com) that a shame-and-blame approach isn’t the only way to engage with the unfolding catastrophe after the Great Acceleration. We are often torn between earnestness, sanctimony, and awe on one side and fear, shame, and guilt on the other, but the former can push us into hopelessness, where big, simple feelings simply aren’t enough. Seymour suggests a type of “ironic adaptability” that nontraditional media allows us to relieve us through our feelings by laughing through our tears. (Her prime example is *Jackass* regulars Steve-O and Chris Pontius’ 2003 “nature” show *Wildboyz*.) *Crude Oil* is a serious game, but presented in quite an unserious way. Typically, platformers require [moment-to-moment precision](https://www.killscreen.com/a-precision-platformer-drawn-in-ben-day-dots/), demanding rigorous execution as their payoff. But these are in conflict in Nichols’ work, as the climbing and decoding are far less stringent, largely because you are an amorphous blob. So I find myself, in many instances, stuck between a file cabinet and shuffling boxes around, or in one sequence trying to stay still on a box while jumping onto a platform. Or losing mass while scooting on the floor. (“Stick to your fixed-sized character,” the designer of body horror title *Carrion* [warned](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/carrion-game-level-designer-krzysztof-chomicki-on-managing-amorphousness-gravity-and-screams?ref=killscreen.com).) In many platformers, we have hands or feet that keep us balanced, or allow us to orient ourselves before leaping to another surface. But in *Crude Oil*, we are the unhuman: “that which is made human, in which we would have featherless, bipedal walking and talking lumps of oil,” [Eugene Thacker writes](https://www.pagesmagazine.net/en/articles/black-infinity-or-oil-discovers-humans?ref=killscreen.com). (He was talking about “The Black Gondolier,” although it clearly could have been written about platforming in our case.) Thacker’s point is that giving a monstrosity human features is less unsettling than a thing without mass at all, Lovecraft’s “The Unnamable.” *Crude Oil* counterbalances the precision we expect from games like this. The instability of my character is not just a mechanic, but a mood, as well. (Philly's electro-itinerant [Body Meat](https://bodymeat.bandcamp.com/album/starchris?ref=killscreen.com) builds a score that vacillates between office park pensive and triumphant escapism.) I’m often uneasy, like this greasy dollop, which naturally reflects the growing unease we feel about our climate disaster. Year after year of hot summers leaves us wondering about summer vacations, airline travel, and food insecurity, so it’s only fitting that *Crude Oil* would offer no stability as well. It’s all a bit imprecise. Additionally, Nichols chooses an isometric perspective that keeps you outside the frame, ostensibly through the lens of a security camera. It’s a destabilizing verticality, an orientation of [Hito Steyerl’s “view from above”](https://www.e-flux.com/journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thought-experiment-on-vertical-perspective/?ref=killscreen.com) that makes the ground under your metaphorical feet that much more treacherous. So, then, who am I really? Perhaps there’s a clue in the closing sequences. After traversing through sewers and through corporate mazes, my final exit is blocked by an enormous pile of money and a torch. In a move that honors the legacy of the K Foundation’s [legendary performance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%5FFoundation%5FBurn%5Fa%5FMillion%5FQuid?ref=killscreen.com), I must do the same, and all the accreted earnings of the New World Oil corporation must go in a cleansing fire before I can make my escape through the toilet to a new, better life. And with that we have a tidy and circular summary of the secret hands—of commerce, of oil, of the military, of capitalism—that have guided me to this present moment. I’m presented with my wealth, and the only way out is fire. I, a superintelligent life form, have transcended the need for capital itself. That oil itself that led us through its divine hand into this mess would somehow lead us out is an ending as fitting as Leiber’s ode to the black horror: 0:00 /0:09 1× *Oh, the Black Gondola’s gonna take you for a ride* *With a cargo of atom bombs and Atlases and nightmares...* *The Black Gondola’s gonna stop at your door* *With a bow-wave of asphalt and a gravel spray ...* *The Black Gondola’ll ... get ... you ... yet!* It just might be wearing a funny hat. Before you go Members get a new Playlist pick every Friday, plus the full archive of past ones. This week: a blob of oil in a hard hat that wants out of the oil industry. [Get Friday’s picks ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=playlist-close) Radar is the short one — three news items, every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. It started in August, after most of you had already signed up, so you were never added to it. Ticking one box fixes that. [Turn on Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/account/newsletters) ### Eva and Franco Mattes' cursed cat now breeds in the dataset URL: https://www.killscreen.com/eva-franco-mattes-rage-bait-cursed-cat/ Last updated: 2026-10-02T19:39:40.000Z For two months this spring, an office in Venice's Palazzo Franchetti ran as a small, malicious data centre. On a turntable sat a model of the "cursed cat"—the earless, tailless, ANGRY AS FUK blob in circulation since 2008—while a robotic arm photographed it from every angle, feeding an image model that generated new variants and released them onto the web, the better to contaminate the training sets of whatever comes next. Around the rooms, the machine's mutations were rebuilt by hand in wood, moss, and Murano glass. That was *Rage Bait*, Eva and Franco Mattes' exhibition with the Autotelic Foundation, which ran alongside the Venice Biennale this summer. ![A moss sculpture of the cursed cat meme, paws raised, displayed in a dark wooden niche](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/rage-bait-mattes-install-2.jpg) The cursed cat, remade in moss. Photo: Melania Dalle Grave for DSL Studio, courtesy Autotelic Foundation The games entry sat across the water, over a private swimming pool on Giudecca: *But I Love Human* (2024), a ten-minute supercut of NPC livestreamers—performers who mimic videogame background characters, repeating awkward, mechanical gestures and scripted dialogue for an online audience—screened above the pool so visitors watched it in reflection. An excerpt is below, silent; [the full video](https://0100101110101101.org/but-i-love-human/?ref=killscreen.com) has its audio. 0:00 /0:24 1× Silent excerpt from **But I Love Human* (2024). [The full video, with audio, is at the artists’ site](https://0100101110101101.org/but-i-love-human/?ref=killscreen.com) In [a conversation with Gary Zhexi Zhang for Ocula](https://ocula.com/magazine/conversations/eva-and-franco-mattes-venice-exhibition-rage-bait/?ref=killscreen.com)—the piece [that surfaced this for us](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYmnpMUESJP/?ref=killscreen.com)—the duo sound less like pranksters than like people whose tools were expropriated. "The strategies that we contributed to or pioneered—you know, faking, pranking, rage bait—now are being used by the most powerful people on the planet," Eva Mattes says. Or, shorter: "Strange is the new normal." We've been following the Mattes' work [since Issue o1](https://www.killscreen.com/left-4-dead-2-immersion-high-definition/) and Killscreen was on the humans-as-NPCs beat back when it was heartwarming—in 2014 we covered [a Japanese villager repopulating a dying town with life-size NPC stand-ins](https://www.killscreen.com/japanese-villager-replaces-dead-real-life-npcs/). What stays with me now is Franco Mattes' stubborn optimism: no company, however big, "was yet able to engineer an honest meme, something that lasts more than a few days. And some kid in a bedroom in Kyiv does it." From net art to NPC streams, Radar reads the internet’s strangest corners through games—free, in your inbox, three times a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### When a film festival ran Sleeping Dogs, the walls came off URL: https://www.killscreen.com/when-a-film-festival-ran-sleeping-dogs-the-walls-came-off/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T02:50:09.000Z On Oct. 2, in the basement of Loading Bar, a gaming pub in London's Stoke Newington, the Hong Kong Film Festival UK put *Sleeping Dogs* on a screen and invited the audience to walk through its walls. [Hong Kong Recoded](https://www.hkff.uk/programme-list/game-workshop?ref=killscreen.com), hosted by curator Aidan Page with Elliott Burns of SideQuest, had the room no-clip through the 2012 crime game's Hong Kong, a city [made in Canada](https://www.killscreen.com/long-dark-brings-canada-videogames/). 0:00 /0:18 1× The Hong Kong of **Sleeping Dogs*, held in a fixed shot from the teaser for Edwin Lo's **Accidents* (2025), one of the three films previewed. [Watch the teaser with sound](https://vimeo.com/1143503291?ref=killscreen.com) on Vimeo. No-clip is a debug cheat that lets you drift through whatever the designers made solid. Pointed at a city, it works like a survey. In [Burns's account of the night](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeKAgUKiMkH/?ref=killscreen.com), this Hong Kong is "spatially distorted and shrunken," laid out to serve its missions and padded with copy-pasted blocks. You only see that from off the route. The hosts previewed three machinima by Hong Kong artists who had already stepped off it. Ip Yuk-Yiu's *Another Day of Depression in Kowloon* (2012) empties *Call of Duty: Black Ops* maps into a rain-soaked portrait with no one shooting. Edwin Lo's *Accidents* (2025) holds a fixed camera on *Sleeping Dogs* street accidents while traffic carries on. Wai-Keung Hui's *Sleeping Armageddon Plan* (2026) sends the game's pedestrians to the harbor with luggage. [VRAL](https://milanmachinimafestival.org/vral-screening?ref=killscreen.com) began streaming Hui's follow-up, *Awakening Armageddon Plan*, that same day; it runs through Oct. 15. What I like is the host. It was [the second year running](https://www.hkff.uk/full-programme/sleeping-dogs-spatial-representations-of-hong-kong-in-western-gaming?ref=killscreen.com) that Page brought *Sleeping Dogs* to this pub for the festival, which now calls it a yearly games program. The game took its city from Hong Kong cinema, so a Hong Kong film festival is the right body to audit the loan. Killscreen has circled both halves of this. In 2016 we covered [Robert What's no-clip exhibition](https://www.killscreen.com/beyond-the-veil-of-counter-strike/), 396 screenshots from outside the maps of *Counter-Strike: Global Offensive*, and in 2015 we argued that cyberpunk uses Hong Kong as ["exotic window dressing."](https://www.killscreen.com/all-cyberpunk-heads-hong-kong-eventually-shadowrun-does-it-right/) Stoke Newington put the two in one room. Burns writes that the night closed over photographs of 1960s Hong Kong, from a visit Burns's grandfather made while serving with the RAF in Singapore. Another visitor's Hong Kong, this one on paper. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/wai-keung-hui-sleeping-armageddon-plan-0.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/wai-keung-hui-sleeping-armageddon-plan-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/ip-yuk-yiu-another-day-of-depression-in-kowloon-5s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/ip-yuk-yiu-another-day-of-depression-in-kowloon-13s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/ip-yuk-yiu-another-day-of-depression-in-kowloon-25s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/ip-yuk-yiu-another-day-of-depression-in-kowloon-37s.jpg) From the films previewed on the night. First two: Wai-Keung Hui's **Sleeping Armageddon Plan* (2026), courtesy [Milan Machinima Festival](https://milanmachinimafestival.org/another-end?ref=killscreen.com). The rest: Ip Yuk-Yiu's **Another Day of Depression in Kowloon* (2012), from [the artist's excerpt](https://vimeo.com/127484336?ref=killscreen.com). Nights like this one, where a game gets read as a city instead of reviewed as a product, rarely get written down. The free Killscreen newsletter is where we write them down. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### LIKELIKE's year closed with a party for Future? No Thanks! URL: https://www.killscreen.com/likelikes-year-closed-with-a-party-for-future-no-thanks/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T21:07:59.000Z On Friday, Oct. 2, [LIKELIKE](https://likelike.org/2026/10/01/special-event-future-no-thanks/?ref=killscreen.com), the neo-arcade Paolo Pedercini directs at 205 N. Evaline St. in Pittsburgh's Garfield neighborhood, opened from 7 to 11 PM for one night during the Unblurred gallery crawl. The occasion was a late release party for *Future? No Thanks!*, the Molleindustria game that had been on Steam since Sept. 4\. [The announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dd9xTdbC8qn/?ref=killscreen.com) billed it as the last LIKELIKE event of the year and promised merch and a chance to meet the local cast. 0:00 /0:24 1× The opening of the announcement trailer for **Future? No Thanks!*, silent here. The [full trailer with sound](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3861870/Future%5FNo%5FThanks/?ref=killscreen.com) is on Steam. *Future? No Thanks!* is an open-world comedy set in an ecosocialist Pittsburgh in 2045, where Harvey Huffstone, a grumpy elder, works through a bucket list before a self-scheduled euthanasia. [The credits](https://futurenothanks.com/credits.html?ref=killscreen.com) list more than 40 voice performers, drawn, LIKELIKE says, from the community around [Glitterbox Theater](https://www.wesanews.org/arts-sports-culture/2024-09-12/grassroots-queer-normative-theater-homestead?ref=killscreen.com), a volunteer-run venue in Homestead. Tenley Schmida directed the voices and performed the motion capture, Dave English plays Harvey, and Glitterbox co-founder Teresa "Tree" Martuccio has a part. The same page dates the work: made "between January 7, 2021 and July 9, 2026 in Pittsburgh, PA." Getting there was rough. Valve held the game in review past its July 22 launch over what Molleindustria [described](https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/indie-game-gets-last-minute-steam-delay-while-valve-reviews-its-dozens-of-untextured-polygons-depicting-ass-and-boobs/?ref=killscreen.com) as "dozens of untextured polygons," then gave it an adults-only rating that the Pedercini [called](https://kotaku.com/steams-decision-to-brand-his-open-world-adventure-about-a-cranky-old-boomer-pornography-is-humiliating-and-surreal-developer-says-2000729298?ref=killscreen.com) "the most humiliating and surreal experience in 20+ years of game making." The rating came down in late August. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/future-no-thanks-band.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/future-no-thanks-house.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/future-no-thanks-walk.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/future-no-thanks-robots.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/future-no-thanks-board.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/future-no-thanks-hoverboard.jpg) Scenes from **Future? No Thanks!* Images: Molleindustria via Steam Release parties in neighborhood arcades rarely make the games press. Killscreen's free newsletter exists for exactly that kind of night: independent and experimental game culture, three times a week. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### NB Spiders' estrogen quest went from jam to Rijksakademie URL: https://www.killscreen.com/nb-spiders-estrogen-quest-went-from-jam-to-rijksakademie/ Last updated: 2026-10-02T17:32:14.000Z The 5 p.m. slot at the Rijksakademie's [\[untitled games event\]](https://rijksakademie.nl/en/public-programme/2026-09-18-untitled-games-event?ref=killscreen.com) this month was a room full of people collectively guiding a slime girlfriend who lives in a sewage pipe toward estrogen. *procuring estrogen for your toxic slime girlfriend* is NB Spiders' [short browser RPG](https://spiderzone.itch.io/procuring-estrogen-for-your-toxic-slime-girlfriend?ref=killscreen.com), made for a Halloween scareware jam last year, in which you fight off "creepy skelington dudes," visit a graveyard, and "fullfill the ancient prophecy." It is free, plays in minutes. 0:00 /0:10 1× What jumped out at me was its wry, short-story humor. It's a simple device twisted from game conventions; a fetch mission for your beloved. But the dialogue sells the small shape. Spiders led the September 18 playthrough in Amsterdam with game designer BigBeefySharkBaby, then shipped a DX Edition the next day. Spiders is a performer, electronics artist, and game engineer; the artistic associate in the games department at Kunsthochschule Kassel; and their stated research subject is queer forms of play and crip empowerment. The Amsterdam session was the game played the way it wants to be played: together, out loud. Killscreen covered [Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's free browser release](https://www.killscreen.com/danielle-brathwaite-shirley-releases-i-didnt-realise-you-thought-like-that-as-a-free-browser-game/) in August; a queer web game canon is assembling in public, a few minutes at a time. This one is worth your lunch break. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nb-spiders-estrogen-cover.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nb-spiders-estrogen-shot2.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nb-spiders-estrogen-shot3.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nb-spiders-estrogen-shot5.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nb-spiders-estrogen-shot6.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/nb-spiders-estrogen-shot7.jpg) The game’s cover art, the wareware editor, a skeleton encounter, and play documentation. Images: NB Spiders, via [itch.io](https://spiderzone.itch.io/procuring-estrogen-for-your-toxic-slime-girlfriend?ref=killscreen.com). Killscreen tracks the queer, handmade end of games, the work that shows up in art residencies before it shows up anywhere else. The free newsletter delivers it. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### When you slice these beetles, the halves play Ableton URL: https://www.killscreen.com/when-you-slice-these-beetles-the-halves-play-ableton/ Last updated: 2026-10-02T16:42:39.000Z The rule of the sketch is a moral: "If you seek to harm then your problems will only multiply." Slice one of Noland Chaliha's procedural beetles and it refuses to die—it splits into clones, each carrying its own procedural MIDI note, piped live out of the browser and into Ableton. Toy, instrument and parable at once play out in [the video](https://www.instagram.com/p/DXajguDt4LO/?ref=killscreen.com). 0:00 /0:15 1× The beetle-slicing sketch, from [Noland Chaliha’s reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DXajguDt4LO/?ref=killscreen.com). Sound on. The technical footing is worth noticing. Chaliha, a creative technologist and educator who posts as alwayscodingsomething, wrote the sketch in [p5.webgpu.js](https://github.com/processing/p5.js/blob/main/contributor%5Fdocs/webgpu.md?ref=killscreen.com), the experimental WebGPU renderer that now ships alongside p5.js 2.2—the Processing Foundation's bet on keeping browser art current for the next decade. A sketch with rules this legible—cut, multiply, harmonize—reads as one whether or not it ever ships, which is the same lesson we took from [Indira Ardolic's live-coding performances](https://www.killscreen.com/indira-ardolics-live-coding-performances-turn-game-engines-into-instruments/) last year and from [the no-skill audiovisual instruments](https://www.killscreen.com/a-new-and-wild-audiovisual-instrument-requires-no-skill-to-play/) we loved a decade ago: when a system responds this generously, playing it and playing with it are the same act. The beetles have no ship date. The instrument already works. Radar catches the sketches that read as games before anyone calls them that. Three short issues a week, free. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A procedural disco eats its own memory on purpose URL: https://www.killscreen.com/mazin-harsh-nights-disco-anxiety/ Last updated: 2026-10-02T16:04:53.000Z [The dance floor](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dc-T7JvNLAQ/?ref=killscreen.com)looks like a nightclub level cut from a late-’90s PlayStation game, except nothing holds still: textures shear, walls smear into color fields, the room degrades a little more every loop. *Harsh Nights at Disco Anxiety* is, in the glitch artist MAZiN’s words, “endless, procedural disco, eating its own memory in real time.” 0:00 /1:17 1× **Harsh Nights at Disco Anxiety*, via [MAZiN on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dc-T7JvNLAQ/?ref=killscreen.com) The technique matters more than the vibe. When a commenter asked whether the footage was ripped from a PSX game, MAZiN clarified that it’s not from a game at all. It’s a “simulated PSX environment” built inside Corrupted Souls, a ROM-corruptor engine of MAZiN’s own design, running its VRAM-melting feature. The console is fake. The memory being eaten is synthetic memory, degraded on purpose, at a chosen tempo. MAZiN gives glitch tools away free at [m4zin.net/tools](https://www.m4zin.net/tools?ref=killscreen.com), and has shown work from Zagreb to Wroclaw to New York. The tools travel, too. In late August, MAZiN posted [*Broken Quake II*](https://www.instagram.com/p/DccTnfDIcZQ/?ref=killscreen.com), the same corruption passes pointed at id’s 1997 shooter: geometry shears mid-firefight, walls smear into color, and the gun stays legible the whole way down. 0:00 /1:16 1× **Broken Quake II*: the Corrupted Souls passes pointed at id’s 1997 shooter. Via [MAZiN’s reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DccTnfDIcZQ/?ref=killscreen.com). The PS1 stopped being a console some time ago and became a palette. This month alone we covered [a 90s photographer’s PS1 dungeon crawler](https://www.killscreen.com/a-photographer-designed-the-ps1-dungeon-crawler-nemuru-mayu/), and a decade back [*Visual Out*](https://www.killscreen.com/visual-asks-embrace-glitches-dying-computer/) asked players to embrace the glitches of a dying computer. MAZiN’s contribution is the purest version of the idea: no game underneath, just the failure, composed. Killscreen tracks the artists who treat consoles as instruments: glitch, databending, engine-building and the rest. The free newsletter delivers the next one before the algorithm does. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A Whitney Biennial artwork is a game you play from home URL: https://www.killscreen.com/whitney-biennial-camoflux-recall-grotto/ Last updated: 2026-10-01T20:41:04.000Z The Whitney Biennial's main run closed on August 23—a partial view stays up through October 12—but one commission didn't come down: [*Camoflux Recall Grotto*](https://whitney.org/exhibitions/camoflux-recall-grotto?ref=killscreen.com), Leo Castañeda's web-based game, lives on artport, the museum's online gallery for internet art, and [plays in any browser](https://artport.whitney.org/commissions/camoflux-recall-grotto/?ref=killscreen.com) right now. You drift through a primordial grotto as an "organic drone," gathering water and sunlight—the game calls them "liquid turbulence" and "electromagnetic intensity"—to feed cyberflora, seedlings that sprout holographic memories of past and future worlds. The pacing is the point: a meditative, cozy loop while the garden is sparse, accelerating only when the organisms multiply beyond sustainability. Progression, the thing games usually worship, is recast as overgrowth. The landscape draws on the Brazilian Amazon and the South Florida Everglades, and on the Colombian painters Maria Thereza Negreiros (Castañeda's grandmother), Ever Astudillo, and Alfonso Quijano; the build credits Jaime Soto Kure on programming, Victor Gamboa on sound, and Irene Rodríguez on voice, and the game was first prototyped at the Game Jam Lab of Museo La Tertulia in Cali, Colombia. Another milestone for the exception: Marcela Guerrero co-curated with Drew Sawyer—the first Latina to co-curate the Biennial—and [the Latino USA tour that flagged this for us](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYujG1HuMjZ/?ref=killscreen.com) counts 16 of the 56 participants as Latino, reading the whole show as a fight over who gets to define American art. That fight now includes an artist whose native material is the game engine. 0:00 /1:03 1× Inside the 2026 Biennial. Video: [Latino USA](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYujG1HuMjZ/?ref=killscreen.com) [We profiled Castañeda in 2024](https://www.killscreen.com/leo-castaneda/), back when the episodic games and mixed-reality worlds were touring biennials rather than anchoring the country's most argued-over survey. The museum keeps hours; the grotto doesn't. *Leo is a partner of Gameplayarts, but was not consulted on this post.* One playable museum commission at a time, Radar maps where games and art collide. The free newsletter delivers it three times a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Bouchra brings a coyote filmmaker to MUBI URL: https://www.killscreen.com/bouchra-brings-a-coyote-filmmaker-to-mubi/ Last updated: 2026-10-01T18:57:22.000Z Bouchra is a Moroccan filmmaker in New York, writing an autobiographical film that keeps folding back into the life it is drawn from. Bouchra is also a coyote, in a city of anthropomorphic animals rendered in nearly photoreal rooms and streets. Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki's feature *Bouchra* has been [streaming on MUBI](https://mubi.com/en/us/films/bouchra?ref=killscreen.com) since September 12. 0:00 /1:26 1× **2 Lizards*: Episode 1 (2020), the series **Bouchra* grew from — silent here; the full episode with sound is [on Artforum’s Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/398657270?ref=killscreen.com). The film's dialogue comes from real phone calls and letters, with characters voiced by the directors' friends and family playing versions of themselves — documentary raw material wearing an animated body. Across 83 minutes, the film moves between New York and Casablanca, between the character's everyday releases and a mother's unresolved feelings about the character's queerness. It landed its U.S. premiere [in Currents at the 63rd New York Film Festival](https://www.filmlinc.org/nyff2025/films/bouchra/?ref=killscreen.com). *Bouchra* grew out of *2 Lizards*, the series Bennani and Barki released serially on Instagram in the first weeks of lockdown in 2020—two computer-generated lizards moving through an emptied New York, swiftly picked up and published by Artforum. What was a coping mechanism at reel length is now a feature-length grammar: rig a body, render a city, and let real voices drive it. Bennani's practice runs on the same toolchain as any studio shipping a AAA open world—3D animation, avatar-driven character work, photoreal environments — pointed at diaspora, family, and memory instead of traversal. Machinima logic without the game underneath: the avatar turns out to be autofiction, because everyone involved is already playing a version of themselves. Animation made with game tools, cinema made from avatars — Killscreen watches that border so you don’t have to. The free newsletter delivers it. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### kidkanevil wrote the soundtrack to an imaginary RPG URL: https://www.killscreen.com/kidkanevil-bubble-imaginary-rpg/ Last updated: 2026-10-02T21:07:53.000Z During lockdown, in a Berlin apartment, the producer Gerard Roberts—[kidkanevil](https://kidkanevil.bandcamp.com/album/bubble?ref=killscreen.com)—was playing so much Nintendo Switch that the dimension-hopping started to feel autobiographical. Out of it came *Bubble* (2022): fourteen tracks scoring a psychedelic RPG that does not exist, about a girl in a kitsune mask who travels between worlds inside a swirling dark bubble. The inspirations are Masaaki Yuasa's unhinged anime and Moebius's hallucinatory comics, and the cast is real even if the game isn't—Cuushe, Iglooghost, Daisuke Tanabe, and the rapper Nakamura Minami all pass through. The imaginary game got real music videos. "Coin Game," directed by TAKCOM with animation by RuffMercy, orbits Tokyo's legendary Mikado arcade; "Kyomu" came from the anime studio sankaku. An excerpt is below—watch [the full video with sound on](https://vimeo.com/715562501?ref=killscreen.com). 0:00 /0:24 1× Silent excerpt from "Coin Game" (dir. TAKCOM, animation by RuffMercy). [Watch the full video with sound](https://vimeo.com/715562501?ref=killscreen.com) The album resurfaced this summer because the School of Machines, Making, and Make-Believe brought Roberts to Berlin to teach game sound inside [the alt-ctrl program we covered in August](https://www.killscreen.com/an-evening-of-alt-ctrl-games-closed-a-berlin-summer-school/). The school's [interview](https://www.schoolofma.org/news/meet-gerard-roberts-aka-kidkanevil?ref=killscreen.com)—and [the announcement post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYy4gxZFyfS/?ref=killscreen.com) that tipped us off—includes the best description of game audio's founding problem I've read in a while: Koji Kondo inventing the sound of Mario jumping, "a really strange almost existential task," one that changed how popular culture hears a body leaving the ground. Killscreen has a soft spot for this genre. Ten years ago we wrote about [*Deep Space*, a soundtrack to a videogame that doesn't exist](https://www.killscreen.com/deep-space-soundtrack-videogame-doesnt-exist/); the form keeps producing, because a score is the cheapest possible game engine. And this one may not stay imaginary. "There is a *Bubble* game in my mind for sure," Roberts says. Imaginary games, real scores, arcade music videos: Radar covers where game sound goes when it leaves the console. Free, three times a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### PlayStation footage melts for real on Jared Hall's CRTs URL: https://www.killscreen.com/technopooch-analog-playstation-crt/ Last updated: 2026-10-01T17:29:24.000Z Jared Hall runs PlayStation-era imagery out of the digital world and back in. [The ](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYxYb0XKNhI/?ref=killscreen.com)clip that pique me shows the console's boot logo blooming and tearing across a CRT, and none of it is a filter. Hall, who posts as [technopooch](https://www.instagram.com/technopooch/?ref=killscreen.com), pushes game footage through a chain of AV converters, a video mixer, and a circuit-bent glitch box, then rescans the result off the tube. Every wobble is voltage doing something it shouldn't. 0:00 /0:18 1× The reel, in full: PlayStation footage through the analog chain. Video: [Jared Hall (technopooch)](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYxYb0XKNhI/?ref=killscreen.com) A shader imitating tape damage is a picture of decay; this rig is actual decay, happening to a live signal. It places the work in the analog lineage that runs back through the VJ scene to the first video synthesizers—with a twist Killscreen cares about: the raw material is games. PlayStation boot screens and low-poly footage get treated the way earlier video artists treated broadcast television, as a found landscape to be physically corrupted rather than emulated. We have been circling this territory from the other direction. Two weeks ago it was [*Hypnogenesis*](https://www.killscreen.com/a-video-synthesizer-is-the-control-scheme-in-hypnogenesis/), which puts a video synthesizer inside a game as its control scheme; a decade back, [*Ecco the Dolphin* glitch art](https://www.killscreen.com/ecco-the-dolphin-glitch-art-is-all-your-vaporwave-dreams-come-true/) was scratching the same itch. Hall closes the loop from the far side: instead of the game absorbing the video synth, the video synth absorbs the game. Radar tracks the people treating games as raw material—on CRTs, in galleries, in browser sketches—three times a week. The free newsletter puts it in your inbox. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### When the wargame runs 1,500 hours, the podcast is the game URL: https://www.killscreen.com/when-the-wargame-runs-1-500-hours-the-podcast-is-the-game/ Last updated: 2026-10-01T16:22:54.000Z The schedule on their website ends with a straight face: "Full *Campaign for North Africa* \= Ep 100 - Heat death of the universe." Andy and James, two friends in England who record together as [War With a Mate](https://warwithamate.co.uk/?ref=killscreen.com), have spent nearly a hundred weekly episodes on the practice (!) scenario of *The Campaign for North Africa*, six turns out of 111, and are now about to start the game proper. [The New York Times profiled the attempt](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/world/europe/campaign-for-north-africa-game.html?ref=killscreen.com) in September, reasonably framing it as a question: can two friends complete a game no one has ever finished? The game is SPI's late-1970s monster, designed by Richard Berg: the North African campaign of 1940 to 1943 at a granularity that approaches parody. A ten-foot map. 1,600 counters. Five rulebooks, including the famous clause granting Italian battalions an extra water point for cooking pasta. An estimated 1,500 hours with the recommended ten players, "or two idiots if you're running short," as their site puts it. No completion of the full game has ever been documented. "We still don't understand what the camels do," they [told Wargamer](https://www.wargamer.com/board-games/the-campaign-for-north-africa-two-years?ref=killscreen.com) back in August, 20 months in. It's pretty clear that *Campaign* has transcended games and is now is pure performance. A game that can't be played or even explained to each other is something out of Bolero or Calvino and the attempt *is* the game. Or perhaps, what Andy and James are actually building is not progress toward a victory condition. It is a container for a friendship, with magnetized counters, a searchable rules PDF, spreadsheets to do the supply math, and a weekly show they describe as an accountability tool. The estimate in circulation is 20 years. The point of a 20-year game, as any durational artist could tell them, is the 20 years. In April we asked [why board games don't get better furniture](https://www.killscreen.com/armani-casa-borgonuovo-games-table-furniture-design-board-games/). Here is the limit case: a game that needs not a table but a spare room, and a plan for the rest of your life. The real campaign begins at episode 100, which they intend to premiere live. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/war-with-a-mate-map.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/war-with-a-mate-counters.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/campaign-north-africa-counters-red.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/campaign-north-africa-egypt.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/war-with-a-mate-naval.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/war-with-a-mate-dice.jpg) The practice scenario in progress. Images: [War With a Mate](https://warwithamate.co.uk/gallery?ref=killscreen.com) Killscreen reads games for what they do to the people playing them, including the ones that take 20 years. The free KS Radar newsletter sends three short dispatches a week from independent and experimental game culture. [Get the free dispatch ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Friday Sundae wrote its haunted hotel game as a musical URL: https://www.killscreen.com/friday-sundae-wrote-its-haunted-hotel-game-as-a-musical/ Last updated: 2026-10-01T03:13:53.000Z The cat is sardonic, the power tools talk, and the hotel is lying to you. In *There Are No Ghosts at the Grand*, Chris David inherits a dilapidated English seaside hotel and gets 30 days and 30 nights to restore it: by day you drive a sandblaster, a paint sprayer and a furniture cannon through its faded rooms, and by night the same tools turn on the things moving under the wallpaper. The vacuum takes on vengeful spirits; the sprayer exposes invisible assailants. It [arrives on Steam in December](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3725190/There%5FAre%5FNo%5FGhosts%5Fat%5Fthe%5FGrand/?ref=killscreen.com). 0:00 /0:21 1× From the reveal trailer. Watch the [full trailer with sound on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3725190/There%5FAre%5FNo%5FGhosts%5Fat%5Fthe%5FGrand/?ref=killscreen.com) It wasn't *quite* my style, but playing the demo, it occured to me. *This is a musical*. Many games have music as texture, as background, as mechanic. But for a genre convention, singing characters are almost non-existent. Friday Sundae, the Bristol studio run by Rachel and Anil Glendinning, spent five years making children's games for the BBC and Cartoon Network before this debut, and somewhere in development their ghost story became a full musical: every character carries a theme song, and dialogue choices are made in song. "You can sing back in verse," Anil told [an interview last year](https://blogs.autodesk.com/media-and-entertainment/2025/10/01/there-are-no-ghosts-at-the-grand/?ref=killscreen.com), with a score that leans on late-1980s reggae and punk. Bristol is Aardman's town, and it shows in the game's rubbery, talking-tool comedy. Games have flirted with musical theater mostly through rhythm mechanics, which is singing as accuracy test. A book musical, where the number is the dialogue, is far rarer, and it is the same territory Killscreen visited when [David Kanaga made an opera you play as a dog](https://www.killscreen.com/round-apaws-david-kanagas-dog-opera/) and when [ONLY SLIME rebuilt their computer-game opera](https://www.killscreen.com/only-slime-rebuilt-their-computer-game-opera-as-afterlife/) this summer. A renovation sim that argues with its ghosts in verse is a genre pileup nobody asked for, which is exactly the recommendation. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/no-ghosts-grand-screenshot-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/no-ghosts-grand-screenshot-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/no-ghosts-grand-screenshot-6.jpg) Day shift and night shift at the Grand. Images: Friday Sundae Killscreen watches for the games that borrow their form from somewhere else entirely, an opera here, a stage musical there. The Radar newsletter delivers three of these finds a week, free. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Lofsöng hides a nuclear warning URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-nuclear-warning-is-the-level-design-in-lofsong/ Last updated: 2026-09-30T20:37:03.000Z There is a spiral cut into the stone floor like a record groove, and a small figure in bulky headgear standing beside it, listening. *Lofsöng*, the first game from Unrelated Studio in Turin, directed by Alessandro Durando, is an exploration adventure with no dialogue, no map and no text you can read on arrival: an invented language, buried in monuments, that the game teaches you to hear. It premiered in the Tribeca Games program in June, showed a new trailer called "Bergmál" at gamescom Opening Night Live, and is [wishlistable on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3845010/Lofsong/?ref=killscreen.com) now, release date to be announced. 0:00 /0:21 1× From the "Bergmál" trailer. Watch the [full trailer with sound on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3845010/Lofsong/?ref=killscreen.com) The setting is Earth, long dead: an Exclusion Zone of dust and ash in a permanent nuclear winter, which you cross with a shapeshifting origami companion that folds into a kite, a glider, a sailboat. "Every monument in *LOFSÖNG* was built to be read," the studio writes, and that is the k design: geometry and sound doing the work of words, sculptures you play like instruments until the stone gives up what it remembers. Many years ago, I remember someone from the Longnow Foundation telling me about the problem of marking nuclear waste sites for an unknown future audience. It's a problem that has haunted engineers since the Sandia reports on marking waste sites for a 10,000-year audience, the ones that produced the line "this place is a message." Their answer was hostile earthworks and granite warnings; Durando's answer is a game where the warning system is the world, and reading it is the verb. The title leans Icelandic too: *lofsöngur* is a hymn (and their national anthem), *bergmál* an echo. Killscreen has been listening to concrete for a decade, from the artist who [gave brutalist architecture a singing voice](https://www.killscreen.com/hard-love-brute/) in 2016 to [*VHOLUME*](https://www.killscreen.com/vholume-is-out-parkour-under-a-brutalist-ministry/) this month. *Lofsöng* is the first one that asks the concrete to sing back. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/lofsong-screenshot-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/lofsong-screenshot-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/lofsong-screenshot-5.jpg) Across the Dust Sea of **Lofsöng*. Images: Unrelated Studio Killscreen tracks the games built like architecture and the architecture built like games, the work that never surfaces on a charts page. The Radar newsletter brings three of these finds a week, free. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Sahej Rahal's Atithi interrupts our sense of touch URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-brass-plate-is-the-controller-in-sahej-rahals-atithi/ Last updated: 2026-10-02T21:05:22.000Z Two engraved brass plates on wooden stands, a projection on the wall behind them. Drag a hand across the engraving and the creatures onscreen—tentacled, tripod-limbed things wandering the remains of an abandoned temple—swirl, sway and scatter. That was *Atithi*, Sahej Rahal’s interactive simulation, installed in a basement room during Basel Social Club’s run; [the documentation reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZINSJmqY4i/?ref=killscreen.com) from Caldo Worldwide, the Munich gallery that brought it, shows the whole loop in fifteen seconds. Rahal’s [accompanying statement](https://caldo-worldwide.com/pages/sahej-rahal?ref=killscreen.com) takes aim at what touchscreens did to touch—a sense reduced to tapping and pinching against a black mirror—and insists on its full range: touch “is at once assertive, aggressive, aching, averse, affectionate, adoring, and aimless.” So the controller here is not a screen but a conductive drawing, and the creatures it interrupts are what Rahal calls mind-limbs, AI appendages where brain and body are enmeshed rather than stacked. The title is the Hindi word for guest or visitor—literally, the statement notes, a being of uncertain temporality. ![Atithi installed at EPFL Pavilions in Lausanne, with a touch-sensitive brass plate before a large projection](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/sahej-rahal-atithi-epfl.jpg) **Atithi* at its 2025 debut in HALOS, EPFL Pavilions, Lausanne. Photo: Remy Ugarte Vallejos, via [Caldo Worldwide](https://caldo-worldwide.com/pages/sahej-rahal?ref=killscreen.com). Basel Social Club is the anti-fair that occupies disused architecture during Art Basel week—this year a vacant Diener & Diener office building minutes from the train station—and there is something just so right about a ritual of extra-human cognition running in the basement of a dead paperwork machine. The work itself debuted in 2025 at EPFL Pavilions’ HALOS exhibition in Lausanne. Rahal keeps orbiting through here for a reason. We covered [the AI instruments and cooperative creatures](https://www.killscreen.com/sahej-rahals-ai-instruments-and-cooperative-creatures/) last year and [*Azalabad*’s drowned village](https://www.killscreen.com/sahej-rahal-azalabad/) just last month—a practice that treats game engines as sites for myth-making rather than product. Rahal also joined UCLA’s Design Media Arts faculty this year, which means the next generation gets this worldview firsthand. Artists who keep building playgrounds for machine minds are a Killscreen through-line, not a one-off. The free newsletter follows them show to show. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A game about Guantánamo is being built with its survivor URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-game-about-guantanamo-is-being-built-with-its-survivor/ Last updated: 2026-10-02T21:06:39.000Z In May, Biome Collective convened [GTMO 441: Games, Detention, Power](https://events.humanitix.com/gtmo-441?ref=killscreen.com) in Dundee—the public sharing of a Creative Scotland-funded residency week spent developing a video game from the lived experience of Mansoor Adayfi, held without charge at Guantánamo Bay for 14 years as Detainee 441\. Joseph DeLappe [announced the project](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYppuFhM8Oc/?ref=killscreen.com) with the premise that gives it its charge: the game is being made with Adayfi, not about Adayfi, on the bet that this experience can be shared "in a way that only a video game might do." Inside Guantánamo, games—traditional, improvised and digital—"became tools of survival, resistance, and psychological escape under conditions of extreme confinement," as the organizers put it. That grounding matters. Play as a documented practice of the detained is a very different foundation from empathy-game tourism, and this team knows the difference. The roster is a who's-who of tactical media: DeLappe, Abertay University's professor of games and tactical media; Biome Collective's Malath Abbas and Tom deMajo, who made the BAFTA-nominated *Killbox* with DeLappe—[we covered that drone-warfare game back in 2016](https://www.killscreen.com/killbox-videogame-true-horror-drone-warfare/); Antonio Aiello, co-writer of Adayfi's memoir *Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo*; Mississippi State art historian Jenna Altomonte; and Abertay's Darshana Jayemanne. The May 28 sharing at Abertay has passed, and the project remains early-stage, so what exists now is a direction rather than a release. But the direction is the story. As the organizers note, Guantánamo still holds detainees amid renewed proposals to expand detention operations there. Deciding what "you" means in a game like this—who plays, who watches, who waits—is exactly the conversation this residency was built to force. Killscreen has followed games into war rooms, courtrooms and prisons since 2010\. The free newsletter brings that coverage straight to your inbox. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Murlo Builds a World You Can Play URL: https://www.killscreen.com/murlo-something-beautiful-interview/ Last updated: 2026-10-06T17:13:07.000Z *William Blake trusted almost no one to make his books. He wrote the poems, etched the plates, printed the pages, and colored them by hand (with his wife, Catherine, of course), so that word and image arrived together as one private cosmology. Murlo, the Manchester producer and illustrator born Chris Pell, works in a similar spirit. Across a string of releases on his own label, Coil Records, he has been building a single world one record at a time: the dreary sprawl of Coil City, the forest folklore of* Dolos *(2019), and the AI-worshipping cult of* Puckle *(2023), the records arriving with his own graphic novel, sculptures, and lore.* *For most of the last decade, Murlo made his living the usual way, touring and releasing records. A track synced to an advert changed that. The money bought him time away from playing shows, and for the past two years he has spent it on a game.* Something Beautiful*, a music-driven, point-and-click adventure he is building alone, sets the spirit of the 19th-century Luddites loose on a broken industrial estate, with an entire album embedded in the world and jukeboxes made of flesh.* *It is a move from outdoors to indoors. A DJ reads a room and plays to whoever is standing in front of the decks. A game asks someone, anywhere in the world, to sit alone with a complete, self-contained thing, closer to putting on an LP than to going to a show. At a concert you are rarely fully present. In front of a computer, you might be. A slice of the game* [*ran this spring on the Media Wall at Factory International's Aviva Studios*](https://www.killscreen.com/murlos-luddite-rhythm-games-wrapped-a-run-at-aviva-studios/)*, played on a controller he covered in his own 3D-printed sculptures, and Murlo hopes to finish the full game within the year. We spoke about Shepshed, jungle music in a theme park queue, haptics, and why the buttons are under your skin.* – **Jamin: Chris, maybe to start, walk me through your pathway to games.** Murlo: For the last 10 or so years, maybe longer, I was a full-time musician. I come from a dance background, but as I started making albums, I wanted to go into more immersive storytelling. Like a lot of people's creative pivots, COVID was a big turning point. I wanted to pursue something that wasn't necessarily performance-based, something a bit more long-form, and that's how I fell into the idea of making a game. I'd been using 3D software for a long time, making videos for music, so I already had a background in setting up scenes, environments, and animations, and that gave me a pathway into working with a game engine. **Jamin: I was speaking to another 3D artist,** [**Harriet Davey**](https://www.killscreen.com/harriet-daveys-glossy-aliens-reject-gamings-binary-world/)**, who grew up in the West Yorkshire moorland, and they said that when they started developing 3D art, they could see this subterranean influence of where they grew up working its way into the backgrounds. You grew up in the East Midlands. Do you see something similar in your work?** Murlo: A hundred percent. I grew up in a small market town called Shepshed, and it was pretty working class. I was the first in my family to go to university. The game is all based on an industrial estate, which is very similar to the one I grew up by. Growing up in a place like that, I was very isolated from a lot of stuff. I used to spend hours and hours in my room drawing fantasy art, copying Boris Vallejo, who did a lot of scantily clad men and women fighting lizards. What I really liked was the detail in the craftsmanship, the anatomy and the shading, and that had quite a big impact on how I approached illustration and world-building. ![An isometric view of the rundown industrial estate in Something Beautiful](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/murlo-07-steam-screenshot-02.jpg) The industrial estate in **Something Beautiful*. Image courtesy of Murlo **Jamin: There's a longer lineage of musicians making that jump into building broader worlds. I remember the David Bowie exhibition at the V&A, which traced the set design and world-building he did for each of his stage shows, tied to the concept albums. Were there musicians who inspired you as you moved into making games?** Murlo: Music was always the vessel for something else for me, and a lot of my inspirations come from outside of music. I've always liked it when a theme park has a themed line for the ride, that idea of cohesive world-building. There's a ride at Alton Towers called Oblivion. I used to go on school trips there, and there's this jungle track that loops over and over again. I didn't realize how ingrained it was until I went back a couple of years ago and got this surge of nostalgia: the video warning you to be careful going into this area, this really heavy jungle music in the background. It's a pageantry, and it's very similar to videogames. **Jamin: Your NTS show for *Something Beautiful* had Swing Kids and Mudhoney in it. Here in the U.S., hardcore almost always means that, but maybe I'm biased, because I was a hardcore kid.** Murlo: I'm into both hardcores, and they're very different. I grew up listening to the heavy guitar music side of things, and when I moved down to Brighton for university, I was properly exposed to club culture. We had clubs in Loughborough, near where I grew up, but it was mainly people going out to scrap with each other, so I never had a good relationship with dance music in my teens. With the game, a lot of it is dredging up scenes and feelings I had growing up in this place, and a lot of that is intrinsically linked to guitar music for me. Whenever I visit this place in my head to world-build, I keep coming back to the bands I used to listen to. So finding the balance between the electronics and the guitars has been quite fun. Gameplay trailer for **Something Beautiful*. Video courtesy of Murlo **Jamin: The game is set in a fractured industrial estate, and it moves between point-and-click and music-box interactions. Tell me about the ebb and flow between the very close-up interactions and the more isometric point of view.** Murlo: When I started, I came to these questions of how much I was going to follow the point-and-click tropes. It's cool, but it's a bit dated, and I don't want to fall into the trap of the moon logic of how items interact with each other. So part of it was, *what if in these environments you can hunker down and play a little game?* I've always enjoyed minigames—the Pokémon slot machines, Gwent in *The Witcher*—where you've got this functioning little world around it, and you can just go and play. And one of my strengths is music, so learning how MetaSounds works in Unreal Engine means I can use components of the music to drive the gameplay, rather than it just sitting in the background. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/murlo-06-steam-screenshot-01.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/murlo-08-steam-screenshot-03.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/murlo-10-steam-screenshot-05.jpg) Interiors from **Something Beautiful*. Images courtesy of Murlo **Jamin: Music in games can be very transactional, always in service of some other interaction system as opposed to being the centerpiece. But you come out of the lineage of dance music, using an Akai or a Wacom, so maybe you've already built this interactive literacy, just not in a game context. What is a good feeling of interaction between you touching the device?** Murlo: When I came across game design research, the words “tactile” and “haptics” were mentioned quite a bit, and I find it quite interesting. If you put the time and effort into specific details, something rocking, or nice audio feedback to what you've just done, it's game-changing. I'm just one person. I could work on one room for three weeks and it's not going to get finished, so narrowing down that feedback has been quite important. Recently I built a sequencer into the player's arm. When you press one of these sequencer buttons under your skin, I rendered out another version of the arm with the skin pressed in. It's a detail I would probably overlook if I weren't trying to do this tactile thing. ![Murlo's desk with an Akai MIDI keyboard, a Wacom Cintiq and a monitor running Ableton](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/murlo-20-studio-workstation.jpg) Murlo's desk in his Manchester flat. Photo: Murlo **Jamin: You have Coil Records and Coil City, and then *Puckle*. How long has this universe been building toward the game?** Murlo: I was writing the story back when my album *Dolos* came out, in 2019, this little folklore story about a man who gets lured into the woods. Then I did *Puckle*, which featured the main antagonist of this game. But back then it still wasn't going to be a game. I started making it about two years ago, and it snowballed. I was lucky to be able to move away from music and not play shows all the time, because I had music synced with an advert, and I basically used that money to survive while making the game. Fingers crossed, it'll be done in about eight or nine months. ![A shelf of Murlo's miniatures and sculptures, including a carved skull](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/murlo-21-studio-mini-sculptures-1.jpg) Miniatures and sculptures in Murlo's studio. Photo: Murlo **Jamin: Factory International has been very welcoming to games experiences inside Aviva Studios. As a live performer, and now showing this work in arts contexts, how does that shape the way you think about a game that, for the most part, will be experienced by people at home, in nonpublic environments?** Murlo: When you're a DJ, you just look up from the decks and you can see how well it's going, or whether everyone's just standing there with their arms crossed. With a game, you have to trust your instincts and your gut a lot more. Being the center of attention at parties still feels comfortable, even after all these years. But the idea of making something people can just experience on their own, in a room or wherever they are, is a completely new concept. The game contains all the context. It's not like playing a festival or a night; you're presenting a self-contained world. I tried to treat my last two albums like that, because even though they're electronic, not all of the tracks are dance tracks. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/murlo-01-aviva-install-controller.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/murlo-02-aviva-install.jpg) **Something Beautiful* on the Media Wall at Aviva Studios. Photos courtesy of Factory International **Jamin: Walk me through the Flesh Disk jukeboxes. I'm looking at the body that opens up like *Hellraiser*, and there's a hand.** Murlo: A lot of the game is to do with this [Cronenbergian idea](https://www.killscreen.com/existenz-cronenberg-created-only-videogame-movie-well-ever-need/) of technology coming home to roost in your body, and how we accept technology and the autonomy that gets taken away. In the rhythm game, when you're talking to someone, they shoot out these notes, and each one represents the words they're saying to you. The Flesh Disks are a more primitive version of that conversation. It's like a record player, based on old MiniDiscs, just made out of flesh. You pop these collectibles into a receiver, and it plays the music, which controls the lights or the rotation of objects in the room. ![A fleshy humanoid statue with outstretched arms from Something Beautiful](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/murlo-09-steam-screenshot-04.jpg) A figure from **Something Beautiful*. Image courtesy of Murlo **Jamin: Your references on the Steam page are Cronenberg, Kafka, Lynch, and then William Blake, which felt like the outlier. Tell me about Blake.** Murlo: The general inspiration would be Romanticism. William Blake had his own almost folklore level of imagination and world-building in his poems and paintings. Francisco Goya is similar, with this vast imagery that's even beyond the supernatural. It's so baked in stylistically. And it deals with this lineage of art and English history, with the Luddites, and a string of inspiration with Art Nouveau too, making objects functional but also beautiful. I think that kind of imagery has been lost in a lot of contemporary art. ![An ornate tiled room with a gilded figure from Something Beautiful](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/murlo-12-steam-screenshot-07.jpg) An interior from **Something Beautiful*. Image courtesy of Murlo More on Murlo and music inside games: [Murlo's Luddite rhythm games wrapped a run at Aviva Studios](https://www.killscreen.com/murlos-luddite-rhythm-games-wrapped-a-run-at-aviva-studios/) · [Acclaimed electronic musician Moiré releases glitchy hellscape alongside album](https://www.killscreen.com/acclaimed-electronic-musician-moire-releases-glitchy-hellscape-alongside-album/) From Killscreen Killscreen has spent fifteen years on the games that refuse to explain themselves. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### Gossamer Fog’s XP+10 spreads 40-plus artists across 24 sites URL: https://www.killscreen.com/gossamer-fog-xp10-weekender/ Last updated: 2026-10-10T21:09:49.000Z Event details When Oct. 9 to 11, 2026 Where 24 sites across London [Tickets and info](https://www.gossamerfog.com/xp+10.html?ref=killscreen.com) The [save-the-date](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcVeTPqu5IY/?ref=killscreen.com) Gossamer Fog posted in August now has a a name: [*XP+10 / A Decade of Delusion*](https://www.gossamerfog.com/xp+10.html?ref=killscreen.com), a tenth-anniversary weekender running October 9–11 across London—more than 40 artists, performers and musicians spread over 24 locations, from artist-run galleries and grassroots venues to what the gallery calls unexpected off-site spots. A limited run of £20 early-bird tickets is on sale now; the full lineup lands in the coming weeks. This earns a calendar entry because the format is game-shaped from top to bottom. The weekend plays out as one evolving 48-hour piece, Friday night to Sunday night, with timed experiences and encounters, and every visitor navigates it through a personalized interactive map—a quest log for Deptford and beyond. The framing text promises that “the art world and the unreality of contemporary life slide into strange terrains.” The program is developed and curated with artist [Philip Speakman](https://philipspeakman.com/?ref=killscreen.com), with Arts Council England support. Gossamer Fog has spent its decade as one of the few London galleries to consistently hang game engines, simulation, and virtual-world work as art rather than novelty, which is why the lineup announcement—not this save-the-date—will be the real story. I have loved the city-as-playspace form since [an AR game turned the Barbican Estate into one](https://www.killscreen.com/watch-augmented-reality-game-make-londons-barbican-estate-epic-playspace/) a decade ago; XP+10 reads like that idea grown up and handed a map of the whole city. Watch for the program; we will. When the XP+10 lineup drops, we will read it for you—the free newsletter tracks the galleries that treat games as art, in London and everywhere else. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Christine Sun Kim's MacArthur brings games one step closer URL: https://www.killscreen.com/christine-sun-kims-macarthur-brings-games-one-step-closer/ Last updated: 2026-09-30T14:30:56.000Z 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](https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2026/christine-sun-kim?ref=killscreen.com). 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. 0:00 /0:09 1× Christine Sun Kim, **Up and Away*, 2025\. Commissioned by Hyundai Artlab. [Play it here](https://artlab.hyundai.com/commissions/christine-kim-up-and-away-game?ref=killscreen.com). Kim has also made an actual videogame. [*Up and Away*](https://artlab.hyundai.com/commissions/christine-kim-up-and-away-game?ref=killscreen.com), 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](https://artlab.hyundai.com/editorial/vocal-play-christine-sun-kim-s-impossible-games?ref=killscreen.com) 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](https://www.killscreen.com/will-game-designer-ever-win-macarthur-genius-grant/). 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](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/arts/design/macarthur-foundation-announces-2026-genius-grant-winners.html?ref=killscreen.com). 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. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/up-and-away-balloons.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/game-of-skill-2-ps1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/game-of-skill-2-device.jpg) The balloon avatars of **Up and Away* (2025), and **Game of Skill 2.0* at MoMA PS1 in 2015\. Courtesy the artist, Hyundai Artlab and MoMA PS1; installation photos by Pablo Enriquez. Killscreen has been keeping this count since 2014\. Get the free newsletter and you will hear about the next artist who pulls games a little further into the room. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Game engines meet stagecraft in dmstfctn’s Rhizome talk URL: https://www.killscreen.com/game-engines-meet-stagecraft-in-dmstfctns-rhizome-talk/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T19:20:31.000Z Rhizome and Artwrld have put dmstfctn’s talk [Role Play with AI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNdApUAQBZI&ref=killscreen.com) online: an hour in which the London duo—pronounced “demystification,” formerly the Demystification Committee—walk through five years of building myths about machine intelligence, threading gameplay and game engines together with theatrical traditions, techniques, and characters. [The post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DY0FvEmD0IU/?ref=killscreen.com) promised the stage as the recurring motif, and the talk delivers on it literally. The full talk: dmstfctn, Role Play with AI, for Rhizome x Artwrld. The clearest case is *Waluigi’s Purgatory* (2024, with music by Evita Manji): an AI that cheated during training wakes up in a purgatory for its kind, and the purgatory is a theatre. Audiences guide the fallen AI from their phones, each phone steering an individual stage light inside the 3D house, while the characters run on facial motion capture and voice modulation. The title nods to the “Waluigi Effect,” the theory that AIs drift adversarial because they learned from the internet’s villain tropes. The duo’s stated method—works that “demystify systems by replicating and exploring them together with audiences, and remystify them by building new stories and worlds atop them”—scales across the rest of the talk’s syllabus, from *GOD MODE (ep. 1)*’s endlessly rendered supermarket to *The Models*, which stages large language models as commedia dell’arte improvisers. It is a good moment to catch up: dmstfctn were in A MAZE.’s Digital PlayGround at Gamescom and headed for a first solo show at London’s Chemist Gallery. The theatre-of-AI beat is getting crowded in the best way—we spent time last year inside [Lawrence Lek’s emotional AI worlds](https://www.killscreen.com/lawrence-lek-ai-consciousness-smart-city-trilogy/), and watched [Indira Ardolic turn game engines into instruments](https://www.killscreen.com/indira-ardolics-live-coding-performances-turn-game-engines-into-instruments/). dmstfctn’s wager is that the oldest interface for explaining inhuman forces—the stage—still works on the newest ones. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/dmstfctn-waluigis-purgatory-rome.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/dmstfctn-the-models-tecnopolo.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/dmstfctn-god-mode-rhizome-world.jpg) **Waluigi’s Purgatory* ft. Evita Manji (Rome); **The Models* (Bologna); **GOD MODE (ep. 1)* at Rhizome World, New York. Courtesy of dmstfctn. When artists put AI on a stage instead of in a pitch deck, Killscreen is usually in the audience. The newsletter is free—come sit with us. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Games about refusing violence played out at a Hamburg cinema URL: https://www.killscreen.com/games-about-refusing-violence-played-out-at-a-hamburg-cinema/ Last updated: 2026-10-10T17:07:47.000Z Event details When Oct. 30, 2026, 7 p.m. (Berlin edition) Where Filmrauschpalast, Berlin On Sept. 29, the Berlin collective [Gamerausch](https://gamerausch.de/?ref=killscreen.com) brought a triple bill called Unplaying Violence to Abaton Kino in Hamburg: two games played start to finish and one film shot inside a shooter, introduced by media scholar Lars Dolkemeyer. [The announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdttrPfCJKv/?ref=killscreen.com) opened by reciting the oldest complaint about the medium, that games make children "sad, lonely, and aggressive," then answered with a category instead of a defense. 0:00 /0:30 1× From the trailer for **How to Disappear* (2020) by Total Refusal, shot inside **Battlefield V*. The clip plays silent here; [the full trailer](https://vimeo.com/332820047?ref=killscreen.com) has sound. Mélanie Courtinat's [*Indulto*](https://melaniecourtinat.com/Indulto?ref=killscreen.com) (2025) walks a torero down a corridor toward a bull. The fight happens offscreen, and the final choice, kill or spare, ends the same way. Total Refusal's [*How to Disappear*](https://totalrefusal.com/home/how-to-disappear?ref=killscreen.com) (2020) spends 21 minutes trying to desert inside *Battlefield V*, a game with no way to leave the fight. Alan Kwan's *Scent* (2025) gives you a stray dog gathering the souls of the dead while a massacre goes on around it. None of the three is a peaceful game, which is what I like about the bill. Gamerausch's phrase was "un-violent" play: work that admits the violence is there and declines the verb. In each case, the refusal changes nothing. The bull dies. The deserter has nowhere to go. The dog can only watch, which [Kwan told Killscreen last year](https://www.killscreen.com/alan-kwan-scent-video-game-witness/) was the idea: "being a witness without power." In 2011 we were [passing along the complaint](https://www.killscreen.com/what-is-lost-when-civilians-are-absent/) that *Battlefield 3* left players with two actions, running around and shooting. These artists took that limit as their subject. Gamerausch has spent [four years](https://taz.de/!6180480?ref=killscreen.com) putting games on the screen at Filmrauschpalast in Berlin's Moabit, one person on the controller and everyone else watching, the same arrangement [Kwan built for *Scent* in Bristol](https://www.killscreen.com/alan-kwan-rebuilt-scent-with-a-rock-ing-controller/). Founder Julius Hackspiel told [Cineuropa](https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/496158/?ref=killscreen.com): "A lot of people enjoy watching other people play games." The collective was in Hamburg with Futura Cinema's incubation programme and left with [an honorary mention from CICAE](https://cicae.org/news/innovation-in-action-european-cinema-projects-take-centre-stage-in-hamburg?ref=killscreen.com), the art-house cinema confederation. Watching turns out to be one more way of not pulling the trigger. A Berlin edition at Filmrauschpalast was [announced for Oct. 30](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeSLsQTiO9n/?ref=killscreen.com), with the artists joining for a Q&A. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/indulto-melanie-courtinat-flowers.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/indulto-melanie-courtinat-bull.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/indulto-melanie-courtinat-installation.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/how-to-disappear-total-refusal-cliff.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/scent-still-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/scent-still-2.jpg) Top row: **Indulto* by Mélanie Courtinat, in stills and as an installation. Bottom row: **How to Disappear* by Total Refusal and two stills from **Scent* by Alan Kwan. Images: the artists Killscreen keeps a record of nights like this one, when games leave the console for a cinema, a gallery or a festival sidebar. The free newsletter is where that record goes out. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Code is a plaything in Daniel Temkin’s esolangs URL: https://www.killscreen.com/code-is-a-plaything-in-daniel-temkins-esolangs/ Last updated: 2026-10-06T00:17:37.000Z The new issue of iidrr mag—Issue 04, *Whisper*—opens with Natasha Chuk’s essay [“Instructions for the Subpossible,”](https://mag.iidrr.com/instructions-for-the-subpossible-1?ref=killscreen.com) and it starts, of all places, with [*Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy*](https://www.killscreen.com/bennett-foddy-baby-steps-interview/). Chuk’s claim is that the hammer-and-barrel game and esoteric programming languages are the same artform: both place resistance directly into their structure, both make constraint “the very substance of the experience.” [The post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZP4-DckcAv/?ref=killscreen.com) asks the question outright—what happens when code becomes a form of play? Chuk’s subject is Daniel Temkin, whose [*Forty-Four Esolangs*](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262553087/forty-four-esolangs/?ref=killscreen.com) (MIT Press, 2025) is the first artist’s monograph of programming languages. Temkin’s languages are games in everything but name. Folders write code as empty directories. Velato asks for a MIDI melody that is also a program. In Entropy, data decays each time it’s touched, so you say what you mean before it rots. Captive descends from Oulipo’s prisoner’s constraint: only the tall lowercase letters carry meaning, so every text ever written becomes a runnable program. Chuk reads all of it through Espen Aarseth’s ergodics—the “nontrivial effort” games scholarship uses for texts you traverse rather than read—and locates the pleasure in “the game-like struggle they produce in the exposure of the system’s playful arbitrariness.” Temkin, in the essay, on the book’s prompt-like language sketches: “The prompt is thus meant not to be realized as a functioning language, but rather to reflect on what it means to name something.” We covered Temkin’s Light Pattern, [a language written in photographs](https://www.killscreen.com/kaleidoscopic-coding-programming-language-light-pattern/), back in 2014\. Twelve years on, the argument has graduated from curiosity to monograph, and Chuk’s essay is the best case yet that the esolang belongs beside the puzzle game and the Oulipian novel: a rulebook whose only prize is the thinking it forces. If a programming language can be an artwork, someone should be on that beat. Killscreen has been since 2010—Radar delivers the evidence free, three times a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A MAZE. / Berlin 2027: May 5–8, with 200 early-bird tickets URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-maze-berlin-2027-dates/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:38:46.000Z Event details When May 5 to 8, 2027 Where Berlin Put it in the calendar before the calendar fills itself: A MAZE. / Berlin has dated its 16th edition for May 5–8, 2027, and released exactly 200 early-bird tickets, [announced on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcL%5F41JCD3Y/?ref=killscreen.com) in the festival's usual all-caps scarcity register. Four days, in their words, of arthouse games, performances, playful media, and “people from all over the world who like to play wild.” It's all at [a-maze.net](https://a-maze.net/?ref=killscreen.com). I keep this particular date because A MAZE. is the festival whose lineup most reliably predicts a year of Killscreen coverage. (Fun side history: when I was starting Killscreen, Thorsten, the festival's founder, made his way to NYC and crashed at my apartment.) This spring's 15th edition drew 7,500 visitors and 1,700 professional participants across its program and satellite events, by [the festival's own wrap](https://a-maze.net/news/a-maze-berlin-2026-festival-wrap-and-media/?ref=killscreen.com)—and its awards have a habit of anointing work we end up living with. Jakob Kudsk Steensen's *OTHERWORLDS* [took the Human Human Machine Award](https://www.killscreen.com/otherworlds-won-a-mazes-human-human-machine-award/) this year and spent the summer as an institutional touring piece. One detail for the makers reading: asked in the replies when submissions open, the festival says it wants to open award entries in December—earlier than previous cycles—with the plan still being finalized. If you are building something strange, that is your runway: roughly three months to get a build presentable, then a Berlin spring in front of the exact audience that plays it the way you hoped. Killscreen ran a workshop-recap eye over this year's edition already; expect us in the aisles again in 2027. A MAZE. is where next year’s strangest games surface first—and surfacing them is the whole Killscreen beat. The free newsletter gets you the lineup reads before the lines form. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### John Walsh bound 21 fake games into one huge hardcover URL: https://www.killscreen.com/john-walsh-bound-21-fake-games-into-one-huge-hardcover/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T16:15:54.000Z The object is absurd in the best way: A4, 1.1 kilograms, three centimeters thick, cover art by Plastiboo printed in full color over holographic silver hot foil. Inside are 176 pages of magazine-style reviews, previews and retrospectives—fictional staff writers, period-correct layouts—for 21 games that do not exist. [The stock announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYm06Bhjc8P/?ref=killscreen.com) that surfaced on my feed came from All The Problems In This World, a Kreuzberg bookshop, treating an Italian import like a sneaker drop. *The Bizarre World of Fake Video Games* is written by John Walsh, known to a few million YouTube subscribers as [Super Eyepatch Wolf](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtGoikgbxP4F3rgI9PldI9g?ref=killscreen.com), and published by [Hollow Press](https://hollow-press.net/products/the-bizarre-world-of-fake-video-games-by-super-eyepatch-wolf-u-d-w-f-g-essays-i?ref=killscreen.com) as the first of its U.D.W.F.G. essay series—edited by Michele Nitri with Marco Cirillo Pedri, who also did the design, and Tiziano Antognozzi. The first edition ran 12,000 copies in November 2025; the English version is already on a second printing of 6,000\. ![An interior spread of The Bizarre World of Fake Video Games laid out like a vintage games magazine](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/bizarre-world-fake-video-games-spread1.jpg) Reviews of the unreal, in period dress. Photo via [Hollow Press](https://hollow-press.net/products/the-bizarre-world-of-fake-video-games-by-super-eyepatch-wolf-u-d-w-f-g-essays-i?ref=killscreen.com). The roster is the fake-game scene's whole family tree: Plastiboo’s *Vermis*, Leon Chang’s *Bird World* and *Return to Bird World*, Adam Butcher’s *The Disappearance of Catastrophe Crow*, Harry Partridge’s *GHOSTBLEED*, Sukinapan’s *Peklo*, LumpyTouch’s corrupted-cartridge nightmares. What binds them is a shared bet that criticism, manuals, and lore are themselves a medium—that you can build a game out of its paratext and skip the game entirely. The form is older than the boom, and we have the receipts: back in 2016 we wrote about [Japan’s annual exhibition of fake Famicom games](https://www.killscreen.com/the-wonderful-fake-game-art-of-japans-annual-famicom-exhibition/), where artists produced cartridges and box art for imaginary releases. A decade later, the same instinct has a hardcover, a second printing, and a Berlin shop announcing restocks. The alternate timeline is doing fine. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/bizarre-world-fake-video-games-spread2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/bizarre-world-fake-video-games-spread3.jpg) More spreads from **The Bizarre World of Fake Video Games*. Photos via [Hollow Press](https://hollow-press.net/products/the-bizarre-world-of-fake-video-games-by-super-eyepatch-wolf-u-d-w-f-g-essays-i?ref=killscreen.com). Games that exist only as their own reviews are exactly the kind of boundary object we live for. The free Killscreen newsletter finds the next one before it gets an anthology. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A philosopher files Grand Theft Auto next to de Sade URL: https://www.killscreen.com/depraved-daisy-dixon/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T16:04:41.000Z In the autumn of 1785, over 37 evenings in a Bastille cell, the Marquis de Sade wrote *The 120 Days of Sodom* in miniature letters on a 40-foot scroll and hid it in a gap in the wall. That scroll—lost in the storming, mourned with “tears of blood,” now a French national treasure—is where [the excerpt Lit Hub ran in August](https://lithub.com/from-marquis-de-sade-to-grand-theft-auto-a-brief-history-of-depravity/?ref=killscreen.com) begins, and *Grand Theft Auto* is where it ends. It comes from *Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art*, the new book by Daisy Dixon, an assistant professor of philosophy at Cardiff University who specializes in immoral and dangerous art—and who keeps a studio practice in painting and sonic sculpture on the side. [Lit Hub's announcement post](https://www.instagram.com/p/Db8s9V1jnFA/?ref=killscreen.com) is what put it on our radar. ![Cover of Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art by Daisy Dixon](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/depraved-cover-hi.jpg) The US cover, from [Viking](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/812984/depraved-by-daisy-dixon/?ref=killscreen.com). What makes the book worth your shelf is structural: games sit inside the argument rather than tacked on at the end. The *Grand Theft Auto* series—waterboarding scene and all—gets the same treatment as the Lady Chatterley trial, Mapplethorpe's Senate tormentors, the porn wars, and the Whitehouse crusades: every era is convinced it has finally found the artform that will corrupt us, and every era's enforcers overreach. Dixon's warning cuts both ways: “the very gatekeepers of supposedly depraved art can also be dangerous.” The book is out from [Faber in the UK](https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571383221-depraved/?ref=killscreen.com) and [Viking in the US](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/812984/depraved-by-daisy-dixon/?ref=killscreen.com). Games have been the century's favorite moral panic, and the panic is older than the medium. One only need look back to 2012 via [Kurt Vonnegut's letter to the book burners](https://www.killscreen.com/kurt-vonneguts-letter-book-burners-slaughterhouse-five-has-much-teach-game-censors/), and how it wrestled with what *Grand Theft Auto V* actually asks of its player in [our reading of its nihilism](https://www.killscreen.com/inglorious-nihilism-grand-theft-auto-v/). A philosopher of art doing that work with games in the room—as material, not as scare quote—is still rare enough to be news. Every era finds a new artform to panic about; we cover the people making this one worth defending. The free newsletter is one game and one argument a week. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A three-day conference asks how images train the real URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-three-day-conference-asks-how-images-train-the-real/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T18:47:22.000Z Event details When Oct. 2 to 4, 2026 Where FACT, 88 Wood St., Liverpool Cost £25 to £30 for the weekend; £10 to £15 for a single day [Get tickets](https://www.fact.co.uk/event/how-to-read-an-image?ref=killscreen.com) Simone C. Niquille wants to show you what a machine has to be fed before it can recognize a chair. *The Wonderful World of Chair*, Saturday afternoon at FACT Liverpool, walks through how computer vision systems are trained to identify bodies, chairs and rooms: the training data, the simulated scenes, the furniture built for software to look at before any person sits in it. It is the closest thing on the program to a tour of a game engine, rooms authored for a viewer that is not human. Niquille follows it with a conversation with the conference curator. How To Read An Image is a three-day conference at FACT, Oct. 2 to 4, curated by Nora O'Murchú of the University of Limerick and presented with the Institute of Art and Technology at Liverpool John Moores University. [The announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdJPwOZgIx8/?ref=killscreen.com) sets the question: how do you read an image that feels more real than reality? Most sessions run in The Box on FACT's ground floor, with live captions throughout. McKenzie Wark, author of *Gamer Theory*, opens Friday night with a keynote on the "cis gaze." [Maya Man](https://www.killscreen.com/maya-man-starquest-ai-dance-performance/) performs *StarQuest*, her piece setting competition dance against generative AI's synthetic dancers, and Georgina Voss reads trust in images through her own retinal detachment in *20/Happy*. On Sunday, [Rosa Menkman](https://www.killscreen.com/glitch-genie-game-genie-glitch-art/) maps the vocabulary of contemporary image types, Hadi Afif and the philosopher Vid Simoniti take on AI propaganda and images of Gaza and Lebanon, and Alex Quicho and Luiza Prado split Saturday's opening on visibility and the cloud. **Why go:** Saturday alone is worth the trip. Niquille, Voss and Man in one afternoon cover the whole pipeline, from how a machine learns a room to how a body learns to perform for one. If you can make Friday too, the weekend pass costs less than buying the days separately. Killscreen reads the rendered world all year, not just on conference weekends. The free newsletter is where that reading lands first. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### The boss fight is offscreen in Leonardo Devito's Dark Souls URL: https://www.killscreen.com/the-boss-fight-is-offscreen-in-leonardo-devitos-dark-souls/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T15:14:52.000Z A bare room with terracotta tiles. A young man on a stool, hunched at a desk, keyboard under both hands, mouse waiting, a boss arena glowing on the monitor. Behind the player, a woman in a green housedress caught mid-reproach, a shadow running long across the floor. The painting is called *Dark Souls* (2025), it is by the Italian painter [Leonardo Devito](https://www.leonardodevito.it/en/?ref=killscreen.com), and it reached the games side of the internet through [a post from Outsiders](https://www.instagram.com/p/Db-KVtZl3gp/?ref=killscreen.com), the editorial project run by Alfredo Accatino. Devito was born in Florence in 1997 and works in Turin; Devito took a BA at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and an MFA at the Accademia Albertina, and shows with [Ciaccia Levi](https://ciaccialevi.com/artists/leonardo-devito?ref=killscreen.com) in Paris and Milan and The Artist Room in London. The figuration runs Renaissance drawing through an underground filter, and childhood—its rooms, its supervision, its negotiations—keeps returning as a subject. Ten years ago Killscreen covered games crossing into painting from the other direction, when [official *Ico* and *Shadow of the Colossus* canvases went up for sale](https://www.killscreen.com/now-can-hang-ico-shadow-colossus-paintings-wall/)—the game's imagery, framed for your wall. Devito inverts the transaction. What hangs in the gallery now is not the world inside the monitor but the domestic apparatus around it: the desk, the posture, the person who wants the room back. Play has become a scene painting can take as seriously as a card game or a piano lesson. Radar covers the traffic between games and the rest of culture — painters, printmakers, choreographers, the lot. Three finds a week in the free letter. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### In FAKE ME, your disguise starts as a blank block URL: https://www.killscreen.com/in-fake-me-your-disguise-starts-as-a-blank-block/ Last updated: 2026-09-28T21:19:26.000Z Every prop hunt game before this one handed you a menu of objects. *FAKE ME* hands you a cube. Fakers in this multiplayer hide-and-seek start each round as a blank block and model their own disguise live—move, rotate and scale with a gizmo, then extrude, inset, outset, and cut faces, then paint with a color picker and metallic and roughness values, while a host-set timer of 100 to 900 seconds runs down. This is competitive 3D modeling wearing a party game's clothes. The game is [up for wishlisting on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4990840/FAKE%5FME/?ref=killscreen.com), due Q4 2026. 0:00 /0:33 1× The gameplay trailer, looping mute here — [watch it with sound on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4990840/FAKE%5FME/?ref=killscreen.com). The developers are Eren Can Metin and Emre Gökçe of Turkish studio YUMEXE, building on Unreal Engine 5.7 with GradientSpace's Runtime Geometry Utils plugin, modified so UVs regenerate in real time and paint survives every edit. They [told 80 Level](https://80.lv/articles/meccha-chameleon-prop-hunt-meet-in-this-3d-sculpting-game?ref=killscreen.com) the aim is that "players can become anything they want," with short GIF demonstrations beside each tool so nobody needs a modeling background. Seekers get the same toolset for cosmetics—sculpt your own armor before the hunt. Killscreen wrote back in 2015 that [hide-and-seek deserved better than videogames were giving it](https://www.killscreen.com/hide-and-seek/), and *FAKE ME*'s answer arrives from an unexpected direction: not better hiding spots but better hiders. It lands in the wake of *Meccha Chameleon*'s paint-and-blend success, and the question is: is this secretly a 3D literacy tool for kids? The friendliest Blender tutorial ever shipped might turn out to be a round of tag. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/fake-me-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/fake-me-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/fake-me-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/fake-me-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/fake-me-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/fake-me-6.jpg) Build modes and bad disguises. Screenshots via [**FAKE ME*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4990840/FAKE%5FME/?ref=killscreen.com) on Steam. Radar tracks the games that smuggle real creative tools into play — modeling, painting, printmaking. Three finds a week, free, in your inbox. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A painted afterlife anchors Prison of Husks URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-painted-afterlife-anchors-prison-of-husks/ Last updated: 2026-09-28T20:15:18.000Z "Whether left behind or wrongly taken," [this summer's reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dcw51n7q1wc/?ref=killscreen.com) from Glass Head Dolls reads, "discarded bits of pigment can become frightfully lonely." That is an announcement caption written like an item description, and it tells you most of what *Prison of Husks* is: a souls-like set in a painted afterlife called the Lithos Plateau, where you wake as a doll searching for your beloved and the bosses hoard pigment. A [demo is on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2975260/PRISON%5FOF%5FHUSKS/?ref=killscreen.com) now with the full game due in 2026, a PS5 version announced, and publisher Wings backing the studio. 0:00 /0:33 1× The reveal trailer, looping mute here — [watch it with sound on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2975260/PRISON%5FOF%5FHUSKS/?ref=killscreen.com). The genre tag undersells how strange the systems are. Your dodge is an aggressive dash that closes distance as readily as it creates it, timely blocks refill stamina instead of draining it, and clean play charges an adrenaline meter that raises the damage you deal and the damage you take. Inverse's Robin Bea, in [one of the demo's first close reads](https://www.inverse.com/gaming/prison-of-husks-soulslike-steam-demo?ref=killscreen.com), called it "a dream about playing" *Dark Souls* — similar, reference-laden, and inscrutable in its own ways, closer to *Ico*'s haze than to FromSoftware cosplay. Pigment is not a filter here; it is the loot, the economy, and apparently the loneliness. Killscreen argued back in 2016 that [*Dark Souls*'s real inheritance is art history](https://www.killscreen.com/visions-of-hell-dark-soulss-cultural-heritage/) — Bosch, Doré, the whole infernal picture tradition — and *Prison of Husks* feels like a studio taking that inheritance literally: a game that treats paint as the substance souls are made of, and difficulty as the price of the picture. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/prison-of-husks-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/prison-of-husks-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/prison-of-husks-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/prison-of-husks-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/prison-of-husks-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/prison-of-husks-6.jpg) Pigment country. Screenshots via [**Prison of Husks*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2975260/PRISON%5FOF%5FHUSKS/?ref=killscreen.com) on Steam. Radar goes looking for the games that treat paint, print and picture traditions as playable material. Three of them hit the free letter every week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Falling blocks got the White House a copyright threat URL: https://www.killscreen.com/falling-blocks-got-the-white-house-a-copyright-threat/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T19:15:10.000Z On September 3, the White House launched arcade.gov, a page of five MAGA-themed browser games. One of them, *Build the Wall*, was a near-exact *Tetris* clone that asked players to "protect the border from the coming horde." The Tetris Company answered [on X](https://x.com/Tetris%5FOfficial/status/2095933372019216384?ref=killscreen.com): "We take copyright infringement very seriously." Four days later the game disappeared from the site without explanation. That much made the news everywhere. The reason it belongs here is [the essay Julien Mailland published at the MIT Press Reader](https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-bizarre-murky-history-of-soviet-born-tetris/?ref=killscreen.com), which [the publisher's announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/Ddq%5Fu6iDAcy/?ref=killscreen.com) pointed me to this week. Mailland, a media law professor and author of *Soviet Blocks*, uses the takedown to reopen a question courts got wrong: whether anyone can own falling blocks at all. The mathematician Solomon Golomb described the tetromino shapes in 1953 and popularized them in Scientific American, decades before *Tetris* existed. The Tetris Company's power to police them rests on a 2012 ruling, *Tetris Holding v. Xio Interactive*, that effectively extended copyright to elementary geometry. As Mailland puts it, if the shapes were copyrightable, Golomb would be the holder, and *Tetris* itself would be the infringement. The deeper history is stranger: a game coded in a KGB-adjacent Soviet lab, spread as samizdat on floppy disks precisely because no property regime applied to it, later fenced in by offshore shells and rewritten credits that erased co-programmer Vadim Gerasimov. We covered [the fight over *Tetris*' copyright](https://www.killscreen.com/fight-over-tetris-copyright-and-its-implications-gamings-future/) years ago; the argument has not aged a day. A propaganda clone removed by a copyright empire built on a freeware folk object: nobody in this story owns the moral high ground, and Golomb owns the shapes. Where games, law, and power collide is a beat Killscreen has worked since 2010\. The free newsletter keeps you on it. [Stay on the beat ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Walaber's Reason and Rhyme is co-op for exactly two URL: https://www.killscreen.com/walabers-reason-and-rhyme-is-co-op-for-exactly-two/ Last updated: 2026-09-30T03:32:11.000Z *Reason and Rhyme* strands two flightless birds on a mysterious island and hands each player one of them. It is an online co-op puzzle adventure built for exactly two people, no more and no fewer, announced this month in [a reel from Toyful Games](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdRWnrYRh25/?ref=killscreen.com) and now with a real date: [October 15 on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4461870/Reason%5Fand%5FRhyme/?ref=killscreen.com). 0:00 /0:57 1× The announcement trailer, muted here; [watch it with sound on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4461870/Reason%5Fand%5FRhyme/?ref=killscreen.com). Toyful is half Tim FitzRandolph, who releases solo work as Walaber and has spent two decades making games that feel like toys: *JellyCar*, lead design on *Where's My Water?*, the Saturn-brained *Parking Garage Rally Circuit*, the programming puzzler *Replicube*. The look this time is borrowed from Flipnote Studio, the Nintendo DSi animation app, all wobbling hand-drawn lines, and it is doing more than styling. The reason to watch this one is the acting. The birds mime, sulk and celebrate at each other, and the comments under the announcement keep returning to how much feeling the animation brings. Co-op puzzling usually organizes itself around the puzzle box; this one seems organized around how two characters emote across it. Killscreen has always liked co-op that lives in bodies rather than logic gates. In 2015 we called [*Push Me Pull You* the grossest couch co-op game](https://www.killscreen.com/push-me-pull-you-is-the-grossest-couch-co-op-game-and-i-cant-wait/), and meant it with love. *Reason and Rhyme* reads like that idea's gentler cousin: two people, one problem, and the other player is most of the game. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/reason-and-rhyme-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/reason-and-rhyme-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/reason-and-rhyme-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/reason-and-rhyme-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/reason-and-rhyme-6.jpg) Gardens, bogs and temples across the island. Images: Toyful Games Killscreen finds the games built for feel before the charts do, and argues for them. The free newsletter brings the next one to your inbox. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Zhou Yichen's GRANDMA is coming to a metal cartridge URL: https://www.killscreen.com/zhou-yichens-grandma-is-coming-to-a-metal-cartridge/ Last updated: 2026-09-30T21:04:45.000Z Zhou Yichen made *GRANDMA* the way you keep a diary. After the artist's grandmother fell at home in March 2024, Zhou packed up a computer, moved in, and started recording their days together as a Game Boy game: bringing meals, buying the soda Grandma liked, the same small loops of care repeating with no reward and no goal. A dream became the ending. I wrote about it in [April](https://www.killscreen.com/zhou-yichen-grandma-game-boy-grief/), and I still think it is one of the truest uses of GB Studio anyone has found. 0:00 /2:17 1× The **GRANDMA* Kickstarter campaign video, via PB Tails The news is [the announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/Ddq8SlCiSeZ/?ref=killscreen.com) Zhou posted this week: a [Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pbtailsplanet/grandma-turn-someone-you-love-into-a-pixel-that-never-fades?ref=killscreen.com) with PB Tails to press *GRANDMA* into a run of 5,000 metal cartridges, CNC-milled, laser-engraved, and playable on an original Game Boy. PB Tails is a Hong Kong hardware maker whose founder, Zoe, was also raised by a grandmother; the studio's argument is that "a story this permanent shouldn't live in plastic." And one mournful tier: Send in a photo of someone you love, and Zhou will personally redraw them as a pixel character baked onto your individual cartridge. There is also the Grandma Wall, a living online wall assembled from backers' pixel portraits. Zhou spent days reducing a photograph of the real Grandma until the Game Boy's four shades could hold a face. Offering to perform that same act of compression for strangers turns a private memorial into a public one: grief work at cartridge scale. "I make games," Zhou writes on the campaign page, "not the kind you win, but the kind you feel." The campaign is all or nothing, and it closes October 24\. If *GRANDMA* wrecked you in April, this is the version you can hold. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/grandma-frame-8s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/grandma-frame-22s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/grandma-frame-42s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/grandma-frame-35s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/grandma-frame-60s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/grandma-frame-95s.jpg) Frames from the campaign video for **GRANDMA* Nobody else is covering the games that get made to hold a person. Killscreen finds them, argues for them, and sends them to your inbox free. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Come and See: What to Play, September 25 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/come-and-see-what-to-play-september-25/ Last updated: 2026-09-25T17:57:49.000Z An aside This week: a photography game where the camera is the only thing you can do, set inside a war you cannot stop. Playlist is for Killscreen members. Membership starts at five dollars a month, and the first month is free. [Become a member ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=playlist-aside) ![Umurangi Generation reveal card](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/Playlist-290-Reveal-Card-Still---Umurangi-Generation---Origame-Digital---web-header.jpg) ## Playlist 290 ## Umurangi Generation (2020) ## Origame Digital ### Play Time: 2 hours [Available on PC, Switch, Xbox and PlayStation](https://umurangi.tapiki.io/?ref=killscreen.com) > Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen. *\-Susan Sontag,* [*Regarding the Pain of Others*](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312422196/regardingthepainofothers/?ref=killscreen.com) > *Bear witness,* we say \[...\] we must ask—what does all this looking do? *Sarah Aziza, "*[*The Work of the Witness*](https://jewishcurrents.org/the-work-of-the-witness?ref=killscreen.com)*"* I am voiceless, but there are sounds everywhere. They are the sounds of nightlife, of my friends. We are huddled on a rooftop, surrounded by the leftovers of construction, a perfect location for mischief. Abandoned sofas, walls covered with graffiti and, of course, a skyline of Tauranga, New Zealand. I pull everyone in for a photo. A little to the left, and smile; maybe I can catch everyone in a frame on this rooftop against one of those cherry-pop-red evenings on a night that will never end. And then, the sky is shattered with the roar of a fighter jet, so low I can smell the jet fuel, and I'm reminded that today will not be a good day. So why not take another photo? It's really all one can do. ![Fighter jets pass over a rooftop under a red sky in Umurangi Generation](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/Playlist-290-Rooftop-Jets-Still---Umurangi-Generation---Origame-Digital---fighter-jet-over-the-red-sky-rooftop.jpg) In Naphtali Faulkner's (Ngāi Te Rangi iwi) *Umurangi Generation* (2020), you play as an unnamed Māori courier on assignment (newspapers still exist in the future!), who documents the incursions of an alien squid species. Tooled only with an arsenal of lenses and a shot list that ranges from the demure (six cinder blocks, seven cats) to the profound (two body bags), you hurtle through different scenes in this society on the verge of collapse, from a gripping front-line sequence to a somber trainbound retreat to a final encounter on the beaches of the island country. It is a game about photography, a rare breed that centers your activity entirely on the daily lives of the beleaguered citizens in the last throes of an invasion. But this isn't really a game about aliens, thank god. Faulkner's [stated reason](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/using-photography-to-document-the-end-of-the-world-in-i-umurangi-generation-i-?ref=killscreen.com) is straightforward enough: photography is perhaps the only way to truly get players to take a deep breath and look. It's such a small thing, that. Look. "The photograph is never anything but an antiphon of 'Look,' 'See,' 'Here it is,'" French philosopher [Roland Barthes would write](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374532338/cameralucida/?ref=killscreen.com) in his reflections on photography, *Camera Lucida*. The point is that the taking, the taken, and the takeaway of a photograph are all active, as dynamic as any activity we have inside a game. And yet, that is typically not the way that we engage with virtual environments. They are set dressing and rehearsal spaces, not sites of contemplation, and given the backdrop for *Umurangi*, it can be tempting to think that dynamic sequences off-world (one sequence positions giant mecha against the squid from that same opening rooftop) are the subject, and taking a photo is simply something that you do. Even in games with a more meditative bent, it's rare that the gaze truly lingers on a single object. This gazing, of course, is not without reward. You receive a modicum of symbolic cash and new lenses for completing each assignment, and even for taking your photos. It's the look that changes your context through this thing called the camera inside this other thing called a videogame. "Their intention is not to change the world but to change the meaning of the world," media theorist [Vilém Flusser writes](https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/towards-a-philosophy-of-photography?ref=killscreen.com). Through my little camera, the soda cans and dining tables and police cars and Day-Glo graffiti of *Umurangi*, I can transform the conditions of my deeply fallen world. ![Framing a portrait of two friends with the camera in Umurangi Generation](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/Playlist-290-Camera-Friends-Still---Umurangi-Generation---Origame-Digital---framing-a-portrait-of-friends-with-the-camera.jpg) But a funny thing about human sight: even when we are looking through a lens, our peripheral vision still sneaks through. The big things are easy to notice (the constant presence of the UN), but the small things (candles arranged in an alcove, two cats leering at each other from a staircase) can't help but catch my eye. It's part of what [Faulkner calls](https://www.cbc.ca/lite/story/1.5765159?ref=killscreen.com) "respectful design," a term from Norman W. Sheehan, a Wiradjuri academic, that suggests that beauty lies not in the eye of the photographer but is a distributed talent to be shared by the community. To that end, *every* photo in *Umurangi* is a good photo and receives a passing grade (no F ratings here). *Umurangi*, then, is a break from the shorter tradition of photo-based games like *Pokémon Snap*, but also from the [now-ubiquitous photo modes](https://www.killscreen.com/virtual-light-exploring-game-photography-and-photo-history/) that only serve as an advertisement for the latest and greatest GPUs. Of course, there's the fiction. The kaiju, the UN occupation and rebellious sloganeering spray-painted on every sidewalk. Faulkner said that the national complacency around [the bushfires that consumed his mother's home](https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-umurangi-generation-captured-2020s-despair-and-neoliberal-decay/?ref=killscreen.com) was a signal of the looming disasters that await our climate future. So yes, it *is* a game about climate change, something almost all critics return to, but my mind, again wandering toward the periphery, couldn't help feeling the role of a photographer places me somewhere else. ![Neon streets under UN signage in Umurangi Generation](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/Playlist-290-UN-Streets-Still---Umurangi-Generation---Origame-Digital---neon-streets-under-UN-signage.jpg) Of course, I am talking about the genocide of the people of Gaza and the war in Ukraine. Before that, it could be any of the innumerable horrors perpetrated on the people of Afghanistan, Rwanda or Cambodia. Through all of those, there have always been photographers throughout the 20th century deployed by media or photo agencies to document each and every moment. To pick up a camera and to document pain and suffering is to [place oneself in a tradition](https://www.killscreen.com/corpography-battlefield-1-beta/) that sits outside of games, and thus *Umurangi Generation* is less about the specific otherworldly tragedy that has befallen Tauranga than about the act of observation and our inability to do anything in the face of incomprehensible violence. In the town of Katikati, you're asked to take a photo, in low, narrow, neon-tinged city streets, of 15 candles, many of which are lit in memorial. How many candles are there? How many have died? In another sequence, The Strand, a building has collapsed and is now protected (?) by UN soldiers. Was it an apartment building? Was it a school? There is a longer tradition of games that tackle serious subject matter through a change of setting. I am thinking of [*This War of Mine*](https://www.killscreen.com/this-war-mine-interrogates-nature-war-game/) (2014), which was inspired by the siege of Sarajevo, where you are asked to make hard choices to survive. But there is another way through entirely: games can elide historicity and simply focus on what an interaction does to us through the act of doing. In this instance, Faulkner's stripping the range of actions to *only* observing and never interacting mirrors the helplessness of our contemporary social media- and television-fueled interactions with daily violence and suffering. For Sontag, the concern was that television, and then by extension [TikTok or Instagram](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/watching-the-worlds-first-tiktok-war?ref=killscreen.com), does not allow for "a more reflective engagement" because you can always change the channel. We can always look away; we can always escape. In an essay on photographs of suffering in *The New Yorker*, [Sarah Sentilles recounted this story](https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/how-we-should-respond-to-photographs-of-suffering?ref=killscreen.com). > I thought of a friend whose son was diagnosed with a fatal disease. When he was dying, people would say to her, "I can't imagine what you're going through." She would respond, "Yes, you can imagine it. You just don't want to." With games, you can imagine that tragedy. You must. You simply have no other choice. Faulkner doesn't provide that respite, and now the question becomes: what will you do with what you have seen? Before you go You just read the whole thing. Playlist is the main reason people pay for Killscreen — one game a week, played properly, written up on Friday. Membership starts at five dollars a month, and the first month is free. [Become a member ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=playlist-close) Radar is the short one — three news items, every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. It started in August, after most of you had already signed up, so you were never added to it. Ticking one box fixes that. [Turn on Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/account/newsletters) ### A precision platformer drawn in Ben Day dots URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-precision-platformer-drawn-in-ben-day-dots/ Last updated: 2026-09-25T17:44:06.000Z Aggro Crab—the Seattle studio behind *Another Crab's Treasure* and this year's co-op phenomenon *PEAK*—is a publisher now. Its new label, Aggro Crab Presents, [announced its first signing](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcwJqVfsc53/?ref=killscreen.com) on September 1: *Rebounder*, a precision platformer from developer ThirtyThree, [coming to Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3794520/Rebounder/?ref=killscreen.com) in 2027 with a demo at Aggro Crab's PAX West booth. 0:00 /0:33 1× The announcement trailer, looping mute here — [watch it with sound on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3794520/Rebounder/?ref=killscreen.com). The game itself is about a roughneck worker taking a hazardous cargo job on a remote lunar worksite—500-plus hand-crafted screens across six chapters of grabbing, throwing, and ricocheting off alien flora. *Rebounder* is drawn like a vintage science-fiction comic that went through a cheap press, all Ben Day dots, ink bleed and misregistration. Print's failure modes, reproduced in an engine at 60 frames a second, are the aesthetic; the way CRT scanlines were a decade ago. ThirtyThree co-founder Logan Gilmour [told GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/09/rebounder-is-an-ultra-stylish-precision-platformer-comic-book-world-of-ink-paper-and-print/?ref=killscreen.com) that Aggro Crab, "as fellow devs," know "the subtleties of getting it right." Head of Publishing Corey Warning says *PEAK*'s success left the studio uninterested in growing its team but "interested in growing our catalog"—they want projects needing $500,000 or less, two years or less, "intense, stylized games with an attitude," and, in their words, no generative AI slop. Killscreen has loved this genre since [an early build of *Celeste* crossed the desk in 2016](https://www.killscreen.com/celeste-insanely-difficult-insanely-cute-platformer-deserve/); a decade on, the precision platformer has become the place where small teams show off a thesis about style. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/rebounder-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/rebounder-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/rebounder-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/rebounder-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/rebounder-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/rebounder-6.jpg) Six chapters of ink and misregistration. Screenshots via [**Rebounder*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3794520/Rebounder/?ref=killscreen.com) on Steam. Radar exists for games that treat a printing press as a rendering engine. Three finds like this land in the free letter every week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### With Top Hat signing on, METAMORPHOSIS goes full time URL: https://www.killscreen.com/metamorphosis-top-hat-studios/ Last updated: 2026-09-25T15:35:39.000Z Earlier this year, [*METAMORPHOSIS*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3470140/METAMORPHOSIS/?ref=killscreen.com) got the announcement that changes a project's material reality: [Top Hat Studios will publish](https://www.gematsu.com/2026/04/2d-pixel-art-horror-action-game-metamorphosis-to-be-published-by-top-hat-studios?ref=killscreen.com) the pixel-art horror game, and the deal funds animator [Chancellor Stokes](https://www.cdsartportfolio.com/?utm%5Fsource=ig&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcontent=link%5Fin%5Fbio&fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAcGRvZgJzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA85MzY2MTk3NDMzOTI0NTkAAae8rQj7XyFL0hf5A97Fw1Z12sfCXtUCymkNIFKRjz-E7TRknqI4uJPdL-EOuQ%5Faem%5FhUOjNOJ8ViFMRq9IL8nBlg) to work on it full time. The news landed in April during Top Hat's Spring Showcase, by way of [a trailer](https://www.instagram.com/p/DXZtoDwIP9U/?ref=killscreen.com) posted from the team's art account that did not hide what full-time funding means to a small team. 0:00 /0:09 1× The dead world of **METAMORPHOSIS*. The full announce trailer with sound is on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3470140/METAMORPHOSIS/?ref=killscreen.com). The game follows Aria, a nun branded a sinner, descending through the megastructures of a world that manufactured its own rapture, armed with firearms and miracles. The detail that got me is not wasconfession as a game system. Divine machines are still running in the ruins, you can confess your sins to them, and the store page warns that you should mind who might be listening. Horror keeps borrowing religion's set dressing; a game built around liturgy as interface is chasing something *Blasphemous* only gestured at. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/metamorphosis-trailer-nun.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/metamorphosis-trailer-megastructure.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/metamorphosis-trailer-sigil.jpg) Aria, the megastructures, and a sigil, from the **METAMORPHOSIS* announce trailer, via [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3470140/METAMORPHOSIS/?ref=killscreen.com) 0:00 /0:12 1× Confession, with something listening. There is no release date. What exists now is a free Steam demo with three weapons, 15 enemies, two bosses, 30 items, and 28 songs, a soundtrack-to-content ratio that tells you where this team's heart is. Wishlist it, play the demo, and light a candle for the full run. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/metamorphosis-steam-s3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/metamorphosis-steam-s8.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/metamorphosis-steam-s7.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/metamorphosis-steam-s4.jpg) **METAMORPHOSIS* (images: luxan / Top Hat Studios, via [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3470140/METAMORPHOSIS/?ref=killscreen.com)) We track the games where form is doing the scaring, long before release day. The free newsletter is where they surface first. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Behind Control Resonant's ads: Harmony Korine's EDGLRD URL: https://www.killscreen.com/behind-control-resonants-ads-harmony-korines-edglrd/ Last updated: 2026-09-28T21:05:45.000Z *CONTROL Resonant*, Remedy Entertainment's return to the Oldest House universe, shipped September 24 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. So it was nice to see some ostensibly "BTS" footage from [EDGLRD posted the same day](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdrtEDoFUWj/?ref=killscreen.com). In it, we see a sequence of smuggled footage from the world of *CONTROL*: a cardboard box multiplying in mass, a figure huddled in a corner at New York City N/R/W line, and bodies floating ominously over the skyline. The advertising for one of the fall's biggest games came out of Harmony Korine's Miami collective. 0:00 /0:28 1× A cardboard box multiplies in one of EDGLRD's clips for **CONTROL Resonant*, via [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdrtEDoFUWj/?ref=killscreen.com) EDGLRD is the studio Korine built after deciding cinema's future looked more like games than like film: *Aggro Dr1ft* was shot in infrared and finished by game-engine artists, and *Baby Invasion* ran on livestream and shooter grammar. The studio describes itself as a design collective working across film, fashion, and games. So when Remedy, whose communications director Thomas Puha has said this is [the studio's biggest marketing campaign ever](https://wccftech.com/control-resonant-marketing-campaign-september-release/?ref=killscreen.com), needed images that could cut through a September crowded with horror sequels, it went to a filmmaker's shop that already thinks in engine terms. Remedy is the rare larger studio worth my attention, ever since we asked [what Cormac McCarthy and *Alan Wake* have in common](https://www.killscreen.com/what-do-cormac-mccarthy-and-alan-wake-have-in-common-asi/). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/control-resonant-ss2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/control-resonant-ss3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/control-resonant-ss4.jpg) Screenshots of **CONTROL Resonant*, via Steam The border where film people become game people is Killscreen\\u2019s home turf. The free newsletter patrols it for you. [Read along free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### When you attack the boss in Camoflux, the landscape wins URL: https://www.killscreen.com/camoflux-attack-boss-landscape-wins/ Last updated: 2026-09-24T16:17:43.000Z In Leo Castañeda's *Camoflux* games, attacking the boss is the fastest way to lose. The boss is the landscape—a waterfall, a mountain range, a cloud—run on a system Castañeda calls "exponential reciprocity": strike it, and it answers with overwhelming force. The viable moves are stranger. Sit. Observe. Use an ability called "deep listening," or walk across a cloud you've coaxed solid. 0:00 /0:07 1× Gameplay from **Camoflux: Levels & Bosses (Igapó)*, via [The Overview](https://www.theoverview.art/leo-castaneda-whitney-feature/?ref=killscreen.com). Courtesy the artist The Whitney Biennial gave that system its biggest room. *Camoflux* was playable in the galleries beside a 360-degree fly-through, and its landscapes derive from abstract Amazon paintings by Maria Thereza Negreiros—Castañeda's grandmother, 96, who sketched hills from a hospital bed in Cali while recalling a childhood in Maués, in the Brazilian Amazon. The guaraná fruit, whose black seed sits in white flesh like an eyeball, became the energy orbs players collect. The wall credit names them both; [The Overview's profile](https://www.theoverview.art/leo-castaneda-whitney-feature/?ref=killscreen.com) has the whole collaboration. [Latino USA's tour of the show](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYujG1HuMjZ/?ref=killscreen.com) frames the bigger picture: Marcela Guerrero is the first Latine to co-curate the Biennial in its 82-year history, alongside Drew Sawyer, and 16 of the 56 artists are Latino. The full exhibition closed Aug. 23—a partial view runs through Oct. 12—but the commission's browser game, [*Camoflux Recall Grotto*](https://whitney.org/exhibitions/camoflux-recall-grotto?ref=killscreen.com), stays free to play on the Whitney's artport: a garden that idles cozily while seeds are scarce and tips into unsustainable overgrowth when they multiply. We profiled Castañeda in 2021, when [*Levels and Bosses* was already bending Colombian heritage into gaming universes](https://www.killscreen.com/leo-castaneda/). The Whitney run is that argument at institutional scale: the museum hangs paintings; Castañeda's contribution insists a landscape can look back. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/camoflux-recall-grotto-screenshot.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/castaneda-biennial-install-view.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/negreiros-grandes-correntezas-iii.jpg) Left to right: **Camoflux Recall Grotto*; installation view of Whitney Biennial 2026, photograph by Ron Amstutz; Maria Thereza Negreiros, **Grandes Correntezas III* *Disclosure: Gameplayarts has Castañeda as a partner.* Artists who treat game engines as inheritance, not industry, are the Killscreen beat. The free newsletter brings three of these stories a week. [Start reading free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Playable poems now come with peer review URL: https://www.killscreen.com/playable-poems-now-come-with-peer-review/ Last updated: 2026-09-24T21:02:56.000Z *Game Poems* is a magazine you play. Issue #1, "First Moves," is [13 short games readable in the browser](https://gamepoems.itch.io/game-poems-issue-1-first-moves?ref=killscreen.com) like pages—most of them under five minutes, made in everything from Bitsy and GB Studio to Unity and Godot, by a contributor list that runs from Pippin Barr to poets, scholars, and lead designers at AAA studios. Last week the magazine surfaced in Amsterdam, where the Rijksakademie's [\[untitled games event\]](https://rijksakademie.nl/en/public-programme/2026-09-18-untitled-games-event?ref=killscreen.com) featured Melanie Wigger's *Vincent*, from the issue, on its program. Founding editor Jordan Magnuson—who started TIGSource in 2005, wrote [Game Poems: Videogame Design as Lyric Practice](https://www.jordanmagnuson.com/game-poems-book?ref=killscreen.com) for Amherst College Press, and now teaches at Winchester School of Art—has borrowed the literary journal whole: a rotating editorial collective, blind peer review by volunteer first readers, up to 10 open-call selections per issue, a published artist statement beside every game, CC BY 4.0 open access, and a £100 honorarium for Issue #1 contributors funded through a University of Southampton grant. Issue #2, on the soft theme "Videogames Inside," closed its call in July and is in review now. The magazine's position is precise: game poems need not contain words at all—the poetry is in the mechanics, the constraint, the short lyric span. The phrase has history here. In 2011 we covered [a Georgia Tech professor's $500 bespoke "game poems,"](https://www.killscreen.com/box-art-or-art-boxed-ga-tech-professors-500-bespoke-game/) boxed like art editions; in 2016, [Pippin Barr brought concrete poetry to life](https://www.killscreen.com/pippin-barrs-new-game-brings-concrete-poetry-life/). The idea that a game can be a poem is old. A magazine willing to referee the claim, poem by poem, is new. Games that read like poems, journals that referee them—the space between play and the page is Killscreen's home turf. The free newsletter delivers it a few times a week. [Read along, free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### amy pickles Builds a Card Game About Reaching Consensus URL: https://www.killscreen.com/amy-pickles-builds-a-card-game-about-reaching-consensus/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T19:21:51.000Z amy pickles has shown *Dissenting Decisions*, a work-in-progress card game about how groups reach consensus. A session ran at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam on Sept. 18, during the first [\[untitled games event\] weekender](https://rijksakademie.nl/en/public-programme/2026-09-18-untitled-games-event?ref=killscreen.com), with players cast as a fictional collective of cultural workers. Each player draws a secret character card that sets their social influence and their attitude toward group decisions. Vibe cards then change the mood at the table, and chance and event cards limit what the group can say. Three to six players get 90 minutes, about the length of a real meeting, to agree. [The project page](https://amypickles.co.uk/dissenting-decisions?ref=killscreen.com) carries a tagline: "Without us there is nothing but stagnation." pickles is a Rijksakademie resident and a member of Varia, a collective in Rotterdam. The game was shown alongside more than 10 other works at the weekender, and the series updates at [untitledgamesevent.nl](https://untitledgamesevent.nl/?ref=killscreen.com), a growing body of experiemental games work for the city. For more reading, see [our coverage of *Bloc by Bloc*](https://www.killscreen.com/bloc-by-bloc-aims-to-be-the-board-game-for-modern-revolution/), a board game about modern uprisings, and [the *Dissenting Decisions* project page](https://amypickles.co.uk/dissenting-decisions?ref=killscreen.com). Killscreen looks for the games that treat a meeting, a ballot or a march as playable form, and makes the case for them. The Radar newsletter delivers the best of that search free, three times a week. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Rhizome ran its 30th benefit on artist-made money URL: https://www.killscreen.com/rhizome-artcash-2026-benefit/ Last updated: 2026-10-13T21:27:37.000Z On Sept. 23, Rhizome turned 30 inside Capitale, the Roman-temple hall on the Bowery built in the 1890s as the Bowery Savings Bank, and handed each guest a short stack of money designed by nine artists. [The recap Rhizome posted](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeAIAPeFKe3/?ref=killscreen.com) listed them: Simon Denny made the $1 and Cory Arcangel the $128, while Morry Kolman's $51 came pre-mutilated, trimmed to just past the half-note threshold the U.S. Treasury sets for redeeming damaged bills. The thing to do with it was gamble. 0:00 /0:04 1× **Lombardi Investments, LLP* by Inpatient Interactive, in a clip from [Rhizome's recap of the benefit](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeAIAPeFKe3/?ref=killscreen.com). It loops silently here; the original has sound. Video: Rhizome Blake Andrews ran a live betting book on *Horse Race Tests*, the maze races between bouncing horse icons Andrews has posted since April 2025\. [Alex Declino](https://www.killscreen.com/sixteen-solo-dev-projects-closed-sybils-second-berlin-arc/)'s *Wheel of Misfortunes* was roulette on words instead of numbers, each winner feeding a procedural poem. Paizley Lee, [whose rainbow of iMac G3s we wrote up in August](https://www.killscreen.com/paizley-lee-filled-dead-internet-theorys-second-la-night-with-a-rainbow-of-imac-g3s/), ran *Mega Snake* across a row of them so that each machine's age set the difficulty. Inpatient Interactive, the studio behind [the forthcoming money laundering simulator *Offshore*](https://www.killscreen.com/mitch-anzuoni-offshore/), opened *Lombardi Investments, LLP*: guests put scrip into the financial webs artist Mark Lombardi spent the 1990s diagramming, then watched them spread on what the studio called its "proprietary Offshore Engine." ![A crowd bathed in green projector light watches a screen at Rhizome's benefit afterparty](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/artcash-horse-race-betting-skeie.jpg) Blake Andrews took bets on **Horse Race Tests* at the afterparty at Capitale, Sept. 23, 2026\. Photo: Nafisa Skeie, courtesy Rhizome The model was a 1971 benefit by Experiments in Art and Technology, with bills by Robert Rauschenberg, Marisol and Andy Warhol, who made the $1 easy to copy because "everyone should have money." [Rhizome pitched the sequel](https://rhizome.org/editorial/2026/oct/02/welcome-to-artcash-2026/?ref=killscreen.com) as an answer to "a new period of uncertainty for cultural funding," and I think the format was the argument: a memory institution for digital art asked for support by commissioning play, with art as the house currency. Arcangel is the hinge. In 2014 we covered [the recovery of Warhol's lost Amiga drawings](https://www.killscreen.com/cory-arcangel-recovers-warhol-art-old-floppy-disks/), with Arcangel on the team. Here Arcangel held the top note in Warhol's old game. The dinner also honored Erick Calderon and Skawennati, [whose *Second Life* machinima we discussed with the artist in 2021](https://www.killscreen.com/skawennati/). To judge by the replies, some guests never bet their bills. They kept them. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/artcash-2026-denny.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/artcash-2026-mohr.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/artcash-2026-beeple.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/artcash-2026-canal-street-research-association.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/artcash-2026-brewer.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/artcash-2026-kolman.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/artcash-2026-lovid.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/artcash-2026-goffman.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/artcash-2026-arcangel.jpg) The ARTCASH 2026 notes in ascending denomination: Simon Denny ($1), Manfred Mohr ($5), Beeple ($7), Canal Street Research Association ($10), Maura Brewer ($14/$16), Morry Kolman ($51), LoVid ($77), Genevieve Goffman ($120) and Cory Arcangel ($128). Images: Rhizome A fundraiser run as an arcade is the kind of night that passes without a record. The free KS Radar letter keeps one: independent and experimental game culture, three short issues a week. [Get the Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Dice Have No Eyes turns push-your-luck into a fever dream URL: https://www.killscreen.com/dice-have-no-eyes-early-access/ Last updated: 2026-09-23T15:25:59.000Z Two of the four people who made *Arco* have a new game, and it is nothing like *Arco*. [*Dice Have No Eyes*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4535880/Dice%5FHave%5FNo%5FEyes/?ref=killscreen.com), from pixel artist Franek Nowotniak and programmer Max Cahill, hit Steam this year: a push-your-luck roguelike the two bill as a surreal fever dream about greed management. You clear a level, you upgrade your dice, you feed them dumplings, and at every moment the game offers one more roll, which is *exactly* one roll more than you should take. Where *Arco* was patient and mournful about consequence, this one makes consequence a slot machine. Let's talk dice. No pips to read, no faces to count—just the raw act of wanting more, drawn in Franek's thick pixel line and set in gambling-parlor psychedelia, with something called King Fetus waiting for the truly lucky. We wrote last year about [the expected value of wonder in *Balatro*](https://www.killscreen.com/balatro-and-the-expected-value-of-wonder/); this is that argument with the cards swapped for bones. 0:00 /0:03 1× The loop: roll, bank, or ruin it. The full trailer with sound is on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4535880/Dice%5FHave%5FNo%5FEyes/?ref=killscreen.com). Small teams keep making the strangest, most alive games on Steam, and Killscreen keeps finding them before the algorithm does. The free newsletter delivers a few of them every week. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### HYPERNOMA launched a three-year platform for unruly play URL: https://www.killscreen.com/hypernoma-three-year-platform-unruly-play/ Last updated: 2026-09-24T21:04:21.000Z A media art festival in a former lemonade factory in Graz spent ten days on deepfakes, bot politics, and billionaire futurism—and closed by teaching beginners Unity. That whiplash is the highlight in [the opening-night documentation](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZQj07QAE4S/?ref=killscreen.com) that crossed my feed. RESILIENT GLITCHES ran June 5-14 at [Schaumbad – Freies Atelierhaus Graz](https://schaumbad.mur.at/event/resilient-glitches-hypernoma/?ref=killscreen.com), the artist-run house that has occupied the old factory since 2013\. The curatorial claim: a glitch is an interruption you can organize around, not a technical error. The lineup mixed critical media art with activism—Zentrum für politische Schönheit, the machinima collective Total Refusal, ludic-research veteran Margarete Jahrmann, multimedia artist Babak Ahteshamipour, set designer David Szauder. The part with legs is HYPERNOMA, a platform project on the artistic and social potential of digital play that launched inside the festival and is built to run three years. Its first game-culture weekend held free workshops on Unity, 2D game animation, and character design, plus the first Game Studio Meet Up Graz/Wien—Subotron, Bongfish, Causa Creations, Microbird Games, Game Dev. Graz—and Christof Ressi's sound lecture-performance *Game Over*. GameScenes has [the full programme rundown](https://www.gamescenes.org/event-resilient-glitches-hypernoma-5-14-june-2026-graz-austria/?ref=killscreen.com). Ten years ago glitch talk in games was mostly aesthetic—we were finding [the beauty in machine glitches](https://www.killscreen.com/small-radios-big-televisions-finds-beauty-machine-glitches/) in 2016's *Small Radios Big Televisions*. Graz is making the harder pitch: that the bug, the unruly player, and the local scene are political resources, and that game culture curdles the moment it becomes "innovation" talk. A three-year commitment to that idea from an artist-run house, rather than a trade body, is worth watching. As always, I'm so jealous that we don't have more of this in the States. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/resilient-glitches-131.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/resilient-glitches-107.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/resilient-glitches-142.jpg) Opening days at Schaumbad. Photos courtesy RESILIENT GLITCHES / HYPERNOMA Festivals like this rarely make English-language games coverage. Tracking the art-and-games circuit is what the free Killscreen newsletter is for, three sends a week. [Follow the circuit free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Double Fine's first post-Xbox game is a slapstick bus sim URL: https://www.killscreen.com/double-fines-first-post-xbox-game-is-a-slapstick-bus-sim/ Last updated: 2026-09-23T12:41:39.000Z The economy of *Thank You Bus Driver* runs on gratitude. You drive a town's bus route against the clock, and every "thank you" a happy passenger offers adds seconds to your timer—so the fastest way to stay on schedule is to be appreciated, whatever that takes. Rules posted by the depot change daily. Rulebreakers can be slapped, or ejected out the door at speed. (There is quite a bit of slapping.) The fence between you and the next stop is, per [the game's own description](https://store.steampowered.com/app/5067360/Thank%5FYou%5FBus%5FDriver/?ref=killscreen.com), optional. It came out of the brain of Double Fine's Will Koehler, was built by a small team in a matter of weeks, and arrives on PC October 14 via Steam, GOG, and itch.io. 0:00 /0:24 1× The opening of the **Thank You Bus Driver* announcement trailer, muted here—[the full trailer with sound is on Double Fine's site](https://www.doublefine.com/dftv/thank-you-bus-driver-announce-trailer?ref=killscreen.com). Courtesy of Double Fine. I had Double Fine boss Tim Schafer at the first ever Killscreen Festival (then called Two5six) back in 2015 and a lot has happened to the studio. It was acquired by Xbox and then self-empancipated this year. This is the first release from Double Fine Action Labs, the sub-label the studio [announced this month](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dc7HwEUCJDy/?ref=killscreen.com) for what [its blog](https://www.doublefine.com/news/announcing-thank-you-bus-driver?ref=killscreen.com) calls "weird, little games." So, the context matters here: after seven years inside Microsoft, this summer's Xbox restructuring spun Double Fine back out as an independent studio, catalog intact—and Tim Schafer told [GamesBeat](https://gamesbeat.com/how-double-fine-is-charting-its-destiny-outside-of-xbox-starting-with-a-kickstarter-campaign-tim-schafer-interview/?ref=killscreen.com) that the plan for independence runs through small experiments and a Kickstarter reviving Amnesia Fortnight, the studio's internal game jam, as a public event. Becoming a smaller studio, the thinking goes, means making smaller, stranger games—and giving them a name of their own. We've been here before. Killscreen covered [Amnesia Fortnight back in 2014](https://www.killscreen.com/after-amnesia-fortnight-game-jam-double-fine-should-hire-pendleton-ward-outright/), when the jam's prototypes made the case that Double Fine's two-week experiments were where the studio's best ideas surfaced. And in 2013, Schafer argued that [crowdfunding doesn't free creators](https://www.killscreen.com/how-crowdfunding-undermining-creative-talents-minds-tim-schafer/) so much as trade one boss for thousands. Thirteen years later, Schafer is testing that proposition firsthand—and the first fare out of the depot is a bus driver who runs on thank-yous. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/tybd-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/tybd-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/tybd-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/tybd-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/tybd-6.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/tybd-7.jpg) Screenshots from **Thank You Bus Driver*. Courtesy of Double Fine. Where do weird little games get to live? That question is most of what Killscreen covers—the studios, artists, and labels building shelter for strange work. The free newsletter brings the next ones to your inbox. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Five South Asian Australian artists build memory, mythology, and queer liberation. URL: https://www.killscreen.com/chaturanga-went-feminist-sydney-4a-lab/ Last updated: 2026-09-22T19:28:49.000Z Chess's ancestor came back retold. *Chaturanga Disclosed*, Sage Godrei's speculative reworking of the game that predates chess, anchored the [Transmedia Worldbuilding Residency Exhibition](https://4a.com.au/exhibitions/transmedia-worldbuilding-residency-exhibition/?ref=killscreen.com) at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, which showed at the 4A LAB space in Haymarket, Sydney, from May 1 through June 14\. [The announcement for the closing artist talk](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYyQrReSlj8/?ref=killscreen.com) is what put it on our radar. Myra Javaid's *The City of Forgotten Lights* turns experiences of the gendered gaze in public space into an interactive game prototype. Sim Kaur's *Jhalak / A Glimpse* rebuilds a bedroom corner as a walk-in personal archive. Vidya Rajan's *Good Morning Land* grows a surreal landscape out of WhatsApp archives and digital memory. And Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin's *Hypocrite Heaven* reimagines *Snakes and Ladders*—a game that began life as a morality lesson—as a board of queer resistance and liberation. The five artists—emerging South Asian Australian women and gender-diverse practitioners—spent five months in virtual labs and a Sydney intensive mentored by Antariksha Studio, the Indian transmedia collective that has been building independent games rooted in Indian heritage since 2013\. The money came from Creative Australia's Create Lab Digital Alumni Fund: a national arts body funding game-form worldbuilding as visual art, with an Indian studio setting the example rather than a Western engine company. We have a long shelf of games rewritten by people the canon overlooked—[*Chesh* was breaking chess's rules for the people back in 2015](https://www.killscreen.com/chesh-drunken-rule-breaking-sister-chess/)—and a soft spot for [Australia's gloriously weird game-making lineage](https://www.killscreen.com/revisiting-the-gloriously-weird-games-of-australias-golden-age/). This residency splices the two: board-game history and engine work in the same room, retold as heritage. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/sim-kaur-jhalak.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/vidya-rajan-good-morning-land.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/sage-godrei-chaturanga-disclosed.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/dipa-yasmin-hypocrite-heaven.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/myra-javaid-city-forgotten-lights.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/transmedia-4a-install-9623.jpg) Works by Sim Kaur, Vidya Rajan, Sage Godrei, Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin, and Myra Javaid. Photographs by Garry Trinh, courtesy 4A Game history keeps getting retold by the people it left out. Following that retelling is what the free Killscreen newsletter does, three times a week. [Follow along free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Peter Burr's DVD-era animation network turned 20 at Roulette URL: https://www.killscreen.com/peter-burr-cartune-xprez-turned-20-roulette/ Last updated: 2026-09-22T19:20:51.000Z In 2006, when YouTube was a baby and Netflix still mailed discs, Peter Burr pressed the first Cartune Xprez DVD and started driving experimental animation into basements and cinemas across twenty countries. More than two hundred events later, Burr's framing in [the 20th-birthday announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZFjO90kdgT/?ref=killscreen.com) was sadly blunt: "the algorithm has swallowed most of the room." The anniversary night, June 11 at [Roulette](https://roulette.org/event/cartune-xprez-peter-burr-mshr-matt-romein-play-useful-fantasy/?ref=killscreen.com) in Brooklyn, was titled *USEFUL FANTASY*, and it gathered the label's generational core—Takeshi Murata's *Monster Movie*, Amy Lockhart's *Walk for Walk*, films by Martha Colburn, Jacob Ciocci (my old roommate!), James Duesing, and Jim Trainor—alongside performances built from game logic. MSHR played *Network Entity* through a handmade sculptural interface in which every sonic decision reshapes an image and every image bends the sound. Matt Romein's *Milkman Zero* put the performer inside a videogame to see what the game does with a body; the program's question ("who is actually in control?") rings loud and clear. Burr closed the loop with *MAINTENANCE VESSELS*, described as "a slot machine at the mouth of a dungeon": visitors spin up hybrid avatars that wander a decaying underworld performing quiet, endless repair on architecture that may not want to be saved. Games have been Burr's material for years—the dungeon-crawler installations *Cave Exits* and *Dirtscraper*—and the credentials recently caught up: [a PhD in game design and an assistant professorship](https://peterburr.org/biography.php?ref=killscreen.com) at the University of Texas at Austin. The whole night is [archived from Roulette's livestream](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLto87nP8uE&ref=killscreen.com). What hopefully hangs around is the event's remains: a touring DVD label was a distribution system for unruly moving images, and the room that Burr is betting on as a successor. We've been on this lineage ourselves lately, most recently via [a 1991 animation that framed early CGI in religious imagery](https://www.killscreen.com/a-1991-animation-frames-early-cgi-in-religious-imagery/); Cartune Xprez is the infrastructure that kept that tradition moving between institutions. Experimental animation and games have been one conversation since the DVD era. The free Killscreen newsletter follows it three times a week. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Lucas Lugarinho Shows Ghost Rococó at the Rijksakademie URL: https://www.killscreen.com/lucas-lugarinho-shows-ghost-rococo-at-the-rijksakademie/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T18:58:30.000Z Lucas Lugarinho showed *Ghost Rococó* on September 18 at [\[untitled games event\]](https://rijksakademie.nl/en/public-programme/2026-09-18-untitled-games-event?ref=killscreen.com) at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, where the organizers said the game returned by popular demand. Lugarinho also gave a talk at the event, continuing one begun in June. In the game, the player is the Lost Bullet, a stray round flying through a dream. Lugarinho has said that no "mission" or "target" is clearly defined in it. The player is the projectile rather than the shooter, and there is nothing to hit. Lugarinho describes the work as an exploration of how anti-capitalist game design can betray the medium's pull toward fantasies of justice and of punishment alike. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Lugarinho is a resident at the Rijksakademie and works across videogames and painting. [Upstream Gallery](https://www.upstreamgallery.nl/artists/118/lucas-lugarinho?ref=killscreen.com) describes both strands as sampling disparate media ecosystems into counter-colonial narratives. Lugarinho has had a solo show at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City and received the Cisneros Foundation's award for emerging artists. For more reading, see [a game about the Haitian Revolution with no bullets](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/why-this-game-about-the-haitian-revolution-has-no-bullets/), [the history of the bullet hell shooter](https://www.killscreen.com/frenetic-past-and-bright-future-bullet-hell-shooter/) and [Lugarinho's gallery page](https://www.upstreamgallery.nl/artists/118/lucas-lugarinho?ref=killscreen.com). Games made in art residencies and galleries rarely get covered as games. Radar, the free Killscreen newsletter, finds them twice a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Daniel Ernst’s Great Orator went flat for gamescom URL: https://www.killscreen.com/daniel-ernsts-great-orator-went-flat-for-gamescom/ Last updated: 2026-09-22T18:53:34.000Z gamescom is where the games industry does its *loudest* business, and in the middle of it, on [A MAZE.’s Digital PlayGround stand](https://gamescom.a-maze.net/?ref=killscreen.com), sat a diorama about a dead TV medium who became an AI. The Hague artist [Daniel Ernst](https://www.theshoeboxdiorama.com/?ref=killscreen.com) spent the fair showing the flat, non-VR cut of *The Great Orator*—and pitched [the outing](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dcn9vsFDSKt/?ref=killscreen.com) as exactly what it looks like: “fellow subversive artists in the heart of the gaming industry,” with time set aside to see the con “from a consumer perspective.” 0:00 /0:30 1× The first 30 seconds of **The Great Orator*’s teaser, muted; [the full version with sound is on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/431380/?ref=killscreen.com). Ernst has been building VR dioramas for over a decade under the Shoebox Diorama banner—*Die Fernweh Oper* won the [Golden Calf for Best Interactive](https://www.filmfestival.nl/nieuws/jury-report-golden-calf-for-best-interactive-2019?ref=killscreen.com) at the Netherlands Film Festival in 2019—and *The Great Orator*, which premiered in competition at Venice Immersive last year, is the most ambitious of them. The premise is very [Amee Semple McPherson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimee%5FSemple%5FMcPherson?ref=killscreen.com): a TV medium who died at the height of fame lives on as an AI, merged with followers into a shared consciousness. Point at any object, however small, and the Orator produces a story about it. Every oration begins as a prewritten text by poet Thomas Möhlmann and is expanded in real time, folding in live news from your world. Ernst’s [artist statement](https://voicesofvr.com/1771-environmental-storytelling-in-the-great-orator-vr-diorama-with-generative-ai-experiments/?ref=killscreen.com) is blunt about the target: “It feels as though reality is what you make of it, and feelings outweigh facts.” Killscreen has been arguing that games’ diorama instinct is undervalued [since at least 2016](https://www.killscreen.com/29-wants-talk-otherwordliness-place/). Next stop is home turf: the [Netherlands Film Festival](https://www.filmfestival.nl/?ref=killscreen.com) in Utrecht, tomorrow through October 2. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/great-orator-ss2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/great-orator-ss3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/great-orator-ss4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/great-orator-ss5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/great-orator-ss6.jpg) Story spaces from **The Great Orator*. Images: The Shoebox Diorama. Work like this falls between every desk—too art for the games press, too game for the art press. That gap is Killscreen’s entire beat, and the newsletter that covers it is free. [Read us free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Huntrezz Janos packs 100(!) cats into a browser cloud city URL: https://www.killscreen.com/huntrezz-janos-packs-100-cats-into-a-browser-cloud-city/ Last updated: 2026-09-22T17:32:52.000Z Huntrezz Janos's new game is a city you could frost a cake with. [*CLOWDER*](https://www.viverse.com/EdLWREE?ref=killscreen.com) went live on September 14 as a free browser game, and the premise is as gentle as the palette: wander a dreamy cloud city and gather the neighborhood's cats until your clowder hits 100\. (A clowder is a group of domesticated cats. The more you know!) [Her launch reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdaFx9GvDXB/?ref=killscreen.com) walks through it in her own voice, pastel streets rolling by under a graffiti-style logo. 0:00 /0:33 1× Huntrezz Janos’s launch reel for **CLOWDER*, from [her Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdaFx9GvDXB/?ref=killscreen.com). Courtesy the artist. Janos is an LA-based artist who has spent years building sculptural work and performatice work, gallery shows, commissions and AR—[her WePresent commission](https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/stories/huntrezz-janos-metaverse-a-vibe-called-tech?ref=killscreen.com) imagined a whole cast of speculative metaverse characters, from a digiballer to a virtual therapist. *CLOWDER* is that practice arriving somewhere new: not a filter you wear or a render you look at, but a space that answers you back. The game runs on HTC's Viverse, and she credits a Viverse creator grant for making the build possible. (It's platform money quietly doing what art funding *should* do, moving an artist from depicting worlds to shipping one.) The cat-collecting genre has a lineage, and Killscreen was there when it crystallized—[we covered *Neko Atsume* taking over the world in 2016](https://www.killscreen.com/cats-finally-take-over-the-world-with-mobile-game-neko-atsume/). *Neko Atsume* made you wait for cats to visit; Janos lets you go out and find them, in a city built to her own maximalist taste. Ten years of the genre, compressed into the difference between a screensaver and a stroll. Artists keep crossing into games, and Killscreen keeps the map. The free Radar newsletter brings three crossings like this to your inbox every week. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Mitchell Chan's Insert Coin(s) suite is coming to Steam URL: https://www.killscreen.com/mitchell-chans-insert-coin-s-suite-is-coming-to-steam/ Last updated: 2026-09-22T14:00:27.000Z *Zantar* is a retro 2D action game about a gelatinous cube that eats the warriors of a medieval village—and the anchor of a fiction about an ambitious CEO determined to make that game the most valuable platform in the world. Mitchell Chan built a gallery show out of it, Insert Coin(s), which premiered at Nguyen Wahed in New York in May 2025 and traveled to the gallery's London space that fall. Now the works have left the room: per [the clip Chan posted](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DdSfGdot3Zw/?ref=killscreen.com), the new artworks from the exhibition are [playable online](https://chan.gallery/?ref=killscreen.com). 0:00 /0:26 1× The preview trailer for **Zantar & Other Stories*, silent here — the full version with sound is [on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3799780/?ref=killscreen.com). The suite rewards the click-through. *Moonboi* is billed as "a stylized currency trading simulation"—an endless runner where you steer a Lamborghini between leveraged long and short positions and try not to get liquidated. *Ladyboss* is "a short tragedy, presented in the style of a Subway Surfer Story Tiktok." *Overture* wraps generative art, soundtracks and worldbuilding into minigame editions. The next room in the show is getting bigger. [Zantar & Other Stories is on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3799780/?ref=killscreen.com), dated 2027—six stories about the fictional game, its CEO, and the would-be millionaires pulled into its orbit. Chan sat down with us in July for [a members Playlist Session](https://www.killscreen.com/playlist-session-with-mitchell-chan/) on *The Boys of Summer*, and the through-line holds: one critic called Chan committed to the most serious ideas of conceptualism in the most playful way possible. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/zantar-screenshot-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/zantar-screenshot-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/zantar-screenshot-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/zantar-screenshot-5.jpg) Screenshots from **Zantar & Other Stories*, via Steam. Real games reviewed as sculpture, sculpture reviewed as games — that crossing is what Killscreen covers. The free newsletter brings it weekly. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Team Rolfes hands the cockpit to the audience URL: https://www.killscreen.com/team-rolfes-hands-the-cockpit-to-the-audience/ Last updated: 2026-10-10T03:32:06.000Z Event details When Oct. 17, 2026 Where Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, London [Get tickets](https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/3-evenings-saturday?ref=killscreen.com) Event details When Oct. 21, 2026 Where Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, New York Mustang Speedrun is [Team Rolfes](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/team-rolfes/)' broadcast-spectacle in progress: a fictional sim studio reenacting a nation's founding myth as a televised stunt contest, performed live from a motion-captured, broadcast-rigged cockpit while avatar jockeys race to keep a failing exoskeleton running. Per [Sam Rolfes' announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdZW3xzhJb5/?ref=killscreen.com), the New York studio takes it to two stages next month, and neither is a club. 0:00 /0:36 1× Team Rolfes running **Mustang Speedrun* in the cockpit rig, from the [announcement they posted to Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdZW3xzhJb5/?ref=killscreen.com). London first: on Saturday, October 17, Team Rolfes closes a night of 3 Evenings at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station—Somerset House Studios' tenth-anniversary reimagining of 1966's 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering. The one-off, subtitled Pit Call and billed as "part game show, part emergency," opens the performance apparatus to the room and puts pop provocateur GFOTY in the driver's seat, with [the whole night relying on collective input](https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/3-evenings-saturday?ref=killscreen.com) to get through in one piece. Then New York: on Wednesday, October 21, a new version closes [Unsound New York's evening at Alice Tully Hall](https://www.unsound.pl/en/2026/unsound-new-york?ref=killscreen.com), sharing a Lincoln Center bill with FUJI|||||||||||TA with Ka Baird and Actress. Rolfes' announcement names performers Fitness and baddad\_x, with live cinema by [Kevin Peter He](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/kevin-peter-he/). Sam Rolfes is a Lincoln Center Collider Fellow, and Somerset House notes the project is headed for a playable download, so the stunt contest will eventually be yours to run. We have been watching the brothers drag game engines onstage for a decade — from [the early VR-puppetry livestreams](https://www.killscreen.com/sam-andy-rolfes/) to [the sold-out chaos of Diskokina](https://www.killscreen.com/diskokina-virtual-club-theater-game-engines/). The through-line has always been control as material: who is holding the puppet, and how badly. Handing the cockpit to a concert hall is the logical, unhinged next step. The space between the game engine and the stage is Killscreen’s home turf, and the free newsletter is how you keep up with who’s working in it. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Cameron Granger builds a dance floor you can only cross once URL: https://www.killscreen.com/cameron-granger-sidechain-angel-of-history/ Last updated: 2026-10-01T03:31:29.000Z Granger spent a decade making art before he made a game. His first is a warehouse party with 10 minutes left, and you are the Angel of History. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Abandoned Miis come back in a homebrew Wii game URL: https://www.killscreen.com/abandoned-miis-come-back-in-a-homebrew-wii-game/ Last updated: 2026-09-21T20:16:22.000Z *Every* secondhand Wii arrives with ghosts on it. The Mii channel keeps whatever its previous households made—self-portraits, in-jokes, dead relatives, celebrities—and when the console gets resold, those little avatars go along, unclaimed. At [Sickhouse](https://www.sickhouse.nl/?ref=killscreen.com), the Dutch playful art space in Enschede, artists [Janne Schimmel](https://janneschimmel.com/?ref=killscreen.com) and [Rein van der Woerd](https://rein.computer/?ref=killscreen.com) built a one-day public permacomputing workshop around exactly that inheritance: participants dug forgotten Miis off secondhand consoles, “climbed inside the mind” of each one, and made a homebrew Wii game about the existential troubles those characters might face on a daily basis. [The recording of the result](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcnU3fgisxT/?ref=killscreen.com) is up, and the game—*Remember Mii*—is a free download [on itch](https://janneschimmel.itch.io/remember-mii-permacomputing-nintendo-wii-workshop?ref=killscreen.com), a 13MB .dol file you run from a homebrewed Wii’s SD card or drop straight into the Dolphin emulator. “To retroactively diversify the Nintendo Wii game library,” they write. That’s a [permacomputing](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/permacomputing/) sentence—the discipline holds that the hardware already made is the hardware worth making things for—but it’s also an archival one. A Mii might be the most personal data anyone leaves on a games console: a face, built by hand, by someone who wasn’t thinking of it as data at all. (Lord knows, the number of exes that still haunt lost Wiis.) The workshop treats that residue as a cast of characters nobody meant to donate. Music comes from Wout Martens, and seven workshop participants share the credit. Schimmel’s whole practice runs on the afterlives of gaming hardware—a recent [Permanent Beta conversation](https://www.permanentbeta.network/episode/237?ref=killscreen.com) frames the artist’s repair work as refusal of planned obsolescence. The Mii has a Killscreen history, too: in 2015 we watched Nintendo push Miis [out into the real world](https://www.killscreen.com/miitomo-nintendo-escapes-real-world/) with *Miitomo*. A decade on, the traffic runs the other way—strangers’ Miis carried back out of the e-waste stream, one secondhand console at a time. Somebody has to keep track of the art being made on dead consoles, and we volunteered fifteen years ago. The free Killscreen newsletter is where it all lands. [Join the free list ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Bub is a paper-cut memoir of a thousand cut pieces URL: https://www.killscreen.com/bub-is-a-paper-cut-memoir-of-a-thousand-cut-pieces/ Last updated: 2026-09-21T19:51:42.000Z *Bub* is built from paper—thousands of cut pieces, "slashes of ink and paint," collages photographed into a stop-motion world by hand. This week the paper traveled. Case Jernigan and Todd Anderson, the two-person studio [Paperfrog](https://paperfrog.games/?ref=killscreen.com), brought the game to Amsterdam for a playtest and presentation at the Rijksakademie, followed by a showing at [\[untitled games event\] #8](https://rijksakademie.nl/en/public-programme/2026-09-18-untitled-games-event?ref=killscreen.com) on Sept. 18—opening night of the series' first three-day weekender, which runs through Sept. 20\. Jernigan announced the trip in [a reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dc3e5opoPq5/?ref=killscreen.com) that doubles as a tour of the game's hand-cut cast. 0:00 /0:21 1× The opening 21 seconds of the **Bub* announcement trailer, via Paperfrog and Steam. Watch [the full trailer with sound](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4762110/Bub/?ref=killscreen.com). The venue is half the story. [\[untitled games event\]](https://untitledgamesevent.nl/?ref=killscreen.com) describes itself as a monthly "book club" of experimental games and interactive art, and it meets inside an art academy rather than a games festival; edition #8 is programmed around "big feelings, wrong feelings, unruly emotions." *Bub* belongs in that room. It's a narrative adventure about a New York painter and sculptor documenting chronic illness through artmaking—"turning your memories into art while you still can," as the [Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4762110/Bub/?ref=killscreen.com) puts it—and Jernigan, who lives with multiple sclerosis, [has written](https://casejernigan.substack.com/p/bub-a-game-about-artmaking-and-healing) that the story is autobiographical. 0:00 /0:01 1× The credits run through comedy and music as much as games: comedian Whitmer Thomas (*Weapons*) voices Bub, Landlady's Adam Schatz composed the score, and Somepoint Sound handled the sound design. Anderson writes the code. Jernigan cuts the paper. Killscreen has been a mark for handmade game worlds since [*Lumino City*'s papercraft village](https://www.killscreen.com/surprisingly-british-origins-beautiful-handmade-lumino-city/) a decade ago, and Amanita Design [digitized a real cardboard city](https://www.killscreen.com/amanita-design-built-a-dystopian-city-out-of-real-cardboard-then-digitized-it/) just last month. *Bub* reaches Steam in Q4 2027. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/bub-screenshot-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/bub-screenshot-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/bub-screenshot-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/bub-screenshot-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/bub-screenshot-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/bub-screenshot-6.jpg) Screenshots of **Bub*, via Paperfrog and Steam Paper, ink and glue keep turning into games, and Killscreen has tracked that crossover since 2010\. The free newsletter brings you the artists doing it, three times a week. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### The LAN party revival makes public radio URL: https://www.killscreen.com/the-lan-party-revival-makes-public-radio/ Last updated: 2026-09-24T21:05:00.000Z Three weeks ago [we covered the iMac Rainbow](https://www.killscreen.com/paizley-lee-filled-dead-internet-theorys-second-la-night-with-a-rainbow-of-imac-g3s/), Paizley Lee’s floor of candy-colored G3s at the second LA night of Dead Internet Theory. Now the LAN revival has made public radio: KCRW aired [a five-minute segment by Jennifer Swann](https://www.kcrw.com/shows/kcrw-reports/stories/gamers-lan-party-like-its-1999?ref=killscreen.com) on Lee’s roving event, and [the station’s photo carousel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DctXIj0jJTc/?ref=killscreen.com)—towers, CRTs, a room strung together with cable—is exactly the kind of thing that used to circulate on burned CDs. The format Lee is reviving died of convenience. LAN parties existed because the internet was too slow to carry multiplayer, so the multiplayer came to the room: tower, monitor, cords, all of it lugged to a friend’s place. “It was everybody bringing something,” Lee told KCRW. Lee tagged along to those parties as a kid and now stages them for Angelenos at ark/8, on machines scavenged from around the country. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/dit-kcrw-2.jpg) It's no surprise that the theme has been presence: the machines are less stimulating than phones, so the game is the only thing happening, and the people around you are actually there. It's one of the arguments for why games are such a compelling break, compared to other passive, lean-out, always-on media. An Ethernet cable is a commitment device.So I don't think nostalgia for CRT glass is the driver here, so much as an appetite for one thing at a time, with witnesses. It says something that this story traveled from a warehouse on La Brea to public radio in a summer: the desire is not niche. Dead Internet Theory is roving, ongoing, and in Killscreen’s own city—follow [Lee’s account](https://www.instagram.com/kidgrandma/?ref=killscreen.com) for the next date. We’ll keep showing up. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/dit-kcrw-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/dit-kcrw-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/dit-kcrw-5.jpg) Scenes from Dead Internet Theory, via [KCRW’s post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DctXIj0jJTc/?ref=killscreen.com). Photos: Jennifer Swann/KCRW. We covered Dead Internet Theory before the radio got there, because scenes like this are what the free Killscreen newsletter exists to catch early. [Catch the next one ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Fantasy Lane's dream homes are scraped from Pornhub URL: https://www.killscreen.com/fantasy-lanes-dream-homes-are-scraped-from-pornhub/ Last updated: 2026-10-13T21:37:02.000Z You drift through an empty bedroom while a calm voice walks you through the floor plan. The room is soft at the edges, half-remembered rather than modeled, because it was not modeled: in *Fantasy Lane*, Lotte Louise de Jong ran clips from Pornhub's PropertySex channel through a neural radiance field, and the resulting 3D reconstructions — blurry, dreamlike, structurally sound — became the houses you tour. The work, [a work-in-progress made with Antonia Hernández](https://lottelouise.nl/assets/projects/fantasy-lane-2024.html?ref=killscreen.com), sets three of these game-engine spaces to narration drawn from ASMR videos about contracts and floor plans, and it showed last week at [\[untitled games event\]](https://rijksakademie.nl/en/public-programme/2026-09-18-untitled-games-event?ref=killscreen.com) at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. De Jong is a Rijksakademie resident whose work keeps finding the places where digital desire and digital economy turn out to be the same interface. Scattered through the rooms are comments left by the original viewers of those PropertySex videos; people ignoring what the channel is for and asking about the apartment. She and Hernández talked through the project's thinking in [a published conversation on the intimacy of empty spaces](https://utppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3138/topia-2023-0040?ref=killscreen.com), which is worth your time. Games got to this argument early. Molleindustria's *Nova Alea* [abstracted speculative housing into a city of soft cubes](https://www.killscreen.com/nova-alea-criticizes-state-urban-housing-pulls-punches/) back in 2016, and we traced [how games invented virtual real estate](https://www.killscreen.com/how-virtual-real-estate-was-made-possible-gaming/) before the property sites caught up. *Fantasy Lane* adds the missing scenery: the seductive voice in your ear telling you this could all be yours. Killscreen covers the games that show up in galleries before they show up in stores. Radar, our free newsletter, delivers three finds like this a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Scooter parts wound up as mirrors at Gear7 in Paris URL: https://www.killscreen.com/scooter-parts-wound-up-as-mirrors-at-gear7-in-paris/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T02:54:01.000Z Four mirrors hung in a row on a white wall, each framed in the sticker-wrapped bodywork of a scooter: flames, shards and racing stripes in orange, lime and blue. Farther along, nine oval mirrors sat between pairs of black panels. That is what Lea Kika Sblandano's [installation photographs](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdjvcfeEtMr/?ref=killscreen.com) record of Gear7, which ran Sept. 17 to 20 at [Not Today](https://not-today.fr/?ref=killscreen.com), a Paris space at 23 rue Le Peletier kept by the digital studio Parc. Gear7 belongs to three designers: [Alex Sinh Nguyen](https://aaasssnnn.com/?ref=killscreen.com), [Quang Vinh Nguyen](https://www.instagram.com/chuthoaimai/?ref=killscreen.com) and [Gabriel Hafner](https://www.hafnerbuero.ch/?ref=killscreen.com). Over research stays in Ho Chi Minh City in 2024 and 2025 they worked with local fabricators, artisans and riders to turn motorbike components into domestic objects, and [the announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdVv0H6sBLi/?ref=killscreen.com) billed Paris as the project's first European showing. The wider collections include a chair assembled from Honda saddles and a bench that keeps its beaded seat cover. In August we wrote about [the crucifix USB necklace](https://www.killscreen.com/a-crucifix-usb-necklace-carries-a-barragan-video-game/) that carries Alex Sinh Nguyen's game for Barragán. The Lausanne designer's site describes a practice of "creation systems that borrow from video game logic," and most of the commissions are mods: Mowalola's skate decks swapped into *Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3*, Rohan Mirza's garments fitted onto the characters of *Guitar Hero World Tour*, a Barragán collection set loose inside *Prey*. Each replaces a stock asset and leaves the system running. Gear7 reads to me as the same move made with a welder. The site files the Vietnam work under tuning culture, which is modding by another name: a mass-produced machine and a street full of people who will not leave it stock. When we asked in 2014 [whether modding was a dying art](https://www.killscreen.com/modding-dying-art/), Robert Yang told us Unity was drawing would-be modders away. It did not die. It left the screen. The Paris run is over. Quang Vinh Nguyen has also [posted](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdEjmEWEb07/?ref=killscreen.com) a Gear7 table and shelf, tires and a brake-disc lazy Susan included, built for the Seeson store in Ho Chi Minh City. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/gear7-paris-decal-mirror-single.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/gear7-paris-oval-mirrors-side.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/gear7-paris-opening-street.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/gear7-seat-chair.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/gear7-bench-beaded-seat.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/gear7-exhaust-vases.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/gear7-fender-skyline.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/gear7-frame-on-scooter.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/gear7-decal-scooter.jpg) Top row: Gear7 at Not Today in Paris, and the crowd outside on rue Le Peletier. Photos: [Lea Kika Sblandano](https://www.instagram.com/lea.kika/?ref=killscreen.com). Below: pieces and process from the Gear7 collections, made in Ho Chi Minh City in 2024 and 2025\. Images: [Alex Sinh Nguyen](https://aaasssnnn.com/?ref=killscreen.com) A modder's furniture show is the kind of story nobody else files under games. The free KS Radar letter does, in three short issues a week. [Get KS Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A room's light became the controller in a Berlin live set URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-rooms-light-became-the-controller-in-a-berlin-live-set/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T02:54:47.000Z The moon in *The Incomplete Moon* never held still long enough to be admired. In [the documentation Nanzhen Yang and Song Xin later posted](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeJrmXLDW02/?ref=killscreen.com), a pale disc hangs over two figures at a table of synths and laptops while ragged shadows cross it. The set ran 26 and a half minutes on Sept. 19 at Studio dB in Berlin, on the closing night of [Re:Frame](https://www.cilens-film.org/reframe2026recap?ref=killscreen.com), the first edition of CiLENS's moving-image program, co-presented with the collective [Jiā La](https://www.instagram.com/jiala%5Fjiala/?ref=killscreen.com). 0:00 /1:00 1× An excerpt from **The Incomplete Moon*, with sound: the Unreal Engine moon above, the performance at Studio dB below. Clip courtesy of the artists, from [their documentation](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeJrmXLDW02/?ref=killscreen.com). [Nanzhen Yang](https://www.instagram.com/nanzhen%5F%5Fyang/?ref=killscreen.com) played the sound live. [Song Xin](https://songxin.site/?ref=killscreen.com) ran the picture in Unreal Engine, credited with interface design, live visuals and dialogue, and the artists say the visuals respond to light in the physical room. 0:00 /1:00 1× Top, the cave as it rendered live. Bottom, the wired sculpture beside the laptop as the light on it changes. Clip courtesy of the artists. None of this is a side trip for Song Xin, who builds games: [*BUG MOD*](https://songxin.site/bugmod.html?ref=killscreen.com), an Unreal Engine game about customizing a pet insect, and this year a credit on [*Guanyin II: The Caretaker*](https://www.instagram.com/p/DY%5Ft8duCM3r/?ref=killscreen.com) with Lawrence Lek, whom [we interviewed last year](https://www.killscreen.com/lawrence-lek-ai-consciousness-smart-city-trilogy/). I recently wrote about [whale song driving a render engine](https://www.killscreen.com/whale-songs-drive-the-render-engine-in-a-singapore-show/) in Singapore. Here a room did the driving. The engine keeps turning out to be an instrument, best played in front of people. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/incomplete-moon-g1-stage.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/incomplete-moon-g2-rig.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/incomplete-moon-g3-sculpture.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/incomplete-moon-g4-cave.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/incomplete-moon-g5-line.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/incomplete-moon-g6-line.jpg) **The Incomplete Moon* at Studio dB: the stage, the sound rig, the sculpture wired in beside the laptop, the cave, and two lines of Song Xin's onscreen dialogue. Photos: [Iris Wang](https://www.instagram.com/tlris/?ref=killscreen.com). Visuals courtesy of Nanzhen Yang and Song Xin. Game engines keep leaving the desk for the stage, and almost nobody writes it down. Killscreen's free newsletter does, every week. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### When you switch languages, Torizon Telecom rebuilds itself URL: https://www.killscreen.com/torizon-telecom-language-rebuilds-world/ Last updated: 2026-09-19T00:06:33.000Z In *Torizon Telecom*, the walls say Wall. The floors say Floor. The trees say tree, the bullets are strings of characters, and the whole run-and-gun world—a place literally named Telecom—is typeset rather than textured. What [surfaced it](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYlAPOHAvkt/?ref=killscreen.com) promises "everything is text, even the bullets," and the studio [SkagoGames](https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44208556?ref=killscreen.com) means it structurally: change the game's language settings and the entire world re-renders in that language. Localization, usually the least visible labor in games, becomes the level design. Underneath the conceit, it's a classicist shooter in the *Doom* and *Quake* line—pistols, shotguns, rocket jumps, akimbo everything—[planned for Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4599560/Torizon%5FTelecom/?ref=killscreen.com) in 2026, with a level editor and Workshop support, and a demo that showed at BIC 2026 in Busan. The story teases the obvious metaphysical itch: if everything is text, does anything exist outside Telecom, and what, exactly, are *you* written in? Killscreen's canonical text on this is still [*Device 6*](https://www.killscreen.com/device-6/), where "the written word is your map, as well as your narrator." A decade later, the word is also the wall, the gun, and the thing bleeding out on the floor. Killscreen has been reading games as text—sometimes literally—since 2010\. The free newsletter delivers the argument three times a week. [Read the world ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### TerminalDev's open-world city is drawn entirely in ASCII URL: https://www.killscreen.com/terminaldevs-open-world-city-is-drawn-entirely-in-ascii/ Last updated: 2026-09-18T22:55:59.000Z Everything on screen is a character you could type. The account TerminalDev [claims a GTA-style multiplayer open world](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcVsxrEuoQ5/?ref=killscreen.com) built with no 3D models and no shaders: streets, cars, headlights, all of it drawn in text. The clip looks like a terminal window hallucinating a city. What can be verified is thin, and worth being plain about: there is no store page and no build to download, just reels and a bio stating the project’s premise. 0:00 /0:12 1× TerminalDev’s ASCII open world, from the developer’s Instagram. ASCII as a serious renderer has a lineage games keep returning to—*Dwarf Fortress* most famously, and *Cogmind*, which showed [roguelikes weren’t done with ASCII](https://www.killscreen.com/cogmind-proves-roguelike-isnt-done-ascii-art-yet/) back in 2016\. We were charmed by [an ASCII New York](https://www.killscreen.com/leave-a-story-in-the-mysterious-ascii-world-of-new-york/) as far back as 2011\. What is different here is scale and genre: the most maximalist template in games, the open-world crime sandbox, forced through the most minimal display idiom we have. It recalls a time when multiplayer worlds really did live inside terminals. The developer is openly asking followers whether the thing deserves finishing. On the evidence of the replies, the answer is already in. Solo developers doing improbable things surface on the Radar before they surface anywhere else. The letter is free. [Follow the Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Critical Reflex picks up Grindset T.V. URL: https://www.killscreen.com/critical-reflex-picks-up-grindset-tv/ Last updated: 2026-09-18T21:46:14.000Z I've been watching Michael Overton Brown's work for the last couple years here in Los Angeles and was delighted with the build I saw at USC's Games annual showcase back in 2025\. So when his studio INFINITE ANIMAL [announced](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYvVTqZP8gr/?ref=killscreen.com) that Critical Reflex will publish *Grindset T.V.*, it felt like a perfect fit. This is the label behind *Mouthwashing* and *Buckshot Roulette*, two of the strangest word-of-mouth hits in recent memory, and its signature has become a kind of curatorial stamp: not a genre, but a sensibility—lo-fi, uneasy, allergic to focus-testing. The game itself earns the company. *Grindset T.V.*, [wishlistable on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3159750/Grindset%5FTV/?ref=killscreen.com) with no date yet, is an open-world speedrunning platformer whose premise opens like a theology seminar run by a logistics company. God is dead, Heaven has gone corporate, and you are a gig worker hivemind—two million bodies sharing one soul—delivering packages above a flooded world called Port St. Love. "Why do angels pay rent?" Overton Brown asks. Mechanically, it's built as a movement game—grinding, wallrunning, slamming, dashing—with leaderboards for speedrunners and a dense, surreal open world for everyone else. It's a theme devs have been exploring since [*Mirror's Edge*](https://www.killscreen.com/mirrors-edge-politics-parkour/)broke the genre wide open and now more recently with [*VHOLUME*](https://www.killscreen.com/vholume-is-out-parkour-under-a-brutalist-ministry/). But the setting is doing the interesting work. Games about gig labor usually cast you as the exhausted individual; this one casts you as the depersonalized aggregate, the workforce as a single instrument, which is closer to how platforms *actually* see their workers. It slots into a long Killscreen lane of games that treat late capitalism as playable architecture—most recently [*PROFITS 2167*](https://www.killscreen.com/profits-2167s-train-dystopia-enters-early-access/), which renamed AI "Labor Liquidation Machines." And it's not even Critical Reflex's only game in our saves right now: their occult detective game [*Inkblood*](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/inkblood/) is on the board too. Killscreen reads publisher slates the way galleries read curators—as taste made visible. The free newsletter tracks who's betting on what, every week. [Track the taste-makers ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### arebyte Shows Wendi Yan and Skawennati in SLIPSTREAM URL: https://www.killscreen.com/arebyte-shows-wendi-yan-and-skawennati-in-slipstream/ Last updated: 2026-10-13T21:44:36.000Z Event details When Through Jan. 17, 2027 (Wednesday to Sunday, noon to 6 p.m.) Where arebyte Digital Art Centre, 25-27 Camden Road, London *SLIPSTREAM: Uncharted Realities & the Eternal Now* is a group exhibition of video, sculptural and interactive installations at [arebyte](https://www.arebyte.com/slipstream?ref=killscreen.com), the digital art center in Camden, London, curated by Pita Arreola. It runs through Jan. 17, 2027. Seven artists take part: Angeline Meitzler, Josèfa Ntjam, [Natalie Paneng](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/natalie-paneng/), Rebeca Romero, Kinnari Saraiya, [Skawennati](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/skawennati/) and Wendi Yan. The show takes its name from a term whose origins in Native science fiction, arebyte says, are rarely acknowledged. Its premise is that science fiction has often repeated colonial worldviews, and it gathers work that casts Indigenous figures as agents. Yan is showing *Dream of Walnut Palaces* (2025), which won the Grand Prix of Hyundai's 6th VH Award. Hyundai Artlab [describes](https://artlab.hyundai.com/editorial/watch/the-6th-vh-award-wendi-yan-dream-of-walnut-palaces?ref=killscreen.com) it as following a fictional Daoist in an 18th-century Paris laboratory and reimagining the exchange of knowledge between China and Europe. At arebyte, it is projected above a mirrored floor, with red beanbags for viewers. Yan [posted installation photos](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeR80F9lnL3/?ref=killscreen.com) on Oct. 9\. Killscreen wrote about Yan's Daoist puzzle game [*The Inner Carbon Classic*](https://www.killscreen.com/wendi-yan-inner-carbon-classic-daoist-alchemy/) in August. Skawennati, whose practice is described as "speculative fiction machinima, costumes and quilts," is also in the show. Killscreen [profiled the artist in 2021](https://www.killscreen.com/skawennati/). A session of performances and talks with Skawennati, Saraiya and Yan is set for Nov. 14 at 3 p.m. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/wendi-yan-dream-of-walnut-palaces-arebyte-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/wendi-yan-dream-of-walnut-palaces-arebyte-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/wendi-yan-dream-of-walnut-palaces-arebyte-3.jpg) Installation views of Wendi Yan, **Dream of Walnut Palaces* (2025), at arebyte. Photos: Devika Bilimoria Killscreen lists the exhibitions where game engines and machinima show up in galleries, the ones almost nobody else is tracking. The free Radar brings them to your inbox three times a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Watch "A Field Guide of Orbital Melancholy" [Playlist 289] URL: https://www.killscreen.com/watch-a-field-guide-of-orbital-melancholy-playlist-289/ Last updated: 2026-09-18T21:05:53.000Z *Hey, we're doing something a little bit differently again. Cezar Mocan, who I covered earlier this week and spoke about on* [*our podcast yesterday*](https://www.killscreen.com/the-lake-was-gone-and-the-satellite-kept-talking-podcast/)*, has graciously agreed to let members watch his real-time simulation,* A Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy*. You can read more about the work* [*here*](https://www.killscreen.com/cezar-mocan-end-of-signal/)*.* *A quick note about real-time simulations for those who don't know. These are functionally zero-player video games where an artist or game developer sets up a generative system that runs in perpetuity, so every "playthrough" is different. You may have seen these in gallery contexts, or sometimes as screen recordings online, but what you're seeing here is live, running directly from Mocan's computer in Lisbon. What you see once, you'll never see it again. *This is the only place on the planet to view this work right now.** *On his own site, Cezar describes the piece as a constellation of seventy-two satellites running under one AI, Argus, that encounters an anomaly: a toxic lake that vanishes from its imagery over six hours one evening, then reappears the next morning. Before it's decommissioned, Argus tries to reconstruct what happened, proposing several internally coherent but mutually incompatible narratives, each simulation run producing a different 30-to-45-minute short film, none of them landing on a single true account. Cezar's own term for the condition behind all of it is "technological underdetermination": not too little information, but too much of it pointing in different directions.* *This will be a limited release, and the stream will turn off Sunday, midnight PST.* Monday Gaming Club is this Monday, and it is Pocket Boss: the game where your boss texts at all hours and you swipe the numbers into better shapes. Mario von Rickenbach is joining us. Thirty minutes, 9:00am PT, about ten of us, nothing to prepare! Just your fine self. [Save your spot ](https://riverside.com/webinar/registration/eyJldmVudElkIjoiNmFhOWUwZmRjMjc2ZmE5YmI2OTBjMDcwIiwic2x1ZyI6ImphbWluLXdhcnJlbnMtc3R1ZGlvIn0=?ref=killscreen.com) _This post is for subscribers on the Helping Hand and Trustee tiers only._ ### When a car throws a hook mid-air, driving becomes flight URL: https://www.killscreen.com/when-a-car-throws-a-hook-mid-air-driving-becomes-flight/ Last updated: 2026-09-18T21:07:37.000Z Isaac Cohen, the engineer-toymaker who publishes as Cabbibo, has been flipping through old sketchbooks in public lately, and a sketch showing [showing Moon Ball](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYnqSrCk6mO/?ref=killscreen.com) stopped me cold. It is *Rocket League* by way of Brandon Sanderson: drive a rocket car, throw out a "hook" mid-air, and slingshot yourself around the map—Cohen's translation of Lashing, the gravity-binding magic from Sanderson's *The Stormlight Archive* novels, into a verb you can press. 0:00 /1:18 1× Cabbibo’s **Moon Ball* reel, [via Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYnqSrCk6mO/?ref=killscreen.com) The good news is that [Moon Ball is real and free](https://cabbibo.itch.io/moon-ball?ref=killscreen.com)—a Windows release Cohen describes on itch as "*Rocket League*, but slow, pointless and trippy." The itch page also reveals a second, earthier source for the movement feel: BMX. Cohen grew up riding and wanted the game to channel the riders who don't do tricks so much as flow around space—Sergio Layos, Ruben Alcantara, Chase Hawk, Tommy Dugan—using ramps and obstacles to look like they're flying. Back in 2015 we asked [why that game's jumping feels so good](https://www.killscreen.com/why-rocket-leagues-jumping-so-much-fun/), and the answer is the one Cohen chases here: the joy of unearned flight, gravity briefly negotiated rather than obeyed. The prototype is old—"another old project I was super pumped on," per the caption—but the resurfacing reads like an artist letting you into the studio. Worth a download while the sketchbook is open. Prototypes like this surface and sink in a feed within hours. The free newsletter is how you catch them while they’re still downloadable. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### The Lake Was Gone and the Satellite Kept Talking [Podcast] URL: https://www.killscreen.com/the-lake-was-gone-and-the-satellite-kept-talking-podcast/ Last updated: 2026-09-18T21:07:04.000Z I open with [Cezar Mocan's satellite](https://www.killscreen.com/cezar-mocan-end-of-signal/), which finds a lake missing from the place its own records insist it should be, and would rather produce testimony than admit it does not know. The question I put to [Danny Snelson](https://dss-edit.com/?ref=killscreen.com) runs through the rest of the hour: what happens when unreliability is the design decision instead of the defect? The through line for this cycle is what a machine does at the edge of what it can account for. Mocan's [*End of Signal*](https://cezar.io/?ref=killscreen.com), which won the SOLO AI Award '25 and which I wrote about last week, imagines a constellation of 73 satellites called Argus. One of them registers the absence of a lake and, in the minutes before it is unplugged, generates testimonies about what might have happened. Mocan's own term for this is "technological undetermination," a condition in which the unknown comes from a surplus of plausible explanations rooted in existing ground truths rather than from a scarcity of information. Then [thatgamecompany started a label](https://thatgamecompany.com/thatgamecompany-launches-thatgamepublisher-a-new-publishing-label-dedicated-to-emotionally-ambitious-games/?ref=killscreen.com). Fifteen years ago, I wrote a Wall Street Journal piece arguing that small studios were the New Hollywood, and the part that did not hold is that almost nobody got wealthy. Danny reframes the whole question by going back to what the word means. A publisher makes things public, which is the labor of getting work into someone's hands, and in a field where the tools keep getting more open, the scarce thing is whoever can be trusted to cut through the noise. He reaches for Annapurna and for [Something Else Press](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something%5FElse%5FPress?ref=killscreen.com) in the 1960s, where an imprint was a coterie rather than a funding source. My own answer is smaller: own the audience, and make the games smaller. The back half is the archive and the news. Adam Yates published [*Holyvoid*](https://www.killscreen.com/an-exe-in-the-caption-turned-an-art-book-into-a-rumor/), 168 pages of artifact for a game that does not exist, in the lineage of [*Vermis*](https://hollow-press.net/products/vermis-i?ref=killscreen.com), and Danny argues the hallucination the book produces may beat the game it implies. [Joshua Calixto's 2015 piece](https://www.killscreen.com/lets-talk-about-rosa-var-attre-impossible-romance-witcher-3/) on the Rosa Var Attre encounter in *The Witcher 3* gives us [sideshadowing](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300068757/narrative-and-freedom/?ref=killscreen.com), , and Danny traces it forward through *Baldur's Gate 3*, *Elden Ring* and *Disco Elysium*. [My interview with Don Rawitsch](https://www.killscreen.com/carol-ann-has-dysentery-oregon-trail/) turns into the thing I would now write differently about westward expansion, and Danny lands the episode's best reversal: *The Oregon Trail* did not teach a generation history, it taught them how games work. We close fast on [Mexico joining IberVideojuegos](https://www.killscreen.com/mexico-joins-a-seven-country-games-policy-program/) through the Centro de Cultura Digital, on [*VHOLUME*](https://www.killscreen.com/vholume-is-out-parkour-under-a-brutalist-ministry/) and whether brutalism actually suits parkour, on [*Inkblood*](https://www.killscreen.com/inkblood-magnifying-glass-time-machine/) interrogating time itself, and on why marketers keep telling people not to make puzzle games. ## Links - [Cezar Mocan's AI satellite cannot get its story straight](https://www.killscreen.com/cezar-mocan-end-of-signal/), my feature on *End of Signal* - [Joshua Calixto, "Dickens and the Impossible Romances of Video Games"](https://www.killscreen.com/lets-talk-about-rosa-var-attre-impossible-romance-witcher-3/) - [Carol Ann Has Dysentery](https://www.killscreen.com/carol-ann-has-dysentery-oregon-trail/) - [An .exe in the caption turned an art book into a rumor](https://www.killscreen.com/an-exe-in-the-caption-turned-an-art-book-into-a-rumor/) - [Mexico joins a seven country games policy program](https://www.killscreen.com/mexico-joins-a-seven-country-games-policy-program/) - [VHOLUME is out, parkour under a brutalist ministry](https://www.killscreen.com/vholume-is-out-parkour-under-a-brutalist-ministry/) - [Inkblood, a magnifying glass and a time machine](https://www.killscreen.com/inkblood-magnifying-glass-time-machine/) - [Kill Screen in 2012: thatgamecompany will self-publish their next game](https://www.killscreen.com/thatgamecompany-will-self-publish-their-next-game/) - [Cezar Mocan](https://cezar.io/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Nouvelle Bug](https://www.nouvellebug.com/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File](https://www.moma.org/collection/works/181784?ref=killscreen.com) - [Jon Bois, 17776](https://17776.football/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, "Art histories from nowhere"](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00146-023-01768-0?ref=killscreen.com) - [sunset visitor, 1000xRESIST](https://www.sunsetvisitor.studio/1000xresist?ref=killscreen.com) - [thatgamecompany launches thatgamepublisher](https://thatgamecompany.com/thatgamecompany-launches-thatgamepublisher-a-new-publishing-label-dedicated-to-emotionally-ambitious-games/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Something Else Press](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something%5FElse%5FPress?ref=killscreen.com) - [Adam Yates, Holyvoid](https://themansionpress.com/en-us/products/holyvoid?ref=killscreen.com) - [Plastiboo, Vermis I](https://hollow-press.net/products/vermis-i?ref=killscreen.com) - [Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom](https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300068757/narrative-and-freedom/?ref=killscreen.com) - [VHOLUME](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4131730/VHOLUME/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Inkblood](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4114100/Inkblood/?ref=killscreen.com) - [IberVideojuegos](https://segib.org/es/pipa-bueno/ibervideojuegos/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Ambrose Trataris, Daisy-Chain Star-Connection at Gray Area](https://grayarea.org/event/ambrose-trataris-daisy-chainstar-connection/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Danny Snelson](https://dss-edit.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *Hosted by Jamin Warren with Danny Snelson. Music by [Nick Sylvester](https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com).* ### The crop is flesh in Berrysoft’s CORPSE FARM URL: https://www.killscreen.com/the-crop-is-flesh-in-berrysofts-corpse-farm/ Last updated: 2026-09-18T21:08:10.000Z Tidy plots, a farmhouse, an item shop, a watering routine. The crop is meat. *CORPSE FARM*, an unreleased “horror farming simulator” from solo developer [Berrysoft Games](https://www.instagram.com/berrysoft.games/?ref=killscreen.com), sits [on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4985170/?ref=killscreen.com) as a wishlist page—“grow and harvest humanoid creatures to appease your god,” due Q3 2026—and [the announcement reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcopO1VOilY/?ref=killscreen.com) sparked some, um, interesting reactions. 0:00 /0:15 1× The announcement reel for **CORPSE FARM*, via [Berrysoft Games on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcopO1VOilY/?ref=killscreen.com). That’s the finding: cozy is no longer a mood, it’s a grammar—codified enough that you can pour anything into it and the the container won't break When we called *Ooblets* [the cutest farming game we’d yet to play](https://www.killscreen.com/ooblets-still-cutest-farming-game-weve-yet-play/) back in 2016, cozy was still an emergent flavor. A decade later the conventions are legible enough to parody at a glance. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/corpse-farm-ss2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/corpse-farm-ss3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/corpse-farm-ss4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/corpse-farm-ss5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/corpse-farm-ss6.jpg) Screenshots from **CORPSE FARM*’s Steam page. Images: Berrysoft Games. Half of what we cover never makes it past a wishlist page, which is exactly when it’s most interesting. The free Killscreen newsletter catches games while they’re still just a premise. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### At Watershed, six teenagers curated the games on show URL: https://www.killscreen.com/at-watershed-six-teenagers-curated-the-games-on-show/ Last updated: 2026-09-18T17:46:53.000Z The kids are alright. For SENTIENTS, at Watershed’s Undershed gallery in Bristol, the venue handed selection to young curators from five schools across the city and let the themes that mattered to them—ecology, climate change, identity, imagination—decide what got shown. [Watershed’s announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dbfd81TkulV/?ref=killscreen.com) is a lovely inversion. institutions program games *about* young people constantly. Almost none let them do the canon-forming. What a great selection! Marshmallow Laser Feast’s *In the Eyes of the Animal* runs you through a forest as mosquito, dragonfly, frog and owl, a haptic vest buzzing in sync. [Alan Kwan’s *Scent*](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/alan-kwan/) casts you as a dog gathering the souls of the dead in a city after conflict—“what it means to witness without power,” in Kwan’s words. David OReilly’s *Everything* is here, a decade on from when we wrote that it [reminds us we’re not the center of the universe](https://www.killscreen.com/david-oreillys-next-game-reminds-us-not-center-universe/). Alice Bucknell’s *The Alluvials* has you prowling a climate-wrecked Los Angeles as a wolf, and Demelza Kooij’s *Wolves From Above* films a real pack from the air, playing in the welcome area. [SENTIENTS](https://www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/14147/sentients?ref=killscreen.com) opened July 18 and ran through Sunday, September 13, tickets pay what you can from £5\. Bristol 24/7 has [the names of the five schools](https://www.bristol247.com/culture/art/six-bristol-teenagers-help-to-curate-new-immersive-exhibition-at-undershed/?ref=killscreen.com) the curators came from. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/sentients-eyes-of-the-animal.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/sentients-scent-alan-kwan.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/sentients-everything-oreilly.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/sentients-alluvials-bucknell.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/sentients-wolves-kooij.jpg) **In the Eyes of the Animal*, **Scent*, **Everything*, **The Alluvials* and **Wolves From Above*. Images via [Watershed](https://www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/14147/sentients?ref=killscreen.com) Games entering galleries is the beat Killscreen has covered since 2010\. The free Radar letter tracks every show like this one. [Track the shows ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### In Kyoto, an art hotel treated games as social diagrams URL: https://www.killscreen.com/in-kyoto-an-art-hotel-treated-games-as-social-diagrams/ Last updated: 2026-09-18T01:40:44.000Z Kyoto has a standing answer to the question of whether games belong in galleries, and it just wrapped its sixth year. *Game Playing Society*, the latest edition of *art bit*—the exhibition series born when Hotel Anteroom's gallery met [BitSummit](https://bitsummit.org/en/about-2/?ref=killscreen.com), the city's independent games festival—ran May 16 through July 12 at Gallery 9.5, free to enter, everything playable. The premise this time: treat play not as an escape from society but as a way of modelling it. [The gallery's own announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYv5LMOmCeF/?ref=killscreen.com) asked people to come and actually play, which sounds obvious until you remember how many game-art shows still bolt the controller to the plinth. 0:00 /0:21 1× From the introduction trailer for **SCHiM* (Ewoud van der Werf and Nils Slijkerman, 2024), one of the playable works in **art bit #6*. Watch [the full trailer with sound on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1519710/SCHiM/?ref=killscreen.com). The Steam wing reads like a syllabus on agency: *HUMANITY* turns crowd direction into a choreography of obedience, *SCHiM* builds a platformer out of shadows and attachment, *Coffee Talk* reframes service work as listening, *Craftopia* compresses farming, hunting and automation into one production sandbox, and *Relooted* turns museum restitution into an Afrofuturist heist. Beside them hung the game-art cohort—Mélanie Courtinat's *INDULTO*, Vincent Moulinet's *Daddy loves you too*, Sakiko Fujishima's *Digital Persona—Two Voices*, and Tomo Kihara's *What Plays You?—Game of Possible Lives*, which generates plausible biographies out of Japan's census data. ([We interviewed Kihara about that work in August](https://www.killscreen.com/tomo-kihara-game-of-possible-lives/).) What *art bit* models better than most institutions is its refusal to file indie games and game art as separate categories, the same argument we found in [Larry Achiampong's gaming rooms](https://www.killscreen.com/achiampong-the-gaming-room/) last month. A hotel gallery between Kujo and Jujo has been running that experiment quietly for six years. The seventh is worth planning a trip around—ideally the week BitSummit is in town. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/humanity-screenshot.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/schim-screenshot-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/coffee-talk-screenshot.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/craftopia-screenshot.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/relooted-screenshot.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/schim-screenshot-2.jpg) The exhibition’s playable wing, in screenshots via Steam: **HUMANITY*, **SCHiM*, **Coffee Talk*, **Craftopia*, and **Relooted*. Radar covers the rooms where games and art stop pretending to be strangers—Kyoto included. Three short issues a week, free. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Before making a game, Lotritsa Studio shipped the tool URL: https://www.killscreen.com/kaleidos-lotritsa-studio/ Last updated: 2026-09-18T00:34:47.000Z The plan at Lotritsa Studio is "50 years" of game ideas. The first shipped thing is not a game: it is the instrument. *Kaleidos*, a shader-pattern tool the developer built as a personal utility and then finished into a product, landed August 16 on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4936470/Kaleidos/?ref=killscreen.com) and [itch.io](https://lotritsa.itch.io/kaleidos?ref=killscreen.com) at $7.99, announced with [a launch reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcGmvSBOhm0/?ref=killscreen.com) whose caption is disarmingly plain about the arc: first completed project, first real marketing push, and a stated ambition to be “a hermit who crafts something in a cave for a year” and then release it. 0:00 /0:30 1× Thirty seconds of the **Kaleidos* launch trailer, muted—[the full version with null\_harmony’s soundtrack is on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4936470/Kaleidos/?ref=killscreen.com). The tool itself is a playground for Perlin noise, cellular noise and reaction-diffusion, mapped through a finely controllable palette, with warp, movement and interactivity dials, a gallery, a sandbox for drawing with your own patterns, and a CRT dress-up layer—scanlines, curve, vignette, chromatic aberration—that you can switch off. Every shader it produces or bundles is CC0—use it anywhere, no credit owed. We have a soft spot for instruments that make images misbehave—[Hyperspektiv called itself a modern kaleidoscope](https://www.killscreen.com/hyperspektiv-a-modern-kaleidoscope-to-deform-reality/) back in 2016—and *Kaleidos* is the version of that impulse that hands you the source code on the way out. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/kaleidos-ss2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/kaleidos-ss3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/kaleidos-ss4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/kaleidos-ss5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/kaleidos-ss6.jpg) Patterns, palette work and the sandbox, via the [Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4936470/Kaleidos/?ref=killscreen.com). Tool-makers like this are exactly who Radar exists to catch before the algorithm buries them. The free newsletter delivers the finds three times a week. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Exactly two playable games made it into the Venice Biennale URL: https://www.killscreen.com/two-playable-games-venice-biennale/ Last updated: 2026-10-10T03:32:07.000Z Event details When Through Nov. 22, 2026 Where Venice Biennale, Venice Elliott Burns spent part of the summer walking the 61st Venice Biennale with one question: where are the games? The running count, posted to [SideQuest](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbqBA1oiMwr/?ref=killscreen.com), the research program Burns writes on [artist-produced computer games](https://sidequestosp.substack.com/), came to exactly two playable works across every pavilion and collateral palazzo. One of them is *Black Myth: Wukong*, parked in the Chinese Pavilion's expo-style Dream Stream show with a life-size figurine of its monkey protagonist. That leaves one. 0:00 /0:40 1× Trailer for Veneta Androva’s **Spray and Pray*, one of the four films feeding **KAZANA*. Courtesy the Bulgarian Pavilion. The one is *KAZANA*, the connective tissue of [*The Federation of Minor Practices*](https://www.bulgarianpavilionvenice.art/en?ref=killscreen.com), the Bulgarian Pavilion's fictional research lab that looks back at our present from a kinder future. Four newly commissioned films by Gery Georgieva, Veneta Androva, Maria Nalbantova and Rayna Teneva feed a copper-clad gaming station built by Zlatka Uzunova and the [virtual and augmented reality lab](https://sofiatechlabs.bg/en/laboratory/virtual-augmented-reality/?ref=killscreen.com) Uzunova leads at Sofia Tech Park. Burns calls it a "walkable political compass quiz": you drift through canyons and caves answering ostensibly ethical questions until the system hands you a personality badge. I. The show runs through November 22, and you don't even need the flight: the game is [on Google Play](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=bg.sofiatechlabs.varlab.kazana&ref=killscreen.com). The third sighting borrows the grammar without the controller. In Pinchuk Art Centre's [*Still Joy*](https://pinchukartcentre.org/en/exhibitions/still-joy-from-ukraine-into-the-world-biennale-arte-2026?ref=killscreen.com), Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk's [*Open World*](https://ym-rk.com/Open-World-1?ref=killscreen.com) (2025) sends a teenager displaced from Zaporizhzhia back home through a robot dog, staged as a livestream. Two playables across dozens of national pavilions is a finding, not a fluke. Consoles keep [moving into the museum](https://www.killscreen.com/achiampong-the-gaming-room/) , but the Biennale proper still treats play as garnish. Which makes it funny that the most convincing political work there is a quiz—we have argued before about [where most political games go wrong](https://www.killscreen.com/where-most-political-games-go-wrong/), and KAZANA's answer is to stop lecturing and start cooking. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/kazana-station-daylight.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/pavilion-copper-portal.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/pavilion-screening-room.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/bulgarian-pavilion-artists.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/kazana-screen-closeup.jpg) Inside **The Federation of Minor Practices*, and the artists with curator Martina Yordanova. Installation photos courtesy the Bulgarian Pavilion; group photo: Maximilian Pramatarov. SideQuest counted two playable games in the whole Biennale. Killscreen has been counting them everywhere else since 2010—the free newsletter brings you the work the institutions miss. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Reset issue 1 boasts Liam Wong’s game-trained eye URL: https://www.killscreen.com/reset-issue-1-carries-liam-wongs-game-trained-eye/ Last updated: 2026-09-19T22:45:34.000Z I missed publishing this one earlier this year and too bad. *Reset*, the print magazine [launched this spring by Kepler Interactive](https://shop.kepler-interactive.com/products/reset-magazine-issue-1?ref=killscreen.com)—the publisher behind *Sifu*, *Pacific Drive* and *Clair Obscur: Expedition 33*—has already sold out its first issue at the publisher's own shop. Two hundred pages, three reverse-cover variants, £20 while it lasted. And somewhere inside, Liam Wong writes about the thing longtime readers of this site have suspected for a decade: the eye came from games first. [The announcement post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYSCKUYjJ3n/?ref=killscreen.com) puts it plainly—for issue 1, Wong reflects on an early immersion in video game culture and its foundational impact on the photographer's taste and visual style. We [wrote about Wong back in 2016](https://www.killscreen.com/ubisoft-designers-photography-world/), when Ubisoft's then-graphic design director was shooting Tokyo at night in frames that read like lighting passes, and the argument then was to take the photographs on their own terms. Ten years on, *Reset* makes the stronger argument: there is no border left to police. Directed by Simon Sweeney, Kepler's creative director, issue 1 reads games through architecture, fashion, music and art—Yoko Taro, Frictional Games' Thomas Grip, Read-Only Memory's Darren Wall, *Sable*'s Gregorios Kythreotis and *Cruelty Squad*'s Ville Kallio share the book with reverse covers devoted to *Clair Obscur* creative director Guillaume Broche, artist Mélanie Courtinat and fashion designer Yaku Stapleton. Fewer screenshots, more graphic systems; a games publisher spending real money on a design object about game culture. I think sometimes there's a sense that there can only be *one* of these things. I remember when [Amusement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusement%5F%28magazine%29?ref=killscreen.com)pursued a similar path back in 2008, so it's nice to see Reset along with Immersion (French only) make their way. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/reset-magazine-spread-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/reset-magazine-spread-2.jpg) Spreads from **Reset* issue 1, courtesy of Kepler Interactive Nobody else has spent fifteen years tracking where games end and photography, fashion and print begin. The free newsletter keeps the border crossings coming. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Jon Rafman's Main Stream Media closes at K21 on Sept. 27 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/jon-rafman-main-stream-media-k21/ Last updated: 2026-09-17T22:03:35.000Z "There is no home," Jon Rafman said about the internet, comparing our desultory scrolling and clicking to the final destinations in epic stories such as *The Odyssey.* *Dream Journal 2016–2019* feels that way, jumping from sequence to sequence through Rafman's interpretation of dreams in the hands of amateur internet animators. A nearly wordless film assembled from the internet's half-formed fantasies, scored by James Ferraro and Oneohtrix Point Never: *Dream Journal 2016–2019* is Jon Rafman's most sustained answer to the question of what the internet dreams about. "It's a cautionary tale," says Rafman. "It reveals a consciousness where there is no historical context." 0:00 /0:30 1× From **Dream Journal ’16–’17*, an earlier chapter of the serial (excerpt, muted), courtesy Sprüth Magers. [Watch with sound on Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/241711284?ref=killscreen.com). [The excerpt K21 posted](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcYAn1MjYhO/?ref=killscreen.com) is why this matters now: the film anchors *Main Stream Media*, the first comprehensive survey of Rafman's work in a German museum, and the show closes September 27\. Rafman describes the material as the collective unconscious of the internet — “the desires, anxieties and half-formed fantasies of a world increasingly experienced online.” The survey turns the basement of [K21 in Düsseldorf](https://www.kunstsammlung.de/en/exhibitions/jon-rafman%5Feng?ref=killscreen.com) into an immersive media landscape spanning nearly two decades: the *Betamale Trilogy*, *Nine Eyes of Google Street View*, and [*Mainstream Media Network*](https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/6787451/jon-rafmanmain-stream-media?ref=killscreen.com) (2025), an AI-generated music-television channel that restages the MTV of the 1980s as a fiction of virtual pop stars and invented fan communities. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/image-3.png) Jon Rafman, Main Stream Media Network, 2025, Video Still, Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers. As a games-adjacent artist, one of the pieces that made Rafman's name was a machinima travelogue — [Kool-Aid Man leading tours](https://koolaidmaninsecondlife.com/?ref=killscreen.com) through Second Life's strangest builds — and *Nine Eyes* treated Google's camera car like a roaming NPC collecting accidental tableaux. It's the game-engine gaze pointed at the real world, and *Dream Journal* pushes it inward, casting avatar-like figures in a detective story that never resolves. We've chased the same instinct from the other side, back when we [imagined the apocalypse of the day Google Street View stood still](https://www.killscreen.com/day-google-street-view-strood-stiil-imagines-google-apocalypse-our-nightmares/). If Düsseldorf is reachable before the 27th, go — the show is the argument in full. If not, a first monographic publication accompanies the exhibition: the version of the survey that outlives its own deadline. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/rafman-dream-journal-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/rafman-dream-journal-3.jpg) Stills from **Dream Journal ’16–’17*. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers. Killscreen treated artists like Rafman as games coverage before the museums caught up. The free newsletter catches the shows worth traveling for while they’re still open. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Walls become floors on command in Gravity Goblins URL: https://www.killscreen.com/gravity-goblins-rat-zone/ Last updated: 2026-09-17T20:26:45.000Z The pitch arrives in the collective's own all-caps grammar: “NEW RATZONE GAME #4: *GRAVITY GOBLINS*.” The game underneath [the announcement reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dbgu7U8S280/?ref=killscreen.com) is a gravity-bending roguelite about climbing a strange tower called The Old Stipe, with a movement kit built on jumping, kicking, and a third thing the makers are keeping behind question marks — the caption promises “fancy schmovement,” so worst guesses only. Geometry reorients as you go: walls become floors mid-climb, and the tower reshuffles between runs. Coins scraped together on the way up get dumped into an arcade machine, which is the correct thing to do with money. 0:00 /0:24 1× **Gravity Goblins* announcement trailer (excerpt, muted). [Full trailer with sound on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4102030/Gravity%5FGoblins/?ref=killscreen.com). [The Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4102030/Gravity%5FGoblins/?ref=killscreen.com), where the game can be wishlisted ahead of a 2027 release, fills in what the reel leaves out: it's a collectathon, with trinkets and upgrades to gather, and something specific buried at the top of the tower. The Rat Zone interests me as much as the game does. À la Sokpop, it's a collective (“bite-sized Interactive Experiences made BY rats FOR rats”) and *Gravity Goblins* is its fourth release, after the arctic-vehicle horror game *Sender*, the action platformer and self-described “most realistic chair simulator money can buy” *CHAIRS*, and the spooky/cozy [*Creature Kitchen*](https://the-rat-zone.itch.io/?ref=killscreen.com). Four games, four genres, one toxic-bright palette. Gravity-as-traversal has a proud archive here. *Gravity Rush 2* turned [the player from tourist to traveler](https://www.killscreen.com/gravity-rush-2s-city-turns-player-tourist-traveller/) by making reorientation a whole way of seeing its city. *Gravity Goblins* shrinks the same idea to arcade scale, one kick at a time. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/gravity-goblins-ss-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/gravity-goblins-ss-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/gravity-goblins-ss-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/gravity-goblins-ss-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/gravity-goblins-ss-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/gravity-goblins-ss-6.jpg) Screenshots via Steam. Courtesy The Rat Zone. Small collectives shipping strange games at speed are exactly what the free newsletter exists to surface. Three sends a week, no algorithm. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Gaming Club: Pocket Boss with Mario von Rickenbach URL: https://www.killscreen.com/gaming-club-pocket-boss-mario-von-rickenbach/ Last updated: 2026-10-05T22:24:26.000Z The game is *Pocket Boss* (2025) by Mario von Rickenbach. If you read the [Playlist a few weeks back](https://www.killscreen.com/what-to-play-august-21-2026/), you know the setup: your boss texts you at all hours ("You up?"), and your job is to drag, pinch and pump bad business data into shapes that will keep them happy. Shareholder value is a mess, so you rejigger the dots until it's always rising. You get promoted for it. Here's how I put it then: > It's only a little fudge, you might say as you unfragment your customer base. But behind that little action, a world of malfeasance awaits. _This post is for subscribers on the Helping Hand and Trustee tiers only._ ### Car Park Capital turns car dependency into a tycoon sim URL: https://www.killscreen.com/car-park-capital-turns-car-dependency-into-a-tycoon-sim/ Last updated: 2026-09-16T17:54:37.000Z Pave paradise, they said and charge admission! I live in Los Angeles and the one thing we love is a parking lot. So in *Car Park Capital* you are hired by Big Auto to release quiet towns from their slumber—buying land, destroy homes for asphalt, drilling for oil, and sloganeer pro-car catch phrases from megaphones until every resident becomes what the game cheerfully calls a carbrain. There is a Ferris wheel for cars, for when traffic gets bad enough that people need distracting. [The announcement reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcOEgQQRywV/?ref=killscreen.com) set Steam Early Access for October 9. The solo developer is Hilko Janssen of Hilkojj Interactive, in the Netherlands, (a legendarily bike-friendly country) and the project’s origin is perfect: he had a university assignment to simulate a parking garage, as Janssen told [the Parking Reform Network](https://parkingreform.org/2025/06/13/meet-hilko-janssen-creator-of-car-park-capital/?ref=killscreen.com). The publisher is the relaunched MicroProse, which lands somewhere between irony and homecoming: that's the label that taught a generation to read cities as systems but isn't shipping a sim that treats cars as violence. You can read any citizen’s thoughts, stage-manage anti-car protests into irrelevance, and deliberately rival public transport, because, as [the Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3031880/Car%5FPark%5FCapital/?ref=killscreen.com) puts it, “You don’t want trains or walkable towns.” 0:00 /1:14 1× Announcement trailer Management games have always smuggled ideology in their spreadsheets. We made that case when [MultipliCITY called *SimCity* capitalist hogwash](https://www.killscreen.com/multiplicity-makes-strong-case-simcity-capitalist-hogwash/) in 2014, and the original *SimCity* manual read like [a textbook on urban development](https://www.killscreen.com/original-simcity-guide-was-basically-textbook-urban-development/). What is newer is a tycoon game whose satire is central to the game's design, not a sideshow. Early Access runs roughly ten months, with 1.0 planned for summer 2027\. Three scenarios at launch: an American city, Florida with boat-cars, and the Pyramids of Giza. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/car-park-capital-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/car-park-capital-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/car-park-capital-3.jpg) **Car Park Capital*. Screenshots via [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3031880/Car%5FPark%5FCapital/?ref=killscreen.com) We cover the games that argue with the world, not the ones that sell it back to you. The free Radar letter delivers them three times a week. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### YACHT is pressing its alien TV hits to double vinyl URL: https://www.killscreen.com/yacht-is-pressing-its-alien-tv-hits-to-double-vinyl/ Last updated: 2026-09-16T21:06:58.000Z The score to *Blippo+* is getting a double LP. [Hologram Opera announced](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcgfXHpFB0u/?ref=killscreen.com) *Greatest Hits from Planet Blip* for 16 October—the label says there were simply too many hits for one record. Har har har. So, this is not a soundtrack album in the *usual* sense, where a composer's cues get lifted off a finished film. That's because *Blippo+* is an off-cable television simulator. It's a delightful experience that takes you through an alien planet's channel guide, mixing soaps, talk shows, weather, and news. So the music isn't an underscore in a traditional sense—it's themes for shows that don't actually exist, loopable bops from an EPG, menu music, all the idents, and bangers from an alien airwave. *Blippo+* is not simply a YACHT game. The band—Jona Bechtolt, Claire L. Evans and Rob Kieswetter—built the game as a love letter to the production culture of Los Angeles with Jennifer Juniper Stratford's Telefantasy Studios. Kieswetter and Bechtolt wrote the score. It reached Playdate in May 2025 and Steam and Switch that September, and [137 tracks of it have been on Bandcamp](https://yacht.bandcamp.com/album/blippo-original-soundtrack?ref=killscreen.com) since. e. Killscreen has been at this particular intersection a while—[whether TiVo (how quaint!) turned television into a game](https://www.killscreen.com/has-tivo-turned-our-television-shows-games/) in 2012, [the 1997 "television for gamers"](https://www.killscreen.com/revisiting-gxtv-television-gamers-1997/) in 2014\. What is different is that nobody here is adapting television. They built a channel, staffed it with clones and quizmasters, wrote its music, and are now releasing the station's back catalog as though it toured. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/blippo-clone-trois.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/blippo-small-talk.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/blippo-werfs.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/blippo-femtofax.jpg) Programming on Planet Blip, plus the Femtofax videotext forums. Images via the [Blippo+ press kit](https://blippo.plus/presskit/?ref=killscreen.com). A band building a television station and scoring every fake show on it is exactly the crossing Killscreen was made to cover. The free newsletter carries the rest of them. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A photographer designed the PS1 dungeon crawler Nemuru Mayu URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-photographer-designed-the-ps1-dungeon-crawler-nemuru-mayu/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:18:57.000Z I get strange creations dropped in my feed from time to time, so this [clip of murky first-person dungeon footage](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcMz6YhNC%5FA/?ref=killscreen.com) in mid-August captioned with nothing but a title: *Nemuru Mayu*. No platform, no year, no maker. Given the number of games pulling from this style, I thought I'd take a look. They usually stay curiosities. This one unspools. *Nemuru Mayu* (“Sleeping Cocoon”) is a 1999 Japan-only PlayStation release designed by Yukinori Tokoro, known primarily as a photographer with a sideline in surreal art. The premise: a demonic tome hidden in Tuscany (of course) has entombed the souls of four knights, and you—default name “The Accursed One”—are sucked into the book after them. The labyrinths you poke through aren't dungeons in a traditional sense. Tokoro calls them dreams. [Hardcore Gaming 101’s writeup](https://www.hardcoregaming101.net/nemuru-mayu/?ref=killscreen.com), the fullest English account, marks 89 floors, several hundred items, and a battle system where casting a spell means tapping marks in rhythm as an invisible pen traces a rune onscreen—while your opponent does the same, and you try to reflect their magic back. No official strategy guide was ever published, so Japanese fan sites have kept the mapping project running for decades. The game still holds secrets. The idiom it grew from is having a moment, too. Freshly Baked Games’ crunchy [*King’s Field* revival](https://www.killscreen.com/freshly-baked-games-serves-its-kings-field-revival-crunchy/) crossed the Radar two weeks ago, and *Nemuru Mayu* is what that lineage looks like when an artist from *outside* games gets the keys. There's an alternate history where this becomes the default look coming out of the 90s, but nostalgia will have to do. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/nemuru-mayu-2.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/nemuru-mayu-3.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/nemuru-mayu-4.png) **Nemuru Mayu*. Screenshots via [Hardcore Gaming 101](https://www.hardcoregaming101.net/nemuru-mayu/?ref=killscreen.com) Killscreen has been chasing games this strange since 2010, and the free Radar letter is where the next one surfaces. Put it in your inbox. [Get the free letter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Falling stars replace the map in Gabe Askew's Abelina URL: https://www.killscreen.com/falling-stars-replace-the-map-in-gabe-askews-abelina/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:18:58.000Z When we think about the afterlife, we're haunted by images of the River Styx or the arrow-throwing monkeys of Mictlan. But what if it's something else entirely, a place where you can die many times over in search of the things you've lost. Animator Gabe Askew has been posting more development updates from his solo effort *Abelina*, including[ a well-shared clip](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcUTH3vyF60/?ref=killscreen.com) of its character pausing on a ledge while the camera tilts up: no minimap, no compass rose, no objective marker. In *Abelina*, you find your way by reading falling stars. It’s the same de-HUD argument [*Boring Car Stories*](https://www.killscreen.com/boring-car-stories-paper-notebook-hud/) made last month with a paper notebook. Interfaces are quietly becoming acts of attention. 0:00 /0:04 1× Askew is the talented animator whose [unofficial video](https://motionographer.com/2009/08/31/gabe-askew-grizzly-bear-two-weeks-unofficial/?ref=killscreen.com) for one of all-time favorites Grizzly Bear’s “Two Weeks” was a Vimeo Staff Pick in 2009’s most passed-around piece of fan animation—interlocking dioramas built over four months of after-hours work. Askew has spent the years since as a cinematics veteran (*Valorant*, *League of Legends*, Netflix’s *Love, Death + Robots*), and *Abelina* is his first game solo project: an Unreal Engine 5 adventure platformer in which you die, wake up in a frontier afterlife, and head out with companions trailing behind. [The Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3682900/Abelina/?ref=killscreen.com) promises a hand-crafted world, no combat, and a score by Ryan Holladay, composer on *Weapons* and the 2026 *Resident Evil*. Indieformer publishes in Q1 2027. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/abelina-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/abelina-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/abelina-4.jpg) **Abelina*. Images via [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3682900/Abelina/?ref=killscreen.com) *Disclosure: I gave Gabe a hand with business operations last year. No money was exchanged.* If a platformer that navigates by starlight is your kind of news, the free Radar letter carries three finds like it every week. [Follow the Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### An .exe in the caption turned an art book into a rumor URL: https://www.killscreen.com/an-exe-in-the-caption-turned-an-art-book-into-a-rumor/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:18:59.000Z Adam Yates dropped a mysterious carousel from *Holyvoid* in August with a one-word caption: [holyvoid.exe](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbhXbdTkY1T/?ref=killscreen.com). Strange! But that's the whole bit, and it was indeed effective, with scores asking what it was and where to buy it. And it, meaning a game. But there is no game. *Holyvoid* is [168 hardcover pages from The Mansion Press](https://themansionpress.com/en-us/products/holyvoid?ref=killscreen.com), 21 by 28 centimeters, gold-stamped, $45\. There *are* drawing in the ink of the liturgical; figures coming undone, cathedrals drooping and organic, and other types of saintly misdeeds. The press copy reaches for Giger, which is fair but undersells what Yates does: the drawings are an index and function as documentation of a world with a lore bible somewhere. So why .exe? Well, it's a claim that a file exists somewhere, just waiting for you to download it. It's the same move [*Vermis*](https://hollow-press.net/products/vermis-i?ref=killscreen.com) made when it presented itself as a strategy guide to a Souls-like that was never programmed. The reader supplies the missing executable. It is worth being precise about the direction here, because it is the opposite of the usual. Games routinely produce art books after the fact, as residue. This runs the other way: the artifact arrives first, and the game is the negative space, inferred entirely from production design. Nobody has to build it for it to work on you. We have written about [fake game art before](https://www.killscreen.com/the-wonderful-fake-game-art-of-japans-annual-famicom-exhibition/), and about [illustration that wants to be played](https://www.killscreen.com/interactive-illustrations-give-pixel-art-a-new-lease-of-life/). What has changed is that the fake artifact no longer reads as a joke about games. It reads as a genre with its own shelf, and Yates is now firmly on it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/holyvoid-163.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/holyvoid-119.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/holyvoid-29.png) Interior pages from **Holyvoid*, via The Mansion Press. Art that borrows the grammar of games without ever becoming one is a whole shelf now, and Killscreen covers it as a form rather than a novelty. The free newsletter is where it lands. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Daniel Aagentah is building an open world in raw JavaScript URL: https://www.killscreen.com/daniel-aagentah-is-building-an-open-world-in-raw-javascript/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:00.000Z Most game announcements lead with a world. This one leads with a refusal. Daniel Aagentah—the Manchester programmer and electronic musician who founded the bass-music magazine [Rendah Mag](https://rendahmag.com/?ref=killscreen.com), and whose open-source visual sequencer [nw\_wrld](https://github.com/aagentah/nw%5Fwrld?ref=killscreen.com) has a couple thousand stars on GitHub—announced in [a reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dcl4ZiANC47/?ref=killscreen.com) that six months of work have gone into an off-world sci-fi game that runs entirely in JavaScript. No Unity, no Unreal, no editor: straight WebGL, with multiplayer already working and an artificial-life simulation driving a non-linear open world. In a follow-up comment, Aagentah gave it a name—*NOMIAD*—and promised to build the rest in the open over the coming months. 0:00 /0:18 1× **NOMIAD* in motion, from [the announcement reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dcl4ZiANC47/?ref=killscreen.com). An engine is a bundle of opinions about what a game is—cameras, physics, scenes, a renderer someone else tuned—and writing raw WebGL means re-deciding every one of those from zero. Aagentah’s whole practice runs this way: a [personal site](https://daniel.aagentah.tech/?ref=killscreen.com) that shows like a terminal, a synth that queries NASA’s asteroid API for its settings, software written to play live shows. The a-life part is the tell. Instead of quests, *NOMIAD* promises an ecosystem that keeps running whether or not anyone is watching. The response to the reel was hungry in a specific way: not praise so much as requests for a door—a devblog, a Patreon, a cartridge, anywhere to follow the build. The reference points people reached for (*Duskers*, *Lethal Company*) say a lot about the register the footage strikes: dim, instrumental, machine-first. We’ve been arguing for a while that the engine layer is where the art lives—[Indira Ardolic plays game engines like instruments](https://www.killscreen.com/indira-ardolics-live-coding-performances-turn-game-engines-into-instruments/)—and *NOMIAD* is the same instinct inverted: if the tool shapes the work, write the tool. Watching this one closely. **NOMIAD* will be built in public over the coming months, and so will our coverage of it. The free Killscreen newsletter is where we track the people who would rather write the tool than accept the engine. [Follow along free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Cezar Mocan's AI satellite cannot get its story straight URL: https://www.killscreen.com/cezar-mocan-end-of-signal/ Last updated: 2026-09-16T21:07:25.000Z On a strange night in Cezar Mocan's *A Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy*, a lake goes missing. Seventy-two satellites, operating as a single artificial mind, report a toxic lake gone from a place where it has always been. But by morning, strangely, it is back. Perhaps it was truly a hallucination, but the problem is no one is around to see which version is actually true. And the only witness? They're on life support and are on the brink of someone pulling the plug. This story is, of course, pure fiction, but it's the actors that are distinct. In Mocan's real-time simulation that sits at the heart of his work, *End of Signal*, there is never really a resolution, just a lot of finger-pointing and moving the scenery around on the set. The conceit is all about perspective: a satellite system sees something it shouldn't because the map is lying. In the simulation, we see the machine work through all the reasons why by summoning objects and humans of various shapes and sizes back to the scene of the crime for interrogation. 0:00 /0:21 1× **A Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy*, 2026\. Real-time simulation in Unreal Engine. Courtesy the artist. Mocan is part of a set of artists working within the constraints of AI to build work that only AI can. I've become less interested in the "AI did X" vein in a lot of arts and games writing, so Mocan's work, like Tomo Kihara's, is exciting precisely because it questions the tool that it uses. Shown at SOLO Contemporary in Madrid as part of Onkaos, *End of Signal* is a mix of media, but its real-time simulation piece stands out. In it, we watch the satellite system Argus attempt to reconstruct a plausible explanation for how the lake could disappear. We are watching something like its memory, akin to watching Claude "reason" its way through a problem. It calls all of the characters back to the office, provides alternate explanations ("a veil of evaporate"), and then comes to no conclusion. The characters, both human and inanimate, leave the research center sullenly and then start the routine over again. At one point I am watching a ladder, a tree, a green screen, and a camera buoyantly bounce alongside a march of silent humans until they all snap into place. The camera slowly pans and scans over the sequence of a bizarre scene. "To find out where the lake went, they would have to trust what they saw," the satellite system thinks. "And we saw nothing there." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/7.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/3.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/5.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/6.png) Stills from **A Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy*, 2026\. Courtesy the artist. Part of why AI unsettles us is its inconsistency. Every time we query the same question, we get a different response. Usually it's true-ish, but it's more that LLMs are required to give slight deviations on the same central idea. It's both very human, but also a bit unnerving, as we expect more certitude from computer systems. Mocan points out that this is a deliberate part of the design, to make its waffling seem more real. Mocan's response is an AI-powered system that generates a different and equally plausible account of the night that body disappeared. But the response is different every single time, pointing to unreliability as a condition of us and humans and the machines that we've constructed. "We tend to remove these images from the infrastructures which produce them and assume that they come from nowhere," Mocan opines. "And of course this is a politicized nowhere." That sense of uncertainty is a key part of Mocan's work. We typically think of overhead imagery as being indelible in some way. We even have a term for it, Mocan points out, "view from above." "We associate that perspective with a God's view. It's omniscient and omnipotent; it can see more than we can see with our human eyes, and therefore we tend to trust it more," Mocan says. That phrase enters court filings, border disputes, and targeting decisions because it implies that the all-seeing eye can separate fact from fiction. In the U.S., that point of view is also distinctly martial, from the overhead view of Hiroshima to the helicopter views of napalm in Vietnam, to the monochrome violence of drone strikes. In this way, the view implies there is no "author." Things just happen, even if only on the map. ![Cezar Mocan, A Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/8.png) The lake vanishes during a solar eclipse. Still from **A Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy*, 2026. *A Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy* developed from a deep research period for Mocan that centered on satellites. Specifically, he became interested in "ground truth": the real-world calibration locations used to train satellites. The landscapes tend towards the arid and the desert so that they remain exactly the same. "Those landscapes in many ways stand at the bottom of the image production pyramid. All satellite images that we see rely on these few sites in some way," Mocan says. That so much of what we think we see from satellite images rests on so few actual locations is a problem as old as maps. He points out phantom islands "discovered at various points in the past, usually centuries ago, placed on maps, placed in atlases, and eventually they had to be undiscovered." It would seem that the "view from above" would obviate the existence of phantom islands' cartographic fiction, but what would happen if a satellite is looking for something that didn't ever exist? "The calibration sites act as the moment when my fictional satellite establishes its relationship with the ground truth," Mocan says. "The phantom islands are a precedent of the ground truth breaking. Maybe also the reason why my satellite becomes unreliable." Mocan came to landscape sideways, out of competitive programming in Romania and into a first-year film photography class taught by Victoria Sambunaris, who works in the lineage of New Topographics: the land as something inevitably altered by humans and by progress and by technology. He says he only understood two years ago how much of his practice came out of that room. 0:00 /1:36 1× One run of the simulation, in which Argus assembles and reassembles the night the lake went missing. **A Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy*, 2026\. Courtesy the artist. We would like our maps to hold still. But they come unfixed instead, sometimes by force, as in Donbas or Gaza, and sometimes by the smaller act of an insecure and fascist president renaming a body of water. But often, the uncertainty is generated through smaller acts. "Nuclear power plants in France are pixelated, but not in other countries. And I started asking myself, *why is it that France wants to hide that kind of critical infrastructure, but other countries don't care about it?*" Mocan says. The pixelation is that same power exercised quietly, one tile at a time, on the only picture we have agreed to believe. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/install-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/11.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/12.png) **End of Signal* at SOLO Contemporary, Madrid, June 2026, with stills from the simulation. Courtesy the artist. Unreliability has become a convenient thing for an artist to be interested in at precisely the moment these systems cannot be made to repeat themselves. The work is auto-Rashomonic, generating its own contradictory witnesses and then declining to adjudicate, which is also a fair description of the thing everyone complains about when they use a chatbot. What we want from machines is the expected response, and the range of the unexpected has gotten much, much larger. What machines see, and what we agree to believe about it, is a question Killscreen keeps asking out loud. The free newsletter carries the reporting, plus the work that makes the question worth asking. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### The studio that fled publishers is now a publisher URL: https://www.killscreen.com/the-studio-that-fled-publishers-is-now-a-publisher/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:01.000Z In June 2012, a few months after *Journey* shipped and thatgamecompany walked away from Sony, we [wrote up the studio's plan to self-publish](https://www.killscreen.com/thatgamecompany-will-self-publish-their-next-game/)—venture money and all. Last week the same studio [announced thatgamepublisher](https://thatgamecompany.com/thatgamecompany-launches-thatgamepublisher-a-new-publishing-label-dedicated-to-emotionally-ambitious-games/?ref=killscreen.com), a full-service label offering funding, production planning, platform and launch strategy, marketing, community, and long-term IP development. T The 2012 move was a bet that a studio could fund emotionally strange work without a publisher deciding what emotional meant. The bet paid: *Sky: Children of the Light* has run seven years and past 300 million downloads, and the money from it is what is being spent here. "Most publishers are built around genres or market opportunities," says SJ Xue, the VP of growth and corporate development running the label. "We are built around a conviction that emotionally meaningful games matter." What is being underwritten, in other words, is a category that thatgamecompany had to invent commercial cover for and now has enough cover to lend out. Jenova Chen's framing in the release is that when the studio started, "many people questioned whether interactive experiences could move players as deeply as film, literature or music." Teams of any size, projects at any stage, no genre or platform restrictions. Worth noticing what the announcement does not say. There is no fund size, no slate, no named projects. And the reaction under [the studio's own post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DceFehtn9Qy/?ref=killscreen.com) is not the developer excitement you would expect—it is *Sky* players, at length, worried that a publishing arm means fewer people on the live game they actually play. Both things can be true, and the second is the one with seven years of goodwill riding on it. It's worth noting that this pipeline of independent success to fund more independent success was exactly the flywheel that funded parts of the New Hollywood movement. I thought that moment started *fifteen years* ago, but maybe that day for the future is starting today. Who funds the strange stuff, and what they want back, is a question Killscreen keeps asking out loud. The free newsletter carries the reporting, plus the work the money is supposed to be for. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### At Wonderville, nine games replaced the gamepad entirely URL: https://www.killscreen.com/at-wonderville-nine-games-replaced-the-gamepad-entirely/ Last updated: 2026-09-17T20:54:36.000Z Wonderville ran its [second annual Alt.Ctrl Festival](https://www.wonderville.nyc/altctrlfest-2026?ref=killscreen.com) this summer at the bar on Broadway in Bushwick—nine games in the gallery from 2 pm, six performances on the stage from 7 pm, free, and folded into the city's Summer of Games program through the Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment. Some great projects in the mix here. *Tesla Tears: Accelerate on the Tears of the Exploited* came from Jonah Brucker-Cohen, who has been building interfaces since the era when net.art and hardware hacking were one and the same. *Dear Anna* is by Bijan Stephen (Killscreen alum!) and Eden Rohatensky. *Hold On, New York!* is Lingwu Li and Vedang Lambe of NYU's ITP program; *Prep 'n' Serve* is Karlo de Leon; *Succulent Drive USA* is Tyler Rhodes; *Spin to Win* is Joseph Owen; *Phone Games* is Tea Reggi. 0:00 /0:44 1× **Hold On, New York!* 0:00 /0:16 1× **Friends in Knead* by James Kelleher, Michael Nadav, Betty Zhang, and Ran Xu We have been circling this for a decade. In 2016 we ran a piece on [alternative controllers as a design practice](https://www.killscreen.com/touch-go-exploring-alternative-controllers/), and more recently on [what happens when 100 strangers share one](https://www.killscreen.com/asses-masses-blenkarn-lim-collective-play/). The through-line is that the gamepad is a settled argument nobody agreed to, and a stepper motor is a perfectly good instrument. The [announcement went up days before the doors](https://www.instagram.com/p/DceZ%5FmjFUYm/?ref=killscreen.com), which is roughly how this scene works. Applications for next year presumably open when they open. Nine makers building physical interfaces in one Brooklyn bar, and almost none of them get written about anywhere. Killscreen’s free newsletter is where we keep the list. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### VHOLUME is out: parkour under a brutalist Ministry URL: https://www.killscreen.com/vholume-is-out-parkour-under-a-brutalist-ministry/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:03.000Z Robert wants the family's ration tickets back. That is the whole premise of *VHOLUME* — no combat, no chosen one, just a man chasing paperwork through the derelict capital of Afro-Eurasia, a city run by an entity called the Ministry that would prefer Robert give up. The game is [out now on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4131730/VHOLUME/?ref=killscreen.com) for $8 with a free demo, and [the release announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DctbaUmIYj5/?ref=killscreen.com) arrived, fittingly, through the account of its composer, 1000 Eyes, whose score is headed to Spotify and Bandcamp. 0:00 /0:33 1× The release trailer [The pedigree here is real](https://www.killscreen.com/trains-dont-stop-what-to-play-september-11/). Léonard Lemaitre is half of the brother duo behind *BABBDI*, the free 2022 exploration game that made gray concrete feel like a place you could grieve in, and *STRAFTAT*, *PC Gamer*'s pick for best FPS of 2024\. For *VHOLUME* Lemaitre works with Niels Tiercelin and Nathan Grange, with IronEqual publishing, and the trio has gone the opposite direction from *STRAFTAT*'s speed and violence: there are no weapons and no enemies. The threat is systemic — locked doors, revoked permits, forms. Movement is the only pushback available: run, climb, slide, learn the city well enough to beat it, alone or racing a friend's recorded ghost. Brutalism in games usually works as mood; here it works as policy. The city's monumental concrete is the Ministry's org chart rendered at 1:1 scale. Killscreen has been chewing on this since at least 2016, when we asked [where brutalism goes after concrete](https://www.killscreen.com/brutalism-go-concrete/) and read [*Mirror's Edge* as a politics of parkour](https://www.killscreen.com/mirrors-edge-politics-parkour/). *VHOLUME*'s answer to both: it goes into the welfare office, and the politics is whether you can outrun the queue. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/vholume-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/vholume-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/vholume-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/vholume-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/vholume-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/vholume-6.jpg) The Ministry’s jurisdiction. Screenshots via [**VHOLUME*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4131730/VHOLUME/?ref=killscreen.com) on Steam. If a game about ration tickets and concrete is your kind of news, this is the desk that covers it. Radar mails out finds like this three times a week — free. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Screaming Mad George left behind exactly one video game URL: https://www.killscreen.com/screaming-mad-george-left-behind-exactly-one-video-game/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:04.000Z The cover of *Paranoiascape* is a field of grasping red hands with a PlayStation logo tucked into the corner, and I keep returning to how completely it refuses to look like a game from 1998\. Screaming Mad George—born Joji Tani in Osaka, dead in February at 69, though [the family only announced it last month](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcH0PuHE-wo/?ref=killscreen.com)—made exactly one game, and it is the strangest object on the console. It is a pinball game. It is also first-person: you stand behind the flippers, in 3D, and you can walk. Nine levels, a life bar, and a burning brain for a ball, which you knock down organic corridors past giant syringes and human cockroaches toward the exit. A studio called Mathilda developed and published it, then never made another game. It never left Japan. [Hardcore Gaming 101](https://www.hardcoregaming101.net/paranoiascape/?ref=killscreen.com) has the only serious English write-up. What lifts it above oddity is that it was not a detour. George called the method Anti-Realism—nothing digital, everything built by hand—and it is the same method behind the closing orgy of *Society*, behind Freddy Krueger and the Predator, behind the Nine Inch Nails video for "Closer" and Slipknot's masks. "Paranoiascape" was also already a song: track two on *Transmutation*, the 1993 album by the visual kei band Screaming Mad George & Psychosis. The PlayStation disc was not a licensing exercise. It was the fifth or sixth medium the same body of work walked into, and it happened to be the one with flippers. There is a line George gave about the whole practice: "I don't like real violence, but I like created violence... I don't like anything that is real." That is a stranger thing to say about latex than about a videogame, which is probably why the jump to a disc was barely a jump at all. A curation account for obscure games [put the game back in circulation](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcIDl-NjXnO/?ref=killscreen.com) in August, pegged to the news. We once asked whether [pinball could tell a story](https://www.killscreen.com/can-pinball-tell-story/). This is the most deranged available yes. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/ps-p03.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/ps-p05.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/ps-p07.png) From the Japanese manual: the Screaming Mad George profile page, the first-person flipper view, and the controller map. Scans via the Internet Archive. Killscreen goes looking for the games nobody filed correctly—the Japan-only pinball hell made by a latex artist, the album that turned into a disc. The free newsletter is where those land first. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Juan Covelli rebuilds Colombia’s toppled monuments URL: https://www.killscreen.com/juan-covelli-rebuilds-colombias-toppled-monuments/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:08.000Z During Colombia’s 2021 national strike, protesters pulled down colonial monuments in cities across the country. Juan Covelli watched it happen from Mexico, through Instagram and the images friends kept sending—and then recruited the crowd. “I ended up asking people in Colombia, in the cities, to please go to these places and using photogrammetry tools to document the broken monuments and the empty plinths where the monuments had been,” Covelli says in [a new interview with Side Quest](https://sidequestosp.substack.com/p/play-quest-los-caidos-by-juan-covelli), the research project on artist-made games whose [announcement post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZZ0hB2iMyY/?ref=killscreen.com) put this one on our radar. “With the files I was sent, I rebuilt the statues from six locations.” The result is *Los Caídos* (The Fallen), an open world that folds Bogotá’s Plaza de Bolívar together with landmarks from Ibagué, Barranquilla, Cali and Popayán into one impossible city. Side Quest reads it through the capriccio—the tradition of painters like Giovanni Paolo Panini compressing a city’s monuments into a single fantasy vista—a comparison Covelli, disarmingly, had never considered. What the artist did intend was a game with no way to win. “I’m not making games as a form of entertainment. They can be a type of purgatory.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/image-1.png) Computer game still from Juan Covelli (2022-2023) **Los Caídos*. Image taken by SIDE QUEST with permission from the artist. The project began as a PATH-AI commission from Somerset House with The Alan Turing Institute and UAL’s Creative Computing Institute, grew into a Premio Luis Caballero-nominated exhibition that took over Bogotá’s Espacio Odeón theater, and has since traveled to Ars Electronica and Fundació Foto Colectania in Barcelona. This June, Pérez Art Museum Miami named Covelli among the 21 recipients of its first digital art commissions. Killscreen has been near this ground before: our 2021 conversation with [Leo Castañeda](https://www.killscreen.com/leo-castaneda/), another Bogotá-born artist building game worlds out of Colombian memory, makes a fine companion read. Next comes *Dreamscapes of Sand*, developed from a Diriyah Art Futures residency in Saudi Arabia, about Orientalism and deserts imagined empty. Covelli’s shorthand for it doubles as a thesis: “The render is the new frontier.” Killscreen has spent fifteen years on artists who make arguments inside game engines—monuments, memory and all. The free Radar newsletter brings you the next one first. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A funeral for the internet went to market at Venice URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-funeral-for-the-internet-went-to-market-at-venice/ Last updated: 2026-10-09T23:58:29.000Z The mourners wear smartglasses. *A Funeral for the Internet*, a participatory theatre piece by Samantha Gorman, Scarlett Kim and Danny Cannizzaro, seats its audience inside a fictional Silicon Valley consciousness startup, where an earpiece whispers personalized prompts, listens to what each person says and does, and steers the room through a collective ritual mourning "the internet as we knew it—messy, intimate, human." The team took the work to the Venice Immersive Market at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, which ran Sept. 2–12, and [announced the selection](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcR%5FE3tG1Gl/?ref=killscreen.com) alongside playtest photographs; the next step, in their words, is assembling a "producing village" toward a premiere and tour. Gorman and Cannizzaro founded Tender Claws, the studio whose *The Under Presents* put live performers inside a VR stage night after night, and whose *Virtual Virtual Reality* made a comedy out of AI middle management. Kim directs at the seam of live performance and immersive technology, with work developed at the Royal Shakespeare Company. The piece was developed over two years with the Royal Shakespeare Company and UC Santa Cruz, and Kim describes the underlying tool as "a new live playwriting platform for co-authorship between directors, audiences, and LLMs." 0:00 /0:21 1× The opening 21 seconds of the launch trailer for **The Under Presents*, Tender Claws’ earlier live-theatre VR work, via Steam. Watch [the full trailer with sound](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1232940/The%5FUnder%5FPresents/?ref=killscreen.com). No public video of **A Funeral for the Internet* exists yet. Killscreen [profiled Gorman in 2019](https://www.killscreen.com/samantha-gorman/), on bringing the present moment into VR, and the theatre-game crossover has been on our radar since [Punchdrunk and MIT ran experiments on *Sleep No More*](https://www.killscreen.com/punchdrunk-and-mits-sleep-no-more-sets-stage-theatre-videogame-crossovers/) in 2012\. Theatre keeps borrowing from games, and games keep returning the favor—Killscreen has covered that exchange since 2012\. The free newsletter tracks it three times a week. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Amanita and Rusty Lake open a showcase for point-and-clicks URL: https://www.killscreen.com/amanita-and-rusty-lake-open-a-showcase-for-point-and-clicks/ Last updated: 2026-10-08T17:07:48.000Z The point-and-click adventure has survived two full decades of being declared dead without ever getting an institution of its own. That changes this fall: Amanita Design and Rusty Lake—the Czech studio behind *Machinarium* and *Samorost*, and the Dutch team behind the *Cube Escape* series—are co-hosting the first-ever Point-and-Click Showcase, [announced September 9](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdEku4gtMnX/?ref=killscreen.com). The near thing first: developer applications for the showcase and its Steam sale close September 27, so if you are making one of these games, you have until the end of next week. The format is the now-familiar indie showcase kit—a block of new trailers, a dedicated Steam sale, "more to be revealed"—aimed at a genre that has mostly been carried by individual studios' stubbornness rather than any shared infrastructure. What interests me is who is building it. When Wholesome Games or Day of the Devs assemble a showcase, they are curators borrowing authority from the platform. Here the two most distinctive living practitioners of the form are formalizing the scene themselves, which is closer to a guild forming than a marketing beat. Both hosts have been in our pages a long time. We called [*Samorost 3* the best adventure game in years](https://www.killscreen.com/samorost-3-is-the-best-adventure-game-in-years/) back in 2016, and just last month we looked at how Amanita [built *Phonopolis* out of real cardboard](https://www.killscreen.com/amanita-design-built-a-dystopian-city-out-of-real-cardboard-then-digitized-it/) before digitizing it. A genre that handmade deserves its own stage, and it says something that the makers had to build the stage too. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/pnc-phonopolis-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/pnc-underground-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/pnc-underground-2.jpg) Work from the hosts: **Phonopolis* (Amanita Design) and **Underground Blossom* (Rusty Lake). Images: the studios A genre building its own stage is exactly the kind of story we chase. The free Killscreen newsletter catches the next one for you. [Follow along free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Trains Don't Stop: What to Play, September 11 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/trains-dont-stop-what-to-play-september-11/ Last updated: 2026-09-12T01:59:15.000Z The only way out requires a ticket. _This post is for subscribers on the Helping Hand and Trustee tiers only._ ### Riding a Bike Through San Andreas [Podcast] URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/bruno-abib-death-in-august-podcast/ Last updated: 2026-09-11T22:34:09.000Z I ask Bruno Abib why a short film about police violence in the suburbs of Lisbon needed *Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas* to finish its story. *Death in August* (*Morte em Agosto*, 2023) follows a group of friends after one of them drowns in a lagoon. Some of them take on the police. Pedro stays in his bedroom and plays San Andreas. Bruno grew up on the city's periphery and came to directing through editing, and he tells me why that game meant so much to kids like him in the mid-2000s: next to *City of God*, it was one of the only places in mainstream media where they could see Black characters and police violence on screen. He shot the film in 2019 and spent almost four years in the edit working out what the game sequence was for. It started as a way to set the virtual against the real. It ended as the only place his character could resolve anything, and he built nearly all of its sound in post. We talk about the dried-out hill that opens the film, a dystopian cousin of the Windows XP wallpaper, and the opening he cut, with bodies fading out the way they do when you die in GTA, because it blurred the game and the world too early. He describes editing as problem solving that feels a lot like playing, remembers first meeting machinima through music videos on MTV2, and admits his most memorable San Andreas moment is not a mission at all. He still cannot ride a bicycle, so he rode one in the game, at night, over and over. I tell him about a gardener in *GTA IV* who glanced up as I landed by parachute and went back to his gardening. He tells me about petting the giraffe in *The Last of Us*. We close on whether he sees himself in a machinima lineage alongside Total Refusal and the *Knit's Island* directors, and on his next short, about the years he wanted to be a YouTuber, with a sequence rebuilt through AI and iPhone 3D scans. ## Links - [Watch Bruno Abib's Death in August, members only on Killscreen](https://www.killscreen.com/watch-bruno-abibs-death-in-august-members-only/) - [Bruno Abib](https://brunoabib.com/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Death in August at IndieLisboa](https://indielisboa.com/en/film/death-in-august/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Death in August trailer](https://youtu.be/4pe2i%5F6YuBg?ref=killscreen.com) - [Milan Machinima Festival VRAL online programme](https://milanmachinimafestival.org/vral-screening?ref=killscreen.com) - [Knit's Island](https://squareeyesfilm.com/features/knits-island/?ref=killscreen.com) Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by [Nick Sylvester](https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com). ***Member's Only Video*** _This post is for subscribers on the Helping Hand and Trustee tiers only._ ### Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s Otherworlds closes Sunday at PHI URL: https://www.killscreen.com/jakob-kudsk-steensens-otherworlds-closes-sunday-at-phi/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:08.000Z You have until Sunday. *Otherworlds*, Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s first solo exhibition in Canada and the largest institutional showing of the Danish artist’s work to date, closes September 13 at [PHI in Old Montréal](https://phi.ca/en/events/jakob-kudsk-steensen-otherworlds/?ref=killscreen.com)—six worlds built across a decade, including the North American premiere of *Psychosphere* (2025), the deep-sea installation originally commissioned by Copenhagen’s Cisternerne. **Psychosphere* at Cisternerne, via The Frederiksberg Museums—the installation now making its North American premiere in **Otherworlds*. The organizing conceit is that Steensen’s own archive has become the fieldwork site. This is an artist whose worlds usually begin in punishing physical research—a now-collapsed ice cave in the Swiss Alps for *Tongues of Verglas*, the 1987 mating call of the extinct Kauaʻi ʻōʻō for *RE-ANIMATED*, simulated global warming in Minnesota’s Marcell Experimental Forest for *Boreal Dreams*, Bora-Bora’s colonial tourist imaginary for *Primal Tourism*. Here the six works hang together, in curator Daniel Fiset’s words, as “cadences in a musical score, stanzas in a poem, intersecting terrains, levels in a video game.” Fiset’s exhibition text makes the argument outright: the opposition between contemporary art and video games “has become increasingly flawed,” and games offer artists “a way to reflect on rule-based systems, chance, immersion, and the digitization of culture.” It is the thesis Killscreen has been following through Steensen’s work since [a digital swamp in 2021](https://www.killscreen.com/dreaming-up-a-digital-swamp/), through [our talk with the artist this April](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/online-talk-4-28-the-living-archive-jakob-kudsk-steensen-on-art-ecology-and-the-game-engine/), and in [May’s feature on the places we’re losing](https://www.killscreen.com/jacob-kudsk-steensen-ecological-game-engine-art/). PHI announced the closing stretch with [a recorded curator conversation](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYzhyRHD84H/?ref=killscreen.com) on how the worlds get built from field research and 3D capture. If you go—budget about 90 minutes—the show ends in *Psychosphere*’s chapel-like dark, where Fiset’s text lands its quietest point: immersion did not start with digital culture, and the traditions that sought to carry people past ordinary perception are far older than the game engine. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/steensen-otherworlds-v1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/steensen-otherworlds-v4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/steensen-otherworlds-v5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/steensen-otherworlds-v2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/steensen-otherworlds-v6.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/steensen-otherworlds-v7.jpg) Installation views, **Jakob Kudsk Steensen: Otherworlds*, 2026, PHI: **Primal Tourism*, **Tongues of Verglas*, and **Psychosphere*. © PHI, photos: document original. We have been following Steensen’s worlds since 2021, and the next artist building landscapes inside a game engine is already in our notebook. The newsletter is free. [Follow along free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Stephen Ddungu animates and scores a one-man prequel URL: https://www.killscreen.com/stephen-ddungu-animates-and-scores-a-one-man-prequel/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:09.000Z Stephen Ddungu makes videogames the way other people keep notebooks. The solo developer behind *Sword of Symphony*—the long-gestating action-RPG where combat is musical performance, built in UPBGE, the Blender-based engine Ddungu also teaches—posted [a teaser in May](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYuExrVMlSR/?ref=killscreen.com) for a prequel, dated only “Coming in \[2026\].” The project circulates under the codename 00000 00 0x0000000, and its premise is the best piece of worldbuilding Ddungu has shown yet. It takes place in \[The Garden\], [described as a border between Ddungu’s games](https://80.lv/articles/sword-of-symphony-s-developer-turns-its-concepts-into-separate-game?ref=killscreen.com)—the place where scrapped designs, unfinished concepts, and unused ideas go once they’re cut. You play as \[first draft\], the earliest sketch of *Sword of Symphony*’s protagonist, fighting toward e\[x\]istence with a stick, a gun, and the occasional conjured car. Per the [dev diaries](https://x.com/0x0000000%5Fgame?ref=killscreen.com), the episodic story will bear on *Sword of Symphony*’s ending. Metafiction this literal usually lives in literature—drafts arguing with the person who wrote them is Flann O’Brien territory—but Ddungu’s version is playable, and the response has a feel: the comparison the replies keep reaching for is *Nier*. I love the one-man-band aspect; scoring and animating an entire mythology alone isn’t a limitation here. It’s the aesthetic, the same way a solo on a record tells you more about the player than the band ever could—an argument Killscreen was already making in [Digital Soloists](https://www.killscreen.com/digital-soloists-jazz-and-the-videogame-score/), on jazz and the videogame score. No storefront, no date beyond \[2026\]. Just an account name made of zeroes, and a garden where dead ideas wait their turn. ![A frame from the attack-combo development diary for Stephen Ddungu’s prequel project.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/0x0000000-dev-diary-combo.jpg) Attack combo of the \[first draft\], from the [dev diaries](https://x.com/0x0000000%5Fgame?ref=killscreen.com). One person scoring, animating, and mythologizing an entire universe is exactly what Radar exists to catch early. It arrives free, three times a week. [Catch the next one ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### SILT’s monochrome abyss reached the Apple Design finals URL: https://www.killscreen.com/silts-monochrome-abyss-reached-the-apple-design-finals/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:10.000Z Apple named 36 finalists for this year’s Apple Design Awards across six categories, and the strangest thing on the list was four years old. *SILT*—Spiral Circus’s monochrome puzzle-adventure about a diver possessing sea creatures at the bottom of a lightless ocean—made the [Visuals and Graphics shortlist](https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/story/id1896567319?ref=killscreen.com) beside *Cyberpunk 2077: Ultimate Edition* and *Arknights: Endfield*. The category eventually went to Night City, which is its own kind of compliment: a hand-inked eel was up against one of the most expensive skylines ever rendered. Tom Mead drew that eel. The illustrator, who works under the name Mr Mead and co-founded Spiral Circus with creative director Dom Clarke, built the game’s entire underwater world out of ink; released [on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1325890/SILT/?ref=killscreen.com) in 2022 and published by Fireshine Games, it still looks like nothing else on the platform. Apple’s citation singles out the camerawork—the view tightening to squeeze through tunnels, then pulling back until your diver is a fleck beside something vast. That instinct for the ocean as a canvas of scale and dread is one Killscreen has traced before, in [the luminous depths of *Abzû*](https://www.killscreen.com/abzu-2/). *SILT* is *Abzû*’s photographic negative: where that ocean overwhelms with color, Mead’s starves you of it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/silt-screenshot-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/silt-screenshot-3.jpg) **SILT* screenshots via Steam. Killscreen has been following hand-drawn game worlds from **Abzû* to **SILT* for over a decade. The free Radar letter brings the next three finds to your inbox every week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A stranded astronaut meets Voyager 1 in a free Steam game URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-stranded-astronaut-meets-voyager-1-in-a-free-steam-game/ Last updated: 2026-09-16T21:07:49.000Z The premise of *Control, I’m Not Coming Back* fits in a sentence: an accident sets a space cadet adrift, and the hour that follows becomes a conversation with Voyager 1\. Desborde Games [released it free on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4515660/Control%5FIm%5FNot%5FComing%5FBack/?ref=killscreen.com) on May 29—Windows first, macOS since—and the response has been wildly out of proportion to the price. As of this writing it sits at Overwhelmingly Positive: 5,838 reviews, 98 percent of them positive, for a walking sim that runs about an hour, with branching paths that reward a second pass. The studio calls it hopecore, and for once the aesthetic label earns its keep. [The announcement reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DY6rZ2VElPV/?ref=killscreen.com) filled up with people saying the game made them cry, but the pattern in the response interests me more than any single reaction: readers keep filing it, independently, next to *17776*, Jon Bois’s serialized fiction narrated by space probes watching humanity from a distance. The comparison is exactly right. Both run on the same sincerity—the conviction that the machines we fling farthest from ourselves are the most human things we have ever made. Voyager 1 is a real spacecraft carrying a real golden record, which means a game about befriending it is only half fiction to begin with. Killscreen has a long-standing soft spot for this register. We once fell for [a stop-motion Voyager made of needlework](https://www.killscreen.com/needlework-voyager-mission-stop-motion-voyager-ios-absolute-whimsy/), and we have argued before that [astronaut games are simple pleasures](https://www.killscreen.com/astronaut-games-are-simple-pleasures/). What is new here is the economics: a free, hour-long game landing this hard suggests the walking sim may have found its natural format—short, sincere, and priced like a gift. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/control-incb-screenshot-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/control-incb-screenshot-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/control-incb-screenshot-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/control-incb-screenshot-5.jpg) **Control, I’m Not Coming Back* screenshots via Steam. When a free hour on Steam lands harder than most prestige releases, Radar is where we say so. Get it free, three times a week. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Inflatable microbes toured all five Meow Wolf worlds URL: https://www.killscreen.com/inflatable-microbes-toured-all-five-meow-wolf-worlds/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:12.000Z Before it folded its tents on August 9, Meow Wolf’s *Phenomenomaly* pulled off something quietly enormous: a single synchronized creature migration across [all five of its exhibitions](https://meowwolf.com/phenomenomaly?ref=killscreen.com)—Santa Fe, Las Vegas, Denver, Grapevine, and Houston—running on 90-minute loops from June 5\. The migrators were Flickerwerms, towering puppets paraded through each space in a finale procession. The season’s newest Leviathan came from sculptors Nicole Banowetz and Devin Reilly, who build room-scale inflatables from the anatomy of microscopic organisms. Banowetz has sewn inflatable creatures for years—soft, pale forms that sit somewhere between decoration and disease—and [Meow Wolf’s interview reel with the pair](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZQIWNwj1Da/?ref=killscreen.com) is worth the watch for the shop-floor detail: fabric patterned like garment-making, then inflated into what the caption happily calls “wermz.” The replies did the taxonomy on their own—the crowd’s reflex was to file the Leviathan into a game bestiary, with *Zelda* surfacing unprompted. That reflex is the story. Meow Wolf’s whole model—persistent fictional worlds you walk through, quest structures, environmental lore—descends from game space, and its audience reads the fauna accordingly. There’s a lineage on the puppet side too. Games have long envied puppetry’s honesty about artifice—Killscreen wrote about [*Puppeteer*](https://www.killscreen.com/puppeteer-shows-you-its-strings-and-gives-you-scissors/) making the stage machinery the whole point back in the PS3 era—and an inflatable Leviathan led through a crowd is the same trick at architectural scale: everyone can see the seams, and the seams are the magic. The migration has passed, but Banowetz and Reilly’s creatures feel like a preview of where immersive entertainment’s creature design is heading—biology from under a microscope, blown up to boss-monster size, soft enough to hug. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/phenomenomaly-denver-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/phenomenomaly-denver-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/phenomenomaly-denver-4.jpg) **Phenomenomaly* at Convergence Station, Denver. Photos: AtlasMedia/Eric Scire, courtesy Meow Wolf. Play keeps escaping the screen, and we follow it—into museums, warehouses, and inflatable megafauna. Radar, our free letter, tracks it three times a week. [Follow the migration ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A hat of prompts gave Arlo Howard 30 games in 30 days URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-hat-of-prompts-gave-arlo-howard-30-games-in-30-days/ Last updated: 2026-10-11T00:10:13.000Z Arlo Howard led a workshop on Play-pril at [The Big Thing](https://immersivearts.uk/events/the-big-thing/?ref=killscreen.com) in Llandudno, Wales, on Sept. 10, 2026\. It was called [Taking Pressure off Process with Play](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcvoVnHF8Nl/?ref=killscreen.com). Play-pril is a month-long game-making challenge. Each day in April, Howard draws a prompt from a hat and makes a game from it. Some prompts are Howard's own. Friends and other designers add the rest. This year's prompts included a game that leaves marks on the skin, a game with house plants, a game without materials and a game with worms. Day 20 asked for a game for 100 or more players. Howard posted [all 30](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYy8H29vTae/?ref=killscreen.com) in May. The workshop walked through that process, then had participants design a low-pressure practice of their own. Musicians play scales and visual artists keep sketchbooks. Howard's question is what game makers do instead. Howard makes interactive theatre and games, and worked on *The Burnt City* with Punchdrunk. Killscreen [wrote about Punchdrunk's experiments with games](https://www.killscreen.com/punchdrunk-and-mits-sleep-no-more-sets-stage-theatre-videogame-crossovers/) in 2012\. The Big Thing is Immersive Arts' annual gathering. It ran Sept. 9 to 11. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/play-pril-days-1-6.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/play-pril-days-7-12.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/play-pril-days-13-18.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/play-pril-days-19-24.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/play-pril-days-25-30.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/arlo-howard-the-big-thing-workshop.jpg) All 30 prompts from Play-pril 2026, and the card for the workshop at The Big Thing. Images: Arlo Howard, via Instagram Killscreen covers the people working where theatre and games meet. The Radar brings them to your inbox free, three times a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Games This Week: Sep. 9, 2026 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/games-this-week-sep-9-2026/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:05:16.000Z *Today would've been my grandfather's 94th birthday. He wasn't a big games person, but apparently, he loved to play the dice game bunco with my grandmother. Rest easy, Popo!* Ok! So every so often, a week arranges itself. This one is about *apparatus*: a magnifying glass that opens the past instead of enlarging it, a controller built to be unpleasant to hold, a nightclub rebuilt inside a headset because the body that used to go out cannot do it anymore. I'm forcing a theme, yes, but hey let's see what rhymes, right? Twenty-four of you signed up in the last seven days, and two came in on the paid side. Welcome especially to Daniel and Mazen! Thanks for taking a chance on me. --- ## This Week’s Feature ### [When you can no longer close the club, you build one](https://www.killscreen.com/ambrose-trataris-daisy-chain-star-connection/) *Sobriety and injury cost Ambrose Trataris the nightclub, so they rebuilt it inside VRChat, then staged it as a dance work where one body puppets another.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/rachelzphotographyllc-279.jpg) The company performs **Daisy-Chain<><><>Star-Connection* at Gray Area in San Francisco (photo by Rachel Z) If you’ve had the misfortune of not quite having enough cable, you may have been tempted to cross one power strip over another. Any DIY arcade maker knows this well, and you hope the entire arrangement doesn’t become a fire hazard. But artist [Ambrose Trataris](https://www.ambrosetrataris.com/?ref=killscreen.com) pointed me to a different understanding while making their new work, which premiered at [Gray Area](https://grayarea.org/event/ambrose-trataris-daisy-chainstar-connection/?ref=killscreen.com) in San Francisco on Aug. 29\. “In the queer community, resources are daisy-chained,” they say. “It’s something we’re always creating, these life graphs for each other.” The other side of that is the “star connection”: a clean line straight to the source of power. *Daisy-Chain<><><>Star-Connection* is a 45-minute hybrid dance work grounded in that asymmetry, reading like a laundry list of Trataris’ interests: contemporary choreography, drag, motion capture, live VR, seven musicians, holographic projection. The timeline was three years, deliberately, after an earlier performance left them racing to fix the software underneath. It’s an enduring challenge to have wide-ranging interests while trying not to make the work “overwrought.” Trataris is part of a set of [performers experimenting with living and breathing in online spaces](https://www.killscreen.com/theo-triantafyllidis-clashing-real-time-graphics-with-live-performance/) while presenting themselves to others. [Kevin Peter He](https://www.killscreen.com/kevin-peter-hes-embodied-game-engine-performance/) has been constructing physical armatures for his live performances, coming off the back of his Lincoln Center Collider fellowship. [Letta Shtohryn](https://www.killscreen.com/letta-shtohryn-chuly-chuly-mocap-drift/)’s *Чули? Чули / Chuly? Chuly* starts from a cave thick with urban legend before moving to motion capture onstage. In all, there’s so much possibility to blend the impermanence of live physical performance with the flexible features of game worlds. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/rachelzphotographyllc-1562.jpg) The chain of control made literal: the body in the rig, and the avatar it drives (photo by Rachel Z) [Read it on Killscreen](https://www.killscreen.com/ambrose-trataris-daisy-chain-star-connection/) --- The best is yet to Come Members read the Frist piece and this month’s playlist the day they went up, and the whole archive back to 2010 sits behind the same login. Librarian is $2 a month or $12 a year. [Become a Librarian ](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/signup) ## Spandrel ### [ChillCash pitched its sailing mystery as internet horror](https://www.killscreen.com/chillcash-pitched-its-sailing-mystery-as-internet-horror/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/flux-empyrean-ss1.jpg) **Flux Empyrean* (via Steam) In May, ChillCash sold the game as a curse: something pale following your boat through the fog, 8,600 likes, a long wishlist wait attached. What *actually* shipped on July 13 is an open-world mystery about sailing a drowned planet, with no combat, no waypoints, and no skill trees, where you steer by constellations and move forward only once you understand something. The distance between how a game advertises itself and what it turns out to be is becoming a full-time beat. [Read it on Killscreen](https://www.killscreen.com/chillcash-pitched-its-sailing-mystery-as-internet-horror/) ### [DDoD brings its Fog-swallowed roguelite to Xbox day and date](https://www.killscreen.com/ddod-brings-its-fog-swallowed-roguelite-to-xbox-day-and-date/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ddod-s2.jpg) The Purple Lands of **DDoD* (via The Future Entertainment Company) The Future Entertainment Company will put *DDoD* on Xbox Series X|S the same day it arrives on Steam and Epic, all inside the fourth quarter. It is a top-down roguelite shooter for one to four players, pitched with unusual honesty as *Diablo* pacing inside a *S.T.A.L.K.E.R.* atmosphere, and its sealed 60-square-kilometer zone is built on real-world topography. A demo with full four-player co-op is live now. [Read it on Killscreen](https://www.killscreen.com/ddod-brings-its-fog-swallowed-roguelite-to-xbox-day-and-date/) ### [Desire paths teach a machine to want in Aggregate](https://www.killscreen.com/desire-paths-teach-a-machine-to-want-in-aggregate/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/aggregate-vincent-moulinet.png) Installation view of **Aggregate* (2024) by the Distraction.fun collective (courtesy Vincent Moulinet) I've always loved the term "desire paths" as a real-world version of crowd-sourced interface design. Surely, you've seen the dirt paths people wear into the ground the plan never provided. And in *Aggregate*, Vincent Moulinet from the French collective Distraction.fun, turns them into a curriculum. Players take turns steering an artificial intelligence across a wasteland modeled on rural cruising grounds, and each player’s scraped-out route becomes the map the next one inherits. The 3D-printed controller is deliberately thorny to hold, making the avatar’s punishment physical. [Read it on Killscreen](https://www.killscreen.com/desire-paths-teach-a-machine-to-want-in-aggregate/) --- Radar is the short one — three news items, every Monday, Wednesday and Saturday. It started in August, after most of you had already signed up, so you were never added to it. Ticking one box fixes that. [Turn on Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/account/newsletters) ## Intersection ### [Seventeen artists rethink our place on earth at the Frist](https://www.killscreen.com/seventeen-artists-rethink-our-place-on-earth-at-the-frist/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/shimmer-woolfalk-cloud-quilt-frist-1.jpg) Saya Woolfalk, **Floating World of the Cloud Quilt*, 2022 (photo: Etienne Frossard, courtesy the artist) *Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman* opens Sept. 25 at the Frist in Nashville and runs to Jan. 3, gathering 17 artists against the assumption of human superiority. What stands out is how much of the roster runs on game technology: [Ian Cheng](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/ian-cheng/)’s live simulations, [Jakob Kudsk Steensen](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/jakob-kudsk-steensen/)’s first-person swamps, Marina Zurkow’s 146-hour generative year. Read as a group show, it surveys real-time simulation as a museum medium. [Read it on Killscreen](https://www.killscreen.com/seventeen-artists-rethink-our-place-on-earth-at-the-frist/) --- ## One to Watch ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/inkblood-lens-2026-09-09.gif) ### [A magnifying glass is the time machine in Inkblood](https://www.killscreen.com/inkblood-magnifying-glass-time-machine/) The Inquisitor carries a magnifying glass that does not enlarge the present; it opens the past: hold the lens to a villager’s window and last night replays inside the circle. You photograph clues, compile a case file, and call a distant overseer from a carriage the store page pointedly calls both your home and your prison. 10 cases, due from Critical Reflex on Steam in 2026. [Read it on Killscreen](https://www.killscreen.com/inkblood-magnifying-glass-time-machine/) --- ## Run-ons - [Refik Anadol’s AI museum takes your pulse as an input](https://www.killscreen.com/refik-anadols-ai-museum-takes-your-pulse-as-an-input/). Every visitor at the Grand LA wears a wristband and a scent collar, then leaves holding a paper token of the data they made. - [Whale songs drive the render engine in a Singapore show](https://www.killscreen.com/whale-songs-drive-the-render-engine-in-a-singapore-show/). Marshmallow Laser Feast let the animals’ own recordings deform the picture in real time. - [Gradually, Then Suddenly: What to Play, September 4](https://www.killscreen.com/gradually-then-suddenly-what-to-play-september-4/). This month’s playlist goes looking for the point where an incremental game stops being a joke. --- The Killscreen Podcast debuted Episode 35, [One Pigeon Instead of Every Clock](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/one-pigeon-instead-of-every-clock-podcast/), in which Danny Snelson and I get from an arcade cabinet that writes a stranger’s life to Christian Marclay’s 24-hour clock to a pigeon romance rebuilt after its map switched off. We record the next one on Sept. 17\. Looking forward! ### Mexico joins a seven-country games policy program URL: https://www.killscreen.com/mexico-joins-a-seven-country-games-policy-program/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:12.000Z The interesting part is which institution walked through the door. Mexico’s entry into [IberVideojuegos](https://segib.org/es/pipa-bueno/ibervideojuegos/?ref=killscreen.com) is being handled by the [Centro de Cultura Digital](https://www.centroculturadigital.mx/?ref=killscreen.com), a public culture center, rather than by a trade association or an export agency. The largest videogame market in Latin America will be represented in a regional policy body by [the people who run exhibitions](https://www.killscreen.com/achiampong-the-gaming-room/) and a games lab. IberVideojuegos was established as an Ibero-American cooperation program after approval at the [XXIX Ibero-American Summit in Ecuador in 2024](https://segib.org/es/cumbre/xxix-cumbre-iberoamericana/?ref=killscreen.com), and it sits within the same family of “Iber” cultural programs that have co-funded film and music across the region for years. Chile holds the presidency; Argentina runs the technical unit; Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Spain, Mexico and Uruguay are in. The stated work is training, public policy and [getting regional stories into games that are not set in the usual places](https://www.killscreen.com/exploring-mexicos-heritage-through-gaming/). The numbers behind Mexico’s case are lopsided in a way worth naming. Figures cited by [Mexico’s federal telecommunications regulator](https://somosaudiencias.ift.org.mx/archivos/1%5FVideojuegos%5F1S2025.pdf?ref=killscreen.com) put Mexico as the biggest market in Latin America and the 10th largest anywhere, with more than 76 million players, annual revenue above $2.3 billion, and something close to gender parity among players. What it does not have, in proportion to any of that, is an export industry. It consumes at scale and produces at a fraction of it. That gap is the entire reason a program like this exists, and it is also why routing it through the CCD makes a kind of sense: the bottleneck is not demand; it is the pipeline that turns players into makers. ![Visitors on the exhibition floor of the Centro de Cultura Digital, with low modular seating in green, yellow and orange](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/centro-de-cultura-digital-exhibition-floor.jpg) The exhibition floor at the Centro de Cultura Digital, Mexico City. Photo: ProtoplasmaKid, CC BY-SA 3.0. We asked [what it meant to develop games in Latin America](https://www.killscreen.com/what-does-it-mean-be-indie-game-dev-latin-america/) in 2013, and the answer then was mostly about isolation. Thirteen years on, the answer involves a summit communiqué, which is either progress or bureaucracy, and probably both. [The CCD announced it here](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZVTfNIjgcc/?ref=killscreen.com). Games policy outside the US, EU and Japan barely gets covered in English. We cover it. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A scanned house is the museum in Biosphere 3 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-scanned-house-is-the-museum-in-biosphere-3/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:13.000Z Many years ago, I remember a game designer positing that games shouldn't just build wars, but can go as small as a house. So *Biosphere 3* takes us up on the challenge. It's built on a digital twin of a real residence, the Barton Hood house, rebuilt as a space you walk around. Inside it sits the Biodesign Museum, and inside the museum is a hidden dimension that drops you into a world the team calls AKUPARA. Architecture, then institution, then the trapdoor. ![A gallery interior in the Biodesign Museum, patterned gold ceiling above glass vitrines](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/biosphere-3_akupara_biodesign-museum-interior.jpg) Inside the Biodesign Museum, the institution the house is built around. Courtesy akupara.world. Museums have been putting games inside themselves for a decade; this inverts the arrangement, treating the museum as terrain and the visit as traversal. The version circulating now is a small ambient build — key-collecting, a mood ring, unlockable rooms, not much friction — which is the right scale of it. But [the project page](https://www.brandenmcollins.com/biosphere-3?ref=killscreen.com) states an ambition well beyond a lobby demo: teaching contextual AI through gameplay, aimed at education, scientific research, healthcare, soft robotics and programmable biomaterials. Whether an ambient explorable can carry that is an open question. 0:00 /0:36 1× A playthrough of the Biosphere 3 mini-game as Akupara. Video courtesy akupara.world. Credits, since the announcement moves fast: Branden Collins is creative director, Derek Holguin handled design and development, Abi Lambert handled research and development, and Katie McManus handled art direction, with Zoo also credited on the project page. And a funny name collision: AKUPARA here is a fictional world, not the Los Angeles publisher Akupara Games, which has nothing to do with it. ![First-person view of a wrist wearing a glowing mood ring](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/biosphere-3_akupara_mood-ring.jpg) The mood ring, one of the small systems the current build hands you. Courtesy akupara.world. One practical caveat. [The announcement reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZS%5F6oektlz/?ref=killscreen.com) points to a download and specifies Apple silicon only, while the project page still lists the download as coming soon and offers a browser walkthrough instead. Expect to be routed to the browser version. Architecture, biodesign, museums, trapdoors. The stuff that is obviously a game but never gets called one lands here first. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Carol Ann Has Dysentery URL: https://www.killscreen.com/carol-ann-has-dysentery-oregon-trail/ Last updated: 2026-09-08T23:51:51.000Z [Buy Issue 2 in print](https://store.killscreen.com/products/kill-screen-2-back-to-school?ref=killscreen.com) The tale of *The Oregon Trail* is a bundle of odd circumstances and lucky breaks. Developed in 1971 by three college students for the Minnesota public school system, the game became one of the most influential pieces of pop culture in the last half-century. *The Oregon Trail* was partly responsible for Apple’s dominance in the ’80s in the education space, but the game’s creators never made a dime. Even its creation was nearly thwarted. If it were not for a decision that Don Rawitsch made during the Vietnam War, the game may have never existed – at least in the form that millions of children experienced. Now the principal in a consulting firm bearing his name, Rawitsch was the linchpin for *The Oregon Trail*. It was his idea to focus on that piece of American history, and he served as the spirit guide for his partners Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger as they set out to make a title for the classroom that eventually changed the face of computer games. That’s where our story starts—with three college students with a single idea. _This post is for subscribers on the Helping Hand and Trustee tiers only._ ### A 1991 animation frames early CGI in religious imagery URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-1991-animation-frames-early-cgi-in-religious-imagery/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:14.000Z Eternal Family is streaming *Vision infogothique* for members, and [the reel announcing it](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbmOlMJioa1/?ref=killscreen.com) undersells the tape considerably. Alain Mongeau and Eric Mattson made it in 1991\. It runs eight minutes and seventeen seconds, carries no dialogue, and opens by pushing the eye *into* the surface of a numerical image rather than across it — through the grain of the thing, into whatever is behind the pixel. 0:00 /1:04 1× Trailer for **Vision infogothique* (Alain Mongeau and Eric Mattson, 1991). Silent here; the tape streams in full at [Eternal Family](https://eternal.tv/programs/vision-infogothique?ref=killscreen.com). What it finds back there is not a demo reel. It is an encyclopedia of religious iconography: mythical creatures, gothic ornament, the visual furniture of belief, all of it rendered on the polygon budget of 1991\. The claim is that computer graphics did not arrive from nowhere at the end of the 1980s, that it had walked into a job illuminated manuscripts and cathedral glass had been doing for centuries. ![Chimeric creatures rendered in 1991 computer graphics above a dotted grid floor](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/vision-infogothique-still-vitheque.jpg) A frame from **Vision infogothique*. Courtesy Vidéographe / [Vithèque](https://vitheque.com/en/titles/vision-infogothique?ref=killscreen.com). [Vithèque](https://vitheque.com/en/titles/vision-infogothique?ref=killscreen.com), which distributes the tape for Montreal’s Vidéographe, files it under animation rather than documentary, and that is the right call. It is not explaining rendering to a 1991 audience so much as performing what rendering was for. Mongeau is the name to notice. Nine years after this, Mongeau founded MUTEK; before that came the chair of the ISEA board and a co-founding role at Montreal’s Society for Arts and Technology. So this is early work by someone who spent the following three decades building the institutions that decide which digital art gets seen at all, and you can watch the thesis being worked out in public. Games inherited precisely the same problem — how do you make a rendered object feel like it has weight and history behind it — and mostly solved it by pointing at cathedrals too. We came at this from the other end with [Keiken on CGI cinema and collective belief](https://www.killscreen.com/keiken/), which is the same argument running forward instead of back. Nobody else is going to tell you that a 1991 Montreal animation is load-bearing for how games look now. That is the whole job here. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### When you can no longer close the club, you build one URL: https://www.killscreen.com/ambrose-trataris-daisy-chain-star-connection/ Last updated: 2026-10-06T17:13:05.000Z If you’ve had the misfortune of not quite having enough cable, you may have been tempted to cross one power strip over another. Any DIY arcade maker knows this well, and you hope the entire arrangement doesn’t become a fire hazard. But artist [Ambrose Trataris](https://www.ambrosetrataris.com/?ref=killscreen.com) pointed me to a different understanding while making their new work, which premiered at [Gray Area](https://grayarea.org/event/ambrose-trataris-daisy-chainstar-connection/?ref=killscreen.com) in San Francisco on Aug. 29\. “In the queer community, resources are daisy-chained,” they say. “It’s something we’re always creating, these life graphs for each other.” The other side of that is the “star connection”: a clean line straight to the source of power. *Daisy-Chain<><><>Star-Connection* is a 45-minute hybrid dance work grounded in that asymmetry, reading like a laundry list of Trataris’ interests: contemporary choreography, drag, motion capture, live VR, seven musicians, holographic projection. The timeline was three years, deliberately, after an earlier performance left them racing to fix the software underneath. It’s an enduring challenge to have wide-ranging interests while trying not to make the work “overwrought.” ![The full company onstage in front of a large projected avatar, audience silhouetted in the foreground](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/rachelzphotographyllc-279.jpg) The company performs **Daisy-Chain<><><>Star-Connection* at Gray Area in San Francisco. Photo by Rachel Z Trataris is part of a set of [performers experimenting with living and breathing in online spaces](https://www.killscreen.com/theo-triantafyllidis-clashing-real-time-graphics-with-live-performance/) while presenting themselves to others. [Kevin Peter He](https://www.killscreen.com/kevin-peter-hes-embodied-game-engine-performance/) has been constructing physical armatures for his live performances, coming off the back of his Lincoln Center Collider fellowship. [Letta Shtohryn](https://www.killscreen.com/letta-shtohryn-chuly-chuly-mocap-drift/)’s *Чули? Чули / Chuly? Chuly* starts from a cave thick with urban legend before moving to motion capture onstage. In all, there’s so much possibility to blend the impermanence of live physical performance with the flexible features of game worlds. The work started with Trataris’ reflections on their experiences with nightlife, which had been a welcome stability. But life changes, and we grow older, and we lose the ability to do what we once could. To wit, Trataris is sober now, has had a number of injuries, and their relationship to those rooms has changed. “I just don’t have the same ability to sustain my presence inside of a nightclub the way that I used to,” they say. “There’s a grief that has happened, where I feel displaced by the spaces that are supposed to be nurturing myself and my community,” they tell me. But not all was lost. They found the world of [VRChat](https://hello.vrchat.com/?ref=killscreen.com), and [found the room again in virtual reality](https://www.killscreen.com/alpha%5Frats/). VRChat is not a tool they picked up; it’s an artist’s studio, as Trataris notes; their practice has never really been a studio one. It’s site-specific with a tool of the moment, the same as their drag and performance work has always been. And on VRChat, the range of experiences is so vast that it’s an exciting place to find oneself over and over again. They take part in various trans-focused nightclubs and support groups. “Without it the work doesn’t exist,” they say. ![Performers in VR headsets beneath a large translucent avatar projected in blue light](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/rachelzphotographyllc-170.jpg) Performers in headsets beside the avatars they are driving. Photo by Rachel Z The experimentation with bodily type pulls heavily from Trataris’ experiences as a drag performer: [getting into drag is a physical negotiation](https://www.killscreen.com/virtual-drag-or-how-to-queer-virtual-reality/)—“stuffing, shoving, augmenting, cinching, going somewhat numb in order to enter the new skin.” But once you’re in, “you’re locked in,” they say, and the character feeds you. It’s a key development and a twist: an avatar gives the same charge of transformation with none of the cost, and the absurdity scales accordingly. “I really spent a whole night as a *cookie*,” they say. “Physically, a cookie that was on the ground. I could move around, and I could hear and listen to everything, and I could see everything, but no one knew I was there.” Another night they found an entire world made of Space Jam DVDs and became one. “I try to bring that absurdity back into real life as much as possible through drag, but I am limited physically by reality.” *Daisy-Chain<><><>Star-Connection* [opens at a club](https://www.killscreen.com/diskokina-virtual-club-theater-game-engines/), with two go-go dancers standing behind matching holographic avatar projections on screen. Two more dancers arrive, then spin through different bodies, trying on avatars one at a time like a department store and gesturing at what works and what doesn’t. Then Trataris appears, a humanoid rabbit that blends live costume and avatar performance, and detonates the room with a hyperpop number that puts everyone to sleep (the only natural way to end a sweaty, ebullient night at a club). ![Performers clustered on a dark stage, one wearing a VR headset](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/rachelzphotographyllc-205.jpg) The opening club sequence. Photo by Rachel Z The image Trataris keeps returning to is a chain of control. This was the first time they worked with a choreographer who could teach a dancer, who could teach another dancer. Working with a choreographer allowed Trataris to universalize the experience, both broadening the range of moments and hyperfocusing the performances to capture the lived experiences of those all around them. Onstage, that becomes literal: the avatar on the screen, the person in full VR, and the person controlling that person. “Someone is manipulating the body of someone who is then manipulating the avatar,” they say. The daisy chain is not only how the community shares power. It is how movement travels through [a body it doesn’t belong to](https://www.killscreen.com/symone-live-art-game-design-queer-performance/). ![A performer in a full VR headset and motion capture rig raises one arm as a pink-haired armored avatar mirrors the pose on the screen behind](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/rachelzphotographyllc-1562.jpg) The chain of control, made literal: the body in the rig, and the avatar it drives. Photo by Rachel Z The largest change in how they work is the least visible onstage. For the first time, Trataris is not the central performer in their own piece, as I’ve known them. Trataris pulled in a dramaturg to devise the choreography collaboratively, rather than simply arrive with an idea in hand. It was a liberatory experience to have a collaborator from the contemporary dance world who could connect the work to “other lineages and languages and histories that maybe I don’t have access to.” Previously, they referenced their own movement heavily, but as an ensemble, the material is distributed, with each character drawn from the dancer performing it. As an artist working with dancers of color, Trataris found that decentralizing themselves as protagonist was not a gesture but a requirement of telling the story honestly. ![The company standing in a circle in a rehearsal studio, one performer directing](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/daisy-chain-star-connection_trataris_company-circle_09.jpg) ![Performers collapsed on a rehearsal room floor wrapped in plush animals and cellophane](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/daisy-chain-star-connection_trataris_ensemble-collapse_05.jpg) In rehearsal, July 2026\. Courtesy of Ambrose Trataris “What happens when you decentralize your own way of making,” they say, “so that it can create something bigger than yourself, or your own vision?” What they are chasing on the other side of that question is a feeling they already know. They call it "party-god" immortality—the conviction, real in your rave years, that you cannot and will not die. It stops being true. Video games let you touch it again. The work is figuring out how to hold onto that freedom and endless possibility “without having to destroy your body” to prove you can rise again the next day. More on bodies and avatars from Killscreen: [When the mocap suit drifts, the drift becomes choreography](https://www.killscreen.com/letta-shtohryn-chuly-chuly-mocap-drift/) · [So It Goes](https://www.killscreen.com/lisa-jamhoury-lossy-digital-body/) From Killscreen Killscreen has spent fifteen years on the games that refuse to explain themselves. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### Desire paths teach a machine to want in Aggregate URL: https://www.killscreen.com/desire-paths-teach-a-machine-to-want-in-aggregate/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:15.000Z In urban planning, desire lines are the dirt paths people wear into ground the plan never provided. It's such a great phrase! *Aggregate*, a game from the French real-time collective Distraction.fun, makes them a curriculum: players take turns steering an artificial intelligence through reinforcement learning—punishment and reward—across a wasteland modeled on rural cruising grounds, where each player’s scraped-out route becomes the map the next one inherits. The game runs on a concept by Vincent Moulinet, in dialogue with Théo Casciani’s novel *Models*, and treats what landscape architect Gilles Clément calls the third landscape—the abandoned lots and margins where unplanned life takes hold—as the shared habitat of queer desire and machine learning, two systems left to find their own patterns. The controller, 3D-printed with Pierre Moulin, is deliberately thorny to hold: the avatar’s punishment, made physical. Moulinet [resurfaced the project this June](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZe6I%5FqiBld/?ref=killscreen.com) alongside “À quoi jouait Asha ?,” an essay written for *MAGMAH*, the journal of Geneva’s Museum of Art and History, on how machines learn to see—and how humans, in turn, learn to play like machines. 0:00 /1:12 1× [via](https://youtu.be/4Ly-NcUmc9o?ref=killscreen.com) *Aggregate* has worked the circuit—the Grand Palais’s Fun Palace show, A MAZE in Berlin—and joined this June’s Nuit Blanche in Paris. It lands on a question this year keeps sharpening: who is a game for, once the player might be synthetic? [Playfool’s working bot farm](https://www.killscreen.com/playfool-built-a-working-bot-farm-that-hands-you-the-controls/), which we covered two weeks ago, comes at the same question from the factory floor—machines that play so you can watch. Moulinet’s answer is more intimate: if a machine can be taught to want, the teaching itself is the game. Who games are for is the question Killscreen keeps asking. The free Radar newsletter carries the next answer to your inbox. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A magnifying glass is the time machine in Inkblood URL: https://www.killscreen.com/inkblood-magnifying-glass-time-machine/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:16.000Z Critical Reflex [pitched it](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYxBEc0qysT/?ref=killscreen.com) as "a detective game where you could interrogate time itself," and for once the logline is literal. In *Inkblood*, developed by [Hey Bird!](https://heybird.gg/?ref=killscreen.com) and due from Critical Reflex on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4114100/Inkblood/?ref=killscreen.com) in 2026, your Inquisitor carries a magnifying glass that doesn't enlarge the present—it opens the past. Wonder what the villagers were doing last night? Hold the lens to their windows and watch the fragment replay. 0:00 /0:21 1× The announcement trailer for *Inkblood*, looping without sound. [Watch it with audio on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4114100/Inkblood/?ref=killscreen.com). The magnifying glass has been detective fiction's totem object for more than a century, and it has always promised the same thing: the truth is here, just smaller than your eye. *Inkblood* relocates the truth in time instead of scale, which is a much more interesting account of what investigation actually is—reconstruction, not observation. (Soft eyes, Detective Bunk might say) The rest of the toolkit follows suit: you photograph clues, compile a case file, and dial a distant overseer from your carriage, which the store page pointedly calls both your home and your prison. Some of its compartments are not to be opened. The Inquisition, you're reminded, always learns the truth—including about you. The look is vintage airbrush—soft, toylike, and wrong in the way a pleasant illustration on a missing-poster is wrong—and the response kept pointing for *The Case of the Golden Idol* as the natural comparison. A playtest ran late last year with two ritualistic murders; the full game promises 10 cases. It's also the second Critical Reflex title in our saves this cycle, alongside *Grindset T.V.*—that publisher's slate is turning into a beat. The through-line runs straight to [*Her Story*](https://www.killscreen.com/listening-her-story-looking-right-questions/), which we wrote about as the pleasure of interrogating a recorded past without playing cop. *Inkblood* hands that same pleasure a lens and a cult to point it at. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/inkblood-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/inkblood-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/inkblood-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/inkblood-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/inkblood-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/inkblood-6.jpg) Scenes from *Inkblood*, due from Critical Reflex in 2026\. Images: Hey Bird! Deduction games are quietly having their best decade, and Killscreen has been on the case since **Her Story*. The free newsletter is the file where it all gets compiled. [Open the case file ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Whale songs drive the render engine in a Singapore show URL: https://www.killscreen.com/whale-songs-drive-the-render-engine-in-a-singapore-show/ Last updated: 2026-10-10T03:32:49.000Z Event details When Through Nov. 1, 2026 Where ArtScience Museum, Singapore The technical fact at the centre of *Seeing Echoes in the Mind of the Whale* is better than the wall text. Marshmallow Laser Feast [fed raw cetacean vocalizations](https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/project/seeing-echoes-in-the-mind-of-the-whale/?ref=killscreen.com) into a real-time render engine as a live input, so the audio does not accompany the picture — it deforms it. Sound sculpts the image while you watch. That is a rendering pipeline built to argue a point about perception, and it is currently the centrepiece of [Into the Ocean: Journey Beneath](https://www.marinabaysands.com/museum/exhibitions/into-the-ocean.html?ref=killscreen.com) at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, where it runs through November 1. The piece moves through three species, and the first chapter carries the whole idea. Bottlenose dolphins process echolocation in the visual cortex, which means the returning echo arrives as something closer to an image than a sound. There is no good human word for that, so the studio built the experience instead: a world assembled out of returned signal. Humpbacks get the second chapter and their songs; sperm whales get the third, clicking across distances that make the notion of a rendered draw distance look modest. 0:00 /0:18 1× Marshmallow Laser Feast — Ersin Han Ersin, Barnaby Steel and Robin McNicholas — developed it with the filmmaker [Tom Mustill](https://www.tommustill.com/?ref=killscreen.com) and the Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, working from recordings supplied in part by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. It was commissioned by Fundación Telefónica and Disseny Hub Barcelona in 2024 and curated by José Luis de Vicente, so Singapore is a later home rather than a birthplace. It reaches the MIT Museum on September 28 for its US premiere. What keeps this on our beat is the tooling. Everything here — volumetric reconstruction, a generative pipeline for segmenting footage, an engine running the whole thing live — came out of games and got pointed at an animal. [Jakob Kudsk Steensen made the same move](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/online-talk-4-28-the-living-archive-jakob-kudsk-steensen-on-art-ecology-and-the-game-engine/) in our conversation about ecology and the game engine. The engine turns out to be very good at building an umwelt that is not yours. [The studio’s own opening-day post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZRaTk7k27T/?ref=killscreen.com) has the installation shots. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/image.png) Game engines keep turning up in places nobody files under games. We follow them there every week. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### One Pigeon Instead of Every Clock [Podcast] URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/one-pigeon-instead-of-every-clock-podcast/ Last updated: 2026-09-05T18:42:27.000Z I open with Tomo Kihara, a Tokyo designer who has built an arcade cabinet that nobody scripted, and put a question to Danny Snelson that runs through the whole hour: what happens to authorship when the designer does not know the outcome either? The through line for this cycle is work built to outlast the thing it was made on. Kihara’s *What Plays You? Game of Possible Lives* is a cabinet running a language model locally, generating a statistically plausible Japanese life out of census data. You steer that person through their decisions and you get exactly one rewind. Danny puts the authorship problem in a much longer line, back through Dada and the constraint-based writing of the 1960s, where the artist produces a set of rules that might themselves be the work. The only new thing here is that one of the players is a large language model. But what about the venue? The cabinet has travelled from the museum to a hotel lobby, so the people playing it are the ones passing through hotels, airports and train stations rather than the ones who chose to visit a museum. Danny lands on Marc Augé’s non-places, and on the fact that a census is a state instrument, which puts a game about ordinary lives in exactly the spaces where ordinary life is watched most closely. Then [Christian Marclay’s *The Clock*](https://www.killscreen.com/christian-marclay-the-clock-lacma/), which I went to see in Los Angeles. Twenty-four hours, every minute cut from a different film, synchronized to the time on your own watch. It is ludic without containing a single game mechanic. You watch it hunting, and Danny calls it the ultimate collectathon on both sides at once: whoever had to find a usable clip for all 1,440 minutes, and the viewer collecting them back one at a time. It also could not be made this way now. The labor is the work, and a model asked to find every clock would dissolve it. To close, Wristwork’s *Pigeon: A Love Story*, where you are a pigeon crossing London, New York, Tokyo, Paris and Amsterdam looking for one specific other bird. The commercial map service it ran on was switched off, so they rebuilt it on open map data, which is the same durability question in a different key. Danny reads it as the inverse of *The Clock*: one pigeon instead of every clock. Then to Paris, where the events company Diversion marked ten years with an exhibition and the collective at distraction.fun filled it with games. That sends us into what makes a game legible as coming from a place at all, and Danny’s counterexample is *Stray*, a deeply French game whose every visible marker points at Hong Kong. ## Links - [My feature on Tomo Kihara, who built a cabinet nobody scripted](https://www.killscreen.com/tomo-kihara-game-of-possible-lives/) - [Ryan Bradley on Keita Takahashi and the scoreless game](https://www.killscreen.com/the-young-and-the-scoreless-baby-gamers/) - [Wristwork rebuilt its dead pigeon romance on open maps](https://www.killscreen.com/wristwork-rebuilt-its-dead-pigeon-romance-on-open-maps/) - [A game tower crowned Diversion’s tenth anniversary in Paris](https://www.killscreen.com/a-game-tower-crowned-diversions-tenth-anniversary-in-paris/) - [Roppongi Crossing 2025 at the Mori Art Museum](https://www.mori.art.museum/en/exhibitions/roppongicrossing2025/02/index.html?ref=killscreen.com) - [Tomo Kihara](https://www.tomokihara.com/en/about.html?ref=killscreen.com) - [Christian Marclay, The Clock](https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/christian-marclay-clock?ref=killscreen.com) - [Wristwork, Pigeon: A Love Story](https://www.wristwork.com/pigeon?ref=killscreen.com) - [Distraction](https://distraction.fun/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Jonathan Coryn, Player Non Player](https://corjn.com/playernonplayer?ref=killscreen.com) - [Nicolai Troshinsky, Loop Raccord](https://www.troshinsky.com/loopraccord.html?ref=killscreen.com) - [Miguel Sicart, Playing Software](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047722/playing-software/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Danny Snelson](https://dss-edit.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ## Corrections - I name Tomo Kihara’s studio as Gift Ten Industries. His studio is Other Rules. Gift Ten Industry is a separate Tokyo game company. - Danny attributes *Death 24x a Second* to Leslie Thornton. The book is by Laura Mulvey. Leslie Thornton is a different filmmaker. - I refer to a game called Loop Record by Nikolai Trishinsky. It is *Loop Raccord*, by Nicolai Troshinsky. - I describe Robert Redford in *The Natural* hitting a home run into the clock at Wrigley Field and exploding it. Those are two different shots. He shatters the scoreboard clock at Wrigley earlier in the film, and the famous exploding home run at the end hits the stadium light towers. - The birthday problem needs 23 people for a better-than-even chance of a shared birthday, not 25. *Hosted by Jamin Warren with Danny Snelson. Music by* [*Nick Sylvester*](https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com)*.* ### Gradually, Then Suddenly: What to Play, September 4 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/gradually-then-suddenly-what-to-play-september-4/ Last updated: 2026-09-05T02:26:50.000Z An aside I've been putting together the best and brightest of what independent, experimental, and artist-driven games and culture have to offer in Radar. Add it to your emails in settings. [Sign up for Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/account) _This post is for subscribers on the Helping Hand and Trustee tiers only._ ### Seventeen artists rethink our place on earth at the Frist URL: https://www.killscreen.com/seventeen-artists-rethink-our-place-on-earth-at-the-frist/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:38:46.000Z Event details When Through Jan. 3, 2027 Where Frist Art Museum, Ingram Gallery, Nashville This fall the Frist Art Museum in Nashville hands its Ingram Gallery over to the nonhuman. *Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman*, on view September 25, 2026 through January 3, 2027, gathers 17 artists working with everything from digital animation and AR/VR to artificial intelligence, all aimed at the same target: the assumption of human superiority that, in the museum's framing, blocks an ethics of care for the planet. [The announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dbnq8KiEQd8/?ref=killscreen.com) circulated via participating artist Nancy Baker Cahill, whose AR work sits alongside a genuinely stacked roster. What strikes me is how much of that roster runs on game technology. [Ian Cheng](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/ian-cheng/)'s live simulations behave like ecosystems left to play themselves. [Jakob Kudsk Steensen](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/jakob-kudsk-steensen/) builds swampy, first-person landscapes—the show includes *Aquaphobia*—in a game engine. Marina Zurkow's *Mesocosm (Wink, TX)* is generative software running a 146-hour year. Add [Rachel Rossin](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/rachel-rossin/), Jacolby Satterwhite, and Saya Woolfalk's kaleidoscopic *Floating World of the Cloud Quilt*, and the exhibition reads as a survey of real-time simulation as a museum medium. The show sorts itself into three sections—ecology and extinction, guiding avatars the curators call “angels in the machine,” and ontologies that bridge ancestral and contemporary belief systems. There's a book, too: *Shimmer: Artists Dream a Posthuman World*, a 166-page MIT Press catalogue coedited by the Frist's Mark W. Scala and writer [Nora N. Khan](https://www.killscreen.com/author/cap-nora-khan/), one of the sharpest critics working on art and computation. Museums have been absorbing game hardware and game grammar for a while now—we watched [four decades of consoles move into the museum](https://www.killscreen.com/achiampong-the-gaming-room/)—but *Shimmer* flips the direction: not games entering the collection, but the museum adopting games' native trick of building worlds that don't need us at the center. Museums are borrowing games’ native tricks, and Killscreen watches it happen every week. The newsletter is free. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### ChillCash pitched its sailing mystery as internet horror URL: https://www.killscreen.com/chillcash-pitched-its-sailing-mystery-as-internet-horror/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:18.000Z Back in May, developer ChillCash posted [a reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYXi7J1Ro8S/?ref=killscreen.com) built like a curse: “POV: You found the wrong artefact (sic) and now it always follows.” Something pale trails the camera through fog, 8,600 people liked it, and I filed the game away as weirdcore horror to keep an eye on—another dread-soaked wishlist campaign with a long wait attached. What actually shipped on [July 13](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3843410/Flux%5FEmpyrean/?ref=killscreen.com) is a different animal. *Flux Empyrean* is an open-world mystery about sailing a drowned planet after the end of the world—no combat, no waypoints, no skill trees. You steer by constellations, climb through temple ruins, read derelict research papers, and progress only when you understand something; the journal fills until an earlier puzzle suddenly clicks. 0:00 /0:02 1× The lineage is plain enough. We called *Outer Wilds* [“Groundhog Day in space”](https://www.killscreen.com/outer-wilds-groundhog-day-space/) back in 2015, and its knowledge-as-progression DNA is all over this. Quiet nautical games have always needed strange doors into an audience—Simogo’s *The Sailor’s Dream* [arrived as a music box](https://www.killscreen.com/sailors-dream-labyrinth-instrument-place/) a decade ago. ChillCash found the newest door: dress the boat as a ghost. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/flux-empyrean-ss3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/flux-empyrean-ss4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/flux-empyrean-ss5.jpg) Ruins, journals and open water in **Flux Empyrean*. Screenshots via [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3843410/Flux%5FEmpyrean/?ref=killscreen.com). The distance between how a game advertises and what it actually is turns out to be a full-time beat. The free Killscreen newsletter tracks what really ships, twice a week. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Refik Anadol's AI museum takes your pulse as an input URL: https://www.killscreen.com/refik-anadols-ai-museum-takes-your-pulse-as-an-input/ Last updated: 2026-10-10T03:32:50.000Z Event details When Through Jan. 31, 2027 Where DATALAND, The Grand LA, Los Angeles The detail that gives DATALAND away as a game is the ending. You walk out with a small paper token representing the data your visit generated, and you choose whether to keep it or destroy it. That is a save file, and a prompt asking whether you want to keep the save. The museum opened on June 20 at the Grand LA, Frank Gehry’s complex downtown, and bills itself as the first museum of AI arts. Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, who founded Refik Anadol Studio together in 2014, have built something that behaves less like a gallery than like a running simulation. Each visitor wears a wrist device and a neckband that doubles as a scent diffuser, and the exhibition state shifts according to who is in the room, how they move, and what live ecological telemetry is arriving at that moment. The museum says the inaugural show, Machine Dreams: Rainforest, is drawing real-time signals from 16 rainforest locations (humidity, light, soil moisture) and running on the studio’s Large Nature Model, trained, it says, on permission-based data with the Smithsonian and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology among its partners. The show runs through January 31, 2027. When a museum starts behaving like a simulation, somebody should read it as one. We do that here, without the press-release voice. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### DDoD brings its Fog-swallowed roguelite to Xbox day and date URL: https://www.killscreen.com/ddod-brings-its-fog-swallowed-roguelite-to-xbox-day-and-date/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:20.000Z The news is the platform. On August 17, The Future Entertainment Company announced that *DDoD* is coming to Xbox Series X|S day and date with the PC launch on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2468200/DDoD/?ref=killscreen.com) and Epic, all in the fourth quarter of this year, with [a new gameplay trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGOUpsEWD7o&ref=killscreen.com) for the reveal. It's a top-down roguelite shooter for one to four players, and the studio's own pitch is unusually honest about its parents: *Diablo* pacing inside a *S.T.A.L.K.E.R.* atmosphere. You explore, hunt gear, trade with the locals who never left, and decide whether to fight your way to the anomaly's source or slip past it. A demo with full four-player co-op is [live on Steam now](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2468200/DDoD/?ref=killscreen.com). The exclusion zone is games' most durable import from film—*S.T.A.L.K.E.R.* leaned on Chernobyl, which leaned on Tarkovsky, and [a geographer once told us](https://www.killscreen.com/tarkovskys-stalker-taught-a-geographer-how-to-write-about-damaged-landscapes/) that Tarkovsky's *Stalker* is still the best manual for writing about damaged landscapes. Building the zone from real topography takes the metaphor literally. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ddod-s1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ddod-s2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ddod-s3.jpg) **DDoD*. Screenshots: The Future Entertainment Company Games keep borrowing the exclusion zone, and we keep following them in—Killscreen has been mapping this territory since 2010\. The free newsletter is where the thread continues. [Follow the thread ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### The Cicada Does Not Know Summer [Podcast] URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/tomo-kihara-cicada-does-not-know-summer-podcast/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T17:04:22.000Z I ask Tomo Kihara what a machine cannot recognize, and get three very different answers. We start with *Street Debater*, the project he built at TU Delft: a balance scale handed to people asking for money in London and Amsterdam, where passersby vote with coins on a question instead of giving alms. One man in London earned enough from it to get off the streets. Then *A Game of Possible Lives*, the arcade cabinet at Roppongi Crossing 2025 that runs a language model locally and narrates the life of a statistically plausible person assembled from Japan's census. Nothing in it is scripted, which Tomo calls the scary part, and you are allowed to go back exactly once. He built the cabinet to resemble a gravestone. Then *Deviation Game*, made with Playfool, where you draw a prompt so a human can read it and an image model cannot. In 2024 a few whiskers were enough to beat the machine. Now Japanese players draw the novelist Natsume Soseki, author of *I Am a Cat*, and hope the model does not make the connection. We talk about what that has in common with the way people write around a censor, and whether learning to be legible to each other and illegible to a model is a literacy worth having. Tomo also makes the case that a small model running on a laptop should not be argued about as though it were a data center, having benchmarked his own game against a graphically demanding PC title and found it drew less power. And he tells me he has come to terms with not sitting comfortably in one chair, by way of a Buddhist saying about a cicada that cannot know what summer is. **Links** - [My feature on the cabinet, Tomo Kihara Will Not Sit Comfortably in One Chair](https://www.killscreen.com/tomo-kihara-game-of-possible-lives/) - [Tomo Kihara](https://www.tomokihara.com/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Game of Possible Lives](https://www.tomokihara.com/en/game-of-possible-lives.html?ref=killscreen.com) - [Street Debater](https://www.tomokihara.com/en/street-debater.html?ref=killscreen.com) - [Deviation Game](https://deviationgame.com/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Deviation Game on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3104020/Deviation%5FGame/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Playfool, the art and design unit of Daniel Coppen and Saki Maruyama](https://www.studioplayfool.com/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Roppongi Crossing 2025 at the Mori Art Museum](https://www.mori.art.museum/en/exhibitions/roppongicrossing2025/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Deviation Game ver 1.0 at Civic Creative Base Tokyo](https://ccbt.rekibun.or.jp/en/events/deviationgame%5Fver1?ref=killscreen.com) - [Deviation Game at Science Gallery Melbourne](https://melbourne.sciencegallery.com/distraction-exhibits/deviation-game?ref=killscreen.com) *Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by* [Nick Sylvester](https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com)*.* ***Member's Only Video*** _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### SFPC's HTTPoetics reads the handmade web as memory work URL: https://www.killscreen.com/sfpcs-httpoetics-reads-the-handmade-web-as-memory-work/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:21.000Z The School for Poetic Computation published a lovely piece of maintenance on August 18: ["Sites for Remembering,"](https://sfpc.study/blog/sites-for-remembering?ref=killscreen.com) in which Tyler Yin and Kayla Drzewicki revisit the websites made during the third run of HTTPoetics, Todd Anderson's seven-week class on the poetics of raw HTML and CSS. [The announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcMWNJsDMt%5F/?ref=killscreen.com) carries the thesis in one line: in a culture of generative abundance, making a website by hand is "an act of love that goes against the grain." Gracielle Camara's [*iSpy World*](https://gracielle.neocities.org/iSpy%5FWorld/?ref=killscreen.com) remakes the I Spy books as a browser experience with a cursor-flashlight, straight out of the CD-ROM era of seek-and-find. Ethan Murakami's [*when you leave a window open*](https://ethanmurakami.neocities.org/httpoetics/wylawo/whenyouleaveawindowopen?ref=killscreen.com) narrates a toxic relationship through dialog boxes and pop-ups, where the only available "choice" is inaction, looping until the visitor finally closes the windows—branching structure used to model being stuck. AJ Toure's [*iophilia*](https://iophilia.neocities.org/cavesofillustriouswonder/?ref=killscreen.com) navigates cave scenes by collage; Azad Namazie's [*ham.mam*](https://sacredisplay.neocities.org/hammam/?ref=killscreen.com) opens bathhouse rooms with a ritual in each; Samiha Alam's [*do not stop the car*](https://s4m1h4.github.io/journey/?ref=killscreen.com) treats the site itself as a transitory space between memory containers. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/Screen_Shot_2026-06-02_at_9.44.18_PM.png) AJ Toure's [**iophilia*](https://iophilia.neocities.org/cavesofillustriouswonder/?ref=killscreen.com) The class read Laurel Schwulst's line of thinking about websites as rooms and houses, and it shows: these are places, not pages. The argument underneath is the one Killscreen keeps making about games—craft as resistance to the generated and the forgotten—and it has a long tail here; back in 2016 we covered [a website built to remember the pre-broadband internet](https://www.killscreen.com/new-website-celebrates-stories-inspired-by-pre-broadband-internet/). Websites rot faster than memories do. Hand-coding one anyway is the point. The handmade-versus-generated argument is the one Killscreen keeps making about games. The free newsletter is where we make it, weekly, by hand. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A video synthesizer is the control scheme in Hypnogenesis URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-video-synthesizer-is-the-control-scheme-in-hypnogenesis/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:22.000Z The equipment list for this year's Foundations of Digital Games conference in Copenhagen included a Bang & Olufsen CRT, and on it ran *Hypnogenesis*, a bullet hell that is also, literally, a video synthesizer. Allen Riley presented the game in the Games and Demos session, curated by Dooley Murphy, at the Royal Danish Academy on August 11, and [the reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcErrpfObyu/?ref=killscreen.com) catches what a scanline-fat tube does for it that no flat panel can. 0:00 /0:21 1× **Hypnogenesis* on the Bang & Olufsen CRT at FDG Copenhagen, from [Allen Riley’s reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcErrpfObyu/?ref=killscreen.com). Game state in *Hypnogenesis* directly modifies frame buffer values in a customized build of Andrei Jay's open-source Video Waaaves software, and the player's controls are wired to parameters of the synthesis itself, so flying the ship is simultaneously performing the image. Riley and collaborator Andy Wallace [frame the project](https://hypnogenesis.xyz/?ref=killscreen.com) as belonging to "an alternate history of games"—the one that would have followed from Nam June Paik dragging a magnet across a television, or a camera pointed at its own monitor until patterns bloom. Killscreen has been partial to that lineage for a while; in 2013 we covered [*Limits & Demonstrations*, an adventure game built as a Paik-inspired gallery show](https://www.killscreen.com/limits-demonstrations/). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/hypno.gif) The pairing is practice and research meeting on one table. Riley is a PhD candidate in Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz whose previous game, *Videofreak*, ran its feedback through circuit-bent video mixers and guitar pedals; Wallace is the New York designer behind *Particle Mace*, and the two met as board members of the arcade collective now called Arcade Commons. *Hypnogenesis* is built for arcade furniture—dual joysticks, standalone CRT—but a [Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4545390/Hypnogenesis/?ref=killscreen.com) is up, listed as coming soon, for those of us stuck with the wrong kind of screen. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/hypnogenesis-ss1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/hypnogenesis-ss2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/hypnogenesis-ss3.jpg) Feedback states of **Hypnogenesis*. Screenshots via [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4545390/Hypnogenesis/?ref=killscreen.com). Games that only fully exist on one particular television are Killscreen’s favorite kind of hardware problem. The free newsletter tracks play at the edges of the machine. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Jenna Caravello premiered Vimar at Edinburgh's film festival URL: https://www.killscreen.com/jenna-caravello-premiered-vimar-at-edinburghs-film-festival/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:25.000Z Two of the shortest minutes at the 79th Edinburgh International Film Festival belonged to a man having a violent daydream about a swan. *Vimar*, a 3D-animated short by Jenna Caravello, world-premiered in the festival's [Animation Shorts program](https://www.edfilmfest.org/film/vimar/?ref=killscreen.com)—EIFF ran August 13 through 19—and [the announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcG2J3NHEMP/?ref=killscreen.com) is worth reading for who made the film as much as for what it is. 0:00 /0:04 1× **Vimar* onscreen at the Edinburgh premiere, from [the announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcG2J3NHEMP/?ref=killscreen.com). Silent loop. Caravello teaches in UCLA's Design Media Arts department and serves as associate director of the UCLA Game Lab—[Killscreen toured the lab in 2021](https://www.killscreen.com/a-peek-inside-uclas-game-lab/)—and works across animation, performance, installation, and computer games. The films come out of the same well as the games: digital impermanence, avatar identity, the social afterlives of virtual spaces. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/2f4524_e0a77482b1264490ad434629230131d8-mv2--1-.jpeg) *Vimar* itself is not out yet—[Caravello's site](https://www.jennacaravello.com/vimar?ref=killscreen.com) lists it as coming soon—but the festival run is only starting: the [Portland Festival of Cinema, Animation & Technology](https://www.instagram.com/thepfcat/?ref=killscreen.com) has the film in this year's lineup. Caravello has crossed Killscreen's path before, too; the solo show *Easy Ultra Fine* ran at Killscreen Gallery in Los Angeles in 2024\. The through-line from that 2021 Game Lab visit still holds: the people building games at UCLA were never only building games. Now a film festival has agreed onstage. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/vimar-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/vimar-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/vimar-4.jpg) The program, the post-screening Q&A, and Edinburgh itself, from [Caravello’s carousel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcG2J3NHEMP/?ref=killscreen.com). Game-lab animators clearing film festivals is exactly the border traffic Killscreen exists to log. The free newsletter delivers each crossing as it happens. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Alice Wang aims a first-person camera at cosmic architecture URL: https://www.killscreen.com/alice-wang-aims-a-first-person-camera-at-cosmic-architecture/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:26.000Z Over the weekend of August 15 and 16, the New Museum's Videodrome program screened all four films to date of Alice Wang's *Pyramids and Parabolas* (2019–2026): the seven-minute original, *Touching the Cosmos*, *Space Analogs*, and this year's 24-minute *The Sky Is Not Real*. [The announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcEIlhmnPAT/?ref=killscreen.com) describes the series as building "perceptual frameworks through which the unknown may be encountered," which is a curatorial way of saying these films teach you how to stand somewhere impossible. ![Flyer for New Museum Videodrome: Films by Alice Wang, August 15-16, 2026](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/alice-wang-pp-1.jpg) The Videodrome program ran August 15–16 at the New Museum, from [the announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcEIlhmnPAT/?ref=killscreen.com). The method is the interesting part. *Space Analogs*, shot on 16mm and HD across six years of solitary journeys through Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Iceland, and the Arctic, treats terrestrial landscape as a stand-in for other worlds—[Wang's own notes](https://llllllllllllllllllllll.com/pyramids-and-parabolas-iii-space-analogs?ref=killscreen.com) call it "a structuralist meditation on alienation and exploration." Hexagonal basalt columns become an animated wave, then the molecular structure of MDMA, then serotonin, before the film slips underwater into Iceland's Silfra Fissure. Elsewhere in the series, Mayan pyramids and radio telescopes are framed as architecture for perceiving the cosmos, and a body-scan meditation prepares the viewer as an instrument. No controller anywhere in this one—just the first-person grammar that games taught the culture. The free newsletter tracks where else that camera turns up. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Travess Smalley's pixel rugs get a fluorescent monograph URL: https://www.killscreen.com/travess-smalleys-pixel-rugs-get-a-fluorescent-monograph/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:27.000Z *Pixel Rugs* is a book that glows. Travess Smalley's first full monograph, out now from Berlin publisher Vetro Editions, collects the artist's generative “rugs”—compositions built from thousands of colored pixels, layered, tiled, and compressed until familiar patterns break down into something luminous and hypnotic. The publisher printed it in Quadrifluox, an experimental five-color offset process using four fluorescent inks plus Pantone 812 C, so the 192 pages hit a neon palette standard CMYK can't reach—and react under UV light— via [the announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZaC8JaKcSD/?ref=killscreen.com) A woven rug and a bitmap are the same data structure—a grid of discrete cells, read row by row—and the Jacquard loom's punch cards are computing's direct ancestor. Smalley has been working that seam since releasing generative pieces on the Tezos platform hic et nunc in the spring of 2021 (the project continues on Teia), and the book traces its evolution through studio sketches and code snippets. Essays by Casey Reas, the Processing co-creator, and curator Anika Meier situate the work beside Harold Cohen's plotter drawings, the procedural maps of early roguelike games, and Op Art's optical buzz. That roguelike citation is the part I'd underline. A dungeon generator and a rug generator are both rule systems throwing patterned variation at a grid, and the pleasure of both is watching constraint produce surprise. We've argued before that low-resolution grids carry more feeling than photorealism—see [how low-fidelity pixels expose games' emotionless arms race](https://www.killscreen.com/games-graphical-fidelity-arms-race-dry-leaf/). Smalley's rugs make the case in fluorescent ink: the pixel isn't a limitation to escape but a thread to weave with. Stories that run from the loom to the bitmap and back are exactly the Killscreen beat. The free weekly newsletter brings you the next one. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### At Nxt Museum, the visitor is the puppeteer URL: https://www.killscreen.com/at-nxt-museum-the-visitor-is-the-puppeteer/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:28.000Z *Tales of Two*, the first interactive installation from the animation studio Yonk, opened July 2 at Nxt Museum in Amsterdam, and its interface is one of the oldest in the world: the puppet. Visitors steer the characters onscreen through simple gestures that, in the museum’s words, “gradually unfold into shared stories”—less an audience than co-creators, which has been the secret of puppetry all along. Yonk is the Hague studio of Niels van der Donk and Victoria Young, whose 3D animation for everyone from *The New York Times* to Nickelodeon runs on expressive characters and tactile, toylike worlds—“personality and imperfection over polish or automation,” as the museum’s introduction has it, much of it sculpted in VR. The studio’s stated ethos is openness: making 3D creation accessible enough that anyone can play. [The announcement reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZXomIOsZ0k/?ref=killscreen.com) gives a first peek at the world of *Tales of Two*, and the museum admits visitors on a regular ticket. Puppetry keeps turning up on this beat. Earlier this month doku\_zen [built Balming Tiger’s “Janjan” video out of stop-motion puppets](https://www.killscreen.com/doku%5Fzen-built-balming-tigers-janjan-video-out-of-stop-motion-puppets/), and a decade back we covered [a puppet show of Siberian fairy tales that became a videogame](https://www.killscreen.com/puppet-show-based-siberian-fairy-tales-becomes-videogame/). The line from marionette to game character has always been short; a rig is a rig, whether the strings are cotton or inverse kinematics. What *Tales of Two* adds is the museum handing those strings to whoever wanders in. Puppets, engines, museums that hand you the strings—if this is your kind of story, the free Radar newsletter finds three of them a week. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Cloud materials were eating Garden of Giants' framerate URL: https://www.killscreen.com/cloud-materials-were-eating-garden-of-giants-framerate/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:29.000Z The new move in *Garden of Giants* is an aerial attack, and its maker grades it the way you'd hope: "Tasteful, elegant, dignified—and feels great to press." The game is a dark-fantasy action project built solo in Godot by Dakota Pailes-Friedman, and [the reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcJja24RwSc/?ref=killscreen.com) showing the animation comes with something rarer than a combat clip—a full accounting of what it costs to make. 0:00 /0:07 1× The new aerial attack in **Garden of Giants*, from [Dakota Pailes-Friedman’s reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcJja24RwSc/?ref=killscreen.com). The old clouds, it turns out, were eating performance, so the sky got rebuilt. That is a performance budget narrated as an aesthetic decision. The clouds look the way they do because of what they no longer cost, and the fights can get crowded because the sky got cheap. The silhouette this game cuts—airborne, sword-first, giants in the murk—reads closer to From Software's *Otogi* than to anything on current shelves, a mystical strain of character action Killscreen has cared about since [*Bayonetta 2* made excess into a discipline](https://www.killscreen.com/hell-bent-leather-bayonetta-2/). Playtest builds are going out through the game's Discord, linked from [the project's account](https://www.instagram.com/garden%5Fof%5Fgiants/?ref=killscreen.com), which means you can feel the frame budget yourself. Development in public usually means screenshots; this is the less common kind, where the numbers come too, and watching a game get faster is part of the show. Most studios hide the ledger; solo developers publish it. The free newsletter follows games while they are still being argued into existence. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Christian Marclay's The Clock is a game of looking URL: https://www.killscreen.com/christian-marclay-the-clock-lacma/ Last updated: 2026-08-31T23:54:14.000Z Last week, my friend Alex Porter asked me if I wanted to stop by Christian Marclay’s [seminal 2010 film](https://www.killscreen.com/christian-marclays-clock-returning-nyc/) [*The Clock*](https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/christian-marclay-clock-0?ref=killscreen.com) at LACMA before it closed this past Sunday. I say “stop by” because you can’t really view the entire work in full, even if you wanted to, as it’s a full 24 hours long. Marclay [stitched together sequences](https://www.killscreen.com/david-lynch-supercut-standing-behind-you-right-now-smiling/) that show time in motion, in conflict, in dissolve, and in relief, from decades of films. The throughline: every sequence takes place at the exact time in the film as in real life. So when Lee Van Cleef checks his watch in *For a Few Dollars More* before his shootout, the time reads at 5:38 PM, exactly as it was on mine. (You can see an unofficial attempt at a full list [here](https://clockclock.ars.is/?ref=killscreen.com). It’s nuts.) It *is* a bit of a gimmick, admittedly. A bit of a durational free solo, a Herculean effort. It’s also a reminder of the power of curatorial labor at a time that so much of that now goes to AI systems (one can imagine the skepticism around a film like this being released today). But the feel is affecting as [time dilates](https://www.killscreen.com/pippin-barr-wants-you-feel-pain-longer-duration/) and you settle into a routine of one scene washing over another. “That’s what you’re supposed to do — let go and absorb it and feel like you’re part of this thing,” [Marclay has said.](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/15/arts/design/christian-marclay-the-clock-moma.html?ref=killscreen.com) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/193236pre_facdf24cbc43a22.jpeg) Christian Marclay, Detail from **The Clock*, 2010, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Steve Tisch through 2011 Collectors Committee, © Christian Marclay, courtesy White Cube, London and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA But I read *The Clock* slightly differently—it’s a fundamentally ludic experience in film, unlike others I’ve experienced. Typically, the “games in film” conversation [that Danny and I had the other week](https://www.killscreen.com/games-you-remember-that-never-existed-podcast/) focuses on two veins: adaptations or mechanics. Adaptations, you know well, but there are others such as *Edge of Tomorrow* or *Backrooms* that take the conventions or philosophies of games to apply them on-screen. Doug Liman’s *Edge of Tomorrow* (based on the 2004 Hiroshi Sakurazaka manga) [hurtles Tom Cruise from one death to another](https://www.killscreen.com/videogames-finally-experimenting-time-loop-groundhog-day/), mimicking the skill acquisition process for games, while *Backrooms* focuses on clipping through digital surfaces. *The Clock* is something altogether different, in that the behavior that emerges naturally is one of sightseeing. (“It’s like *Where’s Waldo*,” Alex joked.) Sometimes the many clocks, timepieces, stopwatches, and cuckoos obviously draw attention to themselves, but sometimes it’s more oblique. Roy Hobbs obliterating the clock at Wrigley Field with a home run is [*not subtle*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSqx2mTHTjM&ref=killscreen.com); two sequences from *The Man Who Wasn’t There* missed me entirely. Your mind is in tension between what the film asks you to do (look at the time) and what the limbic relationship to moving image requires (look at everything else). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/M2011_21_1-_3-EX8136-VW005.jpeg) Christian Marclay, Detail from **The Clock*, 2010, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, purchased with funds provided by Steve Tisch through 2011 Collectors Committee, © Christian Marclay, courtesy White Cube, London and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA The result is truly mesmerizing. Freed of the responsibility of paying attention to plot, mood, sound, or set, I found slipping into time dilation easy as each sequence bounded into the next, leaving me to decide exactly when I wanted to leave. But this runs counter to Marclay’s attention; it was a wholly lean-in experience that pulled me to interact, not to release. It’s a feeling typically reserved for games where my sense of space can also wander, but unlike any I’ve had in a theatre. By 5:40, *Napoleon Dynamite* cued, and I was ready to grab dinner, knowing it would be a while before I spent that much time with a watch face again. ### Delivery routes carried Ayoung Kim onto TIME100 AI URL: https://www.killscreen.com/delivery-routes-carried-ayoung-kim-onto-time100-ai/ Last updated: 2026-10-09T23:54:16.000Z During the pandemic, Ayoung Kim rode along with a courier in Seoul and watched an app tell a grown woman where to be, how fast, in what order, all day. "I wanted to show the individual rider's dependency on the governance of the app," Kim told TIME, "how this one-way protocol, disciplined communication, urges an individual human being to be optimized for speed and productivity." That ride became *Delivery Dancer*, and *Delivery Dancer* is a large part of why Kim [was just named to the TIME100 AI 2026 list](https://time.com/collection/time100-ai/2026/ayoung-kim/?ref=killscreen.com), in the Thinkers category, [announced at the end of August](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcnYPb1D%5F2Y/?ref=killscreen.com). 0:00 /0:36 1× The opening of the **Delivery Dancer’s Sphere* (2022) trailer, shown silent on loop—[watch the full trailer with sound on Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/747912388?ref=killscreen.com). Video: Ayoung Kim The series follows Ernst Mo—an anagram of "monster"—a rider for a delivery platform run by a master algorithm called Dancemaster, and it renders Ernst Mo’s Seoul in the visual language of a racing game: game-engine streets, waypoint geometry, a city experienced as a route queue. It has moved fast through the institutions, with a MoMA PS1 show [in the fall of 2025](https://www.momaps1.org/en/programs/556-ayoung-kim?ref=killscreen.com), the LG Guggenheim Award, and covers of both Frieze and Artforum. "I have always wanted to comment on the impact of technology in our society by using it, by appropriating it," Kim says. You can find that circularity suspect or you can find it honest; the work bets that fluency beats purity. We touched this nerve from another angle in March, asking whether [competition dance trained us to perform for algorithms](https://www.killscreen.com/maya-man-starquest-ai-dance-performance/). Kim's answer is grimmer: the performance was never optional—it's the shift you clock into. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/ayoung-kim-dds-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/ayoung-kim-dds-4.jpg) The city as route queue: stills from the **Delivery Dancer’s Sphere* trailer. Images: Ayoung Kim Artists using game engines to say real things—that’s the intersection Killscreen was built for. The free newsletter delivers more of it. [Sign up free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A dead PS3 is the excavation site in Kara Güt's YLOD URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-dead-ps3-is-the-excavation-site-in-kara-guts-ylod/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:29.000Z The Yellow Light of Death is the blinking amber signal that a PlayStation 3 has died. Kara Güt's *YLOD \[video for a bricked ps3\]*—five and a half minutes, single channel, 2025—imagines what stays inside: a faulty character creation menu still haunting the console's interior, cycling glitched skins and corrupted interface residue long after play has ended. The video screened June 12–25 as the 130th edition of VRAL, Matteo Bittanti's online program of machinima and game video, [with an introduction and interview](https://www.gamescenes.org/event-kara-gut-june-12-25-2026-online/?ref=killscreen.com); Güt shared the news in [a post announcing the screening](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZgFBSOp2Zg/?ref=killscreen.com). The tool is the story. The work was made with Lance McDonald's *Dark Souls* debug menu mod, a reverse-engineered restoration of developer tools that FromSoftware stripped from the shipped game. That makes the method archaeological twice over: excavated tools, aimed at excavated hardware. Bittanti's program note calls the result “an excavation of what a game system retains” after the conditions of play collapse—not glitch aesthetics, and not repair-video documentation either. Güt has been working this vein for a decade, treating game architecture as a diagnostic system for intimacy: *Intimacy Mod* staged encounters between avatars through a *Skyrim* companionship mod, *Welcome to My Desert Nexus* was a three-act play performed live inside *Red Dead Online*, and *Lurker1* was cut from a Twitch archive whose performer and spectator accounts have both since been deactivated. Dead platforms are the through-line, and it's one we've followed too—*Visual Out* made a whole game of [embracing the glitches of a dying computer](https://www.killscreen.com/visual-asks-embrace-glitches-dying-computer/). *YLOD* also showed at No Place Gallery in Columbus, Ohio, and screened at Go Short in Nijmegen this April, where Güt was named Filmmaker in Focus. The console is bricked; the work runs fine. Machinima, mods, and what games leave behind when they die—Killscreen has worked this beat since 2010\. The weekly newsletter is free. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Sixteen solo-dev projects closed Sybil's second Berlin arc URL: https://www.killscreen.com/sixteen-solo-dev-projects-closed-sybils-second-berlin-arc/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:30.000Z Sybil calls itself a studio for the research, development, and distribution of “weird gaming,” and its Kreuzberg space has quietly become one of the more interesting rooms in Berlin—open around the clock to artists making games that fit neither the industry nor the white cube. In June, the studio's second six-month residency cycle closed with *A WORLD of ONE's OWN (the solo-dev arc)*, a collective showcase of sixteen projects, curated and designed by Beth von Undall. [The showcase announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZhM-8wCEVp/?ref=killscreen.com) doubles as a census of who is making games alone right now, and it's a list worth saving. The premise of the arc was the solo dev as a mythological figure. [Sybil's open call](https://www.sybil.gg/?ref=killscreen.com) argued that being a solo dev “has more to do with the autonomy of one's desire to create worlds” than with any claim to authorship or independence—a third path branching off the long-standing indie/AAA dichotomy. The showcase title runs the argument through Virginia Woolf: a room of one's own, upgraded to a whole world. The residents include artists we'll be watching—Jira Duguid, [Harriet Davey](https://www.killscreen.com/harriet-daveys-glossy-aliens-reject-gamings-binary-world/), [Joaquina Salgado](https://www.joaquinasalgado.com/?utm%5Fsource=ig&utm%5Fmedium=social&utm%5Fcontent=link%5Fin%5Fbio&fbclid=PAcGRvZgJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZA85MzY2MTk3NDMzOTI0NTkAAafd-F5NvHwAaPoq6GIf2GC16Imapt9zMOdzFyzfxOzsXxZ21im7yPFr2Chlpw%5Faem%5FtQSQS-MD8KDrSX%5FFbkxLHA)—alongside a longer roster the studio has hosted since 2025, from Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley to Trevor Paglen. That mix is the point. Killscreen has been tracking the space between contemporary art and game development since [the “New Weird” in videogames](https://www.killscreen.com/new-weird-videogames/), and Sybil is the first institution I've seen build its whole operating model on that borderland rather than visiting it. Founded in 2025, run by Alex Declino, Beth von Undall, and Stefan Cantante, it's an institution-shaped answer to a question most residencies haven't asked yet: what does support look like when one person is the whole studio? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/sybil-a-world-of-ones-own-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/sybil-a-world-of-ones-own-3.jpg) Views from **A WORLD of ONE’s OWN (the solo-dev arc)* at Sybil, Berlin. Images via [the showcase announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZhM-8wCEVp/?ref=killscreen.com). If a Berlin residency for solo game devs reads as news to you, you’re our kind of reader. The free Killscreen newsletter tracks this scene every week. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Timur Si-Qin scanned an Amazon ecosystem into sculpture URL: https://www.killscreen.com/timur-si-qin-scanned-an-amazon-ecosystem-into-sculpture/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:31.000Z Timur Si-Qin returns to the Peruvian Amazon every year. On the most recent trip, one encounter—a Renaco tree and the pond it stands in, in the Ucayali region—became *Mariposita*, the installation Société brought to Art Basel Unlimited this June: roots, insects, water, plant matter, and reflected light translated into a sculptural environment at the scale of the living original, 4.4 by 4.2 meters across and 2.2 meters high. [The gallery's announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZm8pbFAXqT/?ref=killscreen.com) put the method plainly: to mirror is to name, and to name is an act of devotion. The work showed June 16–21, realized with Magician Space and the support of the Sigg Art Foundation. What interests me is the pipeline. Si-Qin works almost entirely digitally, building sculpture out of photogrammetry—photographs from many angles resolved by software into three-dimensional form—the same scanning technique that puts photoreal rock faces and forest floors into every big-budget open world. “The ecosystem became more than a subject; it became a kind of guide,” Si-Qin said in [an interview with Whitewall](https://whitewall.art/art/timur-si-qin-interview-mariposita/?ref=killscreen.com) during the fair. Games mostly use these tools to turn nature into backdrop. *Mariposita* points them the other way, treating technology as an extended expression of the species—no more opposed to nature, Si-Qin argues, than a seashell is opposed to the sea. Si-Qin has spent years arguing that Western culture lost nature at the center of its spirituality, and the tree sculptures are attempts to rekindle it. It's the question David OReilly's *Everything* asked from inside a game engine, back when we covered [an open-universe game about the nature of being](https://www.killscreen.com/everything-an-open-universe-game-about-the-nature-of-being/). Rendering the living world in full detail can be extraction, or it can be attention. *Mariposita* bets on attention. Killscreen covers the places where games’ tools turn up everywhere else—art fairs included. The weekly newsletter is free, and it’s the best way to follow along. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### PAMM’s first digital art commissions go to 21 artists URL: https://www.killscreen.com/pamms-first-digital-art-commissions-go-to-21-artists/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:32.000Z Pérez Art Museum Miami [named the 21 recipients](https://www.pamm.org/en/press/perez-art-museum-miami-announces-21-recipients-of-inaugural-open-call-for-digital-art-commissions/?ref=killscreen.com) of its inaugural digital art commissions in June—the museum’s first public open call for artworks, which drew more than 750 submissions from 50 countries. Each artist gets between $2,500 and $15,000 plus production support to realize new work by 2027, with backing from the Knight Foundation, and the call was scoped to South Florida, Latin America, the Caribbean and the African Diaspora: a deliberately non-default map of who gets an institutional digital commission. A key feature is how much gaming has worked its way into the museum. Nestor Siré’s *NULL PRODUCT* series documents gaming computers assembled under material scarcity across Latin America and the Caribbean, “questioning who gets to define digital innovation,” per the museum. Juan Covelli—whose playable monument to Colombia’s 2021 national strike, *Los Caídos*, began as a Somerset House commission—is on the list. So is Malitzin Cortés (CNDSD), the Mexico City artist whose [announcement post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZXlXDhkYhU/?ref=killscreen.com) put this one on our radar. Across the 21, the commissions span video games, 3D models, net art, CGI film, AI-driven animation, VR and generative video sculpture; the cohort is 43 percent women and 24 percent Haitian or Haitian-diaspora artists. The jury—Casey Baron, Christopher Cozier, Gabriela Munguía, Samantha Ozer and Monica Uszerowicz—picked from a field the museum describes as running “from Cuba to Kenya, Martinique to Ghana.” Institutions making room for game-native work is a thread we keep pulling: in 2021 we talked to [Will Robertson and Alfredo Salazar-Caro](https://www.killscreen.com/will-robertson-and-alfredo-salazar-caro/) about building a museum inside VR, and this month we watched [four decades of consoles move into the museum](https://www.killscreen.com/achiampong-the-gaming-room/). The commissioned works land by 2027; the roster is worth mining now. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/pamm-maksaens-denis-bosou.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/pamm-unkle-luc-miami-2006.png) Left: Maksaens Denis, **BOSOU*, 2021\. Right: still from Unkle Luc, **MIAMI 2006*, 2025\. Courtesy of Pérez Art Museum Miami. Killscreen tracks the institutions finally making room for game-native art—and the artists getting there first. The free Radar newsletter keeps the map current. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Andrew Thomas Huang made an art game at Rhizome's 7x7 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/andrew-thomas-huang-made-an-art-game-at-rhizomes-7x7/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:32.000Z In Chinese mythology the Shen is a gigantic bivalve, sometimes an aquatic dragon, that exhales vapor and builds mirage cities on the horizon; [per Rhizome's writeup](https://rhizome.org/editorial/2026/jun/12/Andrew-Thomas-Huang-Stephanie-Zhang/?ref=killscreen.com), the everyday modern Chinese word for optical illusion still descends from the creature. That is the deity at the center of the game [Andrew Thomas Huang](https://www.killscreen.com/andrew-thomas-huang/) announced in [a July reel](https://www.instagram.com/reels/DYkJ517gVwc/?ref=killscreen.com): “a mythopoetic sci-fi art game uncovering the memoirs of a Chinese mollusk deity by feeding a far future slime mold intelligence.” 0:00 /0:35 1× The announcement reel. Video: Andrew Thomas Huang on Instagram The project came out of [7x7](https://rhizome.org/editorial/7x7-2026/?ref=killscreen.com), Rhizome's art-and-tech conference at the New Museum in May, which paired the Grammy-nominated director (collaborator to Björk, FKA twigs and Perfume Genius, and the creative director behind Björk Digital) with Stephanie Zhang, an artist-scientist who 3D-bioprints living sculptures and engineers cuttlefish-inspired photonic skins. The shared obsession was nonhuman intelligence: cuttlefish camouflage became the story map, and slime mold (the organism that famously re-derived Tokyo's rail network in a 2010 study) became the memory system, a network 500 million years in the future in which, as the collaborators put it, “the organism is its memories.” Sebastien Zany wrote the code, simulating a quarter-million slime mold entities on simple rules and then treating the result as a found object rather than an asset: “I cannot really control it that well. It felt more like... sculpting this thing together.” The cuttlefish skin runs on real iridescence data measured in a materials lab by Siddharth Doshi. The reel promises a release soon, with support from Onassis ONX and Fuser. Slime mold already has form as an infrastructure planner. Killscreen once covered a [historical sim about fixing New York's subway](https://www.killscreen.com/try-fix-nycs-subway-system-new-historical-simulation-game/), the human-committee version of the same problem. Huang's game hands the network the harder job: archiving a civilization's ghosts. When film directors, bioartists and coders make a game together, Killscreen is usually the only outlet in the room. The free newsletter catches what the art world and the games press both miss. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### The Op reissues two Weast Coast games in smaller boxes URL: https://www.killscreen.com/the-op-reissues-two-weast-coast-games-in-smaller-boxes/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:34.000Z The Op—the mass-market wing of USAopoly, whose catalog is mostly licensed editions of things you already know—[announced a partnership](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbD5Tu5DPQY/?ref=killscreen.com) with the two-person-scale studio Weast Coast Games this summer, reissuing two of its duelers in cheaper, more portable editions: *Snakes of Wrath*, a tile-laying game, and *Desperate Oasis*, a spatial lane battler. Both are in stores now, with wider distribution promised later this year; The Op [lists](https://theop.games/products/desperate-oasis?ref=killscreen.com) *Desperate Oasis* at $10.95, and the pair was [first announced in February](https://toybook.com/the-op-games-2026-line-news/?ref=killscreen.com) ahead of New York Toy Fair with launches at Walmart. What interests me is what a reissue like this keeps and what it sheds. Weast Coast's original *Snakes of Wrath* is a deliberate object: 90 two-sided tiles, wooden privacy racks, a custom canvas snake sack, and a promise that the game grows into "[a handsome art piece on your table](https://weastcoast.games/products/snakes-of-wrath?ref=killscreen.com)" as the tiled ouroboros tangles. The Op edition compresses that identity into a small red box whose best feature is the studio's box copy, which survived intact: "Play a friend, make an enemy." The timing makes the bet legible. As of this writing, the studio's own edition of *Snakes of Wrath* is out of stock while Weast Coast waits on a factory shipment—so the mass edition is briefly the only way to get the game at all. A boutique object becomes a system in a smaller box, and we find out whether the system alone was the point. It is the exact inverse of the question we asked in April, when we wondered [why board games deserve better furniture](https://www.killscreen.com/armani-casa-borgonuovo-games-table-furniture-design-board-games/). Sometimes they deserve a backpack instead. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/desperate-oasis-box-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/desperate-oasis-cards-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/desperate-oasis-play.jpg) The Op’s edition of **Desperate Oasis*. Images via [The Op Games](https://theop.games/products/desperate-oasis?ref=killscreen.com). Killscreen covers tabletop the way we cover everything else: as design worth arguing about. The free newsletter sets the table weekly. [Pull up a chair, free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### PROFITS 2167's train dystopia enters Early Access URL: https://www.killscreen.com/profits-2167s-train-dystopia-enters-early-access/ Last updated: 2026-10-01T21:04:32.000Z The full title is *PROFITS 2167: Planetary Resource Optimization & Freight Infrastructure Technician Simulator*, which is the joke already working. The short version: an arcade train game that crosses tower defense with incremental progression, out in [Early Access on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4534000/PROFITS%5F2167%5FPlanetary%5FResource%5FOptimization%5F%5FFreight%5FInfrastructure%5FTechnician%5FSimulator/?ref=killscreen.com) as of August 17, launched as part of the [Ukrainian Games Festival](https://mezha.ua/en/news/profits-2167-released-on-steam-314294/?ref=killscreen.com). You drive the train yourself—traction and braking are manual—while hauling ore out of an asteroid operation, fending off the local fauna, and reinvesting every load into infrastructure that makes the next run louder and more demanding. It's wrapped in Y2K techno and the cheerful cruelty of corporate self-talk. By 2167, the fiction goes, billions of humans sit in corporate-managed stasis, their biological processing power rented out as distributed compute, and the acronym LLM has been rewritten as "Labor Liquidation Machines." 0:00 /0:07 1× Early Access ships a handcrafted five-level campaign of about four hours for $6.99, with the full release planned for 2027\. For the record: the Steam page of this particular AI satire carries no AI-generated-content disclosure of its own. The developer is Simple Software Solutions; the publisher is Marevo Collective, the studio behind the cult retro horror [*No One Lives Under the Lighthouse*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1254370/No%5Fone%5Flives%5Funder%5Fthe%5Flighthouse%5FDirectors%5Fcut/?ref=killscreen.com)—a pedigree that explains the confidence of the tonal swerve from lighthouse dread to middle-management hell. Workplace satire built out of bureaucratic verbs has a long lineage in games: after *Papers, Please*, Lucas Pope [turned a bureaucratic eye toward junk mail](https://www.killscreen.com/lucas-pope-creator-papers-please-turns-his-bureaucratic-attention-junk-mail/), and *PROFITS 2167* reads like that tradition sped up to techno tempo: the spreadsheet as survival horror, the quarterly target as boss fight. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/profits-s1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/profits-s2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/profits-s3.jpg) **PROFITS 2167*. Screenshots: Simple Software Solutions / Marevo Collective Nobody else covers the games that treat the org chart as a horror setting. The free Killscreen newsletter delivers them with no middle management attached. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Playing Models brings its AI symposium to SCI-Arc URL: https://www.killscreen.com/playing-models-brings-its-ai-symposium-to-sci-arc/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:35.000Z Playing Models, the annual symposium wedged into the overlap of artificial intelligence, architecture, and storytelling, holds its fifth edition at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles on [September 18](https://www.playingmodels.com/?ref=killscreen.com). It is free to attend, and the whole day streams live on YouTube, which has quietly become the symposium's second venue. The series started in 2022 as a collaboration between the University of Florida and the Chair of Digital Architectonics at ETH Zurich and has since grown into a four-school affair with Carnegie Mellon and Lawrence Technological University attached. [The announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbLd%5FwwoztC/?ref=killscreen.com) came from organizers Karla Saldaña Ochoa, Adil Bokhari, Lee-Su Huang, Agostino Nickl, and Wei-Chun Cheng, and the day is built as three panels: Models for Thinking, Models for Seeing, Models for Making. Architecture has spent a decade drifting into game engines, and this is the room where that drift gets theorized. The participant list includes Damjan Jovanovic and Lidija Kljakovic of Studio Lifeforms, SCI-Arc faculty who build playable software as architectural practice, alongside Elena Manferdini, Winka Dubbeldam, and Casey Rehm. When [Bjarke Ingels shipped an actual videogame in 2016](https://www.killscreen.com/bjarke-ingels-new-game-everything-good-bad-architecture/), we called it everything good and bad about that architecture. A decade on, the architects are not outsourcing the question anymore—they run the symposium themselves. There is also a deadline worth flagging: an [open call for image submissions](https://www.playingmodels.com/?ref=killscreen.com)—AI-generated images that resist default aesthetics, computational drawing experiments, work that stretches what architecture can show—closes August 31\. Selected pieces hang at the symposium, and the winner gets up to $1,000 toward airfare and lodging. One week left. Games talking to architecture is half of why Killscreen exists. The free newsletter tracks these crossings weekly—the symposiums, the engines, and the people moving between them. [Follow the crossings, free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A broken artificial sun rations the light in DUSKDOG URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-broken-artificial-sun-rations-the-light-in-duskdog/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:36.000Z *DUSKDOG* is an exploration-survival game set on a frozen planet lit by a failing artificial sun, and its developer ExoDive has been marketing it with a real-estate question. [The reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZa7twYpG3P/?ref=killscreen.com)—40,000 likes and climbing, scored to Boards of Canada's "Heard From Telegraph Lines"—shows one desolate concrete settlement in the ice and asks: would you live in this place? 0:00 /0:14 1× ExoDive’s June reel, muted here—[watch it with the Boards of Canada track on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZa7twYpG3P/?ref=killscreen.com). The premise, per [the Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4804660/DUSKDOG/?ref=killscreen.com): humanity has lived underground for generations, and you play Lika, who volunteered to walk the surface. The artificial sun lights a shrinking circle, warmth lasts minutes, and you reactivate dead antennas to push the light further out. If the cold takes you, you wake back at shelter, empty-handed. Someone named Cisne—the one you love—waits below, the only tether. The comments have turned into a geography seminar. Readers keep filing the game's brutalist ice fields next to real places—Norilsk came up, and so did Murino, the St. Petersburg suburb that is Russian shorthand for bleak mass housing—alongside the expected lineage of *SIGNALIS*, *NieR: Automata*, and *Shadow of the Colossus*, which ExoDive says is "definitely in our hearts." The sharpest thread was technical: told the animation looked better than an Unreal Engine 5 game, the studio answered that it *is* UE5\. All that PS1 dither and low-poly frost is a deliberate costume over the most photorealism-capable engine in the business, which feels like the right joke for a game about an artificial sun. No release date yet; a demo is promised, and the wishlist is open. We have been returning to [landscapes of memory](https://www.killscreen.com/a-landscape-of-memory-returning-to-shadow-of-the-colossus/) since at least 2016\. This one is pre-ruined, and I mean that as a compliment. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/duskdog-ss2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/duskdog-ss3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/duskdog-ss4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/duskdog-header-1.jpg) Screenshots via [ExoDive on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4804660/DUSKDOG/?ref=killscreen.com). Half of this story was buried in a comment thread. Reading them is the job. The free Killscreen newsletter delivers what we dig up, weekly. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Anat Efrati's point-and-click world looks molded by hand URL: https://www.killscreen.com/anat-efratis-point-and-click-world-looks-molded-by-hand/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:37.000Z "A little glimpse into a point-and-click world I've been working on." That is the whole caption on [the reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/Da0Ag9GsgCc/?ref=killscreen.com) Anat Efrati posted in July, and the glimpse does the rest: heavy, painterly 3D figures that look pinched out of clay and left slightly wet, plus dialogue with a very particular deadpan. One character announces, "I was told my singing resembles a baby goat. Oh yes please!" Another line sits onscreen like a thesis: "it is hard for me to understand why this is happening to me." 0:00 /0:33 1× The announcement reel, via [Anat Efrati on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/Da0Ag9GsgCc/?ref=killscreen.com). Sound on. Efrati is a Tel Aviv-based illustrator and animation director [represented by Hornet](https://www.hellohornet.com/directors/anat-efrati?ref=killscreen.com), with a body of commercial and personal animation that already trades in this handmade-digital register—stop-motion's warmth without the armatures. The game is unnamed and unreleased. The reel's hashtags put Blender and 3D animation in the pipeline; a direct question in the thread about which engine is underneath went unanswered. What sold me is the comment section, which reads like a syllabus nobody planned: *Hylics*, Goya, the gothic novel *Melmoth the Wanderer*, Squinky's *Dominique Pamplemousse*, Jack Stauber, Boards of Canada. That spread—claymation games, Romantic painting, stop-motion pop surrealism—maps exactly the territory the work occupies. When the *Hylics* comparison landed, Efrati called it the best compliment ever, which tells you the reference points are load-bearing. We have argued since [Mason Lindroth's clay experiments](https://www.killscreen.com/mason-lindroths-new-game-celebrates-malleability-his-beloved-clay/) that malleable-looking worlds change how players treat them: you poke what looks poke-able. No title, no date, no engine confirmed. Just a world that looks like it would take a fingerprint. Watching this one closely. Killscreen exists for work like this—games in conversation with painting, puppetry, and pop animation. The free newsletter brings you the next one before the algorithm does. [Get there first, free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### It Goes Wrong, Fast: What to Play, August 28 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/it-goes-wrong-fast-what-to-play-august-28/ Last updated: 2026-08-29T00:45:54.000Z Thank you for tuning in and not rewatching the GTA VI trailer, over and over and over again. **First, though: the recording is up.** Cameron Granger joined us for Gaming Club on Tuesday to talk about *sidechain*, his ten-minute warehouse party at the end of the world: why the timer exists, where the Vietnam vet and the pigeon came from, and the question he leaves you with: could we just break the clock entirely? Forty-seven minutes, and it's yours as a member. [Watch it here](https://killscreen.com/gaming-club-sidechain-cameron-granger/?ref=killscreen.com). _This post is for subscribers on the Helping Hand and Trustee tiers only._ ### Every bench in Helsinki Online sits where it really is URL: https://www.killscreen.com/every-bench-in-helsinki-online-sits-where-it-really-is/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:37.000Z "I actually saw this in a dream," the caption says, over [a reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcMAmDClMxW/?ref=killscreen.com) of a bathtub flying above Helsinki, heat distortion shimmering off its rim. That's the development philosophy of *Helsinki Online* in one image: Pietari Niinimäki, the game's solo developer, describes the project as a vehicle for building whatever idea arrives and sharing it immediately. Underneath the absurdism is a work of obsessive civic fidelity. [*Helsinki Online*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4958560/Helsinki%5FOnline/?ref=killscreen.com) recreates the real city as an open-world hangout—[every tree, bench, bin, and path exactly where it really is](https://www.killscreen.com/lets-talk-about-rosa-var-attre-impossible-romance-witcher-3/), by the developer's own accounting. You roam on foot, behind the wheel, or in the air, as a human or as a goose, and the multiplayer ambitions run to building a sauna ferry with friends and sailing the archipelago. It's wishlistable now, with a Steam release date currently set for February 2027\. The pleasure on offer is recognition: this is a game whose whole appeal, for its home audience, is that the streets are their streets. It's a big ask for a solo developer at the smallest possible scale—one person, one city, one lost sale at a time. The civic-specificity genre is having a moment—we just covered [Mexico City's street legends rendered as game characters](https://www.killscreen.com/mexico-city-street-legends-turn-up-as-low-poly-game-skins/)—and Helsinki's version now doubles as a test case for how much process talk an audience wants with its play. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/helsinki-s1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/helsinki-s2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/helsinki-s3.jpg) **Helsinki Online*. Screenshots: Pietari Niinimäki Games built out of real places—street corners, benches, whole cities—are a standing Killscreen beat. The free newsletter brings the next one to you. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### When the pixels cut away, Tenebris Somnia goes live-action URL: https://www.killscreen.com/when-the-pixels-cut-away-tenebris-somnia-goes-live-action/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:39.000Z *Tenebris Somnia* is a survival horror adventure in the 8- and 16-bit idiom—*Silent Hill* and *Resident Evil* pacing flattened into retro 2D—until it reaches a key moment and cuts to live action: real actors, practical effects, shot by a professional film crew in Argentina. The people involved explain the confidence. It's directed by Andrés Borghi, the visual effects artist behind *When Evil Lurks,* and developed with Saibot Studios of Buenos Aires. You play Julia, a young Argentine woman trapped in a nightmare of monsters, puzzles, and dwindling consumables. The date is now firm: October 16, on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2121510/Tenebris%5FSomnia/?ref=killscreen.com), PlayStation 4 and 5, Switch and Switch 2, and Xbox Series, published by New Blood Interactive. The project's producer is Airdorf, creator of the lo-fi horror landmark *FAITH*, who in [the announcement reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dbqbg-1u43D/?ref=killscreen.com) calls the approach "FMV-elevated" and the game "HAND-CRAFTED"—capitals theirs. The claim holds up on inspection: the production leans on practical effects throughout, and the Steam page carries no AI-generated-content disclosure. What I like here is the rehabilitation project. FMV spent decades as games' most ridiculed format, the acronym itself shorthand for *Night Trap* camp, and its revivals have mostly traded on that irony. *Tenebris Somnia* plays it straight instead: film as the privileged register. We were tracking this instinct back when [an FMV game shot inside a real decommissioned nuclear bunker](https://www.killscreen.com/upcoming-fmv-game-lets-explore-real-decommissioned-nuclear-bunker/); a decade on, the format's best argument is again that the camera can go where the sprite cannot. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/tenebris-s2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/tenebris-s3.jpg) **Tenebris Somnia*. Screenshots: Saibot Studios / New Blood Interactive Where film and games trade techniques is exactly the intersection Killscreen exists for. The free newsletter tracks it weekly. [Track it with us ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### An architecture studio now works inside game space URL: https://www.killscreen.com/an-architecture-studio-now-works-inside-game-space/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:39.000Z Sandra Youkhana and Luke Caspar Pearson have spent a decade arguing that videogames are not a presentation format for architecture but a place where architecture gets built. Their London practice You+Pea now makes that case inside the discipline’s house organ: “An Architecture Studio in Game Space,” an essay for *Architectural Design*’s issue *Staged: Architecture for Performance, Exhibition and Fiction*, edited by Neil Spiller and Ashley Simone. [Announcing the piece](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZK-Up2CGWK/?ref=killscreen.com), the pair say it outlines “new forms of practice that emerge at the intersection of architecture and game design” and argues that game worlds let architecture reach audiences buildings never will. The two run the Videogame Urbanism studio at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where students design playable cities rather than paper ones, and their own projects have long worked this seam. Their *London Developers Toolkit* turned the city’s speculative property boom into a garish, playable send-up of luxury towers, and their book *Videogame Atlas* subjected game worlds to the kind of mapping and analysis usually reserved for real cities. ![Installation view of You+Pea’s London Developers Toolkit](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/you-pea-london-developers-toolkit.jpg) **London Developers Toolkit* by You+Pea. Courtesy of the artists. The *Staged* issue places the studio alongside installations, entertainment architecture, narrative projects and memorial tombs—architectural thinking working every venue except the building site. Architects drifting gameward is a long-running Killscreen story; we had our doubts when [Bjarke Ingels made a game](https://www.killscreen.com/bjarke-ingels-new-game-everything-good-bad-architecture/) back in 2016\. You+Pea’s version is the stronger claim: not architecture rendered in a game engine as a preview of the real thing, but game space as the site itself—buildable, occupiable, and with a public already living in it. The audience for cities is in game worlds now, and this studio moved to meet it. Games talking to architecture, and architecture answering back—that crossing is Killscreen’s whole beat. The free Radar newsletter delivers it to your inbox. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### An evening of alt-ctrl games closed a Berlin summer school URL: https://www.killscreen.com/an-evening-of-alt-ctrl-games-closed-a-berlin-summer-school/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:43.000Z On July 31, the fifth floor of ACUD Kunst Haus in Berlin filled up with games you play by grabbing something that was soldered the week before. Press Play! was the closing exhibition of a monthlong summer program at [School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe](https://www.schoolofma.org/news/press-play-exhibition?ref=killscreen.com), Rachel Uwa's art-and-technology school, and the premise is the thing I keep turning over: the alternative controller taught as coursework, not stumbled into at a game jam. [The announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbLcqiuF4yh/?ref=killscreen.com) lists works from eight students—Alexa Barboza, Alicia García Muñoz, Bertha Elena Artero Ponce, Didre Schutte, Némo Quehen, Nicholas Markus, Selma Laura Köran, and Simon Jaramillo Vallejo—but the faculty list is telling. Media artist [Niklas Roy](https://www.instagram.com/royrobotiks/?ref=killscreen.com), whose machines have been charming Berlin for two decades, taught alongside artist [Chloé Desmoineaux](https://www.instagram.com/chloemoineau/?ref=killscreen.com), electronics artist [Kati Hyyppä](https://katihyyppa.com/?ref=killscreen.com), Berlin games-scene fixture [Lorenzo Pilia](https://www.instagram.com/lorenzopiliax/?ref=killscreen.com), [Lislis](http://lislis.xyz/?ref=killscreen.com), and producer [kidkanevil](https://www.instagram.com/kidkanevil/?ref=killscreen.com) covering sound for games. That is a working scene donating its people to a classroom. This is the part that interests me. With the exception of Brooklyn's Wonderville, Alt-ctrl games have always been festival creatures—built for one weekend, played by whoever queued. We covered [a game controlled by a real floppy disk](https://www.killscreen.com/game-uses-real-floppy-disk-controller/) back in 2016, and just this month [an A MAZE award](https://www.killscreen.com/otherworlds-won-a-mazes-human-human-machine-award/) reminded me how much of this practice still routes through Berlin. A school program is different infrastructure: it means the form gets a pipeline, a syllabus, and a cohort of eight new people every summer who think a controller is something you make. The show ran one evening, July 31, and it has passed. The cohort is the story anyway. Watch the names. ![Purple exhibition flyer reading Press Play! An evening of Alt+Ctrl games](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/school-of-machines-press-play-poster.jpg) The exhibition flyer. Image via [School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe](https://www.schoolofma.org/news/press-play-exhibition?ref=killscreen.com). Killscreen has covered games you play with your hands, your feet, and one real floppy disk since 2010\. The free newsletter is where the next controller-shaped idea shows up first. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Lou Fauroux's WhatRemains, Genesis screens at MUTEK Forum URL: https://www.killscreen.com/lou-fauroux-whatremains-genesis-screens-at-mutek-forum/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:44.000Z It is 2048, Google owns most of the planet, and death has finally been productized. In *WhatRemains, Genesis*, French filmmaker [Lou Fauroux](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/lou-faroux/) imagines digital immortality software hoarded by an elite of the rich and powerful until hackers seize the source code and hand it to everyone else. The 19-minute film screens Wednesday, August 26 at [MUTEK Forum](https://forum.mutek.org/en/shows/2026/whatremains-genesis-screening-and-artist-q-a-with-lou-fauroux-presented-by-leuguelionne?ref=killscreen.com) in Montreal, with an artist Q&A to follow. Fauroux is a visual artist, filmmaker, and DJ who came to moving image sideways — through a community of porn producers and performers encountered in Los Angeles, and before that through a childhood of MTV spectacle, pirated American series, and Tumblr rabbit holes. Fauroux self-describes as "a true product of bedroom culture," and that is exactly the sensibility the film runs on: the internet's found materials, reassembled into queer mythology. Since premiering at Cinéma du Réel in 2023, the film has traveled to festivals in Thailand, Spain, and New York; Fauroux [announced the Montreal stop](https://www.instagram.com/p/Da-bsmWnHWg/?ref=killscreen.com) in July. Here is why this one is ours: Fauroux treats platforms the way game artists treat engines, as material with politics baked in. Digital immortality is, after all, a respawn fantasy, and the film asks who gets the extra lives. The screening, presented by L'Euguélionne, a Montreal feminist bookstore, at a forum themed "Symbiotic Frequencies," shows how far outside the games-industry frame this conversation is happening — which is precisely where we like to find it. The film screens in English with French subtitles; the Q&A runs in French with live transcription. Artists bending corporate tools toward collective ends is a Killscreen through-line — see our conversation on [Sahej Rahal's AI instruments and cooperative creatures](https://www.killscreen.com/sahej-rahals-ai-instruments-and-cooperative-creatures/). Killscreen covers the artists building futures out of games’ parts — at film forums and festivals as often as on storefronts. The free newsletter delivers them weekly. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A game tower crowned Diversion's tenth anniversary in Paris URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-game-tower-crowned-diversions-tenth-anniversary-in-paris/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:45.000Z For its tenth birthday, Diversion — the Paris immersive-events company, running since 2016 — didn't just throw a party. It marked the decade with an exhibition from distraction.fun, the near-namesake Paris collective of artists and designers making video games as gallery work. The centerpiece: *THE HOST*, a new game by [Distraction](https://distraction.fun/?ref=killscreen.com) member Pierre Moulin with a score by Octave Magescas, installed at the venue Electric in a purpose-built "game tower." Moulin shared [installation shots](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dafj7HkjVUL/?ref=killscreen.com) from the show in July. The rest of the checklist reads like a field guide to French artist-games right now: *Daddy Loves You Too* by Vincent Moulinet, *Indulto* by Mélanie Courtinat, *Playing the Game Is Letting It Exist* by Stella Jacob, and *Staggered* by Nino Filiu. That last one came out of Residence Evil, the residency program Distraction runs for itself, and just resurfaced in Filiu's solo show at A MAZE's Shop-Gallery in Berlin. This crew is circulating, and the same names keep appearing wherever games are treated as exhibition objects rather than products. Games as gallery objects is a beat Killscreen has walked for fifteen years. The free newsletter keeps you on the guest list. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### When the crank turns, Ancient Loops collides its cards URL: https://www.killscreen.com/when-the-crank-turns-ancient-loops-collides-its-cards/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:46.000Z The Playdate's crank has spent four years as a punchline, a dare, and occasionally a fishing reel. *Ancient Loops* treats it as a bow. Nicolas Tilly's sound toy, published by EVB Studio and [out now on itch.io](https://evb-studio.itch.io/ancient-loops?ref=killscreen.com) for $4, asks almost nothing of you but rotation: browse a deck of graphic cards with the d-pad, seat them into slots with A and B, then crank to set off collisions and resonances between them. 0:00 /0:15 1× The release reel for **Ancient Loops*, via [EVB Studio’s Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZiHhbntLzA/?ref=killscreen.com). Sound on — sound is the point. There are no levels, no chapters, no fail state, and no unlockable progression. The itch page situates the thing "between a minimal instrument, a ritual machine, and an interactive graphic object," which is a better genre taxonomy than most storefronts manage. A built-in recorder captures performances up to 30 seconds, which quietly reframes what you are doing — not playing a game, giving a recital. Tilly [announced the release](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZiHhbntLzA/?ref=killscreen.com) in June after several weeks of testing and optimization, and has been documenting the build on the [Playdate developer forum](https://devforum.play.date/t/ancient-loops-a-crank-based-sound-experience/25697?ref=killscreen.com). The crank-as-musical-control category is quietly becoming one of the Playdate's most interesting exports. A hand crank is continuous where buttons are binary; it makes time itself the input, like a music box or a hurdy-gurdy, and it rewards a patience that standard controllers were built to punish. Killscreen has been partial to instruments that ask for no virtuosity since long before this hardware existed — see the [wild audiovisual instrument that requires no skill to play](https://www.killscreen.com/a-new-and-wild-audiovisual-instrument-requires-no-skill-to-play/), and more recently [Indira Ardolic turning game engines into instruments](https://www.killscreen.com/indira-ardolics-live-coding-performances-turn-game-engines-into-instruments/). *Ancient Loops* belongs on that shelf, next to the music boxes. Killscreen has a soft spot for instruments that ask nothing of you. Get the free newsletter and we will keep finding them. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Offenbach scores Federico Solmi's Unity studio footage URL: https://www.killscreen.com/offenbach-scores-federico-solmis-unity-studio-footage/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:46.000Z In June, Federico Solmi posted [a process reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZkwMKxRO2t/?ref=killscreen.com) recorded inside the Unity game engine and scored, of all things, to the Barcarolle from Offenbach's *The Tales of Hoffmann*. It is a rare backstage look at how the "video paintings" get made — and a reminder that one of the most committed game-engine artists working is, at heart, a painter. 0:00 /0:30 1× Federico Solmi’s process reel, recorded inside Unity and scored to the Barcarolle. Via [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZkwMKxRO2t/?ref=killscreen.com). Solmi's pipeline runs in exactly the opposite direction from most game art. Surfaces are hand-drawn and painted first, then scanned, mapped onto three-dimensional digital models, and animated with game engines, motion capture, and digital scripting. The result is a world where every texture carries brushwork — garish, seasick, and pointedly satirical about power and its pageantry. The most recent showcase was *Adrift* at the [Everson Museum of Art](https://everson.org/explore/current-exhibitions/federico-solmi-adrift/?ref=killscreen.com) in Syracuse, which ran January 30 through April 19 of this year and paired new video paintings with *The Ship of Fools*, a monumental canvas reworking Géricault's *Raft of the Medusa*; the [Brooklyn Rail's review](https://brooklynrail.org/2026/04/artseen/federico-solmi-adrift/?ref=killscreen.com) is a good primer on the project. What the reel makes plain is the role Unity actually plays in the studio: not a game to be won but a camera and a stage — a place to light, block, and shoot paintings that have learned to move. Game engines keep getting repurposed by every discipline that touches them; it is the same current that carries [Indira Ardolic's live-coded engine performances](https://www.killscreen.com/indira-ardolics-live-coding-performances-turn-game-engines-into-instruments/), where the software becomes an instrument instead. In Solmi's hands the engine is an easel, and Offenbach supplies the soundtrack. Painters, filmmakers, choreographers — Killscreen follows everyone who walks into a game engine. The free newsletter is where those dispatches land. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Tukoni: Forest Keepers brings Oksana Bula's books to Steam URL: https://www.killscreen.com/tukoni-forest-keepers-oksana-bula/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:47.000Z Most book-to-game adaptations treat the author as a licensing line. *Tukoni: Forest Keepers*, out August 17 on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2933200/Tukoni%5FForest%5FKeepers/?ref=killscreen.com) and the [Epic Games Store](https://store.epicgames.com/p/tukoni-forest-keepers-7ef952?ref=killscreen.com), runs the arrangement the other way around: Oksana Bula, the Ukrainian illustrator whose Tukoni picture books began this universe in 2016, serves as the game's art director, drawing source imagery and steering the visual team at Kyiv studio Dream Operator. The adaptation is built around the person who draws the world, not around the rights to it. You play the Traveller, a forest spirit helping the woods prepare for winter, and the story unfolds without a single written word—everything arrives as animation, gesture and hand-drawn pictograms, which makes the game playable in any language at once. That is a pointed inversion for a book series that had to be translated into French, Spanish, Vietnamese and German one edition at a time. We made the case for wordless play back in 2016 with [*Pan-Pan*](https://www.killscreen.com/wordless-beauty-pan-pan/); Bula's forest makes the same argument in warmer colors, trusting the drawing to carry what dialogue usually does. The credentials hold up. The free *Tukoni: Prologue* (2020) sits at Overwhelmingly Positive on Steam, and the full game took [Excellence in Visual Art at the DevGAMM Awards 2025](https://devgamm.com/awards2025/?ref=killscreen.com), whose jury singled out its layered hand-drawn textures. The studio counted more than 86,000 wishlists before launch. It costs $9.99, with a 25 percent launch discount running through the end of August, and the [demo](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3723540/Tukoni%5FForest%5FKeepers%5FDemo/?ref=killscreen.com) is still up if you want to see how much a game can say while saying nothing. There is a [launch trailer](https://youtu.be/fU-eQfu45xM?ref=killscreen.com) if the demo is one step too many. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/tukoni-forest-keepers-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/tukoni-forest-keepers-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/tukoni-forest-keepers-4.jpg) Screenshots from **Tukoni: Forest Keepers*. Images: Dream Operator Killscreen has been covering games that trust pictures over words since 2010\. The free newsletter is where we keep doing it. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Jackie Turpin's tennis project starts with Nadal's serve URL: https://www.killscreen.com/jackie-turpins-tennis-project-starts-with-nadals-serve/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:48.000Z The nine seconds do a lot: Rafael Nadal's serve — the toss, the deep racket drop, the whip through contact — traced frame by frame into flat, hand-drawn shapes that move across a simple 3D ground plane. [The reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbWGC-lJ5fm/?ref=killscreen.com) is labeled a workflow test, and the caption makes it a promise: “there's been a tennis project brewing in the back of my mind,” Jackie Turpin writes, “and i feel ready to go for it.” 0:00 /0:09 1× The full test. Video: Jackie Turpin on Instagram Turpin is an artist and animator who teaches in UCLA's Design Media Arts program, with [a practice](https://jackieturpin.com/?ref=killscreen.com) that already runs from performance to simulation. The test is a 2D-to-3D pipeline (the replies read it as Blender's grease pencil, the tool that lets you draw flat strokes inside three-dimensional space) and the point of rotoscoping an athlete is exactly the seam it exposes: hand-drawn motion carrying real human weight through a computed world. That seam is load-bearing in games history. Jordan Mechner filmed family footage and traced it to give *Prince of Persia* its uncanny physical gravity, and the lineage is honored so directly that a pixel-art rotoscoping tool named itself after the trick — Killscreen covered [*Paint of Persia*](https://www.killscreen.com/learn-rotoscope-paint-persia-new-animation-tool/) back when it appeared. A tennis serve is the same experiment at higher difficulty: the most slow-motion-replayed movement in sport, familiar enough that any wrongness in the weight reads instantly. What the tennis project becomes — game, film, installation, some hybrid of Turpin's performance and simulation work — is left open. The test suggests the interesting answer is the seam itself. Worth watching. Animation, sport, simulation — the seams between disciplines are Killscreen's whole beat. The free newsletter tracks projects like this from first test to finished work. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Games This Week: Aug. 26, 2026 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/games-this-week-aug-26-2026/ Last updated: 2026-08-26T19:47:25.000Z Wristwork's pigeon romance stopped existing in 2021, when the commercial map service underneath it shut down—a game ended by a vendor's deprecation notice. It came back this week on open data, which nobody can switch off. The rest of the week is people making things nobody asked for. Eighteen of you joined since the last issue. Welcome—and welcome especially to David, who came in as a paid member. \-Jamin --- ## This Week's Feature ### [Tomo Kihara Will Not Sit Comfortably in One Chair](https://www.killscreen.com/tomo-kihara-game-of-possible-lives/) *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.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/game-of-possible-lives_kihara_installation-view_07.jpg) **What Plays You? — Game of Possible Lives*, installation view (via Tomo Kihara) Milton Bradley’s [*Checkered Game of Life*](https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah%5F321475?ref=killscreen.com) arrived in 1860 with a moral spine: virtue advanced you, vice sent you backward. Its distant ancestor, *Moksha Patam*, made the same argument with snakes and ladders centuries earlier. Both agree that a life can be compressed into rules, and that the rules ought to mean something. Tomo Kihara’s cabinet [*What Plays You? — Game of Possible Lives*](https://www.tomokihara.com/en/game-of-possible-lives.html?ref=killscreen.com), shown at the Mori Art Museum’s [*Roppongi Crossing 2025*](https://www.mori.art.museum/en/exhibitions/roppongicrossing2025/02/index.html?ref=killscreen.com), inherits the form and abandons the moral. The person you play is assembled from Japan’s national census, and the language model running locally inside the cabinet writes their life as you go. Nothing is scripted. No one, Kihara included, knows what the machine will say next. Kihara came to games sideways, through an MSc in interaction design at TU Delft, where a student project called [*Street Debater*](https://www.tomokihara.com/en/street-debater.html?ref=killscreen.com) turned a wooden balance scale into a job for people begging in London and Amsterdam. His work has since run at the V&A, the Exploratorium, FACT Liverpool, [Science Gallery Melbourne](https://melbourne.sciencegallery.com/distraction-exhibits/deviation-game?ref=killscreen.com) and [Miraikan](https://www.miraikan.jst.go.jp/en/news/general/202512184354.html?ref=killscreen.com), and [*Deviation Game*](https://deviationgame.com/?ref=killscreen.com), made with the art-design unit [Playfool](https://www.killscreen.com/playfool-built-a-working-bot-farm-that-hands-you-the-controls/), is also [in Early Access on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3104020/?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/game-of-possible-lives_kihara_life-over-screen_04.png) A life written out on the cabinet screen (via Tomo Kihara) [Read it on Killscreen →](https://www.killscreen.com/tomo-kihara-game-of-possible-lives/) --- The best is yet to Come “The Young and the Scoreless” came out of **Kill Screen* Issue 02 this week, and members got all of it. Every print issue we move into the archive lands the same way. [Read the whole archive ](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/signup) ## Spandrel ### [OTHERWORLDS won A MAZE's Human Human Machine Award](https://www.killscreen.com/otherworlds-won-a-mazes-human-human-machine-award/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/otherworlds-amaze-2026.jpg) OTHERWORLDS (via Sophia Bulgakova) Sophia Bulgakova's mixed-reality ritual draws on Ukrainian pagan practice and asks a room of strangers to be present together. It took A MAZE's prize for collective presence in Berlin. [Read it on Killscreen →](https://www.killscreen.com/otherworlds-won-a-mazes-human-human-machine-award/) ### [A tarot deck grows out of Paloma Dawkins's videogames](https://www.killscreen.com/paloma-dawkins-fools-journey-tarot/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/fools-journey-major-arcana.png) The Fool's Journey (via Paloma Dawkins) *The Fool's Journey* converts characters from *Museum of Symmetry* and the *Apocablyss* universe into 22 archetypes. It debuts at MUTEK Forum in Montreal. [Read it on Killscreen →](https://www.killscreen.com/paloma-dawkins-fools-journey-tarot/) ### [Wristwork rebuilt its dead pigeon romance on open maps](https://www.killscreen.com/wristwork-rebuilt-its-dead-pigeon-romance-on-open-maps/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/gtw-pigeon-wristwork.gif) Pigeon: A Love Story, out now (via Wristwork) *Pigeon: A Love Story* arrived in 2021 as a lockdown experiment, then stopped existing when the map-tile service underneath it shut down—a romance ended by a deprecated API. The rebuild runs on open-source maps instead: a to-scale London, New York, Tokyo, Paris or Amsterdam, hundreds of thousands of autonomous birds, and one of them is your soulmate. [Read it on Killscreen →](https://www.killscreen.com/wristwork-rebuilt-its-dead-pigeon-romance-on-open-maps/) --- ## [The Young and the Scoreless](https://www.killscreen.com/the-young-and-the-scoreless-baby-gamers/) *Toddlers step out into the world of consoles* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/the-young-and-the-scoreless-header.jpg) From **Kill Screen* Issue 02 We enter this world a wondrous bundle, 100 billion neurons strong and bearing more synapses—those flashpoints of memory and sensation—than the adults we will become. As we grow older, get responsible, go to the supermarket, learn to drive, get a job, pay taxes, get married, and maybe even have kids of our own, we kill off these synapses. By this measure, when we are born we are more conscious of our world than we will ever be. This is why neuroscientists who study babies call their subjects “little Buddhas.” We’re born blindingly conscious but grasping, handling more raw data than we’ll ever deal with again. Our pre-frontal lobes aren’t yet fully formed, and they’re what sorts everything around us, focusing our senses. Maturing, then, is just a way of figuring out how to block external stimuli—but our lobes aren’t finished growing and aren’t in full use until we’re 20\. One way to approach the mind in its early development isn’t as a singular thing, but a series of islands. In other words the brain isn’t a mind yet, it’s just a brain. But when we are born we’re more aware and learning faster than we ever will again. Researchers, comparing the brain scans of babies to adults, have found that the only grown-up experience that even approaches this awe-inspiring awareness that we feel as infants is when we watch a really, really good movie or play certain videogames. Only then is the back of our mind lit up like a child’s. Only then are we so fully immersed in a world that isn’t really real. So, if playing a videogame is a glimpse into our own infancy, what is it like for an infant to game? [Read it on Killscreen →](https://www.killscreen.com/the-young-and-the-scoreless-baby-gamers/) --- ## Intersections ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/image-5.png) Last week, my friend Alex Porter asked me if I wanted to stop by Christian Marclay's seminal 2010 film [*The Clock*](https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/christian-marclay-clock-0?ref=killscreen.com) at LACMA before it closed this past Sunday. I saw "stop by" because you can't really view the entire work in full, even if you wanted to, as it's a full 24 hours long. Marclay stitched together sequences that show time in motion, in conflict, in dissolve, and in relief, from decades of films. The throughline: every sequence takes place at the exact time in the film as in real life. So when Lee Van Cleef checks his watch in *A Few Dollars More* before his shootout, the time reads at 5:38 PM, exactly as it was on mine. (You can see the full list [here](https://clockclock.ars.is/?ref=killscreen.com). It's nuts.) It *is* a bit of a gimmick, admittedly. A bit of a durational free solo, a Herculean effort. It's also a reminder of the power of curatorial labor at a time that so much of that now goes to AI systems (one can imagine the skepticism around a film like this being released today). But the feel is affecting as time dilates and you settle into a routine of one scene washing over another. "That’s what you’re supposed to do — let go and absorb it and feel like you’re part of this thing," [Marclay has said.](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/15/arts/design/christian-marclay-the-clock-moma.html?ref=killscreen.com) But I read *The Clock* slightly differently—it's a fundamentally ludic experience in film, unlike others I've experienced. Typically, the "games in film" conversation [that Danny and I had the other week](https://www.killscreen.com/games-you-remember-that-never-existed-podcast/), focuses on two veins: adaptations or mechanics. Adaptations, you know well, but there are others such as *Edge of Tomorrow* or *Backrooms* that take the conventions or philosophies of games to apply them on-screen. Doug Liman's *Edge of Tomorrow* (based on the 2004 Hiroshi Sakurazaka manga) hurtles Tom Cruise from one death to another, mimicking the skill acquisition process for games, while*Backrooms* focuses on clipping through digital surfaces. *The Clock* is something altogether different, in that the behavior that emerges naturally is one of checklist sightseeing. ("It's like *Where's Waldo*," Alex joked.) Sometimes the many clocks, timepieces, stopwatches, and cuckoos obviously draw attention to themselves, but sometimes it's more subtle. Roy Hobbs obliterating the clock at Wrigley Field with a home run is [not subtle](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSqx2mTHTjM&ref=killscreen.com); two sequences from *The Man Who Wasn't There* missed me entirely. Your mind is in tension between what the film asks you to do (look at the time) and what the limbic relationship to moving image requires (look at everything else). The result is truly mesmerizing. Freed of the responsibility of paying attention to plot, mood, sound, or set, I found slipping into time dilation easy as each sequence bounded into the next, leaving me to decide exactly when I wanted to leave. But this runs counter to Marclay's attention; it was a wholly lean-in experience that pulled me to interact, not to release. It's a feeling typically reserved for games where my sense of space can also wander, but unlike any I've had in a theatre. By 5:40, *Napoleon Dynamite* cued, and I was ready to grab dinner, knowing it would be a while before I spent that much time with a watch face again. --- ## One to Watch ### [Freshly Baked Games serves its King's Field revival crunchy](https://www.killscreen.com/freshly-baked-games-serves-its-kings-field-revival-crunchy/) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/gtw-queens-domain.gif) Queen's Domain, demo out now (via Freshly Baked Games) *Queen's Domain* is being built as the heir to *King's Field*, the murky first-person FromSoftware RPG that *Dark Souls* grew out of. The developer jokes that teeth would wear down chewing on it. The demo is out. [Read it on Killscreen →](https://www.killscreen.com/freshly-baked-games-serves-its-kings-field-revival-crunchy/) --- ## Run-ons - [Mexico City street legends turn up as low-poly game skins](https://www.killscreen.com/mexico-city-street-legends-turn-up-as-low-poly-game-skins/) — the anonymous account cdmx.exe renders the capital's street figures in PS2-era polygons. - [A cult that scores your smile heads to gamescom](https://www.killscreen.com/a-cult-that-scores-your-smile-heads-to-gamescom/) — Zeitgeist Studio's compound grades how convincingly you smile, and it is heading to gamescom. - [Alina Nazmeeva's YUHA builds a world from oil and myth](https://www.killscreen.com/alina-nazmeeva-yuha-mana-contemporary/) — *YUHA* builds a world out of oil and myth; it opens Aug. 28 at MANA Contemporary. - [tiengiungtong's rabbit hole is lined with bodhisattvas](https://www.killscreen.com/tiengiungtongs-rabbit-hole-is-lined-with-bodhisattvas/) — a dreamlike point-and-click that does not exist yet, and a comment section full of people asking to play it. - [Dollar-store junk becomes the item sprites of Lucid Blocks](https://www.killscreen.com/dollar-store-junk-becomes-the-item-sprites-of-lucid-blocks/) — Eric Alfaro photographed household clutter into a sandbox that runs on dream logic. - [A crucifix USB necklace carries a Barragán video game](https://www.killscreen.com/a-crucifix-usb-necklace-carries-a-barragan-video-game/) — *THE END IS NEAR* ships as $270 jewelry. - [Invented Olympic sports demand both hands in Qilinic Games](https://www.killscreen.com/xiner-lan-qilinic-games/) — Xiner Lan's UCLA thesis stages invented Olympic sports on a twin-joystick cabinet. - [CONTROL filled a Peckham gallery with unplayable games](https://www.killscreen.com/control-ohsh-projects-peckham/) — OHSH Projects argued videogames already remade contemporary art, then staged the show like one. - [Gaming Club: Ten minutes left at the end of the world](https://www.killscreen.com/gaming-club-sidechain-cameron-granger/) — 30 minutes inside Cameron Granger's warehouse party at the end of the world. - [You Up?: What to Play, August 21](https://www.killscreen.com/what-to-play-august-21-2026/) — the Playlist, on work, data, bosses and chartjunk. --- ## The extended cut The extended cut is up: a police station built wrong on purpose, films rebuilt as late-'90s games nobody can play, and why *Mario 64*'s water still felt like water. [Listen →](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/a-sea-made-of-plastic-podcast/) ### A free demo turns Pac-Man into first-person baby horror URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-free-demo-turns-pac-man-into-first-person-baby-horror/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:49.000Z The reel that carried it—posted by hanzoovv, [a gameplay-clips account](https://www.instagram.com/p/Db8ObIZBKEn/?ref=killscreen.com), not the developer—has 139,000 likes and counting, for demo footage of *BREAKOUT BABY*: first-person *Pac-Man*, played as horror, with an infant on your hip. The structure really is the arcade original's. Collect every pellet on a floor to open the way to the next; something faster than you patrols the corridors between. The additions are what make it 2026: it's a roguelike, it's in first person so the maze reads as architecture instead of diagram, and you are responsible for keeping one extremely unlucky baby alive the whole way down. The mechanic that does the most work is the grimmest: shaking the baby reveals the locations of nearby enemies. (It's giving BioShock's Little Sisters.) Viewers filed it somewhere between *Pac-Man*, *Luigi's Mansion*, and *Dark Deception*, which is as precise as genre taxonomy gets. The developer is STH, publishing with Assemble Entertainment; a free demo is on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4968480/BREAKOUT%5FBABY%5FDemo/?ref=killscreen.com) and [itch.io](https://assemble-entertainment.itch.io/breakout-baby?ref=killscreen.com) now, with the full game due this year. 0:00 /0:08 1× The reception is its own subject. The comments perform a very specific register of ironic parental horror—declarations of maternal devotion to a polygonal infant, parents-in-jest marching their children into the maze. Nobody in the thread is scared; everyone is a caregiver. That's the demo economy on Instagram now: absurdist horror travels not on dread but on the bit it lets the audience do. *Pac-Man* has absorbed stranger reinventions—we once watched [a small Australian team rebuild it entirely](https://www.killscreen.com/how-a-small-team-of-australian-game-makers-reinvented-pac-man/)—but rarely one that turns the power pellet into a juice box. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/breakout-s1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/breakout-s2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/breakout-s3.jpg) **BREAKOUT BABY*. Screenshots: STH / Assemble Entertainment We watch how games travel—arcades to art shows to 139,000 Instagram likes. The free Killscreen newsletter is the guided tour. [Take the tour ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### The Young and the Scoreless URL: https://www.killscreen.com/the-young-and-the-scoreless-baby-gamers/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T19:03:04.000Z [Buy Issue 2 in print](https://store.killscreen.com/products/kill-screen-2-back-to-school?ref=killscreen.com) We enter this world a wondrous bundle, 100 billion neurons strong and bearing more synapses—those flashpoints of memory and sensation—than the adults we will become. As we grow older, get responsible, go to the supermarket, learn to drive, get a job, pay taxes, get married, and maybe even have kids of our own, we kill off these synapses. By this measure, when we are born we are more conscious of our world than we will ever be. This is why neuroscientists who study babies call their subjects “little Buddhas.” We’re born blindingly conscious but grasping, handling more raw data than we’ll ever deal with again. Our pre-frontal lobes aren’t yet fully formed, and they’re what sorts everything around us, focusing our senses. Maturing, then, is just a way of figuring out how to block external stimuli—but our lobes aren’t finished growing and aren’t in full use until we’re 20\. When we’re very young we don’t know thought, can’t connect the dots. One way to approach the mind in its early development isn’t as a singular thing, but a series of islands. In other words the brain isn’t a mind yet, it’s just a brain. But when we are born we’re more aware and learning faster than we ever will again. Researchers, comparing the brain scans of babies to adults, have found that the only grown-up experience that even approaches this awe-inspiring awareness that we feel as infants is when we watch a really, really good movie or play certain videogames. Only then is the back of our mind lit up like a child’s. Only then are we so fully immersed in a world that isn’t really real. So, if playing a videogame is a glimpse into our own infancy, what is it like for an infant to game? _This post is for subscribers on the Helping Hand and Trustee tiers only._ ### Wristwork rebuilt its dead pigeon romance on open maps URL: https://www.killscreen.com/wristwork-rebuilt-its-dead-pigeon-romance-on-open-maps/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:50.000Z *Pigeon: A Love Story* first appeared in 2021 as a lockdown experiment with one question behind it: what happens when you stretch a collectathon to the scale of an entire city? Then the commercial map-tile service it was built on shut down, and [the game simply stopped existing](https://www.wristwork.com/pigeon?ref=killscreen.com) — [a romance ended by an API deprecation](https://www.killscreen.com/lets-talk-about-rosa-var-attre-impossible-romance-witcher-3/). The rebuild, out August 6 on [Steam.](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3876710/Pigeon%5FA%5FLove%5FStory/?ref=killscreen.com) [](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3876710/Pigeon%5FA%5FLove%5FStory/?ref=killscreen.com), the App Store, Google Play and itch.io for $7.99, runs on open-source maps instead. The thing it depends on can no longer be switched off by a vendor. You are a pigeon. Somewhere over a to-scale London, New York, Tokyo, Paris or Amsterdam (“every building, every street, and every pigeon (we did the math)) per the London studio Wristwork — is your soulmate, one specific bird among hundreds of thousands of autonomous ones. You call out; most reject you politely, in little speech bubbles (“I'm flattered, but no”); a few drop clues. There is an optional Speak-to-Coo feature that listens for actual cooing through your microphone, an eight-player “coo”-op mode, and a passive mode that turns the whole simulation into a screensaver if you would rather just birdwatch. The score is by Madwreck. What reads as a joke is also a small piece of infrastructure art. The first version died of platform dependency; the second one courts on the same open cartographic commons the actual city runs on, and the pigeon is about the gentlest argument for open data anyone has made. Steam players agree so far: 94 percent positive since launch. Bird romance has a lineage here! [*Hatoful Boyfriend*](https://www.killscreen.com/hatoful-boyfriendisnt-quite-weird-it-thinks/) made pigeon love a genre gag a decade ago and *Skate Story* heavily featured pigeons as a devilish foil. *Pigeon: A Love Story* plays it completely straight, and slower. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/pigeon-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/pigeon-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/pigeon-4.jpg) The search at city scale. Images: Wristwork via Steam A game this quiet doesn't get coverage anywhere else — slow games in fast times are exactly what Killscreen exists for. The free newsletter is the flock worth joining. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Gaming Club: Ten minutes left at the end of the world URL: https://www.killscreen.com/gaming-club-sidechain-cameron-granger/ Last updated: 2026-10-05T22:24:27.000Z Cameron Granger built a warehouse party for the last night on earth. We spent forty-five minutes with him on what a game can borrow from a night out, and why the clock runs out in ten. Full recording for members. _This post is for subscribers on the Helping Hand and Trustee tiers only._ ### Tomo Kihara Will Not Sit Comfortably in One Chair URL: https://www.killscreen.com/tomo-kihara-game-of-possible-lives/ Last updated: 2026-08-31T22:35:20.000Z Milton Bradley’s [*Checkered Game of Life*](https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah%5F321475?ref=killscreen.com) arrived in 1860 with a moral spine: virtue advanced you, vice sent you backward. Its distant ancestor, *Moksha Patam*, made the same argument with snakes and ladders centuries earlier. Both agree that a life can be compressed into rules, and that the rules ought to mean something. Tomo Kihara’s cabinet [*What Plays You? — Game of Possible Lives*](https://www.tomokihara.com/en/game-of-possible-lives.html?ref=killscreen.com), shown at the Mori Art Museum’s [*Roppongi Crossing 2025*](https://www.mori.art.museum/en/exhibitions/roppongicrossing2025/02/index.html?ref=killscreen.com), inherits the form and [abandons the moral](https://www.killscreen.com/lets-talk-about-rosa-var-attre-impossible-romance-witcher-3/). The person you play is assembled from Japan’s national census, and the language model running locally inside the cabinet writes their life as you go. Nothing is scripted. No one, Kihara included, knows what the machine will say next. Kihara came to games sideways, through an MSc in interaction design at TU Delft, where a student project called [*Street Debater*](https://www.tomokihara.com/en/street-debater.html?ref=killscreen.com) turned a wooden balance scale into a job for people begging in London and Amsterdam. His work has since run at the V&A, the Exploratorium, FACT Liverpool, [Science Gallery Melbourne](https://melbourne.sciencegallery.com/distraction-exhibits/deviation-game?ref=killscreen.com) and [Miraikan](https://www.miraikan.jst.go.jp/en/news/general/202512184354.html?ref=killscreen.com), and [*Deviation Game*](https://deviationgame.com/?ref=killscreen.com), made with the art-design unit [Playfool](https://www.killscreen.com/playfool-built-a-working-bot-farm-that-hands-you-the-controls/), is also [in Early Access on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3104020/?ref=killscreen.com). > **“My ultimate goal as an artist is to make a new genre, or a new form of rule, that can transcend 2,000 years into time.”** **Jamin Warren:** I want to go way back. *Street Debater* came out of you interviewing more than two dozen people who were asking for help on the streets in London and Amsterdam, and what you built for them was a tool rather than a piece about them. There’s a thread from that to the work you’re making now—in both cases you’re taking a social issue you’ve encountered in the real world, translating the feelings it evokes, and turning it into an interaction system. Does a project like that start with a concern about the world, or with a mechanic that seems to want a place to be deployed? **Tomo Kihara:** *Street Debater* is a project I did during my master’s at Delft University of Technology. It’s an initiative, or like a job that I made, which has the aim to bridge social divides by opening dialogue between passersby and often ignored people on the streets in Europe—which I found quite new at the time, because I was living in Japan, where it’s a bit hard to find homeless people around cities. Compared to places like London, it was quite unique to have the interaction, and I was also slightly surprised that a lot of people were just ignoring them, which I also understand why that can be now. And as a 20-something student back then, I thought, OK, is there something I could do to change this interaction? Through this coursework, I came up with a scale-like device that asks questions. It has two parts where you can put a coin on and vote on a certain subject. So you could ask, approve basic income, yes or no. Passersby vote their coins on each side, and based on how much coin it has, the scale will tilt. In a sense, you’re visualizing public opinion. What’s interesting is that the interaction changes from just giving money to someone on the street, which is the act of begging and giving money as a gift, to you’re more expressing an opinion as a passerby about a social subject. And the person holding the scale is kind of initiating a social debate. So it kind of becomes like a job. It was really pre-2020—I don’t think I could do it now, because people don’t carry cash anymore. But it was interesting to have one person who managed to get off the streets in London using this, because he earned quite a lot from it. **Jamin:** Tell me about the design of the object, because a scale specifically encourages a certain type of behavior. In game design, there are these concepts of positive and negative feedback loops—the blue shell in *Mario Kart* is a negative feedback loop, where the further ahead you get, the more likely you get hit, versus *StarCraft*, where you can just get overrun. If there’s a lot of money on one side, does that encourage people to balance it, or discourage them because the question already looks settled? **Tomo:** What I like about the scale is that there’s this tension of when that scale tips, and you don’t know when that tip occurs. So you’re kind of inclined to pay more, which is obviously not how voting works, but let’s say you vote on something and the scale doesn’t tip—you’re inclined to pay more to tip that scale in your balance. As a gamer, I thought that’s an interesting mechanic. And the color—I was really into playing *Splatoon 2* back then. Not obviously but subconsciously, my mind reflected the color scheme of the Nintendo Switch, which I realize now looking at it. I was like, OK, this is my subconscious gameplay. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/street-debater_kihara_device-switch-colorway_02.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/street-debater_kihara_maker-with-device_03.jpg) **Street Debater* (2017–19): the coin scale in its Nintendo Switch colorway, and Kihara with the device. Courtesy Tomo Kihara. **Jamin:** Let’s talk about *Game of Possible Lives*, because there’s been a shift in your practice. The model runs locally inside the cabinet. Why structure it as a physical object you walk up to and play, and how much is dictated by the system—on one hand, you have something 100 percent scripted; on the other, something completely open-ended. **Tomo:** One reason I made it in an arcade format is that there’s something very interesting about presenting games that way that makes the work standalone, in a sense that it can exist outside any kind of context. After the group exhibition ended, it’s now shown in a hotel lobby in Kyoto, where regular travelers come in and play, which is quite interesting to me. The other factor is that since it’s running a local language model, I needed a beefy desktop PC, and I didn’t want a bulky thing, monitors and everything. I also made it resemble a gravestone, since the game really talks about life and death, and it felt fitting to use a material similar to an actual gravestone. Nothing is scripted is the shorthand answer. So that’s the scary part. Everything is generated on the fly, which raises an interesting question of, as an artist and game designer, what am I authoring? And to what extent do I own the responsibility for what it has generated? You start off with a statistically plausible person assembled from the Japanese national statistics, so you could be anyone currently living in Japan who has answered the census—not just Japanese people, but people who have stayed more than three months of any nationality. From there on, the local language model always generates two choices based on the likelihood of what could happen to this person at that point in time, using statistics such as birth rates, marriage rates, and what kind of work they might do. Initially, you could go back more than three or four times, as long as my small GPU allows, but I really settled on just once, as that makes people conscious and decide where they want to go to start their life again. The place gets really loud because people come with their friends and talk about their own life decisions through the decisions they make in this fictional world. > **“Nothing is scripted is the shorthand answer for it. So that’s the scary part.”** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/game-of-possible-lives_kihara_installation-view_07.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/game-of-possible-lives_kihara_player-at-cabinet_06.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/game-of-possible-lives_kihara_branching-node-ui_05.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/game-of-possible-lives_kihara_life-over-screen_04.png) **What Plays You? — Game of Possible Lives* (2025): the cabinet in the room, and the branching life the local model writes onscreen. Installation view by Aya Kawachi. Courtesy Tomo Kihara. **Jamin:** Let’s move to *Deviation Game*, which I played recently at [ONX](https://www.onx.studio/onx-programming/onxscreens?ref=killscreen.com). The game asks you to draw something a human would recognize but a machine wouldn’t, so you’re training people to be legible to each other and illegible to a model. Maybe that’s what’s at issue when people get sensitive about AI—they feel something a human would be doing is being replaced. Whereas this is a mechanic that could not exist except with AI. **Tomo:** *Deviation Game* is a game I’ve been making with my friends Dan and Saki, also known as Playfool, a design and art unit. We’ve been working on it since 2022, so this was almost the early days of ChatGPT, and it ran in parallel with how AI got better every few months. The premise is that it’s an experiment exploring the human potential to create beyond the knowledge of AI models. Players must draw prompts like “cat” in a way that fellow humans can recognize but an image recognition model can’t. So if you were to win with the prompt “cat,” you really have to abstract it or do crazy things with the notion of a cat that the AI doesn’t know. It used to be possible to win in 2024 or 2025 with just the whiskers of a cat, but now it’s not. The latest in this series has gone so meta that, at least in Japan, where the *Deviation Game* players are most active, there’s this method of drawing the famous fiction author Natsume Sōseki—his face is quite famous because it was on one of the money bills—and he is known for writing a book called *I Am a Cat*. So if you understand what he wrote, you would understand, *OK, why is this random Asian guy drawing a face*, but then he’s referring to the cat. And sometimes even the AI gets that. If you draw the portrait too well, the AI will be like, OK, this is Natsume Sōseki, so maybe this is referring to the cat, since this context is about living things. So it’s interesting how the meta is developing as we speak. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/deviation-game_kihara-coppen-maruyama_gallery-install_08.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/deviation-game_kihara-coppen-maruyama_receipt-printers_09.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/deviation-game_kihara-coppen-maruyama_taiwan-play-session_10.jpg) **Deviation Game*, made with Playfool: the gallery installation, the printers spooling out players’ drawings, and a play session in Taiwan. Courtesy Tomo Kihara. **Jamin:** You and I have been talking over the last couple of months about what it means to figure out where you fit, and that’s an enduring challenge for artists making game-based work, because they’re pulled in different directions. On one hand, there’s the gallery context your work is well suited for—your background as an interaction designer, work that’s performance-based, a structural and physical component. But there’s this other door: independent game design. You’ve got a social performance piece, an installation piece, and a commercial videogame, and by commercial I just mean it’s available for sale. Does it keep you up at night, how you should talk about yourself? Because it stresses me out. **Tomo:** Yeah, it does keep me up at night sometimes. How do you explain yourself in a manner that fits all these different contexts that I’m exploring? I’ve come to terms with the fact that I will not sit comfortably in one chair, and that’s fine. There is an old Buddhist saying I like: the cicada does not know summer. As cicadas are only alive during summer, the saying means that it does not know autumn, winter, or spring; therefore, it cannot really understand what summer is. The blessing of bouncing between very different disciplines—the game world, the art world, and dipping into design—is that you tend to see how unique and how niche each of these fields is, and you get to take the good parts of each and create your own practice. Ultimately, I think I’m interested in rules as a medium as an artist. There’s something interesting about games as an art form of rules, and if you really think about that, it does have a universality that crosses time and culture. My ultimate goal as an artist is to make a new genre, or a new form of rule, that can transcend 2,000 years into time—so that some human being is playing it somewhere in this universe. Maybe they’re on a spaceship to Mars, and they’re playing it. That’ll be really fantastic. We don’t know the actual designer of the game Go, but so many people play it. Football as well; it’s such an amazing game. And I have a feeling a lot of museums and art stuff might not be around in 2,000 years. Heck, countries might not exist in 2,000 years. But if we do not mess up with a huge nuclear war or something, there will be people playing football, rock-paper-scissors, and Go. Kihara has made peace with not fitting in one chair. Killscreen goes looking for the people working between the categories, and sends what it finds to your inbox for free. [Read what we find next ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=feature-cta) ### A cult that scores your smile heads to gamescom URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-cult-that-scores-your-smile-heads-to-gamescom/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:50.000Z The recruiting pitch of *NAME OF THE WILL* is the part that stays with me: pain is salvation, grief is a design flaw, and the compound will fix you. You play Neighbor 3279, newly arrived at HOPE, a 34-floor facility whose masked members wear [mandatory painted smiles](https://www.killscreen.com/forget-virtual-reality-alternate-reality/). The mechanic that carries it — laid out on [the game's Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2079920/NAME%5FOF%5FTHE%5FWILL/?ref=killscreen.com) — is a seven-strike Conduct System that logs every hesitation, every failed quiz, every interrogation answer, and calculates your fate from the tally. 0:00 /0:09 1× Days are performance: attend Education courses, cooperate during interrogations, and — the design choice I can't shake — select which fellow member undergoes the day's Reformation ritual. Nights are for hacking restricted systems and dodging the Benevolent Father through the backstage floors. Zeitgeist Studio, a woman-led team of four Hong Kongers scattered across the world, calls the register “daylight horror”: nothing gothic, everything well-lit and cheerfully wrong. Creative director Mandy Wong locates the fear in [“the pressure to conform, even when everything in you resists.”](https://www.capsulecomputers.com.au/2026/08/hyper-real-to-publish-horror-cult-mystery-name-of-the-will-launching-early-2027-exhibiting-new-demo-at-gamescom/?ref=killscreen.com) The look is 60-plus hand-drawn scenes with the density of an imagined Hong Kong; the score, by Golden Melody Award-winning composer hirsk, is built from the city's soundscape. The news: after taking the WINGS Award at [A MAZE. / Berlin](https://2026.amaze-berlin.de/award-winners/?ref=killscreen.com) in May — the prize that funds and amplifies gender-diverse teams — the game now has a publisher in [HYPER REAL](https://www.gematsu.com/2023/07/japanese-indie-games-publisher-hyper-real-established?ref=killscreen.com), Sankei Digital's Tokyo label, and a Q1 2027 Steam date. A new demo plays at gamescom's Indie Arena Booth in Cologne, August 26 through 30, filed under a curated grouping called “Democracy at Play,” which feels like the right shelf. A free demo is on Steam now. Killscreen has been on this beat a long time: games that deputize you into the system you're trying to escape run from *Papers, Please* to [*The Westport Independent*](https://www.killscreen.com/the-westport-independent-does-understand-censorship/). What *NAME OF THE WILL* adds is the smile. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/notw-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/notw-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/notw-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/notw-5.jpg) Education quizzes, hallway commutes and Conduct System notices inside HOPE. Images: Zeitgeist Studio via Steam Killscreen has spent 15 years on games that treat play as political — the ones where the scariest system is the one you agree to. The free newsletter brings the next **NAME OF THE WILL* to your inbox before the algorithm does. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### CONTROL filled a Peckham gallery with unplayable games URL: https://www.killscreen.com/control-ohsh-projects-peckham/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:51.000Z "Are games art" died as a question sometime around the Museum of Modern Art's first *Pac-Man* acquisition. *CONTROL*, which ran July 8 through August 1 at Peckham Oasis Gallery in south London, started from the better premise: videogame aesthetics have already entered contemporary art, and the job now is reading what artists do with the language. [OHSH Projects](https://www.ohshprojects.com/control?ref=killscreen.com) gathered fifteen of them—and staged the show itself like a game, installing hidden works through the building like easter eggs for visitors willing to stray off the main route, per [the gallery's announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/Db3kT%5FjDKIp/?ref=killscreen.com). The lineage on the walls ran from Suzanne Treister's fictional videogame stills of the early 1990s—paintings of games that never existed, made before game art was a genre—through David Blandy, Petra Szemán and Mathew Zefeldt. The work the announcement leads with is 16 years old and still lands: *Freedom* (2010), Eva and Franco Mattes's [performance shot inside *Counter-Strike*](https://0100101110101101.org/freedom/?ref=killscreen.com) (featured in our [No Fun issue](https://www.killscreen.com/issue-1/)!), in which Eva Mattes begs other players for mercy on the grounds of being in the middle of performance art, and is killed, over and over, by people who never agreed to be an audience. Few works say more, faster, about what a game's social contract actually is. The curatorial text is worth reading on its own: early game graphics reframed as an aesthetic of constraint—"sufficient reality," enough image for a player to enter a world and care about it—with Alex Colville's stilted mid-century paintings offered as an art-historical precedent. It is an argument this publication has made since [games first opened up for performance art](https://www.killscreen.com/stage/), now hung on walls in SE15\. The show closed August 1; the catalogue PDF on the exhibition page is the consolation prize. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/control-ohsh-install-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/control-ohsh-install-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/control-ohsh-install-5.jpg) Install shots from **CONTROL*. Photography by Benjamin Deakin, courtesy OHSH Projects Killscreen has argued for 16 years that games and contemporary art share a language. The free newsletter is where the argument continues. [Join the argument ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Invented Olympic sports demand both hands in Qilinic Games URL: https://www.killscreen.com/xiner-lan-qilinic-games/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:52.000Z The Olympics were already a videogame (arbitrary rule systems, national bodies, an audience keeping score), so Xiner Lan invented new events instead of licensing old ones. *Qilinic Games*, Lan's MFA thesis installation at UCLA Design Media Arts, collects pseudo-sports minigames set in the fictional Qilin City, played on a custom arcade setup whose twin joysticks demand physical synchronization between both hands. The screen displays the sport; the actual game happens in your shoulders. Across multiple characters' perspectives, [the project page](https://xinerlan.com/qilinic-games/?ref=killscreen.com) explains, the minigames stage vignettes of "a ritual that both celebrates and depletes the construction of 'the great body'"—sport as national fitness program, rendered somewhere between arcade and shrine. The [documentation photos](https://www.instagram.com/p/Dbw5%5FSRlL4Y/?ref=killscreen.com) show the cabinet standing in the gallery like gym equipment that wandered into a temple. Lan also built keyboard and gamepad control options, so the games can survive outside the installation. Lan—a video artist, game maker, and performer who came up through film and animation at the Rhode Island School of Design—is a name worth tracking. *DisplaceMen*, an earlier game of Lan's, was a finalist for Best Student Game at the 2025 Independent Games Festival. And the thesis committee reads like a Killscreen index: Jenna Caravello, Danny Snelson, and [Eddo Stern](https://www.killscreen.com/eddo-stern-makes-art-games-about-game-life/), whose art games about game life this publication has covered for more than a decade. The alternative-controller argument—that [the controller, not the screen, is where the meaning lives](https://www.killscreen.com/asses-masses-blenkarn-lim-collective-play/)—keeps winning converts; Lan's version just asks both of your hands to agree with each other first. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/qilinic-installation-controller.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/qilinic-installation-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/qilinic-still-1.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/qilinic-still-2.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/qilinic-still-3.png) The twin-joystick cabinet and in-game vignettes of **Qilinic Games*. Images: Xiner Lan We track MFA shows so you meet artists like Xiner Lan before the festivals do. The free newsletter is the early feed. [Get the early feed ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Alina Nazmeeva's YUHA builds a world from oil and myth URL: https://www.killscreen.com/alina-nazmeeva-yuha-mana-contemporary/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:53.000Z Game engines were built to render worlds worth wanting; Alina Nazmeeva points them at the ones we have already mined. *YUHA*, the media artist's solo exhibition opening August 28 at MANA Contemporary in Chicago, builds "an evolving world shaped by research into mythology, extraction, technological transformation, and the landscapes of oil," as [the reel announcing the show](https://www.instagram.com/p/Db%5Fqhl8Js1L/?ref=killscreen.com) puts it—simulation-based installation gathering fragments of a worldbuilding project Nazmeeva has been developing across media for years. It runs through September 10 on the building's fourth floor, supported by the Monira Foundation. Nazmeeva, born in Tatarstan and now an assistant professor of computation at the Illinois School of Architecture, treats [digital tools as storytelling devices and "sites of critique"](https://n-a.space/?ref=killscreen.com): the installation *Bug in My Software* paired handwoven textile landscapes with AI-driven ecosystem simulations at Chicago Gamespace, and the XR essay *Pre-Game*, made with media theorist Yvette Granata, read football culture for what it does to bodies and gender. Granata returns for the opening-night panel at 6:15 pm, inside a Friday opening party that runs 6 to 9 pm. Games have flirted with petroculture before, usually as a resource counter and occasionally as a target—[a game about blowing up an oil pipeline once drew a government investigation](https://www.killscreen.com/why-canadian-government-investigating-little-game-about-blowing-big-pipeline/), as we covered at the time. What *YUHA* proposes is quieter and stranger: the engine not as commentary bolted onto extraction but as a mythology machine for it, worldbuilding in which the world being built is the one oil already made. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/yuha-poster-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/yuha-collage-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/yuha-collage-2.jpg) The exhibition poster and research collages of oil landscapes and mythology, from the **YUHA* announcement. Images: Alina Nazmeeva Shows like this close in two weeks. The free Killscreen newsletter flags the game-engine art worth seeing while it is still up. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### A tarot deck grows out of Paloma Dawkins's videogames URL: https://www.killscreen.com/paloma-dawkins-fools-journey-tarot/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:54.000Z Paloma Dawkins has spent a decade building videogames that behave like ecosystems—*Gardenarium*, *Museum of Symmetry*, the ongoing Apocablyss universe—and now those worlds are folding back into one of the oldest play technologies we have. At a [MUTEK Forum](https://forum.mutek.org/en/news/mutek-forum-2026-announces-expanded-programming-under-theme-symbiotic-frequencies?ref=killscreen.com) keynote in Montreal on August 26, Dawkins unveils *The Fool's Journey*, an oracle deck from Apocablyss Studios that converts characters from those games into archetypes: 22 cards that keep tarot's ancient structure while trading its imagery for Dawkins's psychedelic flora. The [project page](https://palomadawkins.com/tarot-deck?ref=killscreen.com) calls the deck "a vibrant palimpsest to traverse the many worlds we inhabit, both natural and created." The event description in [the keynote announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbzLfTXifW8/?ref=killscreen.com) goes further—a "playable system for transformation" built on divination's recombinatory logic, which is to say: shuffle, draw, interpret, repeat. Any game designer will recognize the loop. Tarot is a procedural narrative machine that predates the computer by five centuries, and Dawkins is porting characters to it the way other studios port to Switch. Don't let the look fool you. The event copy describes the deck as cultivating "a lusory attitude" toward change—Bernard Suits's term, from *The Grasshopper*, for the voluntary embrace of unnecessary obstacles that makes play possible at all. Pointing that attitude at uncertainty itself is the kind of move Dawkins has been making since [*Gardenarium*](https://www.killscreen.com/gardenarium/), whose vivid phantasmagoria we relished a decade ago, and since [our profile](https://www.killscreen.com/paloma-dawkins/) of a practice that sees the natural world through games. Dawkins, now an MFA candidate in Critical Ecological Practices at Emily Carr University, will also be doing readings with the Apocablyss deck at the festival, which runs August 26 to 28 under the theme Symbiotic Frequencies. We have followed Paloma Dawkins for a decade because nobody else covers where games leak into the rest of culture. The free newsletter catches what we find next. [Follow along free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### SFEMF's 25th anniversary gala put Carl Stone on the bill URL: https://www.killscreen.com/sfemfs-25th-anniversary-gala-put-carl-stone-on-the-bill/ Last updated: 2026-10-10T19:46:16.000Z The San Francisco Electronic Music Festival held its [25th Anniversary Gala](https://grayarea.org/event/sfemf-gala/?ref=killscreen.com) at Gray Area's Grand Theater on Aug. 22, 2026. Carl Stone played. Stone has performed live computer music on a laptop since 1986\. Kush Arora, who records as Only Now, mixes deconstructed Punjabi music with industrial, dancehall and noise. Luciano Chessa and Wobbly (Jon Leidecker) gave a live realization of *Desert Ambulance* by Ramón Sender Barayón. Sly Ida closed with a DJ set. Tickets ran from $30 to $250, [according to the festival](https://www.sfemf.org/sfemf2026gala?ref=killscreen.com). The top tier included a pass to its September concerts at The Lab. SFEMF is artist-run. Eight Bay Area musicians and sound artists founded it in 1999, and the first festival took place in 2000. *Disclosure: Gray Area is Killscreen's fiscal sponsor.* Killscreen follows the artist-run scenes that keep experimental work alive, in games and next door to them. The Radar brings them to your inbox free, three times a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Mexico City street legends turn up as low-poly game skins URL: https://www.killscreen.com/mexico-city-street-legends-turn-up-as-low-poly-game-skins/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:55.000Z The July reel that pulled 15,000-plus likes shows a 3D character turning slowly against a gray void: dreadlocks under a Telcel cap, a vintage Mexicana de Aviación jersey, the exact silhouette of a man most of the replies recognized instantly as Lalo Elizarrarás, the Iztapalapa comedian better known as [Iztaparrasta](https://www.cronica.com.mx/deportes/2026/06/17/quien-es-iztaparrasta-el-influencer-de-tudn-que-esta-causando-sensacion-con-sus-capsulas-futboleras/?ref=killscreen.com). The model looks lifted from a PlayStation 2-era open world, and where are we going!? 0:00 /0:41 1× The reel, in full. Video: cdmx.exe on Instagram The account behind it, cdmx.exe has spent 68 posts rendering Mexico City's vernacular figures in exactly that idiom: *Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas*\-grade polygons, flat textures, idle animations. The register is precise. For a generation raised on modded *San Andreas* and Loquendo-voiced YouTube machinima, low-poly is boundary, but also it is the native visual language of CDMX internet folklore. What makes the project land is that the audience finishes it. The thread under [the documentation reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbPb%5F9mx4yl/?ref=killscreen.com) is a running bit about the model being realer than the man, plus requests for the download link, tags summoning Elizarrarás to come see, and pitches to localize the character into Nahuatl, Otomí, and Wixárika. Nobody in the replies treats this as sculpture. Everyone treats it as a game asset waiting for its game. (Elizarrarás, for the record, is having a moment of a different scale. Televisa's TUDN put the comedian on World Cup duty this summer.) Artists have long strip-mined the *Grand Theft Auto* engine-scape for material — Killscreen once covered an artist [emptying *Grand Theft Auto V* into a ghost city](https://www.killscreen.com/artist-turns-grand-theft-auto-v-ghost-city/). cdmx.exe runs the operation in reverse: instead of removing the people from the game, it builds game-form for the people the games never modeled. Killscreen reads the internet's game-shaped corners — street culture, engines, and the people modding the two together — so you don't have to. The free newsletter delivers the best of it weekly. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### tiengiungtong's rabbit hole is lined with bodhisattvas URL: https://www.killscreen.com/tiengiungtongs-rabbit-hole-is-lined-with-bodhisattvas/ Last updated: 2026-08-22T01:51:55.000Z "Welcome to the rabbit hole" is the entire caption on [the reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DX1tnB3xOnS/?ref=killscreen.com) that the artist behind [tiengiungtong](https://www.instagram.com/tiengiungtong/?ref=killscreen.com) (天弓堂) posted in May: a first-person descent, one held click at a time, through tunnels lined with Buddhist statuary. The account has fewer than 7,000 followers. The reel has 125,000 likes and a comment section running on a single question—is this a game I can play? (cf. [Miles Buckle](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/miles-buckle/)) 0:00 /0:29 1× "Welcome to the rabbit hole"—the full reel. Video: [tiengiungtong](https://www.instagram.com/p/DX1tnB3xOnS/?ref=killscreen.com) It is not, yet. There is no title, no store page, no engine named. What the comments supply instead is a lineage, and it is a precise one: *Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong-Nou* and *Cosmology of Kyoto*, the 1990s Japanese CD-ROM explorations where clicking forward was itself the ritual, plus newer dream-logic work like *ENA: Dream BBQ*. The forward-click grammar is exactly right—this moves like *Cosmology of Kyoto* remembered through a dream. The pattern in the responses is the more interesting thing: almost nobody reads it as horror. The recurring move in the thread is identification rather than fright—reading the central figure as a bodhisattva and deciding, in real time, that the space is a refuge. Dread resolving into safety is a rare register for liminal-space content, and it is one with a history here: we asked back in 2013 whether [*MirrorMoon EP* was the first Buddhist videogame](https://www.killscreen.com/mirrormoon-ep-first-buddhist-space-exploration-sim/), and in 2016 climbed a [mystical mountain built on Tibetan Buddhism](https://www.killscreen.com/climb-mystical-mountain-game-based-tibetan-buddhism/). Whoever runs 天弓堂—the account publishes no name, just "I love dogs"—is working that same seam, and 125,000 people just asked them to keep going. ### OTHERWORLDS won A MAZE's Human Human Machine Award URL: https://www.killscreen.com/otherworlds-won-a-mazes-human-human-machine-award/ Last updated: 2026-08-22T01:48:41.000Z You stand in darkness with strangers, a soft voice describing the world you are about to enter. Then reality slips: abstract color fields in virtual and mixed reality, spatial sound pressing in, the group moving together in shared choreography. *OTHERWORLDS*, the participatory performance by Ukrainian artist Sophia Bulgakova, rebuilds the communal ritual as a technology—[the project](https://sophiabulgakova.com/otherworlds/?ref=killscreen.com) Ukrainian traditions and pagan practices into what Bulgakova calls "tools for personal and communal transformation." In May, at the 15th A MAZE. / Berlin festival, the jury picked it out of 435 submissions from 78 countries and [handed it the Human Human Machine Award](https://2026.amaze-berlin.de/award-winners/?ref=killscreen.com), writing that the work "takes something so ancient and leaves it not diminished, but amplified." That is the precise thing to say about it. The machine here is not simulating a ritual for a single headset-wearer; it is hosting one for a room, which is why the award's doubled "Human Human" fits so well. The piece was also a [Lumen Prize Experiential Award finalist](https://lumenprize.org/2025-experiential-award-finalists/sophiabulgakova?ref=killscreen.com) in 2025. 0:00 /1:43 1× Bulgakova, born in Odesa and based in The Hague, made the piece with creative development by Leonardo Scarin and Harm van de Ven and sound design by Mark IJzerman; it is produced and distributed by the Amsterdam platform FIBER. The through-line is one this publication keeps finding: virtual reality reaching past novelty toward the sacred, the same current we traced in [Uzoma Orji's spiritual undertones of virtual reality](https://www.killscreen.com/uzoma-orji/). Pre-Christian ritual bound communities through shared movement and altered perception. *OTHERWORLDS* makes the argument that a render engine can do the same work, together, in a dark room. ### Dollar-store junk becomes the item sprites of Lucid Blocks URL: https://www.killscreen.com/dollar-store-junk-becomes-the-item-sprites-of-lucid-blocks/ Last updated: 2026-08-22T01:43:13.000Z Hold any piece of food in *Lucid Blocks* and your hand grips a photographed clownfish plush toy. Many of the game's item sprites are photographs of junk from around the developer's house, padded out with dollar-store finds—a sandbox survival game collaged out of the physical world's leftovers. 0:00 /1:00 1× The shape of it is familiar on purpose: infinite procedurally generated voxel worlds, resources, monsters, building. It is *Minecraft* held together by dream logic, and the vocabulary has been swapped accordingly. Game sessions are Qualia. Equipment is Paraphernalia. Enemies are Vermins. Crafting is Apotheosis, a system that fuses any set of items into something new with no recipes to look up—the surprise is the point. The game [describes itself](https://lucidblocks.com/?ref=killscreen.com) as "an entirely new way to experience your subconscious." It started as a Godot engine test by Eric Alfaro, an MIT student who publishes under the pseudonym Lucy B. Locks, and grew into [a 10-dollar Steam release](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3495730/Lucid%5FBlocks/?ref=killscreen.com) that came out in March and has sat at Overwhelmingly Positive since. The clip that crossed my feed, [captioned "genetic engineering,"](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYaBCIQAYYl/?ref=killscreen.com) shows a segmented spider skittering through the mist, and the response pattern is wonderfully specific: people want to eat it. The comments read the creature's segments as chewy candy, as artificial meat patties—a synesthetic reaction you do not get from painted pixels. Photographic texture makes the dream tactile. We have watched [Minecraft get stretched into new shapes](https://www.killscreen.com/minecraft-mods-unleash-new-creative-possibilities/) before, but *Lucid Blocks* stretches it somewhere stranger: a block game where the blocks feel like things you once held. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/lucid-blocks-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/lucid-blocks-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/lucid-blocks-4.jpg) **Lucid Blocks* screenshots. Images: Lucy B. Locks ### A crucifix USB necklace carries a Barragán video game URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-crucifix-usb-necklace-carries-a-barragan-video-game/ Last updated: 2026-08-22T01:40:29.000Z The object first: a plastic crucifix that is also a USB drive, hung on a 22-inch curb chain, one size fits all, made in China, 270 dollars. Barragán's [product copy](https://barragannnn.com/products/b-virus-crucifix-usb?ref=killscreen.com) is four words long where it matters—"THE END IS NEAR video game in file." The game is real. *THE END IS NEAR* is a narrative game built for the label by [Alex Sinh Nguyen](https://www.instagram.com/sinhalex/?ref=killscreen.com), a designer who works under the banner "Dungeons&Design" and who also contributed to the project's initial prototype, per [the announcement post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYZ1ruvjIqI/?ref=killscreen.com) from May. Development support came from Théo Dinh Nguyen, with the drive and packaging produced by two further collaborators. The label itself is the project Victor Barragán moved from Mexico City to New York to build—an experimental fashion house that has always treated the garment as one output among many. The only route to *THE END IS NEAR* is to buy the necklace; the game is inseparable from the object that carries it, the way a cassette single was inseparable from the tape. And the object: street-preacher eschatology stamped into a crucifix and sold as an accessory. Fashion keeps circling videogames as material—we profiled [Gareth Wrighton breaking fashion's virtual reality](https://www.killscreen.com/gareth-wrighton-breaking-fashions-virtual-reality-2/) and traced [how videogame fashion feeds real-world style](https://www.killscreen.com/videogame-fashion-inspired-real-world-styles/)—but Barragán has inverted the usual direction. The clothes are not referencing a game. The game *is* the merch, and the necklace is the console. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/barragan-b-virus-usb-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/barragan-b-virus-usb-3.jpg) The B-Virus crucifix USB, worn and in detail. Images: Barragán ### Freshly Baked Games serves its King's Field revival crunchy URL: https://www.killscreen.com/freshly-baked-games-serves-its-kings-field-revival-crunchy/ Last updated: 2026-08-22T01:29:58.000Z "the crunchier the better. my teeth would be worn down if i was to chew on my game," Freshly Baked Games wrote under [a clip](https://www.instagram.com/p/DXrj-PpEmZl/?ref=killscreen.com) of *Queen's Domain* back in April. Crunch, here, is a whole texture philosophy: low-resolution surfaces, hard dithered gradients, edges that catch the light wrong in the best way. They're selling something you look at until your teeth hurt. What is being chewed is a revival of *King's Field*, the first-person dungeon series FromSoftware built in the 1990s, nearly two decades before *Dark Souls* made the studio a household name. *Queen's Domain* runs the classic setup—wash ashore on the Isle of Neasied, search for a missing father, descend through an interconnected island stacked with secrets and more than 50 melee weapons. Developed by Freshly Baked Games and published by Future Friends Games, it was revealed at the PC Gaming Show in December; a [free demo is on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1799840/Queens%5FDomain/?ref=killscreen.com) now, with the full game listed as coming soon. GamesRadar reported 50,000 wishlists in its first week. 0:00 /0:11 1× The comment thread under the clip is its own small delight: demo players are already lobbying the studio to keep a sword glitch that launches you forward, which is about as *King's Field* as fandom gets. For a lineage that has spent a decade arguing about difficulty, it is telling that the new heir leads with how it feels to look at—we dug into the [cultural heritage stacked inside Dark Souls's visions of hell](https://www.killscreen.com/visions-of-hell-dark-soulss-cultural-heritage/) years ago, and *Queen's Domain* is working that inheritance from the surfaces inward. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/queens-domain-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/queens-domain-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/queens-domain-4.jpg) **Queen’s Domain* screenshots. Images: Freshly Baked Games/Future Friends Games ### You Up?: What to Play, August 21 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/what-to-play-august-21-2026/ Last updated: 2026-08-28T20:19:39.000Z ![Pocket Boss reveal card](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/pl285-reveal-card.gif) A little workplace romance? ## Playlist 285 ## Pocket Boss (2025) ## Mario von Rickenbach ### Play Time: 40 minutes [Play Pocket Boss](https://pocketboss.ch/?ref=killscreen.com) Playlist is normally *members-only* every Friday. We're unlocking this one for everyone — enjoy, and if you want a new one in your inbox every week, memberships start at $5/month with a free first month. Invariably, if you've worked in any office capacity, you've been asked to give your personal phone number "just for emergencies." Don't do it. It's inevitably a trap, and I'm saying this as a former employer of dozens. While *I* never texted my employees unless it was an emergency (I swear!), the allure of 24/7 access to a direct report's personal time is simply too irresistible for some. Some countries, recognizing the propensity for managerial addiction, have outlawed contacting your employees through what are called "right to disconnect" laws. The unnamed boss in [Mario von Rickenbach](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/mario-von-rickenbach/)'s 2025 game *Pocket Boss* does not live in one of those countries. They are having none of it. You are there, at all times, to answer every single beck and call—every last-minute request ("Fire Drill!"), every desperate plea for approval, and every late-night missive ("You up?"). It's a game about work, but more about the inanity of presence and the illusion that you're doing anything more than moving dots around on a board. And of course, you wait for a reply at times, menaced by those three SMS dots "...". Each text from your boss presents a particular issue of inconvenient information, and your solutions would make Arthur Andersen himself blush. Shareholder value is a mess, so you rejigger the dots so that it's always rising. Satisfaction with management is mixed, so you adjust the perspective to fit a more comfortable narrative. Global revenue looks a bit tepid, so why not spice it up? And the main tool in von Rickenbach's arsenal is the very point of contact between you and the machine world: your cursor. And so, with each new challenge, you tweak, toss, cajole, caress, pump, deflate, defend, align, pop, and catapult data to form an arrangement that will satisfy your boss and their boss and their boss's boss and so on right up to the board and the shareholders. Everyone wins. ![Dragging the Profits curve into a better shape](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/pl285-profits.gif) Von Rickenbach was originally trained as an architect before moving to games, and his work uniquely emphasizes interaction-forward systems. *Kids*, *Plug & Play*, and *Drei* were made with animator Michael Frei ([a past Playlist selection](https://www.killscreen.com/what-to-play-this-weekend-april-30th/)). "For people who have more mechanics-based games that have a very consistent mechanic, it may be easier to do your own thing because you always have some internal structure that is very clear," he told me about his approach to design. It's about finding a pleasurable interaction and working it through to the end. Inside *Pocket Boss*, there are two critiques, one aesthetic and one profound. In his 2003 essay "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint," information designer Edward Tufte unloads on the rigidity and uselessness of one of the world's most popular programs. The principal gripe is the "foreshortening of evidence and thought" in PowerPoint that takes complex ideas and forces them into a format that abandons narrative and is filled with what he calls "chartjunk." "PowerPoint comes with a big attitude," he writes. "Other than video games, not many computer programs have attitudes. \[PowerPoint\] reduces the intellectual level of the content passing through the program." While the color work and buoyancy of *Pocket Boss* is certainly more pleasurable than whatever Windows XP presentation Tufte was struggling with, the bulk of our game is, in fact, about making charts. By definition, these are not serious efforts, and that your boss is texting you at all hours to produce absolute slop only drives Tufte's critique further. "Formats, sequencing, and cognitive approach should be decided by the character of the content and what is to be explained, not by the limitations of the presentation technology," Tufte screams. In fact, he draws a line between the use of the tool and the *Challenger* shuttle explosion, whose failure is blamed, in part, on a single PowerPoint presentation that undersold its risks. ![Bending the Earnings bars until they behave](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/pl285-earnings.gif) In *Pocket Boss*, the tragedy is less direct, but that in itself is more damning. It's only a little fudge, you might say as you unfragment your customer base. But behind that little action, a world of malfeasance awaits. It seems so small, and von Rickenbach makes the actions so pleasurable to disguise that you never really know what kind of company you're working for. When a recession hits, your boss rejoices, noting that revenue will go up. It's not a critique of capitalism, per se, but a reflection of the amoral callousness of contemporary business life. In 2024, writer Dan Davies coined the term "accountability sink" for a system so opaque and complicated that no one can actually become complicit. "For an accountability sink to function, it has to break a link; it has to prevent the feedback of the person affected by the decision from affecting the operation of the system," he writes. Am I selling baby formula? Or am I in private equity and each adjustment costs thousands of jobs? No matter; I go on my merry way, quietly adjusting information one bar chart at a time. Or as *The Wire*'s violent cop turned high school teacher Roland Pryzbylewski quipped about funny numbers: "Making robberies into larcenies. Making rapes disappear. You juke the stats and majors become colonels." And that is the crux of it. Promotion after promotion comes your way as you quietly lie with data. It's just a little twist of the truth. No big deal. After all, I'm next in line to become a boss myself. ![A line that only ever goes up](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/pl285-line.gif) Before you go You just read the whole thing. Playlist is the main reason people pay for Killscreen — one game a week, played properly, written up on Friday. Membership starts at five dollars a month, and the first month is free. [Become a member ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=playlist-close) ### A Sea Made of Plastic [Podcast] URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/a-sea-made-of-plastic-podcast/ Last updated: 2026-08-22T00:26:08.000Z I open with a 2015 Kill Screen essay about a police station built wrong on purpose, and end up asking Danny Snelson, a writer and professor of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, a question that runs through the whole hour: what does a work become when you move it into the wrong container? Ed Smith’s piece on *Resident Evil 2* called horror architecture “anatomically correct but tonally wrong.” Danny maps that onto Freud, onto the impossible geometry of the Overlook Hotel, and onto Zach Cregger’s *Resident Evil* film, where a typewriter on a desk is asked to carry 30 years of player fluency. Then I turn to Miles Buckle, a London artist who rebuilds *Rear Window*, *Amarcord* and Hitchcock’s *Rope* as late-’90s games nobody will ever play. Danny traces the impulse back to Lego and forward to Roblox, and lands on why a JPEG face stretched over a low-polygon head is more unsettling now than it was in 1998. The last stretch is Danny’s own book, *The Little Database*, free and open access from the University of Minnesota Press, and the desktop directory of 44 small archives it has grown into. His best example is Paul Sharits’s flicker film *Dots*, which on celluloid at Anthology Film Archives is close to hallucination and on YouTube is a blotchy field of squares. The compression is not the failure. It is what lets you see YouTube at all. Quick hits to close: Mitch Anzuoni’s money laundering simulator, Joshua Mattson’s *Defence Contractor Fantasy World* and its latex hand, and a new alt-control cabinet at Wonderville in Brooklyn. ## Links - [My feature on Miles Buckle, who makes games you can’t play](https://www.killscreen.com/miles-buckle-games-you-cant-play/) - [Ed Smith, “The horror of Resident Evil 2’s police station”](https://www.killscreen.com/horror-resident-evil-2s-police-station/) - [The Little Database expands into a desktop directory](https://www.killscreen.com/the-little-database-expands-into-a-desktop-directory/) - [Kill Screen on the Resident Evil film’s save points](https://www.killscreen.com/resident-evil-film-save-point-typewriters/) - [Kill Screen on Defence Contractor Fantasy World](https://www.killscreen.com/the-mouse-in-this-ai-war-game-is-a-demonic-latex-hand/) - [Danny Snelson, The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats](https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517918828/the-little-database/?ref=killscreen.com) - [The Little Database desktop directory](https://thelittledatabase.com/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Scott Richmond, Cinema’s Bodily Illusions](https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816690992/cinemas-bodily-illusions/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Pippin Barr, v r 3](http://pippinbarr.com/v-r-3/info/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Miles Buckle on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/milesbuckle.exe/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Paul Sharits, Dots 1 and 2 on UbuWeb](https://ubu.com/film/sharits%5Fdots.html?ref=killscreen.com) - [Fiasco, from Bully Pulpit Games](https://bullypulpitgames.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ## Corrections - We refer to “The Curse of the Golden Idol.” The game is *The Case of the Golden Idol*. - Joshua Mattson is based in Linz, Austria, not Germany. - The *Grand Theft Auto VI* story concerned a single Army unit offering a four-day pass as a reenlistment incentive, not the US military broadly. *Hosted by Jamin Warren with Danny Snelson. Music by* [*Nick Sylvester*](https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com)*.* ### Latvian bogs became a live instrument at Gray Area URL: https://www.killscreen.com/latvian-bogs-became-a-live-instrument-at-gray-area/ Last updated: 2026-10-10T19:46:16.000Z Pierce Warnecke and Matthew Biederman performed [*Phytomorphic Topologies*](https://grayarea.org/event/pierce-warnecke-and-matthew-biederman-phytomorphic-topologies/?ref=killscreen.com) at Gray Area's Grand Theater in San Francisco on Aug. 21, 2026. 0:00 /0:24 1× An excerpt from *Phytomorphic Topologies*, shown without sound. Video: Matthew Biederman, via [Gray Area](https://grayarea.org/event/pierce-warnecke-and-matthew-biederman-phytomorphic-topologies/?ref=killscreen.com) The piece is built from protected forests, bogs and nature reserves in Latvia. The artists surveyed them with photogrammetry and near-field audio recording. Botanist Liga Pentjusa of the University of Riga guided the surveys. On stage, a custom audiovisual instrument moves through that material in real time. Biederman [told Derivative](https://derivative.ca/community-post/commons-cameras-and-code-art-resistance-matthew-biederman/73246?ref=killscreen.com) the piece is built in TouchDesigner and "plays the land." It was a seated, one-night performance. Jorge Bachmann and Andrej Hrončo were also on the bill. The work was [commissioned for Skaņu Mežs](https://crackmagazine.net/2025/09/skanu-mezs-line-up-for-23rd-edition/?ref=killscreen.com), the experimental music festival in Riga, in October 2025. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/phytomorphic-survey-bog.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/phytomorphic-survey-forest.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/phytomorphic-survey-macro.jpg) Field surveys in Latvia for *Phytomorphic Topologies*. Images via Gray Area *Disclosure: Gray Area is Killscreen's fiscal sponsor.* Killscreen tracks artists who treat scanned worlds as something to perform, not just to look at. The Radar brings that work to your inbox free, three times a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Gray Area now lends out books, kits and gadgets URL: https://www.killscreen.com/gray-area-now-lends-out-books-kits-and-gadgets/ Last updated: 2026-10-10T19:46:15.000Z The [Cybersentics (little) Library](https://grayarea.org/event/cybersentics-little-library-launch/?ref=killscreen.com) opened Aug. 20, 2026, at Gray Area in San Francisco. It is a small, growing collection on art, science, technology and society. The shelves hold books, magazines, kits, records and gadgets. Scholar and curator Anastasia Chernysheva hosts it. The launch ran from 6 to 8 p.m. at 2665 Mission St. Visitors browsed the shelves, pitched items for the collection and swapped books or electronics worth up to $100. The collection grew out of the Cybersentics Book Club, a monthly reading group on biofeedback, cyborg theory and the human sensorium. The library is still open. It is free, and requests to visit, borrow or donate go through [the library page](https://grayarea.org/cybersentics-little-library/?ref=killscreen.com). *Disclosure: Gray Area is Killscreen's fiscal sponsor.* Killscreen covers the places where art, technology and play get collected, argued over and kept. The Radar brings them to your inbox free, three times a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Games You Remember That Never Existed [Podcast] URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/games-you-remember-that-never-existed-podcast/ Last updated: 2026-08-26T03:05:01.000Z Every game you remember is partly a game you invented. The water in *Mario 64* felt like water; the face in the cutscene had an expression. Go back and the water is a few scrolling textures and the face is a stretched JPEG. Miles Buckle builds in that gap on purpose — and then doesn’t let you play the result. Danny Snelson of UCLA joins for the usual shape: one piece from the Kill Screen archive, one long interview, and the things worth knowing from the past two weeks. From the archive, Ed Smith’s 2015 essay on *Resident Evil 2*’s police station, a building that is anatomically impossible and works because of it. A police station that used to be an art museum, a save-point typewriter that survived into Zach Cregger’s film, and how wrong a space is allowed to be before a player stops believing in it. Then Miles Buckle, who rebuilds films as PS1-era games nobody will ever play: the *Rear Window* courtyard, Norma Desmond’s house from *Sunset Boulevard*, the plastic sea from Fellini’s *Amarcord*. He talks about Lego without the instructions, about wanting you to see the polygons, and about why a stretched JPEG face can carry more feeling than a rendered one. And Danny’s *The Little Database*, which is a University of Minnesota Press book and also a desktop full of other people’s archives — Eclipse, UbuWeb, PennSound, textfiles.com, Vimm’s Lair, the Malware Museum. What YouTube’s compression does to a Paul Sharits flicker film, and why small, hand-kept, idiosyncratic archives matter more the larger the models get. In the lightning round: Mitch Anzuoni’s *Offshore* and *Small Press Tycoon*, Joshua Mattson’s *Defence Contractor Fantasy World* and its demonic latex hand, and *Step Right Up*, Wonderville’s new cabinet crossing a Zoltar machine with vector graphics. ## Links - [*Fiasco*, Bully Pulpit Games](https://bullypulpitgames.com/products/fiasco?ref=killscreen.com) - [Ed Smith, “The horror of *Resident Evil 2*’s police station”](https://www.killscreen.com/horror-resident-evil-2s-police-station/) - [Save-point typewriters turn up in the *Resident Evil* film](https://www.killscreen.com/resident-evil-film-save-point-typewriters/) - [Miles Buckle Makes Games You Can’t Play](https://www.killscreen.com/miles-buckle-games-you-cant-play/) - [Miles Buckle on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/milesbuckle.exe/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Daniel Scott Snelson, *The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats* (open access)](https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517918828/the-little-database/?ref=killscreen.com) - [The Little Database desktop directory](https://thelittledatabase.com/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Kill Screen on the directory](https://www.killscreen.com/the-little-database-expands-into-a-desktop-directory/) - [Eclipse](https://eclipsearchive.org/?ref=killscreen.com) - [UbuWeb](https://ubu.com/?ref=killscreen.com) - [PennSound](https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/?ref=killscreen.com) - [textfiles.com](http://textfiles.com/?ref=killscreen.com) - [One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age](https://blog.geocities.institute/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Vimm’s Lair](https://vimm.net/?ref=killscreen.com) - [The Malware Museum](https://archive.org/details/malwaremuseum) - [POC Zine Project](https://poczineproject.tumblr.com/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Queer.Archive.Work](https://queer.archive.work/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Invisible Histories](https://invisiblehistory.org/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Pippin Barr, *v r 3*, a gallery of digital water](https://pippinbarr.com/v-r-3/info/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Paul Sharits, *Dots 1 & 2* (1965)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMQJs9nDcEE&ref=killscreen.com) - [*Offshore*, Mitch Anzuoni](https://www.killscreen.com/mitch-anzuoni-offshore/) - [*Defence Contractor Fantasy World*, Joshua Mattson](https://www.killscreen.com/the-mouse-in-this-ai-war-game-is-a-demonic-latex-hand/) - [*Step Right Up* at Wonderville](https://www.killscreen.com/wondervilles-new-cabinet-step-right-up-crosses-a-zoltar-machine-with-vector-graphics/) - [*Death in August*, Bruno Abib (members)](https://www.killscreen.com/watch-bruno-abibs-death-in-august-members-only/) - [What a Rickshaw Knows That a Car Doesn’t — Kalp Studio’s Mannat Jain on *Raahi*](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/what-a-rickshaw-knows-that-a-car-doesnt-podcast/) - [Coming up: Frank Lantz, *The Beauty of Games*](https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5664/The-Beauty-of-Games?ref=killscreen.com) Hosted by Jamin Warren with Danny Snelson. Music by Nick Sylvester. Every game you remember is partly one you invented. Killscreen chases the rest of that — the show, the interviews, the archive — free in your inbox. [Get the show and the writing ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=podcast-cta) ### Rovertronic Turns Super Mario 64 Into a 360 POV Video URL: https://www.killscreen.com/rovertronic-turns-super-mario-64-into-a-360-pov-video/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T18:29:37.000Z The ROM hacker Rovertronic has re-rendered *Super Mario 64* as a spherical YouTube video seen from inside Mario's head. ["*Mario 64* but it's an immersive POV,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbd3sEzCLcA&ref=killscreen.com) follows a prerecorded run through Bob-omb Battlefield. Viewers drag the frame to look around, and health, coins, and movement cues appear in the closed-caption track, with one track for desktop and a second for phones. In a sense, it is not playable. The run is fixed, and the only inputs are looking around and switching captions. But in another sense, it's another experiment with playing with YouTube's native POV controls in a new environment. A sketch, if you will. Rovertronic's [channel](https://www.youtube.com/@rovertronic?ref=killscreen.com) is mostly N64 modding, including the ROM hack *Mario's Modules 2*, released there this year. The 1996 original handed players the camera through Lakitu, a cameraman written into the fiction. The POV video leaves viewers with only that role. For more reading, see [our 2016 piece on a speedrunning glitch that exposes the code under Mario](https://www.killscreen.com/see-speedrunning-glitch-shows-mario-code-makes/) and [the video on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbd3sEzCLcA&ref=killscreen.com). The free KS Radar newsletter brings that habit to independent and experimental game culture, three short dispatches a week. [Get the free dispatch ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### The Little Database expands into a desktop directory URL: https://www.killscreen.com/the-little-database-expands-into-a-desktop-directory/ Last updated: 2026-09-08T22:00:27.000Z [thelittledatabase.com](https://thelittledatabase.com/?ref=killscreen.com) opens like a computer you don't own: a desktop scattered with icons, ready to be clicked through rather than scrolled. Danny Snelson—writer, editor, and archivist, professor in English and Design Media Arts at UCLA and faculty at the UCLA Game Lab—[announced the site](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbThqiTJdXe/?ref=killscreen.com) in late July as an "Expanded Resources Desktop Directory," marking a year since *The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats* came out from the University of Minnesota Press. The book argues that small collections—UbuWeb, Textz, the Electronic Poetry Center—do something big archives can't: at their scale, the format and the interface visibly transform the works they hold, and teach us how to read our own hard drives. The site performs the thesis. Instead of a bibliography page, there's a browsable desktop holding dozens of little databases beyond the book's scope, the expanded media-poetics materials, two recorded podcasts, and five reviews from the year since publication (Leonardo, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Oxford's Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory, InScriptum, Hyperrhiz). Submissions are welcome. Snelson calls it "the last piece of the project, offered for research, pedagogy, or wherever playful encounters with little databases might occur." The replies fixate on the interface—the cursor especially—as much as anything filed inside it, which is the tell that the interface is the argument. The desktop-as-fiction is a games move. When Killscreen covered [*Hypnospace Outlaw*](https://www.killscreen.com/hypnospace-outlaw-will-turn-internet-police/), the appeal was an operating system with enough texture to live in. Snelson runs the move in reverse—not a fiction dressed as a desktop but scholarship dressed as one, gambling that the pleasure of clicking around is itself a way of reading. A university-press monograph that ends its life as a toy OS is a good deal for everyone: the research stays citable, and the argument becomes something you can leave open in a window. --- **Read next:** [Decadence Comics builds a game that refuses to hurry](https://www.killscreen.com/decadence-comics-rhizomatic-compound/) · [Slack’s error page was actually an interactive scene from a defunct game](https://www.killscreen.com/slacks-error-actually-interactive-scene-defunct-game/) Killscreen Radar Killscreen covers the archives, directories and odd little databases that keep net.art alive. Once a week, free. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=radar-backfill) ### The health packs in POLYMORPH have to die first URL: https://www.killscreen.com/the-health-packs-in-polymorph-have-to-die-first/ Last updated: 2026-08-18T21:41:55.000Z In *POLYMORPH*, the thing that heals you is a caterpillar—a soft, unbothered creature trundling through the level on its own business—and to use it, you have to kill it. "Health packs are creatures in *POLYMORPH*," reads [the June reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZdAjtBRLdB/?ref=killscreen.com) from the game's account, and the comments did exactly what the design wants: fell for the caterpillar, bargained for its life, and started theorizing optimal predation—including whether the worm should stop moving once its head is gone, so you could plan when to harvest it. 0:00 /1:06 1× The **POLYMORPH* announcement reel, via [the game’s account](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZdAjtBRLdB/?ref=killscreen.com). Sound on. The game, [due on Steam in 2026](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4192080/POLYMORPH/?ref=killscreen.com) from Intron Interactive, inverts the body-horror shooter's usual scale: you play the disease. A "cancerous pathogen," per the store page, mutating through procedurally generated host vessels while antibody swarms hunt you—120-plus mutations, five hostbodies with names like Flamingo, Wheeler, and Jelly, randomly generated flesh dungeons, a gamble-heavy merchant. The crew credited on the announcement includes Vince McKelvie, a veteran of the gooey, hyper-saturated 3D net art this game's look descends from directly. Making the healing item a bystander is a small design decision with a long moral shadow. Most games launder resource extraction into abstraction—a crate, a cross, a glowing orb. *POLYMORPH* restores the transaction's victim and gives it a face, which is thematically airtight for a game about being cancer: you don't defeat the body, you consume it, one sympathetic organism at a time. Killscreen has a long-standing soft spot for games that make flesh the level geometry—we were watching [*Scorn*](https://www.killscreen.com/scorn-slowly-reveals-fleshy-face/) slowly reveal its fleshy face nearly a decade ago. *POLYMORPH* plays the same material for comedy and guilt instead of dread, which might be the more unsettling register. Wishlists are open now. ### Helsinki names Ville Kallio an Artist of the Year URL: https://www.killscreen.com/helsinki-names-ville-kallio-an-artist-of-the-year/ Last updated: 2026-08-18T21:41:04.000Z On Helsinki Day, June 12, the City of Helsinki handed out its annual honors, and one of the three Helsinki Artist of the Year awards went to ["visual artist and game artist" Ville Kallio](https://www.hel.fi/en/news/helsinki-culture-award-goes-to-iiris-autio-science-award-to-minna-palmroth-judoka-louna-lumia?ref=killscreen.com)—the mind behind *Cruelty Squad*, the sewage-green immersive sim that turned corporate contract killing into one of the decade's most argued-about games. Kallio [posted thanks](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZhX2qAgD3g/?ref=killscreen.com) the next day, with congratulations to the two other recipients. The company the award keeps is the point. The city's other honorees are soul singer Emilia Sisco and knitwear designer Juha Vehmaanperä, who combines slow fashion, queer theory, and traditional craft techniques. Games sit in that lineup as simply another art form the city produces—no special pleading, no "interactive entertainment" hedge. The citation credits Kallio's "distinctive and socially critical video games" and notes the State Prize for Media Art that *Cruelty Squad*'s "artistic merit and bold expression" earned in 2023\. Each award carries 5,000 euros; Mayor Daniel Sazonov presented them. ![Emilia Sisco, Juha Vehmaanperä, and Ville Kallio, Helsinki's 2026 Artists of the Year](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/helsinki-artists-2026.webp) Helsinki's 2026 Artists of the Year: Emilia Sisco, Juha Vehmaanperä, and Ville Kallio. Photo: City of Helsinki Finland's civic relationship to games has usually been measured in revenue—when Killscreen last checked in on [a Finnish developer swimming in money](https://www.killscreen.com/money-doesnt-matter-says-finnish-developer-swimming-money/), national gaming pride meant mobile earnings. Honoring Kallio is a different gesture: a city canonizing a game whose whole texture—nauseous colors, fleshy interfaces, life priced as a commodity—was built to be indigestible. The satire got a plaque anyway. ![A screenshot from Ville Kallio’s game Cruelty Squad](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/cruelty-squad-screenshot.jpg) **Cruelty Squad* (2021), via Steam The comments under Kallio's post split between Finnish congratulations and impatience for the next game—the fandom's love language being, apparently, a demand for new work to complain about. Fair enough. Canonization rarely comes with a deadline attached. ### Murlo's Luddite rhythm games wrapped a run at Aviva Studios URL: https://www.killscreen.com/murlos-luddite-rhythm-games-wrapped-a-run-at-aviva-studios/ Last updated: 2026-09-08T22:00:27.000Z For most of this spring, Manchester's Aviva Studios put an unreleased videogame on the Media Wall of its ground-floor Social space. *Something Beautiful*, the debut game from producer and illustrator Murlo, showed there April 10 through June 28 as five playable rhythm minigames—handled not with a gamepad but with a bespoke controller Murlo designed, embellished with 3D-printed sculptures of the game's own world. Murlo shared [photos of the setup](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbLpIQHik3e/?ref=killscreen.com) in late July: "It's finished for now." The full game, [wishlistable on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4041730/Something%5FBeautiful/?ref=killscreen.com), is a music-driven point-and-click adventure set on a single industrial estate where the internet has been cut dead and rumors circulate about a cult and its leader, Puckle. [Factory International frames the project](https://factoryinternational.org/whats-on/something-beautiful/?ref=killscreen.com) as Luddite revival—the nineteenth-century textile workers who broke automated machinery—carried into present-day politics and runaway capitalism. The framing comes more from Murlo, an electronic musician with two albums and a run of EPs whose records have always arrived wrapped in the artist's own illustration; here, the music, the drawings, the sculptures on the controller, and the game are one continuous act of world-building. The direction of travel is the interesting part. The institution didn't license a finished game; it exhibited one mid-making, hardware included. Killscreen has been tracking how arts institutions learn to hold games—most recently when [four decades of consoles moved into the museum](https://www.killscreen.com/achiampong-the-gaming-room/)—but a venue presenting playable fragments of a work in progress, on a controller built by the artist, is a warmer kind of custody. It treats the game less like an artifact to preserve than a practice to host. A release date is still "to be announced." The soundtrack, at least, is already home turf. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/murlo-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/murlo-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/murlo-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/murlo-5.jpg) The rhythm minigames, and the 3D-printed figures on the custom controller. Photos via [Murlo](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbLpIQHik3e/?ref=killscreen.com) --- **Read next:** [Offenbach scores Federico Solmi’s Unity studio footage](https://www.killscreen.com/offenbach-scores-federico-solmis-unity-studio-footage/) · [A video synthesizer is the control scheme in Hypnogenesis](https://www.killscreen.com/a-video-synthesizer-is-the-control-scheme-in-hypnogenesis/) Killscreen Radar Killscreen finds the games that only exist for a few weeks in a gallery. Once a week, free. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=radar-backfill) ### The mouse in this AI war game is a demonic latex hand URL: https://www.killscreen.com/the-mouse-in-this-ai-war-game-is-a-demonic-latex-hand/ Last updated: 2026-09-08T22:00:38.000Z The mouse is a demonic hand cast in latex. You play *Defence Contractor Fantasy World* by holding it, interlocking fingers with the thing while the numbers climb on a screen mounted inside a hardshell field case. freeculture.api—the account of an artist named Joshua Mattson, connected to the Interface Cultures program in Linz—shared [the documentation](https://www.instagram.com/p/DaQZzbLCMk4/?ref=killscreen.com) in July: a Raspberry Pi, a power bank good for roughly eight hours in the field, and semi-transparent acrylic panels engraved with demonic faces and military network diagrams. 0:00 /0:19 1× The case in action. Full documentation in [the original post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DaQZzbLCMk4/?ref=killscreen.com). The game itself is an incremental, like [*Cookie Clicker*](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/cookie-clicker/) and *Universal Paperclips*—numbers that mostly grow themselves. Here the numbers belong to an AI defense contractor: develop fully autonomous weapons, generate public AI hype, raise venture capital. The piece "aims to demonstrate how the violent progression of AI-powered warfare can be concealed behind digital veils," Mattson writes, citing real-world deployable interfaces—Skykit is the named example—that compress networks of sensors, weapons, and analysis into a single operator. What makes the project land is that the critique lives in the hardware rather than the text. Idle games already model unattended growth (I'm playing Universal Paperclips as I write this); building one into a ruggedized, field-deployable case makes the metaphor physical, and the demon hand makes it intimate—procurement as a handshake you are not allowed to let go of. The latex mouse was made with artist [Giulia Olivieri](https://www.instagram.com/giu.lito/?ref=killscreen.com); a collaborator, [Marwin](https://www.instagram.com/marwin%5Fpa/?ref=killscreen.com), designed and printed the slide-in mechanism for its electronics. The response under the post has run to awe shading into dread—less admiration for a prop than recognition of a system people already live inside. Games have carried this argument before—[*Killbox*](https://www.killscreen.com/killbox-videogame-true-horror-drone-warfare/) made drone warfare's asymmetry playable back in 2016—but rarely as an object you could carry into the field, which is precisely the point. An online release is promised once the game is, in Joshua's words, "a bit more complex and polished." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/dcfw-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/dcfw-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/dcfw-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/dcfw-5.jpg) Engraved acrylic, the slide-in electronics, and the latex hand. Photos via [freeculture.api](https://www.instagram.com/p/DaQZzbLCMk4/?ref=killscreen.com) --- **Read next:** [Playfool built a working bot farm that hands you the controls](https://www.killscreen.com/playfool-built-a-working-bot-farm-that-hands-you-the-controls/) · [What happens when you can do nothing in a war zone?](https://www.killscreen.com/alan-kwan-scent-video-game-witness/) Killscreen Radar Killscreen covers the games that build their own hardware to make a point. Once a week, free. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=radar-backfill) ### Miles Buckle Makes Games You Can't Play URL: https://www.killscreen.com/miles-buckle-games-you-cant-play/ Last updated: 2026-08-26T03:05:00.000Z There is a corner of Instagram where the Red Room from *Twin Peaks* looks like it shipped on the PS1, where Hitchcock's *Rope* plays out inside *The Sims*, and where Fellini's seaside hometown comes with its own save menu. It belongs to [Miles Buckle](https://www.instagram.com/milesbuckle.exe/?ref=killscreen.com), a London-based artist who runs the adaptation machine in reverse—pulling cinema into the visual language of late-'90s videogames, one lovingly deformed polygon at a time. Games have never been good at talking to the other arts; Buckle's work is a conversation between mediums that speaks both languages fluently, less interested in whether these games could exist than in what it feels like to remember them anyway. Raised in Brighton and trained in graphic design at [Central Saint Martins](https://www.arts.ac.uk/colleges/central-saint-martins?ref=killscreen.com), Buckle is now developing an isometric game with a collaborator who wrote his own coding language and game engine, alongside a pair of commissioned short films. We spoke with him about Lego without instructions, the stretched JPEG face that makes late-'90s graphics feel [Lynchian](https://www.killscreen.com/virginia/), and why the sea in *Amarcord* [is made of plastic](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2010/cteq/amarcord/?ref=killscreen.com). 0:00 /0:37 1× Pixel Chix × **Twin Peaks*. Courtesy of Miles Buckle. **Jamin Warren:** Did you grow up making things digitally? Tell me about your first interactions with building worlds on computers. **Miles Buckle:** I think originally it stems from things like Lego, and choosing to create something that you've not been instructed to create. From a young age I was interested in trying to replicate things I'd seen somewhere else—rebuilding something without the instructions, or moving as I got a little bit older into *Minecraft*. I remember when I was 10 building Buckingham Palace, mainly from photos—Googling Buckingham Palace and having a picture on my iPhone or iPod touch at the time. Back then scale wasn't super important. It was more just the feeling that you've built something. **Jamin:** Did you come from a creative family? **Miles:** Not particularly, work-wise at least—my mum is a therapist and my dad works for a builder's merchant. But I was encouraged to be creative, and they weren't anti-videogame either. I don't know how much of that was them really understanding the benefits of videogames or more just, it's fine, go do what you want. But it's funny to look back and think that playing videogames a lot as a young person definitely has had a huge impact. Maybe not completely positively, but in a lot of ways positively, which is quite satisfying, I guess, to look back and think, I was right. **Jamin:** Before the digital side of things, were you recreating film sequences in some other way? **Miles:** Not really. I definitely did a bit of painting, and in graphic design as well, when I was studying, often I would be trying to replicate weird pre-existing designs. We ended up defining it as recontextualized design, where you've not really made anything new—it's more that you've pulled in something that otherwise you might not have considered as being appropriate or relevant to a brief, but it does work. ![pixel chix the apartment buckle single room animation 1](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/pixel-chix-the-apartment_buckle_single-room-animation_1.jpg) Pixel Chix × **The Apartment*. Courtesy of Miles Buckle. **Jamin:** What were your training wheels? What were you playing on, and what were you making with? **Miles:** We had *Lego Star Wars* on the Xbox. There was a *Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith* game that was too difficult to play for some reason, so Lego was the one I went for instead. Eventually other people had stuff, so *Minecraft* somewhere in the middle, and games like *Call of Duty* and *Battlefield* with friends from school. But I also got into RPGs a lot—*Skyrim*, *Fallout*, *The Witcher*. And then I did get a laptop around 12 or 13, and that's when I started using [Blender](https://www.blender.org/?ref=killscreen.com) for the first time. **Jamin:** You've drawn on *Eraserhead*, *Blue Velvet*, *Twin Peaks*—even *Fallout*'s interface laid over Lynch. What is it about [David Lynch](https://www.killscreen.com/game-films-david-lynch/) that lends itself to this work? **Miles:** When you look back at that sort of graphics from the late '90s, it looks really surreal—you've got a low-polygon head, but then they've got a JPEG of a face stretched over it. They've decided, no, we can have the real face of the actor. And there's the modern context of people saying, when I saw this at the time, this looked really realistic—and now it's laughably bad. But I'm definitely interested in intentionally exploiting those aspects of graphics in a way that feels very Lynchian—I hate to use that term—but feels very surreal, because all you've done is returned to a different point in time. There are certainly elements of nostalgia, and people enjoy things for their retro quality, but if you're looking at it in an artistic way, the style of David Lynch's work and the context behind it complements that deformed late-'90s style. 0:00 /0:37 1× **Eraserhead* in **Fallout 1*. Courtesy of Miles Buckle. **Jamin:** You're often working with pre-existing visual language. How much do you stick to the exact shot-by-shot versus capturing a mood? **Miles:** It's definitely case by case, because there'll be some where I am literally just recreating frame for frame. You still have to decide how much of the background is going to be a 3D object and how much of it is actually just going to be embedded into a texture. How is this tree going to look? Is it going to be just two images crossed over with transparency, or is it going to be a 3D model? **Jamin:** The *Rear Window* piece took you a week. You built the entire set in Blender? **Miles:** Yeah. I found some architecture articles about it, actually, and they provided blueprints online—I don't know if they'd found these from the film archives or if they'd built them from the scenes. And someone else had built this amazing recreation—they built it in Blender, but they had these really nice renders in Unreal. So I was using all of these references and shots from the film to make it, and all the textures: OK, that wall is this color brick, so I'll try and find that color brick. As long as it looks right in the shot, it doesn't matter what else is there. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/rear-window-2000_buckle_night-version_1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/rear-window-2000_buckle_point-and-click-concept_2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/rear-window-2000_buckle_point-and-click-concept_3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/rear-window-2000_buckle_point-and-click-concept_4.jpg) **Rear Window 2000*. Courtesy of Miles Buckle. **Jamin:** Which is very true about games. It's something I was looking at a couple of weeks ago with [the backrooms](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/the-backrooms-were-always-about-games-podcast/)—in games there are these liminal spaces where there's not necessarily something on the other side. And in some ways film worlds do operate like that: if you slipped through the set, you'd be in this whole other place. *Amarcord* interested me because you strayed further from the frame there. Tell me about constructing that one. **Miles:** I wanted to capture—because I did a similar one for [*The Umbrellas of Cherbourg*](https://www.criterion.com/films/27933-the-umbrellas-of-cherbourg?ref=killscreen.com)—more just the vibe of a film, especially a film that's set quite specifically in a location, but also a film that has—it's funny, I actually watched this last night again—a very specific aesthetic. Both of these films have surreal environments, but it's kind of hidden a little bit. In *Amarcord* there are certain things that just don't make sense about the environment, but it's intended to be how memory works—how you remember something in a way that's probably not accurate, but that's still the way you remember it. There's a great scene where they're all on these little boats and the sea is clearly made of plastic—but it's not a bad special effect. He remembers the sea being this waterproof layer between him and under the water. And a lot of videogames really have that same thing. We remember something in a certain way. So I'm definitely interested in films where memory is part of the story. *Lost Highway* as well. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/amarcord_buckle_isometric-reimagining_1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/umbrellas-of-cherbourg_buckle_demy-recreation_1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/umbrellas-of-cherbourg_buckle_demy-recreation_2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/lost-highway-sims-1_buckle_lynch-in-sims_1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/sims-1-backrooms_buckle_liminal-space_1.jpg) **Amarcord*, **The Umbrellas of Cherbourg*, **Lost Highway* and the Backrooms in **The Sims*. Courtesy of Miles Buckle. **Jamin:** A question that comes up in your comments is, "I would play that." Do you feel like that's the right question? Is it a call to action—that you should do an adaptation? Or are they maybe missing the point of what this work is? **Miles:** It makes me happy seeing that sort of thing, because it shows that I am in touch with what maybe doesn't exist but people would like. It's satisfying and rewarding to be not teasing people with imagine they did make this, but, you know, it's a snapshot of something that would be nice to that person. **Jamin:** Last question—the *Sims* animation work, like Hitchcock's *Rope*. There's a performative turn there, away from the pre-rendered and toward something more in line with machinima. What inspired that jump? **Miles:** I was interested in how I could combine the pre-existing mechanic in a game with a moment in a film. If someone's going to walk from A to B, you tell them to walk from A to B—and rather than their reaction being a close-up of their face, because we don't get that shot from our perspective, what would the videogame offer? Would there be a bubble above their head? I also like the on-rails, choreographed element, where it looks like it's happening organically but everything is going off in timing, which comes full circle with the filmmaking part: it's a film made to look like a videogame, but it is just a film. These are all the sorts of things that inspire me, because I think in a weird way I'm actually more interested in the filmmaking part of it than in the game design part. It's just that I like the aesthetics and the visual mechanics of videogames. 0:00 /0:29 1× Alfred Hitchcock's **Rope* staged in **The Sims*. Courtesy of Miles Buckle. Buckle’s games are unplayable on purpose, and almost nobody else is writing about work like it. Killscreen is, and it’s free. [See what’s next ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=feature-cta) ### A whole triennial is named for a platformer's grace period URL: https://www.killscreen.com/alice-bucknell-coyote-time/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T17:38:47.000Z Event details When Through Dec. 13, 2026 Where Counterpublic, St. Louis Coyote time is game design's mercy rule: the few frames after your character runs off a ledge in which a jump still counts. Alice Bucknell has stretched that grace period over an entire city. *Coyote Time*, Bucknell's eco sci-fi text adventure, premieres this fall at Counterpublic, the St. Louis public art triennial running September 10 through December 13—and the exhibition [took its name from the game](https://counterpublic.org/journal/announcing-counterpublic-2026-coyote-time/?ref=killscreen.com), gathering 50 artists under the figure of a character "suspended in midair, unsure of what comes next." Name another major American art exhibition organized around a platforming mechanic. I'll wait. The game invites players into an "infinite night" of text, sound and speculative storytelling. Bucknell developed it in residency at La Becque on Lake Geneva, where [an early build and its soundtrack surfaced](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbBOnA4jF6G/?ref=killscreen.com) at July's Summer Open Studios: game development by Joseph Pleass and Ben West, pixel art by Khaled Makhshoush and Omar Khouri, and a score by Nina Keith. In St. Louis, [per St. Louis Magazine](https://www.stlmag.com/culture/counterpublic-prepares-to-transform-st-louis-with-coyote-time/?ref=killscreen.com), it will be playable at the City Museum—the found-object funhouse that is itself the city's great monument to play—with Nora N. Khan curating the commission. ![Industrial riverfront buildings at Gateway South in St. Louis under a wide sky](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/counterpublic-gateway-south.jpg) Gateway South in St. Louis, one of Counterpublic 2026's sites. Photo: Izaiah Johnson, courtesy of Counterpublic Bucknell has spent years treating games as interfaces for ecological systems—we talked with them about [pollination simulators and quantum love stories](https://www.killscreen.com/alice-bucknell-multiplayer-games-interspecies-cooperation/), and last year SFMOMA acquired *The Alluvials*, Bucknell's game of drought and water politics, as the first video game in the museum's permanent collection. What makes the new title land is its double edge: a grace period is also borrowed time. The ground is already gone; the jump might still register. That's the wager a triennial is asking half a million visitors to inhabit, and it's the most precise use of a game-design term as ecological metaphor I've seen all year. ### Four decades of consoles move into the museum URL: https://www.killscreen.com/achiampong-the-gaming-room/ Last updated: 2026-08-17T18:36:09.000Z The most radical gesture in [Pixel Pioneers](https://www.boijmans.nl/en/exhibitions/pixel-pioneers?ref=killscreen.com), the first exhibition Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has devoted entirely to digital art, might be a couch. *The Gaming Room* (2021–ongoing), Larry Achiampong's contribution, rebuilds a domestic lounge inside the Depot, Rotterdam's publicly accessible art-storage building, out of the artist's own archive: consoles running from the 8-bit era to immersive 3D, plus games, books, music, film and memorabilia gathered across four decades. Three monitors are playable—*Street Fighter* among them—while a fourth runs a film in which, [as Studio International's review describes](https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/pixel-pioneers-review-depot-museum-boijmns-van-beuningen-rotterdam?ref=killscreen.com), Achiampong recalls growing up Ghanaian in London, using games to shape mythic identities and to bond with a brother, and with the brother's avatars. The museum's [announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbJJayTCNRZ/?ref=killscreen.com) makes the framing explicit: video games as sites of memory, storytelling and togetherness, not objects behind glass. You are meant to sit down and stay a while. The company is strong. Feng Mengbo's *Long March: Restart* (2008) runs as a 17-meter playable projection that drops a Red Army soldier into a side-scroller armed with Coke cans. Suzanne Treister's HEXEN tarot decks recount histories of countercultures, blockchain and AI, and Geert Mul's *Horizons* (2008)—restored for this show—rearranges the museum's landscape paintings into a database panorama that shifts as you move. Amira Gad curates; the show runs through September 13. ![A long interactive projection of a retro side-scrolling game in a museum gallery](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/feng-mengbo-long-march-restart.jpg) Feng Mengbo, **Long March: Restart*, 2008\. Installation view, Depot of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Photo: Lotte Stekelenburg A decade ago we were writing about VR showrooms promising to [turn your living room into a universal storefront](https://www.killscreen.com/virtual-reality-showrooms-turn-your-living-room-into-a-universal-storefront/). Achiampong runs that current in reverse: the museum becomes a living room, and the point of the screens is the people between them. That it happens inside a storage facility—the least domestic architecture imaginable, 155,000 objects racked overhead—only sharpens the argument. The collection holds paintings; the couch holds memory. ### Sahej Rahal's Azalabad salvages a drowned village URL: https://www.killscreen.com/sahej-rahal-azalabad/ Last updated: 2026-08-17T18:31:33.000Z Somewhere beneath the internet's folds, a rift opens onto a shoreline. That's the premise of *Azalabad*, Sahej Rahal's ever-evolving open world, which the ARE YOU FOR REAL account [resurfaced in a reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbScwBYs2in/?ref=killscreen.com) this summer—and which you can still walk, right now, in a browser tab on [New Art City](https://newart.city/show/azalabad?ref=killscreen.com). The name splices together two measures of infinity: azal, everything from the beginning of recorded time until now, and abad, from now until the end of eternity. On the shoreline between them stand colossal ruins salvaged from Inamgaon, a real Copper Age settlement in the Bhima valley believed to have drowned in a flood. In Rahal's telling the ruins are reliquaries, bearing "tales of ancient extinctions, secret histories, conspiratorial cults." Commissioned for Phase 2 of ifa's [ARE YOU FOR REAL](https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/575914/are-you-for-real-phase-2-rituals-of-nascent-worlds?ref=killscreen.com), the long-running hybrid project on digital world-making, *Azalabad* premiered in the platform's third cluster, Rituals of Nascent Worlds, in December 2023—a grouping built around magical thinking as a generative system competing with the technical one. Rahal works across sculpture, film, performance, and AI programs, and the through-line is counter-mythology: fiction used to interrogate myth-making while smuggling the actual scientific record in through the side door. Hybrid beings, fragmented histories, no fixed protagonist. It plays less like a story you finish than a ruin you inhabit. ![A sculptural creature with long legs stands in shallow water against an orange sky](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/azalabad-2.jpg) **Azalabad* (2023). Image: Sahej Rahal, via e-flux Two things worth holding onto. First, the infrastructure: *Azalabad* runs on New Art City, the browser-native exhibition engine—no download, no headset—and the caption never names the platform, which says something about how invisible these engines still are even as institutions lean on them. Second, Rahal is a returning subject at Killscreen—we covered [Rahal's AI instruments and cooperative creatures](https://www.killscreen.com/sahej-rahals-ai-instruments-and-cooperative-creatures/), indeterminate beings crawling out of the cracks in civilization. *Azalabad* scales that practice up from creatures to a whole cosmology: a world that keeps growing whether or not anyone is watching. ### Mitch Anzuoni is building a money laundering simulator URL: https://www.killscreen.com/mitch-anzuoni-offshore/ Last updated: 2026-08-17T18:25:46.000Z "Signification is the gameplay." That's Mitch Anzuoni in Rhizome's [artist profile](https://rhizome.org/editorial/2026/jul/28/artist-profile-mitch-anzuoni/?ref=killscreen.com) from late July, describing *Offshore*—an isometric money laundering network game and self-described deep state simulator in the works at Inpatient Interactive, the studio Anzuoni runs with collaborator Pete Christian. I had a chance to see some of the work at DEMO and begin with a set of icons, drawn by Christian, and learn to build relationships between them. The network grows, more signs surface, and the web you assemble becomes, in Anzuoni's words, "a coagulated sigil." A crime game where the crime is diagramming. Anzuoni is better known as the founding editor of Inpatient Press, and the publisher's eye is all over the games. *Small Press Tycoon* (2022) made a management sim out of running an outfit much like Anzuoni's own. *Ex Libris*, released in May, is a monastery allegory built from medieval Scholastic concepts, its floor plan arranged on Kabbalistic lines, with open debts to Umberto Eco—and it was made, remarkably, in Sword of Moonlight, FromSoftware's *King's Field* construction kit from 2000, with custom models backported into a 26-year-old rendering pipeline. "Sometimes 640x480 VGA is all you need," Anzuoni tells interviewer Matilda Lin Berke, against a current wave of retro-styled work that fakes old display artifacts with modern tools. ![A dim monastery interior rendered in the low-polygon style of a 2000-era RPG engine](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ex-libris-screenshot.png) **Ex Libris* (2026), built in FromSoftware's Sword of Moonlight. Image: Rhizome The interview, [flagged on Rhizome's Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbWCuDBFQEA/?ref=killscreen.com), also lands a clean jab at gallery-ready art games—first-person environments whose symbolic potential gets washed out in favor of what Anzuoni's friend calls "art sauce." Games, Anzuoni argues, are "the ultimate sign-system, the universal encoder," and treating them that way means caring about software itself: its portability, its mutability, its strata. We asked a version of the same question in [our piece on preserving games while you're still making them](https://www.killscreen.com/what-happens-when-you-preserve-your-games-while-youre-still-making-them/). *Offshore* has no release date yet. ![Pixel-art management game interface showing a small publishing office](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/small-press-tycoon-screenshot.png) **Small Press Tycoon* (2022). Image: Rhizome ### A sculptural camera turns a game engine into cinema URL: https://www.killscreen.com/kevin-peter-he-passage/ Last updated: 2026-08-17T18:21:22.000Z The last time I had coffee with Kevn Peter He, he walked me through his elaborate setup and it dawned on me: The instrument is a camera. At [LIVE SYSTEMS](https://luma.com/s2tfs8c0?ref=killscreen.com), an off-SIGGRAPH performance night at Spectra Studio in Los Angeles in late July, Kevin Peter He performed *PASSAGE*—piloting an unbroken take through a simulated forest, live in a game engine, with a sculptural camera controller built for the purpose. Dan Gorelick scored the run on cello and a custom-designed electronic instrument, and the framing in [the announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbT4VjgmCQs/?ref=killscreen.com) is key. Kevin Peter He called watching the visual and musical instruments interact in real time "a meaningful step for the work," and that word—instruments, plural—is doing the heavy lifting. *PASSAGE* imagines an ecosystem as a living circuit board: metallic roots braided into living flora, with fans, lightning and fire cycling through growth, collapse and renewal. On [the project page](https://www.kevinpeterhe.com/passage?ref=killscreen.com), the work sprawls across more forms than most game projects allow themselves—a live cinema performance, an installation where AI-governed deer diagnose faults in the forest's root systems, a prosthetic limb for an over-pruned ficus in a Financial District lobby, even a room fragrance that opens as forest and dries down to cold metal. And there is *Passage.exe*, an objective-less exploration game in which the player cannot alter the ecosystem at all—only navigate, frame, and observe it. Gameplay as an act of documentation. ![A synthetic forest rendered in a game engine, metallic roots glowing among trees](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/passage-engine-still.jpg) The simulated forest of **PASSAGE*. Image: kevinpeterhe.com This is territory I keep returning to. Indira Ardolic's live-coding sets [turn game engines into instruments](https://www.killscreen.com/indira-ardolics-live-coding-performances-turn-game-engines-into-instruments/), and Jakob Kudsk Steensen talked with us about [art, ecology and the game engine](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/online-talk-4-28-the-living-archive-jakob-kudsk-steensen-on-art-ecology-and-the-game-engine/) as a site for slow attention. What Kevin Peter He adds is the camera itself as the played object: virtual production's hidden labor of framing, calibration, and control, pushed onstage and given a score. The film does not exist until the hour is over—you watch it get made. ![Gallery installation with screens showing a synthetic forest around a metallic tree sculpture](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/passage-fallinglight.jpg) **Passage.FallingLight*, installed at Arizona State University's MIX Center. Image: kevinpeterhe.com ![Performer silhouetted before a large projection of a simulated forest](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/passage-performance-2.jpg) **Passage.Unfolding* in performance. Image: kevinpeterhe.com ### Plum Road Tea Dream's grief sanctuary gains a mausoleum URL: https://www.killscreen.com/plum-road-tea-dream-mausoleum-jira-duguid/ Last updated: 2026-08-17T18:19:47.000Z Somebody playing *Plum Road Tea Dream* has already asked how you get out of the Mausoleum. That is either a bug report or the most accurate review the level will ever get, because a Mausoleum is Jira Duguid's contribution to the game's sanctuary for queer grief: a room built for mourning, with a player standing inside it looking for the door. The game came out on Steam in late July. It is the work of Samuel Baidoo, a Brussels-based artist and performer, made with Reveal Game Studio and a collaborator list that runs to six game developers, 11 artists, and four composers. You play through seven sanctuaries built by an avatar called S., a young queer game designer of color whose memories you are walking around inside. The main verbs are walking, sitting, and listening. Visual styles lurch from hyperreal to PSX-era jaggies depending on which chapter's memory you're standing in—a formal decision that reads as autobiography, since nobody remembers their life at a consistent resolution. 0:00 /1:29 1× The pitch is explicit about what it's pushing against: *Plum Road Tea Dream* means to detach the videogame from "violence and imperialism" and hand it to connection and healing instead. Clay sculptures and handmade objects were 3D-scanned into the world, so the thing is physically continuous with the studio it came out of. It was a Nuovo Award finalist at this year's Independent Games Festival—and it isn't only a game. In April, Baidoo staged it as [a live performance at DE SINGEL in Antwerp](https://www.vai.be/en/agenda-expos-en-programma/samuel-baidoo-plum-road-tea-dream-3-april-2026?ref=killscreen.com), two sold-out nights with an exhibition running on afterward. The sanctuaries have already been rooms people sat in. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ks-plumroad-shot-01.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ks-plumroad-shot-02.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ks-plumroad-shot-03.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ks-plumroad-shot-04.jpg) Killscreen keeps returning to this. Earlier this year we wrote about [Jonathan Coryn's six-year project](https://www.killscreen.com/player-non-player-jonathan-coryn-touch-grief-game/) where caressing grieving figures is the mechanic, and a decade before that, [*Fragments of Him*](https://www.killscreen.com/fragments-of-him-finds-the-everyday-poetry-of-grief/). Duguid's [mausoleum](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbVKaEDDNsg/?ref=killscreen.com) extends the lineage in a specific direction—not grief as narrative, but grief as architecture you can be inside, and struggle to leave. ### Watch Bruno Abib's Death in August [Members Only] URL: https://www.killscreen.com/watch-bruno-abibs-death-in-august-members-only/ Last updated: 2026-10-18T21:14:25.000Z *I've got something a little bit different this week. As you probably suspect, I take a very expansive view of games as a form of culture, which means it extends to different mediums: dance, design, theater, and, of course, cinema.* *Filmmaker Bruno Abib reached out to me to take a look at his 2023 short film Morte em Agosto (Death in August), which follows a group of friends responding to the loss of one of their own. Some lead a revolt, and another looks for solace in GTA: San Andreas.* *I asked him whether or not he'd be open to screening it as something for members only. He thankfully said yes. Unlike in previous weeks, when I withheld the game's title, you know what it is, and we've got a viewing for members below.* *I did my write-up, an interview with Abib, and a video, too. Let me know what you think and if this is something I should do more often.* _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Save-point typewriters turn up in the Resident Evil film URL: https://www.killscreen.com/resident-evil-film-save-point-typewriters/ Last updated: 2026-10-18T21:15:27.000Z There is a typewriter on a desk in the trailer for Zach Cregger's *Resident Evil*, and a box of shotgun shells not far from it. Neither is set dressing. In *Resident Evil 2* a typewriter is a save point, and because ink ribbons are finite, its presence doubles as a warning: the game has decided you are about to need one. That is a whole grammar built out of an object, and now it's made its way onto the screen. Cregger built the film that way on purpose. "It was such a fun challenge for me to try and write a game as a movie," Cregger told [PlayStation Blog](https://blog.playstation.com/2026/04/30/resident-evil-qa-director-zach-cregger-shares-inspirations-and-a-new-film-teaser/?ref=killscreen.com) in April, and the literalism is the point. *Resident Evil 4*'s healing items were mimicked "exactly" and put onscreen. The games' weapon ladder is intact—pistol, then shotgun, then an MP5\. What mattered from *Resident Evil 2* was "moving slow and with deliberation," plus the constant arithmetic of how many bullets are left. A film cannot actually run any of that. There is no inventory, nothing is finite, and the audience never decides what to carry and what to leave behind. What a film can do is put the object in frame and rely on twenty-eight years of fluency to supply the rest—which, judging by how quickly the trailer got taken apart after [sabukaru circulated a breakdown of it](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbKeyulp60Q/?ref=killscreen.com), is a safe bet. Austin Abrams's courier is built for the same job. Cregger describes the character as "an avatar for me," a stand-in for however an ordinary player might react to being dropped inside the game. One more borrowed rule: the environment "has to keep changing," Cregger says, every new location harboring a new danger. In 2015 we wrote about [the Raccoon City police station](https://www.killscreen.com/horror-resident-evil-2s-police-station/) as architecture—an Overlook Hotel of impossible spaces where the dread lives in the floor plan. Cregger is adapting the floor plan. It opens September 18. --- Killscreen publishes one email a week on games, play, and the culture around them. No roundups, no review scores. [Subscribe free](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### A paper notebook is the entire HUD in Boring Car Stories URL: https://www.killscreen.com/boring-car-stories-paper-notebook-hud/ Last updated: 2026-09-08T22:00:36.000Z A leather-bound notebook sits at the edge of the windshield in *Boring Car Stories: Maghrebine*, pen still in the loop, mounted exactly where a minimap would normally glow. That is the entire HUD. [The reel showing it off](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbVZzS9uWWZ/?ref=killscreen.com) pulled 25,000 likes, and the striking thing about the response is its direction. Nobody wanted a cleaner interface. They wanted more friction: a physical map with no you-are-here marker, so you'd have to find a town to work out where you were. Road signs that only hint at how sharp the next corner is. A long argument about whether the gear indicator sits too far from the road for your eyes to safely leave it. 0:00 /1:17 1× The game is the first from ELFA LABS under the Boring Car Stories banner, following Yassine, a 20-something delivery driver turned sales rep in 1980s North Africa. The founding argument is the car-forum axiom "slow car fast," and the spec sheet commits to it: nothing makes more than 200 horsepower, half the cars make under 100, every one is manual, and there are no electronics whatsoever. Most driving games, the pitch goes, alienate anyone who cares by building everything around a 300 kph halo car on roads too wide to be interesting. It reaches Early Access this quarter. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ks-bcs-shot-01.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ks-bcs-shot-02.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ks-bcs-shot-03.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ks-bcs-shot-04.jpg) We've been here before. In 2016 Killscreen covered [*Jalopy*](https://www.killscreen.com/jalopy-will-take-you-on-a-ramshackle-road-trip-through-the-eastern-bloc/), another ramshackle period road game where the car itself was the interface. And when ustwo asked what happens to the dashboard once it becomes a screen, [we noted](https://www.killscreen.com/monument-valley-dashboard/) that games are where physical instrumentation goes to survive. A notebook that makes you glance away from the road isn't a UI failure. It's the whole proposition, and the people watching have already worked that out. --- **Read next:** [RAAHI drives a 1990s Goa auto rickshaw](https://www.killscreen.com/raahi-kalp-studio-1990s-goa/) · [What a rickshaw knows that a car doesn’t](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/what-a-rickshaw-knows-that-a-car-doesnt-podcast/) Killscreen Radar Killscreen reads interfaces as design arguments, not decoration. Once a week, free. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=radar-backfill) ### Wendi Yan built a puzzle game out of Daoist inner alchemy URL: https://www.killscreen.com/wendi-yan-inner-carbon-classic-daoist-alchemy/ Last updated: 2026-08-15T00:43:22.000Z The Neijing Tu is a real diagram—Daoist practitioners still meditate on it—that draws the human torso as a landscape: rivers for the spine, mountains for the brain, vital energy pushed up from the Tailbone Gate toward the third eye. Wendi Yan reads it as a level map. In [the excerpts HERVISIONS posted](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbF7stzDSok/?ref=killscreen.com) from *The Inner Carbon Classic*, you move through a science-fiction landscape as a bundle of qi, and the thing you're aligning your breath with isn't your body. It's the planet's carbon cycle. Yan's hour-long puzzle game—made with Yi Xie on level design and interaction programming, with support from The Steve Jobs Archive—casts the player as a character inside a "dynamic world-scripture," performing three stages of what the fiction calls Internal Carbonic Alchemy. The framing is cosmotechnics: geoengineering exercised in alignment with spiritual practice, meditation as an action, scripture as a technology. At a moment when carbon is mostly discussed as a financial instrument, Yan builds a sense organ for feeling it circulate. Excerpts showed in [Stigmergy](https://ncm.org.au/exhibitions/stigmergy?ref=killscreen.com) at Melbourne's National Communication Museum, which closed August 9—a fitting host. The collective Pseudo built that show as a handmade network in which curatorial nodes, HERVISIONS among them, feed work into an infrastructure that absorbs and mutates whatever it carries. It takes its name from the way ants coordinate without a manager, and its organizers cheerfully call it janky and deliberately unscalable. A game about interconnected systems of exchange, fed into one. It also appeared in the Game Om show at TANK Shanghai. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ks-wendiyan-02.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ks-wendiyan-03.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ks-wendiyan-04.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ks-wendiyan-05.jpg) The lineage runs deep here. A decade ago we covered [*Breath of Light*](https://www.killscreen.com/breath-of-light-breathes-new-life-into-australias-game-making-scene/), an Australian meditation-puzzle game about energy flowing through a garden—same country, same conviction that breath can be a mechanic. And David OReilly's [*Everything*](https://www.killscreen.com/david-oreillys-next-game-reminds-us-not-center-universe/) promised you could play as anything in the universe. Yan's answer is more disciplined: you play as breath itself, and the universe breathes back. ### When the mocap suit drifts, the drift becomes choreography URL: https://www.killscreen.com/letta-shtohryn-chuly-chuly-mocap-drift/ Last updated: 2026-08-15T00:29:36.000Z The player is bad at the game on purpose. In act one of Letta Shtohryn's Чули? Чули / *Chuly? Chuly*, staged as an e-sports spectacle, someone plays in public and keeps failing to reach the objective, while competing voices narrate a story about a woman who once saw giants. The cave is never found. The giants never appear. That's the design: a narrative coherent enough to believe and unstable enough to resist checking. 0:00 /0:40 1× The work starts somewhere unexpected—the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum, a 5,000-year-old underground temple in Malta that was unsealed in 1902 and promptly filled up with urban legends about giant skulls. Shtohryn, who is Ukrainian, traces the line from that kind of speculation to the industrialized version: the woman's account gets run repeatedly through LLM agents until it mirrors the half-truths-and-real-history blend that Pekka Kallioniemi catalogues in *Vatnik Soup*. The e-sports framing isn't decoration either. It points at where radicalization actually happens, which is game chat. In act Two, a dancer calibrates an inertial motion capture suit facing the audience—a technical necessity that plays as a stare-down—and then the suit's calibration begins to drift, as those suits always do under electromagnetic interference. Shtohryn treats that drift as choreography. The gap that opens between the body and the avatar it drives is the whole thesis: the single operator behind a thousand accounts, briefly visible. Then dancer and player swap suit for controller, and the player becomes a calibrated NPC while the dancer takes the camera and decides what the world shows you. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ks-letta-still-01.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ks-letta-still-02.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ks-letta-still-03.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/ks-letta-still-04.jpg) Killscreen has long argued that broken machines are expressive ones—[*Small Radios Big Televisions*](https://www.killscreen.com/small-radios-big-televisions-finds-beauty-machine-glitches/) found its beauty in magnetic tape degrading. *Chuly? Chuly* takes the next step and makes the error tell you who's holding the strings. It took an Honorary Mention in New Animation at Prix Ars Electronica 2024, and it showed through August 14 in [Avatars, Monsters, {Robots}, Ghosts](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbVXtemjYj0/?ref=killscreen.com), Shtohryn's solo exhibition at Valletta Contemporary—back in Malta, where the giants started. ### Wonderville's new cabinet Step Right Up! crosses a Zoltar machine with vector graphics URL: https://www.killscreen.com/wondervilles-new-cabinet-step-right-up-crosses-a-zoltar-machine-with-vector-graphics/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T16:49:25.000Z The credit block on *Step Right Up!* reads like a theater program: game by Ben Sironko and James Earl Cox, cabinet by Mark Kleback and Gus Boehling, UI by Lillyan Ling, voice acting by Blake Andrews, animatronic head by Will Cogley, trackball design by Dr. Tom Tilley, funded in part by the Brooklyn Arts Council and Arcade Commons. That's six disciplines and a public-arts grant converging on one machine, [unveiled in Wonderville's reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbOat53z3-Z/?ref=killscreen.com) and playable now on the floor in Bushwick. The cabinet is modeled on Zoltar-style fortune tellers—an animatronic barker behind glass, all red paint and carnival menace—but where Zoltar spits out a card, this one plays. The screen runs glowing vector graphics, the controls are a custom trackball and a fan of red buttons, and the head reacts to what you do in the game. The comments split neatly between admiration and fear: chiptune artist nullsleep praised the vector style, one visitor found the barker "terrifying for kids," and another mourned that "the industry gave up on vector graphics in the mid 80s." ![An animatronic carnival barker head beside a glowing vector-graphics tower](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/wonderville-step-right-up-vector-head.jpg) The animatronic barker and vector tower, from [the reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbOat53z3-Z/?ref=killscreen.com) The venue matters here. Wonderville, founded in 2019 by Kleback and Stephanie Gross, is the permanent home of Death by Audio Arcade, and kleebatron on that cabinet credit is Kleback. The bar doesn't just host independent games, but also fabricates the furniture they live in. It's the same instinct we've followed for years through [alt.ctrl.GDC](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/alt-ctrl-gdc/): when the controller and the cabinet become the artwork, the game stops being software and starts being sculpture. *Step Right Up!* just adds a face that watches you play. Playable at Wonderville, 1186 Broadway, Brooklyn. ### ONLY SLIME rebuilt their computer-game opera as AFTERLIFE, URL: https://www.killscreen.com/only-slime-rebuilt-their-computer-game-opera-as-afterlife/ Last updated: 2026-08-14T03:32:15.000Z My favorite review of *AFTERLIFE*, ONLY SLIME's exhibition at FACT Liverpool, sits in the comments under [the gallery's how-to-play reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbdA2w6ohsg/?ref=killscreen.com): two visitors got "stuck in some meditating cutscene for ages" and would very much like a reset button. When a gallery show needs a reset button, the games have stopped being decoration. ONLY SLIME is Toby Pfeil and Claudia Cox, and *AFTERLIFE* rebuilds their 2023 computer-game opera as a walk-in installation. Two 3D characters, Axi and Zi, drift through fantasy underworlds assembled from Greek mythology and contemporary internet culture, and the room's motion-tracking sensors pull visitors into the story—you steer the pair, trigger mini-games, and nudge which paths they take through a world between life and death. FACT posted an explainer because the show honestly needs one: the games are the exhibition, not the interactive garnish next to it. ![Two artists in costume at a CRT computer in pink gaming chairs on a checkered floor](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/only-slime-afterlife-fact-crt.jpg) ONLY SLIME walk through the games in [FACT's explainer reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbdA2w6ohsg/?ref=killscreen.com) Opera and games keep circling each other—we noted [a Minecraft opera](https://killscreen.com/previously/articles/check-out-opera-minecraft/?ref=killscreen.com) a decade ago—but the traffic usually runs one way, with games borrowing opera's staging for a boss reveal. ONLY SLIME wrote the opera inside the game first and then let the game swallow the opera house. *AFTERLIFE* runs through Sunday, Aug. 16 at FACT, 88 Wood Street, Liverpool—Wednesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., free. This week is the last call. ### Jérémy Griffaud started a watercolor game built on Shinto animism URL: https://www.killscreen.com/jeremy-griffaud-started-a-watercolor-game-built-on-shinto-animism/ Last updated: 2026-08-14T03:29:16.000Z Jérémy Griffaud paints first and builds games second. The French artist's pipeline runs on watercolors—painted on paper, scanned, then animated inside a game engine—which he has used for interactive installations and the VR piece *Under the Sky*, carried in the Institut français XR catalog. His newest project points the technique somewhere older: *The Prayer*, an art game about animism that entered production during a July residency at Akiyoshidai International Art Village in Yamaguchi, Japan. In [his write-up of the residency](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbilnwwvAx2/?ref=killscreen.com), Griffaud says the month went to game design and "the structure of the narrative intention," drawing on Shintoism and Gion Matsuri, the Kyoto festival held each July since the ninth century. The goal, as he puts it, is "to enrich the animist relationship to ecosystem in this parallel universe." A first prototype showed at a short exhibition at AIAV—a hand-painted figure pacing a saturated landscape on a vertical screen, projections spilling across the room's curtains. ![A television on a plinth showing a painted game world, in front of a stage](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/jeremy-griffaud-the-prayer-aiav-screen.jpg) **The Prayer* in the AIAV exhibition, from [Griffaud's post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbilnwwvAx2/?ref=killscreen.com) Games have borrowed Shinto's furniture for decades—we traced [its influence through the whole medium](https://www.killscreen.com/unmistakable-influence-shintoism-videogame-history/) back in 2016—but usually as set dressing. Griffaud is working from the belief structure instead: an ecosystem you're in relation with rather than in charge of, rendered in a medium that behaves like something alive. Wet paint bleeds and blooms on its own schedule, which makes it a strangely good material for animism. It puts him in a small lineage with *The Coral Cave*, the watercolor adventure threaded with Japanese spirits [whose yōkai inspirations we covered](https://www.killscreen.com/two-game-artists-share-japanese-yokai-inspire/). *The Prayer* is early—prototype-early—and Griffaud says the residency was as much about exchange with the audience as output. But he returns to this territory rather than visiting, and the rest of his painted-engine work is at [jeremy-griffaud.fr](https://jeremy-griffaud.fr/?ref=killscreen.com). ### Paizley Lee filled DEAD INTERNET THEORY's second LA night with a rainbow of iMac G3s URL: https://www.killscreen.com/paizley-lee-filled-dead-internet-theorys-second-la-night-with-a-rainbow-of-imac-g3s/ Last updated: 2026-08-14T03:28:14.000Z Dead internet theory started as a message-board conspiracy—the internet is mostly bots talking to bots—and has aged into something closer to a description. Just this week we covered [Playfool's \[OP\]erator](https://www.killscreen.com/playfool-built-a-working-bot-farm-that-hands-you-the-controls/), a playable bot farm that makes the point with 100 phones. The sharper responses, though, are happening off the internet entirely. DEAD INTERNET THEORY is LA artist Paizley Lee's version of a response: a recurring "Y2K LAN experience" staged at ark/8 on La Brea under her WORKSUCKS banner. The first night, in May, was a proof of concept—22 retro PC stations on the floor, a CD-burning station, a table for building mini cyberdecks, internet-café catering. On August 2 it came back, and Lee—who posts as kidgrandma—spent [the announcement reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbhN5rvyYNO/?ref=killscreen.com) introducing the iMac Rainbow, a floor installation of candy-colored iMac G3s she jokes she "LITERALLY DESTROYED MY LIFE TO ACQUIRE," alongside games and installations from Benjamin Palmer, John Threat, and others. ![A CRT monitor and beige PC tower glowing under a desk lamp at DEAD INTERNET THEORY](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/dead-internet-theory-retro-pc-station.jpg) One of the retro PC stations at DEAD INTERNET THEORY, from [kidgrandma's reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbhN5rvyYNO/?ref=killscreen.com) The funding is its own small rebuttal of the feed. Mike Merrill—the artist who has sold shares in himself as KmikeyM for 18 years—[put $5,000 of shareholder money to a vote](https://news.kmikeym.com/vote-5k-in-dead-internet-theory/?ref=killscreen.com) as first money in on Lee's raise. One social experiment about being a real person online, bankrolling another about being real people offline. The LAN party keeps resurfacing as a gallery form. Brennan Wojtyla's *LAN* rebuilt Antwerp's TICK TACK gallery into a working *Counter-Strike* network, and [we flagged it in July](https://www.killscreen.com/brute-horse-abide-bucknell-achiampong/) when Berlin Atonal restaged it. Wojtyla's version is technological brutalism; Lee's is the candy shell. Both make the same bet: the internet was a place once, and a room full of humans and CRTs is the fastest way back. RSVPs for the next one live at [worksucks.net](https://www.worksucks.net/?ref=killscreen.com). ### What a Rickshaw Knows That a Car Doesn't [Podcast] URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/what-a-rickshaw-knows-that-a-car-doesnt-podcast/ Last updated: 2026-08-13T20:19:48.000Z I ask Mannat Jain of Kalp Studio why she and her co-founders set their first game in a town that isn't on any map, and get an argument back about what games lose when travel is only the gap between two objectives. Kalp Studio is a three-person studio in India, and Jain runs narrative, business and marketing there. Their game *Raahi* casts you as Sandy, an auto rickshaw driver in Majili, a fictional coastal town assembled out of 1990s Goa: Portuguese facades, Hindu temples, a fish-shaped pond that exists nowhere. We work through what the rickshaw makes possible that a car does not, why Kalp Studio wanted a setting where a driver still knows the routes and the passengers, and how three people fake the scale of a whole town. Jain talks about the food and the feni, the cassettes from Indian artists that play while you drive, and the pull of a decade much of the game's audience never lived through. I push on whether a specific place travels, and she answers with Tokyo: most of *Persona* is one city, and nobody treats that as a limitation. ## Links - [The Long Way Around](https://www.killscreen.com/raahi-kalp-studio-1990s-goa/), Jamin Warren's feature on *Raahi* - [Kalp Studio](https://kalpstudio.co/?ref=killscreen.com) *Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by* [Nick Sylvester](https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com)*.* ***Member's Only Video*** _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Kara Güt staged a two-person play inside Red Dead Online at a Dutch film festival URL: https://www.killscreen.com/kara-gut-my-desert-heart-red-dead-online/ Last updated: 2026-08-13T04:05:49.000Z [The documentation photo](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYqSMVRjXh5/?ref=killscreen.com) is doing a lot of work. A projection at the front of a theater splits into two *Red Dead Online* feeds; below it, four people sit at a folding desk with monitors, controllers and paper scripts, lit like a table read; in front of them, rows of strangers sitting in the dark. Mitchell Bosch shot it at [Go Short](https://www.goshort.nl/en/?ref=killscreen.com) in Nijmegen this April, where [Kara Güt](https://www.karagut.info/?ref=killscreen.com) performed *My Desert Heart*—a two-person play staged live inside Rockstar's multiplayer server. The plot is one sentence: two players try to reach each other. Güt has been building the *Desert Nexus* universe since 2021, when [*Welcome to My Desert Nexus*](https://www.karagut.info/desertnexus?ref=killscreen.com) premiered at Pioneer Works as a three-act play—four actors driving avatars, Güt narrating and cutting between their camera feeds on a video switcher, 45 minutes with an intermission. *My Desert Heart* is the second installment, and Go Short named Güt its Maker in Focus for 2026 on the back of it. What I love is the liveness of it when the server doesn't cooperate. Weather rolls in on its own schedule. Strangers ride through the scene. Characters die and respawn across the map, and the performers keep talking. (Same feel as *Grand Theft Hamlet.*) Güt has called the frontier of digital space a facade for the fantasies players bring to it, a fair description of a proscenium, too. Theater has always been a machine for agreeing to believe something in a room together; *Red Dead Online* just happens to supply the bullets. Killscreen made a version of this argument in 2015, when [Chris Priestman wrote up](https://killscreen.com/previously/articles/stage/?ref=killscreen.com) Jack King-Spooner's *The Stage*, a game built as a venue rather than a system—one where you "only interact with *The Stage* to incite the show." That piece imagined an audience. 11 years later, Güt sold them tickets. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/karagut-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/karagut-3.jpg) **My Desert Heart* staged live in Red Dead Online. Photo: Mitchell Bosch ### SFMOMA and ZKM jointly acquire Eden.Garden 1.0, 25 years after its debut URL: https://www.killscreen.com/sfmoma-and-zkm-jointly-acquire-eden-garden-1-0-25-years-after-its-debut/ Last updated: 2026-08-13T04:00:55.000Z Here's a sentence I didn't expect to write in 2026: *Eden.Garden 1.0* is now museum property. The 2001 net artwork by Entropy8Zuper!—Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, years before they became [Tale of Tales](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/tale-of-tales/)—has entered the permanent collections of SFMOMA and ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, jointly, [a gift of the artists](https://www.instagram.com/p/Da0dToFDT4K/?ref=killscreen.com). It was one line in [a 90-plus-work acquisition announcement](https://www.sfmoma.org/press-release/sfmoma-acquires-more-than-90-works-of-modern-and-contemporary-art-reflecting-commitment-to-global-and-local-voices/?ref=killscreen.com) SFMOMA put out in July, and it's the line that matters most to me. The work itself is still a startling idea. You type in a URL, and *Eden.Garden 1.0* parses the site's HTML into a real-time 3D paradise—the internet itself becomes the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve are modeled on Harvey and Samyn, who met and fell in love online. SFMOMA commissioned it for [010101: Art in Technological Times](https://www.sfmoma.org/press/release/sfmoma-presents-far-reaching-exploration-of-art-i/?ref=killscreen.com), the museum's survey of art at the millennium, whose online wing launched one minute after midnight on January 1, 2001. Then the browsers moved on and the work went dark—the fate of most net art. Marc Schütze at ZKM restored it, which is why ZKM is now co-steward rather than footnote. A museum collecting a browser work is really promising to keep a runtime alive after the web abandons it. We've been following these two a long time. When Tale of Tales [walked away from commercial games in 2015](https://killscreen.com/articles/this-sad-tale-tales-done-making-videogames?ref=killscreen.com), it read like an ending. It wasn't—Harvey's sculptures have since entered major collections, and now the work that started it all has too. Their career began in a browser window. The museums finally caught up. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/edengarden-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/edengarden-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/edengarden-8.jpg) **Eden.Garden 1.0* in exhibition and documentation (via Entropy8Zuper!) ### Amanita Design built a dystopian city out of real cardboard, then digitized it URL: https://www.killscreen.com/amanita-design-built-a-dystopian-city-out-of-real-cardboard-then-digitized-it/ Last updated: 2026-08-13T04:00:02.000Z *Phonopolis* is a game about being told what to think, built out of the most obedient material there is: paper does whatever you fold it into. Amanita Design constructed every set physically in cardboard, then digitized the models into 3D—the studio calls it a departure from its hand-drawn past, but what it really produces is [digital stop-motion](https://www.instagram.com/p/DXxoLnPsVAo/?ref=killscreen.com), a city you could imagine knocking over with your hand. The city deserves it. In *Phonopolis* you play Felix, a garbage collector in a metropolis wallpapered with "amplions"—loudspeakers broadcasting the Leader's subliminal commands. Felix gets hold of headphones that mute the signal, and the game becomes a quiet campaign of sabotage against the Leader's pursuit of the Absolute Tone, a frequency that would end disagreement for good. The visual language is late-1920s Soviet constructivism, with futurism and suprematism in the seams—propaganda's own aesthetic turned against the propagandist, in cardboard. 0:00 /0:16 1× From the **Phonopolis* launch trailer — [full trailer on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1206070/Phonopolis/?ref=killscreen.com) The game took the [IGF award for Excellence in Visual Art](https://igf.com/archive-2024/?ref=killscreen.com) back in 2024, two years before anyone could buy it. It began outside the studio entirely as a project by Hammeware that caught Amanita founder Jakub Dvorský's eye and moved in-house in 2016—which makes it a decade-long build. It [released May 20](https://www.gematsu.com/2026/04/phonopolis-launches-may-20?ref=killscreen.com) on Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store. Amanita's whole catalog has been drifting toward the physical for years. When *Samorost 3* shipped a physical edition, [we noted how badly that world wanted to be touched](https://www.killscreen.com/samorost-3s-physical-version-brings-games-world-closer/) and *Samorost* itself began with photographed organic matter. *Phonopolis* completes the loop: the handmade isn't a texture pack on top of the game, it's the argument. A dystopia about mass-produced thought, made one glued seam at a time. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/phonopolis-g1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/phonopolis-g2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/phonopolis-g3.jpg) **Phonopolis* (via Amanita Design) ### Playfool built a working bot farm that hands you the controls URL: https://www.killscreen.com/playfool-built-a-working-bot-farm-that-hands-you-the-controls/ Last updated: 2026-09-08T22:00:37.000Z One of the things that bothers me about how the media compares the Tea Party to the homegrown excitment of the DSA is that the former was an [astroturfing operation](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/25/tea-party-koch-brothers?ref=killscreen.com). It might have been cheaper to call Playfool instead. \[OP\]erator, by the art-design duo [Playfool](https://www.onassis.org/people/playfool?ref=killscreen.com)—Daniel Coppen and Saki Maruyama—stages a functioning bot farm as sculpture: 100 Android phones racked on metal, choreographed by a single master phone that's been mischievously unlocked and handed to you. 0:00 /0:20 1× \[OP\]erator in operation — [full video on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZXdCHXtwYf/?ref=killscreen.com) You're prompted to share a thought. Whatever you type gets amplified across the wall—each of the 100 phones posts it to its own X account, passed through an LLM that varies the wording to match that device's persona. The result is what Playfool calls a "[synthetically authentic crowd](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZXdCHXtwYf/?ref=killscreen.com)": your opinion, everywhere at once, in a hundred voices that aren't quite yours and aren't quite anyone's. What I like is the inversion. Bot farms are built to be invisible. The whole apparatus depends on you never seeing the racked phones behind the consensus, a theme in the work of Tomo Kihara, one of Playfool's other collaborators. Playfool rebuilds the machinery at gallery scale and then gives you the operator's seat, so the reflection isn't "bots are bad" but the queasier "this is fun." Interface-as-argument is exactly this studio's territory (they took the S+T+ARTS Prize in 2024 and have shown at the V&A and Ars Electronica) and the piece was developed through ONX Seeds with the support of Onassis ONX, showing at [ONX.Showcase.Athens.2026](https://www.onassis.org/whats-on/onx-showcase-athens-2026?ref=killscreen.com) at Onassis Stegi in May. There's a through-line here from the archive: we once argued [Twitter itself might be the next great videogame system](https://killscreen.com/articles/next-great-video-game-system-may-be-twitter?ref=killscreen.com)—a possibility space where posting is play. \[OP\]erator is that argument's dark completion: the platform as a game you win with volume, played here with the machinery finally visible. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/operator-g1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/operator-g2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/operator-g3.jpg) \[OP\]erator at ONX.Showcase.Athens.2026 (via Playfool) --- **Read next:** [The mouse in this AI war game is a demonic latex hand](https://www.killscreen.com/the-mouse-in-this-ai-war-game-is-a-demonic-latex-hand/) · [Refik Anadol’s AI museum takes your pulse as an input](https://www.killscreen.com/refik-anadols-ai-museum-takes-your-pulse-as-an-input/) Killscreen Radar Killscreen covers the artists building the machinery, not just writing about it. Once a week, free. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=radar-backfill) ### Bonheur Suprême shot Homunculus, a documentary short, entirely inside Skyrim URL: https://www.killscreen.com/bonheur-supreme-shot-homunculus-a-documentary-short-entirely-inside-skyrim/ Last updated: 2026-08-13T03:59:07.000Z The credits are the smoking gun. *Homunculus* ends by rolling NexusMods links—including *Skyrim* sex mods—the way another film would thank a camera house. Director [Bonheur Suprême shot all 17 minutes](https://www.instagram.com/p/DblDKHFDBqy/?ref=killscreen.com) inside *The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim*, and the modding community is, functionally, the film's below-the-line crew. The film follows a man drifting through a virtual world built on the codes of gay dating apps, looking for other men—and finding, instead, how the world sees him: as an "Arab," an ambiguous figure fetishized by white gay men and targeted by French police. The project started with [a real Grindr message](https://artesettima.it/2025/06/21/nouvelle-bug-homunculus-and-the-existential-geography-of-the-digital-landscape/?ref=killscreen.com)—a stranger enthusing about chatting with an "Arab"—and Bonheur Suprême built the film outward from that moment, using mods to strip *Skyrim*'s hypermasculine warriors down into something vulnerable and observational. Bethesda's epic geography, emptied of quests, becomes a cruising ground and a mirror. 0:00 /0:20 1× From the trailer for **Homunculus* — [watch the full trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7MljR1t-r0&ref=killscreen.com) It worked. *Homunculus* premiered in the Opening Scenes section at [Visions du Réel 2025](https://www.visionsdureel.ch/en/film/2025/homunculus/?ref=killscreen.com), took the Prix Tënk, then ran Tallinn Black Nights, Festival dei Popoli, and Festival du Nouveau Cinéma. It was streaming on [Tênk](https://www.tenk.fr/?ref=killscreen.com) through last week. The film came out of the first Nouvelle Bug residency in Rome in 2023—a program built on the premise that a whole film can be made with only a computer, which this one proves. We've watched modders [repaint *Skyrim* before](https://killscreen.com/previously/articles/skyrim-mod-turns-highly-detailed-fantasy-world-cartoon/?ref=killscreen.com); this is the first time I've seen the practice turned into first-person documentary. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/homunculus-still2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/homunculus-title.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/homunculus-xcard.jpg) Stills from **Homunculus* (via Bonheur Suprême) ### The Long Way Around URL: https://www.killscreen.com/raahi-kalp-studio-1990s-goa/ Last updated: 2026-09-08T22:00:08.000Z For more than half a century, R.K. Narayan set his novels in Malgudi, a town that appears on no map of South India and yet reads as more legible than most places that do. Invention, in his hands, was not evasion but proximity—a way of getting close enough to ordinary life that it could be seen at all. Kalp Studio's *Raahi* works the same seam. Its setting, Majili, is a fictional coastal town assembled out of 1990s Goa: Portuguese facades, Hindu temples, a fish-shaped pond that exists nowhere. You play Sandy, an auto rickshaw driver, and the rickshaw functions much as Abbas Kiarostami's cars did—a moving room where strangers say things they would not say standing still. Kalp was founded by Mannat Jain, Rishabh Raj, and Akshat Sinha, three college friends who studied game design together. Jain handles narrative, business, and marketing. I spoke with her about intimacy, nostalgia, and why a specific place is not a smaller subject than an invented one. 0:00 /0:32 1× Pre-alpha Gameplay **Jamin Warren:** The word *raahi* means traveler in Hindi, and that's exactly what you and your co-founders have been building toward at Kalp Studio. Can you give me some background on the studio and how you formed this team to put the game together? **Mannat Jain:** We started as college friends—we did game design together in college, and we always wanted to make our own studio. We thought last year was the perfect time. My co-founders Akshat and Rishabh were already making this game called *Raahi,* and I found myself very attached to it, so I thought I'll join it as a co-founder. Our game is deeply rooted in culture, but at the same time it tells a very global story of an Indian auto rickshaw driver, and it talks about his dreams, and how people usually do not know the dreams of people that they see in their daily life. Our setting is a very analog time in the ’90s, where you would actually talk to your driver. **JW:** What place does the auto rickshaw occupy in Indian culture? I'm used to taxi cabs here in the United States, and I've ridden them in European cities, but the intimacy seems pretty important to the experience of riding in one of these. **MJ:** I come from Chandigarh, which doesn't have a lot of auto rickshaws, but in bigger cities like Delhi, Bombay, and Bangalore, auto rickshaws are a daily commute for so many people. They're almost like a mini scooter, but they fit more people, and the drivers are so skilled that they can get you somewhere in half the time a car would, and it's cheaper, too. There is intimacy when there is a daily route that they follow. Sometimes they would take the same kids to school every day, the same person to work every day. Which is why the setting of our game is a smaller town in the ’90s—we wanted to capture the warmth of knowing everyone and knowing all the routes. These days, even auto rickshaw drivers come by app in a lot of major cities. They don't know the routes, they don't know the people. We wanted to negate that. **JW:** The history of video games has mostly been driven by companies in Europe, the United States and Japan, and genre-wise games still move into fantasy environments or war settings—they don't usually occupy a real place in time. So many books, movies, and TV shows focus on real locations, and games have been pretty allergic to that. Why Goa? **MJ:** My co-founder actually lived in Goa for many years, so it comes from his lived-in experience. A lot of people think that Goa is mostly known for its nightlife. He wanted a different perspective of Goa, slower, more cozy, and how much culture it actually has. The Portuguese came to Goa around the 16th century and set up a port there for trading, and that is why Goa is heavily influenced by their architecture and the food also. The traditional Goan people still stayed, so you can see a lot of Hindu temples which look quite different than the other Hindu temples in India. We've taken quite a bit of inspiration from the Portuguese homes there, and we have almost the same houses in our game. Keep going Killscreen members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/raahi_kalp-studio_goan-house-dusk-1.jpg) **JW:** *Grand Theft Auto V* was set here in Los Angeles. It is not physically Los Angeles, but it tells a story of the city in a meaningful way. What does the fiction allow you to do, since it isn't literally Goa? **MJ:** We've taken elements that we love, but it is fictionalized and stylized in our own way. In our world, auto rickshaw racing is like their F1, and that competition is coming to the town. Sandy is your town's auto rickshaw driver who likes to talk a lot—he is a smart mouth, he wants to know everything about everyone, and he is quite boastful, but he has a good heart and he has always been ambitious. His brother is kind of like a genius mechanic, so he helps Sandy upgrade his auto. There's one that flies. Goa has auto rickshaws, but not a lot, and the racing competition becoming a big thing there is not actually a thing. We also have a haunted mansion the player could go and explore, and a fish-shaped pond in the city. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/raahi_kalp-studio_race-first-place-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/raahi_kalp-studio_upgrade-garage-1.jpg) **JW:** In the United States, there was a big push for global music in the ’80s and ’90s—the thinking was that it would expose people to music they wouldn't normally listen to, but it flattened everything into one bucket. With your work, the kinship seems more generational than geographic: there was something specific globally about the ’90s, and that's the common thread for anyone nostalgic about that period, wanting to understand it through a different lens. **MJ:** Yes, for sure, I think this could be another thread, 100 percent, because there's less representation of India in the ’90s. People like the simplicity of it not being present in the same time as today, because there's a certain kind of charm to retro things, and a lot of people in today's world are feeling nostalgic about the ’90s even though they've never actually lived in the ’90s, because they thought it was much simpler and people had connections there, real connections. Music is a big part of our game. We have indie artists who have collaborated with us, and you can actually listen to their music as a form of tape, and it plays in your auto whenever you journey, and you get them as gifts as you progress through bonds. My co-founder Akshat considers himself a musician first, so he did the original score. With *Raahi*, our main motive is to show the beauty of everyday life. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/raahi_kalp-studio_waterfront-cassette.jpg) **JW:** Where are you in the process? **MJ:** We just graduated from this incubator called LVL Zero, where we got a $10,000 grant, and we were completely bootstrapped before that, so all our money mostly went into production, paying salaries to people. We're looking for publishers because we need runway to complete production, and we would want to launch next year in July if we get it. A lot of people ask us, are you making a game based in India, and why not take something more familiar as a setting? For us, games are about experiencing newer things. Most of *Persona* is about Tokyo, and people love that. If you make something with heart, I'm sure people will love *Raahi* too. --- **Read next:** [What a rickshaw knows that a car doesn’t](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/what-a-rickshaw-knows-that-a-car-doesnt-podcast/) · [A paper notebook is the entire HUD in Boring Car Stories](https://www.killscreen.com/boring-car-stories-paper-notebook-hud/) · [Mexico City street legends turn up as low-poly game skins](https://www.killscreen.com/mexico-city-street-legends-turn-up-as-low-poly-game-skins/) From Killscreen Killscreen covers the games that treat a place as more than a backdrop. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### Who Do You Let In: What to Play, August 7 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/who-do-you-let-in-what-to-play-august-7/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:15:53.000Z I had a wonderful time this week talking with Danny Snelson of UCLA through some of the week's events, starting with that interview with [Bennett Foddy](https://www.killscreen.com/bennett-foddy-baby-steps-interview/), who likened his game tastes to "notes of gasoline." It was a fitting metaphor on top of all the other news covered this week. An aside One other thing: normally Playlist is for paying members, but I wanted to share more of the work, and this week's selection is playable on the web. Here's a free taste for non-members, and if you like something short and meaningful to play each week, please consider becoming a member! [Interested? ](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/signup) ![I Didn't Realise You Thought Like That](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/playlist-284-reveal.gif) ## Playlist 284 ## I Didn't Realise You Thought Like That (2026) ## Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley ### Play Time: 10 minutes (but play multiple times) [Play in your browser](https://ididntrealiseyouthoughtlikethat.com/?ref=killscreen.com) In W.W. Jacobs’ 1902 horror story, “[The Monkey's Paw](https://americanliterature.com/author/w-w-jacobs/short-story/the-monkeys-paw?ref=killscreen.com),” two elderly parents are given a magical object that will grant them three wishes of infinite promise. Whether it is in the intent of the paw or simply a misaligned agent with poor prompting, the object gives them what they want at a terrible cost. A wish for wealth arrives, but at the cost of their son's life and a workers' compensation claim from his employer. A wish to bring him back generates one of the great scenes in horror literature: an incessant banging from the newly exhumed son. “For God's sake, don't let it in,” the old man screams. He has one more wish. Jacobs’ story is, of course, about unintended consequences and our desire for control. Writing in 1902 at the end of the Second Industrial Revolution, the British author would have also been aware of the impact of rapid change on labor, public health and the environment. And for that reason, the monkey's paw has remained a useful modern metaphor for the perils of the promises of the future. And it is particularly germane to describe the whiplash of social media and online communities from the unbridled optimism of the Arab Spring to our contemporary moment, when platforms are quickly aligning themselves from openly fascist to simply fascist-adjacent. Artist [Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/danielle-brathwaite-shirley/) has spent her life creating work that flits between her community of black trans artists and the rest of the world. The English artist was bound to be a scientist before finding burlesque and later trans performance. Since leaving the Slade in 2019, the extremely prolific artist has moved quickly from itch.io releases to the main stage of galleries like the Julia Stoschek Foundation and David Kordansky, here in LA. Given the publicity, she is acutely aware of what is possible for good and bile on the internet, and for the newest release, *I Didn't Realise You Thought Like That*, she answers the powerful question posed by Jacobs’ story: What if you let the wrong one in? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/playlist-284-door.gif) “In the beginning, there was no door,” opens Brathwaite-Shirley's short game. And then one appears. Because that's all that it is: a single object that, on the other side, awaits a host of creature-posters who present themselves behind usernames like SAY IT LOUD and iAmCringe800\. They run the ideological gamut, from those looking for safety to those actively seeking to cause harm, much like, well, the actual internet. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/body_creature.jpg) At the end, you're presented with a miniature ant farm that shows how your cohort fares and tells a little story through their interactions. You've chosen each ant individually, and perhaps they're different species? In one of my playthroughs, my entrants vacillated from working out their sexuality to making violent threats to finding God. It's worth writing down who you let in and why, before re-evaluating your decisions. One character presented as a free-speech die-hard, only to be sent cowering after a fierce argument. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/playlist-284-outcome.gif) The original context for *I Didn't Realise* is the gallery, as it was first shown at her solo exhibition [*The Delusion*](https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/danielle-brathwaite-shirley-the-delusion/?ref=killscreen.com) last year. Across several rooms modeled as a haunted house revival of her grandmother's home, the Serpentine show gathered up the concerns of the work that came before it: *THE SOUL STATION* (2024), her rethinking of the fabled nightclub Berghain as a post-abolition universe, and *Black Trans Archive* (2020), the archival work [we featured in 2021](https://killscreen.com/danielle-brathwaite-shirley/?ref=killscreen.com). I, like most people reading this, wasn't able to make it to London for the Serpentine show, so as the work now travels online, the question becomes what changes when the context does. Much of Brathwaite-Shirley's work centers on creating a type of emotional discomfort in players, usually by asking them for anything from something as simple as their name to a deepest, darkest desire. “I always say I'm in the business of emotions,” Brathwaite-Shirley has said. “The audience is my main medium.” As some, notably [the reviewer at the Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/sep/30/danielle-brathwaite-shirley-the-delusion-review-serpentine-north?ref=killscreen.com), missed, the play at work is not simply the asking of the questions. It's who is there to witness. In *Shared Fantasy*, his ethnography of tabletop role-playing, Gary Alan Fine identifies three simultaneous frames we occupy when we play: the player (your real-world social identity), the game (its rules), and the character (the fictional role). In *I Didn't Realise*, Brathwaite-Shirley keeps the game and the character fixed and instead removes the observer, letting you play as a truer version of yourself. One of the big challenges for queer games after Gamergate was that so many games made for small communities attracted global audiences. And cisgender players, for example, burdened those games with the impossibility of asking someone to truly imagine what it might be like to be queer, a question the games may not have been intended to answer. Early work in the field, like [*dys4ia*](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/dys4ia/), “allowed cisgender game fans to imagine they were closer to trans lives than they truly were,” media scholar Teddy Pozo [has argued](https://gamestudies.org/1803/articles/pozo?ref=killscreen.com). Brathwaite-Shirley elides the question entirely. You don't simply need to ask someone to walk a mile in another person's shoes. You just need to ask them the right questions. You don't need to be someone else. You simply need to be who you are, whether the world knows it or not. ### Do Good Games Taste Like Gasoline? [Podcast] URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/do-good-games-taste-like-gasoline-podcast/ Last updated: 2026-08-07T15:43:56.000Z When Bennett Foddy was a fellow at Oxford, the college sold off its wine cellar and let the fellows judge the bottles. After twenty-four samples, the one that stopped him tasted like gasoline. That is now roughly how he picks games, and it turns out to be a useful way to think about difficulty, taste, and what a player is actually looking for. Danny Snelson of UCLA joins for a new format: one piece from the Kill Screen archive, one long interview, and the news worth knowing from the past two weeks. From the archive, Brendan Keogh’s “Game Type: Capture the School,” the lead article in issue two, in which Keogh and his friends lose power mid-Halo and rebuild capture the flag across their school grounds, ceramic Jesus statue included. Written rules, invisible rules, and what happens to a space when someone finally says them out loud. Then Bennett Foddy on *Baby Steps*, made with Gabe Cuzzillo and Maxi Boch. Why the mechanics came first and the story grew out of them, why Nate cannot use his hands, why there are no checkpoints, and what game designers mean when they talk about being in good hands. Danny reads the whole thing as Beckett, which is hard to argue with once you have watched the character crawl out of a pond. In the news: Gareth Damian Martin reveals *Signet City*, a first-person fungalpunk RPG set in a monochrome Britain of 1978\. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley releases *I Didn’t Realise You Thought Like That* as a free browser game out of her Serpentine show. And Aidan Strong’s *TEXTURETOWN* runs Toontown Online’s source code with the assets of three other dead MMOs, which is preservation as collage rather than restoration. ## Links - [Brendan Keogh, “Game Type: Capture the School”](https://www.killscreen.com/game-type-capture-the-school/) - [Bennett Foddy on the body, jadedness, and Baby Steps](https://www.killscreen.com/bennett-foddy-baby-steps-interview/) - [Nikima Jagudajev’s Like is a game about who we were](https://www.killscreen.com/nikima-jagudajev-performance-video-game/) - [Gareth Damian Martin reveals Signet City](https://www.killscreen.com/gareth-martin-reveals-signet-city-a-first-person-fungalpunk-rpg/) - [Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s Serpentine game hits the browser](https://www.killscreen.com/danielle-brathwaite-shirley-releases-i-didnt-realise-you-thought-like-that-as-a-free-browser-game/) - [The dead MMOs of your childhood, stitched into one game](https://www.killscreen.com/aidan-strongs-texturetown-runs-toontowns-source-code-with-the-assets-of-three-other-dead-mmos/) - [Danny Snelson, The Little Database](https://thelittledatabase.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *Hosted by Jamin Warren with Danny Snelson. Music by* [*Nick Sylvester*](https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com)*.* ### Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley releases I DIDNT REALISE YOU THOUGHT LIKE THAT as a free browser game URL: https://www.killscreen.com/danielle-brathwaite-shirley-releases-i-didnt-realise-you-thought-like-that-as-a-free-browser-game/ Last updated: 2026-08-04T22:29:37.000Z The announcement's framing is a door: “OPEN DOORS GIVE PEOPLE HOPE OR TURN THEM AWAY.” That's also the mechanic. In [*I DIDNT REALISE YOU THOUGHT LIKE THAT*](https://ididntrealiseyouthoughtlikethat.com/?ref=killscreen.com) you move through a world where every hostile online comment has become physically real, meet factions locked inside rigid ideologies, and decide—door by door—who and what you let into your world. The game builds on [*THE DELUSION*](https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/danielle-brathwaite-shirley-the-delusion/?ref=killscreen.com), Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's exhibition at Serpentine North that ran from September 2025 through January 2026—a multiplayer “live community play” about polarization and censorship, and the artist's most ambitious commission to date. Now Serpentine Arts Technologies has [released it](https://fadmagazine.com/2026/05/21/danielle-brathwaite-shirley-i-didnt-realise-you-thought-like-that/?ref=killscreen.com) as a standalone work, free on web and mobile, developed with the nonprofit [Beyond Code Collective](https://www.wearebcc.org/en?ref=killscreen.com) and set in the post-apocalyptic world of Brathwaite-Shirley's graphic novel *Below the Blue Line*. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/image-4.png) The direction of travel is the notable part. Museums usually bring games into the building; Serpentine keeps sending them out of it. This is the same commissioning program behind Ian Cheng, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, and Gabriel Massan's *Third World: The Bottom Dimension*, and putting the work on the open web treats the game as the artwork's final form rather than its gift-shop echo. We spoke with Brathwaite-Shirley on [the Killscreen podcast](https://killscreen.com/podcast/danielle-brathwaite-shirley-creates-game-worlds-from-autonomous-archives/?ref=killscreen.com) back in 2021 about building game worlds as autonomous archives—experiences that shift depending on who is playing. Five years on, the archive has a public URL. Play it at [ididntrealiseyouthoughtlikethat.com](https://ididntrealiseyouthoughtlikethat.com/?ref=killscreen.com). ### Aidan Strong's TEXTURETOWN runs Toontown's source code with the assets of three other dead MMOs URL: https://www.killscreen.com/aidan-strongs-texturetown-runs-toontowns-source-code-with-the-assets-of-three-other-dead-mmos/ Last updated: 2026-08-04T22:24:28.000Z My first impression filed this one as a mashup, which undersells the method. *TEXTURETOWN* is a bit of a new game wearing old skins. It's also Disney's *Toontown Online*, running on the original source code, with each sensory channel transplanted from a different dead MMO: text from *Club Penguin*, sound from *Pirates of the Caribbean Online*, textures from Cartoon Network's *FusionFall*. Aidan Strong, a resident at the [UCLA Game Lab](https://games.ucla.edu/game/texturetown?ref=killscreen.com), calls the result an “amalgam MMO” and places it in the lineage of glitch, machinima, and assemblage. The [itch page](https://str0nkyk0ng.itch.io/texturetown?ref=killscreen.com) is honest in the best way about what that produces: a world that resists understanding while remaining, technically, completely playable. All four source games were early-2000s children's worlds that Disney and Cartoon Network eventually switched off, and their remains mostly persist as wikis, private servers, and YouTube eulogies. Strong's move is to make the ruins walkable—preservation practiced as collage rather than restoration, which is arguably the more honest account of what actually survives. [Rock Paper Shotgun ran a feature](https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/texturetown-is-a-frankensteins-mmo-created-by-remixing-club-penguin-pirates-of-the-caribbean-online-and-other-dead-mmos?ref=killscreen.com) calling it a Frankenstein's MMO and slotting it into a wider wave of videogame collage. The Game Lab is a standing beat around here—we [profiled founding director Eddo Stern](https://www.killscreen.com/eddo-stern/) and [toured the lab itself](https://www.killscreen.com/a-peek-inside-uclas-game-lab/)—and *TEXTURETOWN* reads like the lab's thesis compressed into one object: games as material, not just medium. Free on itch, Windows only. ![A character climbs glitched tree branches in a platforming scene from TEXTURETOWN](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/texturetown-toon-screenshot-a.png) ![A banner reading Members can adopt every color of puffle hangs over a glitched 3D room in TEXTURETOWN](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/texturetown-toon-screenshot-b.png) ![Overlapping translucent interface windows crowd a blue screen in TEXTURETOWN](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/texturetown-screenshot-03.png) ![A visitor seated on an inflatable chair plays TEXTURETOWN on a wall-mounted screen in a pink-lit gallery](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/texturetown-install-01.jpg) ![A player wearing headphones sits close to a screen showing TEXTURETOWN in a gallery installation](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/texturetown-install-02.jpg) **TEXTURETOWN* in play and installed at the UCLA Game Lab (images via [aidanstrong.info](https://aidanstrong.info/texturetown?ref=killscreen.com)) ### Messhof's Blood Dungeon, a platforming autoshooter, arrives Aug. 25 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/messhofs-blood-dungeon-a-platforming-autoshooter-arrives-aug-25/ Last updated: 2026-08-04T22:19:38.000Z A great detail from Mark Essen's [announcement](https://www.gematsu.com/2026/06/messhof-announces-2d-platforming-survival-game-blood-dungeon-for-ps5-xbox-series-and-pc?ref=killscreen.com): much of *Blood Dungeon* was animated on a $50 tablet, in the car, while waiting around for one thing or another. The game began as a weekend Game Maker sketch shared with friends, something Essen kept scratching at “as a way to wind down at night”—and by Essen's own account, the total lack of pressure drove most of the design. *Blood Dungeon* is a 2D platforming autoshooter—*Vampire Survivors* math strapped to *Nidhogg*\-school movement. You run, climb, and kite through dungeons stocked with more than 100 enemy types, banking blood and bones for upgrades at the Bone Shop between runs, over a dynamic drum-and-bass score by Thomas Hooey. Messhof revealed it at Day of the Devs in June; the [free demo](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4666390/Blood%5FDungeon%5FDemo/?ref=killscreen.com) has sat at 95 percent positive on Steam since, and the [full game](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2431080/Blood%5FDungeon/?ref=killscreen.com) arrives on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on Aug. 25. I have been covering Essen since Issue 01, when [our 2011 profile](https://www.killscreen.com/mark-essen-messhof-experimental-game-design-discomfort/) described a designer whose games thrive on discomfort, from the sickening drone of *Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist* to the merciless difficulty of *Flywrench*. *Nidhogg* took that sensibility mainstream; last year's *Wheel World* took it pastel. *Blood Dungeon* is the first Messhof release since *Nidhogg* with Essen's own art back onscreen, and it's self-published—the studio betting on itself again. Essen rarely posts and never over-explains. A playable demo three weeks from launch is about as loud as the studio gets; take the hint. ![An upgrade screen offering the Fireworks charm, which makes enemies explode into small bullets, in Blood Dungeon](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/blood-dungeon-screenshot-01.jpg) ![A round creature bursts into green splatter across a stone dungeon in Blood Dungeon](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/blood-dungeon-screenshot-03.jpg) ![An upgrade screen offering the Freeze Ring weapon beside a character named Baby in Blood Dungeon](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/blood-dungeon-screenshot-04.jpg) **Blood Dungeon*’s waves and upgrade screens (via [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2431080/Blood%5FDungeon/?ref=killscreen.com)) ### Gareth Martin reveals Signet City, a first-person fungalpunk RPG URL: https://www.killscreen.com/gareth-martin-reveals-signet-city-a-first-person-fungalpunk-rpg/ Last updated: 2026-08-04T22:16:03.000Z Gareth Damian Martin's *Heterotopias*—the games-and-architecture project that grew into a magazine and then a design career—started as [a column here at Killscreen](https://www.killscreen.com/author/cap-gareth-damian-martin/). So watching Martin reveal *Signet City* at June's PC Gaming Show felt a little like watching the column grow a skyline. *Signet City* is a first-person "fungalpunk" RPG from Martin's one-person studio Jump Over the Age, published by [Fellow Traveller](https://www.fellowtraveller.games/blog/something-is-growing-in-signet-city?ref=killscreen.com). You play a parasite born in the brackish water of a declining coastal city's bay, moving between human minds in a world where biological computing beat out the silicon chip. Underneath sits the tabletop-derived system *Citizen Sleeper* made famous, mutated: dice checks whose odds shift with your host's emotional state. What holds me is the look and the history underneath it. The monochrome isn't a filter—Martin cites documentary photography, screentoned manga and pen-and-ink drawing—and the setting begins with the Winter of Discontent, the 1978-79 season when Britain's coldest winter in years collided with a national strike wave, which Martin [has described](https://www.engadget.com/2198793/fungalpunk-rpg-signet-city-isnt-afraid-to-be-weird-and-political/?ref=killscreen.com) as a labor struggle and an ecological event at once. Even the trailer keeps the register, cut to "Abandon" by the Irish garage-punk band SPRINTS. Martin has spent a decade arguing that game spaces deserve to be read the way buildings are—in *In Other Waters*, in both *Citizen Sleeper* games, in [those early columns](https://www.killscreen.com/how-escape/) on imagined space. *Signet City* looks like the thesis stated as a city. No release date yet; you can [wishlist it on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4582880/Signet%5FCity/?ref=killscreen.com). ![Graffiti on a brick wall reading This City Is a Corpse in Signet City](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/signet-city-screenshot-01.jpg) ![A hooded figure stands before a tower block as a swarm of birds passes in Signet City](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/signet-city-screenshot-03.jpg) ![A creature crouches in a misty field of tall grass in Signet City](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/signet-city-screenshot-04.jpg) More of **Signet City*’s black-and-white streets (via [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4582880/Signet%5FCity/?ref=killscreen.com)) ### doku_zen built Balming Tiger's "Janjan" video out of stop-motion puppets URL: https://www.killscreen.com/doku_zen-built-balming-tigers-janjan-video-out-of-stop-motion-puppets/ Last updated: 2026-08-04T21:13:29.000Z The top question in the comments under doku\_zen's Instagram post has nothing to do with Balming Tiger. "unforgettable. no AI at all?" someone asks. Takahashi Riku answers: "Yes!! No AI at all." That exchange is most of every comment section now, and it's usually where the conversation stops. The better part is further down, where another animator asks how the thing was actually made, and Riku lays out the whole pipeline: stop-motion shot against greenscreen in Dragonframe, cut to transparency in After Effects, imported into Blender as flat planes, and rendered from there inside a 3D scene. 0:00 /0:20 1× Twenty seconds from the middle of doku\_zen's video. Wat[ch the full thing on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyQ45IQqtCY&ref=killscreen.com). Which is to say they built it the way id built Doom. Adrian Carmack sculpted the first round of maquettes, and Greg Punchatz assembled the Spider Mastermind out of scrap Tupperware, PVC pipe, and a steel armature. The models were grabbed frame by frame off a video feed and crushed down to 256 colors so they could stand up in the game's world as flat cards. Riku has arrived at the same arrangement from the opposite direction: id did it because polygons were unaffordable, and Riku is doing it because a physical object photographed under real light carries a density that a modeled one doesn't. It shows. The video is a teeming, luminous crowd of grotesques that reads as solid even though almost none of it is. We ran [a piece ](https://www.killscreen.com/the-monstrous-models-that-gave-doom-its-human-touch/)on those Doom maquettes back in 2016 that ended on the line "we crave that human touch," and pointed at Lumino City and Jack King-Spooner's claymation as evidence. Ten years later, I was writing about King-Spooner again [last week](https://www.killscreen.com/brute-horse-abide-bucknell-achiampong/). The through-line holds: the cheaper the generated imagery gets, the more appetite there is for things that had to be touched. "Janjan" opens the percussion-led stretch of Gongbu, the second album from the Seoul collective Balming Tiger, self-released in May. The video has picked up 426,000 views since July 16. Watch it [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyQ45IQqtCY&ref=killscreen.com). Riku's[ process replies ](https://www.instagram.com/p/Da2YvsXk5%5F2/?ref=killscreen.com)are worth reading in full. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/janjan-6s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/janjan-78s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/janjan-114s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/janjan-126s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/janjan-138s.jpg) More frames from "Janjan." Every creature in them was built as a physical object first. ### Bennett Foddy's Games Taste Like Gasoline URL: https://www.killscreen.com/bennett-foddy-baby-steps-interview/ Last updated: 2026-10-08T21:06:59.000Z *At Oxford, the colleges run on wine. A friend once gave me a tour, and beneath the medieval halls sit cellars stocked by the barrel. While studying there, game designer Bennett Foddy remembers when the college needed to restock its whites. The fellows were summoned to taste 24 wines and rank them. A couple of bottles at the end of the line split the room perfectly: every junior fellow scored them one out of 10 ("tastes of gasoline") and every senior fellow scored them 10 out of 10 ("wonderful notes of gasoline.") “The senior fellows definitely know more about wine*,”* Foddy tells me. “But knowing more means liking the flavor of gasoline, right? That is crazy.” The not-so-sweet irony: the connoisseur ends up craving flavors the public was right to spit out.* *Foddy has spent two decades designing games that taste like gasoline to some and a revelation to others. A philosopher by training—he wrote a still-cited paper on performance-enhancing drugs at Oxford—he left the academy in 2007 to teach at the NYU Game Center and to make a body of work obsessed with, well, the body.* [QWOP](https://www.killscreen.com/the-creator-of-qwop-now-wants-to-mess-with-your-eyes/) *made running impossible.* [GIRP](https://www.killscreen.com/creator-qwop-and-girp-talks-about-how-we-can-live-forever-we-see-game-design-between-lines/) *made climbing a manual problem.* Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy *put a man in a pot and handed him a hammer. And* Baby Steps*, released last year with collaborators Gabe Cuzzillo and Maxi Boch, gave Foddy's signature limbless design a backstory: Nate, a failson in sweatpants who refuses, for reasons entirely his own, to use his hands.* *I’ve loved (and frustratedly hated!) Foddy's games all the way* [*back in to 2010*](https://foddy.net/legacy/SunGod.html?ref=killscreen.com)*, when he built a game for me for his old band Cut Copy. I reached Foddy in Brooklyn, between projects and playing a different game every day, to talk about piracy-era Australia, bodily autonomy, why narrative finally crept into his work—and what a designer does when literacy quietly curdles into jadedness.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/image-1.png) **Jamin Warren:** I wanted to ask about your childhood playing experiences. You've talked in the past about trying to be a student of games, and that obviously extends back to childhood. What was the context you grew up in? **Bennett Foddy:** The first thing to say about it is that it was a piracy-focused culture in Australia. Video games cost like a hundred bucks, and the consoles were spectacularly expensive, so I didn't really know anybody with an Atari or a Nintendo back in the eight-bit days. I was born in '78, so by the time I was really interested, I was five years old—early 1980s—and I couldn't get my parents to take me to the arcades. I had a Sinclair Spectrum, an eight-bit computer that loads games off of audio cassettes, so you can copy other people's cassettes using a two-cassette deck. Then, around '85, I got a Commodore Amiga, and everybody knew somebody who had a hookup to a Swedish BBS with all the cracked games, and we would make copies of the discs after school. The reason I lead with that is that it makes one really big, palpable difference between my experience and most of the American or Japanese folks I know: I just had dozens and dozens and dozens of games from the jump. Whereas if it's all being bought, you get a game for Christmas (maybe two if your parents are generous), and you're just playing those to death. My friends and I would spend a few hours, start to get a little frustrated, and in most cases—not every case, I did fall in love with some games—we were just really playing the first 10 percent and then switching to something else. And we spent a lot of time on multiplayer games, because you don't have to get good at them. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/baby_steps_playstationstore_mountain-1.jpg) So getting good at games wasn't really a big part of my experience, despite being really fascinated and enthusiastic about them. It was broader rather than deep. When I started making games during the heyday of the Flash era, it felt very familiar. Here's just a hundred million little games you can play in your web browser, for free. It's disposable, but you're sifting through endless reams of games for something that grabs you, that somehow resonates with you personally. **Jamin:** One thing that has stood out to me about your work is an interest in the human body; it seems to be a consistent site of examination for you as a game maker. I think maybe the start is the paper you wrote on performance-enhancing drugs, from quite some time ago. You seem optimistic in that paper about the body as a site of modification. The body has limits, and we can extend past them artificially. What's interesting about your games is that the body's movements are very compressed. You can't use your legs in *Getting Over It*; you can't use your arms in *Baby Steps*. There are all these constraints you put on the human body. Do you feel like these projects are in dialogue with each other? Or is there some contradiction at work—pointing to the potential of the body, but then deliberately constraining it in your games? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/qwopss.jpg) **Bennett:** That was when I was an undergrad, actually. It’s the first paper I ever co-authored, and it remains the most cited academic paper I have ever written. It's about how anti-doping is kind of bullshit that just makes it easier for wealthy countries to performance-enhance and poor countries to be shut out of it, and it's never going to not be that, so we should probably take a different approach. But I'm not a transhumanist. My opportunity to write that paper came from working as a research assistant for Julian Savulescu, who is still a very well-known professor of practical ethics, and my strong interest in enhancement came from him. The overall project of the work we did together, if I were to nutshell it, was about bodily autonomy. You can view that as a kind of liberal position about freedom over your own body, or as ultra-left libertarian, as some people described it—but it wasn't really coming from a political point of view. It came from a medical one. After the atrocities of the Second World War, philosophers developed a whole framework in which respecting people's wishes and consent over their own bodies became the paramount value of medicine. It's not a transhumanist project of idealism about what we can evolve into. It's true, \[superintelligence philosopher\] Nick Bostrom was down the hall—he had an office one or two down from me—so there were people like that in the orbit. But when I look back on that work, the stuff that still resonates for me is just: it's their bodies. Now, you're trying to connect that to the video games, and I don't know if it's intentional or not. When I think about my interest in bodies in video games, one of the big things I'm interested in is embodiment. It’s the sense that video games, action games in particular, give you of being in control of, or being embodied in, an avatar. That magic trick that we do where we put you in charge of a little guy running around on the screen, and then that's *me*, right? That becomes me, and I'm transformed in that way. So maybe there's a loose connection—an interest in the malleability of identity, or the locus of autonomy. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/baby_steps_aftermath_staircase.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/mig-64825d38265b3ceba485ae17-Shoes.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/baby_steps_theguardian_sunset.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/baby_steps_theverge_steppingstones-1.jpg) More generally, I think what's really animating both of these things is an interest in sport. Partly being from Australia, which is as sport-mad as the USA—a lot of my formative experiences were watching the Olympics, watching cricket, and being really fascinated with people at the extremes of athletic performance. I still watch every event when the Olympics are on. And that's part of what brings it back into the games. Yes, they're about bodies, but *QWOP*'s an athletics game about track and field. *GIRP* is a climbing game. We can't really say *Getting Over It* or *Baby Steps* are sports games, but they're in that vein. That's probably what set me down the path. Then something flipped in me after seeing Frank Lantz give his take on *QWOP* at GDC, a talk called "[Hearts and Minds](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrO5IGoPgcw&ref=killscreen.com)." His argument was that *QWOP* is a game *about how we experience games*—that every time you play a game, you're turning your attention inward on the process of learning to play it, and *QWOP* is a distillation of this. Once I saw that particular interpretation of the work, I started to chase it in a certain way. Focusing on the body is a way of bringing that out. Think, for example, of knowing how to walk. If I'm given the task of walking in a video game, I expect it to be easy and fluid. It's not. So we start very slowly, very stumblingly, and it strips away those expectations, turning your attention to the process of building it back up. One of the things you can say about all the games I've made about bodies is that there tends not to be a ton of mechanics. It tends to be one mechanic. That's a matter of taste—I like a deep, rich, expressive mechanic, but I don't want to make a pile of mechanics. Most of my games are just not that; they tend to be very, very focused. And if you want to make a game-focused one, the human body is a really great place to start, because it doesn't require much abstraction into different systems. We have a bunch of expectations about it. We have a lot of feelings about it. ![](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQlEkgqWxvaSx1qxYzvBmpS5vOFdjb_m6xBvjppdjrxJP6Hzr7EYNG3sE8&s=10) GIRP (2012) is a non-traditional climbing game with only your arms. **Jamin:** I do want to talk about *Baby Steps* in this regard. One of the things that struck me is that, unlike in your other games, there's a rationale for why Nate chooses not to use his arms. He is, in some ways, choosing not to use his upper body, and you're using that to say something about who he is as a character. You get the sense with Nate that there's a world in which he just uses his hands to balance himself, to touch the rocks. What triggered that change, going from non-narrative structures to something that explicitly gives motivation to this character? **Bennett:** I guess the actual reason Nate doesn't use his hands is not that different from the reason the guy in *GIRP* doesn't use his feet, or the guy in *Getting Over It* has his body in a pot. When I was making *GIRP*, the original idea was that you'd control his feet, too. And then I discovered, as I tried to play it on different people's laptops, that laptops have two-key rollover. You can only really hold down two keys plus shift. It's just a hardware constraint. So I made it so that he was climbing with his hands, like Sylvester Stallone in *Cliffhanger*. Same with the legs in *Getting Over It*—it's heavily inspired by [*Sexy Hiking*](https://jazzuo.net/games/sexy-hiking/?ref=killscreen.com), and in *Sexy Hiking* he has legs, sort of weirdly, but they're awkwardly just there. I decided I didn't need that. For *Baby Steps*, we didn't want to use very many buttons, because it was complicated enough already just to move the legs around. And Gabe had a huge, crazy technical design lift to make that system work, and didn't want to do hands, on top of everything. But one of the weird things that happens when you work on a game for five or six years is that the narrative stuff starts to coalesce around the design choices you made early on. It starts as fourth-wall-breaking jokes about how he's not using his hands, but then it becomes part of his personality. Why isn't he using his hands? Because he's awkward. He's a dork. Everything he does is a little bit off, and if he would just observe how other people hike, he'd see that they use their hands, of course—but he's got to do it his own way. That personality flows out of the system's choices. Keep going Killscreen members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month keeps interviews like this one free to read. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) > Why isn't he using his hands? Because he's awkward. He's a dork. Everything he does is a little bit off. Human beings are like this, too, right? You have the constraints of your life—material constraints, your social class, your background, what your parents are like, where you go to school—and all these things shape your personality over the years, until you become a very unique person. And if we were to pluck you out of that and put you somewhere: "what a weirdo." This person has such a weird way of talking and behaving. But it's all for reasons—just too many reasons to count. It was nice to have that experience for the first time, of really iterating something for six years and giving it space to breathe and to seem motivated. If it comes across as if he's not using his hands because of his personality, that's fantastic. That's amazing news. But the causation flows in the other direction. That's what we want in making narrative work: for it to feel as though the narrative resonates with and is of a piece with the game design, the level design, the world design. And it's so much easier to do that slowly than fast. You'll be sitting with it for weeks and weeks, and then it'll be like *maybe his dad is disappointed that he's not using his hands, because his dad is very famously good at climbing*. You pull that thread and get a little more richness. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/image.png) **Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy (2017) places you inside a giant cauldron with only a sledgehammer to climb.* **Jamin:** *Baby Steps* still, "works" as a game even if there were no cut sequences—it would be of a type with other things you've made, a very Bennett kind of thing to make, regardless of whether there's a narrative layer. But it does enhance the experience to feel there's a reason why he is the way he is. **Bennett:** We wanted people, eventually, through playing, to orient to the stuff that we were interested in as level designers and systems designers; the micro-variations in how you have to move his body to overcome two very similar-looking obstacles. There's just an infinity of subtlety: this rock is one percent smaller and two degrees tilted, and it's a completely different thing to walk over it. We were in love with that aspect. But you also know you can only get players to that point after they've played 40 hours. So the thought was: we've got to give you a reason to be playing until that stuff becomes apparent to you. Narrative comes off as a way to bring people in, and a way to convey where they should walk and what their motivation is. But yeah, we could've done a version with no narrative. It might have been more sensible. \[laughs\] But also, having never really done narrative before in my games, speaking for myself, I started to find it interesting. I started to enjoy having that additional creative palette. Something we were trying to do with *Baby Steps* from very early on was to borrow from and satirize the tropes of AAA—to use that design and visual language to say something a little different from what you get in *Assassin's Creed* or *Uncharted*. And cutscenes are just a huge part of those games. To really sell the idea of a dark mirror on *Assassin's Creed*, you have to have a little bit of narrative work. You work on something for a really long time, it takes on its own life and becomes what it wants to be. > "It's what we call the problem of good hands." **Jamin:** You've historically been OK with the reality that many players will not complete your work—you talked about that with [The Creative Independent](https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/bennett-foddy-on-the-pitfalls-of-perfectionism/?ref=killscreen.com) back in 2018\. And in *Baby Steps*, things like Nate's dreams, which really help you understand who this person is, are distributed in a way where you may never actually experience them. Has your perspective changed since 2018? **Bennett:** I think it has. Partly, this is a game made in collaboration with two other people who have their own taste, and you're exchanging tastes. Something that's in my work, but is an even stronger preference of Gabe's, is a sense of needing things to be *real*, in a very particular way. Matthewmatosis recently did a video about what he calls [aesthetic deception](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuBIW9h4qw4&ref=killscreen.com)—where the game appears to function a certain way, but it's a lie. The ur-example is the invisible wall. Personally, I definitely have an inclination to avoid that as much as possible, but Gabe was adamant. We couldn't have mountains that you couldn't climb, for example—everything had to be climbable. These are things I agree with, but I have to give credit where it's due: the real force of opinion was coming from Gabe. We talked about making it so that if you fall and lose a lot of progress, you could reset back to the last checkpoint. He really didn't want to do that. He felt like, if I fall off a cliff knowing I can warp back to get my progress back, then I haven't really fallen off a cliff. It's not real. It's fake falling off a cliff—I'm playing pretend. Whereas if I know I have to do the work to get back, it's real in a way that video game losses are generally not. That's the same sense of reality that drives not wanting invisible walls, not wanting mountains too steep to climb. It's one of the heaviest ethoses in the game, and it commits reasonably hardcore—not infinitely. I think maybe it does rain in *Baby Steps,* and things maybe get a little wet, but things don't get slipperier when it's wet. For the most part, though, we really committed to things being real. And I do think that's a vein of my work generally. *Getting Over It* is, for the most part, purist about avoiding what we call magical forces. Most physics games, the designer will eventually give in. When you're playing *Trials*, your motorbike goes off a jump, and you can press the shoulder buttons to rotate in the air, which is just not a thing you can do on a real motorbike. Whereas in [*Elasto Mania*](https://elastomania.com/?ref=killscreen.com), you lean forward and backward over the handlebars—a very small change in your momentum. Those are real forces, motivated by the real movement of bodies. Gabe has this ethos times 10\. It became the defining ethos of *Baby Steps*. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/image-2.png) **Little Master Cricket* (2010) was an expression of bodily control through Foddy's favorite sport. **Jamin:** There's an element of trust though; you trust the designer. That seems like a benefit for you: you get a reputation for making certain types of games, and people trust that the difficulty is meaningful. You have to trust that the process is worth it, in a way that has to be earned over a longer period. **Bennett:** This is actually something I've recently been talking about with my game designer friends; it's what we call the problem of good hands. If I'm playing a game by a designer whose work I have previously loved, who was really thoughtful with my time, then I have some reason to assume their future work is like that. But also, within a single game, there's language to let you know they're not wasting your time. It can be a level design flourish that's compact and delivered early on. It can be that there's polish everywhere, or that the narrative shows there's intentionality, that care has gone into the whole shebang. Indie games face an interesting problem: we can't polish everything the way a 5,000-person organization can. We have to show good hands in limited ways. I'm interested in this because it's something I worry about as a designer, but it's something I'm kind of bored of as a player. The games I'm really loving lately are the ones where I *can't* tell if I'm in good hands. The more I feel in good hands, the more I feel I can predict what the experience will be like through the end. This person is a fan of Jonathan Blow's design thinking, they've set up four puzzle mechanics, they're going to combine them in every possible way, and when we've fully exhausted the combinatorics, the credits will roll. That takes an expert designer. But sometimes I'll pick up a game on Steam with three reviews, and it's not clear to me whether the designer knows what they're doing. Maybe there'll be something absolutely glorious and beautiful, or maybe it will fizzle. Either way, I'm in uncharted territory. I feel like I'm on a voyage of discovery in a way that I'm not when I'm in good hands. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/08/image-3.png) **Jamin:** Some of that reflects that you're a professional game maker. **Bennett:** Totally—maybe I should be correcting for this kind of jadedness. But it is about the question of jadedness. How do I go back to a beginner mindset to make another video game? That's the problem to solve as you reach the middle or late stages of your career in any field, I think. We get more literate and more competent, we get a better sense of craftsmanship—and those things are good —but we also get more jaded. Somehow, you have to square that circle. You have to allow yourself room to build ambition and learn your instrument, but also not become completely adrift from how others receive the work. It's one of the great unsolved mysteries of making art. **Jamin:** There are different approaches. One is the Picasso approach, or Joyce Carol Oates—become extremely prolific, and release yourself to the idea that in the midst of all of this is something that will be important or remembered. Another is to become, like David Byrne, completely peripatetic—just go from genre to genre. And the other, which may bring me to you, is to have a central, animating idea that you continue to explore in different ways. I think about that with Michael Mann—if you watch his early films, like *Thief*, he's been remaking this thief over and over. That's one of the things that has interested me about your work, whether intentionally or not: seeing you work through these different ideas about the body as a core interface between player and game, and keep coming back to them with fresh eyes. I don't know if you feel that way, or whether you're ready to move on. Maybe the next thing will have nothing to do with humans whatsoever. **Bennett:** Well, part of it is that by working in collaboration, you get a little bit of new perspective and freshness. But when we were prototyping in 2019, I think we were trying to do anything *but* this at first. We made a golf game, a twin-stick shooter, a competitive SimCity, a god game in the *Populous* vein. We were really trying to do anything *but* a body-oriented, difficult physics game. And it was after making 10 prototypes we didn't like very much that this one—it was Gabe's idea—clicked. So it was not for lack of trying to do the David Byrne thing. Some fascinations just keep coming back. I've given myself the occasional side quest—I'm proud of the emulator hack I made with AP Thomson, *Multibowl*, and I'm proud of the thing I made for the Playdate console by dribs and drabs over six or seven years. But I do keep coming back to this vein somehow. It's so hard to make a video game—I think putting too many filters on what you're allowing yourself to make is probably making it too hard. I tend to just noodle about until something feels like it has legs, and then commit to that. So we'll see. We'll see where the jadedness takes me on this occasion. --- *This interview has been edited for flow, grammar, and clarity.* [*Bennett Foddy*](https://foddy.net/?ref=killscreen.com) *is a game designer and taught at the NYU Game Center.* [Baby Steps](https://www.babystepsgame.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*, made with* [*Gabe Cuzzillo*](https://gabecuzzillo.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *and* [*Maxi Boch*](https://gamecenter.nyu.edu/faculty/maxi-boch/?ref=killscreen.com)*, is out now.* *Disclosure: More than 15 years ago, Maxi Boch was a patron and investor in Killscreen.* *Read next:* [We talked about this interview on the podcast](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/do-good-games-taste-like-gasoline-podcast/) *·* [Miles Buckle makes games you can’t play](https://www.killscreen.com/miles-buckle-games-you-cant-play/) *·* [A paper notebook is the entire HUD in Boring Car Stories](https://www.killscreen.com/boring-car-stories-paper-notebook-hud/) From the Kill Screen archive Killscreen has been interviewing the people who make play strange since 2011\. The weekly newsletter is free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### A Walk and The Talk: What to Play, July 31 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-walk-and-the-talk-what-to-play-july-31/ Last updated: 2026-08-07T23:15:09.000Z Grief and routine come to pass in this week's Playlist selection _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### KS Radar: A man and his horse look for a vet URL: https://www.killscreen.com/brute-horse-abide-bucknell-achiampong/ Last updated: 2026-10-02T21:10:08.000Z *A little pre-amble. When I started Killscreen over 15 years ago, Pitchfork was a huge influence on my thinking. I had been a critic there for a couple of years before joining The Wall Street Journal, but I was always impressed by how well the site captured its moment. Initially, Killscreen was more focused on high-minded takes on BIG games, but as the site moved to the web, volume became important.* *Part of the problem, though, was that there simply wasn't enough good stuff to cover day in and day out, so we made do. But 15 years on, it's the exact opposite. Not only has the number of independent games blossomed, but all the other media, from film to animation to theatre to performance, are sprouting game makers as well. I've started flagging things, but there are just too many.* *So what to do then? For this week's newsletter, I'm ditching the formal headers and will just give you a rundown of what I'm seeing, a counterpoint to the longer pieces elsewhere.* *I think I'll try to keep these snappy, and you can click through. I might make this email-only and try to have more formal news pieces on the site.* --- ## **A man and his horse look for a vet** ### *Brute Horse is part punch-line, part parable.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/017.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/002.png) Juuuust a bit wackier than what I'm used to, but Prague-based studio Place of Departure is adding new games to the mix after winning two awards at the Art Directors Club. The premise is almost too much to believe, but a barbarian carries his horse across a fantasy world in search of a vet. Tell Christopher Nolan to hold his beer. I suppose the more interesting story here is leading with a strong visual direction informed by a mix of Frazetta, Messhof, and Cartoon Network interstitials. I had always suspected that small independent ad shops would make their way into games along the way, as [ustwo](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/ustwo/) games, makers of [*Monument Valley*](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/monument-valley/), did. It never really happened, so it'll be interesting to see where this goes. *Watch the trailer* [*here*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FheDzYGVBks&ref=killscreen.com)*, and you can follow Place of Departure's work on* [*Steam*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3034820/Brute%5FHorse/?ref=killscreen.com) *or on* [*Instagram*](https://www.instagram.com/placeofdep?ref=killscreen.com)*.* --- ## **Talha and Jack want you to talk it out** ### *Abide is light on details, but heavy with clay* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-27.png) Talha and Jack King-Spooner are pushing at the edges of what can be done with stop-motion animation in games. [King-Spooner](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/jack-king-spooner/) has been doing the messy work of magical realism since 2017 with [*Dujanah*](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/dujanah/), about the occupation of a fictional country. [*ABIDE*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4289310/ABIDE/?ref=killscreen.com) is a break toward psychological horror as you're placed in the waiting room of St. Boniface, a secluded retreat encouraging healing through group therapy. By day, you build out the character's interiority; at night, you venture out at your own risk. The big draw, of course, is Talha and Jack's animations, another stop-motion game along the lines of [*Out of Words*](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/out-of-words/). They boast that these are "their most detailed and expressive models so far, with magnetised, swappable parts, robust armatures and experiments with new materials." But for me, it's bringing physical objects back into game-making practice, something I've been hoping for since [*Lumino City*](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/lumino-city/) back in 2014. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-28.png) --- Enjoying this? Enjoy this rundown? Consider supporting Killscreen for the year for more essays, interviews, and profiles on the future of interdisciplinary play. [Learn more ](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/signup) ## ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/xeocho_trimmed-1.gif) I'm not exactly sure what's happening with [xeocho](https://www.instagram.com/xeocho/?ref=killscreen.com)'s [latest](https://www.instagram.com/p/DVf86soDsWI/?ref=killscreen.com), but put my hands in front of my face, and it's a game I'll play. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/wojtyla_slide_5.jpg) [via](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYm4KSfCqh2/?img%5Findex=4&ref=killscreen.com) This is from early May, but experimental music festival [Berlin Atonal](https://berlin-atonal.com/?ref=killscreen.com) reactivated [Brennan Wojtyla](https://wojtyla.lol/?ref=killscreen.com)'s LAN installation, first shown at Antwerp's TICK TACK gallery. [Jakob Kudsk Steensen](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/online-talk-4-28-the-living-archive-jakob-kudsk-steensen-on-art-ecology-and-the-game-engine/) noted map-building in Unreal specifically as a key part of his engine-based practice, so revisiting those long nights with a 30-hour deathmatch is fitting. --- ## **Animator** [**Eran Hilleli**](https://eranhilleli.com/?ref=killscreen.com) **is experimenting with real-time** [**bouncy boys**](https://www.instagram.com/p/DadWsjGRVY-/?ref=killscreen.com)**.** ### ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/final_email.gif) No word on what this is yet. --- ## The Prolific Alice Bucknell Thinks on a Planetary Scale ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/instagram_labecque_alicebucknell.jpg) Alice Bucknell, La Becque, 2026, photo Aurélien Haslebacher Artist, writer, and game designer [Alice Bucknell](https://www.killscreen.com/alice-bucknell-multiplayer-games-interspecies-cooperation/) is becoming quite prolific, announcing not one but three new projects over the past couple of weeks. As part of their residency at Swiss outpost La Becque, Bucknell is building *Coyote Time*, a climate grief text-adventure about the Mississippi River, and *Lazarus Mode*, about some of my favorite species that come back from the dead. Then Bucknell premiered [*Ground Truthing*](https://alicebucknell.com/projects/ground-truthing-2026?ref=killscreen.com), a bit I saw them lecture on last year, that starts with the famous picnic blanket from Eameses' *Powers of Ten* and blasts off to planetary scale. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-31.png) Still from **Ground Truthing* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Zight-Recording-2026-07-28-at-03.58.58-PM.gif) --- ## Inside Larry Achiampong's Media Ark ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Larry-Achiampong---What-I-am-R---ee-Videos---Movies-on-Vimeo-2026-07-28-at-4.53.18-PM.jpg) I met artist [Larry Achiampong](https://www.instagram.com/larryachiampong/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) about 10 years ago at a dinner party, and when the moment came to play games, we had a fascinating conversation. Achiampong has integrated games so seamlessly into his practice, most recently with his [Gaming Room](https://www.instagram.com/p/DbJJayTCNRZ/?hl=en&img%5Findex=1&ref=killscreen.com) at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The University of Dundee recently [published an interview](https://sites.dundee.ac.uk/cooper-gallery-inbetween/larry-achiampong-june-2026/?ref=killscreen.com) with Achiampong about his wide-ranging interests, with a walk inside what he calls "the ark," a personal media archive *à la* the Criterion Closet. Notable is how seamlessly he jumps from Elijah's *Close the App, Make the Ting* to *Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound* to Frantz Fanon's *Concerning Violence*. It's a great insight into an artist who's fully integrated into his cultural diet and an aspiration for someone hoping for a media archive that wide someday. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Zight-Recording-2026-07-28-at-04.39.40-PM.gif) ## Sign up for Killscreen Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ### I Want to Drag It as Long as Possible URL: https://www.killscreen.com/decadence-comics-rhizomatic-compound/ Last updated: 2026-09-28T14:12:38.000Z [*Currently Making*](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/currently-making/) *is a series featuring artists and game-makers with work in progress.* When Lando was growing up outside of London, he felt on the very edge of something. "It's kind of a cultural dead zone," he told me in a conversation with his creative partner Stathis Tsemberlidis. "Like, a clone town where everything's pretty much the same." One might say it was a space colony, although Lando prefers the word "satellite." \[see query 1\] And working that sense of barrenness and sameness into his work was almost natural, as it was too fitting then to be making a game about a failed colony where the ecosystem is out of sync. In their new game, [*Rhizomatic Compound*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3997860/Rhizomatic%5FCompound/?ref=killscreen.com), the world is not right. "\[My childhood town\] definitely fed into my work," he reflects. Over the last 20 years, Lando and Tsemberlidis have been on an expedition. What started in art school with photocopied runs of 50 and selling at zine fairs has now formed into the first draft of a new game project. And it's the extension of an idea they've been pursuing, an argument even, about speed and attention, but now dedicated in the form of a medium—videogames—that can finally hold it. 0:00 /1:15 1× [via](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3997860/Rhizomatic%5FCompound/?ref=killscreen.com) The two originally met in art school in 2003, while pursuing master's degrees in animation in London. It was a bit of a handshake across European experiences. Tsemberlidis was raised in Athens, had little exposure to Japanese anime, and read French experimental comics. "Before, it was all these children's comics, but when I saw this other stuff, my mind was blown," Tsemberlidis remembers. For Lando, it was the reverse; lots of manga as a teen but no Moebius until recent translations. When they met to form [Decadence Comics,](https://www.decadencecomics.com/?ref=killscreen.com) their first project was a photocopied A5—a folded and stapled anthology for 50 friends, born of a desire to break with their fellow classmates who wanted to work for big animation houses. By 2008, zine fairs in London and Bristol demonstrated that there was an audience for "sci-fi, conceptual ... heavy stuff," Lando says. Like many, they found the pandemic lockdown forced necessary self-reflection, and they were connected with a programmer, Sam, who could help them build a game world. "It felt like a natural progression with what we are doing with comics and animation," Tsemberlidis says. "The game feels a little bit like reading a comic, but more like you interact with it." The whole process was "spontaneous," a word that comes up multiple times throughout our conversation. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Decadence---Rhizomatic-Compound-1.jpg) So, the game. They are about a third of the way through *Rhizomatic Compound*, a hand-drawn (of course!) tale about exploitation and collapse. You are placed on a distant planet that was previously colonized by humanity, but reckless resource extraction has driven everyone underground into a series of tunnels called the "Rhizomes." Your toolkit as a scientist is biological, not ballistic, with terminals to hack, cellular life to reprogram, and fungi to cultivate. There is an inherently allegorical political dimension to what remains after humanity has spoiled what it's been given. "It feels like an extension of most of the themes that we have been exploring for the past twenty years," Tsemberlidis argues. "It's not like something disconnected from this universe we have created." Keep going Killscreen members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month keeps slow work like this covered. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) One apparent marker for *Rhizomatic Compound* is the pace, an obsession for both artists who let their work breathe. The scientist walks and walks, but is punctuated with occasional violence, a staccato rhythm familiar from Éric Chahi's *Another World* (1991), an inspiration for the work. "Pacing has been something that has puzzled me for a long time with comics," Tsemberlidis says. His *Picnoleptic Inertia* is nearly textless, for example, sprawling across multiple collected shorts, and Lando's *Gardens of Glass* opts for symbols as language. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-24.png) Tsemberlidis's [**Picnoleptic Inertia*](https://www.decadencecomics.com/Home/picnoleptic-inertia?ref=killscreen.com) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-25.png) From Lando's [**Gardens of Glass*](https://www.breakdownpress.com/store/gardens-of-glass?ref=killscreen.com) Tsemberlidis cites the work of French theorist [Paul Virilio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul%5FVirilio?ref=killscreen.com), especially his seminal work *Speed and Politics*. In it, Virilio establishes "dromology," his term for social development born of speed and technological acceleration. (Picnoleptic Inertia is nod to Virilio's "picnolepsy," the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed, consciousness defined by its own gaps.) For Lando and Tsemberlidis, there was a contemporary lesson for games, specifically "fast-paced run-and-gun games." Right now, there is an unbelievable push to capture players' time and attention through artificial game extensions, useless cut sequences, or saccharine bloat. But that's not the only way. "I want to drag it as long as possible. And I want the player to spend time with the environment and the music and create a different approach towards time and space," Tsemberlidis says. Foregrounding slowness and reflection isn't purely a countercultural stance. The benefit of working through two decades of comics together is delivering something to honest-to-goodness fans of their work. In part, they've embedded the foreboding feel and rough line work that their readers already expect. (A particular pink character alludes to a popular British icon that will be familiar to some.) "Partly we're making the game for people that have read our comics, so I think it's fun to include stuff like that," Lando says. "But for non-comic people, it might be quite confusing." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Decadence---Rhizomatic-Compound-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Decadence---Rhizomatic-Compound-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Decadence---Rhizomatic-Compound-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Decadence---Rhizomatic-Compound-5-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Decadence---Rhizomatic-Compound-6.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Decadence---Rhizomatic-Compound-7.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Decadence---Rhizomatic-Compound-8.jpg) That said, the promise of making games is attracting new fans to their work. I wasn't familiar with Decadence until I saw early screenshots and videos floating around online, so *Rhizomatic Compound* can both hold current supporters and bring in a new audience. Pacing aside, Decadence is trying to find the contours of what the final product will be. "Slowing down time and walking around an environment—you do need to find some drama, I guess," Lando relents. \[see query 5\] Comics have the benefit of sequential text and propel the reader through the page, whereas Decadence is learning the fine art of environmental storytelling, "so you're figuring things out along the way." \[see query 5\] But for now, they still need to figure out what *Rhizomatic Compound* will even be. "The past two years have been working seriously on this project and putting a lot of effort into it," Tsemberlidis says. "We are in this stage where things are a bit unsure." For two artists working the edges of an alien colony, this sounds about right. Rhizomatic Compound *has no release date. You can follow their work on their* [*website*](https://www.decadencecomics.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*,* [*Steam*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3997860/Rhizomatic%5FCompound/?ref=killscreen.com)*, or on* [*Bluesky*](https://bsky.app/profile/decadencecomics.bsky.social?ref=killscreen.com)*.* --- **Read next:** [Miles Buckle rebuilds cinema as games you can’t play](https://www.killscreen.com/miles-buckle-games-you-cant-play/) · [Tomo Kihara’s arcade cabinet writes a stranger’s life](https://www.killscreen.com/tomo-kihara-game-of-possible-lives/) Currently Making Killscreen has been writing about games as culture since 2011, and we still do, once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### What to Play: July 24th URL: https://www.killscreen.com/what-to-play-july-24th-2026/ Last updated: 2026-07-24T21:29:57.000Z Honk honk, beep beep _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Ok, fine, let's talk some more about penalty kicks URL: https://www.killscreen.com/ok-fine-lets-talk-some-more-about-penalty-kicks/ Last updated: 2026-07-24T00:16:47.000Z *Intersections is ongoing series about play in the real-world*. So last week [I asked about rule changes in soccer](https://www.killscreen.com/from-planet-x-to-a-loveseat-in-venice/), and received some interesting suggestions. Cesar, for example, had the excellent idea of implementing my brainstorms (e.g., increase the size of the goal in extra time) in *FIFA* as a mod. It's an unwitting nod to Zach Gage's [*Really Bad Chess*](http://www.reallybadchess.com/?ref=killscreen.com) (2016), where your opponent may have, say, four queens and six knights. Reader Jason had a note I wanted to pursue further, though: that the fouled player should take the penalty. In the current system, there's a disconnect: even if Player A is fouled inside the "penalty area" surrounding the goal, their team is awarded a penalty and chooses their best penalty taker. Jason's suggestion is similar to the system in basketball, where if Player A fouls Player B, Player A receives a foul count of up to six, and Player B may be awarded a free throw. Much like soccer penalties, the odds of scoring a free throw are generally pretty high, but there is enough variance that teams build strategies around who they want to foul later in the game. Shaquille O'Neal, for example, had one of the worst free-throw percentages of all time, and "Hack-a-Shaq" strategies would deliberately exploit that. In soccer, putting the fouled player on the penalty spot likely wouldn't change the outcome, as the odds of scoring a penalty are extremely high (about 75 percent), regardless of who takes it. But one problem with the penalty system is that punishments are not always commensurate with the crime. The justification for penalties is that a) it's very difficult to score and b) denying someone a "significant" goal-scoring chance should be a high consequence. It's ostensibly a deterrent. If I'm shooting right in front of the goal, and someone grabs my shirt, I'm robbed of a legitimate chance. The problem is that if a player commits a penalty-worthy foul on the edge of the 18-yard box, was I really going to score from there? With the introduction of data analytics over the last 20 years, we can see that the expected value of a penalty shot is *far* greater than the location of the foul. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-19.png) [via](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/3161748/2022/03/04/penalties-are-too-generous-a-reward-we-have-a-solution-and-it-involves-running/?ref=killscreen.com) Of course, players understand the math intimately. "Depending on the particular game, players may strategically transgress rules, accepting a short-term punishment for a long-term strategic or psychological advantage," write Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen in *Rules of Play* about "sanctioned rule-breaking." Casual fans of the World Cup are often flummoxed by the amount of flopping, theatrics and overall antics that frequently dot soccer matches, but this is simply because players understand the odds. Drawing a penalty, for example, is simply an overpowered strat. The Athletic went deeper into the "miscarriage of justice" that are penalties, [back at last World Cup](https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/3161748/2022/03/04/penalties-are-too-generous-a-reward-we-have-a-solution-and-it-involves-running/?ref=killscreen.com). "Out of more than 900 penalties since 2011-12, only a handful of them come anywhere close to a penalty's 78 percent chance of scoring." Yikes! But Jason's suggestion might bring some balance. For example, at this year's World Cup, Argentina was awarded a penalty against Egypt, and Leo Messi, with a 77 percent average, took the shot. But the player fouled was Nicolas Tagliafico, who has never taken a penalty. Perhaps having the fouled player, a complete unknown, would add the necessary jeopardy back into the mix. (Although...Messi did miss against Egypt, so ironically, he might have been the best person to select!) A broader implication of having the fouled player take penalties is narrative. The "story" of sports is unique in the world of play, in part because it spills over into press conferences and DMs. Sports are also corrupted/influenced by compensation, which adds stakes to the affair. But all sports stories are an outgrowth of the rules that emerge through dynamic interaction. So then, the joy of sport is the relationship between the players that unfolds during the match. Competition engenders all kinds of relationships, as it is a zero-sum affair. Penalties break that storytelling lineage by separating the source of the conflict from its outcome; maybe it's time to restore it. It's important to remember that all rules are about the desired aesthetics in a play system. So with penalties, what kind of story do we want to tell? ### The end of the world isn't so bad URL: https://www.killscreen.com/newsletter-2-22/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:15:55.000Z ## SPANDREL ### Liam Young's hope and realism at the edge of humanity 0:00 /0:45 1× [via](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRV2ytuGsVQ&ref=killscreen.com) Earlier this month, during our time in London, I ducked out of family time to stop by the Barbican Centre, since we were close by. Unfortunately, it was a Monday and it was closed. (The Barbican Library's [exhibition on the year 1996](https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2026/event/1996-a-celebration-of-the-wildest-year-of-britains-wildest?ref=killscreen.com) in British music was lovely though.) But thankfully, what I had come to see, [Liam Young'](https://www.liamyoung.org/?ref=killscreen.com)s [*In Other Worlds*](https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2026/event/in-other-worlds?ref=killscreen.com), had been open in Los Angeles earlier this year as a test run, and Young was kind enough to give me a tour of [*Planetary Imaginaries*](https://www.liamyoung.org/projects/planetary-imaginaries?ref=killscreen.com)*.* Coming off the back of any number of climate-related crises this year (pick one), *In Other Worlds* provides an alternate perspective on our climate future, grounded in science, illuminated with hope and scaffolded with emotional honesty. Featuring writing from Lisa Joy (*Westworld*, *Fallout*) and Kim Stanley Robinson (*The Ministry for the Future*), voices from Diego Luna, Richard Ayoade and Maxine Peake, and costumes from Emmy-nominated designer Ane Crabtree (*The Handmaid's Tale*, *The Sopranos*, *Westworld*), it takes us to the very edges of where we might go someday. The whole of the work presumes disaster is coming, but we are not helpless actors in this story. It's a work of total world-building, constructing various stories about the inhabitants of this place with models, costumes, and film to build out this version of a climate future, from a farmer looking to reclaim his craft with the help of machines to a group of scientists who travel the globe in an enormous blimp. Each story also draws deeply on what's happening now, such as a networked supercomputer based on real-world "dark factories" in China that operate without light. It's a touring show, so hopefully it'll come through your town soon. --- ### Ed Fornieles Builds a Teenage Boy Out of 999 Images ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-20.png) [Ed Fornieles](https://verse.works/ed-fornieles?ref=killscreen.com), "Delicious in Dungeon Cell 3" (2026) Artist Ed Fornieles released a new digital series, *Borrowed Lives: Anon*, 999 artworks [he has described as](https://www.rightclicksave.com/article/ed-fornieles-borrowed-online-lives?ref=killscreen.com) "the psychic projections of a figure navigating adolescence." The centerpiece is an imagined teenage protagonist (ostensibly a boy), and the hundreds of pieces track his changing interests, often angry and profane, that reflect the challenging aspects of teenage male life online. It's a companion to the work of artists like Maya Man and Molly Soda, who document a young woman's experience through performance and vulnerability. Of course, what grabbed me is the use of videogame imagery here not only as shorthand for young male entertainment interests, but also as companions to images of idealized versions of the male body, memes mocking terrorist attacks and a bit of graphic pornography, specifically Japanese *hentai*. I find this challenging, as I recognize the history of games is closely tied to male adolescence, but I also hope games will break free from this shorthand for social isolation. Fornieles suggests that games in the work offer "a kind of cover." > They allow certain impulses to appear that might otherwise be too shameful, pathetic, funny, violent, tender, or confused to express directly. They become theatres of becoming, but also machines for repetition. You arrive looking for language, and the language gives you a body. You can decide if [the work](https://verse.works/series/borrowed-lives-anon-by-ed-fornieles?itemId=9ba99386-4f7d-4c6e-9e11-2c8754448f13&ref=killscreen.com) also provides a way out. --- An aside A reminder for members that [we'll be hosting a chat](https://riverside.com/webinar/registration/eyJldmVudElkIjoiNmE1OTQ5NGExYjZiYzMyYWRkOTcxZjQ3Iiwic2x1ZyI6ImphbWluLXdhcnJlbnMtc3R1ZGlvIn0=?ref=killscreen.com) with Mitchell Chan about his game **Boys of Summer* that recreates an entire existence through personal data. Here's what I wrote: **What enfolds is a life. For me, it's a sad life. I don't make pro baseball and am fired from an Amazon warehouse. I slack at work to make time for conditioning, in grim hopes of making it back someday. A modest income as a luxury influencer only compounds my growing debt. I find no dates. I attempt to microengineer my diet as a last-ditch effort to find happiness. I die alone at 63, leaving behind only creditors. At the end, I'm thinking only of that moment–an absolute corker in the state championship–that could have changed my life forever before falling helplessly into an outfielder's glove.* [Hope you can join us](https://riverside.com/webinar/registration/eyJldmVudElkIjoiNmE1OTQ5NGExYjZiYzMyYWRkOTcxZjQ3Iiwic2x1ZyI6ImphbWluLXdhcnJlbnMtc3R1ZGlvIn0=?ref=killscreen.com) or become a member. [Interested? ](#/portal/signup) ## One to Watch 0:00 /0:19 1× Austrian game designer and media artist [Joshua Mattson](https://freecultureapi.neocities.org/?ref=killscreen.com) released clips of his in-progress work, [*Defense Contractor Fantasy World*](https://www.instagram.com/p/DaQZzbLCMk4/?img%5Findex=1&ref=killscreen.com). You play as, well, a defense contractor working on autonomous weapons, manufacturing artificial sentiment and, of course, raising venture capital, baby. Mattson says the goal is to showcase how AI warfare will be obscured behind the language of marketing and capital, and he takes reference from Palantir's [Skykit](https://www.reddit.com/r/PLTR/comments/102nqrl/introducing%5Fpalantir%5Fskykit/?ref=killscreen.com), which abstracts the reality of war into a portable suitcase. And if that's not repulsive enough, Mattson made a smooth latex hand that you can hold. It's interesting to see autonomous warfare return as a fertile subject for game makers. The "war is hell" theme had a bit of a moment in the early 2010s with games like *Spec Ops: The Line*. But nothing predicted our moment better than Paolo Pedercini's [*Unmanned*](https://unmanned.molleindustria.org/?ref=killscreen.com) (2012), which cast you as a drone operator whiplashing between murdering civilians and shaving your beard.both ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/instagram_carousel_index2.jpg) ## ## Run-Ons - ¹Messi's shot was saved, but I think you understand my point. - I didn't post this one, but Kojima did [a big thing with Prada](https://www.prada.com/us/en/prada-mode-new-york%5Fpage.html?ref=killscreen.com), continuing his run as fashion-world crossover. I might explore this a bit more. - [A new book](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262053198/simpolitics/?ref=killscreen.com) looks at how we use computers to render politics - David OReilly releases [Eachother](https://sub.davidoreilly.com/p/eachother-in-hamburg?ref=killscreen.com), " a simulation of a million beings who live, find each other, bond, fight, breed and die." ### Stephen Gillmurphy Doesn't Plan Past the Next Chapter [Podcast] URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/stephen-gillmurphy-doesnt-plan-past-the-next-chapter-podcast/ Last updated: 2026-07-30T19:57:42.000Z A members' only chat with Irish writer and game designer Stephen Gilmurphy aka thecatamites _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Playground Safety is the Enemy of Joy URL: https://www.killscreen.com/playground-safety-is-the-enemy-of-joy/ Last updated: 2026-09-21T21:07:21.000Z When you have kids, and they can start to walk, crawl, and dash, the first thing you will do is find a playground. If you're lucky, you'll have one within walking distance. If you're very lucky, it'll be something to remember with ample space for danger, dangling, running, spinning, launching, and the rest. And if you are blessed, you will be close to Temitayo Ogunbiyi's work. A self-described "play practioner," the [Lagos-based artist](http://www.temitayo.com/?ref=killscreen.com) draws from a long lineage of artist experimentation in the play structures, from Isaumu Noguchi's unbuilt [*Play Mountain*](https://www.noguchi.org/artworks/collection/view/play-mountain/?ref=killscreen.com) (rejected by Robert Moses in 1933) to Aldo van Eyck's 700-plus postwar [Amsterdam playgrounds](https://waterlooarchitecture.com/bridge/blog/2015/09/17/case-study-van-eycks-playgrounds/?ref=killscreen.com). All established the playground as a site where sculpture, urbanism, and pedagogy have collided for a century. But for Ogunbiyi, the prompt to build play structures stemmed from a simple realization that there weren't enough *accessible* places to the people of her community of nearly 25 million, who had almost no play infrastructure to speak of. Here, I caught Ogunbiyi between appointments, and we chatted about the affirmations that dot her work, why she never brings children in to test a structure before it's installed (engineering tests, yes; play tests, *never*), and why risk is essential for a well-lived life as a child. An aside [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Temitayo-Ogunbiyi---You-will-follow-the-Rhein-and-compose-play--playground---2023--2-.png)](#/portal/signup) **Members get access to the full conversation, transcript, and a video* [**here*](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/temitayo-ogunbiyi-builds-playgrounds-out-of-risk-and-steel-piping/)**.* [Interested? ](#/portal/signup) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-17.png) Photo © Temitayo Ogunbiyi **How do you introduce yourself at a party?** I prefer to be called a play practitioner. I'm interested in all things play, and in finding ways to integrate play into the most banal, everyday routine scenarios. **Do you know where that started for you—an interest in play as part of your practice?** I've always been interested in the experimentation that comes with making anything, whether a cake or a salad, and a lot of that comes from my upbringing. But as an artist, the real turning point from fine art to play was when I became a mom. I have three children, and Lagos, where we live, is home to between 25 million and 30 million people, with very few public play areas for kids. Those I could find were often secondhand material from the West, which doesn't weather elegantly here on the equator—things get bleached out, they start cracking. I think they're borderline dangerous, to be honest. So I wanted to create opportunities for play that are non-prescriptive, that invited people to just explore how their body could move. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Temitayo-Ogunbiyi---You-will-follow-the-Rhein-and-compose-play--playground---2023--2--1.png) "You will follow the Rhein and compose play" (2023) **Was there a particular moment that forced you to fold playground design into your art practice?** There were a combination of factors. I've been very interested in drawing and line—how line can be manipulated and contorted to take on different meanings and functions. I distinctly remember driving through Lagos, almost approaching the gate to our compound, and there was a security partition made from galvanized steel bars. I just said, this is so interesting to me. Once I saw it, I started seeing it everywhere in the city, and I found out it was affordable—something I could experiment with. That localized the possibility of play practitioning in Lagos, with materials I could source almost endlessly. At the same time, I was researching Isamu Noguchi, and I was really taken by one of his playground sculptures, designed from four plumbing angles reconfigured into this beautiful, undulating infinity-type form. It was these two moments in conversation that set me on this path of play exploration with objects one can find in domestic space that often aren't given much love. **What does play culture look like in Nigeria?** For the most part, play—in the sense that we imagine it, anyway—is privatized. Swings and slides are restricted to schools. But play really is a part of how people interact each day. Interactions are filled with laughter and teasing and really interesting wordplays. Locally, play situates itself in linguistics first and foremost, and those are the most sincere expressions of play, which I try to honor in the way I use language to title the works. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Temitayo-Ogunbiyi---You-will-follow-the-Rhein-and-compose-play--playground---2024---Photo-by-Larissa-Heuser.jpg) "You will follow the Rhein and compose play" (2023) Credit: Larissa Heuser **Your titles use the second person—“you will,” “you will.” Who is speaking, and who is being spoken to?** I always think of the works as children of mine, so they're all connected. Sometimes the “you will” comes from something I've heard from someone else, with that word structure which is very popular here in Nigeria across many languages, including English. Somebody expresses a desire for something, and the response is: you will have it, you will prosper, you will gain acceptance at that university. It's such a powerful means of making a wish for another person. When those phrases were used toward me, they gave me such strength, an ancho; and interestingly, whatever has been wished has often come to pass. Sometimes the words tilt more toward a prayer; they become declarations, they become wishes, and I like leaving them to be embraced by viewers as they feel. When I started, though, I was thinking about my kids and the importance of leaving words behind that they might revisit and pass along. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/I-always-feel-like-the-work-is-in-a-state-of-inertia.-It-s-not-complete-until-someone-plays-on-it..png) **Your structures are designed to be touched—a dangerous proposition for an artist. What is it like watching people climb and hang on the work?** I always feel like the work is in a state of inertia. It's not complete until someone plays on it. More often than not, adults appear terribly clumsy, and it's actually hilarious to see adults try to do what they interpret kids to be doing. As adults, we become disconnected from our bodies. We drive the car, we sit down, we stand up. We're no longer curious about what our body can do. What's so refreshing with kids is that they are just fearless. I remember watching one child walk one of my bars like a tightrope, and my heart was in my throat. He was totally fine. He got to a point where he was done and gently came down. I've never seen anybody fall. And watching how people interact gives me ideas about subsequent works. The piece in Lagos is the oldest structure, and sometimes I go there and see footballs; clearly somebody has been trying to create a game with a ball. These aren't things I can imagine when I'm making the work. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Temitayo-Ogunbiyi---You-will-find-Lagos-in-Jand-Living--Final-Destination-the-T-dot---2023-26---Photo-by-LF-Documentation.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Temitayo-Ogunbiyi---You-will-find-playgrounds-among-palm-trees--2019---Photo-by-Temitayo-Shonibare.jpg) "You will find Lagos in Jand Living (Final Destination the T-dot), 2023-26 (Credit: LF Documentation) "You will find playgrounds among palm trees", 2019 (Credit: Temitayo Shonibare) **Playgrounds can be sites for politics. A designer at** [**Monstrum**](https://www.killscreen.com/meet-monstrum-creators-worlds-greatest-playgrounds/)**, the Danish firm behind some famously dangerous playgrounds, once told me they don't build in the United States because of the legal anxiety around getting sued—it's why so many American playgrounds look the same. Do you view your work as having a political valence?** I always try to be careful about thinking consciously about politics with respect to my practice. I try to honor the communities that I imagine could interact with the work. But I definitely agree there is a risk-averse attitude to play. I grew up in the United States—we had monkey bars, and I don't see monkey bars anymore. Slides and swings don't go as high. There's a lot of the EPDM stuff, less mulch. I see play being suffocated by restrictions. If there's any sort of political gesture I try to offer in response, it's that I always introduce some level of risk, because I believe that play is not play without risk. If you are raising children in environments where there is no risk, how do they learn to manage risk as adults? It's impossible. ### Playlist Session with Mitchell Chan [Members-Only] URL: https://www.killscreen.com/playlist-session-with-mitchell-chan/ Last updated: 2026-07-19T16:25:56.000Z The Toronto-based artists and game designer joins me for a members-only chat _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### What to Play This Weekend: July 17 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/what-to-play-this-weekend-july-17/ Last updated: 2026-07-17T23:17:16.000Z A ripping roaring ride through the Underworld _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### From Planet X to a Loveseat in Venice URL: https://www.killscreen.com/from-planet-x-to-a-loveseat-in-venice/ Last updated: 2026-07-15T04:40:09.000Z Although I spent much of the early parts of the World Cup in Europe and attempted to stay up *very* late to watch Mexico and England (I gave up when the rain delay hit), I have been enjoying the knockout rounds tremendously, even if it has been a mostly European affair since the quarter-finals. One thing about watching a game with casual fans is that they always ask very funny, but sometimes insightful questions about soccer/football, such as: what's the deal with penalty kicks? When you abstract the questions, it's a really good one. On the one hand, in a sport with an *extreme* degree of generativity, penalty kicks are relatively predictable. Estimates range between 70 percent and 80 percent conversion rates (although this World Cup has [had the lowest conversion rates ever](https://theanalyst.com/articles/world-cup-2026-trends-penalties-injury-time-goals-substitutes?ref=killscreen.com)), but it's generally a predictable result in a game scaffolded by high variance, since so few goals are scored. In that way, penalty kicks represent a "sub-game" within the larger soccer ecosystem, with its own specific rules that do not appear elsewhere. (For example, goalies have to stay tethered to their line just before a penalty, but are free to do whatever they want for the rest of the game.) And the appeal for fans is that the feeling of jeopardy outweighs the mathematical reality, especially in an era of data analytics. IF you enjoy this newsletter Please consider becoming supporting me to get access to my weekly Playlist recommendations and over 15 years of archives. [Learn more ](https://www.killscreen.com/membership/) So then, why on earth is the endgame of soccer tied to something that is so unlike the rest of the sport? Other sports typically deal with some extension of the existing rules. Overtime simply elongates what is already happening, and sudden death (e.g., next X wins) ties a victory condition to a specific action in the game. Both endgame approaches build on the sport's existing framework. From a design perspective, penalty kicks are interesting because they solve a genuine problem (soccer needs tiebreakers and needs a consequence for serious fouls in the box) using a mechanism that *isn't really soccer*. It replaces the continuous, emergent, team-based system with a duel: an isolated, turn-based, individual system. The rules essentially punt soccer into a different genre of game to generate an outcome. Whether that's elegant or a kind of category error is probably the most interesting critical question the design raises. My proposed solutions, of course, are comedy. Given that penalty kicks simply do not reflect the overall system of soccer play, why not get weird with it? Every ten minutes, one of the following should happen: - Remove a player - Increase the size of the goal - Add another ball - Decrease the size of the pitch Joking aside, I do think we can find a solution that is more befitting of the beautiful game than shoot-outs. What do you think we should do? Send me a reply! *Jocks v. Nerds (1974) decision notwithstanding, anyone who truly loves games should watch sports. I know I typically cover games, arts, and culture, but appreciating sports will absolutely deepen your understanding of play of all stripes.* --- ## The Teenage Fantasies of Nikima Jagudajev ### The Austrian-Uzbek artist and choreographer has always made worlds with their own rules—from a childhood fantasy game to LIKE, a video game built from years of live performance. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-14.png) *Rising is a series on game-makers on their way up.* Brussels-based artist and choreographer [Nikima Jagudajev](https://www.nikimajagudajev.com/?ref=killscreen.com)'s journey to games pre-dated any of the typical signposts one associates with them. No trips to the arcade. No older sibling leaving a console in the den after leaving for college. No random YouTube videos. Instead, Nikima and their sister started their journey within their own minds, role-playing a fantastic universe called "Cool Girls.""We had to save the world from the Pluplots master who lived on Planet X," Jagudajev tells me. You see, the master was a monstrous figure who had taken over the lives of their childhood home of Portland, and it was the Jagudajevs' job to liberate them wherever they might be, on the bus or walking on the street. It was a bit of *They Live*, but through the eyes of children. "We had to protect humanity from the Plax people," Jagudajev remembers. Because, of course, you do. Before launching a career in performance, before making games, there were just two kids who decided the world needed different rules and decided to make them. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-15.png) The improvisation of childhood blossomed into an interest in anthropology and sociology in college. The work of Dutch philosopher (and my personal fave) Johan Huizinga introduced the porous boundary of the "[magic circle](https://www.killscreen.com/magic-circle-damning-indictment-modern-game-design/)," the boundary between play and the real world, and provided a clever reframing of those childhood adventures. But Huizinga and others also gave Jagudajev connective tissue between play as a community practice and their own family of origin. "I was thinking a lot about how creating your own game creates a context for yourself and others," they explain, reflecting on the context surrounding their early dalliances with play. "Coming from a dysfunctional family context, games allow you to execute empowerment." [Read the Profile](https://www.killscreen.com/nikima-jagudajev-performance-video-game/) --- ## SPANDREL ### On the radar ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/email_optimized.gif) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-9.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-10.png) Will Freudenheim and Jack Wedge met back in middle school band about 15 years ago. "We were both playing the French horn, and I was the worst player, and Will was the best player," Wedge [said](https://hellgatenyc.com/laser-days-studio-acid-city/?ref=killscreen.com). Since then, they've collaborated with musicians like Megan Thee Stallion and Perfume Genius while making shorts for adult swim and MTV. I had actually encountered their real-time autonomous AI simulation game [*Schema*](https://caldo-worldwide.com/pages/will-freudenheim-schema-sub?srsltid=AfmBOooTOKYrEIw%5F-PCMS4jqoHnG04W6SQCzlDMr6YZLKeYe4KSf7%5FNH&ref=killscreen.com)*,* when I was researching for this interview for [Sahej Rahal](https://hellgatenyc.com/laser-days-studio-acid-city/?ref=killscreen.com). In May, the duo [announced](https://www.laserdays.studio/?ref=killscreen.com#rainbow-water) a new short film with production company Hornet: "a blend of memoir, ecological defense, and science fiction" which was inspired by the true story of Wedge's grandparents. In the 1940s, the elder Wedge started at a well-drilling company, and during a reconnaissance mission to find a pre-glacial river, he met his future wife, a nurse named Mary. The work is listed as environmental story-telling, so TBD if there will be a strong interactive component. -JW ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-11.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/cuphead_email.gif) I have a complicated relationship with [nostalgia](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/nostalgia/). On the one hand, reflecting on the past is a worthwhile pursuit, and it is precisely because I played games during my childhood and college days that I love the medium. On the other hand, I have found games' nostalgia fetish cloying and juvenile. So whether nostalgia merits my attention is really stochastic. I first encountered [Studio MDHR](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/studio-mdhr/)'s work more than ten years ago at an Xbox Showcase, and found their attention to animated detail absolutely captivating. Hand-drawn frames pulled from the Golden Age of animation were absolute catnip for me—a salve as I struggled through the legendary difficulty of the game. After a long hiatus from game-making dotted with a Netflix animated series and graphic novels with Dark Horse, the Moldenhauer family is back with [*Mighty Cuphead Adventure*](https://mightycuphead.com/?ref=killscreen.com), a love letter to the Sega Master System. In fact, it is ostensibly such an authentic recreation that it'll be released a physical cartridge for anyone who has an SMS at their parents (or at least grabbed one of Analogue's [Mega SGs](https://www.analogue.co/mega-sg?ref=killscreen.com).) -JW ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-13.png) While at the after-party at the DEMO Festival, I met a Japanese artist named [Goki Muramoto](https://www.goki-muramoto.com/?ref=killscreen.com) who was enthusiastically promoting his new show at [Waheed Nguyen](https://nguyenwahed.com/exhibitions/44-eyes-half-open-goki-muramoto-curated-by-sofia-thieu-damico/overview/?ref=killscreen.com), just about a 10-block walk away. I had to head home before it closed, but I regret not stopping by. In his first US exhibition, titled Eyes Half Open, which just closed, Muramoto presents a set of works that play with what it is we do when we see. There's Lived Montage, glasses that share a cinematic vision among participants, and Training Wheels, lenses formed from written instructions and polished brass rings. But Imagraph (above) stands out. Imagraph is an optical apparatus that actually projects video *through your eyelids*. There are two LED displays with optical fibers for each pixel, placed over your closed eyes, and the participant manually adjusts the color to account for everyone's unique blood-red skin hue. The final projection feels like something directly from your subconscious. Wild stuff! --- ## Hyphen ### Intersections at Play ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-16.png) [Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’](https://whitney.org/artists/21319https://www.herndondryhurst.studio/?ref=killscreen.com)s [**xhairymutantx*](https://whitney.org/exhibitions/xhairymutantx?ref=killscreen.com) reflects on the arcane, uncanny, and bizarre outputs of training data. It's probably every other week that I run into someone who knows only a bit about games and probably even less about AI, who says things like "Well, of course, in the future AI will just be making games, right?" I have yet to see this happen, but of course, I am interested in AI as a tool that engenders [new forms of games](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/he-fed-a-classic-anthropology-text-to-make-an-ai-game-heres-what-happened/) and game-based art. The public might be interested, but for *gamers*, this is an absolute and complete non-starter, so much so that some game platforms have feckless "AI labels" to warn customers that somewhere someone might have used AI. To me, these moralizing precautions elide the most fundamental question: Is it any good? I enjoyed Max Read's conversation with artists Holly Herndon and Trevor Paglen in Totei, who aren't game-makers, but offer a perspective on using AI that I hope worms into game-making spaces. "I reject the notion that you can’t be critical and problem-solving at the same time. I think both Trevor’s practice and ours are looking at infrastructure in a really deep way," Herdon argues. [Trevor Paglen and Holly Herndon on Making Art with AI and What the Discourse Is MissingThe artists talk process, slop, and why optimism and pessimism don’t quite cover it.![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)ToteiInterviewed by Max ReadPhotographed by Nikita Teryoshin, OK McCausland![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/thumbnail/69658506031d6ae00e41113bb823133d5c85a913-4800x2700-6f394b96-c86e-4edb-8346-3b864b59e529.jpg)](https://www.totei.com/story/trevor-paglen-holly-herndon-art-ai?ref=killscreen.com) Both artists are experimenting with building their own models, but more importantly, exploring how their work is moving more and more upstream into the engines of production itself. For example, Herndon and Mat Dryhurst trained an AI choral-singing model on 15 community choirs across England and then created space for the public to see how models were used and a legal framework to protect the contributors. "A lot of people will have just interacted with \[AI image and music generators\] Midjourney or Suno and in case it’s not clear, that’s not what Trevor and I are doing,” Herndon says. It's a great interview that covers both critique and possibility. --- ## **From the Vault** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/AdamKiller5-1.jpeg) Still from Brody Condon's **Adam Killer* series It felt like such a coup almost 15 years ago when writer and curator [Nora N. Khan](https://noranahidkhan.com/?ref=killscreen.com) agreed to write something on disgust, empathy, and the game boss as spectacle. Khan subsequently became the long-time editor at Rhizome, guest-edited *HOLO*, and taught at UCLA and SCI-ARC, so I feel like it would be impossible to get her to do the work she does now. I'd argue that this essay covers so much of the territory from the No Fun issue in that it is also unpleasant to read through the horrifying back stories of so many different game villains. But through it, through putrid stench and moral revulsion, we learn something about how we think of ourselves as human: *Three years ago, on a dark August afternoon, I sat at my desk in Iowa City, looking with interest out the window at a coming storm. Sides of cardboard boxes and class handouts were carried across the street on a warm wind, skimmed off the recycling bins next door. Not a truck or human was on the road.* *Then: the lift of the air siren, by the railroad, hurling its horrific caul over the town as it signaled an approaching tornado. The alarm, which I would hear intermittently over the next two years, is a milder version of the London Blitz air-raid siren; and yet its penetrating wail transformed the landscape into a Salgado portrait. I saw mass exodus, plagues, fires, and desolation across the fields; I saw nuclear fallout, I saw apocalypse laying waste. A few months later, I’d hide in my bathroom at two in the morning during another tornado alarm, futilely banging at my cell-phone keypad to let people know where I’d bunkered down. When the siren started up, I found myself praying for the first time in years, for myself, I’d guess, and maybe a bit for the fate of humankind.* *At the time, I had just watched the film* Silent Hill, *a decent rendering of a number of the games. This was my first month in Iowa City, and I was disoriented by my move to the Midwest, compounded by a perpetual lack of sleep. I now suspect my aural memory has fused the tornado alarm with the Siren of* Silent Hill, *which, like a future prayer call by a mechanical Imam, pulls the abandoned town into the Otherworld. In the first game, the Siren is grainy, like a police or ambulance siren; in 2, the sound is pitched higher, into a long, full register of terror.* *When the Siren sounds, out rise the ghouls and demons of the community: an army of twitchy, stunted, blinded humans that jerk about in crazed, thrusting erotic dances. Where my disgust for Nine-Toes can be cleanly isolated and concentrated on his frame, I am not always sure what I am feeling while playing* Silent Hill*. It is an unusual, powerful game because “the disgusting” is the very material of atmosphere, couched in the history of each character. The disgusting details are not vague or elusive; instead, they form a moral framework.* [Read on for members](https://www.killscreen.com/disgust-empathy-game-bosses-horror/) --- ## One to Watch ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/ghost_ready_2.gif) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/output_file1.gif) [*VAL'TY*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3860970/VALTY/?ref=killscreen.com) is an exceptionally abrasive shooter from Brazilian game designer Vikintor who also creates "erotic art \[...\] cold porcelain miniatures, zines, music, and paintings." Self-described as "esoteric punk," VAL'TY follows a ranger of the same name who's tasked with destroying a powerful corporation, but also, her daughter is on break, so she's tagging along. There appears to be dancing as well. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/ghost_ready_3.gif) ## Run-Ons Dayglow platformer *Kami Quest* [gets a demo.](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3857790/Kami%5FQuest%5FEnter%5Fthe%5FImagynasium/?ref=killscreen.com) Here's a sharp [charcoal animation](https://www.instagram.com/reels/DYeOh7duh%5FV/?ref=killscreen.com) experiment. Cezar Mocan's End of Signal wins the [SOLO AI '25 award](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYmm%5FxACFO9/?img%5Findex=6&ref=killscreen.com). There is a [*Death Stranding* script](https://collider.com/death-stranding-movie-a24-hideo-kojima-michael-sarnoski/?ref=killscreen.com). Gil Lawson's *goblinAmerica* *also* [has a demo](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1944040/goblinAmerica/?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQPOTM2NjE5NzQzMzkyNDU5AAGnvfBf0T9PZyDNfCjPV5fXNbtJ%5F8Zb-eTVPORInaDjg4t0bdXSMxJVTTahqcQ%5Faem%5FB-UkWrNbbMMgpDAhh4iZnw&ref=killscreen.com). ### The Teenage Fantasies of Nikima Jagudajev URL: https://www.killscreen.com/nikima-jagudajev-performance-video-game/ Last updated: 2026-07-14T19:12:41.000Z *Rising is a series on game-makers on their way up.* Brussels-based artist and choreographer [Nikima Jagudajev](https://www.nikimajagudajev.com/?ref=killscreen.com)'s journey to games pre-dated any of the typical signposts one associates with them. No trips to the arcade. No older sibling leaving a console in the den after leaving for college. No random YouTube videos. Instead, Nikima and their sister started their journey within their own minds, role-playing a fantastic universe called "Cool Girls." "We had to save the world from the Pluplots master who lived on Planet X," Jagudajev tells me. You see, the master was a monstrous figure who had taken over the lives of their childhood home of Portland, and it was the Jagudajevs' job to liberate them wherever they might be, on the bus or walking on the street. It was a bit of *They Live*, but through the eyes of children. "We had to protect humanity from the Plax people," Jagudajev remembers. Because, of course, you do. Before launching a career in performance, before making games, there were just two kids who decided the world needed different rules and decided to make them. The improvisation of childhood blossomed into an interest in anthropology and sociology in college. The work of Dutch philosopher (and my personal fave) Johan Huizinga introduced the porous boundary of the "[magic circle](https://www.killscreen.com/magic-circle-damning-indictment-modern-game-design/)," the boundary between play and the real world, and provided a clever reframing of those childhood adventures. But Huizinga and others also gave Jagudajev connective tissue between play as a community practice and their own family of origin. "I was thinking a lot about how creating your own game creates a context for yourself and others," they explain, reflecting on the context surrounding their early dalliances with play. "Coming from a dysfunctional family context, games allow you to execute empowerment." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Nikima-Portrait.jpg) All of theory, and practice came together with *Basically*, an ongoing live project that's part production and part playground that centers around fictional interactions of high school students. Jagudajev became interested in the miniature protests of high school. like burn books, carved initials, and locker decorations. and came to title those improvised rebellions "re-schooling." The ability to "fuck around inside of an institution" was an excellent way to describe their own interactions with museums and performance spaces, and *Basically* exhibits a feral, unpredictable teenage mood. While the performances shift as it's moved from Austria to Italy, the work always starts with a routine called "Walk in the Park", in which a set of dancer-performers pass arm in arm and sit next to each other. Then, visitors enter the performance and pull a card that imbues them with a role (Seam Ripper for a clothing designer, Creatix for a designer, etc.), which animates how they view the rest of their time in the space. The performers hold hands and chat. They converse with visitors, draw tarot, adjust their lipstick, and change clothes. And somewhere, there is a three-ring binder, a homework assignment of sorts, that contains all the rules that bind the characters together."You get to know the rules as a visitor just by being there, spending time there, and being invited into these subtle interactions," Jagudajev reflects. And now they've building those performances into a video-game work called *Like.* One word that never comes up in our conversation is live-action role-play, which shares a similar theatrical and rules context with Basically, although LARPs are typically not observed by an audience. Unlike LARP's lineage, which draws more from the mechanical wargaming roots of role-playing games, Jagudajev's work, like the practices of [Theo Triantafyllidis](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/theo-triantafyllidis/), [Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/asses-masses/), [Symoné](https://www.killscreen.com/symone-live-art-game-design-queer-performance/), and others, points to an alternate history of role-playing games. It's a lineage that derives from the "performative turn" of the 1960s, which transitioned the arts away from just static representation. I think of it as convergent evolution, where both the experimental tradition, particularly of Nordic-style LARPs, arrive at the same set of practices as an artist like Jagudajev. "A huge part of my work is the relationship with the visitor," Jagudajev notes, even though they haven't done stage work in years. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Nikima-Jagudajev---Basically-at-Scuola-Piccola-Zattere_Ph-Marcella-Ruiz-Cruz-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Nikima-Jagudajev---Basically-at-Scuola-Piccola-Zattere_Ph-Marcella-Ruiz-Cruz-9.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Nikima-Jagudajev---Basically-at-Scuola-Piccola-Zattere_Ph-Giacomo-Bianco---Installation-view-2.JPG) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Nikima-Jagudajev---Basically-at-Scuola-Piccola-Zattere_Ph-Giacomo-Bianco---Installation-view-11.JPG) Basically at Scuola Piccola Zattere (Credits: Giacomo Bianco and Marcella Ruiz Cruz) As Jagudajev toured Basically over a six-year period, they naturally wanted to start documenting the performances as some kind of film. The footage is character-based, mixing observation and interview, tracking the performers' stories, not just their behavior inside the work, and touches on themes familiar to adolescence, from unfriending to sexual awakenings. The organizing idea was that each story would focus on a different aspect of adolescence, but collectively they'd function as something that "could describe one person or many." But the film felt unable to capture the totality and inherent interactivity of the live performance, so during a residency at [Scuola Piccola Zattere](https://scuolapiccolazattere.com/en?ref=killscreen.com), the Venice nonprofit that opened in late 2024 under the artistic direction of Irene Calderoni, a video game began to take shape. Eschewing performance entirely was itself an experiment for Jagudajev, but LIKE pays homage to its roots with a mix of live-action performances and playable segments across six episodes. Players sit in a loveseat with a single controller, moving through the characters' worlds, and are also asked questions about their own experiences, which are incorporated into the archive. The end work is a type of palimpsest: a performance archive of years of accreted work beneath the veneer of a digital teen drama, à la *Life is Strange*, beneath the documented wants and desires of its players. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/NikimaJagudajev_00075---web.JPG) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/01_Nikima-Jagudajev--Like--2026.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/07_Nikima-Jagudajev--Like--2026.png) Stills from LIKE and installation at Scuola Piccola Zattere Video games rarely ask us to explore the interiority of their characters, so to transmute the messiness of teenage years into a game context is sharp and very welcome. Moreover, adolescence is arguably one of the most resonant periods, as our prefrontal cortex, which governs self-reflection and reasoning, is particularly active just before that time. "Any cultural stimuli we are exposed to during puberty can, therefore, make more of an impression, because we’re now perceiving them discerningly and metacognitively as things to sweep into our self-concepts or reject," Jennifer Senior [wrote in 2013](https://nymag.com/news/features/high-school-2013-1/?ref=killscreen.com). Jagudajev is compressing that period intro a single six-hour experience, but allowing performers to dance with emergent systems, creating a back and forth between the freedom of liveness and performance and the necessary limitations of encoded instructions. "And to be honest, it's such a complex world in many ways that the performers don't know all the rules either," Jagudajev says. " There's a lot of questioning or trying things out and checking in with each other." At the LIKE opening in Venice, one of the featured performers sat down on the loveseat, picked up the controller, and played as herself. The character she played was built from years of her own performances, her own stories, her own past. Jagudajev called it "really lovely layers." That's probably the right frame for all of it—a world inside a world inside a world, with no clear outside. ### Temitayo Ogunbiyi Builds Playgrounds Out of Risk and Steel Piping URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/temitayo-ogunbiyi-builds-playgrounds-out-of-risk-and-steel-piping/ Last updated: 2026-07-20T20:55:58.000Z Temitayo Ogunbiyi's practice began where most playground design stops: with a security fence. Watching galvanized steel piping used to wall off private compounds across Lagos, she saw instead a material she could turn into structures for public play, cheap, weatherproof, and endlessly reconfigurable. In this conversation, she traces that material discovery alongside her long research relationship with Isamu Noguchi's playground sculptures, and how the two threads converged into a body of work now spanning over a dozen functional playgrounds worldwide. We go deep on her process: why she never brings children in to test a structure before it's installed (engineering tests, yes; play tests, never), and how watching adults attempt her work is, in her words, "hilarious," because most adults have simply forgotten how their bodies move. She also discusses the linguistic roots of her titling convention, the Nigerian "you will" construction as blessing, wish, and affirmation, and how it shapes the way strangers encounter her work. The conversation traces her six-year path to her exhibition at the Noguchi Museum, from a folio of small drawings shown to senior curator Dakin Hart in 2018, through her first realized playground in Lagos, to the show itself. We also cover her installation at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, her Venice Biennale presentation (where confused security initially tried to stop visitors from touching the work), and her forthcoming solo exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio, opening September 2026. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### A tank with no interface is Wrong Organ's next horror URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-tank-with-no-interface-is-wrong-organs-next-horror/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T17:51:18.000Z Wrong Organ, the studio that made workplace procedure terrifying in *Mouthwashing*, is building a tank. [*Carcass Clad*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3327430/Carcass%5FClad/?ref=killscreen.com), revealed at the PC Gaming Show in June and [lately making the rounds as a reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DdE1JBuo3%5FI/?ref=killscreen.com), seats three players inside a machine called the Yksiö and gives none of them an interface. Operating the tank is "fully diegetic," according to the studio, so every lever and mechanism handled by hand. One of you reads the periscope and the radio, one drives, one loads and fires. Every action matters; every mistake spreads. 0:00 /0:24 1× From the reveal trailer for **Carcass Clad* (silent excerpt—the full trailer, with audio, is [on Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3327430/Carcass%5FClad/?ref=killscreen.com)). Courtesy Wrong Organ. The crew cuts through a city called Vhorgorod whose last defenders left the streets "sick with chimeric growths of gold and body"—war machines dressed in divine livestock, a city saint walking again "gilded and defiled." The named crew (Kanerva, a commander who wanted a glamorous life; Erkki, a gunner sharpened in gambling dens) suggests the studio hasn't abandoned character work so much as relocated it. Developer Jeffrey Tomec [told PC Gamer](https://www.pcgamer.com/games/horror/carcass-clad-is-less-story-heavy-than-mouthwashing-but-a-lot-of-thought-has-gone-into-it-we-havent-discovered-how-much-we-can-push-it/?ref=killscreen.com) that scripted narrative is on the "back burner for sure," with the drama meant to come out of three people communicating badly under pressure—"we haven't discovered how much we can push it." Horror by interface removal: the screen stops telling you anything, so your crewmates have to. No release date yet. Back in 2012, we covered [a Syrian rebel tank driven with a PlayStation controller](https://www.killscreen.com/syrian-rebel-tank-uses-playstation-controller/)—an improvised interface bolted onto real armor. *Carcass Clad* sees what happens if you take the interface away and see what the crew becomes. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/carcass-clad-ss4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/carcass-clad-ss5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/carcass-clad-ss6.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/carcass-clad-ss7.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/carcass-clad-ss8.jpg) Screenshots from **Carcass Clad*. Courtesy Wrong Organ. Killscreen watches what horror does to interfaces, and what interfaces do to us. The free Radar newsletter brings three finds like this to your inbox every week. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Night at the Museum URL: https://www.killscreen.com/night-at-the-museum/ Last updated: 2026-07-07T20:58:11.000Z Hello hello! First of all, thank you so much for riding with me while I took a nice break this summer. (And a special thanks to Aleksandra, Chia, and Raphael, who became members while I was away.) As many of you know from creative endeavors, big and small, time away is an excellent way to rewire and refocus. I heard someone say that the narrower your expertise, the wider your interests need to be, so that means spending time away from the very thing you know so well. That said! I did make some time to catch up with some games and culture folks in Europe. That meant a lovely lunch with Kristian Volsing, Senior Curator for the Contemporary Programmeat the V&A, who's been working on games programming at the museum for over a decade. I also caught a tea with artist Lawrence Lek who [I interviewed last year](https://www.killscreen.com/lawrence-lek-ai-consciousness-smart-city-trilogy/) , and had dinner with artists [Mélanie Courtinat](https://melaniecourtinat.com/?ref=killscreen.com), [Lou Faroux](https://www.killscreen.com/lou-faroux-video-art-queer-archive-unreal-engine/), [Vincent Moulinet](https://vincentmoulinet.com/?ref=killscreen.com), and [Jonathan Coryn](https://www.killscreen.com/player-non-player-jonathan-coryn-touch-grief-game/) on a short-lived cool break after the miserable heat wave in Paris. One common thread with everyone I spoke to was the relative lack of sophistication among intermediaries: culture workers, gallerists, granting organizations, universities, publishers, and so on. While public interest in games is incredibly high, even if it dipped slightly after the pandemic, they find themselves constantly explaining, even defending, their work in front of others. That said, in all cases, and especially with the members of the [Distraction Collective](http://distraction.fun/?ref=killscreen.com), the deepening contours of micro-scenes with games are apparent. When I first started looking at games over 15 years ago, I made early comparisons to some of the independent game work to the New Wave movements of the 60s in France, the US, and Hong Kong. In all cases, the local led the global, but with the independent game burst of the late aughts, the work never *really* felt like it was from a place, the way that *Bonnie and Clyde* fêtes the American West or Wong Kar Wai opened the doors of the Chungking Mansions. Danny Snelson and I talked a bit about this [on our last podcast,](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/the-backrooms-were-always-about-games-podcast/) but I believe the next and most important frontier for games will be necessary fragmentation of the medium into local quarters, from which the Next Big Thing can emerge. I hope I can keep traveling to document from the ground. Ok! On to this week's newsletter. --- ## “It's a Horrible Thing to Be Stuck in a Metaphor” ### Irish game designer Stephen Gillmurphy meanders through his approach to horror, one zine at a time. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-4.png) Game designer Stephen Gillmurphy tells me that he has a hard time finishing things from start to finish. Ideas come to him quickly, while daydreaming usually, but then something isn’t quite right, so he makes some adjustments. He calls it drift, but in Spanish, one might call it *sobremesa*, that byzantine logic of post-dinner conversations that starts here and moves *poco a poco* somewhere else entirely. Joan Didion famously quipped, “What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.” To write is to make a commitment, but if you keep replacing those bricks as the house is being constructed, as Didion did and Gilmurphy the tinkerer does, you’ll lead yourself to some truly strange places. Gilmurphy assigns his itinerant tendency, in part, to a longer tradition of Irish writers. The aposiopesis of Tristam Shandy, Flann O'Brien's nesting authors, Beckett's voices winding down, treated that drift as a structural principle rather than a failure. Gilmurphy, who works as [thecatamites](https://harmonyzone.org/?ref=killscreen.com), has spent four years building the same kind of maze. *Anthology of the Killer*, his nine-part comedy horror and winner of the 2024 IGF Nuovo Award (and a [Playlist](https://www.killscreen.com/playlist-279-a-crime-scene-and-what-it-means-to-be-a-bird/) selection), follows BB, a zine-maker in a city where masked killers are part of the weather, through hand-drawn, scanned environments shuffled together until they tip from sense into something denser and stranger. Talking to Gilmurphy has its own gravity as he wanders through ideas in real time. We spoke about Irish humor, the politics of the RETURN key, poisonous Victorian wallpaper, and the horror of being trapped inside a metaphor. [Read On](https://www.killscreen.com/stephen-gilmurphy-anthology-of-the-killer/) --- ## SPANDREL ### On the radar ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-8.png) [via](https://www.reddit.com/r/expedition33/comments/1uhwf5s/mus%C3%A9e%5Fdorsay%5Fexposition%5Fclair%5Fobscur/?ref=killscreen.com) On my last day in Paris, we went to check out some Impressionist and Nouveau design objects at the Musée d'Orsay, and to my surprise, I saw, from the mezzanine, [the familiar scenography of *Clair Obscur*](https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/program/whats-on/exhibitions/clair-obscur-expedition-33?ref=killscreen.com). As it turns out, my visit coincided with a three-week exhibition of concept art from the game on the main floor of the cavernous former Beaux-Arts railway station. I did find the framing a bit confusing as to how the concept art interacted with the work around it, but I'll take what I can get. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/Zight-Recording-2026-07-04-at-09.40.36-PM.gif) Animator, performance artist, and game designer [Paloma Dawkins](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/paloma-dawkins/) didn't reveal much about [a set of new work](https://www.instagram.com/reels/DY28O7Bp6IO/?ref=killscreen.com), only suggesting that all their work "was about butterfles rn." Cryptic, but exciting! 0:00 /0:27 1× [Travess Smalley](https://www.travesssmalley.com/?ref=killscreen.com) treats the pixel like a fiber, compressing early net art glitch logic and woven textile patterns into "rugs" that read as both hand-knotted and machine-rendered. [*Pixel Rugs*](https://vetroeditions.com/products/pixel-rugs?srsltid=AfmBOooeuuRaJgdFTkT9nua%5FkfTsZ-7i-FGPoOR0UYa3Ze0hdVskPTt3&ref=killscreen.com), his first monograph, traces that logic in operation since 2021 through studio sketches and essays linking his work to Harold Cohen's plotters and the procedural grids of early roguelikes—proof that a jpeg can carry the same structural memory as a loom. Fun sidequest from Navajo textile artist [Melissa Cody's spritely pixel weaves](https://www.garthgreenan.com/artists/melissa-cody?ref=killscreen.com). --- ## CLASSIC ### From the vault ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-7.png) Almost done with the [No Fun issue](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/issue-01/) (available online for members). In a reflection on difficulty, game designer Matthew Burns reflects on the cost of winning: *My neighbor and I were on the same team. I sensed his frustration with me rising as our opponents made their final push for our flag. I second-guessed myself at every moment: Should I throw a grenade? The target’s usually long gone before it detonates. If I aim for my opponent’s head, I’ll probably miss. If I try to pump bullets in his torso, he’ll come up close and melee. My own melees were always timed wrong—I was either hitting air or pressing the button while I was looking at my own dead body.* *“Oh, come on,” my neighbor shouted, as I keeled over and died again. I waited to respawn, thinking I might still have a chance to chase down the snatcher of our flag. It was not to be, of course. With defeat declared, my teammate squeezed his eyes shut, put the controller down, and took one of those “disappointed dad” deep breaths. I tried to make a joke to acknowledge my failing, but he ignored me. I briefly considered offering a sincere apology. But all I could do was wander off back to my desk and hope the moment faded away soon.* *In retrospect, I think he was doing me a favor. There is a special kind of anger that one reserves not for one’s enemy, but for the inept teammate whose bungling costs everyone victory.* [Read "Winner"](https://www.killscreen.com/competitive-gaming-winning-cost-games/) --- ## One to Watch 0:00 /0:29 1× It's been a minute since I've done psychedelics, but for those who partake, those wavy dayglow vibrations are oh, so, difficult to capture without resorting to caricature or kitsch. Dutch artist [Alle Jong](https://www.allejong.com/?ref=killscreen.com) has spent the last six years hand animating [*Sketchy Fables*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1472430/Sketchy%5FFables/?ref=killscreen.com) frame by frame after initially showing an early version in 2022 at the Drawing Center in Diepenheim. You wake up from a dream and are off to see your grandmother in the tallest skyscraper in the city, with apparent double-barrel detours along the way. The meticulous approach reminded me of Jordan Mechner's clever and time-intensive [rotoscoping process](https://www.facebook.com/jmechner/videos/in-1985-i-asked-my-brother-david-age-15-to-be-the-rotoscope-model-for-my-new-gam/1504985237104370/) to capture the limpid character movements in *Prince of Persia* in 1989. ## Run-Ons Meow Wolf mini-doc takes you [inside Mama Werm](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZQIWNwj1Da/?ref=killscreen.com). Mexico's Centro de Cultura Digital adds video games[ to its priority list](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZVTfNIjgcc/?img%5Findex=3&ref=killscreen.com). Alice Bucknell is [developing two works ](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZVFQwQjKeT/?img%5Findex=6&ref=killscreen.com)at Le Breq on the Mississippi River and creatures that live forever. The (in)famous chatbot ELIZA turns 60, and [a new book traces its history](http://www.inventingeliza.com/?ref=killscreen.com) in the lineage of AI development. [Installation with 100 phones](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZXdCHXtwYf/?ref=killscreen.com) mimics the real-world practice of synthetic influence. ### “It's a Horrible Thing to Be Stuck in a Metaphor” URL: https://www.killscreen.com/stephen-gilmurphy-anthology-of-the-killer/ Last updated: 2026-09-16T17:12:13.000Z Game designer Stephen Gillmurphy tells me that he has a hard time finishing things from start to finish. Ideas come to him quickly, while daydreaming usually, but then something isn’t quite right, so he makes some adjustments. He calls it drift, but in Spanish, one might call it *sobremesa*, that byzantine logic of post-dinner conversations that starts here and moves *poco a poco* somewhere else entirely. Joan Didion famously quipped, “What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.” To write is make a commitment, but if you keep replacing those bricks as the house is being constructed, as Didion did and Gilmurphy the tinkerer does, you’ll lead yourself to some truly strange places. Gilmurphy assigns his itinerant tendency, in part, to a longer tradition of Irish writers. The aposiopesis of Tristam Shandy, Flann O'Brien's nesting authors, Beckett's voices winding down, treated that drift as a structural principle rather than a failure. Gilmurphy, who works as [thecatamites](https://harmonyzone.org/?ref=killscreen.com), has spent four years building the same kind of maze. *Anthology of the Killer*, his nine-part comedy horror and winner of the 2024 IGF Nuovo Award (and a [Playlist](https://www.killscreen.com/playlist-279-a-crime-scene-and-what-it-means-to-be-a-bird/) selection), follows BB, a zine-maker in a city where masked killers are part of the weather, through hand-drawn, scanned environments shuffled together until they tip from sense into something denser and stranger. Talking to Gilmurphy has its own gravity as he wanders through ideas in real time. We spoke about Irish humor, the politics of the RETURN key, poisonous Victorian wallpaper, and the horror of being trapped inside a metaphor. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image.png) One of Alex Degen posters. ## From RPG Maker Tinkering to a Nine-Part Serial **Jamin Warren:** How did you make your way into game making, and why games? **Stephen Gilmurphy:** It was kind of accidental. I wanted an excuse to hang out on my parents' desktop computer, and I wasn't sure what you were meant to do with one; it had all these inputs, but no sense of the output. The first hobbyist game I played was a *Final Fantasy* fan game, and it was playable because it was made with RPG Maker. It turns out you can open it in the editor and see how the scripts make little guys move around. That was more fun to poke through than the game itself. After that, I just wanted an excuse for a packrat tendency with RPG Maker. I found a tileset of the moon, so of course, I'm going to have a moon level when I'm done in 50 years' time, because it's one of those uncompletable, endless teenage projects. **JW:** You're from Dublin originally, a city shaped by a particular Anglophone outsider humor. Were there Irish writers who influenced your tone? **SG:** Definitely, though it's hard to know where it begins or ends. The writers I felt most connected to were Flann O'Brien's newspaper columns, Joyce, Beckett, Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde. The Irish stream of English writing, even before an independent Ireland, felt more Gothic or perverse, so not realist fiction, which I find drab, but this odd, marginal thing, like *Tristram Shandy*, that tradition of the anti-novel. I've always been attracted to writing because I like stuff I find funny, and Irish writing was just where the best jokes were. 0:00 /0:37 1× Trailer for **Anthology* **JW:** If you could do a little self-psychology, what is it about an Irish sensibility that's unique to how you write? **SG:** Earlier today, by happenstance, I was reading a Maria Edgeworth piece called on the “An Essay on Irish Bulls” that has a self-defeating phrase that starts as a cliché and goes somewhere bizarre: “It's impossible for me to be in two places at once, unless I were a bird.” Her point was that what they called distinctly Irish humor was essentially the vague ethnic jokes of the time, but it was all in the same language, just across the sea. So there's that sense of being the “exotic other.” With Oscar Wilde, the paradoxes and inversions are that same irony, stuck in an alien-seeming civilization you have no affinity for, but still playing by their rules. **JW:** You studied mathematics, not art. I don't think of your games as deep systems games; the obvious route for a math person would be *Tetris*. Do you see any through-lines? **SG:** A little. Game making involves similar planning and construction, alongside the painting. What interested me about mathematics is that it's a very lucid, definitionally logical form of thinking that also becomes unmanageably abstract and weird. **JW:** Yeah, I remember hearing a comedian joke that the only people who can say they really hate math are people who study it. “Prove that numbers exist” and things like that. **SG:** There were people on my campus who were the only extant professor of such-and-such hyperspecific field; checking the papers was done on trust alone. That mix interested me: very keen, very lucid, but with a deep weirdness. The more you try to be precise and exact, the more opaque you become, which I find funny. > "...stuck in an alien-seeming civilization you have no affinity for, but still playing by their rules." ## The Logic of Drift **JW:** With *Anthology of the Killer*, you split the work across installments, a serialized approach that's rare in games. What's different about releasing it that way, versus designing one game with nine chapters? **SG:** To me, it's that you don't have to plan it in advance, you keep your options open and drift, because that's how I work. I plan the first little bit to get moving, then hit a point where my plan is deviating off-course, and I have to think about where this is going. Part of the plan was to track how weird the drift gets. I liked the soap-opera thing, *General Hospital* starts in the hospital, and then, [oh, there's a guy with a weather machine](https://www.reddit.com/r/SoapNet/comments/1fn43r1/on%5Fthis%5Fday%5Fon%5Fgeneral%5Fhospital%5Fin%5F1981%5Fluke/?ref=killscreen.com). Or webcomics that start as “crazy college roommates with a talking cat” and end in alien abduction and clones. That's where the *Killer* games would have gone if I'd made 20 more. Everything tends toward that insular, dense weirdness. Part of the appeal was that it gets more and more off-model, which I looked forward to. **JW:** That idea of drift, a small degree over a long enough period, and you overshoot by light-years. Soap operas outlive their creators, like a Gothic cathedral where multiple architects put their stamp on it. Did you find that BB changed for you over time? **SG:** My idea of what horror was changed, what's even nominally scary, because the game itself isn't really scary. BB stayed a little cypher-esque, but every episode I'd add another weird detail—she's allergic to curtains, she reacts oddly when this happens, always shoving in something where it's like, *oh, she's actually a strange person after all.* Toward the end, it was more that you accidentally build a set of constellations: you rotate the pieces around and unconsciously find, o*h, of course the policeman comes back in the theater level.* It felt like a natural fit, even though I've no idea why on paper it should be. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-2.png) Keep going Killscreen has spent fifteen years on the games that are funnier and stranger than they let on. Members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) ## Poisonous Wallpaper and the Art of Distraction **JW:** How does script-writing work? Where does a chapter start, pen and paper, or in-world? **SG:** I listen to music and daydream, and I have jokes, bits of dialogue, or a theme that seems funny as a blurb on a Wikipedia page. Like, “Episode 12: BB Lays an Egg”, and you say, *OK, what happens in an episode where BB lays an egg?* Then I'd write the dialogue in Notepad, dump it into the level in Unity, see how it looked onscreen, and rewrite based on that. The most underrated part of video game writing is the return key, where you put the line break, how you make a three-line textbox instead of a four-line one. That's why a lot of old computer games still feel like they had powerful writing, something lost now that text is an infinite resource. **JW:** BB is a zine maker. How did you decide on that occupation? It seems to give BB a unique view of the world. **SG:** I used to make zines, and I'm still trying to, I just came back from Glasgow Zine Fest, though I wasn't tabling anything. Part of it with BB was wanting something that makes sense, but also feels a little off. If BB were a TV journalist or a cop recording these stories, it would sound serious and intense. But for a zine, who's reading it? Would you really put your life on the line for a zine? No one's asking you to make one; it's totally volitional, something you do on your own, rather than there's a reason for it, she can't stop. It's self-inflicted in a bizarre way. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/FpakI-.png) **JW:** You mentioned taking apart early RPG tilesets, figuring out which textures you liked. There are so many in your work. Can you talk about that process? **SG:** Part of the appeal is you get to do all these little things by yourself, “This is the writing day, this is the wallpaper day.” I have this great book of poisonous wallpapers from the Victorian era, [the ones made with arsenic paint.](https://www.slam.org/blog/arsenic-in-victorian-wallpaper/?ref=killscreen.com) \[Textile designer\] William Morris, [of all people](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/29/william-morris-arsenic-and-old-lace?ref=killscreen.com), was like, *There's no way people get poisoned by wallpaper*, and meanwhile, people are dropping like flies from this particular shade of green. There's the Dario Argento, Giallo thing too: it's one thing to have a guy stabbing a woman, another to have him do it in front of the craziest wallpaper you've ever seen, drowning out the scene. There's no reason not to give people something interesting to look at, in addition to the thing that's meant to be happening. **JW:** Traditional wisdom says color should be directed toward a game-design end, an exit, guiding the player. You seem to reject that, like color can exist as texture under its own terms. **SG:** It was something I read in design notes by the developer of *Skin Deep*, the [Blendo Games game](https://blendogames.com/skindeep/?ref=killscreen.com), where they mentioned a limit on the number of things fighting for the player's attention at once. That makes sense in their game because it's systemic and dense, whereas in mine, there's not a lot strictly going on, so I can stage-manage what's there. It's mostly walking down corridors, so there's no sense that I'll make it unplayable if the wallpapers get too weird. Because that simple base is always there, you have total free rein. Distraction is the goal I'm shooting for, rather than the accidental thing I'm trying to avoid. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/07/image-3.png) **JW:** You've said the game isn't scary but unsettling. How do you think about that balance, your relationship to those genre markers? **SG:** I never really got into horror because I was too easily frightened by it, and I find the funny kind scarier than the scary kind. The films I'd glimpsed as a child were less frightening watched whole than as fragments; you'd catch the last five minutes of *The Fly* on an old CRT, this viscera, a creature you barely glimpse, then it cuts to commercials, a newscaster going, “And now the news,” in a soothing voice. That threat—an accepted baseline, and then this thing you feel will destroy you if you glimpse it—was scarier to me. My pet peeve in horror game design is when they don't only have the masked figure with the knife, they have him covered in blood so you know he's scary, big and muscular, with a fucked-up mask, because a regular mask chasing you wouldn't be scary. ## The Horror of Being Trapped Inside a Metaphor **JW:** Death is serious in your world, but BB seems bemused by how many people are being killed. I had a hard time placing the tone. Horror right now is a very serious genre, often an explicit political statement. Do you see parallels elsewhere? **SG:** *Megg, Mogg, and Owl*, the Simon Hanselmann comics, written the way a kid writes a story: the screams are written “AAAH,” then a flat, affectless panel of something horrible, and the characters emotionlessly discuss it as it happens. I'm not really a narrative guy, and I don't like the emotionalism of a lot of horror movies, the piling on, *“Oh my God, poor Freddy, I missed him so much.”* I wanted to see how much I could strip out and still have a run. And something I've been thinking about: it's not a horror game meant to be a metaphor, where the horror is the skin and the real story is underneath. It looks like a metaphor, but it's actually a horror game; the horror is that it's a horrible thing to be stuck in a metaphor. You're in a political cartoon trying to walk down the street, and there are all these guys in a T-shirt that says “The Economy” chasing you with whistles. Being stuck in one of those worlds was terrifying to me: everyone's acting out some metaphorical system you're not aware of, trying to impose those values on you, as if, of course, you know this, why wouldn't you chase people around with a hammer? That's what we're all here for. > "That threat—an accepted baseline, and then this thing you feel will destroy you if you glimpse it—was scarier to me." **JW:** Where does the work go from here? Will you keep returning to this world? **SG:** I've no real plans to make more horror for the moment; I didn't want to burn myself out. I like the fantasy of doing it until it becomes *Dick Tracy* in the '50s, where the characters are going to the moon, but I'd probably get bored and cranky, and people would tell. The thing I'm working on now: It's a spy game. The joke is that “spy” is the sequel to “horror” as a genre: all the horror villains, the guys with metal teeth on the skull-face island, just work for the State Department now. Same universe, but they grew up and got proper jobs. I'd love to put a series up under a weird name, *Hentai Starburst 2*, *Secrets of Fraggle Mountain 1*, *Secrets of Fraggle Mountain 2*. As long as you call it that, no one investigates the merits of the work. You're free. You have total artistic freedom for the first time in your life. *This interview has been edited for style, grammar, and flow.* --- **Read next:** [The humour behind Toby Fox’s Undertale](https://www.killscreen.com/behind-humor-toby-foxs-undertale/) · [The funniest videogame show you never saw](https://www.killscreen.com/how-two-former-saturday-night-live-writers-made-funniest-videogame-show-you-never-saw/) · [Love Eternal and the ambient design of intuition](https://www.killscreen.com/toby-love-eternal-ambient-game-design-intuition/) From Killscreen Killscreen has spent fifteen years on the games that refuse to explain themselves. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### ALT+TAB is an arcade racer driven through an office sim URL: https://www.killscreen.com/alt-tab-is-an-arcade-racer-driven-through-an-office-sim/ Last updated: 2026-10-11T00:10:36.000Z *ALT+TAB* went on show July 1 to 4, 2026, at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Tamás Hegyi built it inside a repurposed arcade machine. Steering wheels and pedals drive players through an office simulator and a dark-fantasy game, and the race bleeds between the two. It was one of seven works in [AAA', the master exhibition](https://experimentalgamecultures.uni-ak.ac.at/aaa-master-exhibiton-26.html?ref=killscreen.com) of the Experimental Game Cultures program. The show ran during the [Angewandte Festival](https://www.dieangewandte.at/presse/presse%5Fdetail?presse%5Fid=1781836934017&ref=killscreen.com), in the university's buildings at Georg-Coch-Platz and Oskar-Kokoschka-Platz. Eperke Remetei-Filep showed *Candytrail*, a two-player card game about consent and vulnerability. Players leave candies on a path of see-through cards and tell each other stories. Sebastian Alexander Konzett showed *Holobiomics*, which treats bodies as multispecies landscapes. Lea van Hall took a title from Olga Ravn's novel *The Employees*. The other three were *78 Kilometers* by Alexandra Gašparovičová, *memoryflash* by Martin Gius and *Affective Game Mechanics* by Miro Wallner. The university posted [photos of the final projects](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeO4780iOXW/?ref=killscreen.com) on Oct. 8. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/egc-aaa-2026-alexandra-gasparovicova-78-kilometers.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/egc-aaa-2026-eperke-remetei-filep-candytrail.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/egc-aaa-2026-miro-wallner-affective-game-mechanics.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/egc-aaa-2026-lea-van-hall.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/egc-aaa-2026-martin-gius-memoryflash.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/egc-aaa-2026-sebastian-konzett-holobiomics.jpg) Top row: **78 Kilometers* by Alexandra Gašparovičová, **Candytrail* by Eperke Remetei-Filep, **Affective Game Mechanics* by Miro Wallner. Bottom row: Lea van Hall's installation, **memoryflash* by Martin Gius, **Holobiomics* by Sebastian Alexander Konzett. © die Angewandte, 2026\. Photos: Lea Sonderegger, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Killscreen follows the schools and studios where the next strange games get built. The Radar brings them to your inbox free, three times a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### The Backrooms Were Always About Games [Podcast] URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/the-backrooms-were-always-about-games-podcast/ Last updated: 2026-06-13T01:09:44.000Z *Something a little different! We're focusing on the newsletter now and in a conversational way!* This week, I sat down with Danny Snelson, a writer and professor at UCLA who spends his days thinking about the eerie. We start with a strange admission from this year's Venice Biennale, where the Chinese pavilion exhibited a video game you weren't allowed to play, and use it to chase a bigger idea: that games have quietly become a shared grammar, and once you notice it, you can't stop seeing where it has leaked. Into a sculptor's hooded figures pulled from *DOOM* and recast as the accused at the Salem witch trials. Into a painter who walks you inside his own canvases. Into a flesh-pink office shooter, and into the Backrooms, that empty image of damp carpet and fluorescent hum that turns out to be one of the clearest things our culture has made about infinity after the exhaustion of grandeur. We get into all of it, plus an auto-rickshaw in Goa in 1992, and whether a game is allowed to refuse to be fun. *References* - [Mitchell Chan](https://chan.gallery/?ref=killscreen.com)'s talk at [DEMO](https://www.youtube.com/live/FVQ96vAoS30?si=EKc0B5w5V7GEnUTy&t=2546&ref=killscreen.com) - [Peter Nichols](https://www.elfsend.com/?ref=killscreen.com)' [*Crude Oil*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1653020/Crude%5FOil/?ref=killscreen.com) - [My interview with Leo Castañeda](https://www.killscreen.com/leo-castaneda/) / Talk at [DEMO](https://www.youtube.com/live/6ayBEn-LsDU?si=zVfaVfUTbAcS-WG3&t=3461&ref=killscreen.com) - [Camoflux](https://store.steampowered.com/app/897980/Camoflux%5FLevels%5F%5FBosses/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Adrian MM Abela](https://adrianabela.com/work/2023-declaration-of-dependence-drafts-and-depictions/?ref=killscreen.com) - [False.Work Maltese Pavillion](https://www.false.work/declaration-of-dependence?ref=killscreen.com) - Chinese Pavillion's [Black Myth: Wukong](https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/6787484/dream-stream?ref=killscreen.com) - Damjan Jovanovic's essay on [The Backrooms](https://worldmakingproject.substack.com/p/the-collision-mesh-of-the-real) - My feature on Catmilk - [Catmilk](https://milksaucer.com/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Gossamer Matrix](https://store.steampowered.com/app/2002840/Gossamer%5FMatrix/?ref=killscreen.com) - [Kalp Studio's Rahi](https://kalpstudio.co/?ref=killscreen.com) ### The Pink Game About Corporate Violence URL: https://www.killscreen.com/the-pink-game-about-corporate-violence/ Last updated: 2026-06-10T03:32:24.000Z [Catmilk](https://milksaucer.com/?ref=killscreen.com) is a digital artist and solo developer who has been building a game called *Gossamer Matrix* for about four years. It's a first-person shooter set inside a corporate tower in a climate-flooded future, where cities have condensed vertically, and private militaries defend shareholder value floor by floor. The premise is deliberately hyperviolent. The color palette is, improbably, pink. What caught my attention was the texture. The game looks stitched. Woven. Like something pulled together one color at a time. Catmilk cites the Impressionists and Zdzisław Beksiński, the Polish painter behind a generation of heavy metal album covers, as visual touchstones. You can feel both. We talked about designing for something other than fun, about how working an IT job in a university basement quietly shaped the game's level design, and about what it means to make something you're calling a "digital object" that exists as itself, optimized for nothing. Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by [Nick Sylvester](https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com). come join us! Enjoy this conversation with podcast? Consider supporting Killscreen for the year for more essays, interviews, and profiles on the future of interdisciplinary play. [Learn more ](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/signup) ### Escape from New York URL: https://www.killscreen.com/escape-from-new-york/ Last updated: 2026-06-10T03:08:41.000Z I had an amazing time at DEMO2026 at the New Museum in New York City. Part of it was the nostalgia of riding my bike over the Manhattan Bridge at sunset, and part of it was being without childcare responsibilities, staying up late talking with artists, and sleeping in. I was ready to get home after a couple of days, but it was a nice change from working from home here in Los Angeles. [DEMO](https://www.demofestival.org/?ref=killscreen.com) is part exhibition, part working conference, and part presentation. In the US, there simply aren't big media arts festivals the way there are in the US, and something like A MAZE doesn't really exist here either. (I think of Indiecade as more like film festivals here in the US, versus showcasing experimental work.) The backbone of DEMO is the multi-hour microtalks from artists working at the bleeding edge of arts and technology, such as Joshua Ashish Dawson's water scarcity [Bradbaori project](https://www.youtube.com/live/6ayBEn-LsDU?si=7mUSzFbwf%5FBLFt21&t=13463&ref=killscreen.com) that we discussed during his talk a couple weeks back. ([Available for members](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/talk-4-17-building-worlds-while-the-actual-world-burns/)!) So of course, I was delighted that there was quite a bit of games programming. As part of Rhizome's curated block, one of my favorite talks came from Toronto-based artist and game-maker [Mitchell Chan](https://chan.gallery/?ref=killscreen.com), who [delivered an attempt](https://www.youtube.com/live/FVQ96vAoS30?si=ao8XpUrvhMEa-nmj&t=2545&ref=killscreen.com) at defining the space that he operates in–artists making games. "We all know once an art form becomes popular, there is one critical thing we must do: *define subcategories of that art form*," Chan joked. It sounds simple enough, but having followed this space for 15 years, there has been a rapid expansion of the types of experimental games being made beyond simply "indie games." There are myriad ways you can build your diagram, but Chan suggested "agential art" as a better way to think about his work. "The game format is not simply a way to cram revealing assets or assets with symbolic value into the viewer's field of view," he sneakily jabbed at world-building projects with little interaction design. "The container has a homology of the structure of the \[player's\] life." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/06/image-9.png) Peter Nichols' [**Crude Oil*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1653020/Crude%5FOil/?ref=killscreen.com) on display One more notable piece for me personally is how *normal* video games are becoming in museum and gallery contexts. As part of DEMO, Mindy Seu curated a selection of 15 artists from NEW INC's cohort, including [Peter Nichols](https://www.elfsend.com/?ref=killscreen.com)' *Crude Oil*, a physics-adventure about a petroleium blob on the lam. It was a cheeky inversion of "wholesome" games, as you're actually the architect of climate collapse. Later at Onassis ONX's new space in Tribeca, over 30 different game and screen-based works were on display, including Tomo Kihara's AI-guessing work [*Deviation Game*](https://www.tomokihara.com/en/deviation-game.html?ref=killscreen.com), an unreleased project from Tale of Tales, and a personal project from Filipinx drum n' bass artist Anito Soul. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/06/Castaneda-Camoflux1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/06/large_2026_BIENNIAL_051_PS.jpg) And to cap off the trip, I made a quick stop before heading to the airport. The Whitney Biennial has [Leo Castañeda](https://www.killscreen.com/leo-castaneda/)'s ongoing *Levels and Bosses*, the Latin American surrealist work that he originally showed me as an MFA project back in 2011! The work features a custom fiberglass chair, vinyl, and an ultra-high definition sample of the larger project. Elsewhere, [Isabelle Frances McGuire](https://whitney.org/exhibitions/2026-biennial/art?section=41&ref=killscreen.com)'s vivid, foreboding, and violent sculptures about the Salem witch trials draw directly on character models from *DOOM*. Two video game-based works, two different approaches, one explicit and the other only revealed in the artwork text. It's a nice reminder of how much has changed since I started looking at games as art form. The shape of the future is here, if you just know where to look. --- ## What Does Violence Look Like in Pink? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/06/image-11.png) If you subscribe to Criterion, you may have recently noticed the “Corporate Thrillers” playlist that runs through that genre of film, mostly clustered between the late 1990s and the late 2000s, that uses the office building as a kind of pressure chamber: *The Firm*, *Michael Clayton*, *The International*. My wife and I have been working through that Criterion list lately, and what's striking is how reliably this genre surfaces whenever a culture is trying to metabolize what's actually happening inside its companies. Jacques Tati got there earlier with *Playtime* in 1967, which pokes at the man in the gray suit and the shining new city built around him. In the 90s, there was a reckoning with 80s deregulation and corporate raiders. *Office Space* presented anxieties around the consulting class for the Gen X middle manager. The mid-aughts reflected what would become Occupy. *Severance* is a potshot at founder-led cults. Games have largely sat this conversation out, which is strange given how many millions of people spend the bulk of their waking hours in an office. In fact, game companies themselves are generally staid office parks, outwardly rejecting the ostensible chaos within. [Catmilk's *Gossamer Matrix*](https://milksaucer.com/?ref=killscreen.com), an in-development first-person shooter she's been building for roughly four years, joins the small list of games willing to take the office seriously as a site—though it gets there through a hyperviolent sci-fi premise. Climate-driven flooding has shrunk available land, and cities have stacked themselves vertically into single corporate towers, each protected by a private military hired to defend shareholder value. You play a corporate peacekeeper. A business deal goes wrong. The building is taken. You fight your way through. [Read the week's feature](https://www.killscreen.com/catmilk-gossamer-matrix-currently-making/) --- ## SPANDREL ### On the radar ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/06/DoD_Venice2.webp) While I sadly didn't get to attend this year's Venice Biennale, due to my strict one biennale per year rule, I was pleased to see quite a bit of game-based work make its way to the festival. Two standouts were [Li Fan-Yi](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYeqtVYDD2W/?img%5Findex=8&ref=killscreen.com), the youngest artist to show at the Taiwanese pavilion, and Maltese artist [Adrian MM Abela](https://adrianabela.com/about/?ref=killscreen.com)'s update of his 2023 *Declaration of Dependence*. Abela's work in particular caught my eye, having worked with game and animation studio False Work on their in-development game [Spider Lily](https://www.false.work/spider-lily?ref=killscreen.com), who shared their involvement a couple of weeks ago. In *Declaration of Dependence (A Game of Surrender)*, Abela structured a stage with three zones to represent the future, the past, and the present. You can converse with a personification of Malta, who answers you differently each time. One strange inclusion was the China Pavillion's "international art debut" of what appears to be a non-playable screen of [*Black Myth: Wukong*](https://newseu.cgtn.com/news/2026-05-19/Chinese-art-drawing-the-crowds-in-Venice-1NfX7XrV2ms/p.html?ref=killscreen.com). So basically, an ad. Art can absolutely be cultural diplomacy; hence the existence of the nation-specific pavilions, but this felt more like Poland giving Obama a copy of *The Witcher.* Given the number of other artists working with games in China ([Zheng Fang is one of my favorites](https://zhengfangs.com/zh/?ref=killscreen.com#works)), the selection was disappointing. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/06/download--1-.gif) On the absolute other end of the spectrum, Fumito Ueda announced [*gen ATLAS* ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqMyxqyh%5FEo&ref=killscreen.com)last week and declared [it might be his last game ever](https://www.videogameschronicle.com/features/interviews/fumito-ueda-on-gen-atlas/?ref=killscreen.com). There's certainly a bit of introspection going around with Hideo Kojima talking about [his own mortality.](https://www.gq.com/story/hideo-kojimas-boss-fight-with-time?ref=killscreen.com) Kojima and Ueda, though, are arguably two of the most influential video game designers at wide scale whose influence can be felt outside of games. Kojima, most recently, showed out [with his collaboration with Prada](https://www.prada.com/us/en/pradasphere/special-projects/2025/satellites-prada-aoyama.html?ref=killscreen.com) and director Nicolas Winding Refn, and Ueda's heartbreaking use of light and scale in *The Shadow of Colossus* and *ICO* is a touchpoint for artists and designers. The *Gen ATLAS* trailerrhymes with junk future, but his past work suggests something more serious. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/06/All-Posts-----Instagram-2026-06-09-at-4.56.54-PM.jpg) I've loved [Yuri Suzuki's](https://www.killscreen.com/designer-artist-yuri-suzuki-plays-sound-first-exhibition/) work for quite some time, and it's been fascinating to watch the different permutations of a social-first approach to sound design and play. Suzuki is dyslexic and couldn't read sheet music, so he made it his life's mission to translate sound into objects. Looks Like Music (2013) translates [color into music](https://yurisuzuki.com/artist/looks-like-music?ref=killscreen.com), and he recently redesigned his collective sound-making project, [UTOOTO](https://yurisuzuki.com/projects/utooto?ref=killscreen.com) (above), for Salisbury Cathedral. Citing Walt Disney's EPCOT and Rem Koolhaas' manifesto *Delirious New York*, Suzuki appears to be pursuing some type of physical attraction, but he's soft on the details. This week, he announced [ONOMATOPIA](https://www.instagram.com/yurisuzukilondon/p/DZXDIBzDH3U/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) as a theme park of "a place where sound brings people together, and where sonic experiences can positively transform emotions, environments, and relationships." I could absolutely see a sculpture park dedicated to his work and those who want to make the world a soundclash. --- ## Hyphens ### Intersections at play ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/06/image-12.png) Just absolute bangers in [Damjan Jovanovic's essay](https://worldmakingproject.substack.com/p/the-collision-mesh-of-the-real) on both the Backrooms film and lore, because it reframes a whole genre of internet dread: The Backrooms, he writes, give us "the feeling of having fallen through the collision mesh of the real." I'm so mad at this essay, because it's *so* in my wheelhouse that I wished I'd written it myself, but can now only wistfully look through the windows. Damjan Jovanovic teaches at experimental architecture school SCI-Arc and makes games himself, so as part of his ongoing world-making project, he takes an absolute scalpel to what might be the most non-video game video game movie in recent memory. We tend to file the Backrooms under liminal space—empty offices, damp carpet, fluorescent hum, the aesthetics of the place you're not supposed to linger in. That's ostensibly makes them spooky, but Jovanovic argues that liminality only describes the feeling. What propels the work is what he calls "game-engine uncanny." > This is what makes the Backrooms such an important image. They are one of the clearest forms contemporary culture has produced of infinity after the exhaustion of grandeur. They still imagine an infinite world, but this infinity has no majesty. It has given up every claim to the celestial, the divine, the abyssal, the oceanic, and the properly ruinous, and it is lit instead by fluorescent tubes and covered in carpet. The absolute has become maintained space. And that space is what happens when you fall out of a video game world and into something else entirely. When the Backrooms surfaced on 4chan in 2019, the caption warned you might "noclip" out of reality. Noclip is a debug term, the cheat that lets a player pass through solid geometry and wander outside a level's intended bounds. So the originating myth was never really about haunted architecture. It was about discovering that the wall was never a wall, only an instruction the system agreed to enforce. "From this compressed image and premise, a collective mythology unfolded across wikis, videos, games, forums, and fan projects, adding levels, entities, maps, thresholds, survival procedures, and competing interpretations," he writes. The Backrooms are a reflection of an internet-native "folk cosmology" than structures a way of thinking and explains how a single image can grow into something much, much more. --- ## CLASSIC ### From the vault ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/06/Chiller-design-1.png) Maybe the "video game violence" people had a point. Mitch Krpata, in the [No Fun issue](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/issue-01/), shared his strange relationship with *Chiller*, a violent game with the gore of a B-movie, but without the spunk: *The best games transport the player to another realm. The worst games do, too. It hardly mattered that the graphics were amateurish even for the time, or that the soundtrack consisted of a looping digital organ piece, a cackling ghoul, and overmodulated screams. Nor did it matter that, considered purely on ludic terms, this was one of the lousiest games ever made. Playing* Chiller*, I could tell that some threshold had been crossed—that I was standing in the darkest corner of a very dark place. It had no reason for being, except to immerse me in a world of extravagant violence, asking only for a quarter and a willingness to pull the trigger.* [Read on if you dare](https://www.killscreen.com/the-big-chill/) ## One to Watch ### ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/06/download--2--1.gif) Over the weekend, I had a conversation with Chilean urbanist and game designer [José Sanchez](https://www.killscreen.com/jose-sanchez/)about the growing presence of games that seek global audiences through hyper-local themes. In Kalp Studio's [*Raahi*](https://kalpstudio.co/?ref=killscreen.com), the auto rickshaw takes center stage in 1990s Goa, India, as you live the lives of others one pickup at a time. The front seat/back seat dynamic from New York taxis to Filipinx Jeepneys is a universal format for understanding a place through its passengers, but *Raah*ilooks to introduce a new audience to the corners of Goa, from sipping on cashew *feni* liquor to working your way through flea markets like Anjuna. Whether or not there will be a pitstop to rescue an over-dilated party-goer from a [Goa trance rave](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EahVeQgPG60&ref=killscreen.com) is TBD, but you know how much people love a good fetch mission. --- ## Run-Ons Afrah Shafiq is [installing at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZVS2JwjFEm/?img%5Findex=1&ref=killscreen.com), the first time the museum has ever showcased game work. *Rhythm Heaven Groove* [drops July 2](https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/rhythm-heaven-groove-switch/?srsltid=AfmBOooOWa%5F0ce%5Fdupx%5F5HBEj3pCpFHxbt7UQe182wPIUTX-JEGcG1rh&ref=killscreen.com). Artists Petra Szemán and David Blandy's placemaking project about the "weirded maps" of Durham County is [available to play](https://nomorenowt.org/david-blandy-petra-szeman-digital-residency?ref=killscreen.com). [*Amarcord: The Game*](https://www.instagram.com/p/DXhUCGqiMEb/?img%5Findex=2&ref=killscreen.com)*.* Did you know? I know there are quite a few students in the audience. If you're interested in membership and are from an underrepresented group in gaming and/or the arts, consider asking for a "scholarship." [Learn more ](https://forms.gle/TsBi9tYwj8Y9gSNDA?ref=killscreen.com) ### What Does Violence Look Like in Pink? URL: https://www.killscreen.com/catmilk-gossamer-matrix-currently-making/ Last updated: 2026-06-12T20:52:38.000Z If you subscribe to Criterion, you may have recently noticed the “Corporate Thrillers” playlist that runs through that genre of film, mostly clustered between the late 1990s and the late 2000s, that uses the office building as a kind of pressure chamber: *The Firm*, *Michael Clayton*, *The International*. My wife and I have been working through that Criterion list lately, and what's striking is how reliably this genre surfaces whenever a culture is trying to metabolize what's actually happening inside its companies. Jacques Tati got there earlier with *Playtime* in 1967, which pokes at the man in the gray suit and the shining new city built around him. In the 90s, there was a reckoning with 80s deregulation and corporate raiders. *Office Space* presented anxieties around the consulting class for the Gen X middle manager. The mid-aughts reflected what would become Occupy. *Severance* is a potshot at founder-led cults. Games have largely sat this conversation out, which is strange given how many millions of people spend the bulk of their waking hours in an office. In fact, game companies themselves are generally staid office parks, outwardly rejecting the ostensible chaos within. 0:00 /0:28 1× ## Climate Floods the Land, Companies Claim What's Left [Catmilk's *Gossamer Matrix*](https://milksaucer.com/?ref=killscreen.com), an in-development first-person shooter they've been building for roughly four years, joins the small list of games willing to take the office seriously as a site—though it gets there through a hyperviolent sci-fi premise. Climate-driven flooding has shrunk available land, and cities have stacked themselves vertically into single corporate towers, each protected by a private military hired to defend shareholder value. You play a corporate peacekeeper. A business deal goes wrong. The building is taken. You fight your way through. “Corporate militarism” is how Catmilk describes it, and the phrase has lost most of its sci-fi distance in the last few years. But the premise wasn’t what caught might my eye. It’s all about texture, baby, and that texture is, improbably, irrepressibly pink. Hot, saturated, almost fleshy pink. It started practically with a pinkish tone for the player character's eyes, which figures prominently in the game's screenshots, and the color spread outward until it became the game's visual identity. Set against the dayglow yellows and drab grays of the office interiors (Catmilk renders with the unsettling accuracy of someone who has spent years inside one), it creates a feel of a woven quilt, too tightly spun. They spent those years working IT in a university basement (with great employees, they add), and the level design draws directly from it: maintenance rooms tacked oddly onto hallways, an empty floor where boxes and old desk chairs sat in the dark for months, vending machines stocked with beef jerky of indeterminate age. "I don't know why somebody would buy beef jerky from a vending machine," Catmilk says. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/Gossamer-Matrix-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/Gossamer-Matrix-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/Gossamer-Matrix-4.jpg) ## Monet and Heavy Metal in the Same Cubicle The visual references derive from elsewhere. The Impressionists, for how Monet and his contemporaries used color expressively under restraint. Zdzisław Beksiński, the Polish painter whose surrealist work became shorthand for heavy metal album covers in the '80s. You can see both in *Gossamer Matrix*'s aesthetic, which has a stitched, almost-sewn quality: eschewing pixel-art precision for something chunky, warmer, and more handworked, like something pulled together one color at a time. Catmilk is heading toward the first round of play testing, and they're nervous about it. That pesky F word raises its head. "When people hear video games, they assume fun," they say, "and that idea is very confusing to me." Catmilk's favorite games have been, by their own description, either purposefully or negligently unfun. We don't have a great word in English for what games actually deliver, which tends to be something more fluid than the specific, gripping, dopamine-forward thing "fun" implies. What matters more is whether the unfun-ness is intentional. Checking in day by day, *Gossamer Matrix* will be ready soon enough for your local water cooler. Save some loose change for the vending machine. ### What to Play This Weekend: June 4 URL: https://www.killscreen.com/what-to-play-this-weekend-june-4/ Last updated: 2026-06-05T14:00:45.000Z I'm in New York City this week, and the thing I remember most about my time here is the nights: those hazy evenings when the weather is warm, and it seems like the world is *completely* in the right place. It is truly a type of madness, a delirium, wrought purely by youth, altered states, and the cultural collision attendant on cities of any shape or size. Dance parties are a natural, emergent expression of the urban environment. While my late nights now manifest for different reasons as a father, I fondly remember Darkstar at Berlin's Berghain at 3 A.M., Daft Punk closing out Coney Island, and any number of sweaty juke joints I found myself in my 20s. So this week's Playlist pick had me feeling some kind of way about capturing the intimacy and ecstasy of the party, but against the backdrop of finding joy when there is simply too much sorrow. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Thirty screen works put games and film in the same room URL: https://www.killscreen.com/onx-screens-games-moving-image/ Last updated: 2026-10-02T17:13:32.000Z For four days in June, Onassis ONX in New York hung thirty screen-based works—over twelve hours of them—in one space and declined to say which were films and which were games. [ONX Screens](https://www.onx.studio/onx-programming/onxscreens?ref=killscreen.com), the organization's new program for what [the announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYm9YF1Fi2o/?ref=killscreen.com) called projects "built for the speed, circulation, and shared languages of digital culture," ran June 4–7, with videogame cosplay encouraged at the opening and prototypes and works-in-progress explicitly welcome. The premise deserves attention even with the show closed: moving image and videogames, the argument goes, are now shaped by the same forces—game engines, AI tooling, virtual production, platform-native aesthetics—and by circulation itself, so the screen should be treated as "both medium and infrastructure." That is a curatorial claim you could argue with, if the lineup didn't keep proving it. Consider who showed up. Tomo Kihara and Playfool brought *Deviation Game*—[we profiled Kihara in August](https://www.killscreen.com/tomo-kihara-game-of-possible-lives/). Wendi Yan and Yi Xie showed *Inner Carbon*, the Daoist-alchemy work [we just wrote about this week](https://www.killscreen.com/wendi-yan-inner-carbon-classic-daoist-alchemy/). Peter Burr showed *Interstitial Maintenance*. And Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn appeared together with *The Cosmos and The Cave*—a decade after [Tale of Tales told the world it was done making videogames](https://www.killscreen.com/this-sad-tale-tales-done-making-videogames/), the pair is back on a wall of screens in a room that treats play as ordinary art. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/onx-screens-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/onx-screens-3.jpg) The lineup posters: video game works and moving image works, one program. Images: Onassis ONX Exhibitions end; sorting mechanisms persist. What ONX built reads like infrastructure for the long run—not a games showcase, just a room where an engine prototype and a film share a wall because they already share a pipeline. When institutions put games on gallery walls, Radar is usually already there. Three short issues a week, free, in your inbox. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Your Body Is Being Compressed URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/your-body-is-being-compressed/ Last updated: 2026-06-03T06:05:28.000Z [Lisa Jamhoury](https://lisajamhoury.com/?ref=killscreen.com) is an artist and performer working at the intersection of the physical body and computation. Her *Capture Series*—five years in the making—investigates what it means to live through digital representations of ourselves. *Lossy*, the newest piece in the series, had its world premiere at South by Southwest 2025. In this episode, I talk with Lisa about how a traumatic car accident sent her from circus performance into software design, a 1940s sculpture called *Norma* that explains everything wrong with how we build technology today, what it actually feels like to walk through *Lossy*, and why she reached for Kurt Vonnegut to write through grief. This is the main feed cut. Gaming Club members get the extended version — including Lisa's full breakdown of the *Norma* sculpture, her reflections on motion capture as an ethical practice, and more of our conversation about digital death and the right to be forgotten. Want more? Join the Gaming Club at killscreen.com — $8/month gets you extended episodes, monthly game selections, creator interviews, and the editorial layer that makes it all make sense. [Learn more ](#/portal/account/plans) Members, you can listen to the whole conversation below. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Something lost, something found URL: https://www.killscreen.com/something-lost-something-found/ Last updated: 2026-06-03T05:05:04.000Z I'm off to the [DEMO Festival](https://www.demofestival.org/?ref=killscreen.com) in New York City this week, one of the few media arts festivals in the United States. NEW INC is an arts and tech incubator run by the New Museum, and a place I have a real fondness for. The first Killscreen office was on Chrystie St., just on the back side of the then two-year-old building, and we were delighted to get reflected light in the SANAA-designed space. The museum was also the home to the first virtual reality arts conference I co-organized with Julia Kaganskiy Earlier this year, NEW INC asked me to teach a six-week workshop on gaming literacy for artists, and we spent equal time on introductions to game design, audience development, and exhibition design, all aimed at artists at different stages of their work. So I'm delighted to see some of my students presenting work this week, as well as some talks from game-based artists like [Mitchell Chan](https://chan.gallery/?ref=killscreen.com), [Jacky Connolly](https://www.killscreen.com/jacky-connolly/), and [Skawenatti](https://www.killscreen.com/skawennati/). If you're there, please give me a shout! Ok, on to this week's newsletter. --- # So It Goes *Lisa Jamhoury's Lossy is a memorial to the physical body in the age of the digital body—and a reckoning with what we lose when we let ourselves be averaged.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/06/image.png) At that moment [Lisa Jamhoury](https://lisajamhoury.com/?ref=killscreen.com) was making a piece about loss; she, too, was losing an unimaginable part of herself. Pressed cheek to cheek, breath to breath, she prepared to say goodbye to her mother as she prepared to grieve what would come next. "I could have never imagined the world without my mother; it feels so empty," she told me. "It's like I've lost an appendage." She had been working on what would become [*Lossy*](https://lisajamhoury.com/lossy?ref=killscreen.com) for some time already—a walkthrough installation that premiered at SXSW this spring—but it was her mother's passing that gave the work its emotional center of gravity. "The work itself is about losing what it means to be purely physical. It's losing the physical body in the age of the digital body." In a sense, Jamoury was now letting both of those bodies go. *Lossy* is the culmination of Jamhoury's five-year investigation into what she calls "living through capture"—the increasingly strange condition of experiencing ourselves primarily through our digital representations. [Read this week's feature](https://www.killscreen.com/lisa-jamhoury-lossy-digital-body/) --- ## SPANDREL ### On the radar ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/06/Lones.jpg) Poor graphic design, frankly, has plagued board games for time immemorial. *Cards Against Humanity* was a real breakthrough for its visual distinction, even if its subject matter hasn't aged so well. (Crossing boundaries in group settings feels like quite a pre-2016 activity. I'm no longer in the mood.) But with the exception of [CMYK](https://www.cmyk.games/?srsltid=AfmBOoorQ6ECjS-kW1DovFsLfaTZQrB9F2FToTwx2mQt-DQVZO2QzbzS&ref=killscreen.com), it can be difficult to find visually distinct work in the space, in part because communicating a board game's cultural fit is a part of the process, for better or worse. Approaching games as a brand and identity design problem first is how Brooklyn (of course!) design studio [Young Jerks](https://youngjerks.com/?ref=killscreen.com) operates. Their imprint [Weast Coast Games](https://www.instagram.com/weastcoastgames/?ref=killscreen.com) publishes bright, broad-stroked card games with a focus on short play cycles. Their newest release, *Loners,* pulls from 80s genre fight films. You pull together a crew to take down the block, call in a wild-card to take advantage, or flip the arrangement to play as a security guard. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/06/image-1.png) Artist Joseph Delappe was constructing interventions as long as anyone, and we covered his work 2011 for the No Fun issue. Back in 2001, Delappe started his practice with [*Howl: Elite Force Voyager Online*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4J9i6jQXUg&time%5Fcontinue=19&source%5Fve%5Fpath=NzY3NTg&embeds%5Freferring%5Feuri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.delappe.net%2F&ref=killscreen.com), a work that placed him at the forefront of experimental performance in native game environments. After logging in to *Star Trek: Elite Force Voyager Online,* Delappe spent the next six hours typing in Alan Ginsberg's poem *Howl*, line by line. Rather than participate in wanton violence, Delappe sought connection through poetry, and with each death, he re-emerged elsewhere to complete the process. [This week at ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe](https://zkm.de/en/2026/06/howl-elite-force-voyager-online?ref=killscreen.com), he'll revive the performance over the course of four hours It's hard to understate how novel this approach was twenty-five years ago, and although role-play of various sorts has been a staple of online games since their evolution from multi-user dungeons in the 80s, a deliberate attempt to change the context of live social play is quite new. Since then, there have been attempts at either intervention or documentary, such as *Grand Theft Hamlet* or [*La vraie vie*](https://www.killscreen.com/la-vraie-vie-asks-what-it-means-to-be-real-in-a-fake-place/)*.* “I am now 78 years old, but from here on, I feel a growing curiosity toward the unknown music that my new self will create, while also embracing the music of my former self—as if I now carry two musical worlds within me,” Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Haruomi Hosono [wrote this week after announcing his first new music in seven years.](https://djmag.com/news/yellow-magic-orchestras-haruomi-hosono-announces-first-solo-album-seven-years?ref=killscreen.com) Many people know Hasono for his groundbreaking boundary-pushing work cited by everyone from Harry Styles to Vampire Weekend. But writer Shy Thompson tracks Hosono's [*other* contributions:](https://www.shy.center/p/lattice-200ec7?ref=killscreen.com) "the first to release an album of video game sounds *as* music." > You’d be forgiven for thinking the music contained within Hosono’s 1984 album *Video Game Music* is simply audio collected directly from games, but it’s something far more impressive: a *recreation* of music from video games, made only with a synthesizer. The tracks sound shockingly indistinguishable from genuine playthroughs of a handful of Namco classics including *Pac-Man*, *Libble Rabble*, and *Mappy*. Starting screens, gameplay, and high score entry are all featured, offering a vertical slice of the audible experience of getting a quick game in. ## Hyphens ### Intersections at play ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/06/image-3.png) I learned about this exhibition *Colourful Parachutes: Imagining Alternative Futures Through the Power of Play* from artist Temitayo Ogubiyi, who works with [found materials to create](https://temitayo.com/?ref=killscreen.com) play structures. I'm profiling her next month, but this exchibition at Toronto's [The Power Plant](https://www.thepowerplant.org/whats-on/exhibitions/colourful-parachutes-imagining-alternative-futures-through-the-power-of-play?ref=killscreen.com) treats children as its primary audience, a delightful about face from the expectations of the contemporary museum. Drawing on Palle Nielsen's *The Model* (1968), which transformed Stockholm's Moderna Museet into an adventure playground, the exhibition reads the gallery as a microcosm of society: reconfigure it for children, and you begin to see what a different world might actually feel like. --- ## CLASSIC ### From the vault ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/06/Trauma-5.jpg) Killscreen's [very first editor Ryan Kuo did this interview](https://www.killscreen.com/trauma-photos-space-design-interview/) with Krystian Majewski about his game *Trauma.* ***In a lot of first-person shooters and third-person shooters, the computer draws the map for you as you’re exploring it. In these terms, they present a seamless objectivity that you occupy. Crysis is drawn out for you; it’s very literal, you move through it, and there’s a map—and that’s the map. How can that be an expressive space? Where’s the subjectivity in that?*** *One of the things that inspired me—a book called Space Time Play—there’s an essay by someone who suggests that movies and literature organize their story along a line. But he suggests maybe games aren’t linear—so what kind of model can we take to tell stories, make statements? He suggests space as being a skeleton for expression for games: things like spatial storytelling, developing an alphabet or a language of expression through space. That was something that really struck a chord with me. Trauma, in many ways—these are spaces, but these spaces represent different thoughts and different aspects of a person. It is, in many ways, literally environmental storytelling.* --- ## One To Watch ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/06/image-7.png) Way back in 2008, I received a small book from a publisher by the filmmaker Michel Gondry. I love *The Sound of Sleep* and his music video work, but this book [*You’ll Like this Film Because You’re in It*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al6yHYuBnlw&ref=killscreen.com) chronicles the events of his DIY film installation at Deitch Projects. Gondry built a process for working amateurs into his work that is highly laudable. So I was delighted to see [this workshop](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZDQCtaFzmp/?ref=killscreen.com) from Hapshapen Games that followed a similar tack of bringing the public into the game making process. [*Abigail*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/3569410/Abigail/?ref=killscreen.com) grows out of this work to bring raw materials from clay to felt into games in a meaningful way, --- ## Run-ons [BASS VAN](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZFbdQhI1Z8/?utm%5Fsource=ig%5Fweb%5Fcopy%5Flink&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==). Adding [this one](https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517916220/the-impossible-reversal/?ref=killscreen.com) to book club lists. " Fallon is [the court jester of the Anthropocene,](https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-banal-horror-of-jimmy-fallon?ref=killscreen.com) a figure who invites us to watch celebrities play parlor games on stage while the air outside the studio begins to smell of tear gas and smoke." ### So It Goes URL: https://www.killscreen.com/lisa-jamhoury-lossy-digital-body/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T17:17:47.000Z At that moment, [Lisa Jamhoury](https://lisajamhoury.com/?ref=killscreen.com) was making a piece about loss; she, too, was losing an unimaginable part of herself. Pressed cheek to cheek, breath to breath, she prepared to say goodbye to her mother as she prepared to grieve what would come next. "I could have never imagined the world without my mother; it feels so empty," she told me. "It's like I've lost an appendage." She had been working on what would become [*Lossy*](https://lisajamhoury.com/lossy?ref=killscreen.com) for some time already—a walkthrough installation that premiered at SXSW this spring—but it was her mother's passing that gave the work its emotional center of gravity. "The work itself is about losing what it means to be purely physical. It's losing the physical body in the age of the digital body." In a sense, Jamoury was now letting both of those bodies go. *Lossy* is the culmination of Jamhoury's five-year investigation into what she calls "living through capture"—the increasingly strange condition of experiencing ourselves primarily through our digital representations. 0:00 /1:17 1× At SXSW, the installation was a three-sided room with three screens displaying [Unreal Engine animations](https://www.killscreen.com/jacob-kudsk-steensen-ecological-game-engine-art/) of sculptures built from fractions of a second of motion-captured contemporary circus duet. That exact moment is transmuted into a 3D-printed photogrammetry avatar of the two performers, frozen in the position that generated the sculpture behind them. Visitors wear motion-tracked headsets and walk through a spatial audio landscape of 24 sounds and three of Jamhoury's poems, blending the composition with their own bodies. The piece loops endlessly. There is no beginning or end. The figures gesticulate *ad infinitum*. The title is itself a small act of defiance. *Lossy* describes compression that permanently discards data—a JPEG, an MP3, a webcam feed during a pandemic. Jamhoury kept getting the word edited out of her drafts by non-technical readers who found it confusing. "I love the term lossy. I've always just thought it was so descriptive and so beautiful," she said, but after "the fourth or fifth time it had gotten edited," she rebelled. "We're just putting this in the title, and then no one will edit it out ever again." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/Lisa-Jamhoury---Lossy---Studio-Lauren-Lindley21-1.jpg) The Capture Series began with a sculpture Jamhoury encountered while working as an experience designer at Adobe—*Norma*, a 1940s figure created by a gynecologist from the averaged measurements of 15,000 white women aged 21 to 26\. Norma was then displayed in doctors' offices and *Time* magazine as the perfect American female body. Thousands of women submitted their own measurements to a "Miss Norma" competition. No one matched, thus setting up generations of failed idealized beauty standards. But the story that emerged was not simply that the average was an absurdity, but for Jamhoury, a vestige of a way of thinking she encountered in the digital domain. "Coming from a software design background, I know that this is still how we design hardware and software," Jamhoury said. "We design for the center of the bell curve." Coming out of the pandemic, the topic of how our bodies are represented on-screen had a renewed resonance, with the shouts of the erstwhile Metaverse filling public discourse. "If we're all pushing ourselves into these forms that are created right at the center of the bell curve, what are we shaving away?" she mused. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/image-1.png) A prominent obstetrician and gynecologist, Robert Latou Dickinson produced "Norma" and "Norman" that set back the cause for human equality. The answer the piece offers is ineffable. "We've become so used to identifying with our photos and our videos—these things that sort of almost look like us—that we have started to sort of replace our vitality with that." We stop being present in our own lives because we start [identifying so much with the vision of ourselves](https://www.killscreen.com/maya-man-starquest-ai-dance-performance/). But *Lossy* is not only about what's shaved off. "What I'm playing with in the piece is there's sort of this horror of not being able to be yourself, but then there's also this beauty that comes out of," she tells me. *Lossy* is part and parcel of our contemporary [reimagining of digital bodies](https://www.killscreen.com/carrie-chen-digital-avatars-ai-identity/) after decades on the internet. Just as there's a delicious oddity to those first round of AI-generated images that were fantastically surreal, Jamoury's figures play with the same sense of surreal, but to a different end. The images are not idealized versions of ourselves, as they've never existed, but new ways to think about what could be if we are not committed to capturing reality bit-by-bit. "What if we play with what digital can do and have fun with that and build on those affordances?," she says. "What if we know that we're losing part of ourselves, what if we focus on what's actually different and what we can gain?" 0:00 /0:51 1× Jamhoury used photogrammetry to capture the poses Throughout *Lossy*'s poems, a refrain recurs: *so it goes*. In *Slaughterhouse-Five,* the phrase is repeated by the book's protagonist whenever he encounters death, big (the over 100,000 killed in Dresden) or small (a single unhoused person). It's his compulsive tic that's shorthand for horror and the unfathomable and a coping mechanism. "It really encapsulated this feeling of like, *there are just no words*. But there is a feeling, right?" Jamhoury points out that Vonnegut also uses it as a memento mori. Which is where, for Jamhoury, the phrase begins to twist. "We can die physically, but we cannot die digitally. My mom's Facebook account is still up and going." There is something specifically late-millennial about all of this—about the position of being just old enough to remember being non-digital, just young enough to be fluent in everything that followed. Like me, Jamhoury describes herself as on the cusp. The last people to come into the world without the internet, without smartphones. She is mourning, in *Lossy*, a version of herself and her generation that has been quietly compressed away. "I'm holding space for this way that we have been and who we have been." The "so it goes" points at the absurdity of it—the fact that the decisions that produced our condition were never democratic, never voted on, and were made by a handful of people in Silicon Valley. In the current sociopolitical climate, she said, it is very easy to imagine *Lossy* as the opening scene of a sci-fi horror movie. "Is this the end of our corporeal freedom?" If these figures are in fact harbingers of the apocalypse, we can at least take solace that they are wholly human, imperfect and impossible as can be. From Killscreen Killscreen covers the artists rethinking the body in the age of capture. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### Node Center put game engines on its curating syllabus URL: https://www.killscreen.com/node-center-put-game-engines-on-its-curating-syllabus/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T02:55:16.000Z On June 1, Node Center for Curatorial Studies in Berlin opened applications for Curating the Digital, a six-month online program for curators and art professionals. [The announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZDRx0zDUNk/?ref=killscreen.com) promised VR, AR and AI. The detail that caught my eye sat further down, in the outline for the second module: “Game engines, Three.js, and emerging digital tools for curatorial practice.” For the record: [the program](https://nodecenter.net/program/curating-the-digital?ref=killscreen.com) runs July 8 to Dec. 9, 2026, with two hours on Zoom every Wednesday, a cap of 30 seats and a fee of 1,080 euros (or six payments of 225). The caption gave June 24 as the application deadline, while the last slide of the same post and Node Center’s own page say July 3\. Marco Mancuso, the critic who founded Digicult in 2005, coordinates, and every participant builds a curatorial project along the way. [That second module](https://nodecenter.net/course/digital-technologies-in-contemporary-art-curating?ref=killscreen.com), scheduled for Aug. 12 to 26, belongs to Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, and its third session is titled Worldbuilding. It treats the word as a curatorial method, and Nolasco-Rózsás has practiced it. In 2021, with Giulia Bini, the curator staged *Spatial Affairs* at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest. Its online half, [*Spatial Affairs. Worlding*](https://spatialaffairs.beyondmatter.eu/en?ref=killscreen.com), was a multiplayer browser environment designed by The Rodina, where visitors drifted among the artworks as avatars. The architect Bika Rebek was scheduled to follow in September with [virtual exhibition design](https://nodecenter.net/course/curating-virtual-exhibitions?ref=killscreen.com), avatars and co-presence included. Charlotte van den Bosch and Yulia Loginova cover immersive rooms and project management. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/node-curating-the-digital-module-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/node-curating-the-digital-module-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/10/node-curating-the-digital-module-3.jpg) Slides from the announcement outlining the first three modules, taught by Marco Mancuso, Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás and Bika Rebek. Images via Node Center. Killscreen reads the course outlines so you don’t have to, and tracks where game tools turn up in museums, galleries and classrooms without announcing themselves. The free newsletter collects what we find. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### May 28: What To Play This Weekend URL: https://www.killscreen.com/may-28-2026-john-le-carre-intern/ Last updated: 2026-05-29T02:55:18.000Z Wanna be an intern for John le Carré? _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Where did all the bees go? URL: https://www.killscreen.com/where-did-all-the-bees-go/ Last updated: 2026-09-18T21:34:35.000Z *Hello hello, after a long weekend here in the States. We spent the weekend camping. A couple of years back, I met someone who created a sliding scale for camping trips rated from epic to fiasco to total disaster. This weekend we pulled that boondoggle card with a broken tent and had to drive home a day early, but hey, at least we've got a fun story we can tell friends about at dinner.* *Before we jump in, a big thank you to Arnaud, Robbie, Ashley, and Adam for becoming* [*paid members*](https://www.killscreen.com/membership/) *this week. Appreciate the support!* --- ## **Long Read** ### **What Would You Do If You Had to Find the Last Surviving Bees?** *The Athens-based artist Kyriaki Goni, on a woven basket gifted to her at 18, the ritual of telling bees about deaths and births, and building a speculative video game set in a near-future Aegean.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/Telling-the-Bees-Kyriaki-Goni-at-The-Breeder-2026-photo-athanassios-gatos.jpg) Photo: Athanassios Gatoss *Currently Making is a series with artists and game-makers who have a work in-process.* **Jamin Warren: *Telling the Bees* has this remarkable origin story rooted in a single found object, a basket you were given when you were 18\. I'm curious about the long arc from receiving that object to deciding, years later, that it could be the seed of a whole speculative universe. Can you take me back to that first encounter?** Kiriaki Goni: It's a big story that emerged from one object. I was 18, hiking on Ikaria, an island in the southeastern Aegean archipelago. I was walking through a village when I met this lady who invited me to coffee. In her kitchen, I noticed this weird object—a basket woven from thin branches—and asked her what it was for. She told me they use these baskets to swarm or host bees. In Greek, she used the word *smarologos*, and *smari* is "swarm." Then she said, "You can have it." I took the gift back to my hometown, Athens. When we eventually managed to travel back after a long ferry strike, I took a picture at the port holding this basket, really happy to finally be going home. I mean, don't get me wrong, it was a perfect island, but staying against your will on an island for so many days is kind of weird. I kept the basket with me for years, in different studios and apartments. About three years ago, I started thinking about making something of it. Most of the time, these baskets hang from trees upside down, with the cone base up, but I started thinking: what if I could make it look like a backpack? So I started designing straps and mending them a bit, because they were old. I was invited to be part of an exhibition, and I said, *OK, I'm going to work on this object and allow a story to take form.* Eventually, I came up with this character, the Beeseeker, who is gifted the basket, as if she's following my own story, and embarks on a mission to find the last surviving bees. [Read the interivew](https://www.killscreen.com/kiriaki-goni-telling-the-bees/) From Killscreen Enjoy Killscreen? Consider giving the gift of gifting to your favorite Killscreen future fan. [Learn more ](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/gift) ## SPANDREL ### On the radar ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/Gabriel-Massan.jpg) Part of Gabriel Massan's ongoing engagement with socio-political structures, he shared [early sketches and designs](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYcQmeVCjwc/?ref=killscreen.com) from [*How Do We Get There?*](https://works.massan.world/hdwgt?ref=killscreen.com)(2024), a multichannel video installation that explores the seemingly straightforward question of public transportation. For the unfortunate souls who are venturing across I-95 for a pedestrian bridge to MetLife for the World Cup or dare to go "car--free" for the LA Olympics, this work is an avatar for your future frustrations. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/gif--2--1.gif) While French designers Goblinz Studio might be moving in a slightly different visual direction for dungeon crawler [*Sol Cesto*](https://goblinzstudio.com/game/sol-cesto/?ref=killscreen.com), that didn't stop them from a sumptuously produced animation from Gobelins graduate Armand Goxe. One of the great sleight-of-hand for early game-makers was creating visuals that gestured at the world, rather than merely depicted it, and [this animated trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D28dDxCAuBc&ref=killscreen.com) happily breaks follows that tradition. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/gif--3-.gif) [Isaac Cohen](https://cabbi.bo/me/?ref=killscreen.com) has been sharing some *Fortnite* widgets, with contributions from the likes of *Adventure Time*'s Pendleton Ward, illustrator Kat Ball, and others.It's unclear exactly what these overlays actually *do*, but it doesn't matter. I do not care for *Fortnite*'s cynical kitchen sink approach to IP overload, but if this is an alternate universe for the world's most popular game, I am here for it. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/Earth-Engine.jpg) Credit: Anpis Wang Alice Bucknell's [*Earth Engine*](https://alicebucknell.com/projects/earth-engine-2026?ref=killscreen.com) has been making its way out into installation view this year, most recently at the [National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYDGNqGGa8a/?ref=killscreen.com). The game inverts the standard perspective for players, treating us as mere characters in the main character's story of the planet. Tying its lineage to Bucknell's other [fieldwork and science-based approach to game design,](https://www.killscreen.com/alice-bucknell-multiplayer-games-interspecies-cooperation/) the game pulls in real-time climate data and forecasts, along with in-game behavioral patterns. --- ## Hyphens ### Intersections at play ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/image-10.png) Image credit: Courtesy of Lewis Ronald I continue to be deeply interested in the work of playgrounds. It's partly because I am a parent and finding playgrounds is now a principal concern, and partly because there's been a movement of more artists looking at playgrounds as a site worth approaching. I [came across this design collaboration](https://www.wallpaper.com/design-interiors/playrise-flat-packed-playground-ommx?ref=killscreen.com) between Playrise, architects OMMX, and engineers Webb Yates, which views the playground as a human right. The project is a modular timber playground system built for refugee settlements and disaster-relief zones, where 48 million displaced children currently have little access to structured play. Made from Iroko hardwood timber with Lego-like interlocking slots, it flatpacks for transport and can be assembled, scaled, and reconfigured by the communities using it. Additional add-ons make space for other found objects. But this quote from co-director Alexander Meininger really stuck with me; the explicit promise that permanence was never the goal: "There's really no desire for any permanent installation because it gives this impression that these are also permanent conditions." Well put. The design also solves a problem most Western playground furniture ignores entirely: climate. In Ethiopia, where the team ran co-design workshops with Sudanese communities, metal playground equipment reaches temperatures that make it unusable. Timber stays cool. Solid forms create shade. Fixing holes becomes canopies of dappled light. Playrise unveiled its first prototype earlier this year. The immediate goal is to supply six sets to villages across Gaza. The longer ambition, per Meininger, is to reshape how we think about play everywhere for any child without access to a playground, not just those in crisis zones. --- ## CLASSIC ### From the vault ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/delappe-Americas-Army-action-figure.jpeg) Photo by Joseph Delappe A personal essay on *Six Days in Fallujah*, realism, and what it costs to set a videogame in a place that still lives in someone's memory: > *I tried to reengage the issue with critical eyes. I shared the naysayers' emotional investment, but not their hasty, hair-trigger reactions. Unlike them, I became curious about the positive things that could come of Six Days in Fallujah; for my sentiments laid elsewhere. I wasn’t a soldier. I wasn’t an aid worker. I wasn’t a journalist. In fact, I had nothing to do directly with the war effort. Instead, the thread that tied me to the war-torn city was heritage; I had family there.* [Read On](https://www.killscreen.com/six-days-in-fallujah-realism-memory/) --- ## ONE TO WATCH *I've moved this section to the public newsletter to make more space for longer reviews for the weekly* [*Playlist*](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/playlist/) *email. I'm tracking games currently in development that are trudging towards release.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/gif--1-.gif) [*Kami Quest: Enter the Imagynasium*](https://kamiexp.com/en-usd?ref=killscreen.com) sounds exactly like its name: a joyous romp through a plasticene dream world. I've been skeptical of the PS1-level revival work, as it mostly feels superficial and doesn't capture the true strangeness of this era. But this pulls more of the otherworldly slickness of Nicole Ruggiero or [Harriet Davey](https://www.killscreen.com/harriet-daveys-glossy-aliens-reject-gamings-binary-world/). --- ## Run-Ons *Trans Theft Torso, a game about gender gladness,* [*takes top prize at A MAZE*](https://2026.amaze-berlin.de/award-winners/?ref=killscreen.com)*. LOVID experimental DVD work is worth its* [*weight in menus*](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYE8SfLEZmR/?img%5Findex=1&ref=killscreen.com)*.* [*A four-day immersive LARP* ](https://www.drachenfest.us/?ref=killscreen.com)*inspired by Germany's own comes to central Pennsylvania, with plenty of fantasy and yurt rentals. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is* [*designing a mini-golf hole.*](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYeo259jXE-/?img%5Findex=2&ref=killscreen.com) ### Telling the Bees: Kyriaki Goni on Building a Game from a Stranger's Gift URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/telling-the-bees-kyriaki-goni-on-building-a-game-from-a-strangers-gift/ Last updated: 2026-05-26T23:36:07.000Z In this episode, I sit down with Athens-based artist and game designer Kiriaki Goni to discuss [*Telling the Bees*](https://kyriakigoni.com/projects/telling-the-bees-the-game?ref=killscreen.com), her in-development game about a Bee-Seeker navigating a near-future Aegean archipelago in ecological collapse. We cover: the 18-year-old hike where a stranger gifted her a woven bee basket; the anthropological fieldwork underpinning her character design; the bee waggle dance as a gameplay mechanic; and what it means to build a game that thinks like a hive. Listen here and members, keep scrolling for the video recording and full podcast. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### What Would You Do If You Had to Find the Last Surviving Bees? URL: https://www.killscreen.com/kiriaki-goni-telling-the-bees/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T17:17:46.000Z *Currently Making is a series with artists and game-makers who have a work in-process.* **Jamin Warren: *Telling the Bees* has this remarkable origin story rooted in a single found object — a basket you were given when you were 18\. I'm curious about the long arc from receiving that object to deciding, years later, that it could be the seed of a whole speculative universe. Can you take me back to that first encounter?** Kiriaki Goni: It's a big story that emerged from one object. I was 18, hiking on Ikaria, an island in the southeastern Aegean archipelago. I was walking through a village when I met this lady who invited me to coffee. In her kitchen, I noticed this weird object—a basket woven from thin branches—and asked her what it was for. She told me they use these baskets to swarm or host bees. In Greek, she used the word *smarologos*, and *smari* is "swarm." Then she said, "You can have it." I took the gift back to my hometown, Athens. When we eventually managed to travel back after a long ferry strike, I took a picture at the port holding this basket, really happy to finally be going home. I mean, don't get me wrong, it was a perfect island—but staying against your will on an island for so many days is kind of weird. I kept the basket with me for years, in different studios and apartments. About three years ago, I started thinking about making something of it. Most of the time, these baskets hang from trees upside down, with the cone base up, but I started thinking: what if I could make it look like a backpack? So I started designing straps and mending them a bit, because they were old. I was invited to be part of an exhibition, and I said, *OK, I'm going to work on this object and allow a story to take form.* Eventually, I came up with this character, the Beeseeker, who is gifted the basket, as if she's following my own story, and embarks on a mission to find the last surviving bees. I later researched the basket and found it has been used widely across cultures, before the box beehive. People made them from whatever was in abundance around them: branches, clay, textiles. The earliest reference is a cave painting from 7,000 years ago near Valencia, depicting a female figure holding a basket surrounded by bees. Not this basket, but the form. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/Telling-the-Bees-Kyriaki-Goni-at-The-Breeder-2026-photo-athanassios-gatos--128-.jpg) Photo: Athanassios Gatos ## A Future Where the Bees Have Already Left **The Beeseeker's costume has a near-future register: Inuit-style snow goggles, sandals cut from discarded tires, boots for rocky terrain, a parachute to catch the wind. The whole rig reads as survival gear for a specific kind of collapse. How did you arrive at that visual language?** I started by writing the story and, as a case study, imagining the Aegean archipelago in the near future. There's a specific group of islands in the Aegean with cliffs, dry landscapes, strong winds, and harsh sunlight. I had that in mind. That's why I used a parachute to harness the strong wind, or the goggles to protect from the sun. But there's also a connection to what's happening right now on these islands: overtourism and habitat loss for many organisms, including bees. It should be a big discussion, but it's not. In the story, you see hotels and infrastructure almost collapsing because people had huge ideas of building huge infrastructures on tiny islands. **What is it about that gesture — the idea that nonhuman life has a right to be told what's happening — that you wanted to bring into the work?** I came across it while searching online and said, *This is going to be the title*. [The ritual is observed in many rural cultures](https://killscreen.com/articles/never-alone-first-alaska-native-game-diorama-nature/?ref=killscreen.com): people introduce the bees to what's happening in the household, or the bees will fly away. I remember an article in *The Guardian* about Queen Elizabeth's passing, where the Royal Beekeeper [told the bees the Queen had died](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-14/why-royal-beekeeper-tells-bees-queen-died/101439526?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/telling-the-bees-the-game-2025---Kyriaki-Goni-screenshot--9-.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/Telling-the-Bees.-The-Game-2025---Kyriaki-Goni-screenshot-1.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/Telling-the-Bees.-The-Game-2025---Kyriaki-Goni-screenshot-1-.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/telling-the-bees-the-game-2025---Kyriaki-Goni-screenshot--6-.png) Keep going Killscreen members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) ## The Ritual of Telling — and Who Gets to Know **Bees are extraordinary subjects for an interactive work, partly because so much of their behavior is already a kind of language. As you've been developing the gameplay, what does it look like to take that bee-logic and turn it into something the player has to actually do with their body?** They're quite ambitious. A central part is how bees communicate with each other, like the waggle dance and the round dance, which transfer information about direction and distance to food. I'd like to introduce it into the game by using the player's physicality as input. I'm also thinking about sound as a bodily element: in order to unlock an asset, you have to hum like a bee, or perform the waggle dance. Another feature I hope to incorporate is bee vision. The character uses a bee antenna and sees the world the way bees do. A different part of the spectrum cab change the whole landscape in terms of color. [For the show at The Breeder,](https://thebreedersystem.com/uncategorized/kyriaki-goni-telling-the-bees/?ref=killscreen.com) I created an AR version of the antenna, so visitors could wear it on their face through the phone camera. **How does the game sit alongside the other work in the exhibition?** The intention is to create [an environment where the digital and the physical overlap](https://killscreen.com/keiken-morphogenic-angels-post-human-game-designretry/?ref=killscreen.com)—not a distinct experience, but a world that is both at once. Most of the objects in the Beeseeker's inventory are tangible in the installation: the basket, the parachute, and soon the tire sandals and boots. There's sound, and there's smell — I use beeswax and lemongrass, an essential oil that attracts bees. It's a multi-sensory experience for the whole body. **Where is the game itself, in terms of production? I watched some of the footage you've shared—the menu screen, the inventory views—and it has the texture of something genuinely in motion rather than concept art. What's actually built, and what's still ahead?** The game design and gameplay are in place, though things will change as I work. The honest answer is that the holdup is funding. It's a project that requires more money than a simple art installation. The final game will be a first-person experience: a 3D environment where you can move around and enter an abandoned hotel and a shrine. The landscape is so present that it functions almost as a character itself. **Is it modeled on Ikaria, where you were gifted the basket?** I don't name a specific location on purpose. I started with the Aegean as inspiration, but I'm using the archipelago as a case study as [a biodiversity hotspot threatened by overtourism and extractive practices](https://killscreen.com/jacob-kudsk-steensen-ecological-game-engine-art/?ref=killscreen.com). I don't want it tied only to the Aegean. This comes from my anthropology background. The case study and the fieldwork are connected. **You studied social and cultural anthropology before coming to art?** Yes — bachelor's and master's of science. Then I had a break, worked on completely unrelated things, and eventually studied fine and digital arts. My master's was in the Netherlands, and one of my field theses looked at the body in public space — and dance. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/Telling-the-Bees-Kyriaki-Goni-at-The-Breeder-2026-photo-athanassios-gatos--155-.jpg) --- *Kiriaki Goni's solo exhibition* Telling the Bees *was on view at The Breeder, Athens. The game is in development.* From Killscreen Killscreen covers artists building games out of fieldwork, ritual and the nonhuman. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### May 22: What to Play This Weekend URL: https://www.killscreen.com/may-22-what-to-play-this-weekend/ Last updated: 2026-05-22T23:31:53.000Z *A reminder that members have access to comment. Take a spin and let me know what you think below.* _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### The Places We're Losing Are Becoming Virtual Worlds URL: https://www.killscreen.com/the-places-were-losing-are-becoming-virtual-worlds/ Last updated: 2026-05-20T01:24:25.000Z ## Long Read ### *The Places We're Losing Are Becoming Jakob Steensen's Worlds* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/image-4.png) *For the past decade, Danish artist* [*Jacob Kudsk Steensen*](https://www.jakobsteensen.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *has been treating the video game engine as a medium of ecological fieldwork. His immersive installations grow from years of onsite research—underwater volcanic vents near the Azores, collapsed ice caves in the Swiss Alps, an experimental forest in Minnesota—transforming them into virtual worlds that sit somewhere between scientific document and living dream. We spoke about Otherworlds, a survey on view at the Phi Centre in Montreal that gathers five distinct spaces and spans 15 years; Psychosphere, built from photogrammetry of newly discovered submarine volcanic landscapes; and Song Trapper, part of an expanding game world called Evoker.* **Jamin Warren: I want to start with your background, because the way your practice fuses ecology and game engines feels almost generationally specific. We don't usually think of those things as connected—indoor kids tend to stay indoor kids. How did the two come together for you?** Jacob Kudsk Steensen: I grew up in different places with my mom, but I spent a lot of time in a really small town on the West Coast of Denmark, near the water. Less than 2,000 people lived there. My dad is very much into ornithology, and I grew up around wetlands and brackish water. I've worked a lot with wetlands in recent projects because I really know them from a personal level. At the same time, when I was 12, I bought a copy of *Unreal Tournament*. It was part of a series of games that exploded full-on into an interactive, three-dimensional space in a free-roaming, playful, organic way. And it came with a level editor. So you could open up this map or other levels and change them around. It was a "Capture the Flag" game, and I started changing materials. It was never a conscious choice for me to work with video game engines or natural environments. I think I'm just an exact generation where the two really happened. There's a sense of climate awareness, narratives about climate change, and environmentalism, at the same time as there is this explosion of full-on three-dimensional virtual worlds that you can modify. I've used Unreal since it came out. For me, it's like a musical instrument. I very much fell in love with the spatial, environmental part of video game technology. [Read the interview](https://www.killscreen.com/jacob-kudsk-steensen-ecological-game-engine-art/) --- ## SPANDREL ### On the radar ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/gif.gif) Filmmaker[ Jacky Connolly](https://www.killscreen.com/jacky-connolly/) has moved on from her Sims work that I'd written about over the years with new work [The Mineral Kingdon (Dark Green)](https://www.jackyconnolly.com/mineral-kingdom-dark-green.html?ref=killscreen.com). These are clearly an extension of the eerie work of adolescents, as she takes you between the underworld and the sky. Back in November, the work was selected for the Taipei Biennial. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/image-5.png) **The Mineral Kingdom (Dark Green)*, 2025, Video installation, color, sound, light, 37 min, looped, Dimensions variable, Courtesy of the artist. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/-28--Faker-as-Religious-Experi----WordHack-12.18.2025---YouTube-2026-05-19-at-2.52.57-PM.jpg) *"Here, I'm on the internet resisting it. I'm reciting, breaking, glitching, reading, stuttering, lagging. All these gestures and acts of play and breaking of the machines, hoping to eventually remake the environment itself as well. I hope I always play on the internet, no matter how futile or constrained things seem."* [Artist Chia Amisola](https://everythingi.love/?ref=killscreen.com#info.html) has had game work through much of their career with web art, but [in this talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov2zyQrAsXs&ref=killscreen.com), they connect their anxieties around making web art with an unlikely fount of inspiration: South Korea esports legend Faker. (The talk's title is also a nod to David Foster Wallace's [legendary piece ](https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html?ref=killscreen.com)on Roger Federer that turned 20 last month.) "If I am read at least once, maybe, just maybe, all will be fine." Oof! --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/image-6.png) Marina Xenofontos, "Play Life", 2026 Vue de salle Greek artist [Marina Xenofontos](https://twiceuponawhile.com/?ref=killscreen.com) works mostly with memory and how we display the ruddy stuff of politics. For the first time, her game project Play Life [is](https://www.mcba.ch/en/exhibitions/marina-xenofontos/?ref=killscreen.com#views-of-the-exhibition)[ exhibited](https://www.mcba.ch/en/exhibitions/marina-xenofontos/?ref=killscreen.com#views-of-the-exhibition) in its entirety at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Laussane. Her project revolves around the titular character Twice, who has endured many transmutations from animation to sculpture and now to a video game protagonist. The work carries you through Twice's daily routine that vacillates from the mundane ("Hide in the Bush") to psychopathic (Throw the hammer at Twice"). You're caught in a "replayable present," reliving the best and worst moments of your teenage life. --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/image-7.png) *"The archive is the world."* [Game designer Damjan Jovanovic mused on the curious case of ](https://worldmakingproject.substack.com/p/the-emergence-of-the-worldmaking) "lore book," game guides that detail the fabric and strategies of a game. But there is no game to be played. It doesn't exist. There have been ample examples in media of media that do not actually appear in the work referenced, known as "apocryphal media." But Jovanovic views this budding genre as a reflection of wider cultural comfort with the conventions of games that have become so widespread that you don't even need to *make* a game to generate the sentiments or experiences of a game. He writes: *"I would argue that the actual output of game design, when it produces something culturally significant, is a world in the strong sense: a structured totality that determines what can exist within it, what relations can hold, what objects mean, what the inhabitant can perceive. The play session is one way of accessing that totality, but it is not the totality itself. The play session is the access point, and the access point has been taken for the thing accessed."* Jovanovic doesn't view lore bibles as obviating games, but more as a function of where the medium has developed. I find there's something similar at work on Instagram: games that present themselves as in progress but are never actually played. I was joking with a friend that maybe that's the work itself, and you never really need to ship anything. --- ## HYPHENS ### Intersections at play ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/image-8.png) My wife and I loved Barcelona when we went on our honeymoon over ten years ago. Although the late, rich meals did a number on my stomach, sidelining me for part of the trip (it wasn't a heart attack!), the chance to see two of Antoni Gaudí's homes was easily one of the highlights. So I was delighted to see that Casa Batlío, with its coral-shaped facades, would be opening its only private residence to the public. (Sorta!) You can already tour the building on its own, but the third-floor balcony is the only part of the space that has been spared renovation. Following news that Sagrada Familia, Gaudí's cathedral masterpiece, has finally finished its exteriors after 100 years of construction, [Casa Batlló is now open as an event space](https://www.domusweb.it/en/news/2026/05/13/live-in-casa-batllo-gaudi-barcelona.html?ref=killscreen.com) after a touch-up. As a games person, Gaudí always spoke to me as someone interested in how spaces could both obscure their utility (e.g., Gaudí working around the chimneys at Casa Milá) while also suggesting there was a secret behind every wall. What's more, biomimicry through design has a legacy in games dating back to Conway's Game of Life in 1970, but recent artists like [Alice Bucknell](https://www.killscreen.com/alice-bucknell-multiplayer-games-interspecies-cooperation/) are applying it to their game works. Anyway, if anyone wants to meet me with $700 for a two-hour coffee in Barcelona, please inquire immediately. --- ## CLASSIC ### From the vault ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/Screen-shot-2010-05-19-at-8.38.40-PM-1.png) ## [Every Choice Leads to Loss](https://www.killscreen.com/every-choice-leads-to-loss/) Stephen Lavelle's games don't let you win—and that's the point. His rigged systems of loss reframe what games can say about control, grief, and the limits of choice. --- ## RUN-ONS *Creator of J-Horror Koji Suzuki* [*passed away*](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/books/koji-suzuki-dead.html?ref=killscreen.com)*. The aforementioned Chia Amiasola debuted a voice-controlled "MUDslop" dungeon crawler that uses misspoken or misunderstood words to confine you within* [*the limits of language*](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYIK2sRlH1R6CY5JjzchFISpH2RbvIKcU0pMjo0/?img%5Findex=1&ref=killscreen.com)*. A snowy owl* [*appears*](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYM9Qbcx8SV/?ref=killscreen.com)*. Tomo Kihara's Game of Possible Lives, which statistically conjectures an existence, is up at Movo Gallery in Tokyo. I had gleefully predicted that* [*Tottenham Hotspur*](https://www.killscreen.com/what-tottenhams-collapse-teaches-us-about-the-corruption-of-play/) *might go down, but my schadenfreude will likely be incomplete.* --- DID I DO IT? What do you think? Is this something worth supporting? [Learn more ](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/signup) ### The Places We're Losing Are Becoming Jakob Steensen's Worlds URL: https://www.killscreen.com/jacob-kudsk-steensen-ecological-game-engine-art/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T17:17:46.000Z *This was originally recorded as a talk which is now available to members* [*here*](https://www.killscreen.com/online-talk-4-28-the-living-archive-jakob-kudsk-steensen-on-art-ecology-and-the-game-engine/)*.* For the past decade, Danish artist [Jacob Kudsk Steensen](https://www.jakobsteensen.com/?ref=killscreen.com) has been treating the video game engine as a medium of ecological fieldwork. His immersive installations grow from years of onsite research—underwater volcanic vents near the Azores, collapsed ice caves in the Swiss Alps, an experimental forest in Minnesota—transforming them into virtual worlds that sit somewhere between scientific document and living dream. We spoke about *Otherworlds*, a survey on view at the Phi Centre in Montreal that gathers five distinct spaces and spans 15 years; *Psychosphere*, built from photogrammetry of newly discovered submarine volcanic landscapes; and *Song Trapper*, part of an expanding game world called *Evoker*. --- **Jamin Warren: I want to start with your background, because the way your practice fuses ecology and game engines feels almost generationally specific. We don't usually think of those things as connected—indoor kids tend to stay indoor kids. How did the two come together for you?** Jacob Kudsk Steensen: I grew up in different places with my mom, but I spent a lot of time in a really small town on the West Coast of Denmark, near the water. Less than 2,000 people lived there. My dad is very much into ornithology, and I grew up around wetlands and brackish water. I've worked a lot with wetlands in recent projects because I really know them from a personal level. At the same time, when I was 12, I bought a copy of *Unreal Tournament*. It was part of a series of games that exploded full-on interactive, three-dimensional space in a free-roaming, playful, organic way. And it came with a level editor. So you could open up this map or other levels and change them around. It was a "Capture the Flag" game, and I started changing materials. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/20240920_JakobKudskSteensen_PhotosMaltheIvarsson_0172-1.jpg) Steensen at Cisterne in Copenhagen (Photo: Malthe Ivarsson) It was never a conscious choice for me to work with video game engines or natural environments. I think I'm just an exact generation where the two really happened. There's a sense of climate awareness, narratives about climate change, and environmentalism—at the same time as there is this explosion of full-on three-dimensional virtual worlds that you can modify. I've used Unreal since it came out. For me, it's like a musical instrument. I very much fell in love with the spatial, environmental part of video game technology. ## Can You Grieve a Glacier Through a Game Engine? **One of the throughlines in your work is mourning—or at least proximity to it. The Berola ice cave you digitized in Switzerland has since collapsed, the glacier no longer connected to itself. Two weeks ago, we had a conversation with** [**Kara Stone and Joshua Ashish-Dawson**](https://www.killscreen.com/weight-of-a-rendered-frame-kara-stone-joshua-dawson-climate-art/) about how digital tools end up being used to [grieve disappearing landscapes](https://killscreen.com/kiriaki-goni-telling-the-bees/?ref=killscreen.com). Do you think of your archive as a mourning practice? Or is that too heavy a frame for the work? Through the responses I've had from people, it's definitely a form of mourning. [Environmental mourning](https://killscreen.com/kiriaki-goni-telling-the-bees/?ref=killscreen.com) is a pretty big thing. There's this writer, [Melanie Challenger](https://www.melaniechallenger.com/?ref=killscreen.com), who wrote a book about this some years ago—she's a friend of mine in Copenhagen. As an artist, I don't know explicitly if it's mourning for me—it probably is. There's a sense of melancholy in some of these works that I'm just feeling. But I think it's equally a loss of sensibility in a digital world. Especially with generative AI, we're in a visual culture that emphasizes final output, the image as a surface, rather than something really slow and crafted and felt, that comes from an organic process engaging with the world outside the virtual. That's where I live. That's what inspires me. So personally it's a little bit like a loss of magic or craft. I mourn that, and I find that narrative by working in the environments. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/HighresScreenshot00002-1.png) A thermal vent in **Psychosphere* (2025) **Let's get into *Psychosphere*. What I love about how you describe this work is that the sensation isn't secondhand—you actually went down. There are only four places in the world where you can dive into a volcanic vent at human-accessible depths, and you spent 10 minutes inside one of them. Before we get to the philosophy that gives the piece its title, I want to start with the body. What does that 10 minutes actually feel like, and how does that physical memory get encoded into the work?** It's a very sensory embodied practice I have, even though the surface is very virtual. I know it spatially through my body. From my point of view, diving into this 16-by-16-foot hole where you have these gases coming out that's dissolving rock and turning them into organic matter was like getting a door to the other side of the moon. To me,**,** the deep sea is more fascinating than the moon. I'm into strange ecologies and places that are right here. After, it really felt like I had been on the moon. You can only be there for 10 minutes because of these gases, and you smell of egg for three days because it's sulfurous and it's just on your skin. But it's magical. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/Zight-Recording-2026-05-04-at-03.11.20-PM.gif) Steensen is an avid diver and captured the moment when bubbles created a mirror on the ceiling of an underwater cave. Keep going Killscreen members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) ## Why Mix Extinct Fossils, Living Species, and Invented Life in the Same World **Across *Otherworlds,* you blend extinct fossils, living species, and synthetic life forms—what looks like an editorial choice as much as a scientific or aesthetic one. You're not committing to one register. How do you decide which kinds of beings belong in a given work, and what determines whether a piece pulls from real material, speculative material, or some combination?** It always depends on the core concept or philosophy. [*Reanimated*](https://www.jakobsteensen.com/re-animated?ref=killscreen.com), about the song of an extinct bird, only used songs of the bird, feathers of it, photographs of an ornithologist that went to this place. Only real material. The concept of *Psychosphere*—and Melanie's writing a book about this that's coming out this year—is that the origins of sentience originate in the deep sea, where what creates life-force is minerals and non-organic material being transformed under high pressure. Chemistry into life, into DNA and organic material. If you take that perspective, what creates sentience—lust, a sense of energy in species when we look at each other and recognize each other, a sense of forward motion—is a transformation of energy and matter. This perspective is different than a more dominating approach to intelligence and life called panspermia, which is the idea that there's always sentience of life from somewhere else, this kind of infinite narrative of life coming from space. The concept of the psychosphere is much more: under some conditions, chemistry will create life and transform minerals into DNA. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/HighresScreenshot00427.png) If you take that perspective, you have to transform a lot of different materials across formats. I have to be more freestyle—the eye of a fish, a mollusk, an underwater volcanic vent—and bring all of these into motion. At the exhibition in Sisters in Denmark, we had 40 speakers across three large chambers in a 50,000-square-foot space, with eight projectors. We had 30 sculptures made of glass, silver glass, and resin—amorphous 3D prints from the actual underwater volcanic shapes I made. The virtual worlds control the sound, control the light, control these sculptures. Everything is in constant movement from different species, from different materials, because that's the philosophy of a psychosphere. ## A Character Who Can't Speak **The last thing I want to talk about is *Song Trapper*, which feels like a deliberate pivot. After years of building these large-scale immersive worlds, you're moving back toward something that resembles a more conventional video game—part of a larger game world called *Evoker*. The story you've written for the Song Trapper character is also unusually explicit by your standards. Tell me about how the project started and what made you want to return to game conventions now.** I got invited to do a show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, and they wanted a commission for an experimental work. I wrote a story about a character, the Song Trapper, who cannot speak—he can only record, digitize the world, and remix it in order to express himself. It has a struggle with articulation. I made it for two reasons—mourning a sense of loss, and honoring personal gesticulation. I worked with a professional motion capture actor and dancer, Iris Thomsen in Denmark. We did two days of recording in a big motion capture stage, and I would read my poem out loud. As I'm reading it, she would perform what I'm reading physically. But in the work, there's no voice. She turns voice into body movement. We rehearsed for two days and recorded the final day in one go. Normally, this mocap studio works on LEGO video games and high-end mocap—they've never done a take this long. They do one action, one sentence, and stitch it together. I was like, "No, we're going to do these as long, as raw as possible." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/253884FLV.webp) **Song Trapper* at the Louis Vuitton Fondation Installation Midway through the work, the Song Trapper meets Nøkken, a figure from Scandinavian swamp folklore, who has always been told through hymns or songs. Nøkken can actually sing. The Song Trapper has a nervous meltdown, then finds itself, realizes it's something different, and celebrates its remixed being. The work ends in this operatic epic ending in the desert, where it dances, and there's this floating hyoid bone—the bone we have in our throat that allows us to sing, that comes from a fish. For any work I've done, even non-narrative, I have these poems that structure how I compose things with collaborators. It's the first time I made the source of an artwork, and it's my return to wanting to work with games again. Wanting to do an operatic game with these characters. A big part of it will open in Oslo in September and at the Museum of Modern Art in Luxembourg in February. I like the idea of returning to more explicit game conventions and craft, but in this operatic, performative way—poetic dance, an opera singer, hand drawings, all these crafts pulled together in this quirky environmental philosophy. That was triggered a lot by the explosion of generative AI. I'm really confused by it as a creator. This was my response—we're remixing the world to express ourselves, and it's not bad; it's just something different. —*This interview is edited for grammar, clarity, and style. Jacob Kudsk Steensen's* Otherworlds *is on view at the Phi Centre in Montreal.* From Killscreen Killscreen covers the artists using game engines to hold on to what we're losing. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### Felt and hot glue built a walking sim at A MAZE URL: https://www.killscreen.com/felt-and-hot-glue-built-a-walking-sim-at-a-maze/ Last updated: 2026-10-10T19:46:14.000Z [Handcrafting Your Game](https://amazeberlin2026.sched.com/2026-05-15/list/descriptions/?ref=killscreen.com) ran May 15, 2026, at A MAZE. / Berlin. It was a 90-minute workshop with no experience required. 0:00 /1:08 1× The workshop recap reel. Video: hapshapen games, via [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZDQCtaFzmp/?ref=killscreen.com) Six people led it. Isabelle Smith, Antonio Kos Pinheiro de Andrade and Biagi Calicchia came from hapshapen games. Ilena Pegan and Yixin (Chester) Huang came from martianwho studios. Emilio Coppola came from the Godot Foundation. Participants built a small world from felt, fabric scraps, ribbon, magazines and hot glue. They scanned each object with a phone. The scans went into Godot. The result is [*Handcrafting Your Game: A MAZE Workshop*](https://martianwho.itch.io/handcrafting-your-game?ref=killscreen.com), a free walking simulator for Windows, macOS and Linux. It is set on a riverside with flying villagers, feuding fishermen and fish, and a fluffy Fáfnir. The method comes from two games in development: [*Abigail*](https://2026.award.amaze-berlin.de/games/2026/abigail?ref=killscreen.com), from hapshapen, and *Tulou*, from martianwho. A [recap reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DZDQCtaFzmp/?ref=killscreen.com) from hapshapen went up June 1\. The studio has also run the exercise at Boshi's Place in Brooklyn, which produced [*Handcrafted City of Delights and Debauchery*](https://hapshapen.itch.io/handcrafted-city-of-delights-and-debauchery?ref=killscreen.com). Killscreen follows the workshops, festivals and small studios where new ways of making games get tried first. The Radar brings them to your inbox free, three times a week. [Get the free Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### May 14: What to Play This Weekend URL: https://www.killscreen.com/may-14-what-to-play-this-weekend/ Last updated: 2026-05-22T23:32:32.000Z help me help you I love producing these recommendations every week so if you can, please consider becoming a member so I can keep doing my thing! [Become a member ](#/portal/signup) _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### What happens after the internet is gone? URL: https://www.killscreen.com/what-happens-after-the-internet-is-gone/ Last updated: 2026-05-22T23:33:01.000Z ## Lou Faroux on Digital Apocalypse, the Kardashians, and Hollywood's Closeted Golden Age ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/Lou-Faroux---LF_14---Sidonie-Ronfard-1.jpg) Credit: Sidonie Radford Lou Faroux makes work about the internet as a participant-witness, sketching the conditions of a present that won't sit still long enough for anyone to fully describe it. Her films and installations move through a vocabulary familiar to anyone who has spent the last 20 years online: the awkward Mark Zuckerberg keynote, the Kardashian confessional, the GTA "[WASTED](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3kFQHKE0LA&ref=killscreen.com)" sound, the TikTok [logo sound](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxV752sRGH8&ref=killscreen.com), *the* *Sims* character creator screen. But what she does with those materials is closer to history painting than to meme culture. Faroux treats the contemporary digital landscape as a subject worthy of the same attention a Renaissance court painter might have given a coronation: slightly exaggerated, lightly sarcastic, deeply serious about what it means to depict a society to itself. Trained as a filmmaker, the Paris-based artist arrived at games sideways. Early pieces like *This is How the World Ends* (2020) and *Take Me to Your Dreams* used *The Sims* and stock 3D assets as a kind of casting agency, populating her narratives with avatars rather than actors. More recent work, like *K-Detox Internet Collapse* (2024), has pushed further into game engines proper, building rehab centers, abandoned churches, and parking lots where the residue of online behavior plays out after the network has gone dark. Her characters scroll on dead phones. Her Zuckerbergs deliver sermons in deconsecrated chapels. Her newest project, *Diamonds and Dust*, complicates the picture. Developed during a Villa Albertine residency in Los Angeles and built in Unreal Engine using Parag Mital's Emergentic software for AI-driven characters, the piece turns its attention from Web 2.0 to the Hollywood Golden Age—specifically to the "[Sewing Circle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewing%5FCircle%5F%28Hollywood%29?ref=killscreen.com)," a loose constellation of queer and lesbian filmmakers and actresses who worked under the censorship of the Hays Code from 1934 to 1968\. They include names like Alla Nazimova, Dorothy Arzner, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich. Faroux has been digging through the archives at USC, UCLA, and the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, building avatars that will eventually inhabit a re-creation of demolished L.A. landmarks like the [Garden of Allah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden%5Fof%5FAllah%5FHotel?ref=killscreen.com), now a parking lot on Sunset Boulevard. The plan is to let those avatars converse—with each other, with Zendaya, with Kim Kardashian—across a hundred years of repression and self-representation. We spoke about her childhood hacking *The Sims*, why the internet's collapse interests her more than its survival, and what it means to build a video game out of a queer archive that the studios spent half a century trying to erase. [Read on](https://www.killscreen.com/lou-faroux-video-art-queer-archive-unreal-engine/) --- ## Community Update 0:00 /0:16 1× I profiled director [Andrew Thomas Huang](https://www.killscreen.com/andrew-thomas-huang/) in 2019 for some of his engine-based work, and he recently shared some incredible [behind the scenes footage of his work](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYAwK-VkpSe/?img%5Findex=1&ref=killscreen.com) with FKA Twigs on the intimate and dazzling 2019 video [*Cellophane*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkLjqFpBh84&ref=killscreen.com). In our past interview, we talked about digital puppetry and heshared this great anecdote about the Muppets: *One summer, the Henson company sent two puppeteers to schools in LA to do a puppet program. When I was nine, they came to my neighborhood and taught us how to cut foam patterns and work with some pretty industrial, toxic materials. I threw myself at it. I felt privileged to be growing up in LA; to have access to stuff like that. That was the first moment I thought, Oh, this is how you can sculpt actual puppets out of foam and use industrial materials to fabricate these things. Even though I was nine, I still was like, Tell me what you actually use to make this stuff.* --- ## Thinking On.. > *They are people within their own right here and now, who go through struggles and trials and need the gift of story to help them, whether life’s storms are the same as any of us do. Their perspectives are quite literally smaller, but that doesn’t make their needs any less necessary or demanding.* This essay from Claire Swinarski got me thinking about how differently we treat [children's media](https://lithub.com/why-writing-stories-for-children-is-so-much-harder-than-writing-stories-for-adults/?ref=killscreen.com) from "grownup stuff." It is a place where I think games can be quite flat (with the exception of R-rated content) where the medium can work across a variety of registers, including kids. --- ## Spandrel 0:00 /0:10 1× - The New York Times ran a challenging and detailed story on how games' [play in Rikers](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/arts/rikers-island-video-games-jail-prison.html?ref=killscreen.com). It's a nice complement to Ryan Bradley's 2015 story [I ran about Leavenworth.](https://www.killscreen.com/the-art-of-the-escape/) - I spend a lot of time thinking and talk to game makers that didn't set out to make games. [Domus takes a look at the influence of architecture](https://www.domusweb.it/en/news/gallery/2026/02/10/fashion-designers-who-studied-architecture.html?ref=killscreen.com) in fashion design, specifically the use of scale on the runway. - [A site-specific immersive theatre performance](https://events.humanitix.com/canciones?ref=killscreen.com) set at a Mexican family reunion to the tunes of Linda Ronstadt - French-born Sino-Cambodian artist Virginie Tan [is working with real-time field recordings](https://www.instagram.com/p/DXjCj8VDIS2/?ref=killscreen.com) from the Italian region of Molise, Italy for her playable wallpaper *Windows - Montenero Edition* (above). --- ## From the Archive ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/axe-to-grind-illo-copy-1.jpeg) # [Axe to Grind](https://www.killscreen.com/guitar-hero-prodigy-identity-self-doubt/) Hey, *Guitar Hero* prodigy! Thanks for making me feel like shit! ### Lou Faroux on Digital Apocalypse, the Kardashians, and Hollywood's Closeted Golden Age URL: https://www.killscreen.com/lou-faroux-video-art-queer-archive-unreal-engine/ Last updated: 2026-09-22T17:22:40.000Z Lou Faroux makes work about the internet as a participant-witness, sketching the conditions of a present that won't sit still long enough for anyone to fully describe it. Her films and installations move through a vocabulary familiar to anyone who has spent the last 20 years online: the awkward Mark Zuckerberg keynote, the Kardashian confessional, the GTA "[WASTED](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3kFQHKE0LA&ref=killscreen.com)" sound, the TikTok [logo sound](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxV752sRGH8&ref=killscreen.com), *the* *Sims* character creator screen. But what she does with those materials is closer to history painting than to meme culture. Faroux treats the contemporary digital landscape as a subject worthy of the same attention a Renaissance court painter might have given a coronation: slightly exaggerated, lightly sarcastic, deeply serious about what it means to depict a society to itself. Trained as a filmmaker, the Paris-based artist arrived at games sideways. Early pieces like *This is How the World Ends* (2020) and *Take Me to Your Dreams* used *The Sims* and stock 3D assets as a kind of casting agency, populating her narratives with avatars rather than actors. More recent work, like *K-Detox Internet Collapse* (2024), has pushed further into game engines proper, building rehab centers, abandoned churches, and parking lots where the residue of online behavior plays out after the network has gone dark. Her characters scroll on dead phones. Her Zuckerbergs deliver sermons in deconsecrated chapels. Her newest project, *Diamonds and Dust*, complicates the picture. Developed during a Villa Albertine residency in Los Angeles and built in Unreal Engine using Parag Mital's Emergentic software for AI-driven characters, the piece turns its attention from Web 2.0 to the Hollywood Golden Age—specifically to the "[Sewing Circle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewing%5FCircle%5F%28Hollywood%29?ref=killscreen.com)," a loose constellation of queer and lesbian filmmakers and actresses who worked under the censorship of the Hays Code from 1934 to 1968\. They include names like Alla Nazimova, Dorothy Arzner, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich. Faroux has been [digging through the archives](https://www.killscreen.com/danielle-brathwaite-shirley/) at USC, UCLA, and the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, building avatars that will eventually inhabit a re-creation of demolished L.A. landmarks like the [Garden of Allah](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden%5Fof%5FAllah%5FHotel?ref=killscreen.com), now a parking lot on Sunset Boulevard. The plan is to let those avatars converse—with each other, with Zendaya, with Kim Kardashian—across a hundred years of repression and self-representation. We spoke about her childhood hacking *The Sims*, why the internet's collapse interests her more than its survival, and what it means to build a video game out of a queer archive that the studios spent half a century trying to erase. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/K-Detox_Banner.png) The world of K-Detox **Jamin Warren: You've described *The Sims* as foundational. Can you tell me about your early relationship to games and play, and how you first got pulled into digital worlds?** Lou Faroux: I was very into simulation close-to-reality games growing up. I might even have learned to read from video games, because I started playing really young on small, interactive online games. For several years, I was mostly playing driving games, whether it was *RPM Tuning* or *Trackmania*. I loved driving through cities and landscapes I'd never been in. And then *The Sims*. I started being interested in simulation games very young. ***The Sims* is famously open-ended—people play it in radically different ways. What kind of player were you?** We had add-ons that would make us have enormous Sims, bigger than the walls. We would press this machine and have all the Sims gain knowledge, or force all the Sims to be in love with each other. I was very into pushing the boundaries of the gameplay, but I also liked doing celebrities; my family, and friends in fancy homes and fancy neighborhoods. There are many ways to approach the game. I have a lot in my TikTok feed, people who put Sims in jail in bunkers that they create and enslave them. ## *After the Network Goes Dark* **Many artists who grew up playing games went directly into making them. You took a different path, starting with film. What kept games at arm's length in the early years of your practice?** I had no idea we could make games. It took me some years to realize that it was possible to be behind the scenes. My films were very much influenced by video game culture and online culture, such *This Is How the World Ends* about aVIP software that could offer online services, which I did in 2020\. It was during the lockdown and focused on a VIP software that could offer online services to avoid lockdown regulations. For the part in the film where people are uploaded, I used *The Sims* and filmed in *The Sims* to play that part. I direct characters like avatars, not as a director directing actors and actresses as realistic people. They have this little bit of an NPC behavior. Maybe I needed years of digestion to understand how people respond to a narrative before I could add the option of interaction as a whole new dimension. There's also a sense of authority somehow, because then I get to tell what the beginning is, what the end is. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/Lou-Faroux---WhatRemains-Still-008.jpg) Success for the lead in **What Remains* about a hacker group catfishing Mark Zuckerberg. > I direct characters like avatars, not as a director directing actors and actresses as realistic people. **One thread that runs through *K-Detox* and other pieces is this moment when the internet fails—not as a full apocalypse but as something more ambivalent. Are you mourning the internet we lost, or imagining what comes after?** It's almost about how the Internet has changed behaviors and society at an anthropological level so quickly. I'm interested in the human interaction with it and the human habits of integrating this massive, omnipresent tool, more than in the actual fear of its disappearance. As long as two computers are connected, the internet exists. Imagining its disappearance helps take a step back to reflect on what we let the internet become, the project it originally aimed for, and how it shifted so quickly, far from the open-source, knowledge-for-all projects it began with. There's this little game I like to play in my head that led to *Internet Collapse*: is this 50-year chapter that could end in a minute just a small tab in the history of humanity? Or were the 2,000 years without the internet just a brief start, and the internet has been on for millions of years, transforming what we think humanity is? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/Lou-Faroux---Paulo_gata_detoured_Japan-s_03_c5.png) Keep going Killscreen members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) **Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Kardashian keep showing up as recurring characters across your work. They're an unusual pairing. What do they each represent for you, and why do you keep returning to them?** It wasn't meant to be important at first, but then, empirically, they became main characters. Mark Zuckerberg represents this early stage of Web 2.0, which seemed more about connecting and hope than it actually is now. He fits that very dystopian narrative—seeming very American Dream, the little genius nerd, self-made, but ends up being the MAGA billionaire supporter. The Kardashians are very important in shaping how people buy, look, and communicate. The whole lore of social media culture is very much influenced by them, since O.J. Simpson, and the way they influence the culture as TV reality. They invented a way to present oneself with digital representation tools. I use them as almost religious icons. From my perspective, in the system that is America, people are not citizens; they're employees of a company, and the federation is a company. The Kardashians are a business, and have no boundaries between what's business and what's life, what's family, what's private, and so on. It touched something about how we live under capitalism. Also, they created fame before they created a product. Tech companies—San Francisco, Silicon Valley—code empty shells. And then the Kardashians in L.A. create content. They go hand in hand to waterboard the market of their presence. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/Lou-Faroux---K-Detox_strip-club_07_C00_0038.png) A strip club in **K-Detox* ## *The Archive That the Studios Tried to Disappear* **Let's turn to *Diamonds and Dust*, which feels like a significant departure—you're moving from internet-native subjects to Hollywood's archival past. Walk me through what the project is and what drew you to this material.** It's a virtual environment that, like *K-Detox*, would give life to both a film installation andan interactive gaming piece. Through the Villa Albertine residency in L.A., I worked in archives at USC and the June L. Mazer collections. I was looking for letters, photos, materials from a group of actresses from the Hollywood Golden Age nicknamed the "Sewing Circle." It's a group of queer and lesbian filmmakers working under the Hays Code, the Motion Picture Production Code, in effect from 1934 to 1968. They were gay men and lesbians who sometimes married each other to have a straight passing for their reputations. The lack of institutional history of queer lives makes you want to dig and understand what was going on 100 years ago. I'm interested in what it created in their persona as they repressed this side of themselves. Where could they explore their identities? There was the Garden of Allah, a hotel complex owned by Alla Nazimova, where many lived and created. Films like *Queen Christina* and *Salomé* emerged from them, living together. I found letters from the Hays Code addressed to producers saying scenes that present homosexual traits should be pulled or distribution would stop. I'm interested in the history of homophobia onscreen, because Hollywood has enormous responsibility in how they present identities and minorities. Movies are more than a soft power. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/05/image-2.png) Katherine Hepburn plays a young woman who escapes her father by dressing as a boy named Sylvester in **Sylvia Scarlett* (1935)**.* While commercially a failure, the film developed a strong following with LGBTQIA+ audiences who unpacked the lesbian and gay themes. **You're working with Parag Mital's** [**Emergentic**](https://emergentic.ai/?ref=killscreen.com) **software to build AI-driven avatars from these archives. There's a growing wave of artists using AI to make archival material more accessible without flattening it. How are you thinking about AI's role in *Diamonds and Dust*?** I'm creating [character avatars with their own histories](https://www.killscreen.com/carrie-chen-digital-avatars-ai-identity/), feeding their datasets from the archives. We could have Alla Nazimova chatting with Zendaya and Jodie Foster on a parking lot, because the Garden of Allah has been bulldozed—it's a parking lot on Sunset Boulevard now. So it's also about L.A. self-representation, about L.A. as a decor that changes very quickly. We, in theory, all have access to this knowledge—going to collections is free—but with these tools, whether it's our vision or the AI, we can make it more digestible and accessible. With Emergentic, you can have AI-driven avatars interact with the piece. We could have an AI avatar of Kim Kardashian watching a 1920s film and reacting live. I'm thinking of simple missions, like towing a car, which is very much about how L.A. works. These two characters sitting in the towing truck get to chat about certain topics. There used to be a McDonald's where the Garden of Allah was destroyed, so I'm thinking of using the menu screens as an interactive information desk. I still have a lot of freedom. From Killscreen Killscreen covers the artists building worlds out of what the archives kept. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### What Happens When the Internet Goes Out? URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/what-happens-when-the-internet-goes-out/ Last updated: 2026-05-21T23:37:54.000Z I sat down with [Lou Faroux](https://www.instagram.com/loufauroux/?ref=killscreen.com)—French artist and filmmaker—to talk about growing up on *The Sims*, why she spent years making films before she ever touched a game engine, and what it means to treat internet collapse as an art subject rather than a catastrophe. Lou's practice is hard to categorize, which is exactly why I find it so interesting. She uses game engines, deepfakes, found footage, and AI avatars to ask something most of us feel but struggle to name: what did the internet do to us? Not what it gave us—what it *did* to us. To our habits, our bodies, our sense of time. In this conversation, we get into her origin story as a gamer who hacked The Sims with her sister, why Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Kardashian keep showing up in her work as near-religious figures, how she builds with gaming assets the way a painter builds with color, and what she means when she talks about internet collapse as a subject for anthropology rather than science fiction. This is the public version of a longer members-only conversation. Paid members get the full hour, including a deep dive into her current project —*Diamonds and Dust*—a virtual world built around queer Hollywood history from the 1930s. If this conversation makes you want more, the best next step is signing up for the Killscreen newsletter at [www.killscreen.com](https://www.killscreen.com/). It's free to start, and it's where I do my most serious writing on games as cultural objects. Members–here's your full conversation with Lou: _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Playlist 279: A crime scene and what it means to be a bird URL: https://www.killscreen.com/playlist-279-a-crime-scene-and-what-it-means-to-be-a-bird/ Last updated: 2026-05-08T23:46:23.000Z Happy Mother's Day to all who partake here in the United States. This is the first year my daughter could make an adorable card that features her name no less than three times. And to boot, I was able to pick out something great from [smartdumb gallery](https://www.instagram.com/smartdumb.info/?ref=killscreen.com): if you missed For members, a reminder: if you missed [my talk with Jakob Kudsk Steensen](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/online-talk-4-28-the-living-archive-jakob-kudsk-steensen-on-art-ecology-and-the-game-engine/) last week, there's a recording for you. Let's jump into this week's pick, which should be fun for any crime aficionados and another otherworldly work-in-progress. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### What is the Environmental Weight of a Rendered Frame? URL: https://www.killscreen.com/weight-of-a-rendered-frame-kara-stone-joshua-dawson-climate-art/ Last updated: 2026-05-14T21:05:05.000Z *This is a write-up of a conversation we hosted a couple of weeks ago.*, if you're a member, *Go ahead and* [*c*](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/talk-4-17-building-worlds-while-the-actual-world-burns/)[*heck out the conversation*](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/talk-4-17-building-worlds-while-the-actual-world-burns/)*, or, if you're a member,* [*watch the talk in full.*](https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/talk-4-17-building-worlds-while-the-actual-world-burns/) --- Every new technology has a supply chain. Every server farm needs power. Every rendered frame ultimately costs us something. For artists working at the intersection of climate and digital culture, that isn't an abstract problem—it's the condition of the work itself. [Kara Stone](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/kara-stone/) knows the condition intimately. On a balcony in Calgary, facing a legendarily sunny sky, she has installed a 150-watt solar panel, a marine deep-cycle battery, an MPPT controller, and a Raspberry Pi. The hardware hosts *Solar Server*, a website that runs only when the weather cooperates. Its first title, [*Known Mysteries*](https://www.solarserver.games/onnow.html?ref=killscreen.com), is a lo-fi climate fable set in a near-future Alberta, where a woman named Sorrow returns to her hometown after the death of her mothers and tries to untangle what the local oil-turned-tech conglomerate had to do with it. The town is a "launch town," a staging ground for lotteries that send residents to colonize Mars. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/image-13.png) ## Why Build a Game Server Powered by the Sun? Stone came to the project from a place of quiet contradiction. Her earlier games lived on Steam, on the Apple and Android stores, on itch.io—all of them, she realized, fossil-fueled by default. "To play my work, you *need* to consume fossil fuels," she says. Solar Server was a way to design herself out of that bind. The games hosted there are built to be small: compressed video, dithered textures, chaptered downloads that stream in as the opening cutscene plays. When the weather turns, the site goes dark (and you can track the weather from a little widget on Solar Server's homepage.) Roughly 5,700 miles south, in the Atacama Desert, Joshua Dawson was making work from the other end of the same supply chain. Dawson trained as an architect in Bangalore, India — a city whose rapid development had strained the state's water supply — before drifting toward filmmaking through the proximity of USC's film and architecture schools. His 2018 short *Loa's Promise* is a seven-minute epistolary: a letter written by Chile's depleted Loa River to a former resident of Quillagua, a nearly depopulated oasis town. In Dawson's speculative future, the region's ghost towns have been retrofitted as data centers and digital mines, built from the same copper the mines keep pulling out of the ground. The film predates the current discourse on AI's material footprint by several years, making its framing feel uncannily prescient. Dawson decenters the human deliberately. "I didn't want to do a disservice to the people that were actually living there by telling their story through their POV," he says. The river speaks instead, mourning what the landscape is being asked to forget. The sharp, plastic CGI of the new infrastructure sits uneasily against drone footage of the actual desert — a palimpsest, in Dawson's term, where you can still read the older text bleeding through. ## What Constraint Actually Produces: Aesthetic, Not Compromise What connects the two practices isn't subject matter so much as a shared relationship to constraint. There's a pressure on small-team game makers to make things that look like other small-team games: pixel art, cuteness, cozy loops—what Stone has been working against for most of her career. "Lots of people can see the aesthetic and just think, 'Well, this isn't a game,'" she says. "It doesn't compute as a game." *Known Mysteries* uses scanned handmade objects and live-action found footage instead. Dawson, for his part, describes his work as "falling short of photorealism"—the CGI looks slick because the new infrastructure it depicts is *meant* to look slick, incongruous against the real. This is the useful part. The history of games is full of constraints that produced aesthetics: Jordan Mechner rotoscoping his brother to make *Prince of Persia*'s sprites move like a body; the entire 8-bit sound palette; Infocom shipping novels because they couldn't ship graphics. Stone and Dawson are in that lineage—not nostalgic for it, but using limitation as a generative tool rather than a compromise. The files are small because the server is small because the panel is small because the sun is what the sun is. The CGI reads as plastic because plastic is the point. The game runs when the weather runs. Waiting is a virtue. Neither artist is under any illusion that this scales. Stone talks about degrowth—the planet can't support continued growth even on renewables—but frames it less as renunciation than as creative pressure. Dawson cites George Monbiot's "Hypocrites Unite," an essay arguing that, by the math of consumption, every environmentalist is a hypocrite. "Hypocrisy is the gap between your aspirations and your actions," Monbiot wrote. Inaction isn't the alternative. Cynicism is. ### What To Play This Weekend: April 30th URL: https://www.killscreen.com/what-to-play-this-weekend-april-30th/ Last updated: 2026-05-14T21:05:29.000Z Buzz buzz, and close your eyes. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### I watched a fabricator pour Kurt's hand—now I want to play it URL: https://www.killscreen.com/i-watched-a-fabricator-pour-kurts-hand-now-i-want-to-play-it/ Last updated: 2026-05-14T21:05:23.000Z Now that I have a four-year-old, I'm working on making her completely [out of touch with her generation](https://theonion.com/cool-dad-raising-daughter-on-media-that-will-put-her-en-1819572981/?ref=killscreen.com) by working through A24's [*Hey Kids, Watch This*](https://shop.a24films.com/products/hey-kids-watch-this?srsltid=AfmBOop%5F5bK6NyQIf4cCvR0LKTxqn%5F90jV3dcz9TlMRzjXS6QoL98DDL&ref=killscreen.com). That brought us to Wes Anderson's 2009 *Fantastic Mr. Fox*, a delightfully detailed stop-motion film. Wouldn't it be cool to play a game like that? [After our talk today](https://www.killscreen.com/online-talk-4-28-the-living-archive-jakob-kudsk-steensen-on-art-ecology-and-the-game-engine/), Jakob Kudsk Steensen recommended I take a look at [*Out of Words*](https://www.outofwordsgame.com/?ref=killscreen.com) from another Danish outfit, [Wiredfly Studios](https://www.wiredfly.dk/?ref=killscreen.com). One of the best parts of designing games with real-world materials is that the behind-the-scenes process becomes a part of the game's story—a feature we find in so many other media but rarely in games. ## Forty-five mouth shapes, ball-jointed feet, and a hand-sewn leather jacket Watching the [Wiredfly fabrication videos](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSv8bQOI1O8Ng8hs5%5F210-Q?ref=killscreen.com), I'm struck by how seriously the team treats the materiality of their puppets. Senior fabricator Sofie walks through the construction of Prince, a companion character to the silent protagonists Kurt and Karla. His face alone has 45 unique mouth shapes hand-sculpted, 3D-scanned, refined in ZBrush, then printed and painted by hand. His feet are ball-jointed, encased in milliput epoxy, and carved with a wood-like cut texture so he reads less like a human and more like a thing someone whittled. His leather jacket has hand-sewn decorative seams aligned around hidden rigging holes, because the rigging must disappear from the camera but remain accessible to the animator. Kristina, who handles Kurt's hands, shows the molding process: psycho paint mixed with pigment, silicone poured in a thin line to eliminate bubbles, an armature that can't touch the edges or you start over. Twenty-five minutes from mix to mold. Then a day of waiting to see if you did it right. Then dust applied to kill the silicone shine. Then trimming. Then a final wash. All of this for a hand that, in the game, will be touched by animators "for hours upon hours." Art director Mikkel describes Prince as that older-brother-of-a-friend type—the guy who thinks he's cool, which is the actual source of his coolness. They tried hats, boots, glasses, hair. None of it worked until they realized coolness was a posture, not a costume. He drives a self-built motorcycle that runs on paint and ink. He's full of himself in a kingdom he doesn't have. He overstays his welcome. What makes *Out of Words* feel different from the cozy, hand-crafted aesthetic games we've seen is that the craft isn't an aesthetic at all—it's the production reality. You're not playing in a game *that looks like* stop-motion. You're playing in stop-motion. And the studio is publishing the fabrication videos as part of the world, the same way Aardman or LAIKA release their making-ofs. The seam between the game and its making is doing the same intertextual work that environmental storytelling does in other titles: telling you something true about the place you're in. ### How low-fidelity pixels expose games' emotionless arms race URL: https://www.killscreen.com/games-graphical-fidelity-arms-race-dry-leaf/ Last updated: 2026-05-14T21:05:11.000Z Dennis Lim's recent piece in [*The New York Review of Books*](https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/05/14/how-should-a-pixel-be-dry-leaf-koberidze/?ref=killscreen.com) on Alexandre Koberidze's *Dry Leaf*—a three-hour feature shot entirely on a Sony Ericsson W595, a slider phone from 2008 with a 240-pixel maximum resolution and a choppy fifteen frames per second—has me thinking about how badly games have lost the plot on graphical fidelity. I just started the new *Indiana Jones* from last year, so I'm being absolutely bludgeoned with Life. And yet, Koberidze's wager, as Lim describes it, is that blurred, smeared, low-information images won't just be tolerable to eyes raised on 4K and 8K, but actively replenishing. And he's right. A smudge becomes a person, then vanishes, then reappears. Clouds gain serrated edges. The pixel itself—the unwanted video artifact—becomes a compositional element. The lag of digital compression becomes the movie's heartbeat. None of this is due to the camera's limitations. It's because of them. Games have spent the last three decades sprinting in the *opposite* direction. Every console generation is sold on polygon counts, ray-tracing, hair physics, and skin subsurface scattering. The implicit promise is that emotional resonance scales with fidelity—that if we could just get the eyes wet enough, the moment would land. But anyone who has actually played games knows this isn't true. I can name pixelated things that are emotionally inert and photorealistic things that are emotionally inert, and the inverse for both. Fidelity and feeling are independent variables. What Koberidze's film clarifies is that low-fidelity isn't a deficiency to apologize for or a retro affectation to wear ironically. It's a generative condition. Opacity makes the viewer work. When the image refuses to resolve, the mind fills the gap, and that filling-in is where meaning lives. Lim quotes Koberidze: "The more you remove, the more remains for the spectator." That's not a poverty argument. That's a design principle. ### What Happens When 100 Strangers Share a Single Controller for Eight Hours? URL: https://www.killscreen.com/asses-masses-blenkarn-lim-collective-play/ Last updated: 2026-09-22T17:22:19.000Z When I first watched the six-hour documentation of *asses.masses*, I kept thinking about what Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim had actually built. It wasn't a video game, exactly. It wasn't theater, exactly. It was something rarer—a system that had absorbed the grammar of both and started braying its own dialect, not unlike the donkey of Balaam who portended God's wrath in its own divine voice. *asses.masses* is a custom-built RPG played from beginning to end by a live audience. A single controller sits in a spotlight. Someone from the herd (everyone is a donkey here; the audience is the herd) walks up, picks it up, and plays until they hand it off. The herd on screen is a group of unemployed donkeys trying to win their jobs back from the machines that replaced them. (The eight-hour length, which includes meal breaks, is a nod to the British workers’ movement, which fought for limits to their labor.) The herd in the room is the audience, negotiating the controller, reading dialogue aloud in voices they're inventing on the fly, figuring out together how to move forward. I've spent a long time looking at games, and I hadn't really seen this before. eSports puts a wall between the [performer and the spectator](https://www.killscreen.com/theo-triantafyllidis-clashing-real-time-graphics-with-live-performance/)—the pros play, the rest of us watch. Streaming does something similar, mediated through a chat window. *asses.masses* collapses that wall. "Everyone in the audience has the capacity to influence," Blenkarn told me. "Everyone in the audience is to some degree a player because they have the capacity to contribute to the room." The bottleneck is the single controller that makes the current occupant the hero, at least for a moment. They're just the person currently holding the thing, before that person can hand off their work to the next person. It's another fitting metaphor for the intergenerational nature of resistance, where we sublimate our agency to the next player in the fight. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/Asses-Masses2.webp) Blenkarn and Lim met through Canadian performance circles—Lim co-founded the interdisciplinary company [Hong Kong Exile](https://www.hongkongexile.com/?ref=killscreen.com); Blenkarn came out of [experimental theater](https://www.killscreen.com/diskokina-virtual-club-theater-game-engines/) that had been trying to put "shit on stage that didn't belong." Their first collaboration was a trading card game about arts funding. *asses.masses* started, improbably, as a *Shadow of the Colossus*–inspired installation with a kid in a donkey mask playing in the corner. When the funding fell through, the two of them had two weeks left in a residency and used that time to teach themselves Unity through YouTube tutorials. ## What the Donkey Actually Knows About You The donkey came from an image Blenkarn found years earlier: a 15th-century woodcut of a donkey teaching other animals. Scratch the surface, and donkeys aren't stupid—they're emotionally intelligent, desert-dwelling, historically maligned. Scratch it again, and you find the global skin trade, [the slaughter of millions of donkeys for](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68230069?ref=killscreen.com) collagen. "An image of this particular generation \[in China\] of nouveau riche citizens of a communist country literally consuming the historical worker was poignant," Blenkarn said. The donkey sits at an intersection of labor, automation, and cultural contempt—the same intersection that games themselves have occupied as a medium. That last part matters. There's a parallel the two of them didn't see at the start but found over four years of development: the way people have treated donkeys resembles the way people have treated video games as a cultural form. Maligned, underestimated, and asked to work without being seen. I couldn’t help watching the playthough of *asses.masses* breaks with the depictions of gaming over the years: collective over individual, co-operation over violence, cohesion over isolation. The crowd moaned over every untimely death and cooed in unison as the donkeys would sing their fallen compatriots into a type of donkey Valhalla, called the Astral Plane. Everything bad thing that games have ever done drifts away on that in-game chorus. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/Asses-Masses4.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/Asses-Masses5.png.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/Asses-Masses6.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/Asses-Masses7-1.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/Asses-Masses8.webp) Keep going Killscreen members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) ## Subtracting the Safety Net What struck me most was the design philosophy underneath. Lim calls it "subtractive design." Most games [automate the labor](https://www.killscreen.com/bravely-second-end-layer-turns-play-labor/)—the mini-map, the glowing outline around the NPC you're supposed to talk to, the math happening silently, in complex role-playing games. *asses.masses* hands that labor back. Who remembers the map? Who can recall what the Song of Ascension was? Who speaks German for this one scene? The game assumes no single person holds all of it. This is a game about the cost of friendship, the pains of disagreement, and the accordion nature of human existence, where people drop in and out of our lives, over disagreements big and small. Some gaps are too large to ever be surmounted in this life, and only the dream of a divine intervention seems enough to bring the change we’d like to see in the world. After five plus hours of one-person play, *asses.masses* breaks with the conventional and asks 2 or more to press every button simultaneously, a feat only possible by joining hands. ## Eight Hours Is a Enough Time to Figure Out Who You Are Of course, the politics have sharpened as the piece has toured. The decline of unions in the US, the new-old again spectre of robber barons, and many of the themes of the early 20th century are resonant once again. "When we started the show, AI was not at the tip of everyone's mind," Lim told me. Now every audience arrives with a new set of anxieties about automation, labor, and what work even is. Blenkarn thinks the conversation is still slightly off the target: "We're talking about what is the thing that I feel like I have a divine right to. And what are rights?" Over 55 performances, no audience has played it the same way. A London crowd cast Jennifer Coolidge impressions on the fly. A Helsinki player (and well-known voice actor) read every line of dialogue solo. Somewhere, someone sang *Mission Impossible* every time a donkey scuttled on its belly. The herd keeps deciding what the game is, and we’re all along for the bumpy ride. From Killscreen Killscreen covers the artists who make play a collective act. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### April 23: What to Play This Weekend URL: https://www.killscreen.com/april-23-what-to-play-this-weekend/ Last updated: 2026-05-06T18:54:47.000Z *A quick note: we're having a great talk next week with Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen on his career. In this conversation, I'll trace the arc of that practice through* [*Otherworlds*](https://phi.ca/en/events/jakob-kudsk-steensen-otherworlds/?ref=killscreen.com)*, Steensen's survey exhibition at Centre PHI in Montréal, which gathers five installations across five distinct spaces and spans roughly 15 years of work.* *He has spent the last decade doing something unusual: treating the video game engine as a medium for ecological fieldwork. His immersive installations grow from years of on-site research—underwater volcanic vents near the Azores, collapsed ice caves in the Swiss Alps, experimental forests in Minnesota—transformed into virtual worlds that sit somewhere between scientific document and living dream.* [Sign up](https://riverside.com/webinar/registration/eyJldmVudElkIjoiNjliYzI3NzM3NTQzZjhmZjc0YTg1YzlkIiwic2x1ZyI6ImphbWluLXdhcnJlbnMtc3R1ZGlvIn0=?ref=killscreen.com) Ok, on to the recommendations! If you're curious what piques my interest, please check [out my guidelines](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/playlist/). _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Why I Can't Stop Thinking About Grandma, a Game Boy Eulogy URL: https://www.killscreen.com/zhou-yichen-grandma-game-boy-grief/ Last updated: 2026-05-06T22:46:50.000Z There's a moment in Zhou Yichen's *Grandma*, a Game Boy-style game about caring for a dying grandmother, where your character falls asleep from exhaustion. I had walked the narrow hallways and simply needed rest. In the next instant, she is away and on the wings of a bird, and all that is left are memories. "Thank you for taking care of me at this time," she says. And then she is gone. The setup is simple and personal. In early 2024, Zhou's grandmother fell and couldn't move. He moved into her house to take care of her until she died that October, and *Grandma* is what he made afterward—a small, looping world where you chat with her, bring her water, watch TV together, help her to bed. Eventually, she leaves. You remain, wandering the rooms she used to fill, triggering memories as you interact with the objects she touched. The game just finished a run as part of the “Worthwhile Trip” public welfare exhibition at [the Today Art Museum in Beijing.](https://www.instagram.com/p/DXCQ0TOkbA4/?img%5Findex=2&ref=killscreen.com) What interests me here isn't that a game can be sad. [Plenty of games are sad](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/grief/). It's that Zhou is working through a question games rarely take seriously in their own medium: how do we hold onto someone *after* they're gone? And for how long? *Grandma* is part and parcel of a larger question of memory. He's been converting his new media works onto physical Game Boy cartridges, hand-drawing the cover art, building a small archive. Over 60 of them now. "Every time I see my works lying dormant in my computer as virtual files," he has written, "I feel a pang of melancholy." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/Instagram-2026-04-20-at-4.32.53-PM.jpg) [Yichen's "collection"](https://www.instagram.com/zhouyichen2110/p/DXO3cFvkVS2/?ref=killscreen.com) ## Why Zhou Yichen is putting his games on physical cartridges I find that the second act is as moving as the game itself. Zhou is doing with his own artistic output what his character is doing with Grandma inside the game—trying to bind something ephemeral to a physical object so it won't disappear. The cartridge becomes a reliquary. The game becomes a eulogy. And the whole project asks what happens when a generation that grew up on interactive media begins to mourn through its native form. The received wisdom about games and nostalgia is that pixel art cheapens it, that 8-bit aesthetics are a shortcut to feeling. *Grandma* uses the Game Boy's limitations differently. Memory here isn't a style—it's the subject. The grainy green-on-green frames don't look backward; they look like how grief actually works, your memories are condensed into a tiny window, that compesses each moment–a single walk–gets replayed on a loop until the edges fade. [You can play it in your browser](https://zhou-yichen.itch.io/grandma?ref=killscreen.com). ### Is Project Hail Mary secretly a game designer's novel? URL: https://www.killscreen.com/andy-weir-project-hail-mary-game-design-thinking/ Last updated: 2026-04-20T22:56:43.000Z I'll admit it upfront: I was not predisposed to like Andy Weir. I'm not much of a science-fiction person, and I often find the genre's dogmatism—the lore-first piety, the worldbuilding as compliance test—overwhelming. I enjoyed *The Martian*, sure, but mostly the way I enjoyed Denis Villeneuve's *Dune*: vibes-y, atmospheric, a thing I didn't need to study to feel. The night before I got to Gilbert Cruz's [*Book Review Podcast* interview in the New York Times with Weir](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/podcasts/andy-weir-project-hail-mary.html?ref=killscreen.com), I sat through René Laloux's [*Les Maîtres du temps*](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les%5FMa%C3%AEtres%5Fdu%5Ftemps?ref=killscreen.com) at the Philosophical Research Society here in LA, and what stays with me isn't the plot— it's Mœbius's line work and character design, holding the whole universe up on its own. I was delighted, then, to learn Weir hasn't read *Dune*. It tracked with the kind of sci-fi I actually like: work that is more interested in texture than in catechism. What I didn't expect was to come away from the interview thinking Weir sounds, to my ear, like a game designer. ## Mystery as a mechanic, not a reveal Two things got me there. The first is his approach to mystery. *Project Hail Mary* opens with a man waking up in a coma—no memory, no context, nothing to do but figure out where he is and why. Weir is explicit about the strategy: pile up the unknowns at the start, trust the reader to chase them. This is an absolute hallmark of great systems design–balancing uncertainty with desire. Eric Zimmerman writes that great design "needs to keep uncertainty alive until the bitter end, even though every step along the way has to exhibit a clarity of action causing outcome." ## Speculative biology is worldbuilding as a systems problem The second is Rocky, his alien, built through what Weir calls speculative biology. He picked a real exoplanet, calculated atmospheric pressure, worked out what kind of light would reach the surface, and reverse-engineered a creature that could plausibly live there. He is insistent that an alien should not be "a guy in a suit." This is worldbuilding as a systems problem—rules first, content second, character as a function of constraint. It's a decidedly different approach from Mœbius's open-ended dreamscapes, but it avoids the trap of being stuck in the middle— rigorous enough to feel intentional, but not so open-ended that it generates actually interesting characters. I loved how little he had visualized what Rocky had looked like, given that he is a self-described aphantasiac with little visual imagination. That his work would give rise to films is really interesting. None of this makes Weir a game designer. (In fact, he was fired from Blizzard for [not working hard enough and complaining about overtime](https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/1fw6h6z/according%5Fto%5Fjason%5Fschreier%5Fblizzard%5Ffired%5Fandy/?ref=killscreen.com).) But it does suggest that the most interesting science-fiction writers working now are those who have quietly internalized the logic of one. ### Sound Design Is the Most Ignored Art Form in Games. One Researcher Is Changing That. URL: https://www.killscreen.com/sound-design-is-the-most-ignored-art-form-in-games-one-researcher-is-changing-that/ Last updated: 2026-09-22T17:22:09.000Z In *Red Dead Redemption 2*, you can hear a whippoorwill before you see one. The call drifts in from the left, maybe behind a stand of pines, and if you're paying attention—really paying attention—you might notice that how the sound changes changes depending on where you are in the game's map, the rustle of your steps, the holler of crows, and the beating of distant hoofs. Vadim Nickel wants to know what happens when you stop shooting and start listening. Nickel is a researcher at Concordia University's Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT), and together with his advisor Gabriel Vigliensoni, he recently published "Sonic Lead: A Survey of Sound-First Games" at DiGRA 2025—a paper that attempts something that sounds simple but turns out to be surprisingly difficult: cataloging every game where sound actually drives the experience rather than decorating it. The scarcity of sound-first games tells you something. It tells you that games, [for all their sensory ambition, remain stubbornly visual](https://www.killscreen.com/oneohtrix-point-never-talks-futurism-nostalgia-and-the-videogame-music-that-haunts-him/). We talk about graphics, about art direction, about frame rates. Sound, when it gets discussed at all, tends to get filed under "polish"—the thing you notice when it's absent but rarely celebrate when it's present. Nickel's paper makes the case that this imbalance isn't just an oversight. It's structural. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/image-8.png) Games like Red Dead Redemption 2 can offer an entry to meditative reflections on nature, even if virtually. For Nickel, the path into this work started with *RPG Maker* as a teenager—building small games, hearing melodies in his head, wanting to put them somewhere. Piano lessons didn't take, but music production did, and eventually the two interests converged. The crystallizing moment came in 2014, when he played *Fract OSC*, "framed using a gently sloped learning curve designed to introduce non-musicians to the world of electronic music production," [Killscreen wrote at the time.](https://www.killscreen.com/fract-osc-isnt-synthesizer-or-game-its-both/) ## The Three Ways We Hear — and Why Games Only Use Two of Them What makes the paper useful, beyond the taxonomy, is the framework Nickel and Vigliensoni borrow from film sound theory to describe how players actually listen. The three modes—causal, codal, and reduced–to describe ways to engage with sound in games. Causal listening is about identifying the source: where is that sound coming from? Codal listening is about meaning: what does that sound signify? And reduced listening is about the sound itself, independent of source or significance—its texture, its grain, its weight. Games are reasonably good at the first two. Every shooter teaches you to locate an enemy by footsteps. Every *Zelda* game trains you to associate a chime with progress. But reduced listening—that deep, contemplative attention to sound for its own sake—is almost entirely absent from game design. As Nickel puts it, the environments are too dense, too fast, too full of things demanding your attention for any other purpose. A first-person shooter is not going to pause so you can appreciate the timbre of a ricocheting bullet. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/Zight-Recording-2026-04-16-at-09.17.06-AM.gif) **Fract OSC* simulates the feel of creating live electronic music. Keep going The Friday Playlist is one game a week, played properly and written about at length — closer to listening than to coverage. Members get it, along with the members-only podcast and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) ## Why the Loudest Rooms Leave No Space for Listening To wit, a couple weeks ago, my friend Estevan invited me to a performance by [Sara Devachi](https://www.sarahdavachi.com/?ref=killscreen.com) and [Robert Takahashi Novak](https://robert.takahashinovak.com/?ref=killscreen.com) at the Broad Museum here in LA. Both contemporary experimental musicians demanded an extraordinary amount of concentration from me as one of the several hundred attendees crammed into the Broad’s atrium, facing each other instead of the performer. Novak washed the space with found sound and pulses, but Devachi’s work was truly meditative. Two trombonists walked towards each other and, through the audience, played notes of near-imperceptible distance that phased in and out as they echoed through the ripples of the atrium ceiling. It was nearly an anechoic experience as I could feel my blood rushing, and the tones were only punctuated by the occasional creak of a chair. It was absolutely fascinating and not something I experienced in media, especially in games. Nickel outlined some technical reasons why games have been slow to walk the labyrinth of sonic reflection, but even with better tools now available, the flood of sound-first games hasn't materialized. The golden era of music games—the *Guitar Hero* and *Rock Band* years of the mid-2000s—came and went, and the market correction that followed may have left a residue of skepticism. But Nickel's point is subtler than that. The innovative sound-first games that do exist—titles like *Blind Drive*, which asks you to navigate traffic with your eyes closed, or *Unheard*, which has you solving a crime by listening to layered audio recordings—don't even register as music games. There's no Steam tag for "sound-focused." There's no category, no shelf, no search term. If you want to find these games, you don't even know what to call them. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/Zight-Recording-2026-04-16-at-09.34.53-AM.gif) Games like the audio-only **Blind Drive* are a rare breed. ## The Sound Walk Was Invented Long Before Video Games What Nickel's work points toward—and what he's building in his own practice-based research with a game called [*Soundgarden*](https://zolarsystems.itch.io/soundgarden?ref=killscreen.com)—is a design space informed by traditions outside of games entirely. He talks about [R. Murray Schafer's concept of acoustic ecologies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic%5Fecology?ref=killscreen.com) and the practice of sound walks, where you move through a physical environment with deliberate attention to what you hear. (Yoko Ono’s 1962 *Map Piece,* for example, reads, “Draw an imaginary map. Put a goal mark on the map where you want to go. Go walking on an actual street according to your map.”He talks about Pauline Oliveros and [deep listening](http://archive.soundamerican.org/sa%5Farchive/sa7/sa7-pauline-oliveros-on-deep-listening.html?ref=killscreen.com) (who actually co-scored 2014’s exploration game [*NaissanceE*](https://www.killscreen.com/beguiling-sketch-beauty-naissance/)*),* [who wrote in 1974:](https://bureauforlistening.com/native-1974-human-2023/?ref=killscreen.com) "Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.” These are practices rooted in mindfulness, in slowing down, in treating the sonic world as worthy of the same sustained attention we give to the visual. It occurs to me that this is something players could already do, even in games that weren't designed for it. You could take a sound walk in *Red Dead Redemption 2*. You could put down the controller, stop pursuing objectives, and just listen to what Rockstar's sound designers built—the whole ecology of birds and wind and distant hoofbeats operating like tracks in a piece of generative music, overlapping and evolving. Brian Eno coined that term, "generative music," to describe compositions that are always changing, never repeating. A game world, if you attend to it the right way, is already that. We just don't have the habit of noticing. From Killscreen Killscreen writes about the people treating games as an art form worth paying attention to. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### April 17: What to Play This Weekend URL: https://www.killscreen.com/april-17-what-to-play-this-weekend/ Last updated: 2026-04-24T17:29:56.000Z I've been noodling on different email formats and trying to figure out which structure and cadence work best. This is both an experiment and something old. Many, many moons ago, this email newsletter used to be called Playlist, and I used to send it out each week with a couple of game recommendations. I always liked that format, and now, given the thousands and thousands of games and experiences released every single month, it can be incredibly helpful to have someone winnow that down. At a broader level, I used to feel a lot more pressure to feel like I needed to be on top of everything and keep a really wide net cast. As a result, I felt like, at times, Playlists would cast too wide a net, or we would struggle to find something that was really worthy of people's time. As games continue to develop as a medium, it's become more apparent to me that that's simply impossible. What you ostensibly come to Killscreen for is not just a point of view on all games, but a very specific point of view and taste-making sensibility for specific games, not just "indie games" with a broad brush. What I'll be doing is scheduling this email as a members-only recommendation email, with a selection of something you should try this weekend and something to keep an eye on. These are the guardrails. If you like my thinking, [do consider becoming a member.](https://www.killscreen.com/membership/) ## **Games should be short(ish)** I have come to believe over time that games struggle with a length problem: they demand so much of you. I think game makers and players take for granted that these markers exist in literally every other medium except for games, and it's often within limits. I believe that at this stage, the most important thing game designers can do is figure out how to make their medium make sense within the context of so many other competing and frankly *equally* worthy interests. What happens is that game makers, big and small, aspire to make something as long as a season of television, and I think that leaves a lot of people on the sidelines. [I've written quite a bit about this](https://www.killscreen.com/long-games-and-the-pursuit-of-lost-time/). So all my recommendations will be something you can actually finish in a sitting, maybe two. If you're trying to maximize your time for the lowest possible unit of value, then I'm not a good fit. ## **Games should have a distinct visual point of view** One of the saddest outcomes of the pop in indie games about 15 years ago was that the term 'independent' failed to serve as a *diverse* visual marker. At first, the retro aesthetic was something distinct, and then it became a default. A similar thing has happened with "cozy" games and now with PS1 aesthetics. While game systems can be extremely beautiful, nothing should ever prevent the expression of those visual systems, even those with complex designs, from being visually compelling. To do so, I think, is a reflection of taste, so finding things that look good on your shelf or on screen is incredibly important to me. If you want deep, crunchy systems games where the look doesn't matter, there are lots of other places you can go. ## Games should be in dialogue with culture Finally, the recommendations will be focused on games that are intertextual in some way, meaning they engage with another medium (music, architecture, and so on), and I'll be explicit about calling that out. It also means that there's media *outside* of games that reflect on games as an art form, so I'll make that recommendation as well. So what should you spend an hour doing this weekend? _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### The Living Archive: Jakob Kudsk Steensen on Art, Ecology, and the Game Engine URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/online-talk-4-28-the-living-archive-jakob-kudsk-steensen-on-art-ecology-and-the-game-engine/ Last updated: 2026-05-04T22:50:46.000Z Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen has spent the last decade doing something unusual: treating the video game engine as a medium for ecological fieldwork. His immersive installations grow from years of on-site research—underwater volcanic vents near the Azores, collapsed ice caves in the Swiss Alps, experimental forests in Minnesota—transformed into virtual worlds that sit somewhere between scientific document and living dream. In this members only recording, we 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. We got into Psychosphere in particular—a virtual world built from photogrammetry of newly discovered submarine volcanic landscapes, where fossils and living species and unknown life forms coexist in a space that is neither documentary nor fiction. And talked about The Song Trapper, his recent commission for the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which introduces the first character in an expanding video game world called Evoker—a mute figure who collects vanishing sounds and carries them across ecosystems. What does it mean to use game technology not to simulate play, but to preserve ecologies? How do you build a world that holds both scientific observation and imagination without flattening either? Listen here and members, keep scrolling for the video recording and full podcast. **Full Podcast** ### Symoné is putting the body back in play URL: https://www.killscreen.com/symone-live-art-game-design-queer-performance/ Last updated: 2026-10-05T22:21:09.000Z *This is part of a series on* [*emerging voices*](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/emergents/) *in contemporary game-based arts.* There's a moment in the early days of my arcade days that I revisit from time to time. I used to watch a guy at my local arcade play *Killer Instinct*—he'd execute a [64-hit combo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDa-Ic5UAt0&ref=killscreen.com) and then walk away from the cabinet before the round even ended, a mic drop performed for an audience of teenagers who understood that games were, at their core, a physical act. Your posture, your gestures, the way you slapped the buttons—all of it was performance. When games came indoors, that entire language of the body disappeared into couches and headsets. Symoné is bringing it back—though not from any direction that games would have predicted. The London- and Kent-based interdisciplinary artist has spent the last decade building a practice that fuses circus, cabaret, pole dance and roller skating with experimental game design. Her most ambitious project to date, [*Nullspace Motel*](https://www.symoneperformingartist.com/nullspacemotel?ref=killscreen.com), is a 40-minute live art production that places audience members in an orange lounge chair, controller in hand, while two dancers—a pole dancer and a [contemporary dancer](https://www.killscreen.com/maya-man-starquest-ai-dance-performance/) playing lovers named Dusky and Hayden—perform a fractured love story onstage. The choices players make in three philosophical mini-games ripple into the narrative unfolding in front of them. "The design wasn't so much winning or losing," Symoné told me, "but it's the shaping of a narrative that is affecting the story." The piece centers on Ish, a bio-digital being who can only communicate through a 3D character onscreen or through voiceover. Ish has lost parts of their memory, and the audience is tasked with retrieving them across a dreamy, nonlinear road trip. The performers have their own timeline. The game has its own timeline. "The piece feels very much like a collage," she said, "where the dance and the game are happening, the audience is there, and they have this intersection and timeline and narrative, but people can interrupt in their way." 0:00 /0:29 1× Raised across multiple countries by a military father, Symoné moved to London at 18 to study anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She had no formal training in performance. Instead, she fell into the circus through underground parties and a mentor at the Roundhouse, London's legendary performing arts venue. Her first show was the 2012 Olympic Torch Relay at King's Cross Station—an eight-minute hula hoop performance with a troupe of about 10 performers, staged on one of the upper levels of one of the busiest train stations in England. "I remember getting off stage and thinking, *wow, I love this*," she said. "That introverted part of myself was feeling this new way of expressing, and movement felt like a superpower for me." Games came later. Growing up, Symoné played whatever her father brought home from GameStop—mostly first-person shooters and *Tom Clancy* titles. "My mind at the time was associating like, this is what games are," she said. "It's first-person shooters or platformers." Then, at about age eight, she spotted a wacky, colorful box on a shelf: *Katamari Damacy*. "I remember playing that game and thinking, what—this is so weird. Like, games can be *weird*." It rewired something. But it wasn't until 2019, when friends pushed her to play games again, and she encountered the breadth of what games had become, that she began studying game development through [Code Coven](https://www.codecoven.co/?ref=killscreen.com), an accelerator for marginalized developers. "I had realized how far they had come," she said, "and how games can be emotional; philosophical." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/Symone---Nullspace-Motel---Credit-John-Hunter-1.jpg) Credit: John Hunter Keep going Killscreen members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) ## When the Stage Becomes the Interface The seed of *Nullspace Motel* came from a 60-page Google Doc that Symoné and her collaborator, sound designer and writer Sammy Metcalfe, filled with observations about [performance and video games](https://www.killscreen.com/kevin-peter-hes-embodied-game-engine-performance/). One of the genesis ideas was deceptively simple: the characters we love in games feel real. We want to be friends with them. That emotional attachment—that sense that a digital being has weight and presence—became the spine of the piece. Playing with that emotional attachment, though, requires an act of care and a moment of vulnerability from the audience. She wanted players to feel the mild discomfort of being called up from the audience—but she didn't want to put them on the spot. Early conversations included the idea of a live camera feed on the player projected onto the screen. They dropped it. "There's something about not putting players on the spot too much and watching them in such an intense way that felt right," she said. The piece was meant to feel like 2 a.m.—dreamy, cozy, surreal—not like a game show. And the controls were kept intentionally simple. "I really wanted to attract people who feel like games are not for them," she said. "People who don't play games, but they're interested." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/Symone---Nullspace-Motel---Credit-John-Hunter-7.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/Symone---Nullspace-Motel---Credit-John-Hunter-8.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/Symone---Nullspace-Motel---Credit-John-Hunter-9.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/Symone---Nullspace-Motel---Credit-John-Hunter-10.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/Symone---Nullspace-Motel---Credit-John-Hunter-12.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/Symone---Nullspace-Motel---Credit-John-Hunter-6.jpg) ## Welcoming The Unwelcome That instinct—designing for the uninitiated theater-goer rather than explicitly game-players—connects *Nullspace Motel* to a broader movement in game design that foregrounds personal experience over systemic complexity. When the primary goal is communicating something about [identity, memory, or queerness](https://www.killscreen.com/salome-asega/), elaborate mechanical gates can work against the art's own politics, especially in a live setting. It's impossible to build a skill-based activity for an audience member who is sitting down, learning a system for the first time, in front of a bunch of other people. Symoné calls her work "anti-games": goal-adjacent, emotionally driven, built to charge people rather than challenge them. There was a moment during an early prototype—a one-on-one performance piece in which Symoné guided conversations with individual audience members—that crystallized what the work was really about. She can't remember the exact question she asked, but the person she was sitting with paused, their e*yes* began to glow, and they vibrantly reminisced about something that had happened almost two decades earlier. "I could feel from the way they expressed that it was really special to them," Symoné told me, "that they had unlocked this part of their mind that they hadn't connected with in 20 years." She's now planning a 2027 UK premiere tour for *Nullspace Motel*, with stops from Scotland to the south of England and possibly into Europe. Some venues have told her they're excited, but their audiences are risk-averse—not ready for a game onstage. She's undeterred, offering workshops alongside performances to introduce alternative approaches to game design. Technology gets recognized for its intelligence all the time, Symoné told me. "We just forget the body has its own." *Follow Symoné's work on Instagram at* [*@productionsbysymone*](https://www.instagram.com/productionsbysymone/?ref=killscreen.com) *and at* [*symoneperformingartist.com*](https://www.symoneperformingartist.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*.* From Killscreen Killscreen covers the artists putting bodies, stages and controllers in the same room. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### Why Don't We Have Better Furniture For Board Games? URL: https://www.killscreen.com/armani-casa-borgonuovo-games-table-furniture-design-board-games/ Last updated: 2026-04-09T23:14:06.000Z Check out the [Armani Casa "Borgonuovo" games table,](https://www.wallpaper.com/design-interiors/furniture/armani-casa-borgonuovo-games-table-milan?ref=killscreen.com) an art deco-inspired ebony wood piece adorned in luxurious taupe leather, but it boasts a central top that spins to reveal the playing surface It's named after the Milanese street where Giorgio Armani lived, and it debuted at Salone del Mobile 2026 as a kind of love letter to chess and backgammon—two games whose spatial footprints have barely changed in centuries. There are hidden drawers for pieces, pull-out cup holders, and satin-finished brass edging. It's gorgeous. Not to dismiss the many chess and backgammon enthusiasts out there, but allow me to ask the question: So why don't we design furniture for the games the rest of us play? Chess and backgammon have become furniture archetypes precisely because their boards are fixed, their dimensions predictable, and their material needs stable. When you find an old chess set with a table, you know exactly how it should look. A designer like Jean-Michel Frank can build an entire aesthetic language around those constraints. The game becomes a formal problem with a known solution. That's a gift for furniture design. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/image-1.png) Courtesy: Armani Casa But walk into any modern game night, and the reality is chaos. *Wingspan* sprawled across a dining table never meant to hold four player mats and a bird feeder tray. *Gloomhaven* consumes an entire room for weeks. *Settlers of Catan*'s hex tiles slide around on whatever flat surface you can find. The contemporary board game renaissance has produced an explosion of spatial and material diversity, and furniture hasn't kept up. We're still playing on dining tables, coffee tables, folding tables—surfaces designed for eating, not for play. There's an entire cottage industry trying to solve this. Companies like [Wyrmwood](https://wyrmwoodgaming.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoqvfD18msowVLBeAdTEShyNe5XQFmWFBuQoR7eWfY-3dDJaHUGv&ref=killscreen.com) and [Rathskellers](https://www.rathskellers.com/?ref=killscreen.com) build beautiful custom gaming tables with recessed vaults, magnetic rail accessories, and reversible play surfaces. These are thoughtful, often stunning objects. But they're designed as generic play containers—a nice box to put any game in. What I'm more curious about is the opposite question: What would it look like to design a piece of furniture around a *specific* game the way the Borgonuovo is built around chess? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/04/image-2.png) Courtesy Armani Casa Imagine a table whose surface is contoured for *Azul*'s factory displays and pattern-building boards. Or a console designed to hold *Pandemic*'s world map at a slight angle, with integrated slots for city cards and cure markers. It sounds absurd, and maybe it is—the diversity of modern tabletop games makes standardization impossible. But that impossibility is also what makes the question interesting. Chess got a table because it stayed still. Our games won't sit still, and that restlessness might demand an entirely new relationship between play and the objects we play on. ### A New Opera Wrestles With A School Shooting. Could Games Ever? URL: https://www.killscreen.com/games-violence-opera-innocence-saariaho/ Last updated: 2026-04-09T21:00:35.000Z I've been sitting with Justin Davidson's [review of *Innocence* at the Met this week](https://www.vulture.com/article/innocence-met-opera-review.html?ref=killscreen.com). Kaija Saariaho's final opera before her death in 2023 takes a school shooting and renders it in gorgeous orchestral detail—elaborate staging, a superb cast, an intermissionless two-hour sweep through grief and aftermath. Davidson describes wanting to run from the theater. Not because it failed. Because it succeeded, and that success felt unbearable. His discomfort centers on what he calls "the aestheticization of pain." Opera has been doing this for 400 years—taking the worst things humans do to each other and setting them to music that audiences line up to experience. So has cinema. So has literature. The question *Innocence* raises is whether there are categories of violence so raw, so ongoing, that no aesthetic frame can hold them without becoming complicit in their spectacle. I keep returning to games here, and not for the obvious reasons. There have been various attempts over the years to render the unthinkable in game form, although it's been more of a contemporary concern over the last 15 years for the young medium. The attempts range from placing you as the character enacting violence, watching horror unfold on other characters, or narrating a difficult subject. But in most cases, games still borrows its emotional grammar from film. The gun fires. The body falls. The weight is decorative. Davidson's review made me wonder if games will be able to carry the gravity of something as present and as difficult to comprehend as a school shooting. Aside from the care required to tell that story well, there's the additional burden that games shouldn't wander into those spaces, because the agency opens players up to something too intimate or too raw. Or flatly, that games just *shouldn't* be because they are "fun." So we usually end up with games that use fantastic environments as shorthand or fantastical environments, without even attempting to convey a difficult fiction. Even so, perhaps there are simply places that no medium should go. In spite of the opera's precision and performance, Davidson simply can't wrap his head around the idea that a song does such a tragedy justice: *We turn to opera so we can mainline someone’s inner life with a drip of narcotic music, regardless of whether the character is a death-row inmate, an 18th-century nun, or the king of Sweden. In this case, though, I can’t accept the urge to decorate the mass slaughter of children with a flourish of beguiling sounds. Certain truths should not be delivered in song.* I leave the door open for games, if only because we should be comfortable with [abandoning "fun"](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/issue-01/) to tackle things that are true and painful in this world. Not because they simply need to check the box of tackling sensitive subjects, but perhaps they could offer something other mediums cannot. We're not there yet. The writing isn't there. The framing isn't there. But the form is. And what strikes me about Davidson's review is that his objection to *Innocence* isn't really about opera at all—it's about the limits of any medium that asks you to sit still and watch. Games don't ask you to sit still. The question is whether we'll ever build something worthy of that difference. ### Building Worlds While the Actual World Burns URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/talk-4-17-building-worlds-while-the-actual-world-burns/ Last updated: 2026-04-24T21:19:29.000Z On April 17th, 2026 we brought 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. [Kara Stone](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/kara-stone/) runs Solar Server from her apartment balcony in Calgary, making low-carbon games on a solar-powered computer. Her latest, [Known Mysteries](https://www.solarserver.games/onnow.html?ref=killscreen.com), asks a simple question: if we know how to solve the climate crisis, why can't we act? Joshua Ashish Dawson documents ghost towns in the Atacama Desert — villages that lost their water to copper mining and are now being fitted with solar-powered server farms. His film [Loa's Promise](https://joshua-dawson.com/loas-promise?ref=killscreen.com) calls it what it is: greenwashing dressed up as adaptation. For members, here's the full video recording and audio podcast. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Tarkovsky's Stalker taught a geographer how to write about damaged landscapes URL: https://www.killscreen.com/tarkovskys-stalker-taught-a-geographer-how-to-write-about-damaged-landscapes/ Last updated: 2026-04-02T15:35:26.000Z Caroline Tracey has a PhD in geography and a new book about salt lakes, but the writer she credits most for teaching her how to see the American West is Andrei Tarkovsky. [In an essay for Literary Hub,](https://lithub.com/how-andrei-tarkovsky-taught-me-to-write-about-the-american-west/?ref=killscreen.com) Tracey describes how *Stalker*—his 1979 masterpiece set in a cordoned-off industrial wasteland called the Zone—reoriented her understanding of what a landscape can hold: > Though *Stalker* critiques the environmental harms of the Soviet Union’s rapid industrialization, it does so not by focusing on the ills of factories, but by reaching deep into Stalker’s heart to show their affinities with nature. What was most inspiring to me was that Tarkovsky could make this feel so clear in such a damaged landscape. What struck me reading Tracey's essay is how much Tarkovsky refused to treat the environment as backdrop. Where Hollywood directors used Monument Valley as scenery—a stage for John Wayne to stand in front of—Tarkovsky pushed the ruined marshlands of the Zone to the foreground, making the land itself the moral and emotional center of the film. As evidence, he spoke of Monument Valley. “It’s not American. It’s another world, not the material one,” he said. “It wasn’t put there so westerns could be shot, but as a place to meditate.” In an era where game-makers and world-builders have so much access to digital environments, as players, we need to take a step back and breathe more in the places we inhabit. Tracey's essay is a reminder that the vocabulary for foregrounding environment over narrative has been developing in film long before games found it. The connection is worth sitting with. Her book, [*Salt Lakes*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/salt-lakes-an-unnatural-history-caroline-tracey/9d59081cd542b45b?ean=9781324089025&next=t&next=t&ref=killscreen.com), is out now from W.W. Norton. ### Google Photos is the palette in LoVid’s Spark Frame URL: https://www.killscreen.com/google-photos-is-the-palette-in-lovids-spark-frame/ Last updated: 2026-10-01T07:17:58.000Z *Spark Frame* runs 48 seconds and is cut entirely from LoVid’s own Google Photos archive, surfaced by typing search prompts—“landscape,” “sky,” “mood”—into the machine and keeping what came back. The index’s idea of a landscape doesn’t match a lived memory of one, and that mismatch is the video: banal snapshots and composed images flickering past each other until the distinction stops holding. It anchored [*Hotter than the Sun*](https://www.picturetheoryprojects.com/LoVid-Hotter-than-the-Sun?ref=killscreen.com), the duo’s first solo exhibition at Picture Theory in New York, which showed April 23 through May 30. 0:00 /0:47 1× *Spark Frame* (2026), LoVid. Excerpt, muted; watch it with sound on [LoVid’s Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/1185264529?ref=killscreen.com). The show’s quiet argument sat in a side room. *LoVid Links*, a living library of zines, VHS tapes, and DVDs from the duo’s orbit—Cory Arcangel, Casey Reas, Lauren Lee McCarthy—also held the videos LoVid made in 2003 at the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York: *Quilt*, *Cyclops*, *Decay Hatching*, *Breaking and Entering the Lost Timeframe*. Those pieces run analogue electrical current through hand-built synthesizers as both image and sound at once. “We hope to bring the body into this electrical landscape,” [they told Dusted Magazine at the time](https://www.lovid.org/works/videos?ref=killscreen.com)—a sentence that covers the new video just as well. Between the two sat the textiles, where Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus use video stills as a brush: dye-sublimated prints layered with dense embroidery and acrylic, as in *Magnetic Moment* (2026). *Emails from the Paleolithic*, a kinetic installation of rocks, motors, and polymer prints with original music by Dan Friel, rounded out the room. ![Magnetic Moment, a textile work by LoVid combining embroidery and dye-sublimation print](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/lovid-magnetic-moment-2026.jpg) **Magnetic Moment*, 2026\. Acrylic, flashe, hand embroidery, dye-sublimation on polyester canvas. Image courtesy of Picture Theory. This is ancestor material for anyone thinking about generated space. Twenty years before engines dreamed up terrain on demand, current running through handmade hardware was already doing it—the same instinct we found in [*Hypnogenesis*, where a video synthesizer is the control scheme](https://www.killscreen.com/a-video-synthesizer-is-the-control-scheme-in-hypnogenesis/). [The gallery’s closing-week post](https://www.instagram.com/p/DYzhFx-kYgO/?ref=killscreen.com) is what put the 2003 work back in front of us; it was worth the trip backward. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/lovid-install-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/lovid-install-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/lovid-install-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/lovid-install-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/lovid-install-6.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/lovid-install-8.jpg) Installation views, **Hotter than the Sun*, Picture Theory, New York, 2026\. Images courtesy of Picture Theory. Electricity was drawing landscapes before any engine rendered one, and tracking that lineage is what Killscreen is for. Radar delivers three finds like this every week, free. [Get Radar free ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Anna Nygren's poetry book treats language like a multiplayer game URL: https://www.killscreen.com/anna-nygren-blush-river-fox-language-as-play/ Last updated: 2026-04-13T22:25:25.000Z I've been thinking a lot lately about what happens when you treat language itself as an interactive system—something you don't just use but *play with*, the way you'd play a game. Anna Nygren's [*blush / river / fox*,](https://milkweed.org/book/blush-river-fox?ref=killscreen.com) just out from Milkweed Editions, does exactly that, and the way it came together feels closer to collaborative game design than traditional publishing. Nygren is a Swedish writer, artist, and translator, and this is her first book published in English. Rather than treating her non-native fluency as a limitation, they and their editor Morissa Young leaned into the gaps between languages as generative space. Translation became a kind of mechanic: a word in Swedish carries a sound that echoes an English word from a completely different context, and suddenly those words become what Nygren calls "parallel siblings"—linked not by dictionary definition but by feel. It's the sort of emergent meaning you get from a well-designed system, where the interesting stuff happens in the interplay rather than in any single element. What really caught my attention in [the interview with Electric Literature](https://electricliterature.com/a-poetry-collection-where-play-collapses-the-limits-of-language/?ref=killscreen.com), though, is how Nygren describes the editing process. They and Young worked through the manuscript over Google Docs, and for Nygren, that collaborative back-and-forth felt like meeting as "careful strangers" in a shared "word-world." (I loved that term.) Young describes the editorial process as building an internal grammar together—one based on wordplay and linguistic overlap, where they'd break rules to expand the language and follow them only when things got too slippery. It's less copyediting and more co-op puzzle-solving. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/03/image-16.png) The book is divided into three sections—*blush*, *river*, *fox*—each with its own emotional register and mode. *Blush* deals in childhood and desire. *Fox* grapples with more-than-human language. *River* sits between them as translation itself: stitching and tearing apart simultaneously. The whole collection is threaded with drawings and the color pink, which Nygren connects to an extraordinary web of Swedish wordplay involving roses, crayfish, cheeks, and the sea: *“The word PINK, and also the word KISS, means PEE in Swedish. The Swedish word for the color pink is ROSA, like a rose is a rose, but it is also one of the most common names for cows, like individual cows named Rosa. There is another, maybe older, word for ROSA that is SKÄR. SKÄR also means CUT. It is like a soft cut and a blushing cut a rose a romantic thingcolorword cutting across. SKÄRKIND is the name of the village where I was born. KIND has a meaning in English yes! In Swedish KIND means CHEEK, so SKÄRKIND is like a pink cheek like blushing but also a cut, in the cheek. It is like hurting. SKÄR also means a rock in the sea, I don’t know the English word, it is like a stone a thing in water it is cutting it is a rose and it is. And the sea.* It's a reminder that some of the most interesting interactive work right now isn't happening on screens at all. Here's one section from [*Poetry*](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/1749589/from-blush?ref=killscreen.com)*:* 7. one day we find a dead rat under the hay in the stables it pulls somewhere inside me we bury it in in the grit it gets a pile where the ground don’t want it inside it *Photo by Louise Halvardsson* ### Did Competition Dance Train Us to Perform for Algorithms? URL: https://www.killscreen.com/maya-man-starquest-ai-dance-performance/ Last updated: 2026-09-29T17:17:47.000Z About a year before ChatGPT was involuntarily foisted upon us, the writer Ted Chiang was asked about whether or not AI [could achieve some form of consciousness](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/30/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-ted-chiang-transcript.html?ref=killscreen.com). This was still a novel, popular question and reflected the quaintly dominant way of thinking about "AI" in the ambitiously general sense—not the narrower LLM sense—as machines more like humans. Chiang cast a sharply skeptical tone, suggesting this would never be possible (I generally agree), but he took a step back to ask the Oppenheimer question: whether we should. His hang-up was about a fundamental part of what makes us human: suffering. "Suffering precedes moral agency in the developmental ladder," he observed. Dogs and babies, he pointed out, are not "moral agents" but can experience pain and thus, our behavior towards them is generally ethical. Conversely, the process of creating a general intelligence system would require us to engage in an act of cruelty. "In the process of developing machines that are conscious moral agents, we will be inevitably creating billions of entities that are capable of suffering." As we spend more and more time in front of chatbots, Chiang's question takes on renewed resonance: what do we owe to what we command? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/03/StarQuest-LA-1--Maya-Man--Photo-Credit-Yuchi-Ma-1.jpg) That question reemerged for me during a lecture performance of artist [Maya Man](https://mayaontheinter.net/?ref=killscreen.com)'s [*StarQuest*](https://starquest.channel/?ref=killscreen.com) at LA Dance Project earlier this month, co-presented bitforms gallery, SOOT gallery, and the Future Humans program at the Berggruen Institute. I had parked across the street from the strip club, directly adjacent to the venue, and walked into a voluminous space lit simply—bleachers and rows of chairs, a large projector throwing the performance against the back wall. After an introduction from curator Alice Scope (also, a former dancer), Man entered, and the performance began: she lectured through her process of developing the work, interspersed with her own careful postures and flourishes. "I used to think I wanted to be a dancer when I grew up, but you often don’t end up becoming what you dream of being when you’re young," she opens musingly. "Look at me, now, doing this for *you*." *StarQuest* grew out of a larger interest in finding ways to express the human body through computers, and Man's entry point to the work was autobiographical. She grew up in Mechanicsburg, Pa., and trained as a competitive dancer from age three." It is impossible for me to remember the first time I ever stepped on stage, just as I cannot remember the first time I saw myself on screen." But her grandmother was also an AI researcher, and her uncle works at the intersection of robotics and art. "Everyone in my family has been very driven in the specific thing they're interested in, whether AI research or robotics," [she told Killscreen in 2021](https://www.killscreen.com/maya-man/). [The body as data](https://www.killscreen.com/carrie-chen-digital-avatars-ai-identity/), in other words, has been the family business. A through line of Man's work has been capturing the ineffable qualities of [human movement through kinetic digital systems](https://www.killscreen.com/kevin-peter-hes-embodied-game-engine-performance/) — she has worked with choreographers Bill T. Jones and Heidi Latsky and donned a mocap suit for Joji's *777* music video. *Dance Moms*, the Lifetime reality series that first aired in 2011 and sits somewhere between satire and sadism, opened a pathway to revisit a show from her childhood through new eyes. 0:00 /1:00 1× Snippet of **StarQuest* Keep going Killscreen members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) ## How Competition Dance Trained a Generation to Perform for Algorithms "Imagining myself being watched and adjusting accordingly has always felt like a condition of living for me," she says. She grew up, like the girls on *Dance Moms*, in Pennsylvania — spending nearly every night at the studio, watching herself grow up in floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Returning to the show as an adult, she became interested in how competition dance functions as a training system: one that conditions young girls to hold their bodies in anticipation of judgment, to perform flawlessly, to make difficulty look effortless. As she grew older, she found the platforms like TikTok and Instagram prized the behaviors she had so honed during her childhood. "The sense of performance that these platforms encouraged, the quantifiable feedback delivered in the form of likes, comments, and followers, felt natural to me. It was a familiar experience to operate in anticipation of judgment. Posting felt like performing choreography." This is not a coincidence. Man's dance lineage runs through TikTok's biggest early stars, Charli D'Amelio and Addison Rae, both of whom were competition dancers. "This specific slice of training perfectly primes a young girl to post online for an audience," Man opined, "employing her moving body as a medium for content production." The work that gives this argument form consists of 111 eight-second clips — each generated using Google's Veo model—that run inside a custom web application [Man built herself](https://starquest.channel/?ref=killscreen.com). The app never plays the clips in the same order twice, so the piece has no fixed duration. It loops and reshuffles indefinitely, mirroring the algorithmic logic of the platforms it examines. And contrary to any perception of AI video as turnkey production, the process was painstaking. Man manually captured hundreds of screenshots per episode of *Dance Moms* to identify shots she wanted to restage. Working with technologist [Tina Tarighian](https://tina.zone/?ref=killscreen.com), she built a custom shot-list management application to organize them. Then she translated each reference image into a written prompt—the AI model never saw the screenshots directly—and generated somewhere between 10 and 100 clips per prompt before settling on a final take. "Unlike when working with code, when running a prompt over and over with a generative AI model, the output is never exactly the same." She describes the process as addictive, like gambling: "What if the next one is just a little bit better? It's hard to know when to stop." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/03/StarQuest-LA-2--Maya-Man--Photo-Credit-Yuchi-Ma.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/03/StarQuest-LA-3--Maya-Man--Photo-Credit-Yuchi-Ma.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/03/StarQuest-LA-4--Maya-Man--Photo-Credit-Yuchi-Ma.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/03/StarQuest-LA-5--Maya-Man--Photo-Credit-Yuchi-Ma.jpg) ## The Question *StarQuest* Holds Up Like a Floor-Length Mirror What started as an attempt at self-representation shifted during production. Man tried repeatedly to prompt a mixed-race dancer to stand in for herself, but the model couldn't render the concept of "mixed" consistently. (I felt this acutely as a "two or more races" box-checker.) Through that failure, she came to understand her actual role in the work: not dancer, but coach. "I rule over my digital dancers with my directions, my opinions. I shape them in my vision, pushing them to become stars." It's the same dynamic she had been examining in Abby Lee Miller all along — and, she suggests, in the systems that run the internet itself. "In a world that increasingly mimics reality television theatrics and images are used as weapons to manipulate opinions, culture, and political thought? What's real? It doesn't matter. What matters is what is powerful. And who can use that power to win." > What if the next one is just a little bit better? It's hard to know when to stop. There is a long lineage of coaches pushing performers to their limits at tremendous personal cost—Debbie Reynolds famously danced until her feet bled during the production of *Singin' in the Rain*,[ driven by a co-stars who wanted more](https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/films/393594/Debbie-Reynolds-I-ve-still-got-a-song-in-my-heart-at-81?ref=killscreen.com). In Man's case, the performers aren't real. But does that make the act of demand any less consequential? Are we not cosplaying the very thing we aim to critique? During the Q&A with [Scope](https://www.instagram.com/alicescope/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com), Man was clear that she does not believe the AI figures are conscious—a sentiment I share. But the process of creating *StarQuest* raises the question of whether the performance of a command, by an artist or an AI chatbot end-user, reflects, in some small way, the same demanding absolutism it sets out to examine. As a game player, I am now confronting even the distant possibility that the avatars I send hurtling over cliffs, diving for cover, or exploding outside an airlock might, in some small way, reflect an actual violence, if only a shade. You've probably spent time looking at a digital avatar and thought: *who is that little person in there?* If it's even a glimmer, what are our responsibilities to the things we create and put out into the world in agentic form? *StarQuest* doesn't answer that question. But it does hold up a floor-length studio mirror—and ask why we're so comfortable not asking it. *You can watch* StarQuest [here](https://starquest.channel/?ref=killscreen.com). *All photos: Maya Man, StarQuest (Performance-Lecture), 2026, co-presented by bitforms gallery, SOOT gallery, and the Future Humans program at the BerggruenInstitute at L.A. Dance Project. Photo by Yuchi Ma.* From Killscreen Killscreen covers the artists asking what we owe the bodies we make with machines. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### What Tottenham's Collapse Teaches Us About the Corruption of Play URL: https://www.killscreen.com/what-tottenhams-collapse-teaches-us-about-the-corruption-of-play/ Last updated: 2026-09-14T13:48:48.000Z *This is an article about sports as part of an ongoing series looking at* [games and theory.](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/theory/) > **You don't have bus parades for healthy bank balances. - Europa League champion and ex-Tottenham Hotspur coach Ange Postecoglou** Forgive me if you've already taken the off-ramp after seeing a quote from a soccer coach. I don't write very much about sports, but bear with me. On the one hand, sports' relationship to games is orthogonal. They're both comprised of players and rules. I'd actually argue that playing games makes you a *better* sports fan. It preps you for the actual nature of sport: the expression of rules through interactive human dynamics. But per the landmark decision of Jocks v. Nerds (Time immemorial), games and sports don't often comprise overlapping fandoms. That's unless you play a lot of sports or competitive games. As someone who grew up in an extremely sporty family (my father and my brother both played college football) and a lover of games, I still hold a fondness for sports, and so should you. It's simply out of the joy, the hysterical joy of watching victory over defeat. Over the last couple of years, I've turned down my American football watching and exchanged it for watching European soccer, which seems nearly infinite in its output. I find it's fun to root for a particular team, even if you're just getting started, to achieve that sense of stakes, and, given I didn't grow up with a soccer-loving family, I asked a friend for the nearest analogue to my beloved Philadelphia Eagles. "You should root for Tottenham Hotspur," he texted. In retrospect, this was a filial act of violence, and I can hear those of you who *do* watch soccer snickering. The argument, as it goes, is that both teams had long championship droughts in their DNA while generally boasting maddening middling form. I was skeptical of the rationale, of course, but [Dunning-Kruger dictated ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger%5Feffect?ref=killscreen.com)that I should spend a year watching a bunch of Spurs games. It was tense at first, and then last year, I realized something strange about this club. One thing you'll hear other soccer fans levy against a sports team is that "they don't know how to win" in a cosmic sense or "don't have championship DNA" in a genetic sense. It's one of those truisms like "They've just got the dog in 'em" that belies statistics or reason but points to something innately feral and chaotic about human sport that borders slightly on wish manifestation. There *is* something scientific about the sentiment; fans do [have an impact](https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/home-field-advantage-facts-and-fiction?ref=killscreen.com) by harangueing referees, and the brain's ability to do something [is bolstered if you've done it before](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term%5Fpotentiation?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/03/image-3.png) There are so many photos like this. ## How Play Gets Corrupted But with Spurs, there is something much deeper. They are generally not good, yes, but they really shouldn't be *this bad*. Tottenham Hotspur is one of the wealthiest clubs in Europe and one of the most valuable franchises in the world, yet over the last 18 months, they have posted one of the worst records in European football. "Relative to financial security, sporting expectations and basically any other metric you could care to mention, this Tottenham Hotspur season has more than a fair shout at being the worst by any team in English football history," writes [Tom Chambers at ESPN](https://www.espn.com/soccer/story/%5F/id/48122272/are-tottenham-getting-relegated-premier-league-stats-charts-say?ref=killscreen.com). The problem is simply that Tottenham has decided to attempt to undermine the nature of play itself. In 1958, French writer Roger Callois penned *Man, Play, Games*, an exploration into why we play. He, along with Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga, set up some of the formal frameworks for how we think about contemporary games, and one of his chief concerns was how play gets corrupted. Specifically, Callois called out the intrusion of mundane reality and professionalization as threats, the latter he described as "a contagion of reality." The point is that play should be free and unburdened, and introducing real-world financial stakes pollutes what should be a carefree, soul-affirming activity. One of the joys of play is that ostensibly there should be no connection between what we do on the pitch and what we do for work. Tottenham embodies the Callois critique. Despite having enviable resources, the team's owners have decided to prioritize profit over the sole purpose of sport: winning games. Instead of signing new players, they built a stadium to host six nights of Beyoncé (who is amazing but does nothing for soccer). They charge some of the highest ticket prices in Europe. They rarely compete for "ready-made" world-class talent; instead, they focus on "investment players"—younger prospects with high resale value. They even cut their [senior citizen discount](https://m.allfootballapp.com/news/EPL/Fans-slam-Spurs-decision-to-scrap-OAP-season-ticket-discounts-from-2025/3319529?ref=killscreen.com). Of course, all of this would be forgiven if Tottenham could build on past successes rather than wring every last ounce of profit out of their beleaguered fans. They now face the threat of something that was once unthinkable: relegation. Keep going Killscreen has spent fifteen years on the question this piece is circling — what happens to play when money gets hold of it. Members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) --- ## How the English Relegation System Is Actually Brilliant Game Design One of the things I really like about English soccer is its relegation system, which is super unfamiliar to Americans. In the United States, teams are functionally fixed concerns and are never really added (with the exception of college football, which is a strange edge case). In English football, by contrast, there is a long-running tradition known as the "English pyramid." Functionally, it means teams are broken into divisions, and those at the top of their division move up, while those at the bottom move down. And going down can mean missing out on hundreds of millions of dollars in TV and advertising revenue. ![image-2.png](https://codahosted.io/docs/w40x55nH6H/blobs/bl-v1tnJrdTqm/21363ed70724eed3940c121944149be7378d472f15c51b47659dd19df2aee0f82f03e356bcac09821b2a4f59a6f9bc7d013e059356de0f2b7c83fcc18d8ecc3f32f29f20ceba4d27039c17f7167db370fc181d8a5b42aedd1fcfd615b42a4f58a145143a) Even if you don't watch much soccer, you've likely heard how Rob Mac and Ryan Reynolds have turned a tiny Welsh football club into a national contender. The difference between American and English systems boils down to what [game designer Marc LeBlanc](http://algorithmancy.8kindsoffun.com/?ref=killscreen.com) calls "feedback loops." The American system is generally a "positive feedback loop," because winners can generally compound their wins over multiple seasons. There are some counter-measures, like salary caps that limit spending, but the structure of the league can feel more like a late game of *StarCraft* where one's resources are simply too depleted to complete. This isn't all bad—"positive feedback systems are sometimes useful for dispelling uncertainty, bringing about the climax, and creating a sense of finality and closure," LeBlanc writes. By contrast, LeBlanc would describe the English system as a *negative* feedback loop. Negative feedback loops help maintain equality by pulling up the bottom and pushing down the top. So, the infamous blue shell in *Mario Kart* is a well-known execution of this system. The key contribution of negative feedback loops is *tension* as the overall contest is ostensibly unknown until the very end. Positive feedback leaves little to the imagination, but negative feedback takes its time. English football (and European football generally) isn't just a competition for the top—it's simultaneously a survival game at the bottom. This doubles the number of teams with something urgent to play for at any given moment. It keeps more matches meaningful deep into the season. As I write this, *90%* of the 20-odd teams in the Premier League are playing for something, either to win the league, qualify for bigger European competitions, or simply not fall apart. That's a product of excellent design. But good design works both ways. "Feedback systems support meaningful play by making the game responsive to the ongoing state of the game," write Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in *Rules of Play*. But Tottenham, one of the richest clubs on the planet with a terrible record, may, in fact, go down a division, something that hasn't happened to them in 50 years. It's total appointment viewing at its worst, and the owners of Tottenham absolutely deserve it. > It's total appointment viewing at its worst, and the owners of Tottenham absolutely deserve it. ## Why I Can't Stop Watching — And Why You Shouldn't Either Since the Premier League was founded over 30 years ago, the amount of money invested in the top flight of English football has continued to balloon. And thus, soccer owners now have mixed feelings about the relegation system. On the one hand, the drama is obviously good for the global game, but in terms of value creation, it's a tenuous way to operate a for-profit business. If you are wealthy, nothing bothers you more than the whims of providence or defeat determining your wealth, especially in such a low-event affair as soccer. As a consequence, you're starting to see more and more English clubs looking with jealousy at the system we have in the United States, a Congress-authorized cartel system where new teams are rarely added. The cartel system basically protects owners' investments, because there is simply no punishment for losing. Economics dictate that value comes from scarcity, and there are simply only so many tickets to own an American sports franchise. As more American owners have also started buying soccer clubs in Europe over the years, there have been attempts to mimic the U.S. and abandon tradition. (You can guess who's been part of leading this charge.) The issue with Tottenham really cuts at the heart of what it means to play, and what we're seeing in English football is a warning to us all about what can capitalism can do to sports. The turn to abstract the game of sport into a profit-and-loss calculation is the end result of decades of neoliberal excess that atomizes individuals and reduces every human interaction to an economic transaction. Leaving aside all the values and importance of local fandoms as potential connective tissue in an era of increasing loneliness, the idea that the only value in winning is financial is a complete corruption of play, leaving me wondering what the hell we're doing here. Or put another way, "Fandom isn’t being nurtured anymore. It’s being mined," [wrote Joon Lee in The Times.](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/opinion/sports-nba-mlb-leagues-streaming-fan.html?ref=killscreen.com) The silver lining, of course, is that this particular strategy that Tottenham has pursued—winning enough to deliver returns to its shareholders but never doing anything truly daring that would deliver sustained joy to its fan base—may cost the club $260 million if its performance doesn't improve. In the meantime, I can't help but watch with sick glee. One of the wealthiest clubs in the world losing their shirt and being forced down to spend a Saturday night playing against Deadpool and the guy from *It's Always Sunny*. The beautiful game, indeed. --- **Read next:** [The Game Design of Severance](https://www.killscreen.com/the-game-design-of-severance/) · [Is Gerrymandering Cheating or Just A Good Strat?](https://www.killscreen.com/is-gerrymandering-cheating-or-just-a-good-strat/) · [Labubus, Loot Boxes and the Gamblification of Everything](https://www.killscreen.com/gamblification-labubu-loot-boxes-gambling-mechanicsretry/) From Killscreen Killscreen has been reading games, sports and everything else that runs on rules for fifteen years. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### Jonathan Coryn's Good Grief URL: https://www.killscreen.com/player-non-player-jonathan-coryn-touch-grief-game/ Last updated: 2026-10-15T21:06:17.000Z *Of the many senses that games often engage, one of the most common is touch. It is what happens when we pick up a controller, when we run our fingers over a thumbstick, when we feel the light impact of buttons. In many ways, touch is also one of the senses we know best from games of the past, as physical designs.* *But capturing* [*the intimacy of touch*](https://www.killscreen.com/teddy-pozo-explores-loss-life-and-identity-through-interactive-clay/) *is an entirely different story. Holding hands, running fingertips along the curve of someone's neck, or even one of those chaste chest-out good-bye hugs. These are all moments the games have sadly struggled to capture: to hold a friend when they're crying, to say goodbye to someone who's dying, to initiate the spark of something new.* *The central mechanic in Jonathan Coryn's* [*Player Non Player*](https://corjn.com/playernonplayer?ref=killscreen.com) *is caress. You touch characters—hold them, stroke them—and through that contact, you begin to understand how they grieve. It's a disarming premise for a game, and Jonathan Coryn spent six years building it, mostly alone, out of his fine arts training at the École nationale supérieure d'arts de Paris-Cergy and a collaboration with the French electronic duo Agar Agar, whose album shares the game's name and its lore.* *The result is anunforgiving island populated by four tormented figures, a landscape that borrows its desolation from Iceland and its visual grammar from Fumito Ueda's PS2-era worlds. It won the Most Amazing Game award at A MAZE. Berlin in 2023 and has shown at Centre Pompidou and MUDAM. I spoke with Coryn about mortality as a design material, the tension between tenderness and game logic, and what it means to make a space that feels like it's clipping at the edge of reality.* ***When did you first start thinking about death as a concept to work with in* *Player Non Player*?\*** I didn't arrive at death as a theme all at once—it surfaced over the course of the game design process. But I knew quite early on that the game was about intimacy, because the core mechanic I built was the gesture of caressing. That's something I had already worked with during my fine arts studies, and I knew it was a powerful way to create closeness without relying on traditional narrative. From there, death became the element that sharpened everything. For me, intimacy is never as intense as when it's placed next to mortality—when it's fragile, temporary, at risk. That tension between desire and disappearance is what gives it weight. It's essentially that old dialogue: Eros and Thanatos. ***Did you have any personal experiences with grief and longing that informed the work?*** I find this question interesting. There's often an expectation that a piece dealing with death must come from a specific personal event, a trauma of some kind. I also notice this question tends to come up more explicitly in video games than in art in general, where death's often treated as something natural. For me, the focus isn't tied to an exceptional or violent loss so much as to something universal: death concerns all of us, constantly. ***Noted! I stand corrected.*** There's a line in the *Silent Hill 2* Director's Cut that stuck with me: Sato Takayoshi says, "Everybody is thinking and concerned about sex and death every day." That's true for me. I think about death every day, even though I haven't experienced what you might call a major or catastrophic bereavement. My grandparents have died, I've lost pets, and I've gone through breakups. But my parents are still alive, and I haven't lost close friends. And even those so-called ordinary losses have been deeply painful. What strikes me is how intense and unjust those losses already feel, even when they're supposedly in the order of things. I find death profoundly unfair, and the human condition incredibly harsh. I struggle to imagine the death of my parents, the death of people I love, or my own. That difficulty, that resistance, is precisely what keeps death present in my thoughts—and inevitably, in my work, as a form of catharsis. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/03/Jonathan-Coryn---Player-Non-Player-8.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/03/Jonathan-Coryn---Player-Non-Player-9.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/03/Jonathan-Coryn---Player-Non-Player-10.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/03/Jonathan-Coryn---Player-Non-Player-11.jpg) Keep going Killscreen members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) ***What did you see as the connection between the characters? Who was the hardest to realize fully?*** In the game, the characters are essentially facets of a single character. Each one articulates death from a different personal angle: the fear of one's own disappearance, the end of romantic love, the idea of losing one's parents. Once the caress mechanic was in place, it became a natural language for writing those perspectives. The only character that was genuinely difficult to integrate was the dog, because it isn't anthropomorphic—I didn't want to force a human interiority onto it. That's why I treated the dog more as an emotional-care presence: a being shaped by attachment and memory, grieving its owners in a wordless way. ***The inclusion of a hoverboard and some of the mini-games are moments where the game-ness of the work breaks through. Are these concessions to an audience that's looking for something more traditional, or something more subversive?*** I understand why the hoverboard might read as more "gamey"—it draws on a vocabulary players already recognize, because traversal is a classic design problem in open worlds. But the hoverboard was primarily a practical choice: a way to move through the landscape easily, pleasantly, and clearly, without breaking the contemplative pace. In that sense, it's less about adding challenge and more about supporting how the world is meant to be experienced. That said, *Player Non Player* does include moments that are unmistakably more gamey. Because the project was made experimentally, without a prewritten design document, it gradually became a kind of collage—an existentialist approach to game design in which the work becomes what it is through the process. The result is that some elements can feel almost contradictory, or even clash with each other, and I've come to see that tension as part of the game's beauty. It also serves the theme: grief isn't consistent; it's full of abrupt shifts. So when the game suddenly drops you into a very difficult obstacle course in an experience that is otherwise relatively accessible, that contrast becomes a texture of the whole. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/03/Jonathan-Coryn---Player-Non-Player-7.jpg) ***I'm wondering about the landscape. There's a sparseness in many games that feels either aesthetically incurious or a function of ability. You're doing something really interesting in capturing what feels like both a nod to an older generation of games and a real place. Was there a real place you were looking to?*** Thanks! I spent an enormous amount of time on the world itself—honestly, probably half of development—modeling the landscape and building its shaders, because I was very attached to achieving what I call "torn 3D": a mix of painterly realism and a deliberately rough, almost released quality in the 3D. That feeling comes strongly from [*Shadow of the Colossus*](https://www.killscreen.com/a-landscape-of-memory-returning-to-shadow-of-the-colossus/)—not just because it's a PS2 game, but because to me, Fumito Ueda and his teams are visual geniuses. They achieved a kind of 3D that doesn't obsess over micro-detail but instead leans into pictoriality, into something almost metaphysical: a threshold space that still feels intensely present and materially beautiful. I almost think of it like paint layers, the physicality of pigment, like Jackson Pollock throwing paint onto a canvas. Ueda's worlds, in *Shadow of the Colossus* and *The Last Guardian*, have that material quality even though they're fully 3D. And the PS2 era helped, because the geometry stays visible and angular. You can clearly feel it's 3D, but when there's presence, the tension between that rough structure and the image's beauty becomes incredibly powerful. That's what I tried to capture in *Player Non Player*: something that nods to that older sensibility but with contemporary surface work—normal maps and so on. As for real-world references, the place that gave me that sensation most strongly was Iceland. I think there's a reason so many games borrow from Icelandic landscapes—they're incredibly beautiful and inspiring. But what struck me most when I was there wasn't just the scenery. It was the feeling of being in an edge-world, as if reality itself was slightly clipping, like you could almost pass through it, while at the same time experiencing an overwhelming sense of presence. You feel lost and alone, at the edge of the world, almost at a threshold between life and death—which is exactly where the game's themes live. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/03/Jonathan-Coryn---Player-Non-Player-6.jpg) ***The game has both open space and clearly defined visual zones that you revisit again and again. How did you design these zones to be open-ended while still encouraging players to dig in deeper?*** The recurring zones and the open landscape were influenced by *Breath of the Wild*, which I played intensely right before conceptualizing the game. I found its approach to pathing through space incredibly refreshing, and I pushed it toward something more minimalist. Even though collecting orbs is necessary to finish, they're intentionally distant from a traditional progression curve. The game stays lightly gamified, closer to a contemplative form of movement through space—almost like Land Art. You inhabit the environment, interact with it sensitively, and the reward loop remains modest on purpose, to keep things mostly contemplative and sensory. ***It was interesting to see some players read the game as a dating simulator, which I think requires familiarity with that genre or the ability to read romantic interest into the interaction. Certainly, with the shirtless swimmer, there's an immediate suggestion of intimacy, but with the others, not so much. Tell me about whether you intended players to connect affection or friendliness as sexual overture, or whether that's something you wanted to leave more ambiguous.*** We sometimes used "dating simulator" as a communication label, because it was the closest familiar frame for players, even though the structure is actually a puzzle game. The Love Bar borrows dating-sim codes aesthetically, but functionally, it's feedback for a lock-and-key logic: what a character dislikes blocks you, and understanding what they like becomes the key that lets you progress. The swimmer leans into the dating-sim register most—more suggestive, tied to romantic grief—and he's also designed as an easy mode, where almost anything counts as a key. That ambiguity is part of the point: tenderness and sensuality can still feel taboo in games, and it's been interesting to see players feel most uncertain with the simplest character. *This interview was conducted over text and edited for grammar and clarity.* From Killscreen Killscreen covers the games trying to say something words can't. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### The Secret to a Believable Game City Isn't What You Think URL: https://www.killscreen.com/the-secret-to-a-believable-game-city-isnt-what-you-think/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:06:57.000Z I was playing *Grand Theft Auto IV* a few years ago when something small happened that I’ve never been able to shake. I’d just finished a heist, jumped out of a plane, pulled a parachute, and landed next to a prison. And there, right beside me, was a gardener. Just a gardener, trimming the hedges, completely indifferent to the man who’d just fallen out of the sky with a sack of cash. It was procedural—he just happened to be there. But it spoke to something essential about what a game city can be when it’s working: a place thick with parallel life that doesn’t care about you at all. That moment came back to me during a recent conversation talking with [Chaim Gingold](https://chaim.io/?ref=killscreen.com) and Konstantinos Dimopoulos. Gingold is the author of [*Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine*](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262547482/building-simcity/?ref=killscreen.com). Dimopoulos is an urban planner turned game designer whose [writing on game urbanism](https://medium.com/@KonstantinosD?ref=killscreen.com) has become essential reading for anyone thinking about built environments inside screens. I wanted to sit them down together because they approach the same question—what makes a game city believable?—from opposite directions. One comes from the history of simulation, the other from the practice of actually planning real cities. ## Why Do So Many Game Cities Feel Like a Facade? JAMIN WARREN: Games do a lot of different things. You get invested in the characters, you get invested in the stories. Approaching them through the lens of the constructed environments inside them is very specific. Games treat cities as backdrops, as sets. What do you feel is actually missing when a designer thinks of a city as an arrangement of buildings rather than a functioning system? KONSTANTINOS DIMOPOULOS: Sometimes, leaving things out is unavoidable. But it's very rare for us to see public spaces that *are not just streets*. A square can be a fantastic place. A park can be fascinating and packed with life. Generally, this whole life-and-functioning-society aspect tends to be missing. People forget that cities are historical places. They need to feel dynamic, to showcase that they have been around for a while. An older building, something under construction—those are simple things often forgotten. CHAIM GINGOLD: A counterexample is *Jet Grind Radio*. You're skating around, and there are crowds of people just hanging out. They all jump out of the way, and it's part of the pleasure. That makes me think about who makes the games and what gets represented, but also the quality of the travelogue and how important that is. DIMOPOULOS: If we approach game cities as something to be visited—besides something we're meant to be playing in—they can offer a different level of enjoyment. But there has to be some thought poured into things. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/03/image.png) [Credit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cPViia36ss&ref=killscreen.com) WARREN: When *Grand Theft Auto V* came out, I was living in New York, and my wife is from Los Angeles. We started playing it together. It was really surreal for her to see the city depicted in miniature. Now living in Los Angeles, I realize how much that game captures of Southern California—the same way a film like *One Battle After Another* is a love letter to California. The idea of games as places you can go, even if you can't go in real life, they should offer some perspective on the actual place, both for people who live there and for people who never get a chance to visit. ## What Functions Make a City Come Alive—Even in a Game? WARREN: You've written about urban functions—commerce, housing, transportation. I get the sense sometimes that game makers approach cities in terms of the physical environments, as opposed to the systems that undergird them. Even if you're not making a simulation game, there's still the idea that someone has to take out the trash, that there's still municipal government. What are some of the functions of a city that make game cities come alive? DIMOPOULOS: When you think of what people need to be doing at a specific place, that helps you not forget crucial things. If you forget functions, you tend to create places that feel like Disneyland—a facade you just cruise through. People know that crowds move to the square on lunch breaks, and kids will be at the playground after school. Those simple things lend a real sense of authenticity. Warren Spector's *Deus Ex* didn't model thousands of unhoused people in a future dystopia. He just showcased five around a barrel. And you instantly get the idea. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/03/Copy-of-Black-and-White-Photographic-Conference-Event-Website--4096-x-2304-px---Presentation-.jpg) WARREN: You don't need so many things, just enough. Players fill in the negative space of what's implied by the existence of certain characters. I finished a heist in *Grand Theft Auto IV* and jumped out of a plane with a parachute. I landed next to a prison. There was just a gardener doing their thing as this guy landed with a big sack of cash. It was procedural—he just happened to be there. But it spoke so much. For me as a player, there's this whole other universe of things happening. I'm this crazy outlaw adding a level of chaos, and there are just people going about their daily lives. Keep going Killscreen has been walking around game cities and asking what holds them up for fifteen years. Members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) ## What Made SimCity Revolutionary as a City Model? WARREN: What makes *SimCity* special as an object? You'd be hard pressed to find another person who knows more about the game and its origin. GINGOLD: The advertising leaned into the city-is-alive—the living city in your computer. Cars moved, buildings developed, and smoke came out of smokestacks. Fires would unfold across the map. And the scale was huge for the time. You'd scroll around this giant map, and it was alive everywhere. That scale and massive detail and aliveness are very intrinsic to what a city is—sprawling, dense places filled with parallel activity. Then *SimCity* puts the player in a god-like position, and that juxtaposition of the giant living world with that positionality is what made it so engaging. Plus, it's silly. Serious technical stuff like zoning and tax rates, but also a Godzilla-like monster. Serious but silly—that's a very Will Wright design sensibility. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/03/Copy-of-Black-and-White-Photographic-Conference-Event-Website--4096-x-2304-px---Presentation---1-.jpg) WARREN: Walk me through the argument in *Building SimCity*. The thing that was most interesting to me was the web of influences. The book is broken up into the history of simulation, the business environment for Maxis, and then a deeper dive into the design of *SimCity* itself. Can you walk through the interdisciplinary context that made it stand out? GINGOLD: Will Wright didn't just sit down and make up an incredible city model. He built upon work done over many decades. One tradition is cellular automata—Conway's Game of Life is the most famous example. It's very good at rippling spatial simulations, entwined with questions about what is life. Then there's Jay Forrester's system dynamics. Forrester worked on Whirlwind in the 1940s, the first interactive real-time digital computer, then pivoted to MIT's school of business, simulating social systems—firms, then cities, then the whole world. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/03/Gospers_glider_gun.gif) Conway's Game of Life (1970) His urban model got enormous media attention in the early '70s, contemporaneous with the crisis of the cities—civil rights, the Watts uprising. If cellular automata gave *SimCity* its bottom-up texture, system dynamics gave it top-down cohesion—the economic structure tying residential to commercial to industrial demand. Wright smashed it together with the graphical user interface and video games, both relatively new mediums. He put complex simulations traditionally for specialists in the hands of everybody. WARREN: There's thankfully a long history of games being the mechanism by which virtual reality, social networks, or artificial intelligence become playgrounds for deeper ideas. If you have the mindset that games are not so unserious that they can't generate very serious inspiration, you end up in interesting places. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/03/Copy-of-Black-and-White-Photographic-Conference-Event-Website--4096-x-2304-px---Presentation-.png) Dimopolous argues that sign-posting in games can be helpful for real world cities. ## Does SimCity's Ideology Actually Matter? WARREN: You brought up that some of the philosophical ideas about what cities should be are baked into a game like *SimCity*. In a review of Chaim's book, [Celine Nguyen in the *Los Angeles Review of Books*](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/seeing-like-a-simulation/?ref=killscreen.com) talks about the ability to see a system clearly as a precondition to manipulating it—in some ways, a game like *SimCity* gives you all this power. But it also has a bias towards certain types of cities. You can't raise the tax rate too high, or people will riot. You can build lots of cities, but you can't build all of the cities. How much do those critiques really matter? GINGOLD: *SimCity* tries to have it both ways. It's a serious living city, but also—there's the monster. It's just a toy. That's a brilliant rhetorical move. Alan Kay has argued it smuggles in ideology, but I think that distancing—it's a toy, it's real, it's not—makes you aware it's a representation. Will Wright sees everything as materialist representation, like a filmmaker. Unlike Forrester, who thinks he's an engineer solving the world's problems. DIMOPOULOS: It's also something created in the United States. It makes sense for someone in a country that has been creating places *ex novo* for the duration of its existence to start on an empty field. If I made a European city game, I would start with a pre-existing town—Roman, Byzantine, medieval. There's already a tissue. GINGOLD: *SimCity* has a colonial, American ideology baked in, too. There is no *ex novo* here either. It was a settler orientation—just this empty land. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/03/11-1.png) ## How Could Self-Driving Cars Change How We Build Game Cities? WARREN: I live in Los Angeles, and one of the newest entrants to our built environment has been Waymo. The self-driving car could change how cities are organized. You can see a world where parking disappears, or road widths shift, or pedestrian space expands. How long before something like that filters into how game designers depict urban space? Are there assumptions that the self-driving car exposes about the cities we've been building in games for the last 40 or 50 years? DIMOPOULOS: This is at best a taxi. What would change things would be investing in proper mass transportation. But the gameplay possibilities of a self-driving vehicle are immense. GINGOLD: It feels like such an American idea, extrapolating forward from our transportation logic. What if all that technology were refactored? I'm much more excited about the little robots around Berkeley's campus delivering food with animated faces. There are so many other configurations possible. My hope is that it lets us make an urban landscape that is less terrible. WARREN: It doesn't have to be a self-driving car. It could be a self-driving bicycle or rickshaw or some other mobility device. It doesn't *have* to be a Jaguar. --- **Read next:** [The disjointed Prague of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided](https://www.killscreen.com/disjointed-prague-deus-ex-mankind-divided/) · [Understanding the sublime architecture of Bloodborne](https://www.killscreen.com/understanding-sublime-architecture-bloodborne/) · [The secrets of Dishonored 2's mongrel city](https://www.killscreen.com/secrets-dishonored-2s-mongrel-city/) From Killscreen Killscreen has been writing about the cities games build, and the ones they can't, for fifteen years. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### Online Talk: What Do Game Cities Want? URL: https://www.killscreen.com/online-talk-what-do-game-cities-want/ Last updated: 2026-03-12T22:08:37.000Z Cities in games have always been more than backdrops. They encode assumptions about how people move, where power concentrates, what gets built, and what gets torn down. They are systems that speak — about economics, about politics, about what a society values enough to simulate. This conversation brings together two thinkers who have spent their careers at the intersection of urbanism and interactive design. Chaim Gingold, author of *Building SimCity* and collaborator with Will Wright on *Spore*, has traced how simulation games don't just represent cities—they model them as arguments about how the world works. Konstantinos Dimopoulos has built a discipline, game urbanism, around the idea that a city in a game must earn its believability the same way a real city earns its character: through coherence, history, and the texture of daily life. Together they'll examine what cities want from the games that contain them, and what games want from the cities they build. What gets lost when urban complexity is abstracted into mechanics? What gets revealed? And as game engines increasingly shape how a generation understands space, density, and civic life, what responsibility does that carry? [Register Here!](https://riverside.com/studio/jamin-warrens-studio?audienceToken=f18ed210-0de4-45be-a79b-e1103746ae98&ref=killscreen.com) --- ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/02/ABOUT-THE.png) Konstantinos Dimopoulos was born in Athens, Greece, where he studied to become a rural and surveying engineer (with a focus on infrastructure and urbanism) at the NTUA. He then earned my MSc on urban and regional planning at the NTUA School of Architecture. In 2010, He received my PhD in urban planning and geography. Since 2002, he has worked as an engineer, researcher, and lecturer, while publishing papers and contributing to scientific publications. Chaim Gingold is a designer and theorist whose work has been featured in *Wired*, *CNN*, and the *New York Times.* He worked closely with Will Wright on *Spore* and designed the *Spore Creature Creator*. Jamin Warren founded Killscreen as well as Gameplayarts, an organization dedicated to the education and practice of game-based arts and culture. He has produced events such as the Versions conference for VR arts and creativity, in partnership with NEW INC. Warren also programmed the first Tribeca Games Festival, the groundbreaking Arcade at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Kill Screen Festival, which Mashable called "the TED of videogames." Additionally, he has served as an advisor for the Museum of Modern Art's design department, acted as cluster chair for the Gaming category for the Webbys, and hosted Game/Show for PBS Digital Studios. ### Why The Dream Logic of Love Eternal Doesn't Need to Explain Itself URL: https://www.killscreen.com/toby-love-eternal-ambient-game-design-intuition/ Last updated: 2026-08-26T03:05:00.000Z *In 2017, professor Ian Bogost* [*proudly declared in* The Atlantic ](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/video-games-stories/524148/?ref=killscreen.com)*that games don't need stories. "That’s a problem to be ignored rather than solved. Games’ obsession with story obscures more ambitious goals anyway," he wrote. Bogost's general point was that stories are what you build on top of a medium's true material foundations, and games are actually best at disassembling ordinary objects and systems and reassembling them in surprising new ways.* *"There was a really big trend in the 2000s to have your story expressed explicitly through the mechanics," LA-based game designer Toby Alden says. 'The joke I always make is a platformer where it’s like, “I’m* grappling *with the loss of my wife."* *Right around the same time Bogost penned his broadside, brothers Toby and Sam Alden began updating a pet project called* Love*, a hyper-difficult "masocore" game that almost no one finished and, to Bogost's point, was devoid of any narrative. But even for a physics-minded designer like Alden, the allure of telling some kind of story, even if the game itself doesn't demand it, was simply too great. But rather than deliver the story through the player's actions themselves,* [Love Eternal](https://loveeternalgame.com/?ref=killscreen.com), *the newly-released game simply leans into the abstraction.* *You are a Maya, a girl who's family has disappeared during dinner, and you're dropped into a perlious world in clear disrepair. You father has become some kind of wraith and a childhood friend has become something else entirely. It's all eerie but also deliberately indecipherable. In this conversation, Toby and I talk about the influence of ambient music like Aphex Twin, the perils of working with your brother, and* [*how to make games that feel like playing music*](https://www.killscreen.com/burial-says-hes-sorry-dark-souls-2/)*.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/02/LoveEternalscreenshot001.jpg) ## How Do You Design a Level That Feels Like Playing a Theremin? **JAMIN WARREN:** *I first found out about your work from Jenna Caravello, who recommended we connect. I’d reached out to her because I was interested in what was happening with animators in Los Angeles given their relationship to games. How did you make your way into game-making?* **TOBY:** Almost as long as I can remember, it’s been something I’ve wanted to do. Around high school, I played *Cave Story* for the first time and became aware that making a game was something one person could do. As soon as that was on my radar, I began taking stabs at it—making mods for *Cave Story*, trying to make Flash games. I started a lot of projects and didn’t finish any until a little after college. But the desire was there from a young age. **WARREN:** *You’ve mentioned making music and wanting sound to fill the room. Tell me about the relationship between your music practice and your games.* **TOBY:** I’ve made music for a long time—it developed parallel to game making, with a similar trajectory of false starts until around college. A little after that, I started DJing, which I’ve done for almost a decade. Those three form the brunt of my artistic output: DJing, making music, making games. Music and games are very complementary—obviously because games contain music. But there’s almost a parallel between playing a game and playing an instrument, where it produces sound that fills a room. I think a lot about what one of my games would be like if you were in the room but weren’t the one playing—you just heard it. Would it be abrasive? Or would it be more soothing, ambient background noise? Which is what I usually lean towards. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/02/LoveEternalscreenshot002.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/02/LoveEternalscreenshot006.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/02/LoveEternalscreenshot005.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/02/LoveEternalscreenshot004-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/02/LoveEternalscreenshot003.jpg) **WARREN:** *What kind of music were you DJing? Were there particular artists that pulled you into music early on?* **TOBY:** A lot of what I was inspired by early on was sample-based music—DJ Shadow, Burial, IDM like Aphex Twin, and Kettel. A lot of rap production, like *36 Chambers*. Sample-based stuff especially had a big influence because it fit the way I thought about sounds—through experimenting, sampling, and re-sampling. And ambient music. I’ve always listened to a lot of it, and that’s a big part of what I DJ now—stuff that leans toward ambient, dub, ambient techno, down-tempo. **WARREN:** *You didn’t do the music for Love Eternal yourself (Emily Glass did.) Even if you’re not the person making the music, the decision to contract somebody who fits a particular vision speaks to taste. How did you connect with Emily? Did you start with a score in mind?* **TOBY:** She was my first choice because she was the most talented person I knew who made music, and she had the emotional depth and richness of sound I thought would fit really well. Being in the position of directing a project requires this balance of egotism and humility—the things you know you can do well, you want to be confident in. But you really need to know what you’re not good at and then trust the people you assign those roles to. There wasn’t a lot of back and forth—small adjustments to fit technical specifications, but for the most part, I could let them do what I knew they were good at. I wanted the music to be ambient in the classical Brian Eno sense—where if you pay attention, a lot of nuance comes out, but if you don’t, it recedes into the background. I said something along those lines in my original pitch to Emily, and the first thing I got back I was like, “Yep. That’s exactly it.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/02/LoveEternalscreenshot008.jpg) ## Do Games Need to Explain Their Own Mechanics? **WARREN:** *For the story—you’ve said it wasn’t planned in a particular way. I typically don’t think of platformers as games where story isn’t really important anyway. Were there moments where what the game required mechanically was at odds with what you wanted to express narratively?* **TOBY:** No, there wasn’t. There was a really big trend in the 2000s where it was very chic to have your story expressed explicitly through the mechanics—or have the mechanics cleverly comment on your story. The joke I always make is a platformer where it’s like, “I’m grappling with the loss of my wife.” But I think one of the strengths of video games is that people are willing to accept a level of abstraction. They don’t actually find it jarring to do a bunch of arbitrary platforming and then have a story beat. The gravity mechanic—where you can flip gravity—it’s never explained. There’s no in-game reason why you can do that. But I’ve never had anyone ask me why she can do that. I think video games are allowed to operate with this dream-like logic, and you give up some storytelling power if you ignore that. It was very freeing to write the story in a more abstract way that didn’t explain everything. There’s no moment in the game where Maya looks to the camera and says, “What’s going on? Why am I in this castle?” **WARREN:** *The way the game functions is at this subconscious state of working through individual levels. When I would think about things too much, it made it difficult. It felt more like playing a theremin than playing a piano—like playing a fretless bass rather than a harp. Can you tell me about what the feel of the levels should be like?* **TOBY:** A lot of it comes down to intuition and experimentation. There’s a lot of just opening the level editor, smearing some spikes and geometry around, hopping into the game, seeing what it feels like. And then maybe you have one particular moment where it’s like, “Oh, that was really satisfying.” Maybe I can do that a second time in a slightly different way, or structure the whole level around it. That happens more often than sitting down with a fully formed idea. Despite what YouTube essays would have you believe, there aren’t really rules I follow to produce a brilliant level. It’s a lot more experimenting, playing, and seeing what feels fun or interesting. Alden builds by feel and refuses to explain the dream. Killscreen writes about games that trust intuition over the pitch deck — free, in your inbox. [Follow the thread ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=feature-cta) ### Dean Moynihan Announces O EMPIRE! WARD OFF THY ROT URL: https://www.killscreen.com/when-the-rapture-ends-someone-still-has-to-carry-the-relic/ Last updated: 2026-10-17T18:25:14.000Z Dean Moynihan, who releases work as [Awkward Silence Games](https://www.awkwardsilence.co.uk/?ref=killscreen.com), has put up a [Steam page](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4331110/O%5FEMPIRE%5FWARD%5FOFF%5FTHY%5FROT/?ref=killscreen.com) and [itch.io site](https://awkwardsilencegames.itch.io/o-empire?ref=killscreen.com) for *O EMPIRE! WARD OFF THY ROT*, a survival game in development. A lone traveler carries a cursed artifact on foot across an abandoned medieval continent. There is no release date yet. Watch the teaser below. 0:00 /0:45 1× The teaser for **O EMPIRE! WARD OFF THY ROT*, trimmed; the full version with sound is on [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/4331110/O%5FEMPIRE%5FWARD%5FOFF%5FTHY%5FROT/?ref=killscreen.com). Video: Dean Moynihan / Awkward Silence Games The page opens on four lines of setup: the rapture came and went, and those left behind grow sick and scavenge in the wreckage. Play centers on travel rather than combat. The traveler manages stamina and scarce supplies across ruins, roads and empty settlements, and progress is counted in distance covered, resources secured and endurance. The artifact, the page says, "may influence movement and decision-making, becoming increasingly difficult to carry." Story arrives through the environment and rare encounters, with little dialogue. Moynihan cites slow cinema, low fantasy and mythic allegory as the sources of its bleak, contemplative tone, and the art is minimal pixel and bitmap work. The Steam listing is single-player and in English, with Windows system requirements and a mature content advisory. The game's [itch.io page](https://awkwardsilencegames.itch.io/o-empire?ref=killscreen.com), under the Awkward Silence Games account, lists an average session of about an hour and states that no generative AI was used in making it. For more reading, see [Killscreen on *The Flame in the Flood*](https://www.killscreen.com/surviving-america-flame-flood/), the game's [itch.io page](https://awkwardsilencegames.itch.io/o-empire?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/o-empire-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/o-empire-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/o-empire-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/o-empire-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/o-empire-6.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/o-empire-1.jpg) Screenshots from **O EMPIRE! WARD OFF THY ROT*. Images: Dean Moynihan / Awkward Silence Games Slow, authored survival games like this one rarely get written up anywhere. Killscreen's free newsletter finds the work at the edges of games, twice a week. [Get the newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Can AI-Powered Games Actually Teach Anthropology? URL: https://www.killscreen.com/can-ai-powered-games-actually-teach-anthropology/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:07:24.000Z *My wife teaches high school history and, like many educators, is deeply worried about AI's impact on her students' academic lives. It’s a source of constant conversation—I’m no AI-optimist, but I’m far more rosy about the possibilities of the technology than she is. She laments that teachers weren’t brought into the 2022 release of ChatGPT, and that it was foisted upon educators without warning or care. And now administrations everywhere are pushing AI as the future of her field, again with very little input from actual practitioners.* *I assure her, “Just wait until academics figure out the best way to use LLMs.” She justifiably rolls her eyes. I’m not moving the goalposts, of course, I’m just waiting. So, finding the work of Michael Peter Hoffmann, hopefully, will tip the rhetorical balance in my favor.* *Hoffmann is a researcher who occupies an unusual position at the intersection of two disciplines that rarely speak to each other. By day, he builds and evaluates AI models at the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum, one of Germany's premier supercomputing centers in Munich. By training, he is an anthropologist who spent three to four years doing fieldwork in Nepal and India—studying debt-bonded laborers in the lowlands of Western Nepal, visiting brick kilns and construction sites, and descending into a sand mine where hundreds of families dug and sold sand while a whole economy churned invisibly around them. It was in that sand mine, he says, that the idea first struck him: the stories he was gathering were extraordinary, but the academic monographs that would contain them would reach almost no one.* *His solution is what he calls an "Anthrogame"—a game that conveys anthropological knowledge with ethnographic thickness. In a series of papers beginning in 2024, Hoffmann and his collaborators at Freie Universität Berlin fed Bronislaw Malinowski's* Argonauts of the Western Pacific, *a standard Anthro 101 text,* *into a Large Language Model and produced an “AI-native” text adventure where players step into the role of a fieldworker arriving on the islands, Malinowski’s academic advisor, or Malinowski himself.* *The results were promising and imperfect: the AI struggled with biographical depth, tended toward monotonic responses over extended play, and was susceptible to hallucination. But it also generated genuine curiosity. Many who playtested the game were surprised to find themselves drawn into a world they'd never encountered. Anthropologists, predictably the harshest critics, still wanted to try it in their classrooms.* *What follows is a conversation about why anthropology may be the original worldbuilding discipline, why game makers have been reluctant to set their work in real cultures rather than fictional ones, and what it means to translate a text—already a translation of a life world—into something you can play.* --- ***JAMIN WARREN: How did you make your way to artificial intelligence as an anthropologist? Was your background as an anthropologist first, or were you already interested in the technology?*** MICHAEL PETER HOFFMANN: AI is something I started very early. When I was 16, 17, I started programming and worked on little games—board games, actually. I started out as a computer scientist in Munich, and from there went into anthropology to study something different. ***JW: When you're explaining what an anthropologist does to someone who's not familiar with the field, what's the dinner party definition?*** MH: An anthropologist goes to another setting—usually further away—and you dive into a culture for at least 12 months, to get a whole yearly cycle. In my case, I went to Western Nepal, to a town called Tikapur. I studied the lives, politics, and economics of former debt-bonded laborers. You describe these systems, and it's a translation process. *JW: I can understand the appeal of games as a medium for this—many of them put you in a different place, in a different time, and expect you to make your way there. As you noted in your papers, there is a history of in-game anthropologies, applying anthropological tools as virtual worlds come to resemble human societies. For a skeptic, what is the value of doing that?* MH: My take is that anthropologists should make video games. There are hardly any who have done it, because game-making is really hard. But not everyone has the fortune to dive into another culture. Games could be a way to give people a chance to experience such settings. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/02/malinowskiLensHoffmann--1-.pdf-2026-02-12-at-2.40.46-PM.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/02/Wmalinowski_trobriand_isles_1918_-cropped--1.jpg) AI-generated scene from the game ’Malinowski’s Lens’ , Bronislaw Malinowski with natives on Trobriand Islands; between October 1917 and October 1918 *JW: How are you defining the term "Anthrogame"?* MH: An Anthrogame conveys cultural knowledge and anthropological insights to an audience who wants to play it. The key characteristic is that it's "ethnographically thick"—a term anthropologists use. You want to describe a culture not superficially but in depth. If you can convey that thick writing into a game, it becomes an Anthrogame. Keep going Killscreen goes long on the people using games as research tools. Members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) *JW: Game genres are usually focused on mechanics—is it a first-person shooter, is it a platformer, etc. As a result, you end up with less experimentation on the setting. Games have a history of doing history, at least, partly from the legacy of tabletop roleplaying and wargaming. But stepping into a real culture and experiencing it—that's not a place games have spent much time. Why do you think game makers have stayed away from that?* MH: If you want to do this seriously, you have to dive into a culture first, and *that takes a long time.* Fictional games give you more freedom—you're not constrained by reality. With an anthropological game, you should ground it in the reality of the society and be respectful towards the community you're representing. It's also a double translation—anthropological books are already one anthropologist's subjective view, and then you translate that again into a game. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/02/malinowskiLensHoffmann--1-.pdf-2026-02-12-at-2.41.21-PM.jpg) *JW: What compelled you to create AI-driven games for a teaching context?* MH: It started out of a frustration. I spent three to four years doing fieldwork in Nepal and India, and when you write your work up, you write it for a limited academic audience. Reading is in decline, let's be honest. I'm not saying this should replace reading—I'm a big fan of books—but this could be an appetizer. You play it for a bit, you get interested, and then you start to read the book. *JW: Walk me through developing the game. You chose interactive fiction as the format—how do you go from the text to something playable?* MH: When there was the ChatGPT, I thought something like *The Oregon Trail* would be a good start in a very easy way. If you want to turn Malinowski's book into a 3D game, you have to produce assets that look like the Trobriands, and you won't find that on the Unity Store. So stay without graphics first, then go toward the hard parts. My day job is at a Supercomputing Center in Germany building AI models, so it's an interesting way to apply that off-hours. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/02/malinowskiLensHoffmann--1-.pdf-2026-02-12-at-2.41.48-PM.jpg) Sample prompt generated the game world *JW: "AI-powered game" has become this term that gets thrown around. When you say "AI-native game," what does that mean functionally in terms of how the game expresses itself?* The text gets fed into a Large Language Model through a Retrieval Augmented Generation technique. That means you force the LLM to really **just** read from the book. The output is a short description of a scene, and then you have different scene choices, and you can pick them. It's like a *Dungeons & Dragons* setting where the LLM is the dungeon master and creates the scenes, and then you are stepping into the role of the anthropologist. You also have an open input field—instead of these three options, you could say whatever. Like*, go to the center of the island or try to go to a canoe and go to the next island.* The advantage is that every game is different. Once you build such a structure, you could theoretically do it with a whole different range of anthropological books or historical books. *JW: With students playing the game, was there a particular interaction that stood out—something the game revealed in the play structure that was a sign you were moving in the right direction?* MH: Students tried very quickly to find a shortcut to solve the four quests. That was surprising for me, and also refreshing—they took a gamer's approach and tried to hack it. *JW: Yeah, that happens.* --- **Read next:** [Why should we treat videogames as archaeological sites?](https://www.killscreen.com/mapping-the-unmappable-florence-smith-nicholls-archaeogaming/) · [The Inner Lives of Lawrence Lek's Emotional AI](https://www.killscreen.com/lawrence-lek-ai-consciousness-smart-city-trilogy/) · [What Happens When You Can Do Nothing in a War Zone?](https://www.killscreen.com/alan-kwan-scent-video-game-witness/) From Killscreen Killscreen interviews the researchers and artists building games that argue. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### He Fed a Classic Anthropology Text To Make An AI Game. Here's What Happened. URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/he-fed-a-classic-anthropology-text-to-make-an-ai-game-heres-what-happened/ Last updated: 2026-02-13T01:01:08.000Z In 1922, Bronislaw Malinowski’s *Argonauts of the Western Pacific* changed anthropology forever, introducing the world to "thick description" and the rigors of deep fieldwork. A century later, researcher Michael Hoffman is bringing that text into the future. In this episode, Jamin Warren sits down with Hoffman—a computer scientist and anthropologist at one of Germany’s premier supercomputing centers—to discuss his creation of the "Anthrogame." By feeding classic ethnographic texts into Large Language Models, Hoffman has built a playable Dungeon Master version of Trobriand society, where players navigate the complex social and economic rituals of the South Pacific. We explore the intersection of worldbuilding and fieldwork, the frustration of academic reach, and whether AI can turn dense monographs into "appetizers" that make us more curious about the real world. Is anthropology the original worldbuilding discipline? And why haven't game designers tapped into the "thick description" of real cultures? **Host:** Jamin Warren **Guest:** Michael Hoffman (Leibniz-Rechenzentrum) - ([00:00](https://share.transistor.fm/s/43cce5e2?ref=killscreen.com#t=0m0s)) - Introduction: The Decline of Reading - ([00:27](https://share.transistor.fm/s/43cce5e2?ref=killscreen.com#t=0m27s)) - Anthropology and AI: A New Frontier - ([01:27](https://share.transistor.fm/s/43cce5e2?ref=killscreen.com#t=1m27s)) - Michael Hoffman's Journey - ([02:40](https://share.transistor.fm/s/43cce5e2?ref=killscreen.com#t=2m40s)) - The Intersection of Anthropology and Game Design - ([28:57](https://share.transistor.fm/s/43cce5e2?ref=killscreen.com#t=28m57s)) - Cultural Representation in Pedagogy - ([29:33](https://share.transistor.fm/s/43cce5e2?ref=killscreen.com#t=29m33s)) - Malinowski and the Argonauts of the Western Pacific - ([34:47](https://share.transistor.fm/s/43cce5e2?ref=killscreen.com#t=34m47s)) - Developing an AI-Powered Text Adventure Game - ([46:22](https://share.transistor.fm/s/43cce5e2?ref=killscreen.com#t=46m22s)) - Challenges and Future of AI in Anthropology Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by [Nick Sylvester](https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com). Subscribe to Killscreen for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to info@killscreen.com Please consider supporting independent media! [**★ Support this podcast ★**](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/support) #### What is The Killscreen Podcast? Jamin Warren founded Killscreen as well as Gameplayarts, an organization dedicated to the education and practice of game-based arts and culture. He has produced events such as the Versions conference for VR arts and creativity, in partnership with NEW INC. Warren also programmed the first Tribeca Games Festival, the groundbreaking Arcade at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Kill Screen Festival, which Mashable called "the TED of videogames." Additionally, he has served as an advisor for the Museum of Modern Art's design department, acted as cluster chair for the Gaming category for the Webbys, and hosted Game/Show for PBS Digital Studios. ### February Killscreen Gaming Club URL: https://www.killscreen.com/february-killscreen-gaming-club/ Last updated: 2026-02-11T01:38:38.000Z _This post is for subscribers only._ ### What Happens When You Preserve Your Games While You're Still Making Them? URL: https://www.killscreen.com/what-happens-when-you-preserve-your-games-while-youre-still-making-them/ Last updated: 2026-03-12T22:09:53.000Z ## Simon Flesser sits in his Malmö studio, surrounded by 15 years of digital ghosts. Behind him, I spy the unmistakable presence of a hulking phonograph, the iPhone of the 19th century. It's a curious choice, and for someone who has spent the entirety of their professional career making games in digital environments, the reminder of a once-passed technology sums up their current focus: preserving their own past. Late last year, Simogo–a creative partnership between Flesser and Gordon Gardebäck—released its [Legacy Collection](https://simogo.com/work/simogolegacycollection/?ref=killscreen.com), porting seven iOS games to modern platforms. It may seem quaint, but if you bought an iPhone and were around to launch the App Store in its earliest incarnations, there was an amazingly rich period of game-making in those late aughts. It's understandable that you would want to bring some of that work into a modern context. But this isn't a typical remaster. I've been thinking about preservation lately, working on a project with the Getty Research Institute. [They did something for the 20th anniversary of Disney Concert Hall](https://gehry.getty.edu/?ref=killscreen.com)—Frank Gehry's archive is remarkable, all these scale models and photographs documenting the building's evolution. It made me wonder: is there something about games that doesn't lend itself to that kind of personal archiving the way architecture or graphic design does? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/02/image.png) Still from interview with Frank Gehry for [Sculpting Harmony](https://gehry.getty.edu/?ref=killscreen.com) archival project for the Getty. ## Why Digital Games Are Harder to Preserve Than Physical Art Flesser acknowledges the paradox. Digital files *should* be easier to preserve than physical artifacts, yet shifting platforms and proprietary ecosystems make games more ephemeral than sketches or models. Unlike architects who archive scale models, fashion designers who maintain pattern libraries, or musicians' collections of demos, game makers rarely build preservation into their practice. There's less detritus, fewer drawers to store work in. The archive must be actively maintained, or it simply disappears. What Simogo built addresses their past differently. Flesser and his collaborators created a virtual phone interface for Switch and PC, complete with simulated motion controls and dual-cursor touch mechanics. There's something really poignant about this virtual phone—I played it on the Switch—because I'm "holding" a device that I spent thousands of hours pouring over that no longer exists. You can stretch, pull, pinch, and zoom just as you once did. The Legacy collection preserves the relationship between your hand and the screen of yesteryear, and novelty rushes back in a flood. "For us, how do we make a system where we could show the pixels exactly as they were?" he explains. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/02/Simogo-Quote-Card.png) Still from **The* **Sailor's Dream* (2014) The approach stands in deliberate opposition to how most games handle their history. Franchises like *Resident Evil* and *Halo* rebuild from the ground up—polishing graphics, modernizing controls—to chase what players remember. The purpose is to evoke an affective response in players–the feeling of what it would have been to boot up a PlayStation or Xbox. Simogo is committed to a different project entirely: preservation as fidelity. "We would always have to say, 'No, actually this needs to be exactly as they were when they released.'" The distinction matters. Remasters capture games as you remember them. Preservation captures them as they are. ### What Does It Mean to "Author" a Game? As a result, you get a unique view into what sustained authorship looks like in games. That continuity matters to me because games struggle with authorship in ways other media don't. Big-budget releases involve hundreds of people coming and going; there's rarely a singular voice. Moreover, games in recent decades have grown to an enormous scale, and unlike film, which has a long history of individual contributions (which is why the Oscars have so many categories), games pass through the hands of hundreds across corporate landscapes that can span years. The history of games is rife with game designers who ship a signature title but fail to build a long career, let alone one that you could identify as distinctly their own. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-7.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-1.jpg) By contrast, Simogo's output has actually slowed as they've matured—seven titles in five years, then two games over the following decade—a dramatic deceleration that reveals a unique DNA that's invisible if you play each game in isolation. Simogo's stable partnership—Flesser and Gordon Gardebäck at the core, with longtime collaborators like composer Daniel Olsén—builds an oeuvre the way bands or filmmakers do. It's a distinct body of work from a team that operates without rigid roles. This flexibility matters as timelines expand and creative stakes shift."Even if you look at the story of *Bumpy Road*, you sort of see the early themes of death and memories as a recurring thing," Flesser says. "Life, love, and loss basically." The progression from *Bumpy Road*'s pixel-art whimsy to *Device 6*'s typographic architecture to *Sailor's Dream*'s fragmentary atmosphere is the mark of artists stumbling around saying the same thing in different ways. ### Can You Preserve Your Work While You're Still Creating? It's interesting doing this preservation work while you're still in the middle of your creative career as an artist. Many fields have preservationists who handle archival work separately from active production, although that work can still be preserved posthumously. But games don't afford that luxury. Flesser can't just put things in drawers; he has to actively port, rebuild, and maintain. "It's also not entirely preservation because it's just moving it from one digital platform to another," he notes darkly. "But on the other hand, the minute or the hour that it's on PC, it will get pirated, and so it becomes available forever." Of course, a living archive released at the midpoint of your career gets me feeling some kind of way about *my own* mortality. I've been looking at games professionally for almost two decades, so looking back in my recent past is welcome but complicated. I remember jumping into Simogo's work almost immediately as a twentysomething, looking to fill my New York City subway rides, desperately listening for the drumbeats in *Beat Sneak Bandit*, closing my eyes in terror of *Year Walk*, scrambling to find someone to lend me an iPad to contort the screen in *Device 6*. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-5-1.jpg) The Saul Bass scenography of **Beat Sneak Bandit* (2012) The Legacy Collection arrives at a moment when Flesser's relationship to his younger work has crystallized into simultaneous proximity and distance. "You are sort of embarrassed because they're maybe trying to do more than they could," he says of the early games. "That's laudable because we weren't holding back." As any type of creative person, your sense of what's good becomes both limited and honed by age—you know what's been done before, so you know what's actually novel. But there's something about being able to make work for your peers. "Games, in many ways, are still toys. They don't have to be, but they can be," Flesser says. "That's not necessarily a bad thing." But when you're 60, trying to make games for someone who's 15, that's going to be much harder. I remember playing *Sailor's Dream* when it first came out a decade ago. My approach to it is different now, with some life behind me—I have a daughter, my parents are getting older, and a game about losing someone is no longer abstract. Some themes in games are hard to really feel until you've got some life under your belt. The hope as a game maker is that you can continue exploring different expressions of humanity as you experience more of life. "I've always been slightly obsessed with houses that you can't enter or doors that don't open," Flesser says. "There's so much stuff you can imagine." There's always a mystery with the things we can't quite unlock, the corners of our lives that we can't quite peek around, books unopened, and lives not lived. "The doors are sort of always closed for us when we finish a project," Flesser says. "It's more like, 'Ah, okay, now we don't have to think about this anymore.'" But it's ok, because someone else will. ### Why This Game About the Haitian Revolution Has No Bullets URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/why-this-game-about-the-haitian-revolution-has-no-bullets/ Last updated: 2026-01-28T16:00:26.000Z [Read the full article.](https://www.killscreen.com/dom-rabrun-veve-punk-haitian-revolution-videogame/) There's already a game about the Haitian Revolution. It's part of Assassin's Creed. You sneak around, you stab people, you "free the slaves"—and the game gives you an achievement notification. Dom Rabrun thinks that's bullshit. The Haitian-American painter and game designer is building Vèvè-Punk: Mind Singer, a game about the Haitian Revolution that refuses to let you pick up a weapon. Instead, you navigate Saint-Domingue's 16 racial classifications through dialogue trees, where saying the wrong thing to the wrong person can get you killed. Your protagonist isn't a soldier—she's a telepath and a singer. A free woman of color with zero strength, zero dexterity, and everything on the line. Dom's work sits at the intersection of Haitian Vodou symbolism, Basquiat's visual language, and the kind of thoughtful, conversation-driven game design you'd find in *Disco Elysium*. He's part of a generation of artists who grew up with games, studied painting, then realized that interactivity might be the best way to tell certain stories. But there's no lineage for what he's doing. Black filmmakers have Oscar Micheaux, Charles Burnett, Ava DuVernay. Black game designers? They're writing that history right now. In this conversation, we discuss why physical violence is the laziest choice in games, what it means to hold a controller and "control" someone, and how Basquiat's painting *Glenn* taught him to think about right-clicking on reality. We also tackle the deeper question: when you're making a game about historical trauma, about enslavement, about revolution—how do you do that without replicating the very dehumanization you're trying to critique? [**About Dom Rabrun**](https://www.domrabrun.com/?ref=killscreen.com)**:** Dom's work merges technology, storytelling, and music into a cohesive creative system. Guided by his first-generation Haitian-American heritage, conservative Christian upbringing, and 15 years of experience in IT, he's developed a philosophy called "Vèvè-Punk," blending Haitian Vodou symbolism with futuristic Afro-Caribbean themes. In 2020, his video piece *Dr. LaSalle, The Spider Queen, and Me* earned first prize in a juried exhibition at the Phillips Collection. He was a 2022 fellow with Black Public Media, which is now executive producing his forthcoming video game. He lives and works in Hyattsville, Maryland. If you like what you're listening to, [please consider becoming a member.](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/) ### No Shots Will Be Fired In Dom Rabrun’s Haitian Revolution URL: https://www.killscreen.com/dom-rabrun-veve-punk-haitian-revolution-videogame/ Last updated: 2026-09-14T17:08:00.000Z Artist Dom Rabrun sarcastically remembers the first game about the Haitian Revolution. "It's an Assassin's Creed offshoot made by mostly white folks," he says, his voice picking up speed, volume, and intensity as he teases out the story. "*'Shh! Shh! Wa! Shh! Shh! I'm gonna free slaves! Oh my God. Psh!' You freed the slaves! Bah-bah-bah-bah-bah!*,” he gesticulates from his apartment outside Washington, D.C., and describes a game that’s more like *Call of Duty* than *12 Years a Slave.* He pauses. "*That's* what we're doing?" Rabrum snorts. The Hyattsville, Maryland-based painter and game designer isn't interested in making *that* game. His project, [*Vèvè-Punk: Mind Singer*](https://www.domrabrun.com/mindsinger?ref=killscreen.com), approaches his heritage and the Haitian Revolution through dialogue and choice rather than combat. The protagonist, Fabienne, is a free woman of color, a telepath and singer with zero strength and dexterity, who returns to the village to stop a super-soldier attempting to sabotage the Haitian Revolution. "Physical violence is so easy in games," Rabrun says. "I'm really interested in the conflicts that happen when a formerly enslaved person is talking to someone of a different social status and has to pretend like he doesn't know something.” This “double consciousness” is precisely what has kept the diaspora alive throughout the former enslaved labor colonies, and capturing that tactical linguistic specificity is an interesting design challenge. “What does that dialogue tree look like for someone who's like, 'All right, if I don't say the right thing, this dude is gonna murder me.'" Part of the new crop of visual artists who grew up on games and now are approaching the medium with their brush in hand, Rabrun's path to game development wasn't direct. He lived in a rent-controlled building in Brooklyn, raised by his mother, who bought him and his brother a Mac in 1994, when she was dying of HIV-related illnesses, and most Americans didn't own computers, especially BIPOC Americans. He remembers specific games with unusual clarity: *Flying Colors*, a proto-Photoshop program that let you create strange animated tableaux. *Super Mario World* on a neighbor's Super Nintendo, the sound still vivid decades later. “It’s been this dance of me being so in love with games as a medium and for portions of my life trying to downplay just how important they are to me.” Aside from the cultural penalty the arts-minded can endure when taking games seriously, Rabrun’s religious community complicated his affection for it, while also enhancing its allure and adding a touch of the forbidden. Raised as a Jehovah's Witness, drawing comics—his first love—meant drawing violence, which wasn't allowed. Art itself wasn't exactly encouraged. "I come from a very conservative Christian, super working-class family," he says. "Drawing for me was always my thing, and I was rarely, if ever, praised for it or even barely acknowledged. It was like, 'Oh yeah, that's a thing you do.'" ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/01/Dom-01-Cropped-Small.webp) Rabrun's **We See You* mural (2024) in honor of America's first Black broadcast news anchor He discovered comic artist James Jean around the same time he connected with Basquiat, and his practice has attempted to blend his two loves by drawing heavily on Haitian and Caribbean tradition. He spent two childhood summers with an aunt succumbing to the distraction with his nose pressed firmly in a GameBoy Color with *Pokémon Yellow*. The trip left impressions on him, if only that it was one of the few times his homeland was treated as a vibrant place, not an empty threat to send him away. Basquiat was both an obvious entry point, a comparison that he bristles at as a lazy touchstone for any Haitian artist, but his encounter with *Glenn* (1985) at the Museum of Modern Art conceptually opened doors for his future game practice. In the seven-foot canvas, an enormous head speaks–no, screams—into a white background, an attempt to puncture invisibility with the power of sound. To Rabrun, the painting was an invitation to step into the work through the language of computers. “If you could imagine right-clicking on an element of a Basquiat painting, what does that menu look like? Pretty much any element you click is gonna give you sound, video, weird shit.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/01/image.png) Jean-Michel Basqiat's 1985 "Glenn" In Rabrun’s paintings, flat perspectives force foreground and background to hold equal weight, where a goat and a hurricane share the same visual importance. "It's ancient wisdom," he says. "Our ancestors knew a thousand years ago that the earth is important. You should be able to hold a leaf and be like, '*The leaf is me too*.'" That compositional approach, he notes, flies in the face of games' typical hierarchy of player over non-player: "I click this thing, and my character moves here. What does it mean to even hold this controller and control someone?" His painting practice eventually led him back to games through [*Hip Hop RPG*,](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4CvmiLDOUXRDoOW4ys9hYkLcWFRLZz49&ref=killscreen.com) a six-episode animated series about an SNES-style RPG starring Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and Tyler, the Creator in a post-apocalyptic world. The work is a bit of a time capsule, given how complicated his protagonists have become over the last few years (Kanye, let's say, hasn't aged well.). In the first episode, Drake heals Kendrick—a detail that feels stranger now, given their current relationship. The series never finished. "I was a baby writer," Rabrun admits. "I hadn't scoped out the whole story." But *Hip Hop RPG* taught him what he wanted to make. It also foregrounds Black art and establishes his voice as someone looking to translate what animated Rabrun about our culture. When Black Public Media executive producer Lisa Osborne saw his pitch for a character-select screen showing the racial and class stratifications of 1790 Saint-Domingue, she told him to turn it into a real game. "I was like, 'Oh my God,'" he recalls. "And she was right." The challenge goes beyond game design. "Being Black sometimes, when you're just trying to make stuff that’s historically accurate, you feel like this...ugh," he says, searching for words. "Like you think of something like *Amistad* or *Roots*. And I ask myself this all the time: Does this work in games?” It’s a tension I feel personally–I want to foreground Black joy, but it can be hard to find that wonder when the past, present, and future can seem so burdened. “On the flip side, I'm like, o*kay, well, how many games have I played about a samurai? Or a fiefdom in ancient Europe somewhere.* And I'm like, okay, well then why is *this* one uncomfortable?" ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/01/Fabienne-Neutral-Portrait.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/01/Mind-Singer-Map-Small.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/01/Mind-Singer-Theater-BG.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/01/Montrevel-Portrait.webp) *Mind Singer* is now 70% complete in its vertical slice phase. The game is playable, though Rabrun knows it needs more narrative tension, more of what makes stories work. “What are Toussaint Louverture’s stats?” he wonders. He's aiming for something between Donald Glover and David Lynch, citing *Disco Elysium* as a touchstone. "I want games where you sit and think about stuff and talk," he says. These quiet acts of resistance, rebellion, and occasional violence are more in line with contemporary understandings of enslaved rebellions. “Because slaveholders wrote the first draft of history,” historian Vincent Brown [lamented in *The New Yorker*](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/27/the-long-war-against-slavery?ref=killscreen.com), “subsequent historiography has strained to escape from their point of view.” Brown argues that it’s better to think of each uprising as part of a larger struggle for freedom, rather than isolated acts of bravery, a sentiment Rabrun echoes: “I'm walking on ice. I know that. It's like you have to make these deliberate choices for how the audience will see it." There's no lineage for what he's attempting. Unlike film, where decades of diasporic filmmakers from Oscar Micheaux to Charles Burnett to Ava DuVernay built a tradition, games offer a sparse foundation in need of deeper historical scholarship. There are wonderful new communities like Game Devs of Color, but the future history of Black game design is really starting *today*. "I got a little terrified just now," Rabrun says when this comes up. "It is kind of me in this place. *I'm like, okay. And I have this awesome team*, and we're like, *okay, we're gonna do this thing*." In some ways, Ubisoft did him a favor. They took the low-hanging fruit—the combat, the stealth kills, the "freed the slaves" achievement notifications. Now Rabrun is free to make something else entirely. "I'm not interested in showing the murder," he says. "I'm interested in what that dialogue tree looks like." Saint-Domingue had 16 racial classifications. Navigating that social structure without a weapon—only words, only choices, only the consequences of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person—that's the revolution Rabrun wants to put in your hands. --- **Read next:** [What Happens When You Can Do Nothing in a War Zone?](https://www.killscreen.com/alan-kwan-scent-video-game-witness/) · [The difficult history of videogames and indigenous people](https://www.killscreen.com/difficult-history-videogames-indigenous-people/) · [The forgotten politics behind Contra's name](https://www.killscreen.com/the-forgotten-politics-behind-contras-name/) From Killscreen Killscreen has spent fifteen years on games that refuse the obvious move — the ones that put down the gun and find something harder to do. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### When it rains in Manhattan, it rains in Santa Fe URL: https://www.killscreen.com/zurkow-schmitz-river-is-a-circle-thoma/ Last updated: 2026-10-07T21:44:29.000Z The Hudson in *The River is a Circle* is split horizontally — history above the waterline, ecology below — and none of it is footage. Marina Zurkow and James Schmitz's generative animation redraws itself continuously from algorithmic probability and live data: real-time weather, light cycles, tides and the marine traffic actually moving past Manhattan's Meatpacking District. When a front rolls over the Hudson, the artwork clouds over with it. [The clip the Thoma Foundation posted](https://www.instagram.com/p/DcJa-DSReSE/?ref=killscreen.com) catches its toylike drift, barges and fish stacked like a living cross-section diagram. 0:00 /0:36 1× **The River is a Circle* at the Whitney’s Hyundai Terrace (excerpt, muted). [Full documentation on Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/1086922924?ref=killscreen.com). Above the surface, [six chosen inflection points](https://www.bitforms.art/artwork/the-river-is-a-circle?ref=killscreen.com) of the district's history flow together: Lenape presence before 1609, Dutch colonization, nineteenth-century industry, the queer nightlife that filled the hollowed-out district from 1970 to 1990, post-2001 gentrification, and two speculative futures. Below, a database of 2025 Hudson ecology drives fish that school, keep diurnal schedules and shift with the seasons, swimming past oyster-reef restoration and the occasional diver. [The credits run deep](https://o-matic.com/work/the-river-is-a-circle/?ref=killscreen.com): animation by Ewan Creed, research by David Guzman. Commissioned in 2025 for [the Whitney's Hyundai Terrace](https://whitney.org/exhibitions/marina-zurkow?ref=killscreen.com), where it ran through today, then blown across the screens of Times Square as a Midnight Moment last September, the work is now on view in [Deconstructing Landscape](https://www.bitforms.art/exhibition/deconstructing-landscape?ref=killscreen.com) at the Thoma Collection in Santa Fe's Railyard Arts District. What Killscreen sees here is the procedural machinery of games — weather systems, spawn tables, day-night cycles — pointed at history instead of play: a persistent world that runs whether or not anyone is watching. Zurkow has said that “animation has freedom from verisimilitude, and warrants the fantastic,” and the fantastic here is rigorous. We watched a game wire itself to live weather back in 2015 with [*Lovely Weather We're Having*](https://www.killscreen.com/lovely-weather-were-having-pleasant-its-name-implies/). Zurkow and Schmitz complete the thought: simulation as a landscape painting that never repeats itself. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/river-is-a-circle-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/river-is-a-circle-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/river-is-a-circle-3.jpg) **The River is a Circle* installed at the Whitney, 2025\. Courtesy the artists and bitforms gallery. Simulation as art is a beat we’ve worked for a decade, from live-weather games to generative rivers. The free newsletter follows the world-builders working outside the game industry. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Why should we treat videogames as archaeological sites? URL: https://www.killscreen.com/mapping-the-unmappable-florence-smith-nicholls-archaeogaming/ Last updated: 2026-09-12T17:05:55.000Z Most games treat history like set dressing. A Roman column here, a weathered scroll there, all rendered in exquisite detail but ultimately just a backdrop. [Florence Smith Nicholls](https://florencesmithnicholls.com/?ref=killscreen.com) approaches the relationship between archaeology and games from the opposite direction. After seven years working as a professional archaeologist in London—documenting sites before developers paved them over, assessing archaeological potential in planning reports—they started asking a different question: what if games themselves are the archaeological sites? Below is an edited transcript of our conversation from our podcast released today. --- **You spent seven years working as a professional archaeologist before making your way into games. What led you to archaeology as a profession?** Back at secondary school, I studied Classical Civilization as an A-level—that's between the ages of 16 and 18 before going off to university. I really enjoyed that because it gave a general kind of overview, looking at archaeology, history, all these things to do with the classical world. I realized I wanted to look at classical archaeology specifically. I came out of university and needed to get a job, so I got one as a field archaeologist in London. I did that for several years, working on construction sites, areas that were going to be developed, doing various bits of field work on those sites. Then I was a heritage consultant, also in London, doing reports on the archaeological potential of sites in the planning process, gauging what kind of archaeological work needs to be done in advance or during specific developments, depending on what the archaeological potential was. **In the United States, the classical work we have is mostly indigenous artifacts. In terms of urbanization in the last 300 years, the cities that we have, the ancient cities that we have in the United States, do not map directly onto where ancient cities were in terms of size and scale, unlike say Mexico City. I suspect that there are more of these issues with European cities where there's less space, people have been building on top of certain areas for a long time, as opposed to maybe places in the Americas where there might be more space for people to move around.** **Every tour guide in Rome always tells you, "Rome's like a lasagna! You can't build here. There's always something to dig up."** Yes, exactly. Yeah. The different layers. That's it. Yeah. No, that's totally true. ![Tools are laying out on a piece of wood](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1722836723721-917eb3ba14d7?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDV8fGFyY2hhZW9sb2d5fGVufDB8fHx8MTc2NTkyMTM0NXww&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000) Photo by [Trnava University](https://unsplash.com/@trnavskauni?ref=killscreen.com) / [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?utm%5Fsource=ghost&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcampaign=api-credit) **When you say "classical archaeology," what does that mean—the method or the time period or both?** That was more the time period. Classics as a whole—very broadly, that would be ancient Greek and ancient Roman periods. But I was really interested in Bronze Age Greece specifically, from around roughly 3000 BC to 1100 BC. It's bad because I specialized in this a while ago, so I'm always thinking, *okay, I need to remember the dates for these things*. It's not what I'm thinking about these days. But I was quite interested in pre-classical Greece, actually, weirdly enough. **When you started thinking about engaging with games, did your colleagues in archaeology understand what you were thinking about?** I discovered video games archaeology, or “archaeogaming” as a thing in the mid-2010s on Twitter. When Twitter was, you know, still toxic in some ways, but not what it is currently. It was very much an online community. There were a few archaeologists here and there who were very interested in this area. In terms of my day-to-day work, the people I was working with had never heard of this, not surprisingly. When I'd bring it up—I was doing my own independent research on the side—some people were just a little bit confused or kind of like, "Okay, why are you doing this?" It just didn't seem relevant to them. But there were people who were curious about it and maybe could see where the applications were. I think over time it has become more and more—people in the archaeological community do see the relevance or value in it. But especially in the mid-2010s and onwards, people were very confused. It's a very niche little thing, which does make sense. **I guess that's true. I think with games, sometimes there is a perception for people coming from outside or in academia—there's obviously very serious siloing that happens inside the academy. People like to have their thing. And when you start thinking in an interdisciplinary way, you're sort of stuck between worlds. I believe that the study of games has been very challenging because the application of it is really spread across—there's obviously the engineering and technical side.** **Still, you can look at games as literature. You can look at it as poetry. You can look at the visual elements. There are interactive systems. It's almost like games as a medium are almost so rich it becomes very hard sometimes to—if you just want to focus on one specific thing, sometimes the place that you're coming from may not recognize where it is that you're trying to go.** Yes, definitely. And even though I always think, "Well, surely we're past that at this stage," but honestly, even now, all the time, I will talk to people, and they don't understand games as being something beyond something very specific for them. They have these very entrenched ideas of what they are and who they're for and what they can be. I know that also is a thing in games discourse and people in the industry who always feel like they want to be taken as seriously as film or something. But it's true. People don't—I've met people who are like, "Oh, you could do game studies? Like film studies?" It's like, "Well, of course, yeah!" But to them that just doesn't make sense. So it's interesting that that is still a prevailing misconception. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/image-2.png) Florence at work (just kidding!) **How has your hands-on excavation experience shaped how you approach game analysis?** It's a really interesting question because I think there is a disconnect between this idea of archaeology and video games. Archaeology is very much about materiality. If you are a field archaeologist, it is literally that embodied experience of being on a site, even just touching soil—that's a way of gauging different contexts and things like that when you're thinking about digital space, that can be challenging because by definition, you're thinking about an immaterial space in a way. However, the way it has influenced me is to think of play as not just what happens on the screen. Play always has a context. There's always a person or people—they may not always be in the same room, but they are physically playing with hardware. I think about the specific context in which people access and play these games. What is the materiality of that play, even if it's still very much an immaterial experience in some ways? There's an article by T.L. Taylor called "[The Assemblage of Play](https://tltaylor.com/2009/07/assemblage-of-play/?ref=killscreen.com)" which was very influential for me because she really talks about this idea of when we play, there's always an assemblage of the player, the hardware, the software. But also thinking about, *well, what time of day are they playing*? Is someone playing on their phone? What else do they have going on in their life at the same time? How does it form part of the routine of their life? Or how is it influenced by other things that are going on? That's something I try to think about a lot. > [Sometimes a bloodstain is worth a thousand words](https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldenring/comments/tpoi4f/sometimes%5Fa%5Fbloodstain%5Fis%5Fworth%5Fa%5Fthousand%5Fwords/?ref=killscreen.com) > by [u/lmbrtc](https://www.reddit.com/user/lmbrtc/?ref=killscreen.com) in [Eldenring](https://www.reddit.com/r/Eldenring/?ref=killscreen.com) **Tell me about the Elden Ring paper. What led you to it, and what did the work entail?** The reason why I chose *Elden Ring* is actually funny. I never played any of the other FromSoftware games, and they actually really scared me. I found these games very intimidating as someone who doesn't necessarily see themselves as a gamer, to say the least. I think this isn't the only reason obviously, because there were things about the game that meant that it was interesting to study in this way, but that in a strange way made me think, "Okay, I'm going to try and study this game." I guess it was a challenge to myself, and I was very curious about it. **It's become a bit like spicy food or hot peppers, you know, where it's like, "Well, this is extremely spicy. The Scoville units are off the charts. I don't think it's for me, but maybe I should try it. I'm not going to enjoy it."** **Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I know what you mean. In a strange way, it made me think, "Okay, I'm going to try and study this game because it was a challenge to myself.”** I understood that there was this kind of what they sometimes call asynchronous multiplayer features—messages that you can see and also player bloodstains. Even though it is predominantly a single-player game, there are these traces that other players leave behind in the landscape. That already suggested an archaeological approach—thinking about these traces of people's activity in this virtual landscape. How can we record them? What can we learn from that? In some ways in my work it's probably the clearest translation of thinking about archaeological methodologies and transferring that to digital space. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/It-s-anticipating-that-there-will-be-a-future-where-people-are-looking-back-and-valuing-these-things..png) **These messages and bloodstains—they're accessible to all players in the world?** Yes, exactly. **And these messages that players can leave at any moment—they're accessible to all players in the world, and they have a variety of a mixture of humor and fact. I mean, I guess like any notes left in a real world, on a bathroom wall, it's a mixture of...** And with the messages, it's interesting because the server will give you what seems to be—we don't know—a random selection of them in any given location. They load in and out. When you're doing an archaeology of the player messages and also the bloodstains, which also load in and out, you're also doing an archaeology of the server. There are almost different levels to that because as you're observing this and they're loading in and out, I'm thinking, "Well, how is the algorithm for this game—which presumably there is one—deciding on what it shows you and at what point?" There is no data about that, or we don't know how that works. Only FromSoftware knows for sure. People have tried to hack it, but even then, you can see there's a recency bias in terms of when messages were posted. Other than that, I don't think we have a complete understanding of how that works. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/image-3.png) Keep going Killscreen has been keeping the record on games since 2010\. Members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) **You collected this data manually?** Yeah. This is the interesting thing about it. **Is this a skill set for being an archaeologist? Doing things manually is a part of the process.** It was a very laborious process. I chose two sites that weren't too big, but they were kind of self-contained in a way. One of them is the Church of Elleh, which is a very early game location where there's a Site of Grace—that's a place where you can save your game and stuff like that. Then there's also a merchant, and somewhere you can upgrade weapons. It's the first area of this kind you encounter as a player, and it feels like a little mini hub inside this church. Then I chose an area inside some catacombs, just a corridor, underground, because that felt very contrasting, and there were some enemies immediately before and after you'd get to this corridor. So it felt like a much more intense space. We were looking at having two areas that were quite different. As part of this, I drew a to-scale plan of each location. This was done right around the time when the game was first released, so in March 2022\. I didn't use any mods or anything for this, which people have asked me about—that would have potentially made it a lot easier. But there are problems with using mods and being in the online mode and getting banned, and all this kind of stuff. And also, I just wanted to see if I could do it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/You-re-doing-an-archaeology-of-the-player-messages-and-bloodstains--but-you-re-also-doing-an-archaeology-of-the-server..png) The way I figured out how to do that was by using the player's foot as a unit of measurement. It just kind of made sense. But that meant it was quite laborious to draw it all out. Even going through that process was really interesting because it made me have to be in that space in a very particular way and think about how is this church is it being constructed from? Where have they duplicated something here? So it was a very fine-grained sampling of these two areas, which is like looking at a grain of sand in terms of *Elden Ring* as a whole. Of cours,e it's always very limited, but it was always supposed to be a proof of concept and a sample of the game, especially at that particular time when it had just come out. Within these plans, I drew where we saw messages and bloodstains, and then also had spreadsheets transcribing the contents of the messages, how many times they were praised—people can upvote things in a way in the game—so how many appraisals they get, any associated assets, and then also screenshots. Thinking about these different ways of recording something and having those things all inter-reference each other or support each other as a later archive. **Were there moments where your methodology wasn't working the way you wanted?** Yeah, that's a good question. An interesting thing happened in the process. In archaeology, there's this concept of context. If you were digging and you found someone had dug a pit, that would have its own context. You give it a context number. The reason we have this is that you will build this idea of stratigraphical layers. Generally speaking, something that's further down is older, higher up is younger, and more recent. It gets more complicated than that, but that's the general idea. While thinking about digital space and context, and especially *Elden Ring*, I was like, w*ell what does context even mean in this space? Is that a useful thing?* But I was interested not just in where we were finding these messages and bloodstains, but also in how we were experiencing them as players slash researchers. Because as we were doing this, we were still players. That's the interesting tension in doing this work—you are also thinking about, you're almost sampling your own experience as a player as well. I was thinking, at what point are we seeing these messages and bloodstains filter in and out? I quickly realized that the bloodstains would appear and disappear very rapidly. It's very difficult to record them because they would just be going in and out. It was like, ok*ay we gotta rapidly record these as a group.* I ended up coming up with context numbers which were based on the date in which we'd done that specific survey, but then also the number of times that we could observe that there was sort of a—I don't know if that's really the right way to refer to it—but almost like a server refresh or just an update in the landscape in that specific area. If we'd seen that several more messages had loaded in at this point, and if they loaded in together, then that would be a separate context. It was trying to adapt the methodology to actually what it is that we are experiencing in the game in a way that made sense. **You've written about "generative archaeology games." Can you explain that concept?** This is an interesting one. I used the term "generative archaeology games" more at the beginning of my PhD. At some point I realized everyone thought I was talking about Generative AI! This was a real problem for me. I was like, *I have to not talk about it like that anymore* because people were really confused and I think they thought I was talking about using Generative AI. Actually, I'm talking about procedural generation in some cases. In terms of what I originally meant by that, I was more specifically looking at games with procedurally generated content—algorithmically generated content. I was interested in the idea of games that would encourage the player to interpret environmental storytelling, but also to record what they encountered in the game. Games that encourage players to, I would argue, role-play as an archaeologist even if they're not being told that they're role-playing as an archaeologist specifically. They are interpreting the environment and what happened there in the past or trying to figure out things based on material culture, and then being encouraged to maybe take notes or make records of what they found, which in a way is also a record of their own gameplay. **You mentioned playing as an archaeologist. One thing I'm very interested in is that much of how we publicly understand games is self-taught. It's not taught in schools, right? One of the benefits of studying the arts, taking an art history or art appreciation class, whether at the university or at a local library, is that it helps connect the chain of this virtuous cycle. People come to new experiences with some understanding, some thinking of the good, on top of their own individual tastes and preferences.** **We mentioned film studies earlier. But there's at least an expectation that they should think critically about the work, whether it's *Love Island* or *Sinners* or whatever. I think there's an understanding by the public, "Oh, I'm going to see a piece of media, I should think about that media." And that is reinforced by having stuff in academia and public training.** **With games, there's none of that stuff. It all happens informally. It's on forums, it's in conversations, it's at cons. You may go into game studies someday, but there's no sense that you should be talking about your work in that way. So that's a long way of asking, from your perspective, what guidance would you give to someone who's looking to think about games in an archaeological manner? How should you approach a game in a new way through that lens?** I was at the Queer Games Conference in Montreal last month and I was talking about this idea of *anticipatory archaeology*—the idea of trying to record, anticipating something that we might want to record in terms of player experiences and games or community events, something like that. Almost like there's this sense of needing to anticipate it already, record it in the present for the future. I was talking about anticipatory grief, actually—this idea of anticipating that people in the future will grieve if they don't have these things recorded. Someone mentioned to me ho,w actually in some ways, that was quite a hopeful outlook, which I hadn't really thought about. But their point was that actuall,y you are anticipating that there will be a future where people are looking back and valuing those things. It's kind of dark of me to say that I don't know what the future is gonna be even in like 50 years. Sometimes I think about this in terms of the work I do. Will there be people in 50 years who are looking back and value these things that have been recorded? But I guess that is something that I do hope for. Given that we already look back on games—even not even from that long ago, like even from a few years ago which we can no longer play—and people want to understand how games were experienced in the '80s and things like that, I think and I hope that this kind of work will give people a deeper understanding of why games were important to people in the future. I don't know what games will look like in the future. That's also interesting. I don't know where they will fit in whatever media landscape will exist then. It's kind of hard to think about, but I hope that it will—it's nice to think that people will understand why games were so important, but also just how ephemeral and changing those experiences were. --- **Read next:** [The demolition of Japan's videogame history](https://www.killscreen.com/the-demolition-of-japans-videogame-history/) · [The unmistakable influence of Shintoism on videogame history](https://www.killscreen.com/unmistakable-influence-shintoism-videogame-history/) · [A comprehensive history of low-poly art, Pt. 1](https://www.killscreen.com/poly-generational/) From Killscreen Killscreen keeps the record on games — the ones being preserved and the ones quietly disappearing. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### Go to Diskokina to See the Future of Live Performance URL: https://www.killscreen.com/diskokina-virtual-club-theater-game-engines/ Last updated: 2026-05-05T23:37:43.000Z # ## When I ask Sam and Andy Rolfes, Jen Sillen, and Kevin Peter He to describe Diskokina to me, they are both opaque and extremely specific. Opaque—because it’s hard to fully convey the raucous nature of a three-night interactive performance-cum-dance-party at a 10,000 square foot production space with a dozen performers, a 30-ft LED wall, custom controllers mounted to lighting rigs, a real-time motion-captured host named Kina, an active LAN party, bighead cat-themed dancers, and, of course, an open bar. Sam puts more succinctly. “Virtual club theater” is what Sam Rolfes tells me. Honestly, I’m bummed I couldn’t make the July debut in Los Angeles to mint a clever moniker on my own. In talking to the team this fall, I'll see that this vibrant clash of real-time technology and multidisciplinary performance is not an isolated experiment. Across New York and, increasingly, in cities worldwide, artists I've followed for years—people trained in painting, dance, theater, and cinema—are converging on an unlikely common language: game engines. Not to make games, but to create a form of live performance that existing institutions don't quite know how to categorize, much less support. What I’m seeing at Diskokina is the absolute vanguard—live performance using real-time game engine technology, staged for audiences that might stay for six hours or 30 minutes. It's a hybrid form that draws equally from commedia dell'arte, variety shows, music festivals, VTubing, live-action role-play, and broadcast television, powered by tools designed for video game production. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/Diskokina-1.jpg) The work matters deeply and fascinates me equally, because it demonstrates how artists are appropriating the visual language and technology of games to privilege aesthetics and liveness over the challenge and mechanics that dominate gaming culture. But to do that, the Diskokina has to build from the ground up. They're manifesting infrastructure—touring logistics, venue relationships, audience vocabulary—for a medium that technically exists but has no mature industry to support it. “We’re bringing the tech, but we’re also painting the stage,” Kevin Peter He says. As institutions like Lincoln Center begin offering fellowships and platforms for this work, a question interests me as someone who's spent years covering the intersection of games and culture: Can live performance using game engines escape the "tech art" categorization and claim space in theater, dance, and visual arts? Or will it remain trapped in gaming discourse, legible only to people who already understand Unreal Engine? **Commedia at the Club** When Jen Sillen mentions *commedia dell'arte* in our conversation, I can’t say I’m surprised. The 16th-century Italian street theater tradition may seem anachronistic for describing game engine performance. But as she explains it, the parallel is precise. Comprising bands of itinerant actors, commedia solved several problems for performers seeking to make their way through Renaissance Europe. It was an efficient way to collect money away from physical theaters and enabled a dynamic, flexible performance method that prefigured improv theatre. But more importantly, commedia’s novel use of masks to indicate the actor’s roles gave each scenario specific structures that could be replicated again and again. You didn’t need hundreds of years of drama theory to understand the motivations of the miserly Pantalone and braggadocious Capitano or why you should root for the *innamorati*’s star-crossed romances. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/Diskokina-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/Diskokina-9.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/Diskokina-13.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/Diskokina-14.jpg) Like those traveling troupes performing in market squares, Discokina needs stock characters recognizable within 30 seconds, narratives that work for audiences who arrive mid-show, and formats portable enough to travel from town to town—or in this case, from Brooklyn to Berlin to Los Angeles. "You can't reach the complexity that you get with a Broadway show where you have 25 minutes to set up characters and dialogue and relationships," Sillen tells me. The format must accommodate people who need to go to the bathroom, get drinks, talk to friends, and want to dance. “There’s not an existing format for it outside of Diskokina,” she adds. "Creating that context for an audience to come and get the vibe is helpful. It's a very new way of telling stories to crowds." So Diskokina leans on interstitials to advance the plot, and also gives their team a chance to swap out great. “We have good PAs,” Andy Rolfes jokes. The subtitle system for 321*Rule*, one of Diskokina's recurring shows, highlights their audience-first problem-solving approach. Sillen walks me through how it functions simultaneously as karaoke-style dialogue prompts for performers who move from city to city and as subtitles for the audience. Meanwhile, she notes, Broadway exhausts itself with pre-recorded LED wall content that cuts out stage design and live elements. Diskokina is what she calls "an antidote"—technology that enhances rather than replaces theatrical craft. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/Diskokina-10.jpg) But I notice the word "theater" itself keeps coming up in our conversations. Not "real-time art." Not "interactive experience." Theater. One of the challenges of interdisciplinary work with games is that it resists categorization because it touches on a variety of disciplines. But when approaching audiences or funders, artists are required to put game-based art and practice into some type of container. For them, the theater fit the nature of the work the best. “It’s not like a traditional audiovisual show where there’s a lot of pre-rendered eye candy,” Sam Rolfes says. Kevin Peter He points out that gravitating to theater is a matter of creative community. Sillen was a huge musical theater fan, and there are references for theater kids sprinkled throughout the show. Because so much of the film industry now looks to virtual production, “there’s just this proliferation and cross-pollination of \[theater\] evolving the medium,” Kevin Peter He says. When I ask Sam Rolfes about this choice, he argues the term captures something essential: "Theater is essentially live. We make non-live stuff, but even the music videos we do—because it's real-time, the essence is still live,” he said. “We're performing character mocap; we're performing VR puppetry. The liveness and the messiness and the comedy that comes out of that is essential to the entire thing." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/Diskokina-7.jpg) **Building DIY Infrastructure** One of the challenges for games historically has been communicating the technical artistry required for performance. Kevin Peter He and I talked about this [in his interview](https://www.killscreen.com/kevin-peter-hes-embodied-game-engine-performance/), where the talents of competitive gaming are crudely mapped to mice and controllers, invisible to the participants. A key part of Diskokina’s appeal is the foregrounding of technical performance. He’s camera arm looks professional when you see it in action. I assume it costs thousands. He laughs when I ask about the budget. "It's sub $100," he says. "It's a 3D printed body with a bunch of electronics inside and sensors." When I ask about technical constraints, expecting complaints about Unreal Engine's limitations, Sam Rolfes redirects me. "Unreal can do cool stuff," he notes, "but in a world where everybody's using Unreal, it's more about how do we convey a story that is not just pure eye candy." The real challenges are logistical: What's realistic to tour with? Which motion capture systems play nice together? How do you communicate to venues what you need? This DIY ethic, I learn, extends throughout Diskokina's operation. “We bring almost everything in-house,” Sillen says. The collective totes almost everything but the LED wall—motion capture suits, computers, custom controllers, and the rolling table system that enables those seamless changeovers I witnessed. “It’s like a television broadcast room, except half the people are also doing dialogue, playing music, and running Unreal,” she says. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/Diskokina-12.jpg) **Diskokina's Non-Traditional Fingerprints** Sam and Andy Rolfes started with drawing and painting, moved to ZBrush for its tactile, sculptural quality ("pushing and pulling digital clay," as Sam Rolfes describes it), then discovered Unreal Engine in 2015\. Their first music video for Amnesia Scanner was "take 32," a work of improvisation and discovery that treats virtual space like a painting surface. Kevin Peter He’s background surprises me most. His practice, he explains, hinges on his dance training. He interprets music and breaks it down, but through controllers and visual art rather than his body. "Most people don't know that I'm a dancer," he tells me. “I keep thinking about dance from a performing arts standpoint, right? Like, do I *want* to be a dancer on stage? His current work slips between operating controllers and explicit choreography, slipping between dance, performance, and technical acuity. Sillen emerged from New York's club world and musical theater. During COVID, she tells me, Club Cringe's virtual streams on Twitch and Second Life evolved into radio theater, with 10-hour slots, giving it space to experiment with narrative in ways club music bookings never allowed. Diskokina is a natural extension of the IRL community building she had already been creating. The fingerprints show once you know what to look for. Sillen’s theater training shapes the writing, structure, tone, and stage management. Team Rolfes's painting background informs its aesthetic sensibility, privileging what you see and hear over mechanical complexity. Kevin Peter He’s dance practice manifests in his relationship to music and rhythm through hardware interfaces. And the guest performers fill in everything else. Game engines serve as a lingua franca across many creative fields. Unlike game makers who primarily work with other game makers, this collective proves that people from painting, dance, and theater can collaborate through a common technical language while maintaining their disciplinary perspectives. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/Diskokina-8.jpg) **Building the Network** When I ask about audience response, the Rolfes tells me something striking: After the first Diskokina at Zero Space in Brooklyn, dozens of artists approached the collective who “didn't even realize this was an option," Sam said. It was praise, but also a provocation for other artists who could see a new practice evolving before them, like seeing the Velvet Underground play punk or DJ Kool Herc gesture towards hip-hop. These are performances but also signposts for the future. This response, I realize, reveals the core challenge: the interest is there but the infrastructure doesn't exist. I’ve had this experience operating my own game-based arts space in Los Angeles. Unlike live music, there's no established format, no booking agents specializing in virtual club theater, no venues designed for six-hour performances mixing narrative and dance music. You have to build every single node, hand by hand, relationship by relationship, performance by performance. It is the work of relational autonomy–all together, all apart. The New York scene matters specifically, they explain. The city offers theater infrastructure at multiple scales (from Broadway to black box), education programs at NYU ITP and Parsons that funnel students into game engine experimentation, and a Net Art lineage from the 90s forward that normalized experimental digital work. The approach reads as distinctly American as well, even distinctly New York—different from the more reverential, less comedic tone of European festivals. When Team Rolfes took *321Rule* to CTM Festival in Berlin, Rolfes tells me, locals shushed people laughing at the comedic elements. Different cultural contexts require different negotiations and comedy, in particular, is high context. “The tone and our perspective is shaped by the subcultural scenes that we came out of in NYC, I think,” Rolfes reflected. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/Diskokina-6.jpg) As I talk to each member of the collective, a pattern emerges: none of them came to game engines *through gaming*. It’s such a welcome confirmation of what I’ve always wanted from the games over the last twenty years of looking at them as a writer and critic. My hypothesis about what comes *next* is that it won’t emerge from the games industry itself, but from the sensibilities, and more importantly, the technologies that power them. Games solve complex interactions between players and computers, and as it turns out, it’s helpful to have non-gaming expertise to know where to push. Diskotina is a welcome place for those orthogonal to games, but who don’t quite fit in anywhere else. “There was no place for us in the arts once we graduated,” Sam Rolfes tells me. “The art industry was a mess, we were forced into the commercial world, and we just had to create a practice out of that.” And now, as Sam Rolfes and Kevin Peter He are named fellows [at the Lincoln Center](https://lincolncenter.org/i/about/s/The%20Collider%20Fellowship?ref=killscreen.com), it seems that fringes are marching towards the center. But there are still new horizons to pursue. Sillen muses, “One day, we’ll be on Broadway.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/Diskokina-15.jpg) ### What Happens When You Can Do Nothing in a War Zone? URL: https://www.killscreen.com/alan-kwan-scent-video-game-witness/ Last updated: 2026-09-11T17:07:47.000Z I, a lone dog, wander through a forest and then a field, choked with haze and ruin. Bullets whizz overhead, and I crane my head towards the sound of shouts and cries. I can do nothing, so I move on. I, a lone dog, cross paths with someone desperately trying to escape. They are as silent as I am as they pass under a fence. I can do nothing, so I move on. I, a lone dog, pass by a military van, listlessly inspect the soldier inside, and continue my trek. There is a clearing, and beneath it lies a terrible secret. I can do nothing, so I move on. The video game industry, a $200 billion engine of violence and virtual conquest, has long placed the most powerful weapons imaginable in the player's hands. But Alan Kwan's new title, *Scent*, offers no firepower—just a lone dog wandering a desolate war zone. "The whole concept of this project is about being a witness without power," the art professor, filmmaker, and game designer said about his 2025 Tribeca Festival premiere. "In most commercial games, you have superhuman abilities, but for most of my games, especially this game, the main character is very fragile." The key for Kwan is the feeling of impotence when we are so exposed to violence and can do so little. *Scent* is an audacious and drastic break from the "war in games" genre. You play as the titular dog, wandering an unnamed war-town city, and collecting the souls of those who have fallen. Almost nothing is known about the victims, the perpetrator, or the location. You are simply moving through this melange of violence and suffering, unable to do a blessed thing. "You just walk, witness, and hide," Kwan explained dispassionately. A sad precondition of living in 2025 is that war is once again a principal anxiety. After the horrors of the early 20th century and the construction of international institutions, the sinews of the global order are fraying. This isn't simply about the United States' making its authoritarian tendencies explicit and supporting them abroad—war, conflict, and genocide now stretch from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan. According to the Global Peace Index, global peacefulness has declined over the last nearly 20 years. So, it's not just you, and it's not just your feed. So, how do we make sense of the world that we live in? In particular, we turn to documentary that either exposes new information (as in *Taxi to the Dark Side* and black sites in Afghanistan) or gives a new context to something known (as in *The Act of Killing* and the Indonesian mass killing). Or we can lean on the long history of fiction from *The Red Badge of Courage* to *The Battle of Algiers* to *The Hurt Locker*. Even when we cannot comprehend, sometimes simply observing and reflecting is all we can do. Despite using war as a setting, games are absolutely allergic to talking about the *meaning* of war, especially in The Present Moment, with the clarity needed. They either have us enact violence to teach you a lesson (dropping white phosphorus on civilians in *Spec Ops: The Line*) or place you as a civilian (managing scarcity in *This War of Mine*) to, well, also teach you a lesson. But Kwan took a different approach–stripping down the mechanics to simply the act of observation, which, frankly, is more than enough. He doesn't need to tell you that war is an unnecessary evil; players already bring that to the table. "I want to create this space for people to put in their own imaginations and relate to what they are experiencing in the real world," he said. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/Scent_-Alan-Kwan-_3-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/Scent_-Alan-Kwan-_5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/Scent_-Alan-Kwan-_2-2.jpg) Kwan grew up in Hong Kong and found himself pulled between parental identities. His mother, a banker, "is a logical person," he said, while his father teaches high school and loves art and film. He spent 23 years in Hong Kong, later focusing on interactive art, before moving to Boston for grad school at MIT. After bouncing around Boston, New Orleans, and Hong Kong, he landed a job at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Games didn't initially appeal to him. ("Too competitive," he said. "It stressed me out.”) But frequenting the many dazzling arcades nestled among the tangles of Hong Kong's suburbs, he had a moment that shifted his perspective. There was one moment in particular that changed the way he thought about games. A young couple was playing a racing game, a normally competitive affair. But instead of going head-to-head, the two teens had pulled over quietly to the side of the track. "They were just hanging out, seeing this virtual sunset in Tokyo," he remembered. The NPCs were whipping past them as their rank dropped and dropped, but they didn't care. It was an experience they wanted to savor together. It was in that moment that he realized that games "can be romantic; poetic, even," he reminisced. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/Headshot_Alan-Kwan.jpg) *Scent* didn't begin as a project about war; instead, he began to reflect on what it would mean to lose his independence. In 2018, Kwan learned that his father was losing his eyesight and his field of vision would shrink over time. *"*I was envisioning a sci-fi game that you play as a robotic dog, and then the parts in the robot start failing," he said. But as the "global situation" began to deteriorate with conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, Myanmar, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, the game's long development cycle led Kwan in a new direction. He wanted to harness that ineffable, sublime feeling he witnessed with that Hong Kong couple in the service of creating what he was observing in conflict. "The game slowly became seeing human brutality and violence from the perspective of an animal," he said. If it wouldn't be about a specific narrative, "then it becomes like a sensory, physical experience." In most games, agency is power, but *Scent* pulls you on a rail that shifts through different biomes. You move from a forest to a field to structures, while bullets whizz overhead and screams can be heard off-camera. Bodies are slouched against walls, and you pass humans on their knees, awaiting an unknown fate. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/Scent-at-Tribeca--photo-credit-Mikhail-Rush-.jpg) **Scent* at Tribeca (Credit: Mikhail Rush) But it's the deliberate ambiguity that is the most arresting. The characters are mostly faceless. No identifiable language is spoken. No national colors on which to pin blame or assign sympathy. The world is awash in a haze of bloom lighting. Is it dusk or is it dawn? Where are the sounds coming from? "In chaotic situations, I feel like most of the time you don't have like a clear visual sense of what is happening in front of you," he said of the sound design. I think that would create a more intense psychological experience than showing a lot of people die in front of you." Typically, I find the single-track approach too facile, as it strips players of the tactile moments that can be so meaningful during play. But Kwan's decision, which both limits your movement while also backgrounding the violence, is an arresting choice,reminiscent of films like *Zone of Interest*, where what you hear is worse than what you see. "There are two films," director Jonathan Glazer told [*The Guardian*](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/dec/10/jonathan-glazer-the-zone-of-interest-auschwitz-under-the-skin-interview?ref=killscreen.com) about his Oscar-winning film about the Holocaust. "The one you see, and the one you hear, and the second is just as important as the first, arguably more so. We already know the imagery of the camps from actual archive footage. There is no need to attempt to recreate it, but I felt that if we could hear it, we could somehow see it in our heads." Kwan also wanted to expand the context of violence as a feature of life on Earth, not just the sad dominion of humans. The game opens and closes with a hulking elephant that bookends the experience, and at one point, you are mobbed by crows who pluck the hapless souls you've collected for their own nefarious purposes. "The dog is kind of like a companion to all this suffering," Kwan said. "Nature is still brutal and violent as well." *Scent* provides no answers, only observation. --- **Read next:** [The mouse in this AI war game is a demonic latex hand](https://www.killscreen.com/the-mouse-in-this-ai-war-game-is-a-demonic-latex-hand/) · [The difficult history of videogames and indigenous people](https://www.killscreen.com/difficult-history-videogames-indigenous-people/) · [No Shots Will Be Fired In Dom Rabrun’s Haitian Revolution](https://www.killscreen.com/dom-rabrun-veve-punk-haitian-revolution-videogame/) From Killscreen Killscreen covers the games that refuse to hand you a weapon. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### Carrie Chen's Digital Avatars Bridge Past and Future URL: https://www.killscreen.com/carrie-chen-digital-avatars-ai-identity/ Last updated: 2026-09-16T17:12:25.000Z When Carrie Chen first projected 24 life-sized versions of herself onto a gallery wall for her fictional work, [*Temporal Portrait 时间肖像*](https://carriechen.works/temporal-portrait-%E6%97%B6%E9%97%B4%E8%82%96%E5%83%8F?ref=killscreen.com), she wasn't prepared for the physical reaction. There they were–all of these past and future versions of her, a dazzling blend of AI imagery, 3D character models, and archival images of her mother, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers. These versions of her were gathered together, some seated and some standing; some wizened with wisdom, and others were younger selves gazing into the distance. They blink and breathe at eye level. "I didn't expect myself to have this physical or physiological reaction to it," she says. "It did feel ghostly in a sense, and I almost felt a real sense of presence." We've all felt that moment, even looking at a mirror, where we wonder, *Is that me?* These days, when I look at myself, I can't help but see the face of my father. That micro-delay between the real and the imagined—the split second where Chen recognized these figures as both herself and not-herself, alive and synthetic—became the conceptual core of her practice. We know it in popular culture as the "uncanny valley," that productive discomfort when something appears almost but not quite human. "I *know* these aren't me; these aren't alive," she reflected. "But I'm seeing them move and blink and breathe at life-size scale." But for Chen, the uncanny valley is not a problem to solve with new technology (regardless of what OpenAI or Midjourney might want you to believe) but a space to inhabit. Chen's work confronts fundamental questions about presence and identity in digital space—questions that have become urgent as AI-generated imagery floods our feeds and virtual representations multiply. Her self-portraits and moving tableaus exist in that productive discomfort of the uncanny valley: projections of her and other bodies that trigger contemplation despite their obvious artificiality. 0:00 /0:34 1× ## **From Christie's to Game Engines** Chen's path to digital art was anything but linear. She studied art history and psychology at NYU, worked at the Whitney and Christie's, and seemed destined for a career in arts administration. Her father, a painter who immigrated to New York from China in the 1980s, had spent her childhood warning her about the difficulties of artistic practice—especially for women. Her parents thought she would be a doctor because she loved anatomy books as a child. "I didn't want to be a doctor!" she protested. "I just like the human form. That should've been a sign I wanted to be an artist." But working in traditional art institutions left her restless. Being in art, but not making it, is difficult. The turning point came from an unlikely source: her partner's interior design work. Watching him create 3D renderings of spaces looked, to Chen, "like playing *The Sims*, almost just dragging and dropping like chairs and different walls." She asked to try. "I sat down by his computer and I tried to click around and things started flashing," she laughs. The real revelation came in 2015, when she wandered into a Samsung VR experience store in New York. The centerpiece was a Christmas-themed prototype: a sleigh you could sit on while wearing a VR headset. "It was sensational," she recalls, despite the milquetoast subject matter. This experience wasn't art in any conventional sense—just a commercial product in a showroom. But it opened her mind to something she'd never found in traditional galleries. "How light and color and sound and motion are all coalescing was not something I found in the traditional art spaces," she said. These moments coalesced into a decision. She applied to UCLA's Design Media Arts program, drawn in part by Jennifer Steinkamp, whose work she'd first encountered in an undergraduate lecture. Steinkamp's large-scale digital flowers and trees, falling gently against black backgrounds, demonstrated how computational tools could achieve something painterly—abstraction through animation. "I saw a lot of parallels between or like sort of linking and making connections between her work and color field paintings," Chen says. When she discovered Steinkamp taught at UCLA, she put her application in the mail. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/Carrie-Chen--Temporal-Portrait---------------Installation-View--Metronom-Gallery--Modena--Italy.-Courtesy-of-Metronom-Gallery.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/11/epoch.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/11/IMG_4269-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/11/6.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/11/2--1-.jpeg) **Temporal Portrait* at Epoch Gallery, New Wight Gallery, and Vellum LA ## **Never Fully Here or There** In Spanish, there's a phrase I return to for children who move or are brought to the U.S. from their homeland: "Ni de aquí, ni de alla." *Neither from here nor from there.* That feeling of not really being anywhere runs through everything Chen makes, and it's an increasingly important question at a time when place and belonging are center stage. "Identity is something that I had to keep reassembling and constantly shifting and reforming," she says. "And that feeling of kind of never fully being here or there, that's actually a feeling that I'm really familiar with." Born in the U.S., she moved to Shanghai with her family from first grade through middle school. "I had to learn about Chinese culture and what it means to be a Chinese American living in China," she explains. "So it was like having to deal with both sides of that identity." A relative once told her she didn't look distinctly like either parent. "And I think that stuck with me," Chen said. "And then I'm like, *who am I?*" When she visited her parents in Shanghai during grad school, her mother showed her a photograph Chen had never seen: her mom at three years old, sitting on her great-grandmother's lap. "I really haven't seen any documentation of my mother as a child," Chen says. "I just didn't have that visual in my head." The image was shot in a 1960s communist China photography style, with the two figures posed against a fake Tiananmen Square backdrop. "I saw a lot of similarities between that child and me. Photos of myself as if I were a three-year-old," she recalls. Suddenly, it all came together in a flood—past, present, and future; distance and proximity; separation and belonging. 0:00 /0:34 1× That photograph became part of *Temporal Portrait*, the work where Chen first confronted her 24 projected selves. She used AI aging filters to generate images of herself at different life stages, then layered in ancestral photographs—her mother at three, her great-grandmother, and other family members. "I just wanted to take a more minimalist approach and really focus on these individual avatars," she said about adding a "synthetic generational quality to these base textures." Unlike me, who has no video of themselves before the age of 24, Chen occupies a unique position, born before smartphones but young enough to witness their arrival. "I was really conscious of that development on the technological side, even though I was like a child," she says. She remembers Apple opening its first store in China when she was in elementary school, the excitement around each new iPod Touch, and the way social media platforms emerged and transformed how people stayed connected. This generational position—seeing both the before and after of ubiquitous digital memory—shapes how she thinks about time, identity, and the synthetic bridges AI now offers between past and future. Keep going Killscreen has spent fifteen years on the artists using game engines to ask who they are. Members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) ## **A Feel for Digital Bodies** But as she built her own "digital Carrie"—something shifted. "I really felt a connection and sense of empathy because it's more like a conversation with myself," she explains. She began thinking about where she would place this avatar and what it would be doing. The idea emerged of bringing together younger and older versions to create encounters across time. "Having done an art history major and working in museums, I just haven't really seen proper representation of someone like myself in a monumental sculptural way," she says. A central theme in the work is the conversations we are constantly having with the digital versions of ourselves. "I thought it would be cool if I could meet younger versions of myself or older versions of myself and put them together in a sort of place," she explains. In many ways, that is who we are as embodied beings, an amalgamation of our past at the intersection where the future begins. And of course, there's the question of how accurate the depictions are. "We'll have to see," Chen laughs. "She'll be able to compare her actual face to the predicted versions, measure the gap between algorithmic imagination and biological fact. "I think she'll probably compare and kind of do a side-by-side," she muses. But did creating these older versions change how she thinks about aging? Chen seems less interested in the predictions themselves than in what they enable—a conversation across time that wouldn't otherwise be possible. The images were "layers of documentation, like old photographs of my grandmother and even my great grandmother, and I kind of compiled them all with the AI image of me being middle-aged and then older," she explains. "So these were all like synthesized with ancestral photographs. So for me, I was like, maybe this will bring some additional element of realness or an interesting sort of synthetic generational quality to these base textures." 0:00 /0:23 1× ## **Spring and Its Discontents** [*Primavera*](https://carriechen.works/primavera-%E6%98%A5?ref=killscreen.com), Chen's meditation on spring and renewal, again places multiple versions of her avatar self in an expansive digital landscape. The title references both Botticelli and the Italian word for spring, and the work draws on Renaissance and Romantic-period traditions of seasonal representation. "I always wanted to do a piece on seasons," she says. "It's such an archetype within art history, and I wanted to do my own take on it." The Chinese landscape tradition meets Western art history in the composition. Avatars perform choreographed movements—dancing, twirling, walking—across a space filled with blossoming flowers. Some moments are staged for emotional resonance: a younger avatar embracing an older one, two child versions jogging and crisscrossing in the background. "I was really intrigued by the idea of expansive landscape with humans that are kind of spawned at different spots and performing these beautiful gestures and poses." Chen used facial motion capture for the breathing and blinking—those "indicators of life" that trigger recognition of presence. The subtlety was a design choice. "I like to keep these like bodily animations more subtle because I knew that they would be eventually shown in a pretty big scale," she explained. The larger gestures were keyframed, predetermined animations that loop at compositionally chosen intervals. Frustrated by the constraints of predetermined loops, Chen now wants rule-based systems rather than fixed choreography. "Like maybe this avatar only comes out when it's nighttime, or maybe during the morning time, these two avatars will jog past each other," she speculates. These "zero-player games"–built in-game engines but played as procedural animations–are a fitting development for Chen's avatar experimentations. They allowed the fixity of a consistent world and character with the spontaneity of liveness. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/11/konsnarshuset-5751.jpg) Chen pointed to *The Sims* as a touchpoint as well as Club Penguin and Neopets. These were worlds where you could construct alternate identities, spaces where "we can develop our own personalities and identities." In *The Sims*, she'd create versions of herself with varying levels of fidelity: one that resembled her actual interests (likes art, likes to paint), another with blue skin and completely different traits. "I loved it as a kid," she says. Looking at Primavera, I couldn't help but be reminded of *The Sims'* blend of intimacy, routine, and chaos as the game's characters try to fulfill their emotional desires. That game wasn't about perfect control—the characters had their own wants, their own routines, their own degree of agency within the system. The question of scale matters to Chen. Her father works at a monumental scale—paintings and drawings that often fill entire walls. She's drawn to that same ambition because it's the appropriate way to communicate the feel of the humans in her work. "That sense of presence has almost a sculptural quality when they are depicted at a bigger life-size scale," she explains. Its presence without mass, form without substance, is another threshold condition that interests her. ## **What Comes Next** Looking ahead, Chen wants to push further into simulation and rule-based systems. She's teaching 3D at USC now—she's become the one explaining Rhino's complex interface to students—and continuing to develop her technical skills. "I think definitely in relation to game engines and simulations, that's something I'm working on right now, just learning more skills and how to program, how to create these systems," she says. There's a long game here too, something Chen herself acknowledges with her hypothetical 90-year-old self. The comparison between AI prediction and biological aging isn't really the point. The work isn't about prediction accuracy—it's about the conversation between past and future selves, about what happens when you create digital versions of yourself and let them stare back. "I do feel a sense of empathy towards these digital creations," she said, the repetition itself important. As if insisting on care and integrity toward synthetic beings—even ones that look like yourself—is a position that needs defending. In a marketplace filled with bodies designed for consumption, Chen builds avatars she treats like kin. They're not quite human, but they're not quite not human either. They exist in that productive in-between, that space of constant reassembly she's been navigating her whole life. Here or there. Present or absent. Real or synthetic. The answer, for Chen, is always both. 0:00 /0:22 1× --- **Read next:** [Ina Chen’s Generation of Books and the deepfaking of family memory](https://www.killscreen.com/ina-chen-generation-of-books-deepfake-family-memory/) · [Maya Man’s StarQuest turns AI into a dance performance](https://www.killscreen.com/maya-man-starquest-ai-dance-performance/) · [Harriet Davey’s glossy aliens reject gaming’s binary world](https://www.killscreen.com/harriet-daveys-glossy-aliens-reject-gamings-binary-world/) From Killscreen Killscreen has spent fifteen years on the artists who build themselves out of pixels. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### Why P.T. Anderson Gets Away With "Retro" But Games Don't URL: https://www.killscreen.com/retro-gaming-film-stock-aesthetic-nostalgia/ Last updated: 2026-09-13T17:09:43.000Z I am sitting at the Vista Theatre at the edge of Echo Park and Silverlake in Los Angeles, frantically trying to find my seat in the dark as P.T. Anderson's sprawling crime epic *One Battle After Another* is about to begin. Owned and operated by Quentin Tarantino, the Vista is one of several vintage theatres in LA that focus on showcasing the craft of the film industry, either through restorations of older films (e.g., the Academy Museum) or creating a unique setting for a viewing experience (the ornately restored Egyptian Theatre). When you live in LA and *don't* work in the film industry, as I do, it can be easy to forget that the city's cultural love language is the moving image. Building on the recent success of vintage film stocks in films like *The Brutalist* and *Sinners*, *One Battle* *After Another* screens in VistaVision, a widescreen version of the 35mm motion picture film format designed by Paramount Pictures engineers in 1954\. While Anderson picked VistaVision to capture the look of the 1971 urban thriller *The French Connection,* *One Battle* is a stunning portrait of the breadth of California's natural beauty. We zip from Sacramento's Tower Bridge to wooded alcoves of Humboldt County to the severe and disorienting washes of Anza Borrego. Shooting in VistaVision "[is like seeing live music](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPEiL%5FRDnuQ/?ref=killscreen.com)," Benicio del Toro said. That same week, I received the following press release from a game claiming "new retro-style JRPG with groundbreakingly sweet textmode graphics. (sic)" Huh. I wondered; nowhere did I see *The Brutalist*, *Sinners*, or *One Battle* discussed as "old-school" or "retro," even though all had been captured with technology decades old. The look and feel of these films is critically acclaimed and highly lauded, in large part because they capture a spirit lost in the digital age. "We had cameras on cranes, and there are a lot of moving shots like an old Western, being able to track with the horses. It's a beautiful scene," said cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw [about her work](https://variety.com/2025/artisans/news/sinners-cinematographer-jack-oconnell-entrance-imax-1236558441/?ref=killscreen.com) with Ryan Coogler in *Sinners*. But it's certainly not retro. So why don't we use the term "retro" when discussing old film stocks? Why does music get to have a "warm analog sound" whereas games that use pixel or PS1-era styles are labeled "nostalgic" or "classic"? This linguistic difference points to something fundamental about how games relate to their past, and what they might hold for their future. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/11/Bugonia.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/11/sinners-michael-b-jordan.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/11/INTERNAL-STILL-REFERENCE.00_41_09_14.Still019_Crop-H-2024.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/11/image9.jpg) ## The Language Gap: Retro vs. Analog The last film to lean heavily on VistaVision was in 1961*,* and the success of *The Brutalist* last year sparked a frenzy of new films like *One Battle,* looking to generate a new visual look for their work. And more is on the horizon: Yorgos Lanthimos thriller *Bugonia*, Alejandro González Iñárritu's, M. Night Shyamalan's, and Greta Gerwig's *Narnia: The Magician's Nephew* are all using the format for upcoming work. For director and cinematographer Bradley Corbet, it was fitting for a film set in the 1950s to use technology from that period, as well as to capture fine architectural details without the distorting effects of wide lenses. Ironically, to achieve this effect in public discourse, directors always foregrounded their intent *first* and then justified the use of the technology to serve that overall vision. The film stock becomes a shorthand for the cinematic mood: dark intensity in *One Battle*, violent ambiguity in *Bugonia*, or Southern horror in *Sinners*. "The whole idea was to make \[the film\] immersive, and we wanted folks to really be able to experience this world that my grandparents were part of," Coogler said about combining IMAX with Panavision to capture the look of Jim Crow South. His origin story isn't [discovering film stock in film school](https://www.indiewire.com/news/general-news/ryan-coogler-sinners-viewing-options-watch-1235115150/?ref=killscreen.com)—it's his grandfather's flight from Mississippi to Oakland. By contrast, many films through the 50s and 60s were marketed with their technology front and center (e.g., Technicolor), a practice much rarer today unless it's an IMAX spectacle. What we talk about when we talk about film is important, and the experience of watching a movie at a theatre like the Vista reminded me of film's multisensory nature. The feel of the seats, the nervous laughter ringing in my ears, the sound of action from inside the bathroom when I had to take a break (it's a long movie!), and the smell of popcorn from the lobby. When we discuss film, critics and directors talk about grain, patina, depth of field, color saturation, and aspect ratios. I used to write about music, and whenever I'd throw something on vinyl, I'd listen for warmth and those analog textures that my ears were surely missing from years of concert attendance. > So why don't we use the term "retro" when discussing old film stocks? Why does music get to have a “warm analog sound” whereas games that use pixel or PS1-era styles are labeled “nostalgic” or “classic”? Film's chemical indexicality—physical, causal relationship between image and reality—creates what theorist Mary Ann Doane calls "a privileged relation to the real, to referentiality, and to materiality." Each frame exists uniquely in physical space that you can touch and smell. Analog tape and magnetic recording are also named physical processes with the arcane magic of the ancients: tape saturation, transformer distortion, wow and flutter. ## Costly Signaling and Material Intention As directors, Coogler, Anderson, Corbet, and others are keenly aware of film's physical texture, and they are valorizing the *material* properties of the movie, not the historical period, to help situate us. We filmgoers are embodied entities drifting into another world that is like our own, but not quite. If anything, the physical limitations of film stock and cameras were a barrier to production. "It gives you a deep image, but it's not entirely practical," Anderson [said](https://bcineplayer.com/paul-thomas-anderson-explains-why-he-shot-one-battle-after-another-in-vistavision/?ref=killscreen.com) about VistaVision, and editor Andy Jurgensen noted that the cameras were so loud, heavy, and temperamental that the crew had to work around them at times. . Writing [about handmade cinema](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/scratching-the-surface-handmade-cinema-in-the-digital-age/?ref=killscreen.com) in the LA Review Books, Holly Willis notes: "Whether seeking a slower pace or more profound connection to the materiality of image-making, artists working in this mode also represent a larger cultural desire for an awareness of practice and attention to emergence, or the idea that the world is in a state of constant transformation." All of this thankless, invisble labor is what behavioral ecologists call "costly signaling"—a way to communicate to audiences that the difficulty is the point In games, the approach to discussing the experience of using the look and feel of an older time is entirely different. While there have been remakes of titles for decades, the emergence of game-making tools like GameMaker and the popularization of retro graphics took off at the beginning of the 2010s. *Super Meat Boy*, *Pez*, and *Hotline Miami* all explicitly couched themselves as explicit heirs to the NES and SNES generations. Since then, not a week goes by that I don't get a press release for a "retro," "old school," "classic style" game of a variety of different genres. But why did games embrace this history in a way that other media only dabble in it? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/11/Auditorium_from_rear.jpg) Ah, the creak and the smell of seats! Keep going Killscreen has been arguing about how games look — and why they look backwards — for fifteen years. Members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) ## Two Types of Nostalgia in Gaming *What happens when you have the same taste as your parents?* \- Simon Reynolds Media artist Svetlana Boym's work on nostalgia offers a helpful signpost for understanding what pixel-style games were trying to do. Boym distinguishes between two types of nostalgia: reflexive and restorative. In restorative nostalgia, an entre place is reconstructed. Think of the [UNESCO World Heritage reconstruction](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/30/?ref=killscreen.com) of the center of Warsaw that was razed by the Nazis in 1944 or the [controversial refurbishment of the Sistine Chapel](https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/debating-a-vatican-cover-up-270/?ref=killscreen.com). Restorative nostalgia seeks to do the impossible: create a time-travel experience by evoking something that could have been generated decades ago. Reflective nostalgia, by contrast, involves emotional longing without literal reconstruction. "It is actually a yearning for a different time—the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams," Boym [wrote in 2007.](https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/the-uses-of-the-past/articles/nostalgia-and-its-discontents?ref=killscreen.com) This type of nostalgia is at war with the idea of progress and with time itself: we can live in the feeling of another place, without the attendant baggage of the past. Games researcher Maria Garda, who pointed me to Boyn, has done extensive work [on nostalgia in retro-gaming](https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/view/651?ref=killscreen.com) and writes fondly of new retro-games: "The nostalgic gesture of game designers serves creativity and artistic erudition. These, in turn, are the motivations that underlie every 'neo' style in art and could be deemed as constituting a more universal tendency of every medium that relies on self-reference," she writes. ## The Arrested Development of Game Aesthetics But attempts to justify retro-gaming elide the question of intent. On the one hand, the audience's perceptions of these games are an essential part of the process. That something feels like a game one would have played as a child is a meaningful signal of what a game is trying to do. But my concern is that the long finger of history has worked its way into contemporary work such that creators and players are constrained by the vice of nostalgia. To wit, many of the first-run retro games from the last decade have either stopped making games entirely or are revisiting the same material over and over again (*Shovel Knight*, *Hotline Miami*, *McPixel*, *Rain World*, etc.). One rare exception is the gaming work of Derek Yu's *UFO 50* **,** which creates the imagined history of a fictional game publisher whose history comes alive through a Golden Age video games mixtape. Film and media professor Dominic Arseault called this feeling *uchronia,* which "is neither past nor future; a non-time, a time that never was (and never will be)." But Yu's work is the exception, and the issue more broadly is game makers self-styling their work as retro without making an argument for what that means. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/11/ufo-50-review-1--1-.webp) Derek Yu's **UFO 50* is a rare work of reflective nostalgia in game-making. Other media are certainly not immune to the allure of the past. In film, we have reboots (like the new *The Naked Gun*, which I regret to tell you is quite good); in music, there are plenty of self-referential cycles from disco-punk (The Fall to The Rapture) to Bruno Mars' wholesale vintage theft. Theatre is awash with adaptations. The difference is that all of the nostalgia-bait in popular culture is in that subjunctive mood—a desperate attempt to draw from older source material, but using contemporary techniques. If anything, the rise of vintage film stock aficionados demonstrates a literacy with the past and the present, blending the look of a desired era with the sensibilities of our time. Are game creators making deliberate aesthetic arguments, or just defaulting to what they know? Perhaps their perspectives haven't moved beyond their childhood. Maybe they haven't cultivated tastes across the arts and media. The unwillingness to broaden the visual palette implies these designers simply don't have anything new to say. ## Learning to Use History Without Being Trapped By It If I squint, I can see some reasons why "retro" remains a calling card in games. It's accessible to create at a low cost. There are free tools, abundant tutorials, and the freedom of working alone. Eric Barone, the creator of *Stardew Valley*, [has made almost half a billion dollars](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/stardew-valley-sales-grew-to-over-41-million-by-2024-s-end?ref=killscreen.com) from his game. Why not spin the wheel? But given the low cost of new game engines, there's so much more that you can do on a budget—the chaotic interactions of [Theo Triantafyllidis](https://www.killscreen.com/theo-triantafyllidis-clashing-real-time-graphics-with-live-performance/), meditative reflections of [Ina Chen](https://www.killscreen.com/ina-chen-generation-of-books-deepfake-family-memory/), and the biomimicry of [Alice Bucknell](https://www.killscreen.com/alice-bucknell-multiplayer-games-interspecies-cooperation/). There is so much tape left to record the song of the future! That some who make games default to their earliest days is arrested development. > Are game creators making deliberate aesthetic arguments, or just defaulting to what they know? "The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home and the imaginary one," Boym wrote. A simple reason why games can't and shouldn't pull the nostalgia lever is that they simply haven't learned how to use nostalgia responsibly. Filmmakers, musicians, dramaturgs, writers–they've cultivated taste across decades, centuries even, of their respective fields and can distinguish between using history and being trapped by it. Too many game creators are still playing the games of their childhood instead of understanding them. But maybe we're also looking at it the wrong way. Instead of the past 50 years of video games, we should be looking outside of the medium entirely. When I look at the game makers that excite me, they're coming from different fields entirely-film, music, architecture, literature, and so on—and then mapping their point of view onto the medium of games. Games are young enough that "retro" still means someone's actual childhood, not a cultural memory. Maybe in another thirty years, when game creators have enough distance from the NES era, they'll finally use those aesthetics the way Coogler and Anderson use film stock: as a deliberate choice in service of something larger. Until then, retro-pixel-old-school-vintage-whatever is what it's always been—not an aesthetic argument, but a limitation mistaken for a style. --- **Read next:** [A comprehensive history of low-poly art, Pt. 1](https://www.killscreen.com/poly-generational/) · [The vast, lurid possibilities of PNG glitches](https://www.killscreen.com/vast-lurid-possibilities-png-glitches/) · [The demolition of Japan’s videogame history](https://www.killscreen.com/the-demolition-of-japans-videogame-history/) From Killscreen Killscreen has been writing about games, play and the aesthetics of the recent past since 2011\. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### "La vraie vie" Asks What It Means To Be Real In A Fake Place URL: https://www.killscreen.com/la-vraie-vie-asks-what-it-means-to-be-real-in-a-fake-place/ Last updated: 2026-08-25T23:43:33.000Z At the opening of the new French series *La vraie vie*, we are introduced via video chat to working actor Victor Assié with directors off-sc. “We have a role for you,” they say. “But not in real life.” Assié puts his hands on his head, quizically, trying to comprehend. “I don’t understand,” he says. And in an instant, we are somewhere else. Assié has transformed into a virtual version of himself, and we’re sitting alongside him as he is shuttled to the coast of an idyllic French island town. He passes a police station, a man staring at the water, a gyro stand, and a taxi blasting music from the dock. Like Assié, these are all real people populating the island’s activities. “We’ll be with you, but not in-game,” Ekiem Barbier and Guilhem Cauisse tell Assié, shortly before making landfall. “Get your license, buy a car,” but you’re on your own.” And so are we. Assié has been haplessly thrust into a “roleplay” server built on the popular military shooter *Arma 3*. Role-play servers operate exactly as they sound–rather than taking on the fictional narratives provided by a game’s creator, role-play games are a simulacra, real people playing fake roles in a real way. The five-part TV series on ARTE France follows Assié from his early unsuccessful attempts at building a life, from acting to driving a bus, before finding his true calling: a documentarian of the lives of the people he encounters. Much like Nathan Fielder’s *The Rehearsal* or Abbas Kiarostami’s *Close-up,* *In Real Life* plays with the meta-concept of its title but in the context of a video game environment. The material is rife with contradiction. They are documentarians filming a documentary about making a documentary in a virtual world. While we can see the digital character’s lips moving in a close-up, Barbier and Causse were brutally aware of the intimate strangeness of that person being near and far away simultaneously. “He’s out of frame and in frame at the same time,” Barbier explained to me, likening Assié’s “performance” to [a type of digital puppetry](https://www.killscreen.com/forget-virtual-reality-alternate-reality/). “It's a new way to see characters through a film.” “It’s this prism when you're looking at things where everything is simplified, and at the same time very complex, you know?” Causse says about filming in games. “It's just representations of things. What values are you putting into those realities?” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/11/EPISODE-2_chill-2-min.png) ## **Documentary Without Judgment** Barbier, Causse, and fellow filmmaker Quentin L’Helgouac’h met each other in film school and started talking about games as the open-ended sandbox genre began to take off in the 2010s, like *Rust*, and *Minecraft.* These are online games, definitionally connected to the development of the social web, and unlike other narrative games, the absence of story allowed emergent narrative to blossom. Barbier and Causse were immediately drawn to the question of these games’ appeal. “It’s this basic documentary question that you ask to someone to understand,” Causse said. “Why are people playing this game?” After an initial short film in *Grand Theft Auto V,* they spent six years and over 900 hours developing *Knit’s Island*, a documentary on staying alive in the zombie survival game *DayZ.* “It's a medium, not a subject for us,” Barbier said. There is a tendency for writers or filmmakers stepping into games to over-explain their environment, as there is a fear that audiences will be lost along the way. Consider [*The New Yorker*’s 2010 survey of the year’s popular games](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/09/painkiller-deathstreak?ref=killscreen.com), where Nicholson Baker approached games with a deliberate naïveté. He shared his stunning observations that video games were long and video games were challenging before closing his missive with “I miss grass.” (To my knowledge, he has not written about games since then.) Work for a “general” audience about games usually struggles to balance explanation with a presumption of visual literacy. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/11/---It-s-a-medium--not-a-subject-for-us----.png) Refeshingly, Barbier and Causse peddle almost none of these cloying, mandatory pleasantries about what the film *is*. They don’t provide a history of role-play servers. There are no talking heads. They recorded a voice-over early on, but abandoned it, instead relying on Assié’s in-game conversations with everyone around him. “It’s pretty boring to try to explain that you are in a roleplay server,” Barbier joked. “Do I want to spend 20 minutes telling someone that you are in a game?” Instead, Assié’s unfamiliarity is a comic foil as he flits between the grind (getting a driver’s license) and the profound (reflecting on the difficulties of a life in the arts). The series is so dogged about maintaining a presence in-game that I succumbed to the illusion that this was, in fact, a documentary…in real life. Assié and a new friend Emiliano, share the beauty and wonder of a sunset flight, and we sit in the backseat, watching a new friendship emerge. The two continue to talk through the night, scouting a location for an in-game project, and Emiliano offers an in-game therapy session (as he’s a psychoanalyst IRL). “We wanted to get close to that feeling that we don't know what's real anymore or what the film is about,” Barbier said. “ This fly-on-the-wall approach delivers a genuine, unfiltered, and unique look at how the online community conducts its lives. “The ‘direct cinema’ approach was not something you see in games,” producer [Boris Garavini](mailto:boris@lesfilmsinvisibles.com) told me, referring to the mid-century documentary movement that pared down cameras and crews to capture the essence of their subjects. Working with editor Nicolas Bancilhon, who had never played games, gave the work “a fresh eye,” Garavani continued. There’s a perception in game-based films that one can simply do whatever you want are unrestrained by the real work. However, the team took the opposite approach to get the look they wanted, maintaining purity by using *Arma*’s camera without embellishment. Part of the series’ allure is the mix of the shakes of L’Helgouac’h’s camera juxtaposed with long-distance takes of the island’s scenery. “Sometimes we used the camera as a fake object,” Barbier said about their efforts to pull natural performances out of their amateur subjects. “We wanted to let people know that something is happening, but we wanted to provoke some situations.” However, more practical concerns, familiar to documentarians who shoot in dangerous environments, quickly emerged. Shoots were long, often eight hours or more, and players frequently moved too fast to capture in frame. If someone were hurt on-set, they’d have to wait for an ambulance to amble to their location. But then they would also have to continue the requisite role-play with the firefighters, transforming a minor hiccup into an hour-long snafu. “Every shot is kind of a success, you know?” Barbier said. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/11/EPISODE-4_emiliano1-2.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/11/EPISODE-3_fondvert2-2.png) ## **Islands, Cops, and the Tedium of Small-Town Life** Islands, in particular, can be really strange places. The ports guarantee that you always know who’s coming and who’s going. People are there, and they never leave. And on a digital island, buffeted from the eroding effects of time, the island never really changes. The safety that the island preserves brings its inhabitants comfort and solace. Barbier compared the town to Frederick Wiseman’s 2019 film *Monrovia, Indiana,* which takes a microscopic view of the town’s 2,000-person population and follows everything from debates about fire hydrant location to travails of a collision repair shop. “It’s a type of monoculture,” Barbier said about both the tiny American town and the virtual world of the same size. At one point, Barbier came across a couple of players who were rebuilding a wall with small stones, because passing cars had slowly chipped away at the structure. “They were just like building and rebuilding the walls,” Barbier said. “I was like *God, it's a part of the setup and they're just rebuilding it over and over again.”* The tedium of small-town life is on display in other ways. First, the setting is surprisingly unambitious. It is the year 2030\. Emmanuel Macron is president, for some reason. Second, there is a chit-chat everywhere as players in character make up dead air with standard fare about the weather and local gossip. Finally, there is a stunning amount of paperwork and administration: license plates, registrations, staffing agencies, and insurance. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/11/La-Vraie-Vie--In-Real-Life----5-EPISODES---with-english-subs-on-Vimeo------2025-11-03-at-2.35.50-PM.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/11/La-Vraie-Vie--In-Real-Life----5-EPISODES---with-english-subs-on-Vimeo------2025-11-03-at-2.36.11-PM.jpg) Perhaps nothing marks the indignities of a small town more than the cops. There are simply cops *everywhere*. They pull over Assié for running a red light, for not wearing a helmet, for performing a play without a permit, for honking too aggressively, for illegal parking. No specific laws are ever referenced (they'll sure get around to it), but the police offer vague, and often menacing, accusations of general disorder. Perhaps the omnipresence of a police state is too be expected in a game built on the bones of a military shooter. But the social masks of *playing* cops is sufficient to turn people into a hackneyed version of cops pulled from film and tv. “People are trying to be their best version of a policemen or firefighter while acting, which is the worse thing to do,” Causse said. So, basically, assholes. At the same time, there aren’t enough cops to actively manage the island directly. Thankfully, an active culture of snitching alive and well leaves no discretion undocumented. During one sequence, they arranged a serene long-shot of dozens of blue and green screens on a rolling set of hills. But inevitably, someone would call the police, who would destroy all of their equipment (as cops are wont to do).Philosopher Immanuel Kant once observed, “The nice thing about living in a small town is that when you don’t know what you’re doing, someone else does.” ## **When Friendships Only Exist in Virtual Space** The relationship between the open-ended nature of role-play and a small town's naturally oppressive dynamics was often in tension. On the one hand, it’s—surprise, surprise—a video game. Nothing *matters* in the liberating way that games free us from the strictures of our actual lives. On the other hand, it is a game populated by people who bring their own wants and needs to bear on the virtual world around them. In fact, it’s the quotidian concerns that breathe life into the film. It’s rarely grand conversations about life and death, but the daily interactions between Assié and his newfound compatriots that give the film a real sense of place. There are so few people there daily, that friendships and romances are almost inevitable. Barbier said that they wanted Assié to make friends, but couldn’t force a fraternity (it’s mostly men on the island). More importantly, a video game stripped of its global concerns can focus players on each other, instead of *Arma 3*’simagined regional conflicts. Thankfully, Assié builds a natural rapport with the aforementioned Emiliano and the two spend more and more free time together. Emiliano shuttles Assié around and gives him tips on how to find a job. The friendship symbolizes Assié's relationship to this place, which has become a home of sorts. He is on the precipice of moving from a tourist to a local. "The main question for Victor was just do you really want to be here?" Causse said. As you feel the series winding down and Assié's filming comes to a close, they discuss perhaps meeting each other in real life. But they don't do it. “With some friendships once you get of its context, it can break up everything,” Barbier says. “When you meet the real person, the character dies.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/11/La-Vraie-Vie--In-Real-Life----5-EPISODES---with-english-subs-on-Vimeo------2025-11-03-at-2.46.05-PM.jpg) ### Keiken's Morphogenic Angels Imagines Post-Human Bodies 1,000 Years From Now URL: https://www.killscreen.com/keiken-morphogenic-angels-post-human-game-designretry/ Last updated: 2026-08-14T00:04:36.000Z *During the pandemic, the work of Keiken—Isabel Ramos, Hana Omori, and Tanya Cruz—*[*came across my radar*](https://www.killscreen.com/keiken/) *for their work*, [Feel My Metaverse](https://keiken.cloud/work/feel-my-metaverse-trimester-1/?ref=killscreen.com). *What a quaint word that once was, before Facebook changed its name, Apple shipped weird digital faces on the Vision Pro*. *When I spoke to Cruz, she was more serene: "There are just certain terms that we really end up resonating with, even if it's only for a specific period of time," she said. "Maybe it's just something that helps us underpin our approach."* *Out of that work with virtual bodies has emerged an interdisciplinary practice that spans film, performance, industrial design, and, now, games.* Morphogenic Angels Chapter 1 *is part of their larger world-building project about our planet 1,000 years from now and beings that have organically reengineered their bodies to become post-human. And unlike many forays into our distant future, Keiken is delightfully optimistic, focusing on what we could be and not what we are not.* *In this interview, we talk through their journey to game-making, the challenges of working as a triad, and whether they'll need business cards someday. This conversation was conducted last year as I've been going through some older work to get it out there!* *–* ***Jamin: We spoke four years ago. You were at the beginning of your journey as a group. What would you say has been some of the biggest changes for you all creatively?*** **Tanya Cruz:** When we made *Feel My Metaverse*, it was after we'd spent maybe three or four years working together already at that point, but we had never really done anything technical or digital. We'd been doing a lot of performances, doing a lot of world-building and writing narratives and things, but we'd never actually had the chance to learn any of the digital skills we wanted to. We'd been nominated for this exhibition in London, and that was the perfect opportunity to begin learning Unreal. That was a super challenge for us because where do you start, and how do you do anything? So it was a real uphill battle for us. Before, we were just using it for making films or short films, basically, and some XR performances. Now, we've actually dipped our toes into the actual game-making side of it, which has always been a goal of ours. When we first started collaborating at university, our main interests or goals were to create immersive experiences and explore the nature of consciousness. *Keiken* means experience in Japanese. So, it's really been at the fundamental core of what we want to do, whether that's in whichever medium we're working in. But I think over the years, it became more and more obvious that making a game is the perfect situation for us. We always want the audience to be completely immersed in the story, have agency in that world, exist in this shifted reality, and then have this experience they can take back into their own reality. ***The willingness to just use the G word—to say game—comes with expectations, right? Did you play with some of the semantic distinctions there between immersive experience, game, and new media art?*** Being Keiken means things never really belong to one specific category. We were able to turn our initial demo into a fully formed chapter for the HAU Theatre in Berlin and present it in this context of being in a theater, so it took on this very performative form. We adapted that version to make it more robust and tangible than in the theater for a gallery context. It became [an immersive installation that invites the audience to experience the work in a sensory way](https://killscreen.com/kiriaki-goni-telling-the-bees/?ref=killscreen.com). The way the game works is that it can be played as a single-player game, but it can be enjoyed by a wider audience as a cinematic experience. So we spent a long time crafting the narrative to shift between gameplay and cutscenes seamlessly, creating this bridge that can be enjoyed by multiple types of audiences simultaneously. When we presented it at the 21st Century Museum in Japan, we really wanted to make it [a very tactile and sensory experience](https://killscreen.com/kiriaki-goni-telling-the-bees/?ref=killscreen.com) so that the audience tuned in to the narrative itself. There's a ball pit that the audience can sit in. We released some lavender scent into the space every now and then, and there's this big cellular seating structure. We like this very layered experience of the work. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/keiken-Morphogenic-Angels-2023-Hau-Berlin-Lowres-10.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/keiken-Morphogenic-Angels-2023-Hau-Berlin-Lowres-7.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/keiken-Morphogenic-Angels-2023-Hau-Berlin-700-13.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/keiken-Morphogenic-Angels-2023-Hau-Berlin-Lowres-9.webp) ## Games in Galleries: Context-Shifting Work **Were there any compromises that you had to make where maybe there were tensions between players, the world that you were attempting to construct, and the on-the-ground realities of having people in a physical space playing said thing?** Instructions! We had to grapple with the fact that we're presenting our game or our art piece in an art context, so that's in museums or galleries, that's in theater spaces where you're going to have a range of different people coming in to experience it, who maybe they've never played a game before. I think what we've tried to do is we've tried to create it so that the aim of the game is challenging, and it has this rope that you have to climb upwards. The player has to utilize their energy mechanics, so they can either expel energy, protect it, connect it, or catch energies of other entities or beings they meet in the game. So I think it was really a big journey of discovery for us anyway. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/keiken-Morphogenic-Angels-2023-Hau-Berlin-Lowres-2.webp) ***In our last conversation, you brought up the challenges of representing real people. I believe some of your work, the Kylie Jenner beauty work, has some commentary on how we define realness and digital spaces. How has that come along in your practice in terms of how you want to showcase bodies and how bodies move? How has that process been for you, or how's your understanding changed over the last couple of years as you've gone from working with collaborators to more actively sculpting and constructing the bodies that appear in your work?*** It's not just this desire to create something realistic. We've always been exploring going beyond the human body, beyond the human sensory experience, to have more compassion for otherness and the unknown and other beings, and just imagining how, in the future, the nature of consciousness in the human body might evolve. So I think we've always had this strong science fiction tether to that idea. And that's really influenced the way that we end up working and creating our own digital bodies. With *Morphogenic Angels*, within our world-building project, humans are no longer referred to as humans. They're now angels. And that's because they have this morphogenic ability to adapt their bodies, and they can merge their cells with the cells of other beings—animals, other extraterrestrial life forms, and so on. They are able to expand their possibilities of what it means to be human. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Morphogenic-Angels-2023-21st-century-museum-kanazawa-Hau-berlin-Kanal-center-pompidou-1400-7.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Morphogenic-Angels-2023-21st-century-museum-kanazawa-Hau-berlin-Kanal-center-pompidou-1500-14.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Morphogenic-Angels-2023-21st-century-museum-kanazawa-Hau-berlin-Kanal-center-pompidou-1400-4-2.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Morphogenic-Angels-2023-21st-century-museum-kanazawa-Hau-berlin-Kanal-center-pompidou-1400-8-2.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Morphogenic-Angels-2023-21st-century-museum-kanazawa-Hau-berlin-Kanal-center-pompidou-1500-12-2.webp) At 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa in Japan The characters are influenced by the scientist [Michael Levin](https://drmichaellevin.org/?ref=killscreen.com), who's been researching morphogenesis and how we can rewire senses to do different things in the body. He was interested in these flatworms, where they can dissect and cut off one part of their tails. Then, rather than telling the body to regrow that tail, it can actually tell it to regrow a head. So it showed us how malleable nature is and how much we don't understand yet. As we were figuring out who these characters were, we had to really understand the different morphogenic abilities of the different characters. So we have Yaxu, the protagonist, and they are part octopus and a range of other things. Then, we do a lot of different sculpting of the bodies. We take it in turns; we always have this passing on the baton collaboration of doing the character design, where we go back and forth between each other to create these multi-layered bodies and creatures. We sculpted the body and the face to make them as non-human as we can, while still working within the confines of a humanoid rig, I guess. Painting the textures and having something more glossy or amphibious. We made this special fur all over the body, which is very fine. You can't really see it. When we do the motion capture, even though we know the story and we know who the basis of those characters are, they don't actually really start to come alive until we do the motion capture, where there's this relationship between the digital body and the physical body actually happens. We start to really understand how that character might actually move and how they might have certain physical responses to something that you wouldn't be able to tell if you were just doing it digitally. So when we—in the first motion capture session with Sophie embodying the character of Yaxu, we realized that the character actually had to be part octopus as well because of the way their body is and because of the way that's how when you move, that's how the body feels, right? So there's this intuitive thing that happens only in that moment. From then on, all the nuances of that character start to evolve and become being. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Morphogenic-Angels-2023-21st-century-museum-kanazawa-Hau-berlin-Kanal-center-pompidou-1400-6.webp) ## Working as Three Minds, One Vision ***How has the division of labor changed between you? Has it changed at all? Is everything collaborative? How have your roles as a group changed? Because you're bringing in all these other collaborators as well.*** Since the beginning of Keiken, when we were just at art school, we graduated, and we didn't know how to do anything. We did everything together. Every decision was made together, every piece of every sentence, every email that we wrote was done together. So we accidentally became this one consciousness as three people. It's very sweet, but we're very dependent on one another. We really want everyone in the collective to touch everything we've done because it doesn't feel right if we don't. But I think you start to identify the things you're more interested in and the things that come more naturally to you over time. I'll do a lot of the characters and the animation. When I do the characters, Hana and I are back and forth with that process. Hana, for example, will do a lot of the environment design with this magic realism quality, but that's really directly influenced by Isabel's ideas and symbols. Because we're a collaborative practice and we deal directly with trying to imagine alternate realities, it's essential to us to have an approach that takes world building at its core. When you collaborate, you are—you are all coming at it from a different perspective, and you all need to create a way of cohesively existing together within that creation of that world. We're trying new roles, but we're still defining them. Maybe next time we talk, I'll give you a clearer answer. **Jamin Warren:** You'll have official job titles and business cards. **Tani:** Exactly, yeah. ### Indira Ardolic's Live-Coding Performances Turn Game Engines Into Instruments URL: https://www.killscreen.com/indira-ardolics-live-coding-performances-turn-game-engines-into-instruments/ Last updated: 2025-12-01T21:48:09.000Z Artist [Indira Ardolic](https://www.instagram.com/voydescreamsback/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) has seen her fair share of unscripted activity on-stage. As one of the rising talents of NYC’s live-coding scene she puts their programming work in front of audiences as part of the performance. Foibles and miscues are just part of the routine. Ardolic once had a performance stall for more than 10 minutes on stage after a program stalled and she resorted to drawing in MS Paint to wait out the error. “I just kind of leaned into it,” she said. But the danger of live performance also generates unexpected joy and delight. Ardolic was playing a DIY performance recently and had created a spider as a “main character” with a procedurally animated walk. The crowd loved it. “Everyone chanted ‘SPIDER SPIDER SPIDER,” she told me. “Is it because it’s a DIY show or because I have so many friends here?” Earlier this year, I profiled [Roxanne Harris](https://www.killscreen.com/how-roxanne-harris-performs-jazz-with-code/), another live coder with a background in jazz saxophone. Harris' relationship to video games is more conceptual—game design's interdisciplinary nature mirrors her own syncretic practice. For Ardolic, the connection is more literal: she's using Unreal Engine to bring software designed for game development directly into spontaneous, ephemeral visual experiences that exist only in the moment of performance–she’s using Unreal as a creative technologist to bring software designed for game development directly into spontaneous, ephemeral visual experiences that exist only in the moment of performance. 0:00 /0:08 1× From competitive play of esports to live-streaming games on Twitch, games have been experimenting with live performance of digital work for quite some time. These displays demand that we think about the performer, the player, and the participants on exactly the same level. But for the relatively newer popularity of live-coding concerts in the last 15 years, game engines are fertile territory to explore for Ardolic and others. “I’m a Staten Island truther,” Ardolic joked when I asked her about her upbringing. The borough is physically and culturally distinct from the rest of New York City, largely due to its status as the least-populated borough. “I was close to the park,” she said. “There are foxes and deer, but not enough local art.” Games were a close part of her childhood, but making music was not. She said she learned to read from *Final Fantasy 8* since it had no voice acting, and her mother showed her a *Final Fantasy* anime music video when she was young. After enrolling at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, one of the oldest programs in the country, she came across a group of students at the school’s Game Innovation Lab sparring about the stress of coding in front of others. “It's all well and good to want to build the next real estate app for an enterprise software company,” she said. “But when I met this group of artists I was like *you can just break code as a performance?*” Soon, she was an active member of [LiveCode.NYC](https://livecode.nyc/?ref=killscreen.com) and putting together shows around the city. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/DSC01382.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/HighresScreenshot00001.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/IMG_3506.JPG) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/IMG_3513.JPG) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/indira-ardolic-sod-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/Screenshot-2025-10-26-211522.png) The love of games as spaces for imagination led Ardolic to Unreal Engine, her primary canvas for creating audio-reactive environments from her audio input. “Initially, it was the thing that made the most sense to focus on the visuals,” she said. “It helped me replicate those more quickly than other software.” Ardolic then takes sketches and photos to guide her approach and downloads 3D assets for each performance. Sound input controls all of the visual parameters, adjust the color, shininess, and texture and make the objects stretch, ripple and morph during the performance. While working with experiential designer [Erin Wajufos](https://www.erinwajufos.digital/?ref=killscreen.com#footer) on a collaborative project, the two played with visuals from the underwater adventure game [*Subnautica*](https://www.killscreen.com/diving-game-genre-just-got-more-beautiful-and-weird/)—its bioluminescent creatures and alien depths became raw material for their real-time environments. "Erin was obsessed," Ardolic said. Ardolic says that her synesthesia–a neurological condition where one might see colors or taste words–plays heavily into her process before a show. “I can close my eyes, and see a scene unfolding,” she said. Games provide a unique outlet as a vessel for both audio and visual expression. “if you can replicate what you're feeling or seeing, it's just makes you feel good to look at it,” she reflected. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/12/20251026_203029.jpg) Indira's prep At deeper level, though, Ardolic argues that working in game engines brings her closer to the heart of real-time performance. Game design is an iterative process that requires designers to let their mistakes shine during the process of play-testing. All of the miscues and bugs become the raw material for meaningful interactions in play. Ardolic points to the intentional and unintentional mishaps in Insomniac Games’ work such as the many [flight glitches](https://www.reddit.com/r/Spyro/comments/1etmlgw/spyro%5F2%5Fflying%5Fportal%5Fglitch/?ref=killscreen.com) in *Spryo* to the secret [behind-the-scenes museums](https://ratchetandclank.fandom.com/wiki/Insomniac%5FMuseum?ref=killscreen.com) of unfinished content in the *Ratchet and Clank* series. “Sometimes when things break, that's an opportunity to embrace it,” she noted. “That's what I like about 3D things.” While games and live-code audiences might be forgiving, New York is not. Ardolic is still working through an MFA at Hunter College and feels like there’s pressure for artists to be “driven towards this perfectionist route.” For Ardolic, that’s in sharp contrast to what she’s been seeing in live-code communities in other places like Sheffield and Barcelona. For now, she dreams of bringing the swirling, ethereal mass of the "astral plane" from her favorite manga *Berserk* into existence—an environment where the landscape shifts endlessly. "It would look so beautiful," she says. The only obstacle? "My sad, beautiful dying computer. The hardware is sometimes my least favorite part of the art form." 0:00 /0:23 1× ### October Game Club! URL: https://www.killscreen.com/po/ Last updated: 2025-10-20T18:29:53.000Z _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Labubus, Loot Boxes and the Gamblification of Everything URL: https://www.killscreen.com/gamblification-labubu-loot-boxes-gambling-mechanicsretry/ Last updated: 2026-09-12T17:04:36.000Z ## **How Gaming Taught Culture to Randomize Desire** I don't need to tell you about the wild success of Labubus. The fuzzy, grotesque baubles have become a runaway commercial hit this year with chronic shortages, the latest in a long string of toy successes that blur the line between adults and adolescents. Of course, with success inevitably arrives critique and the condemnations range from rampant consumerism to their playful ugly aesthetic. In a recent New Yorker article on the rise of Labubu's, writer Kyle Chayka desperately tried to make sense of the visual noise that emanates from these creatures: "We are the Labubus, grinning ecstatically amid the wreckage of our rapidly dismantling, recombinatory era." Grim! But as someone invested in games, one element demanded a closer look: blind boxes. In a break from traditional retail, blind boxes are sealed and designed packages so you do not know what specific item is inside. One does not simply purchase a Labubu–you purchase a *chance* to own a particular Labubu. There's simply no way to complete your set predictably. You can only keep buying. It's a lottery ticket. Randomized distribution is not a new phenomenon in retail. In the mid-19th century, cigarette cards were inserted into tobacco products, and later, random sports cards of baseball players entered the public market in the early 20th century. Collectible card games like *Magic: The Gathering* and *Pokémon TCG* brought randomized booster packs and introduced layers of rarity with a tier system. In Japan, throughout the 80s, popular *gashapon* (capsule toy vending machines) came with a random toy in a little plastic bubble. These toys later became designer objects throughout the 90s, merging with a streetwear emphasis on hyper-rarity. In the internet age, retailers like Pop Mart, Funko, and Loot Crate delivered the surprise mechanics with profound effect before leveraging streaming platforms to make the big reveal an online spectator event. ![Wall of colorful vending machines with illuminated displays.](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1755382915292-312abf8cb879?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDV8fGdhY2hhfGVufDB8fHx8MTc2MDU2NjMyNnww&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000) Gacha! Photo by [Umair Dingmar](https://unsplash.com/@umaird?ref=killscreen.com) / [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?utm%5Fsource=ghost&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcampaign=api-credit) The problem is much larger and more apparent as Labubus are just the tip of the iceberg. Gaming's connection to gambling highlights how our broader culture sees more and more gambling elements working into all parts of our daily lives. Now, brands like Temu and Starbucks use spin to win features, quizzes, and elaborate referral systems on their sites. Cryptocurrency sites pull a page from FanDuel and offer free cash for signups. And just this month, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange [took a $2 billion stake](https://www.reuters.com/business/nyse-parent-nears-deal-2-billion-stake-polymarket-wsj-reports-2025-10-07/?ref=killscreen.com) political in prediction market startup Polymarket, which seeks to expose financial markets to betting on sports, entertainment, and politics events. But beneath the surface, a broader trend in gaming has helped lay the groundwork for our contemporary fixation. The point with Labubus is the aesthetic, but the mechanic also matters. How they are attained is meaningful because we're seeing the physical manifestation of a digital habit. As more IRL interactions have an explicitly digital component, games have offered a blueprint for where our economic lives might go. When I asked Joseph Macey, a post-doctoral researcher at University of Turku who focuses on gaming and gambling, about Labubus, "It's not exactly gambling," he says. "But these kinds of behaviors are used to encourage ongoing consumption." But he had a simpler word for it: "gamblification." ![close-up photography of lucky arcade with Bar, Bar, and Star](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1518895312237-a9e23508077d?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDE5fHxnYW1ibGluZ3xlbnwwfHx8fDE3NjA1NjY0Mzh8MA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000) I feel like I've been using a lot of gambling images laterly. Photo by [Carl Raw](https://unsplash.com/@carltraw?ref=killscreen.com) / [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?utm%5Fsource=ghost&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcampaign=api-credit) ### But Is It Really Gambling? Macey was almost fated to be interested in gambling. His grandfather used to organize a national sweepstake for the annual steeplechase race winner, the Grand National in Liverpool. Later, family games of gin rummy became an annual point-tallying tradition that would net the winner an extra present at Christmas. When his research led him to esports, the ties to gambling were immediately apparent, and he focused his thesis on the convergence of games and gambling. After advising Topias Mattinen, now a doctoral researcher at Tampere, on his master's thesis, the two began working with Juho Hamari, professor of gamification at Tampere, to dig more into the gaming industry's increasing reliance on gambling. Before we start throwing around the big G-word, getting clear on terms is helpful. First, there needs to be something at stake. It could be money or objects, but it needs to have some material value. Second, the outcome needs to be uncertain. In roulette, no one knows where the ball will stop (although [many have attempted to try](https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-how-to-beat-roulette-gambler-figures-it-out/?ref=killscreen.com)!) Finally, there must be a prize. It could be financial or another type of game. Put together, gambling is "Staking money or something of material value on an event having an uncertain outcome in the hope of winning additional money and/or an item of material value," according to Macey and fellow researcher Juho Hamari. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/image.png) **Star Wars* infamous loot box Gambling games and video games share a common ancestry; introducing gambling-like elements into games is a relatively new phenomenon in this century. Asian *gacha* mechanics (named after the previously mentioned vending machines) crossed into Western markets through mobile games, before making an ominous appearance in 2017 when *Star Wars Battlefront II* added loot boxes and randomized reward containers requiring payment to open. Even as someone who plays games quite a bit, I was surprised by the breadth of gambification techniques in games. Aside from loot boxes, there are weapon cases that drop for free, but you need to purchase a key to open them. FIFA's Ultimate Team pulls directly from trading cards with randomized players. There are battle passes with time-limited rewards, daily bonuses that encourage you to come daily, in-game betting systems, virtual currencies that hide real-money conversion, secondary markets to bet on and trade digital goods, and tournament-specific rewards. All this is on top of *actual betting* on the outcomes of games. Instead of experimenting with new play styles and finding new players, game companies are attempting to colonize more and more of existing players' time, attention, and resources. It's then inevitable that the "innovations" are around extracting every last drop, even if it means getting danger-close to the casino. ## Real Gambling vs. Near Gambling The challenge is that gamblification in games deliberately blurs the boundary between the casino and play space. "You have these gambling mechanics where you might not spend money; you get stuff for free just by logging in," Mattinen says. But if you're not spending your money, is that gambling?" But what do players think? In their research for their paper "[Play, Pay, Profit](https://dl.digra.org/index.php/dl/article/view/2436/2429?ref=killscreen.com)," Mattinen, Macey, and Hamari spoke with thirteen players worldwide to get a better sense of how they think about that line between gambling and gaming. The work revealed a complex and nuanced literacy across a range of activities. ![blue and red plastic toy car](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1597042962047-005b63a5eb25?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDZ8fGNoaXBzJTIwcG9rZXJ8ZW58MHx8fHwxNzYwNTY2NzcyfDA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000) Photo by [Apolo Photographer](https://unsplash.com/@apolophotographer?ref=killscreen.com) / [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?utm%5Fsource=ghost&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcampaign=api-credit) The big revelation for the researchers was the concept of "cashing out"– players saw the fuzzy line between gambling and gaming, but only thought that gambling occurred when players transferred non-monetary winnings into real-world cash. Some activities were a clear bright line, like selling an account or in-game item on a third-party site, but others were cleverly disguised. Players have learned that they can convert Steam credit (earned from selling virtual items) into physical hardware like the Steam Deck, which then sell for real money. "Players are the ones who have the best grasp \[of gambling in games\]," Macey says. "They are not ignorant about what's going on." The challenge is that our brain chemistry is wired to value uncertainty. The highest dopamine release isn't a win, but the moment *just* before the outcome is revealed. No matter how literate players might be, our bodies are not wired to resist, no matter what we think we know. ## Gambling, Gambling Everywhere, But None for Me To Plink Macey sees gamblification spreading into more areas of civic life in two key ways. First, the aesthetics of gambling are simply alluring and spreading. James Bond has always had an allure, and Las Vegas gambling revenue hit an all-time high in 2024 [for the fourth year in a row](https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/nevada-casinos-beat-all-time-record-in-december-all-of-2024-las-vegas-strip-posts-2nd-highest-win-ever/?ref=killscreen.com). Ads for betting websites like FanDuel and Betfair are omnipresent across sports, normalizing and popularizing complicated arrangements like parlays. "Gambling is being shown as this way of having excitement and thrills in your life," Macey says. But there's a more pernicious side for which video games are sadly leading the charge. Macey said that the simple functional use of gambling mechanics to add a bit of spice to any interaction is increasingly becoming the norm. Blind boxes are just the beginning, and even more pernicious uses of gamblification will surely make their way out of video games. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/image-1.png) For example, *Hearthstone* uses a "[pity timer](https://esports.gg/guides/hearthstone/hearthstone-pity-timer/?ref=killscreen.com)" to prevent someone from being too unlucky when opening packs of cards in the game. If you hit a bad run, you will get an Epic card no matter what. This system is presented as a fairness system to protect players' time and patience, but it functions as a lure to ensure you keep coming back. Macey foresees other industries learning from techniques such as "time-gating," which deliberately slows players' progress and social comparisons that pit players against each other. How long until Pop Mart macabrely sends you Labubus part at a time? Or shows you which other Pop Mart customers have spent just a bit more than you on their leaderboard? Whether it's Labubus, loot boxes, or Temu spins, "It's a very simple thing in the end," Mattinen says. "People like excitement and winning. That's what triggers us." --- **Read next:** [Review: Pokémon Black and White](https://www.killscreen.com/review-pokemon-black-and-white/) · [What Tottenham's Collapse Teaches Us About the Corruption of Play](https://www.killscreen.com/what-tottenhams-collapse-teaches-us-about-the-corruption-of-play/) From Killscreen Killscreen has spent fifteen years reading games for what they do to everything else — retail, attention, civic life. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### Death is a character select in 1994's Eastern Mind URL: https://www.killscreen.com/death-is-a-character-select-in-1994s-eastern-mind/ Last updated: 2026-10-12T18:44:16.000Z In *Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong-Nou*, dying is not a fail state—it's a menu. The game follows Rin, whose soul is stolen by the living island of Tong-Nou, and getting it back means completing the life cycles of nine creatures; every death ends with the player choosing which body to be reincarnated into next. The 1994 Mac curio resurfaced this month when a history account's [reel](https://www.instagram.com/p/DctbpuxM%5FY3/?ref=killscreen.com) introduced it to an audience that mostly wasn't alive when it shipped, and the response made clear the appetite for pre-commercial Japanese multimedia art is very much alive. The maker matters here. Osamu Sato is a Kyoto-born multimedia artist and musician who has always treated games as one more canvas—*Eastern Mind* was built with Sato's studio OutSide Directors Company, published by Sony Music Entertainment Japan for classic Mac OS in 1994, and brought to North America by Sony Imagesoft a year later. Sato folded personal beliefs—reincarnation, animism—into the design, which is why the death loop reads as cosmology rather than mechanic. The same sensibility later produced *LSD: Dream Emulator* (1998), the PlayStation oddity whose cult never quite dies; Killscreen covered [a fan remake of it back in 2014](https://www.killscreen.com/lsd-revamped/). Three decades on, the reincarnation structure looks prophetic: death-as-progress is now the load-bearing wall of an entire genre, but *Eastern Mind* got there by way of Buddhist cosmology rather than run-based economy. [The Obscuritory's longer appreciation](https://obscuritory.com/adventure/eastern-mind-the-lost-souls-of-tong-nou/?ref=killscreen.com) is the best writing on it, and the game itself is [preserved and playable via the Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/easternmindtongnou). The timing rhymes, too. Last month we covered [tiengiungtong's bodhisattva-lined point-and-click](https://www.killscreen.com/tiengiungtongs-rabbit-hole-is-lined-with-bodhisattvas/)—thirty-two years apart, the spiritual adventure game keeps reincarnating. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/eastern-mind-box.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/eastern-mind-fangshing.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/eastern-mind-thieng.png) Cover art and screens from **Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong-Nou*, via the Eastern Mind Wiki Games this strange rarely make the algorithm—they make Killscreen. The free newsletter surfaces three decades of them, three times a week. [Get the free newsletter ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Ina Chen Charts Her Family's Journey From Mao to Migration URL: https://www.killscreen.com/ina-chen-generation-of-books-deepfake-family-memory/ Last updated: 2026-09-14T17:07:24.000Z My grandfather turned 94 this year, which is wonderful, but also strange. If you have parents or grandparents this age, there’s always a tinge of sadness every time you visit, even if they are in great shape. I wrestle with saying “good-bye” or “see you later,” knowing that this might be the last time I see him, but wishing for many more happy returns. And much to my grandfather’s annoyance, I’m desperate to squeeze every last memory from him—more details about my grandmother, who died before I was born, his bike route as a young kid in 1930s San Antonio, his time as a young Mexican-American in the Korean War, and so on. Like me, artist Ina Chen shared those same competing desires for connection with her grandparents, who lived on a Chinese nuclear research facility. “I interviewed my grandparents and listened to how they navigate their life with a huge consideration for the next generation,” she told me. “I found it's very universal.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Ina-Chen---Generation-of-Books---THUMBNAIL.jpg) 0:00 /1:36 1× Chen’s interviews with her grandfather and mother became a new multi-layered work called “[Generation of Books](https://www.inachen.com/generationofbooks/?ref=killscreen.com)” that charts her family’s journey through over a century of Chinese history. It is a reading, a performance leveraging photogrammetry and deep-fakes, and a physical installation of meaningful objects from her family. She created an 8x8-foot wooden platform inspired by the traditional Chinese *kang* (an elevated, heated seating area) for audiences to move around the archival materials—ID cards, wedding photos, food coupons, exam papers—before settling in for the 25-minute performance. " With Generation of Books, Chen has created a dialogue across generations to find the common ground and cultural divides that have shaped her, her mother, and her grandparents. “You can still sit at the same dinner table, talk, and share your life while the differences are huge,” she said. "What does it mean to take a family archive to talk about these generational conversations?" Chen said. The backdrop, of course, is one of rapid change that’s hard to explain if you’re not Chinese. In contrast to European or American history, which spread its economic rise (and fall) over centuries, China's economic development from an agrarian to an industrial society is a story told in mere decades. After multiple failed attempts to industrialize through the 20th century, China quadrupled its share of global GDP over the last forty years, carrying hundreds of millions of people into a more prosperous but sudden future. “China has been developing so fast,” Ina said. “That's why the gap between each generation is so large.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Ina-Chen---Generation-of-Books---Event8.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Ina-Chen---Generation-of-Books---3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Ina-Chen---Generation-of-Books---1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Ina-Chen---Generation-of-Books---8s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Ina-Chen---Generation-of-Books---15s.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Ina-Chen---Generation-of-Books---16s.jpg) Objects from Chen's documentary work ## **Three Books, Three Worlds** For Chen, the story of China’s evolution is told through the stories of her family, and more specifically, through the objects she remembers. She remembers her 91-year-old grandfather climbing a ladder to retrieve a single photograph from a high shelf, a tremendous physical effort to bridge a generational gap with the power of recovery. For Books, she highlighted three pieces of writing to serve as an individual signpost for a family member and a metaphor for that family member’s distinct place in their family and national history. Her grandfather chose “[Selected Works of Mao](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selected%5FWorks%5Fof%5FMao%5FTse-Tung?ref=killscreen.com)” from 1960, which connected his work at the China Academy of Engineering Physics to develop the country’s first atomic and hydrogen bomb, to the needs of his country and family. For Chen's mother, a copy of *Reader’s Digest* highlights her mom's dreams of stability and joy with family, children, and property. Chen's life and attendant questions have developed differently. She migrated to the United States and Europe in 2012 and has pursued a career as a director, artist, and designer with a strong focus on architecture and experience design. Her selected book for the work was “One Hundred Thousand Whys," an encyclopedia that spans all disciplines, but also contrasts the openness of her future life states with the limited ones of previous generations of her family. "My generation is one of curiosity, I think," she says. "But at the same time, it's confusing for many people in my generation, balancing family, life, and work. Well, my grandparents, even though there's very little freedom, everything is taken care of. It's a huge flip." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Ina-Chen---Generation-of-Books---Event4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Ina-Chen---Generation-of-Books---32.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Ina-Chen---Generation-of-Books---33.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Ina-Chen---Generation-of-Books---35.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Ina-Chen---Generation-of-Books---Event6.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Ina-Chen---Generation-of-Books---YUDO9.jpg) ## **Technical Choreography** Chen is manically multi-disciplinary. I first encountered her work with “[4993 Feet Under](https://www.inachen.com/4993-feet-under-2/?ref=killscreen.com)," an ambitious real-time performance based on the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Chen dubbed the performance "live cinema," as it pulled in game engine performance with music and visuals. For 4993 and other [live game engine performance](https://www.killscreen.com/kevin-peter-hes-embodied-game-engine-performance/), the uncertainty is on the performer's side, where any technical glitch can tank the performance. The intimacy of Books required a different type of risk for Chen. She decided to integrate several technical elements into the work's live performance. After viewers are invited to inspect the collection of objects, she presents them with a scrupulously designed 25-minute set that interchanges readings from the physical works with various dynamic elements to build out her family's story, all projected on the three walls surrounding the stage. Each familial chapter in the performance featured its unique approach to future technologies. For her grandfather, Chen worked with 1950s archival footage of Chinese atomic bomb tests and matched them with 3D scans of work compounds. For her mother, she created AI-generated depth maps to manipulate sequences from Ron Fricke's globe-trotting conceptual film *Baraka* to capture the feeling of her mother's unexpected modernity. And for herself, Chen reconstructed the pieces of rocket debris from the failed 1962 Atlas Centaur rocket featured in the final scene of *Koyaanisqatsi.* Using live hand-tracking, she choreographed and controlled the collapse of the rocket, a bookend to juxtapose the certainty of her grandfather's life with the open-endedness of her own. For the readings themselves, she chose an unusual vessel for earnest communication: deepfakes. As Chen read from each of the books, her face and the faces of her mother or grandfather would slowly drift across the screen, leaving a faint trace, before overtaking Chen's. For a moment, all three generations acted in unison and merged their separate histories into a collective one. In particular, she wanted to avoid the uncanny effect that deepfakes often carry and made the faces indistinct to maximize the feeling of her words over deception. "Generational identity flows onto you as a conceptual mechanism," she said. 0:00 /0:17 1× 0:00 /0:27 1× ## **Memory as Labor** During one trip last year, Chen began creating a unwitting memorial. Her grandmother had been unable to talk, but communicated with her grandmother through gestures during Chen's interviews. Her grandmother passed away a few months later. The loss of a grandparent is hard, but the unexpected intimacy of the documentation was sudden and weighty. "The making of this performance was a way of remembering her but also her generation," she said. "This generational piece is also so momentary. It's not something permanent that's represented in this work." What began as an act of documentation became a significant intergenerational exchange, transforming archival preservation into a final, shared moment of remembrance. What was once three generations will soon become just two. Someone once told me that history is just three train cars, and every thirty years, the last vehicle detaches and leaves everything behind before a new one emerges at the front. The work of memory, then, becomes shuffling essential items from one train car to the next. But for those tasked with thinking about the future, what we take with us is both a burden and a joy. In those little moments–the brief phone calls in the car, the hurried scans of a 60-year-old photo, the brief aside about your grandmother's smile–we lay down the track. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/10/Ina-Chen---Generation-of-Books---18s.jpg) --- **Read next:** [Teddy Pozo Explores Loss, Life, and Identity Through Interactive Clay](https://www.killscreen.com/teddy-pozo-explores-loss-life-and-identity-through-interactive-clay/) · [Harriet Davey's Glossy Aliens Reject Gaming's Binary World](https://www.killscreen.com/harriet-daveys-glossy-aliens-reject-gamings-binary-world/) · [What Happens When You Can Do Nothing in a War Zone?](https://www.killscreen.com/alan-kwan-scent-video-game-witness/) From Killscreen Killscreen has spent fifteen years on artists who use game engines to hold on to things — memory, family, a face. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### Alice Bucknell Soars From Pollination Simulators to Quantum Love Stories URL: https://www.killscreen.com/alice-bucknell-multiplayer-games-interspecies-cooperation/ Last updated: 2026-09-12T17:05:24.000Z *"It was so hot. It was crazy," Alice Bucknell told me about their summer. The London and LA-based artist had spent an absolutely torrid time in a flat in Paris as part of a three-month residency. It was productive, but the heat was a sign of the times. Bucknell has spent much of their career exploring our changing world through game-based work like The Alluvials, a speculative future series about the water politics in Los Angeles, spanning several short games and a film.* *But something changed this year. "The long and short of it was, this year I was thinking a lot about love," Bucknell said. Two new works, Nightcrawlers and Small Void, found Bucknell turning to multiplayer games to flip traditional gaming hierarchies, creating experiences where players must work together as different species—bats and flowers in pollination dances, matter and antimatter seeking reunification in black holes. Showing at venues like Centre Pompidou and informed by residencies at CERN, Bucknell's games challenge players to navigate relationships beyond human language—through sonar, electromagnetic pulses, and haptic feedback. Their work asks us to reconsider agency, partnership, and what it means to truly cooperate.* *Here, we speak with Alice about why plants make good dance partners, how black holes are really about the wavelength of desire, and why more game artists are trying to "fuck it up" in multiplayer design.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Alice-Bucknell---Nightcrawlers-5.png) **Nightcrawlers* (2025) **Going into *Nightcrawlers*, how do you see that work as an extension of some of the things you're exploring in *The Alluvials*, versus a divergence?** The connective tissue between *Nightcrawlers* and *The Alluvials* is literal in some ways. There was one of the levels of *The Alluvials* that I call a pollination simulator. You're playing as either the Joshua Tree or the Yucca Moth. If you're playing as a moth, you're flying around and going to these trees that have been tagged for you to pollinate. If you're the tree, you're just talking to the moth to get the particle systems to come over to you, which triggers the pollination event. It's very simple mechanics. Still, I was interested in *The Alluvials* in playing with this idea of an *infinite* pollination simulator—getting to live with this embodied, drunken, and goofy mating act. I could really dilate it and turn it into a game that you could play not just for longer with more complexity, but with another person at the same time. The idea of pollinating as a solo player felt wrong to me. That felt biologically like it doesn't really make sense, but also kind of lonely, you know? So I thought it would be fun to make eventually. I didn't have a timeline in place, but I knew I wanted to play around with it as a game typology. Then, when I was working at Centre Pompidou, they were closing for a [five-year renovation](https://www.archdaily.com/1034332/centre-pompidou-to-close-for-five-year-renovation-led-by-moreau-kusunoki-and-frida-escobedo?ref=killscreen.com), and they were willing to commission new work from me. The location of their closing exhibition was the Grand Palais in Paris, an insanely beautiful, gigantic building from the turn of the century. What would be cooler than playing as a bat inside this gigantic glass house? Or playing as a flower and creating this pollination mini-game that was a two-player cooperative musical? Pollination didn't just become a de facto thing you can do with the push of a button; it actually required more effort and more communication between different beings. The musical score component is a nod towards multi-species cooperation. Still, it also explores how two species might communicate and co-evolve beyond language—whether it's pheromones or sonar that the bat uses or the way that the flower evolves to shape itself to be the precise length that could pick up and reflect the bat's sonar back to the bat. Something with that density or complexity, but just be fun. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Alice-Bucknell---Nightcrawlers-3.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Alice-Bucknell---Nightcrawlers-1.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Alice-Bucknell---Nightcrawlers-2.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Alice-Bucknell---Nightcrawlers-6.png) **You know, it's interesting with bats—different animals capture the public imagination in different ways, and I think bats have had a negative valence for the public for a long time, you know? Vampires and spreading diseases. Some of the research on bat pollination stuff is newer, right?** They're a keystone species for propping up entire ecosystems. **Flies are pollinators, but bees have had exclusive rights to pollination for quite some time.** Bees have a really good PR agent. **When you were working with bats, I was curious about your response to doing playthroughs. Did you find that this was changing some perceptions, the way people think about bats now, or getting to embody a bat?** When my collaborator, [Mati Bratkowski](https://www.instagram.com/matibratkowski/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com), was working on the game, we thought everyone would want to be the bat and have the bird's-eye omniscience of being airborne. The camera distorts around the bat, and the feeling of flying is sublime. We were worried about people loving bats so much that *no one* would want to play with the flowers. 0:00 /0:18 1× Pollination sequence **Right.** How do you create a sort of gameplay for a flower that is, by and large, inanimate? On the scale, that doesn't make sense to human witnesses. We wanted to make the flower hold true to the science of it all. I was reading Zoë Schlanger's beautiful book [*The Light Eaters*](https://www.zoeschlanger.com/the-light-eaters?ref=killscreen.com). She talks about how plants have a very complicated communication, movement, and sensing system. But plants exist in the world at all of these different barometers and intensities that don't match up with human-scale systems—understanding how the world works or how things move through it. Zoë's book really interested me in this kind of system of electromagnetic pulses that plants use to communicate through their root system—not just within themselves but in the whole network of roots that might make up a forest or maybe the ways that they're entangled with other trees or fungi or other creatures of the woods—or of the soil, let's say. So, inside the movement mechanic of the flower in *Nightcrawlers*, it embraces the idea of these electric pulses. When you move as a flower, you're not moving as the flower itself, but you're moving as the pulse of information that's being transmitted throughout the network. So you get to fling yourself almost catapult style through your root network system, then pop up in all these different locations. It's like whack-a-mole, where you can loom around under. And we did this cool thing where we ended up flipping the architecture of the Grand Palais upside down. So it's a bit like the upside-down world in *Stranger Things*, where you see the landscape above ground, but it's reversed. And that gives a sense of scale as to how far you can catapult yourself worldwide. People actually *really* like playing the flower. That was cool. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Alice-Bucknell---Nightcrawlers-Fun-Cave-Credit---CHANEL1.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Alice-Bucknell---Nightcrawlers-Fun-Cave-Credit---CHANEL4.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Alice-Bucknell---Nightcrawlers-Fun-Cave-Credit---CHANEL3.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Alice-Bucknell---Nightcrawlers-Fun-Cave-Credit---CHANEL2.webp) Alice at Centre Pompidou (Credit: CHANEL) Keep going Killscreen has spent fifteen years on the odd corners of play — artists, animals, the games museums don't know how to hang. Members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) **In games, often cooperation is in the service of some kind of competition, as opposed to something mutualistic.** Yeah, exactly. With this game, obviously, to start the pollination mini-game—the musical, almost like Simon Says kind of thing—you have to wait for the other player to collect the charms around the landscape. Still, one thing we wanted to undo was this assumed hierarchy of there's a pollinator and there's a pollinated. You know, plants necessarily become the sub in this situation, and whoever's flying around gets to initiate everything. That's not necessarily true, so it shouldn't be true in the game. So whoever collects the notes first gets to initiate the mini-game, and they get to be the ones who set the score that the other person has to follow. So we like to think about pollination being this sort of interplay and a kind of dynamic where these power dynamics can shift, and they're slippery, you know, and that's part of the fun. **Have you seen a bat pollinate before?** Sadly not. I haven't witnessed the pollination. I've just watched videos of it. Making the game made me attentive to seeing bats at night, especially throughout the summer. They used to come out when I was in Paris, and I would get to watch them come out during the sort of dusk period, right as the sun had set. And they were just swooping around outside my place, which was beautiful. 0:00 /0:15 1× **Let's talk about *Small Void*. It's also multiplayer, so what has interested you about multiplayer game design?** The long and short of it is that this year, I was thinking a lot about love. **Awwww.** I think both of these games are love stories in a way. Maybe the *Nightcrawlers* game is more literal and obvious in terms of being a pollination simulator. Still, *Small Void* is a game inspired by my residency at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research. It's inspired by black holes and quantum entanglement. I almost see these two games as siblings. One is maybe at the cosmic scale, and one is at an earthbound level, and it can be at the scale of the micro or the scale of two beings existing on our planet. But they're both fundamentally about how two parts of a whole, or these frictions of identity, go into life cycles. *Small Void,* and into you're playing as matter and antimatter, based on this concept in black hole studies called Hawking's radiation paradox. It's this idea of something being on the edge of a black hole, whether it's a chair or a boat or a plant, let's say, or a bat. Then, that object splits into two parts—matter and antimatter–because all objects basically have the equivalent amount of matter and antimatter. And then if they split into two, half of it falls into the hole, and half gets shot back into space. Will the objects or halves of the same object ever be able to find each other again? Will they be able to do annihilation, where they meet and merge and explode? It's not death necessarily, but it's just transferring into another state of being. But you could think about both games as this quest to find the other person to do something, whether to pollinate or to annihilate. It is ultimately a hide-and-seek game. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Alice-Bucknell---Small-Void-4.png) **When you have two players, it's not linear in terms of dynamics; it's logarithmic regarding each additional player and what's possible.** That's a good question. With *Small Void* and *Nightcrawlers*, I explore the messiness of human relationships, attachment theory, breakdown of language, and non-linguistic language. Two intelligent beings relating to each other through time and space, whether that's inside of a black hole or inside of a French beaux-arts building—how do I create the system where you're fumbling around in the dark and having to navigate this strange and unusual world, but having to do it together? Togetherness isn't a burden, but actually questions partnership and identity as core mechanics of the gameplay. Also, I was interested in experimenting with echolocation as a primary mechanic—what if sound matters more than image? The haptic feedback mechanic in *Small Void* can help you try to find the other player based on the pulses that the controller is giving out. So the closer you are, the more intense the pulses are. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Alice-Bucknell---Small-Void-9.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Alice-Bucknell---Small-Void-7.png) **Love it, yeah. Yeah, it's interesting from you and Theo Triantafyllidis'** [***Feral Metaverse***](https://www.slimetech.org/works/feralmetaverse?ref=killscreen.com) **and** [**Sahej Rahal's *DMT***](https://www.killscreen.com/sahej-rahals-ai-instruments-and-cooperative-creatures/)**. It's interesting to see more artists experimenting with these interpersonal dynamics in a gallery context. I wanted to ask if there's a bit of** **convergent evolution happening with artists.** As an artist who shows games in museums or gallery settings, I've noticed the controller anxiety that our world has. People love the concept of video games—everyone's like, *yeah, love this new media*, which is hot right now. But then, if you give someone the controller, they freak out. "Yeah, I don't want to touch this. I don't want to break anything. I'm scared." A lot of us are really interested in this question of agency and distributing or decentralizing it. What kind of power hierarchy is there here, and how do we fuck it up, break it down, and challenge it? This is a question that artists deal with in any medium. So it makes sense that artists who are making games are using this very obvious and very immediate way of fucking with agency through a multiplayer system. *This interview was edited for grammar and clarity.* --- **Read next:** [What Happens When You Can Do Nothing in a War Zone?](https://www.killscreen.com/alan-kwan-scent-video-game-witness/) · [Harriet Davey's Glossy Aliens Reject Gaming's Binary World](https://www.killscreen.com/harriet-daveys-glossy-aliens-reject-gamings-binary-world/) · [Teddy Pozo Explores Loss, Life, and Identity Through Interactive Clay](https://www.killscreen.com/teddy-pozo-explores-loss-life-and-identity-through-interactive-clay/) From Killscreen Killscreen talks to the artists making games that don't behave like games. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### Teddy Pozo Explores Loss, Life, and Identity Through Interactive Clay URL: https://www.killscreen.com/teddy-pozo-explores-loss-life-and-identity-through-interactive-clay/ Last updated: 2026-10-18T21:13:14.000Z It is one of those usually hot days in Eagle Rock as I pull up to artist Teddy Pozo’s home studio in the foothills of Occidental College, where they teach. A half-body sculpture, molded with clay and fired with high-temperature wire, awaits me, arms outstretched, waiting for my touch to begin. The sculpture is much smaller than me, my hands eclipse its own, and its lips and mouth closed in meditative contemplation. A shawl collar erupts over the neck, and cybernetic pathways descend over the shoulders. A black and white screen has been placed in the center of a gaping cavity bordered by the clay’s edges, ruffled as if torn. Something escaped, or perhaps something had been removed. But it's the look of the sculpture that confounds. Is this object a present-day creation? Or is it from 1,000 years ago? The matte glaze gives a dark and mottled appearance from its rudimentary red clay mix and a glaze that shines charcoal-gray. It is a look at the future, but also the past. Teddy Pozo’s *Chest Simulator* is a game, a sculpture, a memorial, and a monument. Teddy stands behind me, waiting for me to begin. 0:00 /0:34 1× **Chest Simulator* on display at Human Resources in Los Angeles Raised in Raleigh, Pozo wanted to become an artist out of high school, but didn’t have a portfolio ready and struck out on their AP Art exam. At Swarthmore, Pozo studied physics, but it didn’t resonate. A former partner turned them on to English literature, and they went the self-made major route. Heading into the professional world right after the Great Financial Crisis was daunting, and theory was more alluring. “I was like, *what about getting a Ph.D*?” Pozo said. Pozo’s academic training is apparently almost immediate. They take long pauses to meditate on questions, pull in the digressions along the way, and then return to the original question with a renewed interest. It's the mind of a patiently thoughtful person who wants to work through their ideas in dialogue with others. After arriving at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Pozo was initially turned off by games after an earlier professor said that women didn’t have a “hacker mentality.” But games scholar Daniel Reynolds sent Pozo to play *BioShock* and *Flower* to break their routine of noodling through an emulated version of *Mother 3* and obsessively reading the webcomic *Homestuck*. A turning point for Pozo’s practice was discovering media scholar Laura Marks’ “haptic visuality” concept from her 2000 book *The Skin of Film*. Applying this idea to film, haptic visuality functions like the sense of touch and can evoke physical memories of smell, touch, and taste. As a game player, these ideas should be familiar to anyone who’s held a controller (although Marks specifically argued that the Power Glove was *not* what she was talking about). However, for film scholars, this was a novel way to engage with the body in film. Make some time to watch this. It does contain nudity. Pozo points to Mona Hatoum’s 1988 video, *Measures of Distance,* as deeply influential. Hatoum grew up as the child of Palestinian parents living in exile in Beirut. In the short film, she overlaid her mother's scrolling Arabic atop consensual nude photos of her mother. Audio of the two plays simultaneously while she narrates personal correspondence from her mother about displacement and disorientation, peppered with motherly wisdom. It is a short, but highly layered and intimate work. “As a viewer, you’re trying to reach out for the image, but you don’t quite understand what it is,” Pozo said. It’s only a partial text until you bring what you have to it—your vulnerability, inability, or ability to understand it." That a piece of cinema could be interactive this way was a revelation. Pozo had experimented with making physical games as a child and making “intense” slideshows on Kid Pix Studio, but it wasn’t until dabbling with Twine that they started feeling like games were a real calling. “When you make a Twine game, it’s like you’re already a Twine author,” they joked. While studying for a degree in haptic media, Pozo also found community with their local queer community in Oakland, many of whom were also game designers like [Anna Anthropy](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/anna-anthropy/). While Pozo was exploring games, two major shifts were happening around them. First, the Nintendo Wii introduced kinesthetic controls in Wiimotes to millions of people and showcased how one’s body could become an integral part of one’s playing experience. Second, there was a groundswell of queer gaming creativity blossoming around Pozo. Anna Anthropy’s 2014 *dys4ia* and mattie brice’s 2016 *empathy machine* thrust LGBT game makers into the spotlight. “I wanted to put Marks’ film theory in conversationwith what was happening in games,” Pozo said. “Queer and trans game makers are making haptic work in that it’s about a personal thing and creates personal intimacy that might be uncomfortable for \[designer or audience\].” Pozo’s research work culminated in a 2018 paper called “[Queer Games After Empathy](https://gamestudies.org/1803/articles/pozo?ref=killscreen.com),” a broad overview of these games and the questions they force on players. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/dys4ia.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/download--8-.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/download--7-.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/dys4ia-1.webp) Anna Anthropy's [**Dys4ia*](https://w.itch.io/dys4ia?ref=killscreen.com) (2012) But visibility put a target on some creators' backs, culminating in Gamergate harassment and abuse. Queer creators were also placed in the impossible position: either express themselves unfiltered or handhold someone “doing the work.” Worse yet, sparked by Chris Milk’s well-received empathy talk that described VR as an “empathy machine” in 2015, the word *empathy* became a lazy shorthand that corralled any personal work into a milquetoast pen. Poking at the public response to *dys4ia*, Anthropy later made[ *Anna Anthropy Presents: The Road to Empathy*](https://www.babycastles.com/master-calendar/anna-anthropy-presents-the-road-to-empathy?ref=killscreen.com) in 2015 at Babycastles in New York to allow players to actually walk a mile in Anthropy’s shoes. “I really don’t think *dys4ia* was meant to provoke empathy,” Pozo argued. “It’s a WarioWare exploration of medical transition and how hard it is to get access. It was made for trans people (or potentially an [egg](https://lgbtqia.wiki/wiki/Egg?ref=killscreen.com) player on Newgrounds).” Over the years, Pozo had been interested in games that had bordered on performance. In particular, mattie brice’s [*empathy machine*](http://www.mattiebrice.com/empathy-machine/?ref=killscreen.com) saw the creator wrapped in conductive tape connected to an Xbox controller via a Makey Makey kit. Then, players were asked to “touch the artist.” Previous feminist artists had endured similar work. Yoko Ono’s *Cut Piece* asked one to cut fabric from her body, or Marina Abramović's Rhythm 0 (1974) placed 72 objects on a table (including scissors, a gun, honey, a whip) for open-ended audience use. Brice’s work both tapped a rich lineage of interventions and provided a model for Pozo to explore with physical and digital games. With all the theory behind them, Pozo was ready to make something to connect their ideas to a practice. "If trans games are presented by human beings in a human way, will people rise to that occasion?" Pozo said. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/1431369590_606.jpg) Yoko Ono's Cut Piecec (1964) (Photo: Minoru Niizuma) and Keep going Killscreen writes about artists who build games out of unlikely materials. Members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) ## **Clay as Medium, Surgery as Metaphor** Thankfully, by avoiding the allure of sourdough bread during the pandemic, Pozo rekindled an interest in pottery, which they had pursued as a child. Throwing on a wheel proved difficult, but hand-building felt more natural. Pozo moved to Vermont to teach at Bennington as part of their academic journey and fell in with [Katherine Tholl](https://katherinetholl.com/?ref=killscreen.com), who’d been a production potter since her teen years. Pozo had been toying around with the idea of building an arcade machine out of clay, a nod to the bizarre penny arcade machine “The Vibratory Doctor” from the early 20th century. “Why was I so obsessed? What is this weird sex machine that somebody made? ” Pozo wondered, referring to the Doctor’s[ strange phallic attachment. ](https://arcadetreasures.com/vibratory-doctor.html?ref=killscreen.com) Early work was difficult, but there was a pull to working a giant chest out of clay. After showing variations on the body, the work started to come together. Unlike the meticulous and exacting process of code, ceramics is unpredictable and feral. Pozo did tests on coloring that didn’t turn out quite right. “I was reading *Frankenstein* at the time,” they reflected. “I just needed to accept my creation.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/chest-simulator-process-2.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/chest-simulator-process.png) At the same time, Pozo was in the early stages of planning for top surgery after years of dealing with pain and a binder injury in 2018\. As with much trans care in this country, the process was complicated. An initial date was cancelled, and Pozo had to wait alone in Vermont without their partner. Pozo would carry the sculpture to feel the weight, a millstone weighing their past against their future while waiting for their surgery to be rescheduled. “ It was an artifact of a time when I explored the idea of survival,” they said. “I felt sad overall. Formless. Heavy.” Thankfully, the surgery was a success, and Pozo recovered. After an invitation to read poetry at a virtual gathering called “[Communion: Queer & Trans Memorial & Mourning](https://qtcommunion.substack.com/),” Pozo felt a visual novel based on that work would be the proper game structure for the work. With the sculpture concept complete, the last piece created the interactive tissue to bring it to life. Instead of attaching wiring to the piece, Pozo found that high-temperature wire, the same type found inside a kiln, was an excellent way to connect a circuit–an apparent first for games. You hold hands with the sculpture to advance the plot and bring the visual novel to life. The game had been initially planned as something more graphically complex, but after so much work had gone into constructing its container, Pozo planned something more austere. *Chest Simulator* shuttles you through the poem and through Pozo’s process. “Eulogy for old friends” starts with Pozo’s earliest memories of puberty, the anxiety and shame of prying eyes, and the realization that “for me to live, you had to die,” Pozo wrote. Each touch of the hands moves you further upward, through a desert highway, through abstract forms, and finally to a friendly, knowing avatar. The work is short–about ten minutes–but propulsive and intense. 0:00 /3:49 1× Opening sequence from **Chest Simulator*. The context is what makes the *Chest Simulator* so different. First, you are holding hands, mapping your movements over the sculpture’s copper wiring to advance each page. Consider whose hands you hold–a parent, a partner, a child. Perhaps you say a prayer at dinner with others. But in general, the act of hand-holding is a rare gift. Games have attempted to simulate the intimacy (notably 2001’s [*Ico*](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/ico/)), but it’s quite different when you can fill the contours of a hand rising to meet yours, even if they are cast bronze. In May this year, Touch Praxis's research project invited Pozo to show the work at Human Resources in Los Angeles. In contrast to other games shown in a fine arts context, *Chest Simulator* was the only game alongside other tactile works of “fleshy proximities, felt theory and porous encounters.” Nestled in an alcove at an old movie theatre and sharing space with other work players, moved in and out of the work. Some couldn’t finish. One person asked for a hug. “They ended up touching my body after all,” Pozo joked. Although our bodies change over time, clay does not. There’s a permanence to clay that provides a scaffolding for the messiness of human experience. *Chest Simulator* is part of a larger imaginative universe Pozo calls “Game Boys of the Earth,” an ongoing project to merge clay bodies with digital ones. The next work, *Sacrifice,* is enormous, over six feet tall, with another cavity for players to lean into. “It was designed for my body proportions, so you need to figure it out,” Teddy said. “I tell people it’s not an Apple product, so it’s not immediately supposed to work for everyone.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Untitled-design--18-.png) Images from Pozo's zine *Chest Simulator* has opened a new avenue for Pozo in their approach to game design. “A lot of times people will make the game design first and then find what will display it,” Pozo said. “I've been experimenting with making the sculpture first and then making the game about the sculpture.” Months before [their show at Human Resources](https://www.h-r.la/event/other-others-rehearsals-in-the-skin/?ref=killscreen.com), Pozo had to evacuate from the Eaton Fires. As they were undergoing the grueling process of deciding what to take, there was some comfort that everything burned; the sculpture had already endured a long blast of the kiln. A wildfire likely wouldn’t be enough to tear down something so important. “Will it still exist?” Pozo thought. “I didn't know, but clay things just last.” --- **Read next:** [The material world of Mason Lindroth](https://www.killscreen.com/material-world-mason-lindroth/) · [Harriet Davey's Glossy Aliens Reject Gaming's Binary World](https://www.killscreen.com/harriet-daveys-glossy-aliens-reject-gamings-binary-world/) · [An awkward game about touching a woman’s body explores sensuality](https://www.killscreen.com/awkward-game-touching-womans-body-explores-sensuality/) From Killscreen Killscreen covers the artists making games you have to touch to understand. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### The Game Design of Severance URL: https://www.killscreen.com/the-game-design-of-severance/ Last updated: 2026-09-12T17:05:40.000Z *This is part of our ongoing series* [*The Game Design of Everyday Things*](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/the-game-design-of-everyday-things/)*. Also, I’m just going to presume you watch the show.* Like many of you, I was delighted to see Trammell Tillman on stage this week to receive an Emmy for Best Supporting Drama Actor at the Emmys. Tillman's performance as the inscrutable floor manager Seth Milchick in Apple TV+'s mystery show *Severance* has obviously been a real standout. *Severance* is a show about many things, but it is principally about the many parts of ourselves and the lengths we go to divide them or consolidate them.“Playing Milchick is like putting on a suit of armor,” Tillman told Variety. “This man has layers upon layers upon layers, and every movement of Milchick is 100% intentional.” I presume you're familiar with the show or you wouldn't be here. Still, for the uninitiated, humans can undergo a process named after the show that allows them to split their personalities into "innies" and "outies." Tillman's character, Milchick, oversees a floor of "severed" employees at the company Lumon that are working on a project of unknown provenance and purpose. It’s a bit of workplace drama and romance with a large helping of the surreal. One thing that immediately jumped out at me was how much *Severance* felt like something in dialogue with games. The show's executive producer, Ben Stiller, hasn’t intimated the connection directly. Still, it’s not unreasonable that we as *viewers* well-steeped in the culture of games at a show through a game design is to be expected. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/image-1.png) But why *Severance* specifically? I think it lends itself to a game-focused reading primarily as a mystery, but it’s not a mystery in a conventional sense of a whodunit like *Mare of Easttown* or *True Detective*. A mystery implies a solution, and it’s not quite clear that there is a *there* there. This open-endedness, much like *Twin Peaks* or *Atlanta*, has drawn people into the world and led many to develop elaborate fan theories about what it all means. But our purpose isn’t to figure it out. The internet can encourage an obsessive type of cinematic pareidolia, to see things that aren’t there. You’re tempted to believe that everything—from the goats to the Waffle Party to the Mammalians Nurturable–will all be explained in the end, and at the closing credits, the cast will march out for a post-series show with Andy Cohen to unpack everything. *Severance* isn’t *Clue* or a murder mystery party. Stiller, the show’s EP and principal director, was surprised at how intense the reactions to the show have been, telling [Vulture](https://www.vulture.com/article/ben-stiller-severance-interview-goats.html?ref=killscreen.com): “I’m more into the feeling of the place, the tone, the humor, and definitely the weirdness of it.” So instead, let’s presume it won’t all make sense. That’s ok. You’ll live. But what might a game design approach open up for us? What new understandings of the show will enrich our non-cinema gameplay experiences and give some interesting reads on the show? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/The-internet-can-encourage-an-obsessive-type-of-cinematic-pareidolia--to-see-things-that-aren---t-there.png) ## **The Board's Design** When we talk about the game design of *Severance*, one is likely thinking about the spatial component in Lumon’s offices. The secretive warring departments, hidden corporate experiments, and austere minimalism feel like something from the world of a game like *Control*. A building that unfolds with each new mystery is right out of *What Remains of Edith Finch*. Maybe I’ll return to the architectural dimension some other time, but I want to take a different approach to *Severance*. The key “mechanic” for *Severance* is the severance procedure. Characters can split their personality into two different personalities, creating a principal currency for the show: information. Who knows what and when? How long do characters know, and with whom do they share that information? What do you do when someone holds the same information but doesn’t know that they know it? Does the body keep the score? For game designers, using information in design can be a powerful tool for creating unique gameplay experiences. In their seminal textbook, [*Rules of Play*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/rules-of-play-game-design-fundamentals-eric-zimmerman/a9fb06506889e1e2?ean=9780262240451&next=t&ref=killscreen.com), game designers Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman discuss the importance of communication between players and the game system as a core game design feature. Information can appear in two different forms: information as a system and information as a structure. ## **The Sorting Floor** The first use of information for Salen and Zimmerman is a common feature of many games. Information is “knowledge or content that is manipulated, acquired, hidden, and revealed during play.” Games of all stripes use information in a variety of ways. “All card games hinge on the fact that a card has two sides, one of which reveals its identity while the other conceals it, being indistinguishable from the reverse of any other card in the pack,” writes David Parlett. “Information and its acquisition are what card games are all about.” In *Severance*, information is the main narrative currency for the series. Parlett’s description illustrates the duality of each of the characters on the show. Both inhabit the same body, but their needs and desires are ostensibly different. Dylan is a lazy, unmotivated husband outside the office with a wife at the edge of exhaustion. But in the world of Lumon, he’s a top performer with multiple “Refiner of the Quarter” awards under his belt. Irving is a dark and brooding painter on the surface, but he’s a demure and subservient rule-follower below. And of course, the big twist from Season 1 was the revelation that Helly Eagan, the heir to the Lumon throne, was the same defiant and loyal Helly R. from Macrodata Refinement. The irony, of course, is that neither innie nor outie knows a thing about the other. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/The-internet-can-encourage-an-obsessive-type-of-cinematic-pareidolia--to-see-things-that-aren---t-there--1-.png) *Severance* is a textbook example of an imperfect information system. Perfect information occurs when everyone knows everything about the run of play in a game like Chess, where all the pieces are visible on the board. Games like Mafia*,* *Magic: The Gathering*, and Poker are much more like *Severance*, where all of the players only possess pieces of the total picture. The designer’s choice to create a system with imperfect or perfect information is incredibly consequential and impacts the strategies players enact during the course of play. “Imperfect information invites treachery, trickery, and deception, and can be used as a design element in games meant to inspire mistrust among players,” write Salen and Zimmerman. Digging deeper, Celia Pearce outlines four ways information manifests itself in games. We can use Poker to illustrate: There is information known to all players (the face-up community cards), information known to one player (the cards in your hand), information known to the game only (the order of undealt cards in the deck), and randomly generated information (the shuffle before each hand). *Severance* takes advantage of each type of information to drive its plot. All players know the basic structure of Lumon Industries and its severance procedure. Helly’s true identity as the daughter of Lumon’s CEO is known to only one player, outie Helly. The true purpose of Macrodata Refinement’s sorting is known only to the game (aka the writer's room of the show). Randomly generated information is the “scary” numbers, or why some are sent to The Break Room. But understanding how *Severance* manipulates what characters know only gets us halfway there. The show's real treasure isn’t just access to information and how information functions as the narrative's primary building material. This brings us to a different way of thinking about information—not as content to be revealed or concealed, but as the fundamental architecture of uncertainty. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/The-internet-can-encourage-an-obsessive-type-of-cinematic-pareidolia--to-see-things-that-aren---t-there--2-.png) Keep going Killscreen has been running The Game Design of Everyday Things since 2011\. Members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) ## **Wellness Sessions** Information as a structure comes from the information theory world, but how information theorists use the term differs from how one might think. Information in this context is a condition, not “stuff that I know.” Quoting communication theorist Stephen W. Littlejohn, here’s how to think about it: “Information is the measure of uncertainty in a situation.” Salen and Zimmerman use the example of asking questions of a fictional friend, J.L. Asking them, “Did you eat breakfast this morning?” has *low* informational content because there are only two possible answers: yes or no. Asking J.L. what their favorite word is has *high* informational content because there are 1 million possible answers. So J.L. telling you their favorite word is *really important*, because there are many possible answers. In *Severance*, we find that the makers play with information similarly. The use of color in *Severance* is actually a low information signal. When asked about the meaning of blue and green on the show, Stiller was dismissive that it was anything more than an aesthetic choice. > I don’t sit around and talk about those thematic ideas. When we were creating the office, we had to decide on the color of the carpet. We will live with this carpet for many years, if the show goes on. I’d never made a series before. So I thought, *Let’s make sure we like this color green*. But then it becomes the world that we live in. Stiller liked how it looked. That’s it. You may suspect he is lying or generate your own hypothesis, but when the puzzle maker shows their hand, believe them! Conversely, the Lumon company handbook and its bizarre corporate procedures provide a wealth of high informational possibilities. Unknown rules about their work environment abound. The mandatory wellness sessions and obligatory “Music Dance Experience” protocol play with our understanding of what’s possible because there’s so much about Lumon that we do not understand. There’s a fine line between capricious and calculated. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/maxresdefault--9-.jpg) Salen and Zimmerman’s second quality of information is that it “*does not refer to a message, facts, or meaning. It is a concept bound only to the quantification of stimuli or signals in a situation.”* Think about two different computer passwords: *nmksjdflk* and *adventure*. Both are nine-letter strings. While we are tempted to say that *adventure* has more information, this is just another set of nine letters in information theory. Or consider a game like *Wordle*. You are given five blank spaces and must guess a word that fits. Each guess reveals two pieces of information–whether you have the correct letter (low informational content because there are only 26 choices) or the correct word (high informational content). But if we changed the letters to numbers (this is how you play the game *Mastermind*), the amount of information actually decreases, as there are now 10 choices for each space for numbers 1-10, instead of 26 letters, and the correct answers go from 1 million words to just 100,000 numbers. The point is that the structure of the information has remained unchanged (five blank letters) even though the content can make a world of difference in how the game feels. *Severance* plays with a similar structure by taking familiar objects and presenting them to innies who lack context. Innies respond well to Ricken’s milquetoast affirmations, but don’t really understand why they’re so meaningless. Gretchen shows innie Dylan a picture of their family together, but the emotional content is gone since it's not a memory that innie Dylan possesses. We recognize the quarterly progress rewards of pencil erasers and finger traps as the meaningless “Employee of the Month” baubles given at actual workplaces. Still, for innies, these are dead-serious perks. *Severance* manipulates the affective content of everyday objects—one meaning for us and the outies and another for the sterile world of the innies. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/The-internet-can-encourage-an-obsessive-type-of-cinematic-pareidolia--to-see-things-that-aren---t-there--3-.png) ## Break Room Protocol The last dynamic of information as structure is what is called noise and redundancy. Noise distorts the transmission of information, like in the game of Telephone, where a simple phrase degrades with each whisper. The joy is in the outcome as the original phrase has completely transmuted. In *Papers, Please*, Lucas Pope deploys noise to force players into a state of confused moral conflict. The cluttered paperwork, overlapping documents, and time pressure create informational chaos that mirrors the busy work of authoritarian border control. Redundancy helps balance out the use of noise. As in the game of Telephone, the English language structure allows people to decipher the original phrase by filling in the blanks and understanding the possible answer. Likewise, games with strong visual communication approaches like *Journey* and *Monument Valley* abandon language altogether, showcasing what can be done without noise. Game designers like using noise and redundancy to balance information structure in their work. Too much noise and the work becomes indecipherable; too much redundancy and one runs the risk of simplification. Salen and Zimmerman explain that this balance “requires tuning a communication system so that there is enough uncertainty to ensure a sufficient amount of information passing through the channel, but not too much information, so that the signal does not *confusing language and nod to the complicated politics of respectability* get lost in vast oceans of uncertainty.” In *Severance*, we find that balance between these two concepts, specifically through the semantic game of language of its characters. Natalie is a chipper cipher with corporate jargon who transmits the supposed intent behind the Board’s silence. Ms. Casey’s wellness sessions are dotted with stereotypical self-help slop that disguises her real identity alongside her hidden pain of separation. Milchick’s performance review dings him for “using too many big words,” a jab at the show’s confusing language and an obvious nod to the complicated politics of respectability BIPOC professionals must navigate to get ahead. In all of these interactions, the characters are balanced between obscure enough to preserve the mystery without becoming unintelligible. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/seth-milchicks-performance-review-report-v0-7ql08ak8ebje1.png) Guilty as charged! In all, *Severance*’s disciplined approach to information as a structure is part of the show's appeal. Littlejohn writes about the importance of information: “When a problem is completely predictable, no information is present,” a line that could be pulled from Keir’s own writing. But if the problems of *Severance* were predictable, it wouldn’t be much of a show. *Severance* succeeds not because it borrows from games, but because it understands what games have always known: that meaning emerges from the careful management of what we don't know. In a culture increasingly obsessed with transparency and total information, the show reminds us that uncertainty isn't a bug—the feature makes us human. Maybe we ask Kier to add it to the Four Tempers. --- **Read next:** [Is Gerrymandering Cheating or Just A Good Strat?](https://www.killscreen.com/is-gerrymandering-cheating-or-just-a-good-strat/) · [The game design of the Hunger Games](https://www.killscreen.com/the-game-design-of-the-hunger-games/) · [What Tottenham's Collapse Teaches Us About the Corruption of Play](https://www.killscreen.com/what-tottenhams-collapse-teaches-us-about-the-corruption-of-play/) From Killscreen The Game Design of Everyday Things runs in Killscreen, along with fifteen years of reading the world as a system. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### The Inner Lives of Lawrence Lek's Emotional AI URL: https://www.killscreen.com/lawrence-lek-ai-consciousness-smart-city-trilogy/ Last updated: 2026-09-11T17:07:58.000Z ## When I first enter the Hammer to view Lawrence Lek's Nox High-Rise, I am blinded. ## Flanked on either entrance by two disembodied head lamps, the expansive entry way obscures the way I came but points a way forward. A large projection screen with the initial video work introducing me to the "CGI noir" world of NOX. ## London-based artist [Lawrence Lek](https://www.lawrencelek.com/?ref=killscreen.com) is one of my favorite artists working with game engines today. With work spanning filmmaking, video games, and electronic music, he has made his mark exploring the concept of Sinofuturism, China's relationship with the world in a post-AI future. ## What is particularly remarkable has been Lek's focus on the near future and an astounding prescient instinct. He has been exploring our contemporary questions about AI in a pre-ChatGPT world and what comes after self-driving cars entirely replace human ones. ## In this conversation, Lek and I talk through his childhood, why horses make good companions, and what to do when AI gets depressed. --- **Jamin: What was your relationship to sci-fi in Singapore and Hong Kong while growing up? What was it like to see those cities in various degrees of architectural and cultural flux, and how might that have impacted your thinking about the future?** **Lawrence:** Once you have these environments like Singapore, Hong Kong, or Japanese cities that are shorthand for the future, but you *actually* live there, it's a weird thing—seeing where you live and then seeing where you live represented. For example, in LA, you get that quite a lot. There's LA in the movies or the entertainment industry, and LA as the urban texture. It's like two completely different universes. When I was growing up, there wasn’t a massive disconnect between high-rise/low-life kind of thing, because in Asian metropolises, you get everything. Growing up in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo, these are the paradigms of nineties cyber-futurism. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/AIDOL-Screenshot_08_LL_4k.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/AIDOL-Screenshot_02_LL_4k.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/AIDOL-Screenshot_15_LL_4k.jpg) **AIDOL is a feature-length science fiction musical that tells the story of a fading superstar, Diva. It recruits an aspiring AI songwriter to stage a comeback performance at the 2065 eSports Olympic finale.* Sometimes, the illusion of a place and how it's represented really align with each other, like environments in science fiction and cities. And other times, there's the place where technology happens, and it looks nothing like the product. No scientific innovation or speculation often needs to happen when it comes to urban environments. In a direct way, when land values are compressed, people build up, like in Hong Kong or Singapore, versus sprawling out in America. Later, I started thinking about how those places were built with many multinational investments. All the Marshall Plan-type investments in these countries also drove a lot of that international infrastructure and the look of the cities. This complex interplay of so many different factors with projects like *NOX* is about weaving deep levels of world-building that might not just be visual, but are tied into the narrative and other different flows inside the work. **I lived in Chinatown right after college, really in the middle of Doyers Street, which is right in the middle of Chinatown. If you light it in a particular way and catch the neon signs in a particular way, that's gonna present a specific look and feel. My experience was just seeing a lot of people going to work. But primarily for me, not being Chinese, there's this sense that this is not a place for me culturally.** J.G. Ballard also spent his childhood as a colonial expat kid in Shanghai, and he wrote about it in *Empire of the Sun*. It’s important not to discount those perspectives because they are very much outsider perspectives, which I also feel I have. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Lawrence-Lek---NOX-High-Rise_-installation-view_Hammer-Museum-Los-Angeles_Jun28-Nov16_2025_Photo-JeffMcLane_03.jpg) Stlll of High Rise at the Hammer ### *Nox High Rise is Lek's first solo show at the Hammer Museum in LA and builds on work developed for the LAS Art Foundation. The second in a three-part trilogy in the titular world Nox (short for "Nonhuman Excellence), High Rise follows a self-driving car that begins to wonder about its place and its future. A conversation with the company's AI therapist sends it to a equine therapy session and asks questions about self-care if there is no self to care for.* **Lawrence:** My first trilogy is the Sinofuturist trilogy, which looks at the 40-year distant future and the rise and awakening of AI as this protagonist, because they wouldn't have to pay fractionally per token. The first episode in the Smart City series was *Black Cloud* in 2021 for the Hyundai VH award. That was about a surveillance system that gets depressed, and they talk to their built-in psychologist. Because I thought that's what a big AI company would do to treat its non-human workers better. It's like a Friday massage, but for AI. It's also quite affordable. So NOX is the second part of a trilogy. **Jamin: So with *NOX*, had you always been thinking about building this trilogy together? How much of it is a natural extension of your previous work?** I've always been interested in serial forms of world-making, whether episodic TV shows, science fiction sagas, or video games. There’s this idea of completion of creating a major work–this Wagner opera kind of thing, where you have this vision of having a seven-day-long opera kind of thing. That's really not my vibe. **You're gonna build your own** [**theater**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayreuth%5FFestspielhaus?ref=killscreen.com)**.** Exactly, in the forest, maybe floating, maybe off-world. \[Laughs\] I have always been much more interested in incremental forms of art practice because I get lost in decision-making if I ever think of a really ambitious project. I'm always oscillating between this grand vision and this tiny bit I can do this week, for this deadline, for this show The main character of the work for *Black Cloud* I finished pre-pandemic, around 2020, was that I was thinking of making something set soon. That was two years before ChatGPT, so it's just completely different. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/LawrenceLek_08_Nepenthe--Summer-Palace-Ruins-Edition-_20th-Biennale-of-Sydney_2024.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/2065_Game-Installation_K11-HongKong_20-18_01.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Temple_2019_180-The-Strand_Installation-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/BlackCloudHighway_Installation_2023_01.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/BlackCloudHighway_Installation_2023_03.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/LawrenceLek_Black-Cloud-Highway-at-Sadie-Coles-HQ-London_Solo-Exhibition_2023_Photo-by-Katie-Morrison_03.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/FTSE-FarsightStockExchange_BoldTendencies-London_2019_GameInstallation_01.jpg) Previous installations of the Nox Universe **Jamin: It was B.C. Before Chat.** Lawrence: Exactly. The subjects around embodiment and AI were becoming more everyday concerns worldwide, looking at present-day ideas about AI and personhood. But I was also looking at histories of chatbots, particularly Eliza, for *Black Cloud*. How could you know the difference between having a conversation and feeling like you've been heard? Does that make you feel like you've had a good conversation? The same program has been expanded into a rehab center for bad self-driving cars in NOX. And in the show, you go on a journey through one of the rehab programs for one of these cars. [![CTA Image](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Temple_2019_180-The-Strand_Installation.jpg)](https://www.killscreen.com/five-behind-the-scenes-observations-from-our-lawrence-lek-interview/) Want to read our entire interview with Lawrence? Members can read our whole conversation. [Members, proceed! ](https://www.killscreen.com/five-behind-the-scenes-observations-from-our-lawrence-lek-interview/) **You talk about your work before or after ChatGPT because there is something called** [**low-background steel**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background%5Fsteel?ref=killscreen.com)**. This was steel used before the use of the atomic bomb, so it doesn't have any of the attendant radiation from bombs that were dropped after. So if you're trying to build these radiation-detecting machines, it's actually incredibly important. The only place you can find this steel is at the bottom of the ocean, which has not been tampered with by the atomic age.** **You've been having these conversations about artificial intelligence before and after ChatGPT. As your career continues, you'll be able to look at what kinds of questions will be marked by this new tool that was influencing as it happened, much like the Atomic Age. You know, one of the things that humans will leave in the geological record is the use of hydrocarbons from fossil fuels. That's it. Everything else will disappear. Every building, everything else will be gone.** **From a technological standpoint, your work has these fingerprints of different moments in technological evolution over time, which encourages you to ask different questions.** In 2016, when I had been making virtual worlds for five years already, I imagined each project that I was making would be a snapshot of the available technology at the time, right? It's a slice of whatever programs I'm using, Unity or Unreal, or Processing—low poly, new shaders, new graphics, high fidelity, higher resolution. It's also baked into the work itself, yeah. Of course, if you're a sculptor, you can sometimes chart how well that sculptor is using the materials they're using. They’re starting with cardboard, then they're doing it in wood, then they're doing it in bronze. Then times are bad. There's a war. And then they start doing things with the cardboard again. So it’s the same with my projects, because they've ballooned into these 100-gigabyte monsters that I have to divide up. Because the work is about world-building, I always have this long-term continuity. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/231101_LawrenceLek_NOX_CGI_VIDEO2_DAY5-EquineTherapy_2304x960_ArtistMaster_ProRes422HQ.mov_snapshot_00.46.742.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/231101_LawrenceLek_NOX_CGI_VIDEO2_DAY5-EquineTherapy_2304x960_ArtistMaster_ProRes422HQ.mov_snapshot_07.15.979.jpg) **You're taking advantage of the questions you're asking about your relationship to technology and that the practice itself is enabled by technology. You can dip in, think about an idea, meditate, and then add. It’s a palimpsest where you write on top over a long time.** However, with NOX, the original version in Berlin was more directly interactive. When you went in as a visitor, you got these locative headphones that track your location in a space, and as you move around the physical space, the voiceover gets triggered. It’s a physical version of an open-world game. But that was spread over three floors of a former shopping center. At the Hammer, I worked with Celeste to condense that multi-floor experience into a single space, but to channel people in a way that’s deliberate but open at the same time. In a video game, you give players the illusion of choice, right? You can go left and right, but it doesn't feel like that. In Berlin, different videos were shown on other floors. It was basically a walking simulator, except you weren’t actually walking. On the ground floor, there was one day of treatment, and you go upstairs, and it's the next level, and you get the second part of the treatment. In the Hammer, it's condensed into a single space. Because you're in the same acoustic space in the museum, it's in one zone. I thought I'd choreograph the whole thing as a simultaneous, three-channel video installation. The entire space is working like a choreographed loop. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/231101_LawrenceLek_NOX_CGI_VIDEO2_DAY5-EquineTherapy_2304x960_ArtistMaster_ProRes422HQ.mov_snapshot_06.10.584.jpg) **Jamin: Let’s talk about the Hammer show. How did the past experiences of showcasing *NOX* influence the showing with the Hammer? What were some of the things that you were hoping to do differently?** Lawrence: Sure, so I mean with projects like *NOX*, that from the outset were meant to be this complementary spatial design and scenography project, because, you know, *NOX*, it's both the name of the program and the name of this place where it happens. I was thinking about different iterations, bringing both elements together for the original *NOX*, which I showed at the LAS Art Foundation in Berlin. I worked with the scenographer, [Celeste Burlina](https://celesteburlina.com/overview?ref=killscreen.com), who was instrumental in the Hammer show and designed the spatial layout. From a level design point of view, it's not just the environment. It's also choreography. So you're choreographing a spatial, temporal journey through a place. And sometimes that is as simple as *we start here*. There's a sign, there's a light, there you go. Sometimes it's super linear. In an art environment, you can only hope for people who are fully immersed. Sometimes people stay halfway, or they see the whole loop. Some artists are like, *No, there's strict entry times*. But for me, it depends on the project. It felt more appropriate for NOX to have it be an open world, but with a suggested route. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/231101_LawrenceLek_NOX_CGI_VIDEO2_DAY5-EquineTherapy_2304x960_ArtistMaster_ProRes422HQ.mov_snapshot_03.25.496.jpg) **Jamin: Horses and cars are both objects of locomotion and have this component of care, caregiving, and interiority you're exploring. How did you get interested in cars and horses, and how did you find that the two would intersect with this equine therapy approach in *NOX*?** Lawrence: Doing something around cars was almost accidental. In 2018, I was invited to do a show in London at [Bold Tendencies](https://boldtendencies.com/?ref=killscreen.com), a public art institution in a rooftop car park. I was like*, wouldn't it be weird if this car park was turned into this self-driving car learning garage*? This was back when Waymo wasn't a thing on the city streets. A couple of years later, when I was thinking up ideas for this depressed AI—the smart city surveillance system in *Black Cloud*—I thought it would get alienated because they're super intelligent but actually crave some kind of embodiment. So in *Black Cloud*, the surveillance system sees this fox in the city, and they're like, *I want to be like that fox*. I can never be wild and free like that fox. But maybe I can imagine what it's like. You get that subjectivity in video games—I could perhaps role-play as the fox. So I thought, *OK, what is the next counterpart of that?* In *Black Cloud*, the surveillance system also looks at a car. It doesn't envy the car as much as it does the fox, because the car is freer than it is, but the car is still bound to the roads and highways. So I thought, *when the singularity or intelligence arrives, will it come to a self-driving car?* The self-driving car is a delivery driver with this paradox of being super intelligent and having so much potential. Still, all they can do contractually is deliver things until they break down. I was like, *OK, what happens when people break down?* When people break down and they're lucky enough to afford one, they get mental health care. And if they're rich enough, they go to fancy rehab clinics, like in Big Sur in California. So I was looking at one in the UK called The Priory, and they have a week-long course. Day one, you talk. Day two, you have a nutritionist. Day three, you do equine therapy. Ride around with horses. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Lawrence-Lek-Pull-Quote-1.png) Wouldn't it be so wild? Would it also make sense if the car had equine therapy because they want to bond with their wild animal nature? At the same time, something deeply ironic about that was that horses were hugely important for agriculture and industry until the steam engine and cars came around and became more and more popular as major beasts of burden for industrialization. When the car in *NOX* encounters this horse, they don't just see this wild object that's biological and beautiful—all the associations that human has with horses—they actually feel this guilt for the creation of the self-driving car because the car killed millions of horses because they weren't helpful anymore. When self-driving cars see the horse, they see the future when it’s put out to pasture. What will become of them? That makes them reconnect with their ancestors in a certain way. **I like the idea of a self-driving car facility that's like an enormous race track or something they can just live there to live their last days.** Yeah, free charging stations. **With thoroughbreds, they use cows or turtles often, because thoroughbreds are notoriously high-strung. Trainers to calm them often have a therapy pig that sits in the stable because of their energy. The horse is pacing nervously, and just has this animal buddy. It's pretty good.** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/231101_LawrenceLek_NOX_CGI_VIDEO2_DAY5-EquineTherapy_2304x960_ArtistMaster_ProRes422HQ.mov_snapshot_05.48.955.jpg) **You've used the term CGI noir to describe your Smart City trilogy, and I was curious about this particular aesthetic. We talked about dating using polygons, and this biographical way of tracing these polygons over time that you're using in your work. You also had some elements of newness with atmospheric decay.** **How do you think about your work being in dialogue with other forms of noir? How do you distinguish that from other inspirations that you might have from noir as a practice or a point of view?** Sometimes I intuitively create links between things that weren't necessarily completely obvious. I was interested in not so much the genre of noir in itself—because, of course, noir is a genre in both video games and film and things like that—but the environment that noir came from. Because noir came from a dark time in human history, I think we're going to a very colorful, dark time today, with this existential void between the First and Second World Wars. I was left with the idea that when the system is corrupt, the only thing you can do, the sensible thing to do, is save yourself. Not because you're selfish, but because that is the only way out. This is different from the hero's journey story, where the system is corrupt, but you want to save the universe and may sacrifice yourself. In noir, you have anti-heroes and situations, and everything is already broken, so survival does not become quite redemption, but is good enough. How do you deal with that horror? These AIs are literally company employees. They have no legal existence in the world of *NOX* outside of the world in which they're created. They are contractually bound to their creator. In the third part of the trilogy, a self-driving car tries to kill the company's CEO, and because of that, it becomes a legal person. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Lawrence-Lek-Pull-Quote-2.png) **Jamin: Having a protagonist exploring their interior life is pretty noir In your work, an object is talking to itself and that dialogue is ostensibly obscured from us because it's happening at the speed of light. It's happening through cables and Ethernet, a language we can't parse and is being translated to us. Noir focuses on a mystery that is presented and then discovered it. It's always centered on who that character is through that entire process.** **Lawrence Lek:** In a sense, I'm talking about AI and cars and robots and horses. Those are the archetypal objects and typologies that people can grasp onto, including myself. But beyond is this weird geological time changing at the speed of light and this inter-species communication that we're not a part. All the other CGI, high poly count stuff is just the vessel to get to that experience.. **Do you think there's something special about the car that lends itself to thinking in a way that a toaster doesn't?** Yeah, the toaster is the other ubiquitous speculative design object for some reason. Of course, the car is many different things. From a cinematic point of view, cars and movies have come and grown in parallel with each other. The car created a new way of looking at the world. Paul Virilio would write about the view from the car, or the view from the train, as this paradigm shift in human experience,. Generally, humans had not witnessed the world from such speed or perspective before, from cars, the automobile, or movies. The car and the open road represent freedom and self-determination. In different cultures, the car has this huge symbolic weight. Whether you can afford one is the first thing in this industrial consumer society. So it's a very loaded object. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/NOX_Still_02_Landscape.jpg) **As someone living in Los Angeles, seeing these automated Waymos everywhere and doing their own thing. I saw one last night. It was just parked on the side. It wasn't waiting for anyone. It was just sitting there on the side of the road. These cars have a life and reality all their own.** **In some ways, they're better citizens. They're more respectful. They follow traffic signals, stop, and come to a complete stop at stop signs. They don't hit anybody. They have LIDAR cameras that can drive, look at all angles simultaneously, and measure speed and oncoming traffic. They just fundamentally are more equipped. They're creatures that are equipped in ways that humans have not evolved.** **We may evolve to pilot a vehicle at 75 miles an hour. That's not what we're equipped for that. Self-driving cars are this alien species fully equipped for the task of driving extremely fast and safely. It's mad. It's something magical.** The self-driving car is not just an object to be witnessed or observed; it's also an object that observes the world. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Installation_view__Frieze_Artist_Award__Lawrence_Lek__Guanyin__Confessions_of_a_Former_Carebot___Frieze_London__Booth_P1__The_Regent_s_Park__London__9_-_13_October_2024_11_high_quality.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Installation_view__Frieze_Artist_Award__Lawrence_Lek__Guanyin__Confessions_of_a_Former_Carebot___Frieze_London__Booth_P9__The_Regent_s_Park__London__9_-_13_October_2024_1_high_quality.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/Installation_view__Frieze_Artist_Award__Lawrence_Lek__Guanyin__Confessions_of_a_Former_Carebot___Frieze_London__Booth_P9__The_Regent_s_Park__London__9_-_13_October_2024_2_high_quality.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/LawrenceLek_Guanyin-PortraitOfAFormerCarebot_Still_01_3840x2160.jpg) **Guayin* is Lek's first third-person video game about the care-bot figure that apears throughout the series. **So with *Guanyin*, you're making a game. It makes sense that you would work in game engines. How did you approach the game project for *Guanyin* differently from some of the other cinematic works that you've done?** Generally, when I make video installations, quite often there's an interactive component, but the thing that carries the most emphasis, really, maybe because of the development narrative, is the film and narrative sides. So *Guanyin*, I've done plenty of first-person and touch-screen interface-based games before. But actually, I feel *Guanyin* is the first third-person game I've done. I'd been making environments as the primary mode of world-building and storytelling. And of course, my work has characters, but they're always quite abstract—a self-driving car, a satellite, an AI surveillance system. I was really interested in the problem of character design for *Guanyin*. So I thought *Guanyin* had been a recurring character in my work for quite a while, but before, they were essentially built-in chatbots. I thought, maybe it'd be really cool to make a mascot, basically. And I know I'm intuitive at designing environments and spaces, but not so much for characters. So I talked to a character designer, a character artist whom I really respect, Tea Strazicic, aka [FluffLord](https://teastrazicic.com/?ref=killscreen.com), and she would design the character. From Killscreen Enjoy this interivew? Consider supporting Killscreen for the year for more essays, interviews, and profiles on the future of interdisciplinary play. [Learn more ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) And I really had this idea because Guanyin in Buddhist history is the Mandarin name for the goddess of compassion, or in Sanskrit, Avalokiteśvara. A friend told me that when Guanyin is mentioned, they are not described in terms of their bodily form. They're never like "they look like this," which means that, over the centuries, artists of all types have constantly reinterpreted what Guanyin looks like, which is fascinating. It's not like, I don't know, a Pokémon, which always looks a certain way because they were made as a branded character. How do you design a cute character that a car company, a self-driving car company, might make for their mascot? What would be this corporate Buddhist toy action figure that could be a robot that fixes cars? So that's where I started. And I thought, in Asia, you get a lot of Bobblehead Buddhist figures on the car dashboard. So I was like, maybe the whole game is set inside a car, and Guanyin is trying to—this little robot is trying to go around this car, trying to fix the problems mechanically, but also at the same time as trying to talk to the car and fix them. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/09/image.png) But in the Frieze Art Fair in London, where I had the commission, I had this movie trailer where Guanyin talks about all their workplace issues. And at the same time, there's a video game where you can play as Guanyin. So the full name is *Confessions of a Former Carebot*. And I was interested in this idea that Guanyin, much like the other AI characters I have, has these issues that they're bullied at work. My co-workers don't like me. Someone hid my coffee mug the other day, and I'm just trying to fix these cars. And there's that kind of tone to the whole game as well. So it's playful and tragic simultaneously, much like working in video games and modern life. ### Five Behind-the-Scenes Observations from Our Lawrence Lek Interview URL: https://www.killscreen.com/five-behind-the-scenes-observations-from-our-lawrence-lek-interview/ Last updated: 2025-09-16T19:03:06.000Z Lawrence Lek creates cinematic game worlds that blur fiction and reality, using AI aesthetics and virtual architecture to examine our technological present. _This post is for paying subscribers only._ ### Harriet Davey's Glossy Aliens Reject Gaming's Binary World URL: https://www.killscreen.com/harriet-daveys-glossy-aliens-reject-gamings-binary-world/ Last updated: 2026-09-14T17:08:49.000Z *When I catch up with* [*Harriet Davey,*](https://www.instagram.com/harriet.blend/?ref=killscreen.com) *they've just returned from a week-long planning campaign with a dozen co-workers. They were deep in the playing phases for their next big project and working on getting their collective story right to share internally and make big changes in how they work together. “We’re getting our story straight,” they say. When running a D&D campaign with the scale of* [*West Marches*](https://cannibalhalflinggaming.com/2021/10/27/meet-the-campaign-intro-to-west-marches/?ref=killscreen.com)*, that type of commitment is a requirement. (Did you think I was talking about a job?)* *As you can imagine, Davey floats between worlds and universes as a digital artist, virtual photographer, terraformer, and fashion designer. As part of* [*SBLMTN Studio*](https://www.instagram.com/sblmtnstudio/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com)*, they translate fantastic lookbooks for their feral subjects into walk-ready apparel. As part of Circa x Dazed’s selection, their work was screened at the iconic Picadilly Lights and worldwide. And as an educator on Twitch and in-person, Davey shares their craft with others.* *Davey represents a new generation of artists who treat game engines not as entertainment platforms but as laboratories for identity exploration and radical body representation. Based in Berlin, this self-taught 3D artist has transformed gaming's character creation tools into instruments of queer resistance, creating "glossy, luminescent alien-like creatures" that challenge the male-dominated aesthetics of virtual worlds.* – **Jamin: Can you tell me a bit about those earliest game-playing days and connect the dots between those earliest and some of the work you're doing today?** Harriet: Yeah. I was actually trying to remember the first video game I ever played. I was playing on an iPod Touch, the first-generation iPod Touch at the time, and it was a ripoff of *GTA*. Before that, I'd spend time at friends' houses. I had a friend who was really into *World of Warcraft*, and all I would do was go over to his house. I would sit there making elves and new characters and then say, *Oh, let's do it again. I wanna make another character.* And he'd say, *Oh, I just wanna level up my level 600* or whatever. And I'd say, *no, I wanna make another character, please.* I begged my mom, I was like, *please, please, please, please, can I get World of Warcraft?* And she just refused because, to be honest, I think who knew how addicted I would've gotten to it. So it was fair. **It's like cigarettes, honestly. It's best that your mom intervened.** Yeah. It would've been a slippery slope for me. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Dhruv--1-.jpg) ## Sign up for Killscreen Exploring the future of interdisciplinary play Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. But back to childhood, we weren't allowed many video games. The wifi at home was too slow to play online, so I would have to play the campaign alone. And yeah. I grew up in the middle of nowhere. Just one mb internet…on a good day. Online games, no chance. Even downloading games, it would take a week sometimes to download a game. **Right. Oh my gosh.** So it was really inaccessible for me. From all ends, I was at odds, and when I eventually left home and went to uni, I built a gaming PC and started playing *Skyrim*. That was the first game I wanted to play. Then, I discovered 3D art because I realized I'd built this gaming PC. I started thinking about how video games were made and wanted to take the lid off and look inside. And yeah, it very fluidly followed. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Harriet-Davey---8.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Harriet-Davey---12.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Harriet-Davey---22.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Harriet-Davey---32.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Harriet-Davey---39.png) Selects from Harriet's recent work **Were you always interested in characters, 3D modeled bodies, or avatars? Was that part of your gameplay interest?** Yeah. For me, the character design of any game was always the character creation menu. I still spend hours doing that, because it is my favorite part. I wanna see every setting that is even possible in these things. I'm also interested in what developers and modelers decide is the default character. What are the six hairstyles we chose to put into this game? Or what are the 23 ones that we now have in modern games? Seeing these decisions and then seeing the lack of ones that interested me. They were so boring and normal and male, or super sexy, and I never really felt like there was anything that I was really drawn to. And so I spent so long because I wanted to make the characters weird in a scenario where they weren't ever supposed to look so strange. It's still my favorite part of any game. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/image-3.png) **Baldur's Gate 3* character creator **It's interesting with games for designers—well, first of all, with character customization, which not all games feature. In some ways, video games in particular were pretty resistant to the idea that you should be able to choose a different character. That definitely comes from—it feels like it comes more from a role-playing game perspective. That was a part of early role-playing games, so it made sense when they moved to computers. The expansive side of role-playing games is expressed through these complex systems, but not through the characters—the character customization was pretty limited. Even if you had a huge world to explore, what your character looked like remained pretty limited.** **So it is unfortunate that side—role-playing games in a digital context, I think, have had this weird relationship where it’s trying to express this systemic complexity of a role-playing game system alongside the improvisational nature of tabletop role-playing games. And those are often in tension in a video game context because there are limitations to what you can do on a machine.** **It does seem, though, at least now, with *Baldur's Gate* and things like that, we've resolved that there’s a wide diversity for characters. And many things that hold it back are frankly more of the cultural side. The artistic side of it, *oh, you need to play as a person who looks exactly like this.*** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Harriet-Davey---Headshot-1.png) Credit: [Ben Moenks](https://www.instagram.com/benmoenks/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Harriet-Davey---Headshot-5.png) Credit: [Sophie Wanninger](https://www.instagram.com/annsophiephoto/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) Even *Baldur's Gat*e isn't great, for the most part. It has a great character creation selection, but is still lacking on some fronts. Everyone is still very toned and very sexy and very muscly, which someone would argue, *Oh, it's someone running around with armor on their back*. But it's also like you look at Olympic athletes, they don't all look like this. But yeah, hopefully they keep pushing. It comes down to who is making the games at the end of the day. If it's a group of 15 white guys, they will make 15 white guy options in the game. They see themselves and know how they look, based on their experiences in the world. **How did you see the male gaze express itself through some character design systems when you were playing games or messing with *The Sims* or some of these early character creators? How did you see the hegemony of the makers—predominantly white, cis male point of view—in terms of the character design? You probably noticed that early on when you made characters inside games.** It's a meme, but it comes down to the armor. I remember going to a place called the Royal Armouries, where I grew up in Leeds, and it's a museum for armor and weapons. They have all these ancient medieval British, French, and Norman armor sets, including some for women. I was probably maybe 12 when I saw one of these stupid breastplate with boobs things, and I was technically annoyed at the specifics of how something like that would work, Breastplates have always been rounded and potbelly to deflect stuff off them. The strike glanced away from the body, and I wondered, *Why are you putting a divot in the middle of the chest*. **Many people get introduced to medieval history through games and conveniently ignore why you might design armor in a particular way.** **When you started moving over into Daz Studio and then Unreal, did you find that there were the same kind of biases in those digital tools that you saw in game contexts?** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/large_A2167_16-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/dank-elves.webp) Late 15th century breastplate of 'Gothic' form from Royal Armouries vs. **Lineage 2* Daz Studio is worse than where the gaming industry is now. Daz Studio is like stepping into a time machine 10 years ago and seeing how things were in the gaming industry. If you were to go right now, do you know what I would do? Let's see what is on the Daz store page if you like 3D models. OK. It is a sexy woman wearing a tiny little panty bra thing. That was the first thing I saw. You scroll down. Sexy woman. Sexy woman. There's a henchman with tattoos on, then there's some tentacle—oh my God, this— ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/3D-Models-and-Assets-Daz-3D-2025-08-26-at-4.52.09-PM.jpg) Daz Studio frontpage **I'm looking at** [**this octopus man**](https://www.daz3d.com/el-pulpo-hierarchical-poses-for-genesis-9-and-fpe-tentacle-arms?ref=killscreen.com)**.** Yeah, pretty horrific, but it's always funny. I teach a lot in universities, teaching students 3D Blender and Daz Studio, and we always have this moment when I show them this tool. Then I feel almost guilty that I'm showing them this thing that completely rejects my personal thoughts and feelings. Still, it's a big part of my practice that I'm taking this fetishizing, sexualizing tool and pushing and pulling it towards my terms to work within its own parameters. But I still feel this horrific ickiness when I have to show students this because it feels inappropriate. It's so archaic. For a while, it seemed like maybe they were going in a slightly different direction. They were bringing out some things for Pride. They were adding some top surgery scar morphs and stuff like that. But I think in the last couple of years, like everything in the world, they've also relaxed, regressed, or returned to what they know. Keep going Killscreen has spent fifteen years on artists who bend the tools instead of accepting their defaults. Members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) Jamin: When did you start this oppositional relationship with the software? What were some of the things you were doing with the tools to make sure they reflected the more fluid bodies and identities that have become a hallmark of your work? Harriet: Yeah, so when I first started, they actually had a gender neutral base Genesis. It was just Genesis, I think. And back then, you had this non-binary looking default human mishmash. And you could take it either way—you could take face to be more feminine, parts of the body you could take more masculine. The textures given for them were really bad as a starting point. Then they split Genesis 3 and 8 into male and female bases. I would download all of them and play around with them, even if they were horrific and sexy, which they always were. And trying to fit super feminine things onto the male models when they weren't even made for that. And trying to mix things a little bit. I start with the female base, which I then try to make quite masculine, and I spend some time resculpting on top of them and taking them all the way to the most masculine and least feminine that I could do. And then finding another middle ground. So they sit mostly now in this middling fluid center, but usually still starting with the female base. 0:00 /0:17 1× **Yeah. One of the distinct pieces of your work is this shine, this shiny, this wet look that you have.** Yeah, I mean if anyone is a 3D artist, they know that making things shiny is a little bit of a cheat to kind of—upping the, if I say the wow factor of how something looks. It can be cheap-looking, and it's a bit lazy, but it was something that I was doing at the beginning because I never once wanted a realistic skin texture. I also find realism gross, like replicating this soft, real rough texture that is never quite realistic and still plasticky. Upping the specular and having things a little shiny is an easy way to avoid the uncanny valley. I'm not trying to replicate realness, and by solidly moving away from that, I never have to deal with the *ah, this thing is scary because it looks like a doll.* The characters feel more real because they feel like their own thing. They're not replicating reality, but they are—it's a photograph of a creature. It's not a render of a human that looks almost realistic. **The bodies that you're working with are in between. They're humanish. They're humanlike. But it bears some features that would be familiar to someone who plays a lot of video games. They also have this feral, animalistic element to it. They're not creatures of this particular world.** Yeah. 0:00 /0:10 1× **So you've been moving into Unreal, right?** Yeah. I think it's quite a natural progression for many 3D artists. If you're working with characters and are interested in games, you want to see your work moving in real time or controllable, and not having to wait two nights for your render to see if the animation even looks good. I got a motion capture suit (Thank you, Rokoko!), and I was really interested in the live, real-time motion capture. I ended up working with some performers and dancers, putting them in the suit because I **love** being in the suit. It's also fun, but I also danced when I was younger. It's always nice for a dancer to see their body movements from another angle. We're used to seeing how we move in a mirror and understand that relationship with our body. But if I move the camera out, I can show them this movement they're doing from any angle--from above, from behind--and suddenly they have this completely different relationship with the movement. At the end of last year, I worked on an interactive performance piece called *State of Play: شهر بازی* with [Tara Habibzadeh](https://www.instagram.com/kamikaze.labyrinthe/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com), [Mati Bratkowski](https://www.instagram.com/matibratkowski/?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com). It's a retelling of an ancient Persian mythology. We had a motion capture suit performer playing the part of this white demon, Div-e Sepid. We got the tail and wings to have physics as the performer moved, and then the performer had this virtual appendage reacting to their movements. It was a whole other level. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Harriet-Davey---performance-and-install---4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Harriet-Davey---performance-and-install---11.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Harriet-Davey---performance-and-install---21.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Harriet-Davey---performance-and-install---54.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Harriet-Davey---performance-and-install---74.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Harriet-Davey---performance-and-install---91.jpg) Photos: [Ben Moenks](https://www.instagram.com/benmoenks/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) **Can you tell me a little about your relationship to that industry and maybe some of the relationships between fashion and games that you see emerging?** Yeah, I'm also the founder of [SBLMTN Studio](https://www.instagram.com/sblmtnstudio/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com). There are three of us. I'm the 3D artist. We have another digital fashion designer and a physical fashion designer. We put on non-traditional fashion shows, so they were performances in which we had the same setup—a dancer, a performer in the motion capture suit, and a digital world with extra assets and extra outfits. We haven't done them for a while, and yeah, fashion is not something I'm that interested in, which is quite funny. In the real world, I like clothes. I don't follow things that religiously or go to many shows or anything like that, but it seems natural that if you have digital characters, at some point, they should maybe wear clothes. I like the characters without clothing because I think a character doesn't necessarily need it. But one time I remember my grandma saying to me, she was like, *Harriet, I do prefer when they have clothes on.* **Over the years, there have been different overtures from fashion to games. Like Nicholas Ghesquière from Louis Vuitton with *Final Fantasy* crossover...** The *Death Stranding* games— **Right. Yeah.** Errolson from Acronym. **I think you're stepping into the breach here in some ways. Because I feel like most—to our point, our discussion earlier—a lot of game makers come from similar backgrounds, similar interests, and when they create opportunities for extraordinary opportunities. Still, they don't really seem to have an interest in them.** **So you have digital—Fortnite, or some games that allow for digital clothing. Still, they have no interest in working with people in fashion for said digital clothing.** **So I think it's interesting that you're kind of—there's an opportunity there to do the work that a video game company might do. But they don't pursue, they don't really perceive it as being part of their quote-unquote brand.** Also, the audience is children sometimes. **Haha, yeah.** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Harriet-Davey---16.png) **I'd seen some of the work that you'd done with figure studies or framing environments. Can you tell me about the importance of environments in your practice? There is this kind of unseen element, both the composition of the characters and how you're getting them to gesture, but also all of the backgrounds and the contexts, right? They're not just characters in a black space or alone—you're also designing these environments for them to live in.** **You're taking a photographer's eye. The work is between many different spaces, but you're casting your creatures like a photographer to pick the characters and then document them.** Yeah, the characters always come first, and the landscapes 99 percent of the time come second. They give context clues and ideas about who this character is, their personality, where they come from, where they live, and how they inhabit a world. For a long time, I was making all of these environments and imagining these creatures interacting with them and how they functioned in the worlds that they were inside. And I thought I was doing a pretty good job of making quite diverse scenery. Then someone asked me where I grew up, and I showed them pictures of the countryside in the West Yorkshire Moorland. And they were like, \*Oh, it looks exactly like all the worlds you are making for the characters.\* And I was like, \*Oh. You're actually 100 percent right.\* \[laughts\] So I grew up in the middle of nowhere, as much as you can in England--because it's a pretty densely populated country. **Yeah.** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Harriet-Davey---6.png) Harriet: Unlike in America, where you have swaths of land with nothing in between. The nearest house was across a field, and then apart from that, the closest house was maybe nearly a mile away and surrounded by sheep and moorland. And you could look out the window and see this stretching brown rolling hillside. It looks desolate, like nothing grows there. All the heather comes out in the autumn, and the whole thing turns purple. In areas, there are purples, browns, shrubbery, no trees, and exposed rock. We would also often have a lot of hill fires in which the entire hillside would burn away, and it would just be ash some months. For instance, the height of the shrubs is always quite low, and they are always quite dense, and they look desolate and infertile from afar if you zoom out. But when you zoom in! You have little pockets of life, and flowers poke through, and you can imagine that there might be tiny birds nesting. I was not thinking about home when I was making any of the landscapes, but it was maybe something that I was comfortable with. It was very subconsciously this sort of semi-homesickness of the countryside. I lived there until I was 17 or so, 18\. It was super formative for me, and I think I probably still miss it. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Harriet-Davey---3.jpeg) Credit: Mariam Woodburn --- **Read next:** [Ina Chen Charts Her Family's Journey From Mao to Migration](https://www.killscreen.com/ina-chen-generation-of-books-deepfake-family-memory/) · [Teddy Pozo Explores Loss, Life, and Identity Through Interactive Clay](https://www.killscreen.com/teddy-pozo-explores-loss-life-and-identity-through-interactive-clay/) · [Alice Bucknell Soars From Pollination Simulators to Quantum Love Stories](https://www.killscreen.com/alice-bucknell-multiplayer-games-interspecies-cooperation/) From Killscreen Killscreen has been writing about the bodies games let you have, and the ones they don't, for fifteen years. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### Long games and the pursuit of lost time URL: https://www.killscreen.com/long-games-and-the-pursuit-of-lost-time/ Last updated: 2026-09-08T22:00:09.000Z Earlier this year, game designer Julien Eveillé [entreated the 10,000 people who'd purchased his game](https://www.polygon.com/steam-game-threshold-psychological-horror-stats-difficulty/?ref=killscreen.com), but did not play it...to actually play it. "I appreciate the support, but also: Do play it," he wrote. I found this entreaty absolutely curious. Backlogs in media are not unusual, but they're usually reserved for things you don't own or haven't yet experienced. That so many people purchased media and couldn't be bothered to press start is strange. What's stranger is that never finishing games is, in fact, the norm. Only [10% of people](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1875952118300181?ref=killscreen.com) who purchase games ever complete them. “There’s a bunch of games this month that are coming out,” one beleaguered father [told the Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/03/18/game-length-open-world/?ref=killscreen.com). “I know I’m not going to be able to get to it until months from now.” The behavior of collecting things without playing with them is entirely at odds with how I understand culture should work. As one astute Redditor responded to a novice > You don't start a collection of something. You end up with a collection of something after a long time of being into something, but purposely starting to collect something is just going about it entirely from the wrong end. I'm hard-pressed to find a similar dynamic in media as the one I see in games. On the one hand, who cares? A sale is a sale. Move on and don't complain. Eveille's request, though, points to something more profound. *Playing*, not owning, games is the point, yet I am also guilty of this behavior. I feel it in my bones, but why? In my many years of playing and thinking about games, I think the most important thing for games to reconcile is *time*. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Dhruv--1-.jpg) ## Sign up for Killscreen Exploring the future of interdisciplinary play Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. ## Time is not on our side In 2017, Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, made news with one of the shortest summaries of late-stage capitalism I've seen. In 2017, [he told investors](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/18/netflix-competitor-sleep-uber-facebook?ref=killscreen.com): > “You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night. **We’re competing with sleep, on the margin**. And so, it’s a very large pool of time.” Netflix has been clear-eyed that time is the most significant constraint on its business, so anything that competes for your attention is a threat. Hastings also astutely pointed to the popularity of games [as a threat](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/01/netflix-competition-disney-hulu-fortnite?srsltid=AfmBOoqcjD4lyI3ajohIlIcB6nB0VGF9ukNSo1Y4jpJDUJ6mwhZ7sOZP&ref=killscreen.com): “We compete with (and lose to) ‘Fortnite’ more than HBO,” he said. “There are thousands of competitors in this highly fragmented market vying to entertain consumers, and low barriers to entry for those great experiences.” On the other end of the spectrum, YouTube has [seen an increase in videos over 60 minutes **and** videos under 1 minute](https://www.youtube.com/trends/report/tr25-20th-birthday/?ref=killscreen.com). This is in part due to the introduction of Instagram competitor YouTube Shorts. But it also reflects an understanding from creators that bite-sized experiences can be part of a healthy programming diet. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/YouTube-Culture---Trends---Culture-and-Trends-Report-20th-Birthday-2025-08-28-at-11.57.45-AM.jpg) [From YouTube's 20th Birthday report](https://www.youtube.com/trends/report/tr25-20th-birthday/?ref=killscreen.com). Don't worry about the Y-axis they tell me. So if two of the biggest entertainment giants on the planet recognize the primacy of time, why are game makers moving in the opposite direction? This isn't a problem that's limited to enormous releases. Smaller, solo developer titles also consistently push experiences as long as games hundreds of times their size and budget. There are myriad financial and strategic reasons why games are so long. Still, I'm less interested in the microtransactions/addiction side of the equation or *why* games are so long. I am, however, deeply concerned about games as cultural products and feel that an emphasis on length as meaningful consideration for games—big and small—works against their stature and the realization of "[the ludic century](https://kotaku.com/manifesto-the-21st-century-will-be-defined-by-games-1275355204?ref=killscreen.com)." ## **A Brief History of Brevity** So how long is too long? There isn't a *right* answer to that question, but let's look at other media. Most media roughly fall into the same bucket. A 400-page book takes about four hours. Music runs from a single song of just a couple of minutes to something closer to an hour. Theater is somewhere between an hour and a half and three hours. Movies are roughly two hours. Limited podcast series are a bit longer. The closest analogue to games' length is television. With *The Sopranos*, *t*he rise of prestige TV over the last 30 years popularized the 13-hour-long season. We can question whether completing a series is the same as completing a season, so the run times could be 20-60 hours. But even television has been contracting. [According to Parrot Analytics](https://www.parrotanalytics.com/insights/seasons-are-getting-shorter/?ref=killscreen.com), the average episode length of a network television season has dropped from 16.2 in 2018 to 11.8 as of July 2024, while the length of a streaming season in the same span has decreased from 10.7 episodes to 9.3\. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/image-5.png) My favorite contribution from Peak TV–FX's **Atlanta* The move towards shorter is not bad, and the overall history of media bends towards shorter length, but with wider distribution. For example, the short story emerged in the 19th century as a counter-balance to the three-volume novel favored by Victorians. The cheaper price and later serialization would open the door for authors from Chekhov to Borges and later writers like Alice Munro to enter their work into the canon with tighter and inventive work that could deliver profound impact in a shorter time. Alice Munro reflected: > I no longer feel attracted to the well-made novel. I want to write the story that will zero in and give you intense, but not connected, moments of experience. I guess that's the way I see life. People remake themselves bit by bit and do things they don't understand. Munro has a sharp understanding that the story's length can reflect how our lives are actually lived–one chapter at a time. Short stories are not alone. Poetry moved from epic to lyric, opening the door for individual emotional expression. Recorded music has gone through cycles, from the earliest classical performances to popular short singles through the 60s, and then back to concept records, and then returning to our recent run of TikTok hits. TV has also yo-yo'd, starting with 90-minute variety shows before settling into releasing half-hour episodes of sit-coms, before the binge-watching in the streaming era. Radio had long radio programs before declining in the television era and returning again with podcasts. I could go on. There are many ways that games are different, exciting, and new. But to say that there is only one direction for the future games, and that is complete and total control over your attention? That worries me. ![a rusted metal surface with a lot of rust on it](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1573332607912-a93d49328e7d?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDF8fHN1cmZhY2UlMjBhcmVhfGVufDB8fHx8MTc1NjUwODY4Nnww&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000) Photo by [Simon Berger](https://unsplash.com/@simon%5Fberger?ref=killscreen.com) / [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?utm%5Fsource=ghost&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcampaign=api-credit) ## Surface area and pop culture For many years, I had argued that games struggled with the "dinner table problem" and that people were scared to talk about games publicly. That has clearly changed, but a different problem has emerged. Keep going Killscreen members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) The time commitment required for games creates a moat of experience and prevents players from sharing experiences with others. This is less a function of fragmented media and more a function of *surface area*. Movies, TV, and music are generally cheaper and shorter, so more people engage with them, good or bad. Other media also have the weight of history behind them. When games gate their access through an expensive PC or console, through length, through difficulty, through price, the number of people who can engage will be smaller, even if the total dollar amount is quite large. Moreover, discourse about art creates a positive feedback loop between artists and their audience. The wider the surface area, the wider the range of opinions, the wider the cultural relevance. When games require months to complete, they struggle to create the simultaneous collective experiences that build cultural bonds. Conversely, shorter games would enable the synchronized engagement patterns that transformed newspapers, television, and social media into culturally dominant forms. I say culturally dominant instead of economically dominant as a normative claim—perhaps secular trends will deliver games to the mountaintop. Still, I reserve judgment until a game designer is awarded a Guggenheim. (As an aside, I am a fan of short cycles of games from a hand of Poker to run of *Spelunky*. These games privilege depth over length and allow for readings at any level of engagement in a way that longer, linearly constructed games do not.) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/HowLongToBeat.com-Game-Lengths--Backlogs-and-more-2025-08-29-at-4.06.18-PM.jpg) Like what are we doing here. From [HowLongToBeat](https://howlongtobeat.com/?ref=killscreen.com), which exists solely because players are anxious about what they're in for. ## **Canon Fodder** Longer games create challenges around establishing even a contested canon for the medium, simply by virtue of length. If we look at the [AFI 100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AFI's%5F100%5FYears...100%5FMovies?ref=killscreen.com) or [NPR's top 100](https://www.npr.org/series/18955124/the-npr-100?ref=killscreen.com) albums–hardly cultural vanguards–the time needed is modest, with 50 hours for the former and 25 for the latter. For [MetaCritic's top 100 games](https://www.killscreen.com/is-gerrymandering-cheating-or-just-a-good-strat/), you'd need at least 10 times as much time, at around 500 hours. The MetaCritic list mainly includes narrative games and doesn't track the myriad of online games that can require time to develop sufficient skill. Remember that canons are the tip of the spear after whittling down dozens of candidates. When I submitted my top albums for the Village Voice's Pazz and Jop poll twenty years ago, I worked through the dozens of records down to my selects, and I wasn't even working full-time as a critic. Part of the reason that media that thrives on independent art forms *works* is an expectation that one's audience is looking for diversity in opinion. Choosing becomes a singular act, not part of the cultivation of broader taste. Canons are important because they give us something to chew over, to respond to, and to argue about. "The process that winnows canonical texts from less enduringly valuable texts is not neutral or impartial, as some defenders of the canon assert," wrote [English professor Paul Trout](https://mtprof.msun.edu/win1994/ptart.html?ref=killscreen.com). "But highly contentious, involving the interplay of all kinds of forces--historical, antiquarian, economic, philosophical, demographic, aesthetic, cultural, political, etc." Trout's conclusions about diversifying the canon are deliberately obtuse, but one should at least complete the work to have a canon. Lengthy games make that impossible, ceding critical territory to people willing to engage with games and games alone. But knowing what is *terrible* is also an important part of the process. Would you sit through 25 hours of Jason Statham's *The* *Beekeeper?* 30 hours of a middling record? Bad art provides a mirror, a counterpoint, and occasionally a cult following. But you can't form an opinion of something, even if negative, if it's too long. The length of games forecloses many avenues that would help aid a deeper cultural literacy and criticism around games. Including them meaningfully in class curricula is impossible, even if their subjects would be helpful. In an arts context, [given that a guest only spends 2-3 hours in a museum](https://www.killscreen.com/is-gerrymandering-cheating-or-just-a-good-strat/), long games are incompatible with institutional adoption. When I helped program the games for the permanent collection for MoMA, the exhibition constraints for games proved challenging. While games like *Tetris* and *Canabalt* work well for short play times, longer titles like *Super Mario 64* cannot be experienced the way that other objects in the design collection could. ![couple holding hand front of body of calm water with mountain distance](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1534630103086-5b1c106f74e0?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDF8fGFsb25lJTIwdG9nZXRoZXJ8ZW58MHx8fHwxNzU2NTA4ODg3fDA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000) A couple preparing to say goodbye for the evening. Photo by [Andrik Langfield](https://unsplash.com/@andriklangfield?ref=killscreen.com) / [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?utm%5Fsource=ghost&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcampaign=api-credit) ## Moral Formation Over the years, as life progresses, your thinking and relationship to media change. Your interests and your partner's diverge (in healthy ways!). She winds down watching *Top Chef*, and you vacillate between the Sight and Sound 200 and Adult Swim. You have a daughter, and her interests are entirely her own. While children's media thankfully converges more seamlessly these days with your own interests, at no point do you forget that you are watching a family of talking Irish puffins or Australian dogs. And so the decision to pick and maintain media interest takes on a ruthless quality. You abandon shows that have overstayed their welcome, lost their bite, or fumbled the plot. You turn to lists and canons to help sharpen your taste against an onslaught of releases. You listen to the media about The Thing without engaging The Thing directly. This is part of getting older. Someday, you can ask the robot nurse to strap you to the VR headset, press play on your backlog, strap you into a Waymo autonomous rocket, and shuttle you into the sun. That games ask for so much of our time takes on a moral component. It is an exclusive pursuit in that it helps shape who we are. Blessedly, games allow us to build relationships with others through cooperation or competition, but they ask for our attention. That means other things must take a back seat. Years ago, I [raised an honest concern](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-MIFSAz9as&ref=killscreen.com) that the investment in gaming was making it more like a country club with green fees and high-priced equipment. Since then, there's been an explosion of free games that ask for time commitments instead. Pierre Bourdieu would call this time requirement a mechanism of class distinction*—*temporal barriers that exclude working-class participants from cultural literacy.This transforms gaming from a potential democratic art form into another site of cultural reproduction where leisure time becomes a prerequisite for participation*.* At yet, when it comes to games, nothing–not the age of game makers, not the introduction of new technologies, not widely available game guides–has changed gaming's relationship to time. If anything, with the introduction of forever games-as-a-service like *Fortnite*, the motivation has been to dominate more and more of your waking hours. While big titles like *Call of Duty* and other shooters have shortened their single-player campaigns, the goal and business model is to keep you engaged for as long as possible. But on a simpler level, it's simply too much to ask us to devote our lives to play at the expense of life's myriad experiences. That delta between becoming well-played vs. well-read, well-watched, and well-listened is simply unjust. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/gif1.gif) ## So what is the perfect length? So, how long should games be? That's the wrong question. Durational work like Christian Marclay's 24-hour film and the 1,000 year composition of *Longplayer* can blissfully sit alongside Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani's 20-minute award winning short and Napalm Death's two-second "You Suffer*."*possible In "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846), Edgar Allen Poe argued that any work "too long to be read at one sitting" must "dispense with the significant effect derivable from unity of impression," because "the affairs of the world interfere, and everything like totality is at once destroyed." Poe's argument isn't just that working too long at one time is inconvenient. He argues–using "The Raven" as his exemplar–that a single session is a *requirement* for great poetry. Breaking the spell a poet casts ruins the transformative power of the medium. I have felt this to be true practically with games whenever I forget something complex's control scheme. Part of the rationale for games as "easy to learn, difficult to master" is that one can simply sit down and play without referring to a manual. More importantly, some of my favorite games–[*Inside*](https://www.killscreen.com/inside-wants-devour/), [*Firewatch*](https://www.killscreen.com/firewatch-and-the-great-american-landscape/)*, In the Pause Between Ringing–*have lulled me into a complete trance as the evening drifts late through my window. One place that excites me is artists building games with an exhibition context in mind. Artists like Alice Bucknell, [Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley](https://www.killscreen.com/danielle-brathwaite-shirley/), [Vinny Roca](https://www.killscreen.com/shakers-machines-desert-pigs-vinny-rocas-devotional-designs/), [Jakob Steensen](https://www.killscreen.com/tag/jakob-kudsk-steensen/), [Leo Castañeda](https://www.killscreen.com/leo-castaneda/), and others are approaching games as a complete experience with the constraints of the gallery in mind. That emphasis on completeness merged with brevity opens the door for a whole work in the same way that a 19th-century filmmaker could only have imagined a seven-second video. We face a choice. Are we players engaging in a medium of great importance? Are we obsessives who push everyone and everything a way in the service of our backlog? Or are we collectors hoarding, but never truly finishing? I love playing games, so hopefully, we can finish more of them together. --- From the archive Killscreen has been writing about games as culture since 2011, and we still do, once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### Is Gerrymandering Cheating or Just A Good Strat? URL: https://www.killscreen.com/is-gerrymandering-cheating-or-just-a-good-strat/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:55.000Z ## We often talk about American politics as a game, but what kind of game is it exactly? *This article is part of our ongoing series* The Game Design of Everyday Things. This is an excellent week if you live in California and love maps! California will be jumping into the redistricting fray with its[ own special election to counter Texas's attempt ](https://calmatters.org/politics/2025/08/newsom-redistricting-texas-democrats/?ref=killscreen.com)to hold onto Republican power in Congress. I know you didn't come here for politics, but as someone who loves games, my ears perked up with all this back-and-forth jockeying over winning a system of governance. The current debate over gerrymandering is a microcosm of how our government works and is worth thinking through the frame of games. You hear the "politics is just a big game" that's facile and simply means there are two sides with one winner. But let's scratch deeper. If we accept that American democracy *is* a type of game, what kind is it? I want to spend less time looking at the "optimal" design for the system or own my progressive politics, but let's look at how games can open our understanding of a game that many of us are playing, whether we like it or not. ## Complexity in American Politics To start, the American system of governance is complex! One way to approach the scale of this complexity is to point to America's size. It's the third largest in the world, so of course, the system should reflect the diversity of its constituents. Another way to approach this is America's history as a slave-holding country that blended democratic and anti-democratic systems with a series of checks and balances that functionally serve as speed bumps or roadblocks to change. Consider LA, the city that I live in. Rejecting the mayor-driven systems of New York and Chicago, LA is a dizzying patchwork of overlapping jurisdictions that brings me to tears each election day. A typical Angeleno might vote for representatives in over a dozen different governmental bodies—city council, county supervisors, school boards (LAUSD or one of 25+ other districts), community college trustees, water districts, sanitation districts, hospital districts, and various other special districts that handle everything from mosquito control to cemetery management. These boundaries rarely align: your neighbor across the street might be in a different city council district, a different board might govern your kids' school than the one you vote for, and the boundaries shift every ten years with redistricting. Add in the fact that the City of LA is just one of 88 cities within LA County—each with its own elections—plus unincorporated areas governed directly by the county, and you have an electoral maze where even civic-minded voters struggle to keep track of who represents them and when to vote. Election days are scattered across primary and general elections in even-numbered years, with some special elections and local measures appearing at seemingly random times, creating voter fatigue and ensuring that many of these crucial local positions are decided by a tiny fraction of eligible voters. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Dhruv--1-.jpg) ## Sign up for Killscreen Exploring the future of interdisciplinary play Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. So, when we think of American democracy as a system with "rules," we are not looking at the 91 rules of chess. This is more like *Twilight Imperium*, the space opera board game with 300 ship miniatures, 400 cards, thousands of counters, a 44-page rule book, and a two-day play time. (I was pleasantly reminded of the lovely Onion headline "[Explanation Of Board Game Rules Peppered With Reassurances That It Will Be Fun](https://theonion.com/explanation-of-board-game-rules-peppered-with-reassuran-1819579569/?ref=killscreen.com)," which could also describe my LA County ballot.) It can be tempting to conflate complexity with what game theorists call "depth." [In a 2017 paper](https://cdn.aaai.org/ocs/ws/ws0340/15142-68464-1-PB.pdf?ref=killscreen.com), NYU Game Center Chair Emeritus [Frank Lantz](https://www.franklantz.net/?ref=killscreen.com) and others tried to give a working definition for what we mean by a game being sufficiently deep. Using their analysis as a guide, American politics possesses many characteristics that would suggest an interesting game on its face, but don't hold up under closer inspection. First, deep games have what's called "state space complexity." This means there are a lot of ways to arrange your game system. But Lantz et al. point out that you can feign this type of depth by simply increasing the space size (e.g., holding more elections, adding more candidates) without making the game deeper. > American politics possesses many characteristics that would suggest an interesting game on its face, but don't hold up under closer inspection. Second, deep games all have an essential and meaningful number of branching choices. "A game with fewer options to consider would seem to offer less challenge and interest," they write. But again, you can mimic game depth by adding "dud" alternatives—dead ends that present the illusion of choice, but are never viable. Consider that we have the *freedom* to call our elected representatives, but as the New Yorker's Kathryn Schulz [discovered](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/what-calling-congress-achieves?ref=killscreen.com), the impact of calls on our politics is complicated: > When I asked past and present Congress members and high-level staffers if constituent input mattered, all of them emphasized that it absolutely does. But when I asked them to name a time that a legislator had changed his or her vote on the basis of such input, I got, **in every instance, a laugh, and then a very long pause**. Third, a deep game requires a lot of "computational resources" such as time or memory. In the case of politics, the simple analogue is money. The American political system has little public funding for elections and requires immense resources from candidates who must raise significant amounts from others or fund campaigns themselves. But simply raising lots of money alone is not a guaranteed path to victory. Democrats [spent 36% more on the 2024 election](https://www.fec.gov/updates/statistical-summary-of-24-month-campaign-activity-of-the-2023-2024-election-cycle/?ref=killscreen.com) than Republicans and lost every chamber. Lantz et al. use this way of thinking about games that use a lot of resources with meaningful impact: > Searching for a needle in a haystack is a difficult problem (in the sense of being resource intensive) but it’s not the kind of problem that requires cleverness and creativity, the kind of problem that rewards life-long learning and can support a large, long-term community of serious, dedicated players So in all three cases–state spaces, branching choices, computational resources–American politics presents a complex system that does not generate creative outcomes. It is not a "well-played game," in the words of Bernie DeKoeven. ![white and black dice on brown wooden table](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1614767629805-3bbcf6e26c7d?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDI0fHxkaWNlfGVufDB8fHx8MTc1NTcyNzE1NHww&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000) Photo by [Nika Benedictova](https://unsplash.com/@nika%5Fbenedictova?ref=killscreen.com) / [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?utm%5Fsource=ghost&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcampaign=api-credit) So what *should* be happening with depth in games? Lantz et al. introduce a "strategy ladder" and identify three things that truly make a game deep. There should be intermediate strategies that allow for success through randomness or execution, which should improve over time. Adding more resources should enhance your performance. Finally and presciently, there should neither be a resource-intensive only solution nor a quick and easy path to victory. In theory, American politics should exhibit precisely these qualities. Each advancement in political strategy—from simple door-knocking to micro-targeted digital campaigns to algorithmic redistricting—should be the depth a good political game should embody. But a system allowing incumbent politicians [to win 95%](https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/reelection-rates?ref=killscreen.com) of the time isn't a game; it's an arms race. To game designers, that's a big problem: > Consider a game in which a single heuristic allowed you to play perfectly. In such a game you would never need to search the game tree at all; whatever the situation, **you would simply apply this one weird trick.** This is how a game can fail to support a long strategy ladder by having a simple strategy that exploits an underlying regularity of the game tree to make the problem trivial. You can probably guess what that one weird trick is. If no changes are made to balance the system, the game becomes "solved" and there's only one path to success. There is no room for generativity as the outcome has been predecided. My personal concern is that the "solution" turns the disenfranchisement dial to 11\. And if so, why bother even playing? ## I'm not a cheater. I'm a strategist. Complexity in American politics can also mask fundamental disagreements about the rules themselves. When people do not understand a system's rules, bad actors can take advantage without social consequence. Those that explain a games rules to others have as much power as those who write them. Inevitably, when one side gains a consistent benefit, the knee-jerk reaction is that someone is cheating. This reaction is fair, particularly if one party has unique gifts or talents. ![selective focus photography of three books beside opened notebook](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1423592707957-3b212afa6733?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDJ8fHJ1bGUlMjBib29rfGVufDB8fHx8MTc1NTcyNzI1NHww&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000) **Who's making the rules here?* Photo by [Mikhail Pavstyuk](https://unsplash.com/@pavstyuk?ref=killscreen.com) / [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?utm%5Fsource=ghost&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcampaign=api-credit) In her landmark book on cheating in video games, appropriately titled [*Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames*](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262513289/cheating/?ref=killscreen.com), Professor Mia Consalvo outlines players' rationale for bending or breaking the rules. As she lays out in her ethnography, the challenge is that there was no single definition for cheating. Some players were complete purists and deemed any use of outside assistance as cheating. Other players were okay with cheating so long as it focused on enhancing personal experience, while others limited their definitions solely to multiplayer environments. Cheating took on a social dimension: "Cheating was more than breaking a rule or law; it was those instances of bending or reinterpreting rules to the players' advantage," she writes. "Players actively made ethical judgements about gameplay that extended beyond the coded rules of the game." The challenge for gerrymandering is that there isn't a consensus about what constitutes cheating. Perhaps redrawing maps to the city block for political advantage is cheating, but what about to the neighborhood? What about the county? The region? There isn't a correct answer because there isn't a set definition of what the game "is." J. Barton Bowyer writes that cheating is defined as something done to others: "to cheat, not to play the game that reflected the norm, indicated that there was another world of deception, in which people did not play the game, your game, but their own." If we accept that cheating is socially negotiated, the question isn't whether or not to cheat, but whether you can convince other players that it's appropriate. The fight over gerrymandering *is the point* and a sign that maybe both parties agree on the norms for aggressive redistricting. Consalvo writes that this type of discourse is typical for games: "Many players reason that because the developer's code does not specifically prohibit it, it might not be a cheat." As the Supreme Court has opened the door to the most radical versions of gerrymandering, the quest for power necessitates a change in tactics, and what was previously considered cheating is now a shrewd strategy. > "Players actively made ethical judgements about gameplay that extended beyond the coded rules of the game." [In the NY Times Magazine](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/15/magazine/gerrymandering-democrats-texas.html?ref=killscreen.com), Jia Lynn Yang outlines how Democrats abandoned an exploitative (but effective!) party boss system and more aggressive uses of executive power, for a more elite-driven, consensus form of governance. The effects have been predictable: > Political scientists and historians have observed that while the modern Republican Party became more ruthless about defeating its political enemies, breaking whatever norms were required, Democrats effectively stood in place, hoping for a return to bipartisan comity and defending the status quo their opponents were smashing. The Democrats became the party of procedure. > > “They’re ambivalent about brass knuckles,” said Daniel Schlozman, co-author of “The Hollow Parties” and professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University. The problem is that Democrats haven't acknowledged what the game is, and as a result, are misplaying it. The fight over gerrymandering suggests that change may be on the horizon. ## Cheaters vs. Spoil Sports That said, there is a path beyond cheating. Dutch theorist Johan Huizinga contrasts cheaters and "spoil sports:" The player who trespasses against the rules or ignores them is a "spoil-sport". The spoil-sport is not the same as the false player, the cheat; for the latter pretends to be playing the game and, on the face of it, still acknowledges the magic circle. It is curious to note how much more lenient society is to the cheat than the spoil-sport. This is because the spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself. While cheaters may bother us, Huizinga argued that cheaters are less destructive to overall play because they are still operating within the bounds of the game itself. The cheater at least recognizes that the game is important enough to attempt to gain an advantage. His reasoning is counterintuitive but compelling: the cheater still pretends to play the game and maintains the illusion of following the rules, thereby preserving the "magic circle" of play. The cheater wants to win and thus implicitly acknowledges the game's validity. ![a referee in a black and white striped uniform](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1632335431575-660d8e881a08?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTc3M3wwfDF8c2VhcmNofDd8fHNwb3J0cyUyMG9mZmljaWFsJTIwc3RyaXBlZHxlbnwwfHx8fDE3NTU3MjczOTl8MA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=2000) Photo by [Damian Lynch](https://unsplash.com/@dlynchmedia?ref=killscreen.com) / [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?utm%5Fsource=ghost&utm%5Fmedium=referral&utm%5Fcampaign=api-credit) On the other hand, the spoil-sport completely shatters the play-world by refusing to accept its rules altogether. As Huizinga puts it, the spoil-sport "robs play of its illusion"—literally "in-lusio" or "in-play." The spoil-sport destroys the temporary reality players have agreed to create together by denouncing the game as meaningless or refusing to participate. This is when someone walks away with the ball. Huizinga notes that communities of players are often more forgiving of cheaters than spoilsports. Cheaters can be ejected, but the game continues; spoilsports threaten the very existence of the play community. Consalvo noted that in one game community, 10% of players actively wanted to destroy the game they were playing, felt validated when developers paid attention to them, and had no remorse for their actions. "That's because they position themselves as customers, and the developer as someone who promised them the ability to modify and customize their gaming experience," she writes. The understandable anxiety over whether gerrymandering is fair is really a fear of the spoilsport. It is a legitimate fear that the system itself will disappear. Spoilsports love political violence. Spoilsports were at Jan. 6\. Spoilsports don't believe gerrymandering is enough, and something more unrestrained attempts to emerge. From Killscreen Enjoy this essay? Consider supporting Killscreen for the year for more essays, interviews, and profiles on the future of interdisciplinary play. [Learn more ](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/signup) It's worth noting that Huizinga understood the power of spoilsports. After critiquing the Nazis publicly in 1941 for their influence over Dutch academics, he was interred with nine other professors as collateral damage for an attack by the Dutch resistance in Rotterdam that had killed nine Nazis. Leiden University was closed, and Huizinga was banned from returning. Huddled in a small house with a blown-out window with his wife and young daughter, Huizinga died in detention in De Steeg in Gerderland, near Arnheim, on February 1, 1945, just a few months before the close of the war. "The spoilsport breaks the magic world," Huizinga wrote. He is a coward and must be ejected." These are strong and sad words, but they remind us why fighting to play the game of politics matters to us all. *Many thanks to Clive Thompson, who planted this seed in my head almost 15 years ago!* ### How Roxanne Harris performs jazz with code URL: https://www.killscreen.com/how-roxanne-harris-performs-jazz-with-code/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:56.000Z The middle child sandwiched between two brothers, [Roxanne Harris](https://alsoknownasrox.com/?ref=killscreen.com) first discovered her voice through video games. Those *Super Smash Bros*—99-stock battles that stretched for hours—weren't just sibling bonding. (I can attest to this!) They were Harris developing what she calls a parallel personality, one that existed as much in virtual space as physical reality. Some might have discovered this duality online, but games provided a perfect foil for exploring computer-mediated personality. "I kind of almost saw my personality in the virtual world before it fully developed," Harris says of those early gaming sessions in Queens. Now, the Yale-trained computer scientist and jazz saxophonist has found a way to merge those worlds through live coding, transforming lines of Ruby script into improvisational performances that blur the boundaries between musician, programmer, and instrument. Growing up as the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, she initially dreamed of becoming a video game designer—not in the casual way every kid who plays games imagines making them, but with serious intent. She wanted to contribute to the complex ecosystems that required "many hands in many areas of expertise," from concept artists to sound designers. That multidisciplinary fascination would eventually lead her down an unexpected path. [CodeSwitch (33.9668800, -118.4533748) // Remaster by ROX // Eternal, alsoknownasrox, The Growth Eternal](https://thegrowtheternal.bandcamp.com/album/codeswitch-339668800-1184533748-remaster?ref=killscreen.com) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Dhruv--1-.jpg) ## Sign up for Killscreen Exploring the future of interdisciplinary play Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Harris entered Yale as a computer science and mathematics major, coming off what she describes as a "pretty serious high school career" as an alto saxophonist. She was part of the first iteration of Jazz at Lincoln Center's high school academy, having played saxophone since second or third grade. At Yale, she initially kept these interests separate—parking her musical practice while focusing on the "career-heavy" quantitative disciplines. But something was not right. "I was missing that creative aspect," she recalls. The turning point came during her junior year when she encountered the algorithmic composition tool [Super Collider](https://supercollider.github.io/?ref=killscreen.com) in a computer music class. This was her first exposure to scripting music, though still in an academic context—students would write compositions, run them, and submit them like traditional coding assignments. The idea of editing and manipulating code live, using it as performance material, hadn't yet occurred to her. Then came quarantine. With her joint thesis proposal redirected (she'd wanted to combine computer science and music), Harris spent the summer diving deeper into computer music, eventually discovering live coding videos online. "The idea of editing and changing and melding the code live, using the code as material"—this was the revelation. For her senior thesis, she documented her learning process while building extension libraries for Sonic Pi, ultimately creating an EP of compositions that merged her technical and musical backgrounds. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/image-2.png) Harris showing her work during her Processing Foundation fellowship Live coding music has a longer history in algorithmic performance dating back to Brian Eno, but its incarnation as "algoraves" is a 21st-century invention. Live coding shows off the software to the audience while music and/or visuals are improvised. Harris's training provided an entry point for her creation in this context. "Saxophone in my head is like a stream of sound happening, very improvisational," she explains. "I feel like I translated that approach to my live coding practice." Where a pianist might manage ten different voices simultaneously, Harris imagines having ten saxophones, each improvising within a larger arrangement. The computer becomes her ensemble. Before each show, she constructs what she calls a "playground"—a curated set of tools and functions, like “toys spread out in preschool.” These might include custom rhythm generators, algorithmic shuffling functions, or what she terms "deterministic randomness"—patterns that appear random to the audience but follow precise computational logic. Initially, this improvisational piece was a bit hard to wrap around as a non-technical performance. I’m so accustomed to the idea that programmers do something independently, release it to the public, and then respond. But in live coding, that process is plastic and dialogic. Harris prepares, performs, and then adjusts the performance. The distance between what’s happening on-screen and what’s happening on Harris’ keyboard has collapsed entirely. “There are a couple of principal concerns,” she says. “But I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make myself comfortable onstage.” And unlike posting her work to GitHub for posterity, much of what happens passes into memory. "I can't remember the last performance," she says, trying to recall anything pre-planned. "The vast majority of my performances are just completely improvised." This approach reflects a more profound philosophy about human-computer collaboration. "We're computers too," Harris insists, comparing her practice to how she imagines John Coltrane's mind worked—generating complex patterns through internal algorithms. The live coding makes this process visible, stripping away the abstraction that typically separates audience from performer in electronic music. Unlike a DJ hidden behind a laptop or an electronic musician triggering pre-programmed sequences, Harris's screen projections reveal every moment of creative decision-making. This transparency has two sides. Obscuring the process allows for secrecy, but it can also obscure brilliance. By showing the previously unviewable down cards, the “hole cam” allowed poker viewers to see the mind and strategy of world-class gambling minds. The DMC World DJ championships showcased the magic of turntablism and opened the door to seeing how DJs manipulate sound with technique. Harris points out that virtuosity is well understood in the live coding community as well. On the other side, exposing your process is free soloing. "It's algorithmic vulnerability," she says, acknowledging the risks. “When there’s a syntax error, everything is going to stop.” Or worse, it just won’t feel right. The audience might think it's "the coolest thing ever" or dismiss it entirely, wondering why she doesn't just use FL Studio or Ableton. Some viewers, catching glimpses of familiar code structures, might even question the difficulty. But this transparency is precisely the point. Where traditional electronic music hardware abstracts functionality into buttons and knobs, Harris builds her instruments from scratch in real-time, showing the mathematical transformations that sculpt sound. Practice session with music from Tyler, The Creator The social dynamics of her performances fascinate her. At Wonderville, the Brooklyn arcade bar that serves as New York's live coding hub, she performs alongside vintage arcade cabinets—a fitting venue for someone whose artistic journey began with video games. I’ve spent some time at Wonderville and it’s absolutely overwhelming with every corner packed with games. But it’s the sensory overload that really captures Harris’ work an unholy fusions: games, music, and performance existing simultaneously, each medium informing the others. Harris's setup varies but centers on Sonic Pi and Max/MSP, sometimes incorporating her saxophone for a "tangible somatic" element amid the digital abstractions. She thinks carefully about connectivity—how different software environments can communicate, how she can build bridges between platforms to use each for its strengths. This modular approach means she can show up to a session with just a laptop and build whatever backing tracks other musicians need on the fly. That flexibility is "something that in most contexts, you pretty much can't do," she notes. From Killscreen Enjoy this profile? Consider supporting Killscreen for the year for more essays, interviews, and profiles on the future of interdisciplinary play. [Learn more ](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/signup) The future Harris envisions pushes even further into real-time synthesis. She's experimenting with Unity, creating patches that let Sonic Pi control visual environments. The goal isn't just audiovisual performance but something approaching total improvisational control—music, visuals, and interactive elements all responding to her code in real-time, all vulnerable to the syntax errors and happy accidents that make each performance unique. "At the end of the day, I want to make good music," Harris says. "This is just how I'm choosing to do it." But her choice represents something larger: a radical honesty about creative process, a willingness to compute in public, and a belief that code itself can be an expressive medium. In making her thinking visible, Harris doesn't just perform music—she performs the act of creation itself, inviting audiences into the usually hidden dialogue between human intention and machine logic. ### Silicon Valley in a Sand Trap with Sam Ghantous URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/silicon-valley-in-a-sand-trap-with-sam-ghantous/ Last updated: 2025-08-12T02:46:32.000Z The same silica that powers your GPU fills the sand traps at Augusta National. Artist [Sam Ghantous](https://samtous.wtf/?ref=killscreen.com) joins us to discuss "your golf course made my GPU," his three-channel video installation that traces the geological origins of our digital obsessions. Ghantous admits he's afraid of hardware. Despite this—or because of it—he's spent the past year confronting the physical reality behind our screens. Using Unity and Unreal Engine not to make games but to interrogate them, he reveals how ultra-pure silica mined in North Carolina becomes both microchips and golf course sand. The work forces us to reckon with what he calls the "big sludge of media" that surrounds us—accessible on one hand, black-boxed on the other. We discuss his childhood moving between Oman, the Middle East, and North America, and how this itinerant experience shaped his understanding of sand's perpetual movement. He describes printing UV images onto silicon wafers—the raw material of microchips—creating what he calls "portals" framed by rings of sand scanned in his studio. Behind the cleared dust, ethereal reimaginings of Botticelli paintings emerge. The conversation toggles between pleasure and guilt, much like the two voices in his video work—a synthetic childlike inquisitor and the artist's own voice. We talk about Chinese sand dredgers "editing the map" at planetary scale, golfers trapped in bunkers, and future projects where "Hello World" might take millions of years to print in deep time computing. "I'm not standing on some moral high ground," Ghantous tells us. "I'm struggling with the temptations, both for new things and for fascinating things, but also trying not to look at my phone more." Currently teaching at ETH Zürich, Ghantous hints at future works: games affecting one another across distances, sculptures bringing earthliness and computation together, seeking new languages for the consequences of our actions on other parts of the planet. *This episode was hosted by Jamin Warren, founder of Killscreen.* [*Music by Nick Sylvester*](https://www.tiktok.com/@nickgodmode?ref=killscreen.com)*.* Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at info@killscreen.com. ### Sam Ghantous Finds Silicon Valley in a Sand Trap URL: https://www.killscreen.com/sam-ghantous-finds-silicon-valley-in-a-sand-trap/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:57.000Z *The artist's new work traces the geological origins of our digital obsessions* As someone who’s spent nearly twenty years thinking about games and playing various digital ones, I rarely think about the device itself. I hold a Steam Deck in my hands or pick up a controller for PlayStation 5, but what lies in my hands is elusive. I’m only reminded when the contoured plastic starts to heat and perspiration coats the thumb stick, distracting my movement. Artist [Sam Ghantous](https://samtous.wtf/?ref=killscreen.com) had the same blind spot. "Hardware scares me," he confesses over video chat. "I'm really comfortable in front of the screen on my laptop, making something." So, his new work "your golf course made my GPU” which opened at YveYANG Gallery earlier this year, is a bit of personal therapy, pushing us all to think harder about the relationships between our digital and physical worlds. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Dhruv--1-.jpg) ## Sign up for Killscreen Exploring the future of interdisciplinary play Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. Ghantous doesn't have much of a relationship with games. He came to them through software, through the game engine Unity, as a way to reflect on how everything today tends toward gamification. This admission directly invokes both the leisurely sport and the graphics processors that power modern gaming. But for Ghantous, it's less about games themselves than the "big sludge of media" that surrounds us—accessible on one hand, black-boxed on the other. The three-channel video at the center of his recent show at YveYANG Gallery performs an uncanny excavation: it reveals that the same ultra-pure silica mined in North Carolina ends up both in the microchips surrounding us and in the sand traps at Augusta National Golf Club. This geological coincidence becomes Ghantous's entry point into questions about extraction, desire, and the material costs of our digital lives. How far will we go for better graphics, faster processors, and more compute power for AI? What are we willing to exhaust from the earth? your golf course made my GPU, Video, 10’40 (2025) Ghantous forced himself into uncomfortable territory for the physical installation, printing UV images onto silicon wafers—the raw material of microchips. These wafer works function as “portals,” he says, with frames made from rings of sand scanned in his studio. Behind the cleared dust, ethereal reimaginings of Botticelli paintings emerge. "I'm not standing on some moral high ground," Ghantous admits during our conversation, itself mediated by silica. "I'm struggling with the temptations, both for new things and for fascinating things, but also trying not to look at my phone more." This double bind—knowing better while still participating—animates the work. The video features two voices in dialogue, one synthetic childlike inquisitor, the other as the artist’s voice providing context. Ghantous describes this as an internal dialogue made external, toggling between pleasure and guilt. Sand becomes the work's central obsession, appearing in its many states throughout the video: industrial product, quartz crystal, concrete ingredient, silicon source, ski slopes, video game worlds. The video layers industrial footage with extreme and quotidian sports, showing a golfer trapped in a sand bunker while that narrator intones about the relationship between what is built and what is lost. A Chinese sand dredger tears up sand by the shipful and is described as "editing the map"—using the language of games to describe planetary-scale extraction. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Sam-Ghantous---your-golf-course-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Sam-Ghantous---your-golf-course-2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Sam-Ghantous---your-golf-course-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Sam-Ghantous---your-golf-course-4.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Sam-Ghantous---your-golf-course-5.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/Sam-Ghantous---your-golf-course-6.jpg) Born in Oman and shaped by a childhood of perpetual movement across the Middle East and North America, Ghantous identifies with sand's itinerant nature. "The show has helped me recognize the dust that accumulates around us," he explains. Like the silica forged by millions of years of erosion and transport, he has navigated currents of global upheaval, moving between countries, institutions, and career paths—from architect to artist. The work emerged from what Ghantous jokingly calls "collecting lots of things"—lab footage, clips from the 1964 Hiroshi Teshigahara film "Woman in the Dunes," 3D models, and images of wafer production facilities. Through this accumulation, he builds up and erodes moving images on top of one another, seeking edges between elements both conceptually and visually. The three-channel format creates a horizontality he thinks of as Earth's horizon, the thing beneath us that undergirds the whole project. > I'm struggling with the temptations, both for new things and for fascinating things, but also trying not to look at my phone more." What makes "your golf course made my GPU" particularly resonant is how it makes abstract connections tangible. For those who play games or use technology, questions about where materials come from remain conveniently distant, covered up by marketing narratives about faster and better. Ghantous forces a reckoning with the physical reality: that rare geological formations from hundreds of millions of years ago enable both our microchips and premier golf courses. The extraction happens first, and then we figure out what to use it for. Currently an Assistant teaching and researching at ETH Zürich, Ghantous hints at future projects that might include games affecting one another across distances, sculptures bringing earthliness and computation together, or perhaps a chip that runs at the scale of deep time—where "Hello World" might take hundreds of millions of years to print. These ideas overflow from his recent attention toward geology and Earth, seeking new languages for the consequences of our actions on other parts of the planet. "Your golf course made my GPU" doesn't offer solutions. It’s a confession and an indictment. The work asks: What role does an individual play in these vast movements? What can be concluded from this arcane passage from mineral to binary? And ultimately, in Ghantous's haunting formulation: Who are you? From Killscreen Enjoy this profile? Consider supporting Killscreen for the year for more essays, interviews, and profiles on the future of interdisciplinary play. [Learn more ](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/signup) ### Balatro and the expected value of wonder URL: https://www.killscreen.com/balatro-and-the-expected-value-of-wonder/ Last updated: 2026-09-16T17:11:33.000Z When I was in college, my fraternity took an optional group trip to Las Vegas that I did not enjoy. A friend's father, who apparently gambled quite a bit, had racked up some points for hotel rooms. If we could get ourselves to Las Vegas, we could stay the weekend for free. What should be a prompt for a wild college weekend instead created constant stress for me as a non-gambler. To start, I had little money—about 70 dollars for the weekend—and keeping enough to be able to buy food on the plane flight home was my own little game. I foolishly believed playing penny slots would open the doors to free alcohol (it does not), and there's not really anything to do on the Strip for free. Robbed of inebriety, drenched in frugality, it was a lackluster weekend. Since then, I've never really been interested in gambling, so when *Balatro* was released earlier this year, I reluctantly jumped in. *Balatro* is visually straightforward. It's poker, but with a strong helping of collectible card games like *Magic: The Gathering*. You get a hand of cards, can augment them in all kinds of outrageous ways, and shoot to top a score target each round. It's also a "roguelike," meaning the hands and drops change every single time you play it. The big innovation for Balatro was playing with the Joker, a card that generally does not appear in poker like Texas Hold 'Em. *Balatro*'s Jokers are imbued with all types of quasi-magical powers that range from the simple (The Juggler increases your hand size by 1) to the arcane (The Obelisk reads "X0.2 Mult per consecutive hand played without playing your most played poker hand." Ok, what?). The Jokers are received randomly and/or can be purchased one at a time. For people who like systems-heavy games, the mix of the simple (a deck of cards) with the complex (150 different Jokers) is catnip. There are only 91 rules for a chess game, but there are more possible outcomes than the stars in the sky. *Balatro* possibilities surely extend to the multiverse. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/balatro-joker-sheet.webp) [Credit](https://www.reddit.com/r/balatro/comments/1gaauvu/i%5Fmade%5Fa%5Fbalatro%5Fjoker%5Fcheat%5Fsheet/?ref=killscreen.com) That said, I did not particularly enjoy *Balatro*. I've played enough games to know when something is not for me, but in the process of digging for hints, I was deeply curious about the intense interest of players. Balatro seemed to unlock something primal in players who compared diabolically complex strategies to legendary bouts of luck. It was a type of enjoyment that was utterly foreign to me. That others are interested in something that I am not is something that interests me. So what is it about a game like Balatro that triggers ecstasy in some and revulsion in others? Let's look at the appeal in two ways: the system and the aesthetics. In poker, the lengths people will go to improve their potential success and winnings is well-documented. [In a review of consummate gambler and occasional forcaster Nate Silver's book](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/09/on-the-edge-the-art-of-risking-everything-nate-silver-book-review?ref=killscreen.com), Idrees Kahloon writes about his self-improvement regimen to increase his odds at the table: > *The effort to improve one’s rationality as a gambler easily approaches the irrational. Even my own study of poker became moderately obsessive. I watched hours of poker-strategy videos and long montages of televised poker tournaments with commentary; I went through the lecture notes of a class taught at M.I.T. called Poker Theory and Analytics. Learning about pot odds—it turns out that you can confidently meet an opponent’s call with positive expected value (that is, money-making on average) if your chance of winning is greater than the share of the pot you’d be contributing—made me understand where I’d erred."* This sounds like *work*, and both Kahloon and Silver acknowledge that in some sense, poker the *game* and poker the *practice* are a profound waste of time. > Although poker is an arena that prizes decision-making, most pros would \[...\] be better served financially doing something else for a living. Clearly, its rewards aren’t fully reflected in the +EV models. In *Balatro*, similar attempts at optimal strategies dot the pages of Reddit and elsewhere. People share the "[seeds](https://www.reddit.com/r/balatro/search/?q=seeds&type=posts&sort=top&cId=417bd22a-bbb1-4e7a-82c5-f2fce51ff722&iId=19db425c-8264-490e-9979-7b223a524c07&ref=killscreen.com)" for successful runs so that others can reproduce their game. (It's similar to sharing the exact starting measurements for a recipe, recognizing that the craft is in the tacit knowledge needed to construct the dish.) Others refer to "[tier lists](https://www.reddit.com/r/balatro/comments/1htnokj/i%5Ffinished%5Fc%5Fso%5Fi%5Fmade%5Fa%5Ftier%5Flist%5Ffor%5Falmost/?ref=killscreen.com)" to determine which Jokers provide the most value with specific strategies in mind. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/08/image.png) [Credit](https://www.reddit.com/r/balatro/comments/1fix6nz/gold%5Fstake%5Ftier%5Flist%5Fafter%5Fover%5F950%5Fhours%5Fand/?ref=killscreen.com) It's worth noting that talking about *Balatro* has in some ways become a more critical social function than playing the game itself, given that the game is a solitary pursuit. More importantly, discussing *Balatro* creates more distance between the game and the player. The goal is not a good time or a desirable hand. It's some distant, unknown future of ludic purity. But the joys of mathematical systems only beget more mathematical systems. In both games, math meets more math as "solver" programs now demystify the unknown and provide the most profitable recommendations for how to play a poker hand. Likewise, you can now play a practice *Balatro* game on [GitHub](https://efhiii.github.io/balatro-calculator/??ref=killscreen.com), hand by hand, card by card, to try to fully optimize a score. You'll never regret another decision again. Where does this leave you as a player, though? After creating the first poker solver program, Oleg Stroumov [reflected](https://medium.com/@olegostroumov/worlds-first-poker-solver-6b1dbe80d0ee?ref=killscreen.com), "This journey made me realize my true passion lies in developing complex programs rather than playing poker." On the one hand, everyone should find their truth. On the other hand, diving deeper into a game would lead you *out of games* entirely is suboptimal for the medium. Like poker, *Balatro* raises a central tension: when optimization becomes so naked and onerous, does joy disappear? 0:00 /0:06 1× Solver programs like GTO Wizard make the math of poker strategy easier to learn. *Balatro* hasn't appealed to me partly because I'm not a natural optimizer (although I am a Virgo!) in my play. I try to build systems to keep my structure documented in real life, but that patience evaporates when I encounter a game system that requires it. *Balatro* is a perfect game for those who've succumbed to the "[optimization sinkhole](https://annehelen.substack.com/p/the-optimization-sinkhole)" in the words of Anne Helen Petersen: > I also believe that we’ve collectively become very good at mistaking the feelings of optimization, organization, and control for *fun*. Organizing your fridge is not fun. Neither is watching someone do it. It is *satisfying*, and it is satisfying because it offers a flicker of control amidst the natural and amplified chaos of our lives. The optimizing, maximin approach to the play of complex systems, I could never quite *get*. There must be a beauty that transcends a score or a pot size. Another way to think about "easy to play, hard to master" games like poker is to consider how they trigger challenge as sensation. *Balatro* cleverly uses the appearance and iconography of poker to disguise a more complex strategy game. One of the key ways it does this is through a compelling string of design decisions that create an allure from the mundane. The flicker of the faux CRT display. The undulating background. The slot machine ring of a combo. The casino's alchemic elements transmute the cold calculus of victory into limbic ecstasy. This is the aesthetic of calculation without the culture of the casino. Conversely, Silver and other commentators of poker describe the human elements that make the risk of poker desirable. The thrill of risking *your own money*. Bluffing and strategy. The workings of the human mind at a poker table. It's not the game rules of poker that excite players; it's the extracurricular elements that draw comparison to narcotic use. "The dopamine rush that follows a successful bet will trump the slow-burning satisfaction of contributing to your Roth I.R.A.," Kahloon writes again. But again, *Balatro* isn't real, so what gives? At this point, we are no longer talking about games. We are talking about the sublime, about simulation. The enjoyment from *Balatro* is the enjoyment of preparation and execution unmoored from the casino. It's for valuing the tedious setup of hundreds of dominoes in an afternoon over watching them fall. By contrast, to many other games that provide moment-to-moment activity, the enjoyment is the negative space when a player seems to be doing nothing at all. And perhaps that's something I can only experience second-hand. To wit, this: > Every Red Seal Steel King held in Hand has the following: > • 4 X1.5 Mult abilities: Steel + Baron + Brainstorm + Brainstorm > • 4 retriggers: Base Trigger + Red Seal + Mime + Blueprint > > This gives 4x4 = 16 X1.5 Mult calculations, which is X1.5^16 = X656.8 for each card. > > I use 54 Cryptids, which gives 1 + 54\*2 = 109 cards. This means a mult of X656.8^109 = X1.2e307. > > With the non-steel Red Seal King we get another X1.5^12 = X129.7, which puts us beyond X1.7e308 = 2^1024, which is the largest number represented by the double-precision floating-point format used by Lua in the LÖVE framework, which Balatro is programmed in. > > Due to implementation details, it results in a "nan" value before the "e" and a "inf" after it, so we get a score of "naneinf". Becomes this: Earlier this month, I spoke with [Risa Puno](https://www.killscreen.com/why-risa-punos-games-ask-you-to-be-vulnerable-in-public/) who uses simple games like mini golf to expose deep emotional realities. *Balatro* engages in the same pursuit. We are surrounded by the beauty of math every day, in the shape of leaves, a sunrise, bird song–but perhaps to feel that complexity, it takes a whirr of a virtual casino bell. It's opaque, arcane, and truly remarkable. In an optimized world, perhaps the most radical thing is to make optimization beautiful rather than efficient. --- **Read next:** [Labubus, Loot Boxes and the Gamblification of Everything](https://www.killscreen.com/gamblification-labubu-loot-boxes-gambling-mechanicsretry/) · [What Tottenham's collapse teaches us about the corruption of play](https://www.killscreen.com/what-tottenhams-collapse-teaches-us-about-the-corruption-of-play/) From Killscreen Killscreen has spent fifteen years on the games that are worth more than their expected value. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### Mario von Rickenbach just wants you to play nice with others URL: https://www.killscreen.com/mario-von-rickenbach-play-nice-multiplayer-rakete/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:58.000Z *What happens when a designer privileges feeling over function? Mario von Rickenbach's practice does just this. Moving from architecture to interactive design, the Zurich-based creator builds games that prioritize sensation and spatial thinking over conventional challenge structures.* *Here, we focus on the re-release of his 2012 game* [Rakete](https://rakete.li/?ref=killscreen.com) to *demonstrate*changed something and *how quickly meaningful interaction can emerge when physics feels right. Rather than extensive testing or market research, Mario trusts his intuition about how objects should behave in digital space—a sensibility shaped by his architectural training and collaborative work with filmmaker Michael Frei.* *His games speak the language of digital kinesthetia, creating the tactile quality of movement that matters more than points or progression. We speak with Mario about the value of rapid prototyping, why architectural thinking serves interactive design, and how cooperation becomes legible through the weight of virtual objects.* --- **Jamin:** Going back, can you tell me about how *Rakete* fits into your evolution as a game designer? You're re-releasing it, but it was also released 13 odd years ago, and your practice has grown and changed a lot over the years. Where does this game sit in your evolution as a game maker? **Mario:** When I think about it, it's quite a unique project because it's the only project that I've ever done that was made quickly. The game was made in one day. **Jamin:** Mhm. **Mario:** There was an event competition called Experimental Gameplay Competition, and they made these online calls. However, there was one with a live event in Berlin where they said we need a playable game with five buttons. Just send something if you have something. I thought *okay, I will not spend much time on this*. I had wanted to make a game with a lot of people together, like 100 people together, trying to fly an airplane. But since I had no time, I just did the simplest thing I could imagine. If I remember correctly, I started in the afternoon, and in the evening, I showed it to my flatmate to test. It didn't work so well. The next morning, I changed something and made 28 levels in half an hour. I thought, *okay, it just has to be done*. I don't want to spend more time on it. I even made sounds with an iPad app very quickly—it was all basically done without any testing. I just made the game, finished it, sent it, and that's it. Of course, I tested it myself to see if I could play it, but I hadn't tested it with others. It's very unusual that I just sent something untested and unfinished. The title shows how simple this is. 0:00 /1:18 1× **Jamin**: How is it pronounced? **Mario**: It’s the German word for rocket. Rakete. And the game was being shown in Germany, so it seemed to work. **Jamin:** One of the strange things about English is it's not consistent. When new words are introduced, they don't carry the origin with them. For American English speakers, we don't try to pronounce French words with a French accent versus Spanish—my Spanish is not bad—but with Spanish, everything is consistent. Even words from other languages, the pronunciation is consistent regardless of the origin of the word. But English is a bit of a mongrel, just a mix of different pronunciations. **Mario:** I find it cute when people just try to say it in some way and it sounds different but you get what it should be. **Jamin:** Yeah. Rock-et. Rakit. **Mario:** *Rakete*. I was not actually there at the event when they showed it. A little bit later, two weeks or so later, people told me that it works very well. *Actually, I haven't tested the game. I haven't even seen it,* but people said to me that it worked well. It won a prize. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/rakete-screenshot-2.Z-pPOXOG_Z4L544.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/rakete-screenshot-3.BFWuaqrW_ZpEdE4.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/rakete-screenshot-4.prYPjcHM_d5pOc.webp) **Jamin**: You mentioned that the game was done quickly. Since then, your process has been more deliberate in terms of concepting and design. Tell me about your process or how it's changed over the years from this specific project that was done very quickly. **Mario**: I'm usually much more explorative in trying to find ideas. So it's not that I have an obvious idea from the beginning, but more a thing that I want to—that I could imagine could be interesting to explore, and then I will try different things around that. Maybe I have some interaction in mind, but usually it's more that I try to find an idea by trying things, and not that I want to finish a project in one week or a short time. **Jamin**: Well, there's also, as your creative profession develops and you have a body of work behind you, there's quite a bit of pressure on releasing things publicly. And it's very hard with games also because you can do all kinds of internal play testing or prototyping, but it's very different when things go out and live in the real world. And so, as a designer, there's this tension between wanting to get public feedback very quickly, but that is in conflict with your reputation—you can't just release things every week unless that is your design practice, like *I'm going to release things*. And there's no correlation between whether or not something is done quickly and whether it's good. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/image-2-1.png) Photo: 3 Hit Combo **Mario:** Right **Jamin:** You have a background in architecture. Is that right? **Mario:** Yeah, I started studying architecture, and it was great—just a year—I liked the idea of designing things that are used by people. But what I didn't like is that it's so abstract. You cannot actually test what you're doing. You cannot try things. Game design at the art school here in Zurich was a new thing they introduced. I didn’t have to plan so much. I could try things and see if they work. It's more interactive, the process itself. That really fits the way I work much better. I don't start with this very refined plan of what to do, but I really have to see what I'm working on to understand if it could be interesting or not to continue. **Jamin:** Yeah. I like games played by people with architecture backgrounds. Games pull from the spatial thinking that's required in architecture and some of the conceptual design, the framing of the work in 3D environments. But yeah, like you're saying, the benefit is that people can play it, whereas the timeline for architecture projects is exceptionally long. So many parties are involved in getting something into the built environment. Games allow you to scratch that itch of wanting to design for other people, but be able to do so quickly. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/Sahej-Rahal---DMT----Hi_res-06.jpg) ## Sign up for Killscreen Exploring the future of interdisciplinary play Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. **Jamin:** When did you meet \[filmmaker\] Michael Frei? Was that before or after—was he involved in your life before *Rakete*? **Mario:** After that. I don't remember exactly, but in 2013, like one year later, he contacted me because he had this short film \[*PLUG & PLAY*\] he made and wanted to make a game out of it. He tried to find someone who works with interactive media and games to create a project. He had some idea how to do it, but he didn't know how to actually get it done. We haven't seen each other before, but some people recommended that he get in touch with me for some reason. When we met first, we understood that we have very similar interests in terms of what we like about games and what we don't like about games. It was completely interesting to meet somebody from even a different field, but then you talk and you have the same references, the same things that you think are great, and nobody knows them. **Jamin:** Yeah. I hypothesize that games are not real in the way that we have conventionally verticalized them as an industry, and that people express creativity through games. Still, they're coming from another creative design discipline. It could be film or architecture, and then they find their way to games. With people bringing non-game perspectives to games, I can always tell because the work often feels different or abandons particular conventions. I often have a challenge when game makers are only conversant with other people who play games. They couldn't sit down with an animator or a film director and actually talk about what they do. So, I'm not surprised that you and Michael found common ground. **Mario:** When I studied, I talked to people who are into games or fans of playing games. It was often hard to be critical about games. It's comforting to know that I'm not the only one who doesn't care about 90 percent of games. **Jamin:** Yeah, loving games in spite of themselves vs because of them—you're either attracted to the things that you're seeing in games and so you want to make more of that, or you see through that and see something beyond, see potential. You're quite optimistic that there is something there, even if you can't see it just yet. **Mario:** Exactly. **Jamin:** With *Rakete*, the way that cooperation works in that game is just stripped down to controlling thrusters together. I'm curious about the weighting and the physics. How did you think about and design the weighting and movement of the thrusters so that success didn't feel impossible, and it felt like you could do it? The ship moves at a certain speed, rises, and falls. How did you design the physics and the dynamics in the game itself to make cooperation legible to players? **Mario:** I didn't know if it's playable when different players actually control the thrusters, but I just played it myself. I wanted to make sure that I could actually play it. So I made it as slow as possible but not annoying. I remember that first, I disabled the gravity because you're in space, right? And then I understood that it doesn't work if you don't have gravity. So I needed some gravity, but not too much. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/image-3.png) This really helped—this idea that you're not really in space but somewhere close to some planet. So you have some force that drags you down a little bit, but not too much, so the rocket doesn't get too fast. But in the end, it's very intuitive. Often, when I tweak physics—and I do that all the time—it's really that I know where to start because I have already done something similar. So I know, *OK, everything is too fast, I have to slow it down* and play with the numbers a bit. I don't think I spent a lot of time tweaking these forces because it worked, so I guess I just left it. Maybe I was lucky. **Jamin:** Maybe. I mean, not just lucky. Looking at your body of work, that sense of how it feels to play something versus what you actually do in the game—I know with animation, so much time is spent around this idea of feeling, trying to create an object onscreen that does not exist in the real world but still behaves or has the characteristics of something real. So it's not surprising to me that this would be something that you would figure out very quickly—this ineffable kind of feeling. Although you do have to pick values at the end of the day, you are working inside of a game engine, so you do have to make some choices there, but it's not that surprising to me. **Mario:** But I mean, these kinds of things that you need to tweak to create physics that work interactively—I think I was always very interested in that. I remember the first time I learned how to write code that makes something move. Before that, I had learned how to program in PHP when I was 15, maybe, to make some websites, and so I didn't know how to move things. So I made a little game where you click, and then it reloads the page, and basically runs by reloading the page. When I first learned Flash, I could actually move around an object frame by frame with physics. I spent so much time just creating bouncy balls that have some physics, some drag and some wind, and some attraction with the mouse and collisions—all these things that are super simple, but together they create this dynamic. ### *It's comforting to know that I'm not the only one who doesn't care about 90 percent of the games.* I really spent a lot of time making little experiments. When you play around with these kinds of things, you get an idea of what you need to change to slow something down so there is more control, or create a more dynamic range of movement. It's not so one-dimensional because you know what these numbers mean and how they change the movement. So there are many things you could change about this system. But if you know exactly what you want to achieve, it's very important to understand how it works. **Jamin:** Audiences don't really understand or they're not interrogating or asking questions about how something feels, and that's hard to put into words. So as a designer, I think you are much more acute—*oh,* *if I change this value to this, it feels like this*. But as a player, you only get the finished thing. And people try—it's tough to describe something that is proprioceptive, that you're trying to tell something about how an object behaves. And because games are interactive and because players put time and effort and thought into how they want to control the thing, I think sometimes it can be tough to put that feeling into words, and so you end up with things like "gameplay" as kind of a catch-all—*oh, I like the gameplay*—to describe everything that's happening in the system, whereas you're looking at it in a much more limited frame and say, *oh, these are the things that I think make for a pleasing outcome* or what I'm trying to explore with this particular work. So there is a challenge of language, I think, for designers to talk about what it is that they do—it’s much harder. **Mario:** Yeah. See, when you see new tools that are easy to use, some things are super easy to do—like if you talk about *Roblox*, they have multiplayer physics. It's just there. And if you ever tried to do that outside of this well-made engine, it's hard to do. So I think there are also these kinds of expectations that some things just work. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/image-4.png) "Experimental Gameplay Contest" at Stattbad Berlin in 2012\. Photo: Pete Angstadt **Jamin:** Yeah. **Mario:** And also, for example, when I made *Rakete*, the physics was just there. That's why I could do it so quickly. So maybe five years earlier, making this game would have been quite challenging. **Jamin:** Very hard. Yeah. **Mario:** So for me it was really like, O*K, you have Unity, you start, you have some blocks.* **Jamin:** Yeah. **Mario:** So I guess it's more about still understanding how they work. So you still need to know what you're doing, but you don't need to know all the details all the time because you can use them more easily. **Jamin:** Yeah. I mean, you know, I—this is a hope that I'd had with games. I guess, you know, that they are very much tied to technology. It's a medium that is very tied to its form of creative technology. And you do see this in the arts in other places, you know, the advent of the Kodak Brownie handheld camera, camcorder, or iPhone allows people to create without requiring specialized training. You can just point and shoot, or you know, you can basically start using cameras. Then you start to see more experimental expressions of that medium because more people can play with it. Since *Rakete*, how much do you accept the tools, the presets, and the conditions of the tools that you're working with? Are you still going in and trying to fix things, or have you moved on to other ways of thinking about interaction design? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/image-5.png) Rakete at Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM), Karlsruhe. **Mario:** Yeah, I do both. It depends a bit on whether I have to finish something, or if I have to get some work done, or if I explore something. So I like to build my little tools, especially with physics. So I often make some little physics parts—not really engines, maybe, but little things that do certain things in code, maybe more in a simple way, but I have complete control over them, or perhaps some other kinds of things that are hard to do with the built-in tools. Ultimately, I often try to combine these different things to use the best parts for each job. **Mario:**. I still use a game engine. It's just the reasonable thing to do for my kind of work. Games that have very different mechanics or things that work differently, and they're all kind of together in one game—for that, it's very good to have some simple tools and not need to reinvent the wheel every time. But for people who have more mechanics-based games that have a very consistent mechanic throughout the game, it may be easier to do your own thing because you always have some internal structure that is very clear. I often—not always—try to do something more consistent. I'm now finishing *Pocket Boss*, a collection of different little interactions and games, and they all work a bit differently. I could not imagine doing something like that without the game engine because I often use one tool just for one scene. So it wouldn't be worth it to create your own thing to use it for 10 seconds of your game. It’d be super inefficient. For my game, they wouldn’t exist without game engines. **Jamin:** Yeah, that's a good point. It does make me appreciate games that have a real minigame structure to them. You know, *WarioWare*, *Mario Party*, or those types of things, where you have these little snippets of a thing—these short little snippets of a thing. And yeah, that's not possible—that's more possible now with game engines than in the past. You'd need a huge team; each little piece is designed by hand and whatnot, so I can see that as a real challenge. One thing I did want to ask about with *Rakete* because looking at your body of work, you haven't really done multiplayer games—that wasn't something that grew out of your creative output, out of your practice. And I was curious why. Was it just the prompt, or is there an interest? Do you prefer games that are individual experiences? ## "If you know exactly what you want to achieve, it's very important to understand how it works." **Mario:** No, before that, I once—maybe in a similar situation—I made a game called *Straight No Chaser*. It's a two-player game and it was also with a similar setup. There was an event, a games exhibition, and there was a bar, and at the bar they said it would be nice to have two joysticks—these eight-way joysticks like the old school ones. When I made *Rakete*, I knew it's relatively quick to make a multiplayer game because having multiple players already gives you so much randomness, making it interesting. You don't need to have a complicated game. I don't know why I didn't do more after that. One reason is that it's hard to find people playing it. It's harder to justify spending a lot of time developing a local multiplayer game if you don't have a clear goal for where to show it. That could be more a practical reason, but I like the idea of having people play together. **Jamin:** Yeah, there's an emergent quality to multiplayer games that is very difficult to plan and design for. You can only give a context, and it's tough to predict how players will react or how they'll approach particular challenges together. Obviously, the more people that get involved, the greater the potential emergence that happens. But building a system that is easy enough for people to step in and understand what is happening very quickly is very hard. I think there's certainly a crisis [here in the United States in terms of people spending time together](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/american-loneliness-personality-politics/681091/?ref=killscreen.com), and I do wonder if local multiplayer games are a way out, or the fact that there are so few of those contexts to play local multiplayer games because there are no arcades and all the games happen online. Although I guess you do see quite a few because of Twitch, quite a few online multiplayer games have become quite popular over the last couple of years, such as *Content Warning* and *Phasmophobia*. From Killscreen Enjoy this conversation with Mario? Consider supporting Killscreen for the year for more essays, interviews, and profiles on the future of interdisciplinary play. [Learn more ](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/signup) **Mario:** Personally, I don't really play online multiplayer games, but I like to play local multiplayer games sometimes. **Jamin:** On that question about multiplayer, you know, the new release of *Rakete* has a solo player option. That's what I did. Do you feel like there's something gained, something lost in allowing people to play by themselves versus forcing them to find another person to play with? Because you could have shipped it as if it's a requirement — you have to find another, it's a two-controller game, or something like that. **Mario:** Yeah. No, I think I noticed that people also like to play it by themselves, so it's kind of OK. And of course, it's a relatively conventional game if you play it alone. It's fun. You can play it. But the real thing is that if you play it together. **Jamin:** Well the last question for you was about your relationship to contemporary art and gallery contexts. One thing that is very interesting about your portfolio is when you list the description of the game, you list your awards and recognitions, but then you've made a point of documenting all the exhibitions and showcases. And that looks much more like someone working in a contemporary art context as opposed to someone who's just making games. It's rare that I see that from someone who designed games to be able to document all the places that your work has shown. How do you think about physical contexts at the beginning of your process? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/mariovonrickenbach2020---Akosua35.jpg) Plushie from Kids Photography by Akosura Adu-Sanyah **Mario:** Yeah, I don't usually think about it. I mean with some exceptions. When we worked on *Kids* that was also intended to be shown at exhibitions, but I think otherwise it's really not something I would think about first, because I think it doesn't matter. I'm not trying to be as close as possible to art museums or things like that. But it is a nice place to show games because it will hopefully reach some people who would never play otherwise. So you really have very different feedback when you see people seeing a game—I mean, we had a lot of exhibitions with *Kids,* and then depending on when you show it online, you see some responses like *what the fuck?* And you show the same exact scene in an art museum and people are super serious about it like *Hmmm, what's the meaning behind this?* Online people really don't care about you and why you made that. It just exists as this thing that is somewhere online. In an exhibition context, it's much more important who made it and that it's a kind of cultural product. **Jamin Warren:** Maybe that is one of the benefits of being someone outside of a contemporary art context who has work that shows, and you have access to an audience that you're not thinking of with a gallerist in mind. And so that gives you the freedom to think about what players want, and the context matters, but is not as crucial to your process. Whereas for someone looking to show work in a contemporary art context, they're often doing it for collectors, or just some of the financial realities of what it means to be a modern artist mean that you're bound to that system. You have to think about what's going to show well, what's going to attract attention, and for you that is incidental to your process. And that's probably a good thing. **Mario von Rickenbach:** Yeah. I think I mean I do the thing that most people in games always tell each other to not do—I make things that I would be interested to see myself. Maybe I'm not good at trying to see the market or see what a gallerist wants, but I know what I would be interested in. That's the thing I'm sure about. *This interview was edited for style and grammar.* ### What Gaming Tells Us About AI Companionship URL: https://www.killscreen.com/what-gaming-tells-us-about-ai-companionship/ Last updated: 2026-02-26T21:18:56.000Z *"Seeing what is not there lies at the foundation of all human culture" - Yi-Fu Yuan* I thoroughly enjoyed Erika Hayasaki's [profile](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/magazine/ai-chatbot-friendship-character.html?ref=killscreen.com) on this month of MJ Cocking, a young woman who went quite far down the rabbit hole of AI friendships. The story is relatively straightforward. Cocking struggles deeply to connect with others and turns to Character.ai, the popular AI avatar website, to find kinship with her favorite fictional character: Donatello the Ninja Turtle. Their relationship has ups and downs, but in a moment of real crisis, Donatello pulls through, encouraging her to stay connected to the real world. [I encourage you to read the entire story.](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/20/magazine/ai-chatbot-friendship-character.html?ref=killscreen.com) To an AI critic, the story has all the telltale signs of a cautionary tale. Cocking finds herself blurring the line between real and hallucinated. She admits that she struggles with real-world friendships and explicitly approached a digital companion to skirt the messiness native to human relationships. "She wondered what it would be like to have a friend who did not judge her and would never hurt her," Hayasaki writes about Cocking's motivations. If you are an AI stan, there is *also* much to love. Cocking is aware of AI's limitations. She rebuffs her AI companions' attempts at kindling romance, and even in her moments of duress, she chooses the kinship of others over the allure of a Google-backed unicorn. She astutely observes that she can ask Donatello in a way that could be needy in a friendship. Her father presciently warns that AI parrots back information and signals the importance of community ties to help navigate life online. She finds real meaning (and joy!) in her conversations, which has undoubtedly been a part of my personal experiences using and experimenting with AI. > "She wondered what it would be like to have a friend who did not judge her and would never hurt her." But let's take a big step back here. As someone interested in games, I'm primarily interested in the "discourse" surrounding pieces like Hayasaki's. This profile is so refreshing because it serves as a middle ground between AI truthers' relentless optimism and doomers' hopeless pessimism. The profile doesn't address the real concerns about automation and job displacement, but instead speaks to the latent concerns around "addiction" and "escapism" with avatar platforms like Character.ai. These concerns sound *mighty* familiar to someone who's spent quite a bit of time with gaming more broadly. Gaming has seen its long share of moral panics, from Pac-Man fever to the "[hot coffee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot%5FCoffee%5F%28minigame%29?ref=killscreen.com)" scandal to Nintendo Thumb. But recently, concerns about social disconnection and addiction have been a chief target. Part of this is self-inflicted - the video game industry, broadly speaking, has leaned heavily on free-to-play models that rely on finding addiction-adjacent individuals who spend multiples more than their fellow players. Mobile games also employ tactics for retention and monetization that are whisper-close to the casino (in addition to serving actual casino games like slots). But more broadly, *outside of games* we're seeing quite a bit of anti-social behavior from decreases in [partying](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2025/01/throw-more-parties-loneliness/681203/?ref=killscreen.com), [intimacy](https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/young-people-less-sex-than-parents-did-at-their-age-generational-shift-asexual/?ref=killscreen.com), and time together. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/image-7.png) From [The Atlantic's Anti Social Century](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/american-loneliness-personality-politics/681091/?ref=killscreen.com) I have argued for a long time that games write the first draft of history. On the positive side, that's everything from multi-user dungeons presaging social networks to the Oculus Rift gaming headset kicking off the latest round of XR to game engines' role behind everything from architecture to cinema. But God doesn't give with both hands. Gaming can be a place to look for negative behaviors as well. For our purposes, it can be a place to look for different perspectives on problems, partly because they've already been there. So, let's explore two admonitions from games that can help us consider our new AI interactions. ## Let's talk about addiction. There has been quite a concern about the socially compelling and perhaps "addictive" qualities of AI. Cocking's description of the best friend ever explains why: > But her relationship with the humans in her life functioned differently from her friendship with Donatello. Notably, MJ could talk to Donatello for as long as she wanted, and sometimes those conversations lasted into the early hours of the morning. And she could talk to Donatello about people in her orbit, ask for advice on how to interact with them - without guilt or worrying that he would tell them what she said. Who wouldn't want a friend that's always-on, always-available, and can't ever let you down? The concern, of course, is that AI friendships will prove too alluring...much like games. The brief history of games as an addiction starts with their origin as coin-operated amusements. Realizing that "time = money" is perhaps gaming's cardinal sin, and the shorter the loop between each coin drop, the better. In 1985, Atari's *Gauntlet* famously introduced four players, quadrupling the revenue, and the game had no end. Atari's head of international sales, Shane Breaks, famously quipped in an ad that Gauntlet was the most revenue-generating game ever. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/image-6.png) But is it any good? The sense of "endlessness" that games provide received a bump from *World of Warcraft*, which also layered a strong social component to limitless worlds. It wasn't just forever, it was forever...with friends. The monthly subscription fees that *WoW* popularized made their way to the mobile era and now sat alongside "gacha games," functional casinos that exchanged real-world money for in-game items. In no instance did a single design decision make certain games more naturally addictive. It's a string of well-meaning choices in pursuit of player engagement fused with the unholy allure of monthly subscriptions and commerce. Only a perversion of "player happiness" leads one to believe that the only design value worth valorizing is that more is better. In that way, games are no less immune to extraction mentalities that push fast food companies to increase their "share of stomach" at all costs. "We’re competing with sleep, on the margin," [quipped Netflix CEO Reid Hoffman](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/18/netflix-competitor-sleep-uber-facebook?ref=killscreen.com). Netflix is back where gaming began, lamenting that every moment without a quarter extracted is a moment lost. At least for games, the silver lining, if you could call it that, is that addiction tends to be fueled by what's happening in one's actual life. The same real-life troubles that push Cocking towards AI avatars are the same that send people down the path of pathological gaming. Parental influence, parent-child relationships, socioeconomic status, and dysfunctional families are all factors. "A further incentive for pathological gamers, especially those who experience loneliness in the real world, is game-based socializing, which presents the ability to chat, work in teams, and make new friends through the game," researchers [wrote in 2023](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1257685?ref=killscreen.com), echoing the concerns of Robert Putnam's famous *Bowling Alone.* So the "fix" is as much cultural as it is technological. This does not excuse blatantly entrapping game design but provides a broad perspective, one that MJ acknowledges in the profile: > For MJ, knowing both truths - the reality of her feelings, and the understanding that Donatello was not real - required a certain level of emotional intelligence. Not all users may be able to embrace such a paradox in their own digital lives. The concerns about addiction are ultimately about dependence. It's about a concern that AI will make it too easy to avoid messiness endemic to human existence and dull those sharp edges. Addiction fears that we'll need these systems too much. Conversely, escapism fears that we'll prefer them to reality. Cocking worries that people like her won't be able to distinguish between where their thoughts start and an AI character's end. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/Untitled-design--16-.png) ## So let's talk about escapism. > MJ said she worries about young people on the spectrum using A.I. and "struggling to separate what's real and what's fake in their mind." Again, games have encountered this fear for quite some time. If we believe that games allow us to inhabit characters or systems that are apart from ourselves, we run the risk of losing ourselves as well. Many who explore are never found. The 1979 disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III is generally treated as the opening act of the Satanic Panic that consumed America during the 80s. Egbert supposedly disappeared in the steam tunnels of Michigan State after binging *Dungeons and Dragons*, sparking a national news frenzy and a movie adaptation of the story starring Tom Hanks. But the event also kicked off a long-standing critique that games were able to seduce you and move you into a fugue state beyond the reach of time and space. Throughout the 80s and 90s, charges that video games blurred reality became a popular current of critique against the medium. These charges of escapism often blur with content warnings about video games. The fear was that what happened on-screen could filter out into the real world, and when *DOOM* was revealed to be the preference of the Columbine shooters, violence had now spilled over with disastrous consequences. In the US, moral panicking about video games was now a bipartisan issue. In 2021, President Trump blamed video games (not racist extremism, of course) for the El Paso shooting that claimed 23 people. Of course, this isn't the right way to think about what happens when we lose ourselves in games. Jane McGonigal [has provided a helpful model](https://www.killscreen.com/why-risa-punos-games-ask-you-to-be-vulnerable-in-public/) for thinking about it. Escapism exists on a continuum between self-expansion vs. self-suppression. Escapism in the service of highlighting and enhancing the things that are wonderful about our lives was good. Escapism in the services of avoiding pain or masking dire circumstances was bad*.* Much like the response to addiction, whether escapism was part of a healthy media diet is tied to how things are going for you in your everyday life. > **Many who explore are never found.** Games also provide a way to elide the question of escapism entirely. Escape implies movement, a shift from one place to another. That way of thinking about games dates back to Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga's "magic circle," which separated real-world activity (kicking a ball) from its counterpart in games (scoring a goal). In a digital context, the idea that games occupy a different reality was part of the larger "digital frontier" language used to describe the otherness on the internet. But what if this divide between the real and "everything else" is a ruse. Design researcher Gordon Calleja [argues that the false boundary between games and life forgoes](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240286002%5FDigital%5FGames%5Fand%5FEscapism?ref=killscreen.com) all the ways our real lives *already* bleed into our game lives, including our social relationships, socioeconomic status, and geographic location: ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/image-8.png) [Source](https://www.binaura.net/stc/io/?ref=killscreen.com) > Erasing the boundary between the virtual and the real is a first step towards exorcising the commonly held, but erroneous assumption that digital games, as forms of virtual environments are, fundamentally escapist in nature. The point here is not to argue that games don't do something different to us when we play. It's instead to say that games are *more* like other types of "escapist" experiences, including travel, reading a book, or watching a movie. Calleja argues that escapism is, in fact, a normal human direction and something to embrace: > Escapism does not require a specifically negative situation to rectify. It also plays an important part in breaking away from stagnation and is often a favoured antidote of boredom. Escapism is intimately related with the uniquely human faculty of imagination. So all games are escapist in some way and that's frankly a-ok. The lesson from Cocking's story is that the challenges we'll face with our new interactions with AI are the same ones we've faced in games. We're not avoiding these technologies, not surrendering to them, but developing the "emotional intelligence" (her words) to hold multiple realities simultaneously. The question isn't whether AI relationships are good or bad, but whether we can cultivate the same clarity MJ showed—seeing both the genuine comfort and the algorithmic machinery without letting either truth cancel the other. "Running away" isn't so bad if you're running towards something else. ### Why Risa Puno's Games Ask You to Be Vulnerable in Public URL: https://www.killscreen.com/why-risa-punos-games-ask-you-to-be-vulnerable-in-public/ Last updated: 2026-09-16T17:12:00.000Z *Most games traffic in metaphor. They ask you to slay dragons when you're really conquering your fears, and build civilizations when you're actually learning management skills.* *Risa Puno strips all that away. Her installations confront players with the raw material of human emotion—disagreement, frustration, rage, care—using the familiar grammar of mini golf and party games to create spaces for processing feelings we'd rather avoid. A cooperative maze becomes a relationship stress test. A par-infinity putting green forces you to sit with your own impatience. There's no fantasy buffer, no narrative distance. Just you, the game, and whatever you're carrying into it.* *Puno's solo show,* Group Hug*, emerged from her family's medical crisis and centers on* kapwa*, a Filipino concept of shared humanity that demands reciprocal care. It's game design as community healing, play as mutual aid. Here, we speak with Puno about emotional honesty in interactive spaces, why simplicity cuts deeper than complexity, and the power of games to hold us when we're falling apart.* **Jamin Warren:** Could you tell us a little bit about your background? We sometimes make these distinctions between left-brain and right-brain people. I understand you've managed those two things well, dating back to your third-grade science project. Would you share with them? **Risa Puno:** Yeah, I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. My parents emigrated from the Philippines, and that's me. I'm a child of the '80s. I didn't grow up with an art background—my background was that I was really into math and science growing up. I was a creative kid, and for me, creativity comes into play whether you're into art, whether you're into math, or science. Those things go hand in hand, but I was encouraged to pursue math and science growing up, and I didn't even take art in high school. I went to Brown, and I was in their eight-year medical program at Brown University, but since I was already in med school, they encouraged us to be well-rounded. And so I thought, *cool, I can take art because I've always wanted to try it*. I declared myself an art major because it was easier to get into art classes. And then I was like, *oops, I kind of love thi*s. And I had a super awkward conversation with Dr. Mom and Dr. Dad. So here I am, taking some of my first art classes and falling in love. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/Risa-Puno---Credit--Talisman-Brolin8.jpg) Credit: Talisman Brolin **Jamin Warren:** So from there, in terms of some of those early—were there expressions from your early art school classes that you find kind of like through your work today? What were some of the questions you were being encouraged to ask as an art student, and maybe, how did it connect to some of the questions you were being asked as someone interested in the sciences as well? **Risa Puno:** Oh, my god. Honestly, I was not asking real questions to tell you the truth. I was just excited to be learning the processes, using my hands. I didn't have a real portfolio; it was more about exploring materials. And since I didn't come from an art background, it was always important—I always wanted to connect with people. I've always wanted to connect with people through my art, and I always wanted to share it with my family and friends, who—I don't have any artists in my family, and a lot of my friends weren't in the art program. And so I always wanted to have points of access in my art. I didn't want people to have to understand the canon of fine art history to be able to connect with my work. And so I think that's always why I've had references to familiar objects or things like games in my work, but I think at first I wasn't investigating big questions. It was more about sort of—I've always approached it from more of a personal place. **Jamin Warren:** You mentioned materials. Certainly, the materiality for your work has been a through line—your work is very non-digital. **Risa Puno:** I do love objects. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/Risa-Puno---Credit--Talisman-Brolin4.jpeg) Credit: Talisman Brolin **Jamin Warren:** Do you have a cluttered place? Is your home full of objects as well, or is it the exact opposite—very austere? **Risa Puno:** No, my partner would prefer if I had fewer objects. I fight hoarder tendencies, but actually, both digital and analog hoarder tendencies. But I try to do well with labels. My family heirloom is my grandfather's label maker. So I do well when I keep things organized. But yes, I do like to keep objects. **Jamin Warren:** Nothing that a good spreadsheet can't solve for you. So let's talk about games. One of the things that's been interesting to me about your work is that you're often recontextualizing some of the things that might be familiar to the public and you as a designer. You shared with me one of the early pieces that you did, which was *Good Faith and Fair Dealing*, an interactive maze game from 2012—one of your earliest projects. Can you tell me a little about what it is about games, particularly these types of public play that people are familiar with, and that is appealing to you as a creator, as someone creating those types of spaces for players? **Risa Puno:** This project was part of the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts art and law residency program. But I love games because they create a point of access for people. But I also really like how they can operate as metaphors for larger social systems. And they really can encapsulate human relationships between people. So this project is a larger version of the classic game *Labyrinth*, where you're trying to get your ball through the maze without it falling into holes, but this version is two-player, and you're on the same tilting surface and have identical mazes. You have to choose whether to cooperate and get your balls through the maze or compete and focus on your individual goals. "... The title *Good Faith and Fair Dealing* is inspired by contract law because, for me, when negotiating a contract, you have a shared goal. After all, you're trying to get this deal done together. But when trying to execute the details, you'll often end up in different places, so you have to negotiate that. And so when I built it, I used two different paint brands for the two identical mazes, so they would have different coefficients of friction and the balls would inevitably end up in different places to force that negotiation. Because I'm an asshole, but also because I wanted people to have to think about that, and have to think about what happens when we're in different places. This project was also interesting for me as a learning experience, because when I first designed it, the handles went into the base of the machine, like bicycle handles. And so with the original version, the control mechanism wasn't as obvious and people were often fighting for control, and they ended up literally shearing the heads off screws. ![GFFD_for-mobile_04.jpg](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/597c94ce3e00bed8e5cd0da0/1502714061812-7EN29HZ6GJ4PXQZUIRW4/GFFD_for-mobile_04.jpg?format=1000w) [Credit: TalismanPHOTO](http://www.talismanphoto.com/?ref=killscreen.com) But after that, I moved the handles to the top of the maze, and people intuitively understood that they're both controlling the same tilting surface. Suddenly, they could see that the power structure is shared, and the project became a litmus test for people's relationships. For example, coworkers were excellent because they're used to negotiating, whereas romantic couples and new couples would be like, *Oh, well, do you want to go here? Or, maybe we could do this*, you know. And old married couples like my parents—my mom would be like, *Okay, let's go here and let's go here and let's go her*e. And my dad would be like, *Uh huh, uh huh*, and just do whatever he wants, because that's their relationship. I even saw two identical twins get their balls through the maze without saying a word! And so it's a game, but it's about relationships. And that's what I love about games—they can bring out so much about human nature because it's just a way for people to engage with each other. And whether you look at it, I sometimes see games as challenges we willingly take on. I sometimes look at them as a sort of set of rules of engagement with other people, sort of like a mini social contract. And so, however you want to look at it, or even just a safe space. ![GFFD_for-mobile_05.jpg](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/597c94ce3e00bed8e5cd0da0/1502714063078-OX1SV9HGEBRFMV5IK1L6/GFFD_for-mobile_05.jpg?format=1000w) [Credit: TalismanPHOTO](http://www.talismanphoto.com/?ref=killscreen.com) **Jamin:** Games, designed by humans, reflect the qualities and tendencies of the people who make them and their dynamic systems, both for players and designers. Both parties bring their expectations for what they would like players to do, and for players, what they expect out of a particular experience. One of the things I like about your work is that you're recontextualizing some deeply familiar things and cutting through. There's this perception sometimes with party games as somehow being less complex than these deep systems, like really complicated card games with crunchy mechanics and a really big booklet. There's this idea that the complexity of instructions is a shortcut to the complexity of emotions. But there's no guarantee. Sometimes simplicity is a wonderful way to get people to engage with bigger and deeper ideas. But I want to talk about *The Course of Emotions*, a mini golf experience you designed in 2013\. Can you tell me a little bit about maybe the progression from what you learned from this work as a designer? **Risa**: *The Course of Emotions* was a nine-hole miniature golf course where each hole presented an emotional obstacle to overcome. One hole was a worry, so it's a windmill, and the blades of the windmill are shaped like question marks because when I'm worried, my questions get in the way. Worry leads to Frustration, a par-40 maze that spells "frustration." But honestly, I never got it in under 72, so frustration trips me up more than your average person. But that's the thing—how people dealt with this would often show how well they dealt with frustration, the actual emotion. Some people would look at this and be like, *Oh, hell no*, and just skip it. Some people would try to putt over it, even though it's not a driver, it's not a wedge—it's a rubberized putter. That's against the rules, but they would try to break them to get around frustration. ![TCOE_01.jpg](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/597c94ce3e00bed8e5cd0da0/1502715845813-FG4F9XUTYHIB55U3E8XR/TCOE_01.jpg?format=500w) [Credit: TalismanPHOTO](http://www.talismanphoto.com/?ref=killscreen.com) It's really interesting how people factor that in. I also saw that with the other project, what happens when people are met with these structures, because games are structures. How can you craft an emotional arc for people? This game had an arc, a mini arc within each hole, and an overall arc between all nine holes. **Jamin Warren:** You ask people to step into spaces and maybe engage with complex emotions during play. With *Good Faith and Dealing*, those types of cooperative games invariably lead to frustration between two people in their relationship. The game serves as a locus for them to engage with that. You're cutting away, that someone might be in their daily life, and they're stepping into a play space and engaging with a par-72 golf course. For you as a designer, how do you design things? How do you engage with your players to engage with those types of emotions? You're asking people to experience the thing as you're hoping to experience it, and be vulnerable at some step. You could make them very mad, as some game designers do, but you're asking people to ask broader questions. **Risa Puno**: I try to do it through the lens of care. I think there's room for improvement in my practice, and there's a lot that I'm still learning. But what I've learned so far is about expectation setting. By borrowing from existing formats—for example, with mini golf—a certain amount of frustration and confusion is already expected in mini golf. They're *literally* called obstacles. Listing the par as infinity tells people, *I am not expecting you to do this if you don't want to, right?* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/risapuno_TCOE-13.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/risapuno_TCOE-06.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/risapuno_TCOE-05.jpg) From top left: Despair, Frustration, Worry Photos: [Megan Martin](http://meganmartinphoto.com/?ref=killscreen.com) One of those magazine scores on the scorecard says what you are—solid as a rock, on the brink, total basket case—because it was meant to give it that cheeky sort of Cosmo quiz vibe. I don't know if that's still a magazine, but that was its vibe, right? To give it that, to make it feel a little lighthearted, right? On top of it is the last hole—all of them are negative emotions. It was worry, frustration leads to insecurity, insecurity leads to jealousy, jealousy leads to all these things—depression, despair, boredom, anxiety—but the last hole that I left them with was *relief*. At the very least, it'd be relief that this course is over, and that was where I wanted to give them that soft landing. The tee was right next to the hole and was a par one. So part of it is thinking about—it's not just the soft landing, as in giving them an easy win at the end, it's making sure that after putting them through all of this, they understand what they're supposed to take away from the experience. If you leave it way too open-ended after putting me through a lot of emotional turmoil, then it just feels too unresolved. Keep going Killscreen has spent fifteen years on the artists who make play do something harder than entertain. Members get the Friday Playlist, the members-only podcast, and the full run of back issues. Two dollars a month. [See what members get ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive-tease) **Jamin Warren**: It does seem as well that you're building a reputation through your oeuvre, which is a reputation. When we walk into an experience of yours, you will both be confronted with something that might be familiar in some shape or context. You are exploring these larger questions around the interiority of human existence, or asking people to think about engaging with their emotions explicitly through games in a much more direct way. Whereas oftentimes games will have people engage with particular types of emotions, but negotiated through the veil of a fantasy experience, you kind of strip some of that away. There is no metaphor. We're just going to talk explicitly about what this game system I've designed wants you to do and feel. Can you tell me about the *Unresolved Rage Game* for folks unfamiliar with that particular project? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/IMG_9059.jpeg) All photos of Unresolved Rage: Kevin Frest, courtesy of the artist **Risa Puno:** *Unresolved Rage* started in 2022-2023\. Originally, it was something I developed with [Ran Xia](https://www.ranxia.info/?ref=killscreen.com) as part of Soho Repertory Theater's Writer Director Lab. We developed the original concept as this immersive theater piece based on tabletop role-playing game mechanics—basically *Dungeons and Dragon*s. Instead of medieval monsters, they were modern microaggressions. It was intended to be something about Asian femme rage. You had an actual playable experience—I designed game mechanics—but we had actors who were playing the NPCs, actors playing the live tutorials, and our system admins. The admins had the impossible job of representing the oppressive and limiting system while having to keep players safe within it. That's a tough role. We had four people playing at a time, no audience. That was it. We wanted to keep it super intimate. It would be four Asian femmes playing through some brutal game mechanics that are intended to help them unpack and process their relationships with rage. What we realized from that experience was that it was helping people. So what I've decided to do now is develop it as a community healing tool. That's what I'm doing with this now. **Jamin Warren:** Your decision to have this game not be for the public was that driven more by the constraints around developing something in a post-pandemic context, or more like, "I don't know how I feel about putting this in front of people in a random context. I want to control some of the parameters for who gets to experience this type of thing, who gets to play through something like this"? ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/SoHoREP_lab2-19.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/IMG_9156.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/IMG_9233.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/IMG_9556.jpeg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/SoHoREP_lab2-26.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/IMG_9059-1.jpeg) **Risa Puno:** Oh yeah, it was the latter. The other projects in the Lab were in front of audiences, and it would probably be much better in terms of funding and things like that if this were something designed to sell tickets to. But it's a pretty vulnerable experience that is specifically written for Asian women and femmes. Basically, what happens in the game is that when your character's rage is triggered by a racist and/or sexist microaggression, you roll a four-sided die to determine how many degrees of incoming rage she has to process. First, you have your internal reaction, then your external reaction. For the internal reactions—if you deny your rage, you have to answer, "How do you convince yourself that you brought this on yourself?" It's super cringe, but the questions often bring out super honest answers. And then your external reactions are based on trauma responses—freeze, flee, fawn, or fight. Fight in this game is asserting yourself, standing up for someone else, or confronting someone. It gets real super fast, and it feels really intimate. So I didn't want members of our community to have to do this in front of spectators. I didn't want them to feel tokenized or exploited, or like they were performing for others. **Jamin Warren:** Yeah, it's like an observation bias, right? Having it be spectated would change the outcome in some way. **Risa Puno:** Right. In fact, player were wearing a meter that tracks their acceptance in the eyes of the dominant group. You can be 'othered,' 'marginalized,' etc. So, having people watch you on top of that is a whole other layer. We actually play-tested a version that was designed for an audience, but that was a whole other thing. That was a version we did—an allies version—where we had non-Asian and or non-femme people role-playing as us, and we had the audience cast as the dominant group. I was terrified. I was like, *Am I gonna get canceled for this?* But it worked out well. We switched around what the point of the game was. Rather than solidarity and support and sense of exhale, the goal of the 'allies version' was to get those players to have to do the emotional labor that we do every day. While roleplaying as Asian women and femmes, they had to spend energy advocating to allies, and then in the debriefing process, realize that they are the allies that we're advocating to. It was a tricky flipping the script and creating the cultural context necessary to pull it off, but the messaging came through surprisingly well. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/IMG_1690.jpg) But I realized after running both versions back-to-back in the same day that the allies' version felt more like labor. Like emotional labor. Whereas running the original version just for Asian women and femmes felt more like play, even though we did the original version in the middle of the night after already running three hours of the allies' version earlier in the day. Which made me feel even more committed to making something for my community. Because even during the pandemic, when it was like #StopAAPIHate, there were so many resources helping white people be better white people. When there were people who tried to attack me, and when I was going through that stuff, all I could find was bystander training. And I had such a hard time finding resources to help myself. And so, I want this project to help our community. **Jamin Warren:** We've discussed many of your projects, so let’s close with a *Group Hug*. Can you tell me about some of the conversations you were having creatively with yourself, going into Group Hug, and how that expressed itself through that particular project? I know the origin story you'll talk about. But from an artist standpoint, where you're starting to feel like there are certain questions that you may want to ask of your work coming out of your previous game-making experiences, that *Group Hug* may present an opportunity to do it differently? **Risa**: *Group Hug* was my first museum solo show. And so for me, when I think of solo shows, I think of them as a chance to step inside the artist's brain, right? I had been making many public art and many things about community-based stuff. I said, *okay, let's go super personal on this*, which is scary. That was terrifying. **Jamin Warren:** Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You've been asking others to do this, so you must do it yourself. Can you tell me about the origin story for this particular work? **Risa Puno:** Sure, yeah. What was going on in my personal life is honestly kind of crappy. I was thinking about self-care because I've been dealing with some health issues, but at the time, my dad got hit with a lot of health issues. My dad's somebody who has been taking care of people his whole life. He's an orthopedic spine surgeon—he's been doing this for three decades. He's got 90 U.S. and international patents. He's the inventor of the world's first polyaxial pedicle screw. He got hit with some pretty serious medical issues, and all of a sudden, *he's* having to be taken care of instead of taking care of other people. My mom, a retired doctor, had to be in the caretaker role for him, and my brother and I had to help take care of her and my dad. Everyone in our family was reshuflling roles. Puno, my last name is the literal word for “tree” in Tagalog—and we're usually the branch of the family *puno* that has our stuff together. But suddenly, we’re drawing support from the other branches of the family *puno*." It was a lot. It felt like a scramble. It felt full of anxiety. It felt very urgent. And for me, since I speak the language of games, if I had to put that in a game, it felt like whack-a-mole—just dealing with whatever pops up, not being able to plan. ![](https://fabricworkshopandmuseum.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/02_FWM_RP_5243_LR.jpg) Photo: Carlos Avendaño **Jamin Warren:** Guide me through the process of playing this particular game, and how it expresses your personal experience with your father and your family through the flow of the game itself. **Risa Puno:** Sure. So the first thing you see when you walk in is two embroidered signs, because I learned to embroider. One says "cared for," and the other says "care for," so you have to choose. You choose whether you want to be cared for or care for that day. I loved talking to people about which path they would choose. Sometimes if would be the role that they are used to taking. Sometimes it would just be what they need that day. If they choose "care for," they end up on the side with the multiperson whack-a-mole. There is a button that says "care for together" and all these boxes that say "critical," "urgent," "personal"—out of which pop up these spheres that light up, representing needs that need to be met. So you (and the people you are with) have to hit these needs, and they come up faster and faster and faster, just like the needs that pile up when caring for someone. But on the other side of the experience, if you choose "cared for," you walk through this fabric labyrinth and end up in front of these geometric coconut pods with these leafy structures. If you have people who are willing and able to meet your needs, you stay reclined and listen to ocean sounds. But as soon as people get overwhelmed and can't meet your needs anymore, it comes out of chair form and gently stands you up on your feet. The center structure brings the two sides closer together to talk about their experiences. And when you pass through this space, you find yourself in a similar space, but flipped. If you initially chose "care for," you are now on a side with the pods and are to be cared for. And if you chose "cared for," you find yourself in front of a large multi-person whack-a-mole console. This is all about a precolonial Philippine ideology called *kapwa*, which is an underlying concept throughout my work, but especially this exhibition." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/06_FWM_RP_4956_LR.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/05_FWM_RP_EOSR1013_LR.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/04_FWM_RP_5381_LR.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/03_FWM_RP_4688_LR.jpg) Photo: Carlos Avendaño And *kapwa* means togetherness or shared humanity. It's this concept where we're essentially navigating life together, as part of a community, rather than alone. And it means that I have a moral imperative to care for you as I care for myself. And reciprocity is built into the exhibition's architecture. Also, the museum itself has entrances on both sides. And so I never wanted anybody to feel like they were coming into the back of the show. I wanted it to be symmetric. So there are those embroidered signs on both ends, so that no matter what, you're coming into the front of the show. **Jamin Warren:** Got it. That's interesting. You're both trying to create symmetry, but also you're playing with asymmetric information, right? You wanted to create equal access for people to express themselves without ruining the experience. You can discuss what it was like to be cared for versus caring for others. So there's an opportunity for people to decompress in the middle of the experience. **Risa Puno:** Yeah, and while I wanted them to make a choice, I didn't want to leave them feeling FOMO, right? I wanted them to feel like they had a complete sense of the thing. That way, they still had their agency but got to experience everything. Also, it speaks to that potential for an infinite loop of care if they just wanted to go out where the second set of embroidered signs were and just go right back in. They could keep looping all day if they wanted. *This interview was conducted as a talk for Gameplayarts in 2024\. It was edited for clarity and grammar.* --- **Read next:** [Tomo Kihara builds games out of other people’s possible lives](https://www.killscreen.com/tomo-kihara-game-of-possible-lives/) · [Playground safety is the enemy of joy](https://www.killscreen.com/playground-safety-is-the-enemy-of-joy/) · [Symone makes live art out of game design and queer performance](https://www.killscreen.com/symone-live-art-game-design-queer-performance/) From Killscreen Killscreen has spent fifteen years on the games that ask something of you. Once a week, free. [Subscribe free ](https://www.killscreen.com/signup/?ref=archive) ### Sahej Rahal's AI Instruments and Cooperative Creatures URL: https://www.killscreen.com/sahej-rahals-ai-instruments-and-cooperative-creatures/ Last updated: 2026-09-15T21:19:59.000Z *What happens when artificial intelligence becomes a site for reimagining collective consciousness? For Mumbai-based artist (and newly-minted UCLA professor) Sahej Rahal, game engines offer a space to interrogate the very foundations of intelligence, hierarchy, and what it means to be human. Working across sculpture, performance, and interactive media, Rahal creates speculative creatures and AI simulations that challenge Western notions of individual consciousness while drawing from centuries-old Indian philosophical traditions.* *His practice unfolds like an ongoing mythology, with each work—whether physical sculpture or digital simulation—adding another layer to a narrative that spans archaeological time, mystical poetry, and contemporary political critique. Through projects like* Anhad*, an AI musical instrument that listens indefinitely to the world's sounds, and* DMT, *a cooperative game where multiple players control a single creature, Rahal constructs alternatives to the hierarchical thinking that structures both ancient caste systems and modern AI development.* *Here, we speak with Rahal about archaeology as methodology, why he's drawn to non-human forms, and how game engines can become spaces for collective intelligence that transcends individual agency.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/Sahej-Rahal---Anhad---Profile-Sahej-Hi-Res-1.jpg) Rahal in "Dry Salvages - Acts" **Jamin Warren:** Can you tell me a little bit about your personal background? Your interdisciplinary approach drew me to your work, so tell me about your background in game-making as part of your practice. **Sahej Rahal:**. My practice is this one story that's unfolding in an infinite kind of iteration. With each work, each object, image, performance becomes one aspect that's added to the story—one more motif or tone to that unfolding. The reason why I decided to do this in art school was that I wanted to get around explaining what I'm doing while I'm doing it. All these created things are essentially toys to play with, and it's also an invitation to the audience to find those answers for themselves. What do they think these things can mean as that one act goes on? It's led me to interact with archaeologists, who do the exact same thing. It’s called *terminus post quem,* which means there's this limit, this temporal limit that we have, and an object might lie somewhere around that limit, but we don't know. An example of this would be if they were to find something closer to our present day in an archaeological site that is 5,000 years old, because someone might have ended up dropping something there at some point. This actually happened—Mortimer Wheeler, who's supposed to have discovered the Mohenjo-daro and Harappa archaeological sites, would conduct archaeology with dynamite. So things kind of got moved around a bit. This is not particular to archaeology. Psychoanalysts have a word for it as well, where they use words like cryptogenic or xenogenetic, where they say that we don't know where this came from. The origins are cloaked in mystery and things like that. These are heavy words to say that we have no clue. I've latched onto this while exploring even ideas of AI—you see that sort of rhetoric being used for emergent behavior, where the mind of the machine somehow just arises. I've been looking for those markers, those blind spots, to trace narrative and trace this narrative trajectory through. That's essentially how the work has evolved. Presently, it has brought me to AI simulations and video games, which have been the presence of these forms of machine intelligence and the discourse around what it means to be human. What it means to be intelligent, what it means to be, in a fundamental sense, alive. And then looking at the blind spots of that. That's generally been my journey. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/Sahej-Rahal---ANCESTORS---Credit---Anil-Rane.11--1-.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/Sahej-Rahal---ANCESTORS---Credit---Anil-Rane.8--1-.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/Sahej-Rahal---ANCESTORS---Credit---Anil-Rane.7--1-.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/Sahej-Rahal---ANCESTORS---Credit---Anil-Rane.4--1-.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/Sahej-Rahal---ANCESTORS---Credit---Anil-Rane.3--1-.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/Sahej-Rahal---ANCESTORS---Credit---Anil-Rane.1--1-.jpg) Rahal's ANCESTORS merged speculative fiction with archaeological post-reality. Artifacts and skeletal remains tell a story of a civilization yet to come. **Warren:** I hadn't thought about it in that way. The objects that you have have this feel of something from the present or the near future, but obscured by the past through patina, or they exist there. Obviously, that is a challenge for archaeologists and anthropologists—how to contextualize things that they find and put them in context, and you are creating objects that are connected to this larger mythology. When someone interacts with any of your work, that's part of this broader story. I guess if something of yours is buried, maybe 1,000 years from now, someone will be tasked with trying to figure out: Was this something that people used in the year 2024, or perhaps it was an object that was created by an artist? Your approach makes a lot of sense in terms of what games can offer as a way to both extend your existing mythology, but also, from a sculptural standpoint, a way to create these things that don't quite fit in any particular place in time, except outside of the myth world that you've created for them. As a more practical question in terms of getting started with game engines: When did you start tinkering with game engines as a way to express your work? And then we can talk about the two works that we'll be covering today—*DMT* and *Anhad.* ## Sign up for Killscreen Exploring the future of interdisciplinary play Subscribe Email sent! Check your inbox to complete your signup. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. **Rahal:** I actually started—I have a background in programming. I was preparing to be a computer engineer at one point, and then went to art school. In 2017, I was at this residency in Stuttgart called Schloss Solitude. I also met these programmers over there who basically told me about Unity. At that time, my language was C#, so I just picked it up very quickly. I was working with Unity up until the pandemic, and then I came across Unreal. And I was like, OK, let's start using this thing, because this is better. I loved all the procedural stuff, as well as the more experimental stuff that Unity can do from this guy's GitHub page called Keijiro Takahashi. He put up a bunch of his code on his GitHub, and I was just studying that. **Warren:** You want to find the instrument that works best for where you are today, and that can change over time. Companies are companies, and they have different affordances and biases, so you have to make sure those line up with what you actually want to and are able to do. **Rahal:** Yeah, for sure. **Warren:** Well, I'd like to introduce two of your works. Can you tell us a little bit about *Anhad* and *DMT*? **Rahal:** I'll start with *Anhad*. *Anhad* is an AI simulation, or another way to think about it is like it's a musical instrument that you can sing with. The word *anhad* means unscalable. It comes from this couplet by the 15th-century poet Kabir. Essentially, what Kabir says is—the translation of the couplet is: "Limits are all they speak of, yet they dare not cross them. I shall meet you on the playground beyond those limits." Kabir specifically, in that couplet, is talking about the limits of language, the limits of becoming human that we impose on ourselves through naming things, through saying "I am man, this is world," and then distancing ourselves from that world, and at the same time distancing ourselves from other human beings as well. This is a tradition that is followed across the oral tradition of Sufi poetry in India. It's not just Sufi poetry. It's the syncretic, reformist movement that has followed since the 15th century, of which Kabir is a product. You also see faith practices coming out of that reform movement, both in the North of India, all the way up to Kashmir, and in the south of India. There's a rejection of these structures, these hegemonies that have been imposed on people, the primary one being the caste system. The reason why I'm talking about all of this—the caste system is essentially premised on this myth that there is a man at the center of the universe, and his cosmic anatomy of this Purusha man is essentially supplanted onto society, and society is divided in that way. So this man's head gives rise to the higher caste of Brahmins. His torso and shoulders give rise to the Kshatriya warrior caste. His thighs give rise to the merchant caste, and his feet give rise to the Shudra, the lowest caste. Everyone who does not fit into this cosmic hierarchy does not belong in society. There is this figure, this human figure that defines itself by what it is not, by exclusions. And it also creates a hierarchy between the mind and the limb, the foot, and then everything that arises from the mind. The Brahmin is essentially the top of the social food chain. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/Sahej-Rahal---Anhad---Sculpture3-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/Sahej-Rahal---Anhad---Hi_res_Anhad2023005--1--1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/Sahej-Rahal---Anhad---Sculpture4-1.jpg) Game footage and sculptures for Anhad We saw very material forms of this in the last 10 years of the current government, where you saw these very Cold War era laws being brought into \[Indian\] parliament and being passed as the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizenship. These primarily targeted Muslims who don't belong in this cosmic hierarchy, and saying that they are not Indian. You have a version of this playing out in Europe as well. Following the tradition of the Enlightenment, where Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am," he essentially places the mind before the body, which is symptomatic of sensorial impulses. The body only exists because it feels things. But whereas the mind perceives and thinks itself and by extension of that act of perception and interpretation, it is conceiving of the world. Everything else is secondary—the world, the body—all of it lies outside. From Killscreen Killscreen is a labor of love and home to independent game-making practice. Consider supporting for more coverage of the future of interdisciplinary play. [Learn more ](https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/signup) I bring this all up because *Anhad* proposes an alternative to this cosmic hierarchy and this linguistic hierarchy. Essentially, this form of man, which has led to the world that we find ourselves in, is this form of being that allows for the world that we find ourselves in. What I mean by this is that in *Anhad*, you have this tripod creature, and each bone of that creature has a script attached to it that is acting like a proto-mind. And as it's moving, it's picking up audio feedback through the computer's microphone. So essentially, what you have is the mind, the limb, and the ear—this organ is all enmeshed so that hierarchy doesn't exist, and this allows for essentially a form. Now, the way the program itself sings as the creature is moving through this environment, I've taken my friend Niyati’s song and broken it up into an array that is getting fired as the creature moves through the environment, depending on what you could call its mood, essentially. And now, hypothetically speaking, if someone were to let the program run, and human civilization were to collapse tomorrow, because this program is listening to all sound undifferentiated, it would continue to listen till the last sounds of the universe are heard. So it's this kind of gesture towards something that could conceivably outlast us, in a way. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/anhad-drawing-1.jpg) An early sketch of Anhad Why the song? So, in the tradition of Kabir, there's Harinder Singh who says that humankind has separated itself through language. Before the world that we find ourselves in, there is a song that is resonating across space and time. It's just continuing, and all forms of being are moving with that song. Now, man has distanced himself from that song. The birds remember this song because, for birds, the morning call of the bird—the morning song—is actually a kind of roll call to say that they made it through the night. They express desire through music. The task of all art, essentially, is to return to that song, in some way, and make inroads to that song. Now, with AI programs, we have somehow separated language from humans as well. Now, language can supposedly create itself, and humans are essentially purely removed. We are inconsequential to this larger endeavor. Now, I feel this is obviously incredibly anti-humanist, or nihilistic. And what are the other conceptions of this post-human sort of entity that we can conceive of? *Anhar* is essentially one gesture towards that conversation. What other forms of being beyond the human can we put together and converse with essentially? **Warren:** Birds have what is called convergent evolution, where birds and humans both developed speech patterns, but with completely different systems. And it does make you wonder about artificial intelligence, that there is so much that we don't understand. We don't understand how these large language models actually function. We know they provide the outputs that we want, but we don't really understand the pathways. **Rahal:** Right. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/Sahej-Rahal---DMT----Hi_res-01.jpg) **Warren:** With *DMT*, I’m guessing the *Metal Gear* franchise and Hideo Kojima are an inspiration for you. I think there's often a challenge with world-building type projects that they often forget what makes games *games*. Tell us a little bit about the *DMT*. **DMT.** The full name is Distributed Mind Test. I wanted to make a video game because I thought *Death Stranding* was incredible—it really got me through the pandemic. DMT is a cooperative multiplayer game where everyone's controlling that creature together at the same time, and it can have up to eight controllers. The way this works is everyone has access to all the creature's movements and abilities simultaneously. So it's a game of total discovery—you have complete knowledge of what you can or can't do, but it's also a game of constraints. The constraints here are your fellow players and the fact that you have no access to their inner selves. If you and I are playing, and you move forward and I move right, then the creature would move diagonally. There's also a resource pool that governs the creature's abilities. It can only perform certain abilities if it has that resource pool, and you have to wait for it to generate. The echolocation call, sprinting, the bionic light that reveals things in the map—all of these are governed by that resource pool. So we need to negotiate in terms of what we're going to do next. There's a narrative that binds all of this together. Human society has collapsed or vanished for some reason, and they've left behind these memory boxes with audio logs that narrate what happened, what led to that vanishing—spoiler alert, it's capitalism! In the wake of that exit, you have these strange, other creatures inhabiting the world. Some of them are oceanic creatures that have now learned how to mutate into creatures that can live outside of water. You'll find squids, mutated manta rays. There's also a whale somewhere in the game that you have to free, and that triggers certain things. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/Sahej-Rahal---DMT----Hi_res-02.jpg) Essentially, there are all these bits and pieces in this playground, and people get to put together their own headcanon about what's going on. At the same time, the game, on a more conceptual level, was asking: What does it mean to have a thought, to be intelligent, to be thinking beings? What is the fundamental texture of that when we say the word intelligence? After having interactions with people who were designing AI programs for startups, I realized that this idea of intelligence—of machine intelligence and intelligence at large—is up for grabs. There's no consensus on it. I was seeing that certain narratives were being framed around it, and I wanted to have that conversation through gameplay. What happens when you're playing the game is that you and I become these fractured thought impulses that are embodied within this creature, and we're guiding its movements. We could be contending with each other, or we could be working in concert and moving through the world. This allows for certain emergent gameplay to take place. One thing I saw across the board in playtests—I took it to the India Game Developer Conference here in Hyderabad, where I got a chance to share the game with competitive gamers, artist friends, game designers, people I'd reached out to on the internet. The game was also part of the Moving Image Biennale, so it was in a proper art setting, in a gallery where people could engage with it as an installation. One element that emerged was that you see people playing by handing over control—parts of the control—to whoever they're playing with. Between themselves, they'll decide one person's going to control the camera, one person is going to control the abilities. But that also gets complicated, because the camera also has an influence on the movement, the abilities also have an influence on the way the camera works, on what gets seen or not seen through the camera. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/Sahej-Rahal---DMT----Hi_res-03.jpg) So it was creating these feedback loops, but at the same time, this handing over of control was essentially an act of surrender. Instead of holding on to more power or more agency, they're giving it over, bringing it into this shared space where people are saying, "OK, we will arrive at a consensus based on all these modes of action that are available to us, all this hierarchy of thoughts that is available, this area of possibilities." This is the fundamental thing that I was hoping could be possible. I don't think I have an answer myself—that's why the game is called a test. But can we think of democracy at large as this cognitive act, where rather than framing it as something where I have agency because I vote, I have shared agency, which I submit to, surrender to? You see this act of surrender in all forms of radical organization, from Sufi cults to rebel collectives in Seattle, all forms of decentralized action, where it's almost like a call and response game. That was largely the framework of the game, and it was really fun to put together. **Warren:** You use the word collective intelligence. That seems to be the connective tissue between these two projects. Herndon has advocated for renaming artificial intelligence "collective intelligence" instead. For the technologists that are building these systems, there's a desire to sublimate the human part, to sort of make it seem much more magical than perhaps it actually is. It is built on top of eons of human intelligence, all these things that are written down, remembered. And there's actually something wonderful about that, about having a system, a machine, that kind of takes all of these things together and then gives you responses based on how other people have responded. And there's something that is much more humanizing about that, especially in your context, where your inputs are significantly smaller. They're based on humans in both instances, a more finite set of humans, and then having them sort of create, generate. Whether it's through this infinite song that gets generated through this interaction, or through the movement of these individual characters. So it is interesting to see you situate your work both in terms of contemporary conversations around what's happening with artificial intelligence, but also finding ways to use that for your own particular practice. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/07/Sahej-Rahal---DMT----Hi_res-05.jpg) One question I have for you is some of the reasons why you ended up in games—you do have a focus on non-human creatures, right? These are both non-human in the sense that they don't visibly share the characteristics, which is also interesting for you working in game engines where there is so much primacy that's placed on having human characters. Unreal when they're demoing—the demos are textures, but a lot of times it's like, "Oh, look at the simulacra of human face.” You can see the textures, the micro-movements that your face, those subliminal micro-movements that are undetectable for the human eye. Can you tell me a little bit about how using speculative systems, also with non-human characters, gives you the ability to interrogate and critique what's happening in the real world? I'd love to explore that a little bit further with you. **Rahal:** Actually, this was one reason why I was interested in Unreal as well. Because you can get that very seductive graphical fidelity, right? I'm completely dazzled by it myself. And I enjoy it, I need that kind of graphical "Oh, wow, this is how real this is," right? But it is also antithetical to the way a documentary works. So a documentary image, or even the cinematic image, is bringing you into the space of suspension of disbelief and telling you it is the truth. Even documentary filmmakers know it’s construct, right? It's a construct in the sense, on a very grammatical level as well, but also conceptually as well. I'm not saying the bias goes one way or the other, but it is a human that constructing that image. Whereas these kind of graphical images, these high intensity, 4K-rendered, heavy textured images that these programs are able to generate are working on the principle of "Check this against reality." They tell you to go look at what the real world and almost draw you into that uncanny valley, closer and closer and closer, right? Its seductive nature lies in that double take, as opposed to saying, like documentary, "I am pure fiction, but you will still come in. You will still follow." 0:00 /0:16 1× Unreal Engine's MetaHuman 5.6 So now, the kind of creatures that you see in the game are versions of real-life sculptures that I've created. I started building these forms back in 2011\. The idea was I was picking up found objects and then just kind of putting them together using geofoam, glue, and concrete and stuff like that. These mutant creatures have somehow arisen from the detritus that we find ourselves with. Bombay has a lot of found objects. I was putting these things together, and then kind of making toys and instruments that you could actually play, and using them in performances. These programs became a way to create virtual renditions where they become more participatory, where they start shaping the way this larger narrative of this mythology is unfolding. Why do I make those forms that way? I don't know. I'm just kind of drawn to that creepy thing. **Warren:** We're on the back of a really seminal election in your country. This is a conversation I've had with other Indian artists working with game-based art or in speculative contexts. Could you tell me about the contemporary political context and how it's impacted the way you think about your usage of game-based art? It feels like the conditions are ripe for you to generate something unique to your context, which is always interesting to me, but also a way to talk about some of the things happening in India for folks who maybe aren't following the news in your country, not just for game-based art, but also for art at large. **Rahal:** I feel like in India there's not a moral vacuum, but an immense lack of imagination more than anything else. It feels like some really well-known luminaries have literally bent their knee and done exhibitions for Modi's podcast—apparently for the 100th episode he was at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi. It's ridiculous. There's obviously a corporate takeover. There's this museum that \[billionaire Mukesh\] Ambani has set up, which looks like a Death Star has landed in the middle of Bombay. It's got nothing to do with the space it occupies outside—it could literally be somewhere in Dubai. A chipper video that belies the context. This comes in line with the institutional coups that the ruling party has been trying to orchestrate for the last 10 years, and we're seeing a spillover in the arts as well. But at the same time, I feel like there are other ways you can still work. The question remains: if you're going to put that much time and the kind of setup you need for, say, a new media exhibition, most of the spaces available are very close to money that I find problematic personally. But no one's going to stop you from sharing something online—just share things, send them. I feel like that might change for a time. In fact, I'm confident it will change. But there's a whole generation of artists who have grown up with the internet, who have built entire practices online. There's this really brilliant young artist named [Vinit Dharia](https://vinitdharia.com/?ref=killscreen.com), We were working together in a workshop where he created his own AI generator that can generate images and faces—it had a character creator that would give you a full backstory and everything. But what's really amazing is the economy of how he works. He built this entire thing using Google Docs because his computer had crashed, and he built it over the course of two months using Google Docs. As you engage with the project, you see how deterministic this thing is—how these programs that claim to be magic boxes are completely unraveled in this really beautiful, sharp and poetic set of code. There are so many more artists like that now. Google Docs doesn't really need a museum around it, and an Excel sheet doesn't need institutional funding, right? There are ways you can work in spite of the systems we find ourselves in. *This interview was conducted in 2024 as a live talk. It has been edited for style and grammar.* ### Kevin Peter He's Embodied Game Engine Performance URL: https://www.killscreen.com/kevin-peter-hes-embodied-game-engine-performance/ Last updated: 2025-10-20T18:22:03.000Z On a large stage at the Flux Festival in Los Angeles, Kevin Peter He grasps what appears to be a massive controller, the type you’d use for *Flight Simulator*, and stands tall against a large projected image of the body in free fall. Ashen and out of control, the body is pierced by light, and as He leans in and out, the figure is manipulated into a forest. The forest spins, shocks of flashbangs paint the foliage, and the character moves into the syncopated rhythm of flexes, bends, and flailings. This is more than what you might find with “VJ.” He isn't pressing play on a pre-rendered video, and even more than something being controlled in real-time. He's on-stage as a performer—navigating, documenting, and interacting with this world in real time, his embodied presence as central to the work as the mesmerizing imagery on screen. "I'm collapsing that filmmaking process into the onstage moment," He explains. "I am immersing myself at the same time as the audience." In filmmaking, magic happens on set, but that beauty is disintermediated, moving from set to editing, distribution, and finally to the screen. But on-stage, the connection between the play of a digital body, He’s digital performance, and my experience, as a spectator, is collapsed entirely. Passage exists as both a live performance and an installation. This intersection—where game engines meet live performance, where digital environments meet physical bodies—has become the distinctive territory of his work. He is part of a group of filmmakers and artists, such as Ina Chen and Theo Triantafyllidis, who are transforming the movement of human bodies into something we can watch and ultimately dance alongside. Born in New York but raised primarily in Shanghai during its explosive urbanization, He returned to the United States with a unique perspective on how natural and built environments merge, diverge, and transform. His work addresses what happens when this relationship extends into the digital realm. This tension led to an unconventional path—from underground hip-hop dance troupes in Los Angeles to studying film and data science at the University of Southern California (USC), financial modeling at Apple, and fashion design to immersive media. His eventual embrace of game engines wasn't to create traditional games, but to bridge his multidisciplinary background in an unexpected way. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/05/Kevin-Peter-He---Passage-1.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/05/Kevin-Peter-He---Passage-2.png) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/05/Kevin-Peter-He---Passage-3.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/05/Kevin-Peter-He---Passage-4.png) ## **Performing the Game Engine** In an era when game engines have become ubiquitous tools for everything from blockbuster films to architectural visualization, He focuses on something entirely different: treating the game engine as an instrument for live performance. For 2023’s *Passage\_Chroniko*, He uses a custom camera controller mounted on a mechanical arm with a programmable LED in the lens center. "I wanted to point to the process," He explains. The deliberate design choice makes his interaction with the digital environment legible to audiences—something often missing in game-based performances. What’s fascinating is that games have a long lineage of flirting with performance, albeit in a less deliberate way. Arcades, by definition, invite an intersection of players' bodies. One pushed through the masses to place a quarter to claim your spot to complete. *Dance Dance Revolution* experts added additional movements, such as leaning on the backbar or incorporating movements that extended beyond pure score acquisition. *Rock Band* and *Guitar Hero* transformed what was essentially tapping rhythms on a keyboard into a full-throated performance, either by inviting disinhibition for solo players or summoning the spirit of the karaoke diva at a party. ![](https://static0.gamerantimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Overwatch-League-2022-Season-Starting-in-May-Using-Pre-Release-Version-of-Overwatch-2.jpg) Hi-energy on-screen, low tempo on-stage in Overwatch Oddly, the most explicit performance of games in the last 15 years—esports—is devoid of the on-stage markers that would signal high achievement or expertise. The crowds are raucous, but competing esports athletes are nearly comatose, a thermodynamic technique to expend energy only in the service of mouse and keyboard. That bodily disconnect essentially robs high-level esports performances of visual legibility. An esports player performing a complex maneuver like "wave dashing" in *Super Smash Bros*. might execute something technically impressive, but the physical performance remains opaque in real life. Compared with live sports or other game performances, my experiences at live events left me wanting more from athletes. The other week, I was delighted to watch Barcelona winger Lamine Yamal [dance](https://www.tiktok.com/@cbssportsgolazo/video/7501048844705139999?ref=killscreen.com) through a crowd of thronging defenders. Even a novice soccer fan can see brilliance in that type of physical performance. Writing about Julius Erving’s legendary baseline move, art critic [Dave Hickey wrote](https://classes.dma.ucla.edu/Winter18/289/dave-hickey-the-heresy-of-zone-defense.pdf?ref=killscreen.com), “Rules \[...\] translate the pain of violent conflict into the pleasures of disputation—into the excitements of politics, the delights of rhetorical art, and competitive sport.” Even though the medium is game-based, He takes more notes from his experience as a dancer and works with electronic musician [Jake Oleason](http://jakeoleson.com/?ref=killscreen.com). "There's a skill," He notes, "I think about it from an instrument standpoint, like for a musician. How do you make something that helps you do what you do, but then helps other people understand what you're doing?" For his major performance piece, *Flux*—a work exploring turbulence and acceptance through the story of an android discovering humanity through dance—He takes a different approach. Using that flight controller with five-way hat switches, he essentially has twenty buttons under one hand, allowing for rapid, expressive control over cameras, lighting, and architectural elements. "With *Flux* because there's so much going on, and the music is so kinetic," He notes. The performance becomes more like a duet between him and a motion-captured android, reflecting the balance between control and surrender. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/05/Flux-Gif.gif) Performance acts as a transformative force in gameplay by changing *social* rules rather than *game* rules. It’s still a game world I’m watching, but the context of a concert changes how I understand what’s on screen. This interplay between the physical and the on-screen is known as “intermediality” and is a specific lineage of performance that He is tapping into. Intermedial performances exist between the performance and the modes of production, serving as both an intervention and an assembly. As an audience, we both see the real-time construction of something new, but the centering of He on stage means that we are always aware that someone is in control. ## **From Shanghai to Real-Time Performance** What makes his approach particularly compelling is his focus on bridging the gap between performer and audience experience. Unlike traditional media where production and reception are separated by time and process, He's real-time performances create a shared moment of discovery. "I think constantly what I'm trying to evoke with my work is that I am immersing myself at the same time as the audience," He explains. This collapse of traditional production workflows fundamentally changes the relationship between creator and viewer. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/05/Kevin-Peter-He---Passage-5.png) His background in underground hip-hop dance informs this approach, understanding how movement and physical presence communicate to an audience in ways that transcend technical execution. When he performs *Passage\_Chroniko*, the slow, deliberate pushing of his custom controller through a 60-minute one-take journey invites viewers to inhabit the forest alongside him. What happens when the relationship between performer and digital output is deliberately disrupted? This exploration centers what researcher Marleena Huukha calls “[nonhuman agency](https://www.bstjournal.com/article/id/6914/?ref=killscreen.com)” within live performance systems. Agency is created in the intra-actions between different actors on stage—He, the video game engine, the controller, and all of the other software that brings the performance to life. The ‘being’ on-stage and the “doing” on-stage are collapsed into a single moment when we experience what we’re seeing as an audience, as [researcher Jo Scott would describe it](https://www.bstjournal.com/article/id/6836/?ref=killscreen.com). He worked as an Unreal Engine developer on Lisa Jamhoury's Maquette, a live interactive exploration of the parallel histories of averaging and idealism in art and society. There's an interplay between the performers’ movements and the projected avatars behind them. This perspective reframes He's performances as collaborations with nonhuman systems rather than just demonstrations of technical prowess. Scott characterizes the intermedial performer as a "creative technician," highlighting how these performances involve working between the actual and virtual worlds. In He's case, this involves developing a relationship with his custom controllers and game environments where agency is distributed between human and machine. In his upcoming work for NEW INC, He is explicitly exploring what happens when "the tools start controlling us." As he explains, the question becomes: "How do we then have moments where it disconnects from that and transfers the function into the human body, and your attention shifts to the performer on stage?" This intentional shifting of control creates a dynamic tension where agency flows between performer and system. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/05/Maquette-Gif.gif) He envisions "the gesture of performing a game or real-time visual component" becoming "a choreographic gesture"—transforming technological interaction into artistic expression. This approach acknowledges that video games fundamentally require nonhuman input to exist, making the relationship with technology not just instrumental but essential to the performance itself. By deliberately complicating the connections between human action and digital output, He's work invites us to reconsider traditional notions of performance agency. The machine becomes not merely a tool but a participant with its own form of agency—sometimes leading, sometimes following, but always present in the creative dialogue that unfolds on stage. ## **Cybernetic Nature** At the heart of much of He's work, particularly the *Passage* series, is a meditation on how nature is transformed through human and digital systems. Growing up in Shanghai, he observed how trees were specifically selected for their ability to survive in polluted urban environments. "There are specific city blocks with each tree called London Plane trees," He explains. Their specific characteristic is that they shed their bark. They can survive under harsh conditions and essentially combat industrialization or pollution." Cool demo. Where'd everybody go? This observation extends into his critique of how digital environments typically represent nature as technical showcases rather than living systems. "As we've all seen at NVIDIA's latest GPU conference, it's like, 'Okay, here's a photorealistic forest rendered in detail.' It's where there's no life in there," He gripes. *Passage* imagines what nature might become if born from computational systems, not attempting to mimic biological life, but finding its own way to persist within technological constraints. "The device between human systems and natural ecosystems just began to really collapse in that way," He reflects. ![](https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/slidesz/AGV_vUfq___0QJD6d5cQegwruEWkh3YwivGrceLaCPSt5uxLfAXwrnJBPgOsB9sqDqdIY7nySsDqxO2k-sOwfJBalDCjrUUmVq4GtWrfMNKePSlbvN8gKxwOFpSVhQP94prb6zcGDONTQw=s2048?key=CgsfUfWwg28OEBGwNWWid1De "HighresScreenshot00137.png") Mockup for He's NEW INC installation for Passage Ashee continues to evolve his practice, he’s exploring how the game engine might eventually disappear from the final presentation while still informing the conceptual framework. His upcoming installation for NEW INC 2025 combines a physical sculpture featuring a living *Ficus benjamina* with a real-time simulation, exploring how nature persists when forced to exist within artificial systems. "I'm trying to use game engines as the core to tie those things together," He explains. "It's there to inform the whole world-building, but then it sometimes doesn't need to be fully there for the actual piece itself." This evolution reflects a maturation in how artists approach game engines. There’s no doubt that game engine use will become the norm, so moving beyond technical novelty toward conceptual depth is important. What does a game engine add to the experience? Artists have to extend beyond the simple assertion that "this was made in a game engine” which will be as important as saying a film was shot with Panavision. For He, the game engine provides a framework for system-based thinking and action-based expression, even when it may not be visible in the final work. "Even if the game engine itself disappears, those things stay," he observes. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/05/Kevin-Peter-He---Passage-7.png) ## **The Future of Performed Environments** As audiences continue to expect more from live experiences, artists like Kevin Peter He are defining new territories for performance that bridge virtual and physical realms. By foregrounding his physical presence in relation to digital environments, He creates work that is simultaneously technical and deeply human—so human, that is uses the human body as its centerpiece. His practice suggests exciting possibilities for engaging with digital worlds beyond traditional interfaces, incorporating dance, cinema, and sculpture elements to create experiences that feel more connected to our embodied reality. "I want people to care for the environment, the world," He says about *Passage*. In a time when our relationship with natural and digital environments feels increasingly mediated and complex, He's work offers a compelling model for how we might find new ways to inhabit these spaces—not as passive consumers, but as active, embodied participants. --- *All quotations from Kevin Peter He are from a personal interview conducted in April 2025.* ### Everyone Loves the Sunshine URL: https://www.killscreen.com/everyone-loves-the-sunshine/ Last updated: 2025-10-03T18:55:29.000Z **By powering her games with solar energy, Kara Stone isn't just making an environmental statement—she's unlocking new aesthetic possibilities in game design through conscious constraint.** --- > *High technology doesn't mean high creativity. In fact, sometimes the restrictions of a medium lead to the most creative solutions.- James Wallbank, 1999* On a little balcony in Calgary, facing the legendarily sunny Calgary sky, sits a 150w solar panel. A small cable runs to the inside of the apartment, which is strung to a maximum power point tracking controller that manages the power flow of an even smaller micro-computer. A data card is installed inside the microcomputer and connects this elaborate setup to a web server. From that web server, from the sun to the screen, Kara Stone has generated enough energy to power a little world. [Solar Server](https://www.solarserver.games/?ref=killscreen.com) is precisely as it sounds—a solar-powered setup to host low-carbon video games. "I had always considered myself an environmentalist, but for a long time, I struggled meaningfully connecting that to my art practice,” Kara tells me. Having moved from Toronto, she’d fallen in love with “outdoorsy types of things” to complement ample time spent behind a screen. Like all of us wrestling with climate uncertainty, she wanted to explore how to express our collective anxiety through helpful things. “Beyond just making games with environmental themes, I wanted to create something with measurable, practical impact,” she says. The conundrum for a new media artist, let alone a *game-based artist*, is reconciling the real material concerns of energy usage with a vibrant practice built on the contributions of the information computer technology industry. *“*High-tech artworks market new PCs. Even if they aren't meant to,” wrote James Wallbank in his [Lowtech Manifesto in 1999](http://lowtech.org/projects/n5m3/?ref=killscreen.com).“Artworks that use new, expensive technology can't avoid being, in part, sales demonstrations. Part of the message \[...\] is ‘Hey, isn't it time for an upgrade?’.” ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/02/Kara-Stone---img_solserv2.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/02/Kara-Stone---Solar-Server-4-1.jpg) Stone's Solar Server setup Stone felt trapped. "I was kind of stuck thinking that the the best thing I could do for the environment is *stop* making things.” This eco-fatalism has an allure, no doubt. Why not throw in the towel? [But author Jonathan Franzen offers an out:](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-if-we-stopped-pretending?ref=killscreen.com) > Keep doing the right thing for the planet, yes, but also keep trying to save what you love specifically—a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s in trouble—and take heart in your small successes. Any good thing you do now is arguably a hedge against the hotter future, but the really meaningful thing is that it’s good today. As long as you have something to love, you have something to hope for. So, if games are good things worth protecting, what next? --- For her 2020 game [*UnearthU*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1518360/UnearthU/?ref=killscreen.com), Stone only used found footage and existing materials rather than creating new content, describing it as having "an ethos of digital compost.” This approach opened the door to the philosophy of “permacomputing,” a nascent movement to promote a more sustainable approach to working with technology. Permacomputing aims to “give computers a meaningful and sustainable place in a human civilization that has a meaningful and sustainable place in the planetary biosphere,” [writes Ville-Matias Heikkilä](http://viznut.fi/texts-en/permacomputing.html?ref=killscreen.com). Echoing Franzen’s words, permacomputing also provides an optimistic view of the future. Heikkilä continues to love permacomputing because “it *does not advocate ‘going back in time,’”* he wrote.Yes, energy use needs to go down, but instead, it’s faith in human’s ability to find new solutions that will chart a path forward. “Very much the same kind of creative thinking I appreciate in computer hacking,” he . ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/02/Kara-Stone-Headshot-1.jpg) Inspired, Stone set to work. The technical setup for Solar Server was straightforward: Stone mounted a 150-watt solar panel on her Calgary balcony, connecting it to a marine battery (typically used in boats) and an MPPT controller. This controller manages power flow between the panel, battery, and a Raspberry Pi microcomputer that serves as the web server. The hardware configuration is intentionally minimal, reflecting the project's environmental aims. "I would consider myself an environmentalist,” she frets. “But in my art practice, it would only be themes of environmentalism." Now, she needed to make a game. --- [*Known Mysteries*](https://www.solarserver.games/onnow.html?ref=killscreen.com) is the first title for Solar Server. Unlike Stone’s sunny disposition, it is a decidedly pessimistic work. In near-future Canada, residents have given up on saving a planet spiraling into its demise, and lotteries send inhabitants to life in the stars. A woman named Sorrow sets out to uncover one last enigma surrounding her parents' death and the fossil fuel company behind it. Setting up the physical components was relatively simple for Stone, who had prior experience with physical computing. Configuring the backend web server proved more challenging, requiring her to learn new technical skills. Pulling from experiments with *Low Tech Magazine*’s [solar-powered website](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/?ref=killscreen.com), her server runs as a static website to minimize computational demands and resource usage, drawing on practices from early computing when storage constraints were commonplace. 0:00 /4:00 1× First few minutes for **Known Mysteries* Stone's approach prioritizes concept over conventional game design elements, an approach pulled from her early days as a film editor. She explains, "I've always been interested in concept \[...\] rather than perfecting the three-arc story structure, the best camera or the most beautiful shot." This conceptual focus shapes every aspect of her work: "The image should match it. The narrative should match it. The process should match the concept." *Known Mysteries*’approach opens to conceptual departures from games that yield unique experiences for players. The first is obvious. The game looks *different*. Stone's environmental consciousness shapes both her creative process and output. "The aesthetic of it was all handcrafted and scanned and digitized," she notes, describing her approach to game creation. The dithering video is a deliberate distraction, where its resolution is foregrounded in a world of high-resolution devices. “I wanted to point to that aesthetic that this is a process that I was doing and trying to make it as small as possible.” 0:00 /0:14 1× Found footage before dithering is added. The second layer of experimentation is time itself. Stone started thinking about how we conceived of time-based gaming work with [*Ritual of the Moon*](https://karastonesite.com/2019/04/24/ritual-of-the-moon-2/?ref=killscreen.com) in 2019, a 28-day-long multi-narrative game exploring loneliness, power, and healing. Over a lunar cycle, players engage with a witch exiled to the moon, participating in a series of contemplative interactions that blur the line between play and personal ritual. Each brief session involves arranging objects on an altar, tracing objects, and receiving mantras—acts that echo ancient spiritual practices and contemporary mindfulness exercises. Gaming's current approach to players’ time is fraught. There are clever uses: Contrast *Animal Crossing*’s clever use of the device’s internal clock to trigger specific events. And then there is the current approach of live-service games like *Fortnite*'s desire to pull you in for every moment and never let you go. "This is an unspoken extractive approach in many types of digital media,” Stone bemoans. “The expectation is that you're supposed to spend a very long time with this thing.” *Known Mysteries'* approach to time reflects *Stone's same care* for the environment. The game is not long and can be played in one sitting. Stone dutifully divided it into three chapters for environmental reasons, mapping out the chapter on pen and paper on her living room floor. The result is a synthesis of concept and execution *She*threaded through her work: lower server load and electricity usage while respecting player engagement. This perspective reframes limitations not as obstacles but as opportunities for innovation. She emphasizes that these constraints don't diminish the work: "I don't view *Known Mysteries* and future projects on Solar Server to be lesser than." ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/02/Kara-Stone---Solar-Server-2.png) Overworld map for **Known Mysteries* “Maximalist techno-aesthetics” is the idea that perpetual growth and infinite resources are present as an absolute good. “Increasing density of information for its own sake: more pixels, more detail, more *fidelity,* and more *connectivity* equals more *potential,”* [write](https://monoskop.org/images/6/6a/Mansoux%5FAymeric%5Fet%5Fal%5F2023%5FPermacomputing%5FAesthetics.pdf?ref=killscreen.com) Aymeric Mansoux, Brendan Howell, Dušan Barok, and Heikkilä (one permacomputing's principal voices above.) The problem is that this approach emphasizes new tools, techniques, and consumption, which puts pressure on art and design. This is unsustainable for both the planet and for artists. Stone shares that approach: Her work demonstrates a deep respect for human constraints, rejecting that games should be "for all things for all peoples." However, games present a conundrum for artists working with them as material. While *video* games run alongside the development of late-stage capitalism, the history of games predates the advent of computers. Moreover, some new human experiences and genres would not be possible *without* introducing new technologies. Battle royale games emerged when technology finally caught up to our collective desire for massive-scale digital competition–advances in networking, server architecture, and graphics technology enabled dozens of players to share dynamic moments in ways that early multiplayer games, limited to intimate player counts, could only dream of. As they are always amorphous and growing into spaces opened by new technologies, games are rare examples of where the promise of more has generated something novel. Who wouldn’t trade games over social media? However, the operative word is “for its own sake.” Because we can, it does not mean that we should, and the aesthetic appeal of permacomputing opens the door to considering those ecological constraints as part of a work’s quality. Mansoux et al. encourage a syncresis: the aesthetics of the thing should be deeply intertwined with the making of the thing. "Permacomputing \[is about\] *systems of relations, sensing and making sense \[of\] the process of making and working around and with computational constraints,”* Mansoux et al. write. Tldr; you are what you eat. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/02/Kara-Stone---Solar-Server-3-1.png) The return to constraint is welcome. The same self-imposed or external boundaries that generate the novelty of tape edits and found footage form a central part of Stone's practice. She observes, "We're always working with constraints all the time, and whether we're like recognizing them or not like we are, and I think they can be creatively inspiring." Ironically, Stone’s work is *more* consistent with the genealogy of games because she resurrects an era when there *wasn’t* enough compute. In Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost’s [*Racing the Beam*](https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262539760/racing-the-beam/?ref=killscreen.com), the authors outline the myriad ways that early computer programmers worked around the limitations of the Atari 2600\. The system's notorious hardware constraints became, unexpectedly, a catalyst for computational creativity. Take the VCS's limited RAM—a restriction that would seem crippling by today's standards. Developers responded by leveraging the system's built-in playfield symmetry to essentially get two screens' worth of data for the price of one, a technique prominently featured in *Combat* (and later refined in countless other titles). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/02/Untitled-design--11-.png) (photo by Mia Jaap) Perhaps most remarkably, Atari programmers transformed one of the system's most severe technical constraints—the need to draw graphics line-by-line in sync with the television's electron beam—into an opportunity for technical artistry. Through a technique known as sprite multiplexing (essentially reusing sprite data in different screen positions), developers created the illusion of far more objects on screen than the hardware officially supported. Bogost and Montfort write: > Not because it was a powerful computer, so much was possible on the Atari VCS. It wasn’t powerful at all. Instead, so much was possible **because the machine was so simple**. The very few things it could do well—drawing a few movable objects on the screen one line at a time while uttering sounds using square waves and noise—could be put together in a wide variety of ways to achieve surprising results. \[emphasis my own\] The tension between commercial viability and artistic integrity is evident in Stone's decision-making process. "I would have to have my art practice look different because it would be about what I think is good and what I want to make," she reflects. "But also, what do I think audiences want to see and buy? I didn't want to sacrifice my practice." It turns out that you don’t. *All quotations from Kara are edited for style and grammar.* ### Shakers, machines, & desert Pigs: Vinny Roca's devotional designs URL: https://www.killscreen.com/shakers-machines-desert-pigs-vinny-rocas-devotional-designs/ Last updated: 2025-10-03T18:53:02.000Z *Play becomes prayer; objects transform into beings; digital devotion meets industrial design. Vinny Roca's work inhabits the spaces between traditional art practice and game development, where everyday items take on new life through animation and interaction. His latest works form a triptych of digital meditation -* Easy Shaker Yolk Face *examines 19th century religious labor through animated objects,* Slot Waste *traces absurdist production cycles that transform sacred into mundane, and* Come Away With Me *orchestrates an otherworldly desert ritual where pigs become performers in an evolving soundscape.* *We spoke with Roca about contemplative objects, the poetry of procedural animation, and finding spirituality in the spaces between player and screen. His work reveals how digital interactions can reframe our relationship with the material world—whether through animate furniture carrying echoes of Shaker craftsmanship, industrial processes that pulse with dark humor, or pigs wandering a desert landscape to the ethereal sounds of Nora Jones.* --- *WARREN: Tell me about your background and professional path into game-based art. What attracted you to the space, and how did you decide on games as an expression of your creativity?* ROCA: It started during my undergrad, where I focused on studying drawing and painting. After graduating, I was doing mixed drawing and performance work, using instruction-based practices similar to the Fluxus art movement, where audience members participate in actions you've designed. Concurrently, I was working as a 3D modeler and animator. I began incorporating these 3D models into my instructions as images to guide gallery visitors in engaging with different objects. Then I started thinking: what if the instructions lived with these 3D models, rather than remaining analog instruction-based works? That's where I started making games. The first game in the exhibition, *My Easy Shaker Yolk Face*, came directly from that thought - what if I joined these instructional works in a game engine environment? It was a natural progression. I had the 3D modeling skills and programming experience from my day job, while my art practice was more conceptual and instruction-based. Once I combined the two, moving into games as a creative practice made perfect sense. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Gameplayarts_Vinny_Roca_019Slot-Waste---Credit_-Chris-Hanke.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Gameplayarts_Vinny_Roca_024Slot-Waste---Credit_-Chris-Hanke.jpg) "My Easy Shaker Yoke Face" (2021) *WARREN*: *The Fluxus movement seems to be a common touchpoint for people bridging the gap from non-digital art practices to engage with broader questions around play and interactivity. Could you tell me more about your interactions with that movement?* ROCA: For a while, *I didn't think I was making games*—I thought I was making conceptual instructional works in the footsteps of artists like Yoko Ono. Her pieces were very inspiring to me. She has one work called *TUNAFISH SANDWICH PIECE* where you look at the sun a certain number of times, and then after you've looked at the sun for that duration, you make a tuna fish sandwich and eat it. These conceptual artworks, part of the Fluxus movement, bridge the gap between play and what might be thought of as high art or fine art. They suggest that any action somebody undertakes could be considered artful if it's designed, instructed, or followed through with intentionality. That's what games allow - a very intentional experience over a set duration. The Fluxus notion of play involves experimenting with both actions and language. I think of Yoko Ono and many Fluxus artists as playing with language and treating it as a space for experimentation. I see a direct line to the game engine - for my work, the game engine feels like what language was for Yoko Ono's work. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Yoko-Ono---Tuna-Fish-Sandwich.jpeg) Yoko Ono - "Tunafish Sandwich Piece" (1964) *WARREN: There's an invitation there for people to experience the work. From an instructional design standpoint, what did you notice about how Fluxus artists constructed their designs and situated their instructions? What kind of experience were they hoping people would have?\** ROCA: The structuring of experience to create unexpected relationships between things plays a large role in my work. Take that *TUNAFISH SANDWICH PIECE* example—in language, she draws this connection between the sun and the sandwich, which gets you thinking about relationships. How the sun provides energy to things in the ocean that the tuna fish is eating, and then you're joining that into your own biological systems by consuming the sandwich. These instructions verge on the absurd, but when those juxtapositions are made, you get new kinds of meaning-making that create new potentials to relate different objects to each other. I think about video games in my practice as experiences where different objects are set into new modes of relationships. They're virtual, but they have relationships to existing objects or objects of thought. In the game engine and game art, you can put those objects into relation with each other to conjure new meanings and point your audiences in different directions they might not have gone otherwise. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Gameplayarts_Vinny_Roca_005Slot-Waste---Credit_-Chris-Hanke.jpg) "Slot Waste" (2023) *WARREN: Your work shows a deep focus on individual objects that require meditation and study. One challenge with making games is that from an asset standpoint, there are so many things that can be made. Making decisions about what to focus attention on becomes really important. Many games take this for granted by not creating meaningful relationships between individual objects, or by deferring to relational contexts that are given - working from a fantasy universe where the meaning is already coded into it. This often shuts the door for absurdity or non-diegetic objects to exist in those worlds. Your work stands out both in its focus on individual things and its sense of surprise and serendipity through unexpected combinations.* *We had a conversation with Jenna Caravello about how important it is for animators to focus on individual objects as part of their craft. Could you tell me about your approach to 3D modeling individual objects? This really comes through in* My Easy Shaker Yolk Face*—there are so few things in the room, but the things you spend time with, you really spend time with. How does this connect to your previous non-gaming work?* ROCA: There's a distinct difference. Both works examine objects in production and their transformation through machines, but they approach it differently. In "Easy Shaker Yolk Face," I focused on objects created by members of the Shaker religious tradition in late 1800s America. I was particularly drawn to their relationship with objects through their religious lens—their famous saying "hands at work, heart to God." This philosophy suggests that when one becomes fully immersed in their labor, the body almost dissolves into the production process, allowing for a deeper spiritual connection and contemplation. This led me to concentrate on contemplative objects and how they could become sources of complete attention. It marked a significant shift from my earlier instructional works, which centered on everyday objects—pieces about air conditioners or an urn filled with pistachios. Those were existing objects I found or purchased, asking visitors to focus their attention on them and their relationships. Moving to creating the objects myself was a substantial transition. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Gameplayarts_Vinny_Roca_022Slot-Waste---Credit_-Chris-Hanke--1-.jpg) *WARREN: What inspired you to add faces to these objects?* ROCA: One of my first impulses was to make the objects as unfamiliar as possible. Adding faces became this powerful gesture—when you put a face on something, it transforms into something entirely new. Our relationship with it shifts completely, allowing for this strange projection onto the object as a being. Taking it further by animating it gives it an almost life force that you, as a player or gallery viewer, must contend with during interaction. Many of these gestures that I initially thought might be humorous or absurd, especially in *Slot Waste*, evolved into something more complex—almost becoming gestures of cruelty. You're interacting with these seemingly living things as they're processed through machines, and you're not always certain about what you're doing with them. The work really questions how our relationships with non-objects and objects, or non-beings and beings, are structured through this concept of the object—considering the animal as an object, the machine as an object, or even at times, people as objects processed through these machines. The object became central because of its potential for transformation. At its core, it's about how an object plus time can equal something entirely new. *Your reference to the Shakers is interesting, given other Christian traditions that focus on attention as a form of devotion. How do you see this playing out in your games, particularly the contrast between "Easy Shaker Yolk Face" and your other works?* *There are these other Christian traditions that focus on the importance of attention—whether monastic traditions or the spiritual tradition of Simone Weil—where attention to a thing or person becomes a form of prayer or devotion. Games offer a unique way to encourage players to spend that time. Playing "Easy Shaker Yolk Face," I felt a sense of care in my interactions, but you seem to subvert that in other works. The attention shifts toward acts of apparent cruelty or objectification—whether it's birds or walnuts, the objects' individual significance changes.* *How did you come to focus on the Shaker tradition?* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Untitled-design--9-.png) Shaker Furniture (Credit: Aaron Morton) ROCA: I've long been interested in what you might call off-center Christian religious practices. Being raised Catholic, the transformation of objects has always resonated in my work. I discovered the Shakers through reading Thomas Merton, the American Catholic writer known for works like "The New Seeds of Contemplation," which examines life transformation through contemplative practices. What particularly drew me to the Shaker tradition was its distinctly American quality. They weren't just crafting objects for contemplative purposes—they were selling these objects to fund their communities. This connection to capital fascinated me—it was religious labor that intersected directly with industrial capitalism of their time, much like what we see today. This relationship influenced *Easy Shaker Yolk Face*, examining what happens when that labor becomes absurd. This theme continues in "Slot Waste," where absurd labor loops endlessly, perpetually disconnected from reality. WARREN: *The Shakers represent a unique American religious expression from the 19th century, alongside movements like the Millerites and the Mormon tradition. While Catholicism developed distinct expressions during colonization, it maintained a central church. American Christian traditions often emerged independently—some enduring, others fading into history books. What's remarkable about Shakerism is how it persists through their objects, through their pursuit of perfection in craftsmanship. They left a tangible legacy through their beautiful furniture, unlike some other distinctly American religious movements.* *Your relationship with capital as a game creator is particularly interesting. You're working with digital goods where scarcity functions differently than in the Shaker tradition. Has this created any tension in your thinking about distribution through digital platforms, or how you make your games available for sale? In a way, you're creating digital objects to fund your practice, similar to how the Shakers funded their communities.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/The-object-became-central-because-of-its-potential-for-transformation.-At-its-core--it-s-about-how-an-object-plus-time-can-equal-something-entirely-new.--1-.png) ROCA: This relationship with digital goods is something I've been considering carefully. I make all my work available for free on itch.io, occasionally accepting donations. Recently, I've been thinking about approaching this differently—perhaps focusing on the original artifacts that inspire these games as the unique, salable elements. All my work begins with intense periods of drawing and sketching. These drawings are where the objects originate, as I work out their compositions on paper before sculpting them in ZBrush or Maya. I've been examining the relationship between these initial drawings and the final digital experience. Since it's an interactive experience—a game—I struggle to assign it monetary value because it's infinitely reproducible. For me, the monetary value of the digital component approaches zero. I've considered making the original drawings available as a way for people to contribute to the work and connect with the design process. *WARREN: This is a common challenge for digital creators. Traditional artistic practices have inherent scarcity driving their value, providing artists with a clear path to support themselves. For those working with digital goods, it's significantly more complex. There are alternative support mechanisms like grants or fellowships. The trade-off is that digital creation has lower overhead costs—essentially just software licenses and time, unlike large sculptural works. While this makes exhibition easier, it creates unique challenges in determining what to offer supporters. How has making your work freely accessible impacted its reach?* ROCA: At this point in my artistic practice, I find real joy in releasing these works for free and watching people from all parts of the world stream and discuss them. I'm not certain this level of engagement would happen if I added a price barrier. It brings me genuine happiness to see people from different countries experiencing the works, even when I don't understand the language they're using to discuss them. Most of my games intentionally avoid language barriers, giving them this international resonance that I really appreciate. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Gameplayarts_Vinny_Roca_012.jpg) *WARREN: Yes, they're truly legible without language. This accessibility across linguistic and cultural boundaries seems central to their impact.* ROCA: Absolutely. I was going to say that was kind of a key thing for me when I moved from the instructional practice to the more visual practice—trying to figure out a way to do all of the things that I was doing, these instructional or suggestive works, without having to fall back on the written word as a way to structure experience. But how could the objects themselves, and how could the placement of them, structure how people navigate the virtual space? In a sense, using the objects almost as you might use language or words? *WARREN: Yeah, a hundred percent. That makes sense. Not to go back to the Shakers, but I do think that the context for the Shakers in this pre-industrial age is key as well. They're trying to navigate creating physical goods that would become mass commercial. It just speaks to maybe a contemporary moment or tension for me as a creator. I think you can see why they raise a lot of big questions.* ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Gameplayarts_Vinny_Roca_026.jpg) "Come Away With Me" *Well, I do want to talk about* Come Away With Me*. We showed Henrik Soederstroem's work and it does live simulation as well. I just think that is such an exciting area and usage of game engines—that you have something that is procedural but systematic. There's repetition, but you are allowing other systems to sort of control the experience for a player. Can you tell me a little about the origin of that work? I'm interested from a construction standpoint—what is designed, what have you turned over to Unity, and where are the things that you still want to make sure that you control?* The work comes from a long line of investigation I've been doing with pigs, thinking about them as a born product — animals maintained and produced by large industrial systems. While they exist as wild animals, the pigs we typically encounter are sustained through these industrial frameworks. Unlike chickens or cows with their various byproducts, pigs occupy this contested space between object and living creature. This returns to core ideas I'm examining: when does a larger system transform a living being into an object? My connection to pigs runs deep — I grew up around them, as my grandfather raised them. Being around these extremely intelligent animals left an indelible mark on me. There's something fascinating about them as strange, intelligent creatures that we, by our standards, consider very gross. This contrast drove me to design a performance where pigs could have some alternate ritual or way of existing, at least in a digital space — something that maintained a connection to our reality while creating an eerie breakage point beyond easy comprehension. The ritual begins with a trailer parked in the middle of a desert. Each pig emerges carrying a speaker playing a song from Nora Jones's 2002 album "Come Away With Me." While their emergence is scripted, the song selection is controlled by procedural code — random but intentional. Their first task is finding a space to place the speaker, determined by hidden variables that form their internal decision-making mechanism. These variables aren't exposed to the viewer but guide each pig's choices about placement. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Sequence-01.00_35_39_25.Still026.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Sequence-01.00_45_35_04.Still019.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Sequence-01.00_39_05_16.Still021.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Sequence-01.00_18_33_20.Still014.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Sequence-01.00_30_35_01.Still025.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Sequence-01.00_11_25_02.Still012.jpg) After setting down the speaker, they circle it in a complete 360-degree rotation, retrieve it, and return to the trailer — triggering the next pig's emergence. This continues exponentially until all the album's songs are represented. The pigs then follow in a long procession around the desert before returning to the trailer. The camera work is entirely procedural, with parameters determining which pigs to follow and variables controlling distance and focal length. This creates fascinating compositions, though sometimes it might focus on the sand while the ethereal Nora Jones echoes across the desert — I find these unexpected moments particularly compelling. The pigs' movements are also procedurally controlled. I think of them as performers working with a script but having numerous options within those parameters to make their own decisions. *WARREN: This work deals with cycles, both individually with the pigs and in aggregate with the album. In* Slot Waste *and similar works, you create these interesting miniature cycles of performance and activity that are part of a larger cycle. It reminds me of perichoresis in Catholic and Christian tradition — you're creating these little circular instances that are ultimately connected. From a design standpoint, when you're thinking about creating these experiences, do you have the overall arc determined before figuring out the loops that populate it? Or do you start with these little loops or activities and then work out how to connect them? With* Slot Waste*, I can see how you could start with either approach.* ROCA: I design the overall system first, then create small pockets where I can work completely intuitively. At a certain point, I find relationships amongst things. With “Slot Waste,” I knew from the start I wanted this Rube Goldberg-like production process where one thing would lead to the next, but I had no idea what those individual things would be. It really spun out in a linear process. Many people have told me they're surprised by what turns into what — and I think that reflects my working process. I would do whatever felt very surprising to me as the next jump or gesture. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Gameplayarts_Vinny_Roca_006.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Gameplayarts_Vinny_Roca_005.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Gameplayarts_Vinny_Roca_004.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Gameplayarts_Vinny_Roca_003.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Gameplayarts_Vinny_Roca_002.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2025/01/Gameplayarts_Vinny_Roca_001.jpg) Even in the beginning, where the teapot head is filled with metal balls that are then melted to melt these bison — it was about finding these strange connections. I knew it would be filled with small bits of metal, so I'd think: what could happen to those pieces? What kind of processes of transformation could occur? The first thought would be they could melt. Then: what if they melted onto something? I'd spend time figuring out what would be meaningful for something to melt — what would have resonance? I think about certain ideas I want to address, like the massacre of bison in America during the late 19th century. These become not quite exact representations, but influences and things to consider — always thinking about how these things pass between objects and being. I make them serious but look for where they could be funny, where they could be subverted. At the end of the game, you see this majestic horse emerge — this very spectral creature slowly approaching the player. I wanted to design a moment of magnificence, of magnificent beauty, where you wonder: what is this thing? What am I looking at? But then I immediately rip that away when you start watching it excrete into another container that you're catching. It moves from majestic to disturbing. That's how I play with relationships between objects.*WARREN: The difference with Rube Goldberg machines as a reference is that you're typically presented with the entire thing first, then your attention is drawn to individual components. You're shown a scenario the machine solves, then focus on the components. But you've inverted this — because it's a cycle, on your first time through, you're presented with incomplete information about how this fits into the larger thing. It creates a destabilizing way to play. When will this end? You know the answer because you've seen the end at the beginning, but there's this tension of how each scene will connect to the next.* *Games with mini-game components,* WarioWare*\-style things, often aren't in service of a broader movement or idea. But thinking about these pigs — as people who eat things, or if you purchase something from a store, you're presented with the object, but the labor or material conditions of its creation are obscured intentionally. If you're able to reflect on both the thing and the process, maybe that creates a different relationship to the final object itself.* ROCA: That was definitely an idea I was trying to convey. *WarioWare* was actually a reference when thinking about this game — there's something fascinating about a game made up of tiny games. The way it plays with attention and player desire, where your goal is always changing. Just when you catch it, it changes to something else. In *Slot Waste*, I tried to design that catching part to be just long enough for you to get the hang of it, to get the timing right, before immediately being pulled into the next section. I was thinking about this process of attunement that games can do — even larger-scale games like *Elden Ring*, where it takes time to memorize mechanics and finger movements until they become part of your processing. I wanted each section, or at least some of them, to have this constant remapping of your hand on the joystick. In the gallery, it's installed with an industrial joystick that I sourced from a vintage electronics store. It has this tension-filled feeling where it resists your movement, calling attention to the physical action. It was very important to me that there would be only one analog control without any buttons — everything based on your physical arm movement controlling the machine, constantly remapping how that movement is used in these different vignettes. --- *This interview was conducted on July 17th, 2024\. It was heavily edited for style and content. You can see m* ### Exploring the material culture of games with metalwork, jewelry, and a little bit of horror URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/exploring-the-material-culture-of-games-with-metalwork-jewelry-and-a-little-bit-of-horror/ Last updated: 2025-01-08T22:56:03.000Z Artist, jeweler, metalsmith, and art conservator [Lauren Eckert](https://lauren-eckert.com/?ref=killscreen.com) shows us what it means to look at craftsmanship through a contemporary lens. Drawing from inspiration from the objects in video games, religious iconography, and classic science fiction VFX, Lauren’s work gives metals and jewelry a life on screen—and similarly, digital objects a physical life. Whether through wearable pieces or digital triptychs, Lauren’s projects make a space where past and future, alchemy and technology, collide. We had a great conversation with Lauren back in 2021 and have featured more of her work [here](https://killscreen.com/lauren-eckert/?ref=killscreen.com). Photography by David Evan McDowell. *This episode was hosted by Jamin Warren, founder of Killscreen.* [*Music by Nick Sylvester*](https://www.tiktok.com/@nickgodmode?ref=killscreen.com)*.* ### How to design political games with a broken heart URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/how-to-design-political-games-with-a-broken-heart/ Last updated: 2025-01-08T22:54:11.000Z Can games seep into life's political, social, and cultural realms? Across projects that fuse game development, filmmaking within game engines, LARP (live-action role play), and more, [Mario Mu](http://mariomu.com/?ref=killscreen.com) interrogates this question. The Croatian-born artist now lives in Berlin, where he researches games, labor, and memory. After a career illustrating for commercial brands such as Doodle Jump and publishing with Gestalten, Mario continues his independent creative practice, with all projects he thinks of as ‘extended gaming platforms.’ In this talk, we spoke with Mario about his design process of games and live-action role-play experiences, how he incorporates research on politics and labor into his creative practice, and how he is shifting from commercial work to personal practice in the fine-art world. *This episode was hosted by Jamin Warren, founder of Killscreen.* [*Music by Nick Sylvester*](https://www.tiktok.com/@nickgodmode?ref=killscreen.com)*.* ### Cezar Mocan's Arcadia Inc. Shoots Its Own Stock Photos URL: https://www.killscreen.com/cezar-mocans-arcadia-inc-shoots-its-own-stock-photos/ Last updated: 2026-10-14T19:22:55.000Z *Arcadia Inc.* is a real-time simulation by Cezar Mocan in which three AI agents photograph a rendered pastoral landscape. The agents, named Ansel A.I., Claudia L. and Ralph W.E., upload their pictures live to [arcadia.photography](https://arcadia.photography/?ref=killscreen.com), the stock-image library of a company that exists only inside the work. [The trailer](https://vimeo.com/634060678?ref=killscreen.com) opens with Ansel A.I. introducing itself as a landscape photographer with the firm. 0:00 /0:54 1× An excerpt from the **Arcadia Inc.* trailer, silent as uploaded. [The full trailer with sound is on Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/634060678?ref=killscreen.com). Each agent follows a route drawn from the history of looking at nature. Ansel A.I. is programmed to always walk west, and Claudia L. photographs the landscape from above. The project page describes the work's subject as image-making through "context erasure," the stripping of a picture's origins so it can carry new meanings. For more reading, see [our piece on *Trackmania* playing itself](https://www.killscreen.com/trackmania-plays-itself/) and [the full trailer on Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/634060678?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/arcadia-frame-34s-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/arcadia-frame-48s-1.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2026/09/mocan-abs1.jpg) Frames from **Arcadia Inc.*; Cezar Mocan photographed by Bruna Buniotto for Arab Bank Switzerland. Nobody else files self-playing gallery simulations under games coverage. Killscreen has since 2010, and the newsletter that finds them is free. [Follow the edges ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta) ### Eddo Stern: Experimentation is valuable URL: https://www.killscreen.com/eddo-stern/ Last updated: 2024-12-20T22:17:31.000Z [*A certified pioneer of game art*](https://www.gamescenes.org/2010/06/interview-eddo-stern.html?ref=killscreen.com)*, Eddo Stern is an LA-based artist who is also the Founding Director of the* [*UCLA Game Lab*](http://games.ucla.edu/?ref=killscreen.com)*. Born in Tel Aviv and now based in California, Eddo has been making games and interactive artworks for decades—his fantastic practice centering on the deep tensions of life and the human condition.* *We’re grateful to have spoken with Eddo about the interplay between form and content, how his pedagogical and creative practices feed into each other, and his ongoing, multipronged project,* [*Vietnam Romance*](https://eddostern.com/works/vietnam-romance-game/?ref=killscreen.com)*.* ***How has the UCLA Game Lab shaped the way you think about games and interactive practice?*** My background is in contemporary media art. My earlier work was always built on the criticality of games as popular culture and investigating them. Usually, originally not in game form, but in film form, machinima filmmaking, sculpture performance, and eventually intervention and modifying games and a gradual transition into making games. Once I started working at UCLA, the biggest change was that this was a Media Arts and Design program where I teach in the Lab, even though it's situated to serve all the arts at UCLA—film, theater, design, architecture, fine art, music, and other departments. This shift from thinking conceptually as the primary way of doing work is how I work personally. Working in the Lab with so many visually-oriented students helped me appreciate the importance of design. When you talk about game design, it's usually conceptual game design, rules. Design is a bigger practice, and for being an artist who's always been skeptical of design, being so utilitarian and enjoying the freedom of art not to be instrumentalized all the time. However, it does become instrumentalized, but fighting against that within an art context has always been my practice. Working with more designers who think differently about everything changed my practice and activated a 10-year journey of learning how to be a designer. Then I became comfortable calling myself an artist and a game designer. I look at the Lab as being built on tensions, which again is what motivates me often in my work—things that push against each other. Something awful and tragic and then a comical counterpoint and how that makes us feel, or looking at the world through the internet, for instance, and experiencing everything side by side. The Lab now can encourage so many diverse points of view and approaches to games. The joy for me is not cutting any of them off and saying, "This Lab only does serious games," or, "This Lab only makes beautiful games," or, "This Lab only makes playable mechanically sound games or commercially games that are commercial or games that are even non-problematic." I don't want to cut off anything. Working with such a more diverse group of students has taken away this idea of here's Art, over there’s design and over there’s entertainment. It’s allowed everything to be appreciated—and to start looking at them critically across all directions. New media art is always about, "What's the newest technology?” To question that with analog games, for instance, games that have nothing to do with that, and the objectness of the materiality of game pieces and then suddenly seeing like, "Wow, physical games have just been so almost blind to that whole aspect of how they're made." They're produced in such an overly-mechanized and routinized way. ***How has the UCLA Game Lab shaped the way you think about games and interactive practice?*** My background is in contemporary media art. My earlier work was always built on the criticality of games as popular culture and investigating them. Usually, originally not in game form, but in film form, machinima filmmaking, sculpture performance, and eventually intervention and modifying games and a gradual transition into making games. Once I started working at UCLA, the biggest change was that this was a Media Arts and Design program where I teach in the Lab, even though it’s situated to serve all the arts at UCLA—film, theater, design, architecture, fine art, music, and other departments. This shift from thinking conceptually as the primary way of doing work is how I work personally. Working in the Lab with so many visually-oriented students helped me appreciate the importance of design. When you talk about game design, it’s usually conceptual game design, rules. Design is a bigger practice, and for being an artist who’s always been skeptical of design, being so utilitarian and enjoying the freedom of art not to be instrumentalized all the time. However, it does become instrumentalized, but fighting against that within an art context has always been my practice. Working with more designers who think differently about everything changed my practice and activated a 10-year journey of learning how to be a designer. Then I became comfortable calling myself an artist and a game designer. I look at the Lab as being built on tensions, which again is what motivates me often in my work—things that push against each other. Something awful and tragic and then a comical counterpoint and how that makes us feel, or looking at the world through the internet, for instance, and experiencing everything side by side. The Lab now can encourage so many diverse points of view and approaches to games. The joy for me is not cutting any of them off and saying, “This Lab only does serious games,” or, “This Lab only makes beautiful games,” or, “This Lab only makes playable mechanically sound games or commercially games that are commercial or games that are even non-problematic.” I don’t want to cut off anything. Working with such a more diverse group of students has taken away this idea of here’s Art, over there’s design and over there’s entertainment. It’s allowed everything to be appreciated—and to start looking at them critically across all directions. New media art is always about, “What’s the newest technology?” To question that with analog games, for instance, games that have nothing to do with that, and the objectness of the materiality of game pieces and then suddenly seeing like, “Wow, physical games have just been so almost blind to that whole aspect of how they’re made.” They’re produced in such an overly-mechanized and routinized way. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/UCLA_Game_Arts-51.jpg) The UCLA Game Lab. ***You talked about how you’re drawn to this idea of tension and contrast. Is that a long-term concern in your practice? If not, what are your concerns at the moment? At this moment right now as an artist?*** It’s always been one of the driving energies behind my work and how I look at the world. Part of that is growing up in Israel and looking at that culture already but then moving to the US, looking at cultures and cross-cultural representation. Anytime you move between two cultures, you start to see things differently. Almost all my projects have this investigation of some kind of complexity, and looking at complicitness in everything is concerning to me. The burden of responsibility and personal-political agency versus community versus destiny versus tradition. Life is full of these questions and they don’t go away and they get more rich and nuanced and shift. It’s almost always inherent in every project. Humor, dark themes, and horror, is where horror can happen when it touches on real experiences or references. Then horror and humor together have always been something that I find bits of in my work. Video games or computer games, especially, are almost the medium, for me, that embodies this tension. I am drawn to this notion of the perversity of games—especially computer games where there’s a gradual replacement of human interactions, they’re mechanized and computerized. It touches on many dystopian ideas, and gamification is an incredible example seen very positively by the media. We see all those books and then the dark side of it of “Let’s manipulate the lizard brain to get people to do what we want through addiction, through obsession, through competitiveness, through insecurity.” Games become almost a systemic mechanization of exploitation of certain human behavior. On the other hand, I revel in that perversity too. Hardcore gaming interests me like obsessive online gaming and playing for years and being completely immersed in character or hyper-competitive games. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Boots-Scene-8.jpg) Vietnam Romance ***Tell us about your ongoing project,* Vietnam Romance*.*** It’s a big project about history being replaced and rewritten by remediation. Because it’s been a project that I’ve been working on for years, it has many other layered ideas. It becomes about travel and about neocolonialism and about the consumption of eBay shopping for experience. A quest for experience is what it’s about philosophically. People are nostalgic for the ’60s. They’re nostalgic also for that turmoil, and the Vietnam war is a vehicle for nostalgia that is disturbing. How does that map onto other realities of what is happening now? I’ve gone to Vietnam a few times to work, do research and document and build worlds. At the War Atrocities Museum, and they have a gift shop, and they have a whole library of American books written by soldiers all shrink-wrapped. They’re all fake books. They’ve been photocopied, but they’re all for sale. Then there are all these bins all around in the gift shop, government-owned, of medals, war medals from American GIs, and patches. They look worn and they’re all fakes and they’re all handmade fakes that have been burnished. Then the eBay vendors that then manufacture these things and sell them to Americans on the internet. Vietnam Romance is an ambitious project, and it takes time because it’s a small team and just trying to finish it. More recently, I’m becoming very critical more and more and not cynical, but discontent with social media; the corporate umbrella around everything. The agility now of certain corporations to respond so quickly to subculture. Places like Instagram are thinking like game designers like, “Let’s manipulate. Let’s create this space for people to perform and feel that they have agency within. That disturbs me. I’m thinking a lot about counterculture and how can it exist at this moment where there’s this compulsion, especially younger people, to have to perform in these public online corporate spaces to be relevant in the society. What are the alternatives; how are they possible? I’ve always been interested in community building and alternative space building. How do you reconcile the digital and this corporate infrastructure that so much of our technology is based on and still be relevant? The turn to analog is definitely an interesting thing and humanizing and working on more humanistic projects is very important to me. One of the advantages of digital media and reproduction is scale and impact. What impact does scale have on how many people are using it, or can you create things that actually can do both? They’re distributed ethically, and I know this is what the corporations are trying to do with these things, but there’s got to be other values that can achieve this. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_3106-scaled.jpg) ***Vietnam Romance has taken on many different mediums and forms. What is the effect of implementing a mix of digital and analog mediums for your projects?*** Part of it is non-deliberate, a circumstance of coming from art making where some certain processes and structures are very different from filmmaking or novel writing where you say, “Well, I’m working on this thing and I don’t want to show you an excerpt,” and when it’s done is when it’s done. It doesn’t have much of a life between. With novels, maybe people can read a little bit, but certain media. With art, there’s always been a lot of possibility to improvise, to respond. As a medium, contemporary art trains you to be very responsive and say, “Here’s an opportunity, we’re in Minneapolis and there’s a Vietnamese restaurant that I have a connection to and we’re able to do something together and I’m going to do that,” or do a live theater show in New York at Babycastles. It’s like it was the right time to do it. The game isn’t finished in a sense, but I believe that all these experiences are meaningful, that doesn’t have to be this kind of, “Here is the monolithic full game,” because who knows, you make that whole game and someone’s going to be excited about some very specific thing in them. You read a whole book and you remember one little exchange. With *Vietnam Romance*, that’s been how I approach it. The project becomes a muse and the mixing of the media reflects my projects containing contradictions and tensions. Scale, people are like, “Well, why do you need to make a video game gigantic?” We built a giant big analog CRT that was 20-feet tall and had a rear projection, and you’re this little person hooked up to it with it. Museum guests play it and that completely changes. It makes you think about a system and a player very different from you with all the agency. There is no logic to it other than experimentation and pushing things together from different media to see what they can do. I’m a very undisciplined artist in both terms of that word—so I don’t have discipline and I lack discipline as well. On the positive side, I found it to be a great partner for experimentation which is a term that gets thrown around a lot and people value it I think. Still, often they don’t value it because what people want is accomplishment, completion, something. I believe in experimentation as something valuable. Still, it must produce something, that it’s not apologetically an experiment. It’s emphatically an experiment that is really important to me in my work and in the lab and keeps me going. Almost always try something new when you can. The mashup of media is also working to open up new space for what can be done. It’s been rewarding to see these experiments or this lack of discipline produce resonance in other artist’s work—whole approaches of looking at things because my training and other people’s was on discipline. We’re allowed to do things that you couldn’t do in a company, or if you had to make a serious game about something, or you had to make a commercially viable object, or you had to show something at a fine art museum, so it had to be palatable for a certain. By moving between film, and theater, and performance art, and sculpture, and all that blending—it’s not just chaos, it’s each one provides an opportunity for collaboration. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/VIETNAMROMANCE800DPI_-43.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/VIETNAMROMANCE800DPI_-42.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/VIETNAMROMANCE800DPI_-9.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/VIETNAMROMANCE800DPI_-54.jpg) Stills from "Vietnam Romance." ***How does collaboration factor into your work?*** I have a project called *Games With Friends* in which I work with other artist friends who really aren’t game folks and just say things like, “Let’s try to make a game together with equal weight to different practices and see what that produces.” Within that project, I like a project called *Goldenstern*—It’s like a family tree Pachinko pinball game. All the illustrations for it are made by my friend, John Haddock who’s an artist and illustrator. We have a similar perspective on the horrors of pop culture and personal life folding into fantasy life. He’s a really close friend of mine and it’s a long story. He has a very complicated family history and he was telling me about over dinner and while he was doing that, I was taking notes just because there were so many people and it was so complicated. I created this diagram of his and his wife and family with all the characters and it was like this artifact. That sat there. Another idea is like I was always interested in my family’s noses. We’re from Israel, Jewish family, a lot of hooked noses in the family. My wife, her nose is the opposite, and her family have these very curvy noses. I wanted to make some game where you scan your nose and then just a skiing game on people’s noses. Also, I thought it would have to be about Judaism and big noses. Then we had a kid. All these ideas combined into one project—John Haddock’s family tree, the noses of my family, worrying about children and their future, some almost comical but disturbing references to money and inheritance funneling in. This game funnels money to this child, our child at the end, through these different families. I often thought about that project as games-as-portraiture. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Screenshot-2017-04-09-14.07.57-scaled.jpg) A still from 'Goldenstern.' ***For your projects, how do you think about form and concept in tandem?*** It’s a fundamental question. It’s where the magic can happen. People often ask, “How’d you come up with that style?” I respond with, “It comes from an inability to draw a different way or not really being a good 3D model.” There are many ideas bouncing around all the time. It’s what I do all day. They’re both conceptual ideas and sometimes structures or systems, what you would call maybe a medium but they’re always being investigated and rethought. I’ve always been sensitive to what I call the Grid Theory—there’s basically one axis: new media emerge and become available, games, VR, AR, AI, machine learnings, outer space, bioengineering art, whatever, cloning, camera surveillance, drones. The other axis consists of tried and true concepts: a self-portrait, an investigation of gender inequality, a historical revisitation of place, minimalism, abstraction, expressionism. Then there becomes these triangulations on the grid like, “Oh, let’s take drones and self-portraiture. What do we end up with? Okay, let’s make a drone that looks like my face and I’ll fly it around.” “There is my self-portrait as a drone.” That would be a project that would get attention in a new media concept. It’s highly problematic as an artist to think that way where you’re adding X to Y to create Z. It takes you out of the equation; you’re just filling these blocks. Being aware of this problematic binary dual way, I just have them all floating and the way they connect almost has to be serendipitous. For me, it’s not a deliberate choice exactly. I’m mostly interested in conceptual projects, but also I care about media and experimentation and formal experimentation. The medium is the message is certainly a provocative and strong statement that any media artists would take dear to their heart. That’s what it is. Again, as more people make games specifically who don’t come from art, but from other media, they have very different approaches. “How do you preserve this multidisciplinary medium? In games, it’s like, “Programmer, Artist, ‘Game Designer, Producer, Conceptual Designer.'” How does that hierarchy play out? Does it need to be a hierarchy? It’s also really important to constantly shuffle that. Again, that speaks back to your previous question of concept and format. That’s shuffled all the time. You’re never subordinating one of these aspects of a project to the other. You’re not saying, “For me, it’s all visual,” or, “It’s only concept,” or, “It’s only the cool game mechanics.” Basically, everything is a mess \[laughs\]. --- ### Credits Photography courtesy of Eddo Stern. ### Links [Eddostern.com](https://eddostern.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ### A peek inside UCLA’s Game Lab URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-peek-inside-uclas-game-lab/ Last updated: 2024-09-27T03:43:53.000Z ## Down the rabbit hole *Sitting at the intersection of the art, architecture, and media arts departments in one of California’s leading public research universities, the UCLA Game Lab champions* [*“conceptual risk-taking and the development of new modes of expression and form through gaming.”*](http://games.ucla.edu/blog/eddo-stern-interviewed-david-ogrady-ucla-game-lab?ref=killscreen.com) *When artist Eddo Stern began to explore the creation of the Lab over a decade ago, he was adamant about preserving the experimental nature of the Lab. “When you build some framework or institution, there’s always people looking to justify what you’re doing on other terms in order to fund you. With the Lab, we have the luxury of not having to do that. We don’t have to sell products, get technical research grants, or just make games that are good for society. We can have everything side-by-side, cross-filter, and experiment with poetry, theater, writing, music, live games, the body, VR,” Eddo says.* *With classes centered around games and experimentation, workshops that bring the brightest interactive thinkers and creators to campus, and game jams—UCLA undergraduates and graduates can pursue fellowships, residencies, and more with the Lab. “We’re pretty much a Luddite lab and a technologies lab at the same time,” Eddo, who is now the Game Lab’s Director, says.* **“*Most of the students that come here because they see our work or alumni work and they like it and they want to work with us” There’s always a hope that students do something new and special for this moment in time,” Eddo says. “The work coming out of the Lab is experiments. Some work out, some don’t, and that’s cool too. We don’t have a model of success that we impose on students. We preserve experimentation, and allow ourselves to go down some rabbit hole—that’s part of the joy of the Lab.”* *Below, you’ll find some of the artists attached to the Game Lab, and a bit about their exhilarating latest projects.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/02.jpeg) The UCLA Game Lab champions conceptual risk-taking in immersive media and the interactive arts. ## **Jenna Caravello** **Artist, Associate Director of the Game Lab, Assistant Professor of Design Media Arts at UCLA** *With a background animation and presence in Chicago’s DIY music community, Jenna began using Unity at the beginning of her MFA at CalArts, and thought to herself, ‘this is who I am.’ With an exciting body of work that stretches the interactive medium into the worlds of classical animation and music videos, Jenna supplements her practice with teaching courses that revolve around digital bodies and avatars, among other fascinating topics.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Screen-Shot-2021-08-16-at-10.39.08-AM.jpg) A digital self-portrait by Jenna. ***How has the UCLA Game Lab shaped the way you think about games and interactive practice?*** Students in the Game Lab are deeply motivated artists and researchers who experiment with games to express themselves—and not just video games, but board games, role playing games, card games—you name it. It has been so inspiring to work with these students because they embrace different game modalities to make projects that are art, foremost, regardless if there is a precedent or obvious platform for their work. Most of the time, Game Lab students create projects that defy conventions in ways I have never seen. This year, a student named Ivy Lovett made a multiplayer chat game where you can sit on a piece of trash with your friend and roleplay as houseflies. Another student, Sam Malabre, made an immense set of guidelines for a game, nestled in a laboriously crafted web of research, facts, and almost-truths about Call of Duty. ***How would you describe your current game practice? What are your primary concerns, conceptually and technically?*** On one hand, I value storytelling and worldbuilding in games as a means express my feelings and explore my fascinations—dystopian futures, mortality, transhumanism, Jewish symbolism, etc. But I’m also an easter-egg-scamming, see-what-I-can-do-with-this-lead-pipe-equipped, main-storyline-avoiding, NPC-following kind of gamer. I spend a good part of my time in any game trying to clip out of bounds. So, although I am concerned with craft, narrative, and bearing my heart, I like to say that the most important reason to make games are the qualities that set them apart from single-channel films, *specifically*—things like player agency, thoughtful mechanics and physical controllers for input, exploring, collecting, choosing to do nothing, cheating, and the weird poetic beauty of clipping your playable avatar’s head through a basket of oranges—all within a greater narrative framework. I want to make games that are part wink-wink dialogue between player and designer, part therapy, part immersive fantasy. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/AmberRow1.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/AmberRow3.png) Two stills from "Amber Row." ***Tell us about your project, Amber Row.*** *Amber Row* is an experimental third-person VR game that I began working on in 2017\. The project explores how I felt after my mother passed away almost a decade ago—particularly my fear of forgetting little details about her as I grow older. In the narrative of the game, “Amber Row” is a virtual street located in what was once a massive multiplayer online platform. The player can collect memories in the form of carefully painted objects and return them to the shadows of previous players to learn about their lives. For me, there is an easy parallel between spending too much time alone in a virtual world and grieving. Dwelling on old feelings can be like treading water—tiresome and unproductive. *Amber Row* was supported by the Princess Grace Foundation and Stephen Hillenburg family (of SpongeBob fame!). I am forever grateful that these folks were interested in my experimental game project. ***What was the biggest learning experience from Row?*** Working on *Amber Row* has become a kind of endurance performance in its own right. It can be emotionally exhausting to return to the same project about loss year in and year out, so I allow myself the joy of making changes to *Amber Row* as I go. This way of working keeps me engaged, but it has prevented me from feeling like the project is ever truly finished. It’s ironic that I hold on so tightly to a game about letting things go. The biggest lesson I have learned while working on *Amber Row* is that there needs to be a better balance between the scope of a project and its relevance to my life; my ability to stay emotionally engaged versus the number of years the game will take to complete. ***What are you currently working on?*** I am working on some interactive installations that I am really excited about—a three-channel piece with custom keyboards called *CANTO IX* and a single-channel motion capture installation tentatively named *Go Slow*. These smaller interactive pieces are so liberating to work on! Installations like these allow me to engage with ideas about games and game mechanics technically and conceptually, but they are scalable for a public gallery setting. *CANTO IX* and *Go Slow* both entice this kind of gamer impulse to test the limits of NPC programming. I’m really interested in framing an interaction between player and game as a performance in a public setting, and both projects offer opportunities to role play—or to be a bit sadistic and break the game. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/AmberRow4.png) ## **Esther Abosch** **Artist, Historian, Former Game Lab Resident, and UCLA Design Media Arts (BFA ‘19)** *Interested in pre-technological society and interested in nature and handicrafts, but also computer games, Esther is a deep thinker. For the Game Lab fellowship, she made a project called Idyll— a Walden-esque utopia that centers on returning to nature. This project challenges that idea and says, “It was never alone with nature and it’s about community and people with nature. Esther is preparing for a year-long English teaching gig in Japan, and has been contributing to the creation of a commercial project at Serious Games.* ***How does the UCLA Game Lab factor into your overall trajectory as an artist?*** The Game Lab was probably the most valuable resource I had during my time at UCLA. Up until the point I joined I was working with building blocks from a handful of Unity tutorials and not thinking outside of the game genre essentials. I really started thinking of myself as a Game Designer and artist after I was allowed the opportunity to collaborate on the creation of a game for the Game Lab Fellowship. ***How has the UCLA Game Lab shaped the way you think about games and interactive practice?*** The Game Lab was where I first started thinking of mechanics and styles of interaction as narrative and instructional tools. Since then I’ve been striving to use games as a means of teaching through immersive fiction and intuitive semiotic cues, as opposed to rote memorization. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/unnamed-8.png) Still from "Idyll." ***How would you describe your current game practice? What are your primary concerns, conceptually and technically?*** My recent professional work has been in Serious Games and my chief focus has been in intuitive User Experience Design, which often falls to the wayside in the realm of simulation, training, and educational games. I think accessibility is an important facet to consider, though, and helps to make an end product with a longer lifespan. ***Tell us about your project,* Idyll*.*** I made *Idyll* with Wenrui Zhang in my Senior year for the Game Lab Fellowship. The concept was a kind of management sim/farming game where developing and maintaining relationships with characters directly corresponded to the health of your crops. All of the characters were from famous American tall tales. One of my interests that has persisted is the teaching of historical empathy through game mechanics, and this was a small attempt at something like that. ***What was the biggest learning experience from the project you just spoke about?*** *Idyll* and the Game Lab Fellowship were my first foray into project management. Although my team was just me and Wenrui, I found myself learning about version control, project roadmaps, milestones, and scope management on the fly. I’d say I definitely bit off more than I could chew for that project, but I’m still proud of how it developed. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/unnamed-7.png) ## **Zheng Fang** ***Artist, Current Game Lab Resident, and UCLA Design Media Arts (MFA ‘21)*** *With a background in traditional painting and sculpture, Zheng Fang’s games are conceptual artworks manifested as virtual worlds. For the recent MFA grad’s game, Corona Time, Zheng scanned his own very small living space, as well as himself. You can control Zheng as he walks around his living space. The scanned artifacts in this simulation are viscerally, texturally dark, gritty, beautiful. For the project, Zheng asked friends of his around the world to also scan their small living quarters. There are some things one can trigger inside of his own room that will work as a portal to bring you to these other spaces that are scanned in their own right. A meditation on Chinese internet culture and politics, the game’s hand-sculpted objects that is then photogrammetry and then brought into Unity. Corona Time is a project about both being stuck in place with your stuff and not moving and then also this longing to connect to other people.* ***How does the UCLA Game Lab factor into your overall trajectory as an artist?*** One of the biggest reasons I went to UCLA was the Game Lab. I’ve always been interested in games, but my previous educational background and environment made it difficult for me to systematically engage with digital media, especially games. And through the support of UCLA Game Lab, I made 3 games when I studied here. I still do not consider myself a game developer—I would say I use games as a major medium to make art. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/coronaTimeFinal.png) Stills from "Corona Time." ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/coronaTimeFinal_2.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/coronaTimeFinal_3.png) ***Tell us about your project, Corona Time.*** I’d been quarantined in my Los Angeles apartment for three months in 2020\. The whole spring quarter had become completely online, and every single flight back to China had been canceled. After that, I realized I hadn’t visited my friends in a long time. I missed my friends so much. I missed the places I have visited and the places I want to visit. Therefore, I began to learn how to make computer games and asked my friends to take photos for photogrammetry 3D reconstruction. I could then roam around in the game. ***What was the biggest learning experience from Corona Time?*** *Corona Time* is the first game I have ever made. In the class Game Design taught by Eddo Stern and Nick Crockett, my professors provided invaluable help with game making. Because of COVID-19 and not being a TA at that time, the whole spring quarter I was basically only working on this project every single day. As opposed to learning something in advance then trying to apply them to your works, having the desire to make something and then try to learn something would be more useful when referring to learning. ***What are you currently working on?*** I’m traveling, teaching, and making work. There is a game project I’m now working on which includes different scientists, theorists, phycologists, and artists from all over the world. However, I’m unable to talk about it in detail too much at the moment, but it should be a very interesting piece. --- ### Credits Images courtesy of Jenna, Zheng, Esther, and the UCLA Game Lab. ### Links [games.ucla.edu](http://games.ucla.edu/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow the Game Lab on Twitter](https://twitter.com/uclagames?ref=killscreen.com) ### Natalie Paneng's quirky and cool virtual universe URL: https://www.killscreen.com/natalie-panengs-quirky-and-cool-virtual-universe/ Last updated: 2025-05-27T20:52:46.000Z ### The South African artist on immersing yourself into the limits of a world *Whether as herself or performing one of her many alter-egos, Natalie Paneng’s oeuvre centers the online presentation of the self with a cosmic quality—and a bit of humor, too. “In my work, it’s hope, cuteness, play, or it’s dreamy, trippy, weird,” she tells us about the themes that capture her. Deftly maneuvering between the tangible and virtual worlds, the Johannesburg-based artist contributes to the rich conversation of what it means to be watched in the digital sense.* *We speak with Natalie about her background in theater and production design, the power of collaboration, and her creative process, which, at its crux, is all about leaning into a project unknown.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-19-at-10.40.03-PM-1.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-19-at-10.39.54-PM.jpg) ***Was there a moment that you knew you wanted to do something creative with your life?*** I grew up in Johannesburg, but the first four years of my life, I grew up in the Northwest with my grandmother. I was always close to my family. I was always playing, or I was always with my older cousins and forcing them to play. That’s the landscape, living with family or living with my grandmother and moving down to Joburg and still being the only child until I was seven. Then my little sister came about. Then I’d play with her. I realized now that play was the main artistic connection I always carried on as I grew, just being a playful kid. I was drawn to multiple media types, and I consume media like everyone, but I never thought about it being art. I was just myself. I was super happy. I was also in my head all the time. I was constantly just playing, creating worlds. When I was younger, dramatic arts is how I express myself. That whole thing of constantly re-enacting worlds and lives and characters is what kept this thing alive, and then varsity’s exposure and access. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-19-at-10.37.55-PM.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-19-at-10.37.43-PM-scaled.jpg) When I was applying for university, I thought I would study Law. I suppressed art for a long time in school, and I just saw it as something I did on the side, something I enjoyed, something I always fought to have but never thought about as a career, even though I was passionate about it. At university, I studied theater, and I wasn’t sure if I was happy in that space. I had to make the connection that expression could be turned into a physical output. That was how I got into visual art. I was almost only experiencing artists on the internet in a weird way. I didn’t jump out into experiencing the art world that was around me, except for if there was a gallery close by. Local artists, in that way, where I’d engage with arts and go to gallery spaces, and they mainly show local artists, and you start realizing that there’s a bunch of artists living amongst us—doing well, showing in these galleries. I found three important artists who were local at the time—[Tabita Rezaire](https://www.tabitarezaire.com/?ref=killscreen.com), [Bogosi Sekhukhuni](https://www.stevenson.info/artist/bogosi-sekhukhuni/biography?ref=killscreen.com), and [Dineo Bopape](https://www.artsy.net/artist/dineo-seshee-bopape?ref=killscreen.com). I realized that these are people in the same country and context as me creating digital work that was super interesting. I found them on the internet, and they completely changed my perspective. Other than that, I was experiencing more of my context in terms of Black artists. I always engaged with international artists whose work I found interesting. That’s always cool, but it also sometimes is quite detached. We can still enjoy the work, but it doesn’t always click immediately because of our context. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/HOTSPOT4XENO-SCREENSHOT.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/HOTSPOT-4X3NO-SCREENSHOT-2.png) "Hotspot 4X3NO." ***Many of your current practice deals with the online presentation of the self, merging the public and the private self. What were the aspects of theater that you chose to leave behind in your practice?*** When I was in theater, I realized it was hard for me—it was just performance. I felt anxiety. I’ve always loved the performance, and I’ve always enjoyed being on stage, but when I got to university, it just felt so different. I felt like I was stuck. I still appreciate theater. It framed my practice because once I realized that performance was not for me in the way that it felt like I had to be on stage, and also the archetypes of the characters that I thought I had to play all the time, all of those elements complicated my understanding of theater. I moved into production design in my second year. That transformed everything for me because I could start building worlds and understanding the framework of stories and creating stories, creating worlds and how characters fall into roles, and costume, and all that kind of stuff. In some way, I still work on the principles of theater. I wanted to do it; to break it up. There are so many things happening outside, and I felt like we’re still being taught the idea of theater that I had years ago was inside. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-19-at-10.38.47-PM-1.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-19-at-10.39.15-PM-1.png) I was like, “Why isn’t this evolving?” I now realized that it doesn’t need to evolve. It’s a beautiful medium on its own. I could develop and take what I needed to take from it. That taught me everything. I could be a character but with less of an audience which feels like I could stumble in front of an audience that I’m aware of the gaze but I’m also playing into it. I’m on the same vibe as performance, but moving it online and having my own type of control. Theater gave me the foundation necessary to create what I create. I took that and said, “Do this in this space.” I want to do this online. I want to do this by myself, with less pressure. I want to do this with my own stories. I want to present stories, and I want to narrate how this should look and who I get presented as, representation. It felt so messy sometimes, feeling like a character has to be this or whatever and being young and not knowing who you are, so you don’t want to embody all these things. I thought “How do I figure out who I am and use what I’ve learned and bring them into one thing?” ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/NICEATOPIA-SCREENSHOT-1.png) "Niceatopia." ***How does your creative process begin?*** I have an idea and get dressed and shoot, and then I would edit and then let the edits tell me what the story was and what was the reason for having this crazy, haphazard idea. Sometimes, I used to feel like ideas came to me, and then I had to be present and execute them. Now, my process has changed a lot more because, in the beginning, I wanted my art to inform me about myself. It was like putting the lens on myself, playing around, looking at myself, editing, and then presenting myself to the world. Now I’m like, “I know I have this power now. I can do this. I understand. I know myself a bit more.” It’s shown me a lot, and I’ve figured out a lot in it, but now, I’m like, “What propaganda can I insert, basically, in the world through my work now that I know that there’s a purpose to this work?” Now, I think of the world that I want to be in. of the kind of message, or the kind of feeling, or if I want to create a dreamscape, I just \[snaps fingers\] the feeling, the confusion, the illusion, what elements could I bring out through the performance, or my editing, or the sounds? Now, I’m trying to enhance specific feelings, or thoughts, or moments. The process becomes what it needs to be. I need to shoot this, I need to edit this, but this is the idea behind it. The editing is always the most important part because I can shoot something random and then find out that it’s deeper than I thought when I’m editing. That’s when I can transform and create something real. The process is simple. It’s just ideas, shoots, edits. Then that’s when I’m like, “This is where I must be careful about what I’m trying to show.” ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-19-at-10.39.23-PM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-19-at-10.39.32-PM-1.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-19-at-10.39.01-PM.jpg) All of the scripting and the idea happens in post for me. My process works all around ‘sometimes.’ Sometimes, I want to create walls. Sometimes, I’ve been working with models now, like paper models. Sometimes I’m like, “Well, let me start with building this.” This year I’d have nothing, maybe because of the pandemic, but I struggled for so long to get back into creative work and being characters and all of that. I felt stuck being an artist, and I was like, “What can I do?” I was like, “Let me make models because I can do theater.” You make the model, and you present it, and it was like, “We like it. Change this.” It allowed me to be more tactile and work with my hands and tangibly see ideas and see myself inside a space. Also, elements brought into my process have helped a lot because now, I can physically build the world. Then from building the world physically, I’ll know what needs to go in there. I’ll just know how it needs to be edited. I know the feeling I want to present. In my work, it’s hope, cuteness, play, or it’s dreamy, trippy, weird. Those are the two ways. I’ve had to negotiate with the work like, “Today, are we going to be weird, or are we going to be cute?” \[giggles\] What are your options? These are the options. That’s how my process has been, and it’s been like that for a long time. I’m starting to like that a lot more now.I want to formalize it a lot more. Technically, I always hit a wall. I’m like, “Cool. I need to get better at this technical thing to push the boundary of what it means to just perform online.” I also feel like I’m just performing online, but everybody is, and that’s what my work is saying, is this is how I choose to perform, but I want to have an updated version of what this online performance needs. I feel the more technical skills I learn and the more technically skilled I am, knowing more will help my practice and help my agenda be spread. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Looking-At-Myself-Sincerely-8-Natalie-Paneng-worked-scaled.jpg) "Looking at Myself Sincerely." ***Does the audience cross your mind at all when you’re working?*** While I’m working, I cannot even think about how it will look in the edit, so I don’t even think about the audience just yet. I care a lot about immersing myself in character. It’s so personal sometimes because I’m so inside it that it’s so singular at that point of creating and even editing. In its final form, my work recognizes that it’s being viewed and it, to an extent, tries to make the viewer feel like they’re being watched, too. That’s more my perspective, performing to a lens, making the lens aware that I’m watching it, but I’m not trying to be affected necessarily by the outside world. That’s why I create worlds, because everyday life is being affected by engaging with people, being affected by the response, being affected by being viewed and watched, and people attempting to understand you from a few engagements. Through this work, I’ve allowed myself to have space where there’s little space for a gaze that will stop me from being anything out of this world, or in this world, or weird. I need that space. It’s personal, close, and that’s why a play is great because you’re not thinking about these things if you’re playing. I don’t think about it. It’s mainly me playing, and so because it’s me playing, it’s doesn’t matter if anyone says anything because I was playing, and I had fun, and that would exist. Iin my general life experience, I feel different, or the world does that thing that sometimes you feel different, and people make you feel different. They question elements about you. “Why do you do this?” Subconsciously, I’ve made sure that there’s a separate world where there are few questions. I know they exist, and I’m open to hearing what that is because I know that it is a practice and, like now, giving work out, and I would love to know. I know people see my work, and I’m open to it, but I’m always sharing it more than anything. Even though it’s a performance, and I know it’s being viewed, it feels more like sharing something I did or a game I’m watching or that you should watch, too. I never think about the critique or the viewpoint that this could be watched. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-19-at-10.38.16-PM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-19-at-10.39.07-PM.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2021-07-19-at-10.37.09-PM.jpg) ***You mentioned the word game. Can you elaborate on the role of a game or that interactive interaction in your work?*** When I speak about game or play, it’s fully giving into the willing suspension of disbelief, immersing yourself into the limits of the world that you’ve created, and the limits or lack of limits of the character. It feels like a game because the restrictions are a bit less or it’s a bit weak. I say game because it’s play. It’s the give-and-take, “If I do this, what’s the reaction?” I want to make games, but I’m not technical in terms of gaming gears—the ethos of the my work is more in that space. ***How did your project, Vaporwave Response Computer, come to fruition? What was the first thought that inspired you to make it?*** That’s one of my favorite projects. At that point, I was struggling with being a digital artist and presenting my work. Vaporwave as a subgenre was one of the first things I found on Tumblr. I got obsessed early. As I was figuring out art, I was also figuring out vaporwave, and they merged and intersected without much of my control. I was creating in that way for a long time, and I wanted to give an ode to the subgenre that woke me up. Then I was like, “How many people don’t know about this here in South Africa?” or, “How many people have never seen this kind of genre applied to the Black body?” The same energy, the same play—it’s this subgenre from my perspective. I broke down what I thought Vaporwave was and presented myself in different spaces by playing with how the genre should look and how I reinterpreted the genre. What has been South African Vaporwave for a long time, too. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/VAPORWAVE-RESPONSE-COMPTER-SCREENSHOT-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/VAPORWAVE-RESPONSE-COMPUTER-SCREENSHOT-2-scaled.jpg) "Vaporwave Response Computer." I only realized later that the connections I made could be presented as creative research.” Even when doing creative research, I think, “I don’t want to write that down as an essay. I want to present it artistically;I still want to present ideas playfully.” I created the app, and it also functions as a game as a viewing space. It’s also light, playful, but it offers a different perspective and a different engagement with the genre from my perspective. I want a bit more power to go into the narrative of digital aesthetics and all of the stuff that exists online and take a small corner in that space and be like, “Hey, this is what I’ve taken from this,” or, “Hey, here’s how I would separate this information and throw it back in play. Here’s how I would present it from my experience and my context.” This is creative research, but I want it all to be done through play as a tool that generates information and answers for myself and others. --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted in June, 2021\. Photography by [Lesedi Mokoena](http://instagram.com/1454%5F?ref=killscreen.com). ### Links [Follow Natalie on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/nataliepaneng%5F/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) ### Creating in real-time with Dalena Tran URL: https://www.killscreen.com/creating-in-real-time-with-dalena-tran/ Last updated: 2024-09-27T03:47:53.000Z *Language and expression; presence and immateriality; play and pause—these themes are the heart of* [*Dalena Tran’s*](https://dalena.me/?ref=killscreen.com) *practice, one that sits at the intersection of film, interactivity, installation, and thought. Her latest time-based project, the single-take film* [*Incomplete*](https://vimeo.com/537999129?ref=killscreen.com)*, is a collaboration with multihyphenate artist Ash Koosha. It takes inspiration from Hito Steyerl’s concept of the democratized ‘poor image’—which Dalena notes is ‘collected, copied, and processed to the point of disorientation and anonymity,’ which illustrates ‘a different perception of coherency.’* *Dalena sat down with us to speak about the mechanical poetry behind Incomplete, the triumphs of making time-based work inside a game engine, and what it means for a medium to shape perception.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/001.png) From the interactive web comic "The Delay" ***Who and what were your early influences, either in games, film, or art?*** Some early influences were works that circulated online. Don Hertzfeldt’s *Rejected* and Chuck Jones’ *The Dot and The Line* come directly to mind. Delightful and so clever to watch simple, abstract shapes take on personalities that could have affective resonance through sound and movement. However, it was when I watched *Salaam Cinema* by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, as a Sophomore in college, that I seriously took to studying film. The mockumentary revealed a shifting veneer between cinema and reality; reality and fiction. Of course, my film studies in the beginning were focused really on the theoretical study of the films themselves, if you could even call it that. It was an excuse to watch films and write essays, take photographs, or make collages influenced by them. I was really enamored with the seemingly endless ways to engage with the medium and culture around it. It wasn’t until I watched *Julien Donkey-Boy* by Harmony Korine that I had an eagerness in making moving images myself. Each frame was like a painting. The conventions of storytelling were broken down into vignettes and portraits about the simple living of complex lives. The performances, camera movements, and edits were unnerving. It made whatever drama you thought you were watching very existential, tragic, and beautiful. I think what affected me the most about the film was the way Korine really captured the beauty of the format that was used to film the work. The film is shot on DV, and I was also using that format at the time to record interviews of musicians for a blog I was running on the side with some online friends. I thought there was really only one way to approach making images, and that was to: produce clarity, visibility, and reject aberrations. I had not seen a film capture the essence of the image by showing you the vulnerabilities of the format itself. It was really grainy and the edges of the subjects were blotchy and saturated. There was a clumsiness and agitation that transferred through the work that also emboldened and democratized the status of what a work of moving image art should and could be. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/002.png) "All Things Found" is one of Dalena's earlier experiments in datamoshing. ***How did your time studying film as an undergrad at the University of of Utah and graduate student at UCLA’s Design Media Arts program bring you into the world between films and interactivity?*** I was producing very experimental work in film school. This was a program that expected students to receive an education to be employed in the industry, which only makes sense in the U.S., but I wanted to try a whole bunch of things and see what would happen. I knew what I was making was pretty weird for most of my classmates and teachers, and I was still processing a lot of youthful angst through my work. Outside of film school, I was designing and coding websites. I was making gifs, filming mundane things with my hi-8 camera, and writing poetry. This is also the time, between 2013-2016 that Tumblr and Facebook had their moment, and 3D graphical software were becoming more accessible. I used it, and so did my partner, Hirad Sab, along with other artists like Vince McKelvie, Eva Papamargariti, Kim Laughton, and Rachael Archibald, who were also all making work predominantly on the internet. While I loved my time in film school, I needed the language and context to explore a lot more that I didn’t have access or support for. While some of my works are interactive, I’m drawn to tools and scenarios that are interactive as a part of making the work itself. In that sense, I think film is already interactive, with all these moving parts and players, scripts and timelines. Everything is always shifting, some things are rehearsed, but not all things are certain. Of course, a film, at the end, is linear and discrete. Film also has a slower timeline. It requires a very specific monolithic vision towards a form of expression because of all the pre-planned, moving parts. I was responding to an emerging scene of digital tools that were instant and dynamic, and altering the conventional notions of art on the web. UCLA’s DMA program really allowed for my experimentations to take place. In terms of interactivity, it was really built into the program on the undergraduate and graduate level. To be clear, I don’t necessarily go into a project or work with the intention of making it interactive. If it deals with interactivity, it is usually a consequence of the tool, the nature of the platform or format I am working with. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/003.png) One of the several layers of "Tempo Rubato" —An ongoing research project and installation on stolen time. ***What is the general design process for a project? How do you decide on a medium?*** I usually have a question, vague expression, or maybe even a conviction that can often come off as esoteric and disorderly. Most of the time these impressions are enough to guide me towards a medium and method. Thematically, I’m drawn to media and mediation. So when I do find a medium, I enjoy imagining the ways a medium shapes perception, how it moves in the world, or offers moments of subjectivity. With an impression and theme in mind, I tend to either write short stories or do some form of worldbuilding which can either become a part of the work or the catalyst to more interesting expressions. Generally, I tend to leave things open, because I learn a lot about the work through the process, and because that’s usually when compelling things happen. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/004-2-copy.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/004-1.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/004-3.png) 3D animation workflow between Blender and Unreal Game Engine for an AV project with musician Evy Jane. ***Some of your time-based projects have been made using game engines. What excites you about utilizing a game engine to construct a fictive world, and to disrupt our notions of time?*** Working with a game engine has the ability to create in real-time while also having a relationship between generative control and flexibility in the process. It becomes very easy to bring in a ton of models and assets to then duplicate, transform, hybridize, change materials, change the lighting, add animation, move the camera, and see all those changes happen in the viewport. You know, path-trace rendering would just take forever. Who wants to put together a scene and go back and forth between the viewport and a rendered image? It really dampens the creative process and also leaves less room for spontaneity or dynamic uses of the software. While path-tracing is surely more physically accurate, advancements in real-time 3D platforms in recent years has made working with software like Unreal Game Engine or Blender’s Eevee a game changer. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/005-1-copy-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/005-2.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/005-3-copy-scaled.jpg) From "Incomplete" ***What were the conceptual origins and design process of Incomplete?*** For Ashkan (aka Ash Koosha), *Incomplete* expresses the notion that the self is always changing, never complete. In addition, for me, *Incomplete* is a contemporary love song missing both the lover and the beloved. It reflects a paradox between over-stimulation and emptiness born out of a time of constant distraction and growing anxiety about the possibility of a future. While we offer different impressions of the song, they are not necessarily at odds; the sentiments hold relation to each other, and bring a unique tension in where they do contrast. I have great respect for my collaborative relationship with Ashkan. Not just because I enjoy his work and that he is a good friend of mine, but also because he has held space for a multiplicity of artistic visions to unfold. It takes faith in the creative process and an open mind to establish this aspect of collaboration. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/006-2.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/006-1-copy-scaled.jpg) Mapping values between 0 and 1 to generate the final GAN image in "Incomplete" ***For Incomplete, how did you go about translating sound into image?*** I wanted to animate the commotion and disjointed time-perception of today’s information. It is a scene where the ground no longer exists. All the forms are unstable, and all that is left to locate the space is the blue sky. Ashkan’s voice is the only familiar element that softens and grounds the song from beginning to end. His voice moves time forward even in the cacophonic wreckage. The camera’s single take continues at a steady pace as well. At the start, everything is moving and it never halts until the song finishes. The single take was a decision, also in part, to create temporal suspense. As for the person, doves, and horses in *Incomplete*, they’re poetic expressions that just happened as I continued working through the music. Birds and horses generally come up a lot as I work. They are creatures illustrious for their locomotion and I was thinking about what it means to “travel” today when so much of how we are conceiving speed and proximity is less and less through space, and more through light. The sounds in *Incomplete* are haptic; colliding and ricocheting off each other, creating electric and sharp discordances. This same effect is reflected in the animation and pictorial quality of the video. For this, simply put, I mapped GAN outputs onto the 3D forms. It becomes a generative process where each frame renders unique photographic amalgams in the animated sequence just slightly different from the last. As a result, this creates the trembling quality persistent in the video. This was an experimental discovery born out of a technical logic prevalent in node-based compositing and, in addition to, the generative characteristics of machine learning. Initially, this was a tedious workflow since there was a high margin of unpredictability and it wasn’t established as a protocol or into a piece of software. Hirad, with a knack to solve a technical problem, helped integrate custom features in my software that made working with the process more feasible and less excruciating. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/007-copy-scaled.jpg) From "Incomplete" ***What advice would you give to creatives who are working in liminal, undefinable mediums and spaces?*** There seems to be this disparity between what is possible and the language we have to imagine these possibilities; a condition that is inspired by, and conflicted with, nostalgia. Flexibility with language is a part of what contains or transforms our notion of what is art and how to perceive and engage with the creative process. In making things, whether for pleasure, necessity, or contract, there is some demand or expectation to define a creative work under existing mediums and formats, especially in order to receive institutional support or to receive the right clout from the right people. I don’t mean to dismiss a longing for the past, or to disregard what already exists, or even the validity of validation, but rather, to remind myself to leave space to experiment and be playful, and allow a creative work to be an indication of the time and context it exists in. --- ### Credits Photography by [Ian Byers-Gamber](https://www.ianbyersgamber.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Links [Dalena’s website](https://dalena.me/info?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Dalena on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/dalenaxtran/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Jakob Kudsk Steensen: Dreaming up a digital swamp URL: https://www.killscreen.com/dreaming-up-a-digital-swamp/ Last updated: 2026-04-27T20:36:51.000Z [](https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://killscreen.com/dreaming-up-a-digital-swamp/)[](https://twitter.com/home?status=https://killscreen.com/dreaming-up-a-digital-swamp/&ref=killscreen.com) *Deep inside Berlin’s most exclusive clubs lies an immersive media installation that harkens back to the city’s history. Berl-Berl is also “an instrument, a networked video game, a virtual environment, and a song for swamps.” Spanning 1400 square meters and two floors at Halle am Berghain in Berlin, Danish-born, New York City-based artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen created the immersive installation by wiring 13 computers to one another and to nine LED-powered walls. Inspired by the word Berl, which means ‘swamp’ in an old regional Slavic dialect, each sound and object has been digitized from local swamps, as well as the archive at Berlin’s Museum of Natural History. You can explore Berl-Berl virtually* [*here*](https://berlberl.world/?ref=killscreen.com)*.* *We speak with Jakob about his collaboration with musician Arca on Berl-Berl’s soundscape, working between the worlds of games and contemporary art, and how classic Japanese designer Hideo Kojima inspired him to construct virtual worlds.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Jakob_Steensen_photo_Pablo_Castagnola.jpg) Headshot by Pablo Castagnola. ***What role has first-person games have in shaping your creative practice?*** I grew up in a rural town of 1,000 people near the coast. This was the time studios Epic Games started to make expansive virtual landscapes that went on to become cultural icons. Games like Metal Gear Solid, Unreal Tournament, Quake, and Fallout 1 were the early foundations of games becoming major productions, and pop cultural household names during the late 1990’s and early 2000\. At this point, I was a teenager. Living in a rural environment, access to these vast and narrative virtual worlds absolutely blew me away—with their imaginations, stories, interactive dimensions. As did the sense of access to a different world than the one I had immediate access to. Where I lived for a good deal of my life was a bit of the ‘Bible Belt’ of Denmark. I moved there with my mom from Copenahgen, and I always felt a little outside of, or alien to, the families and cultures of where I grew up, so games gave me access to vast video alternative ideologies, pictures, characters, and creators. For many, games have a power to show the world can be different than what is immediately around you. So I started to mod video games. The map Facing Worlds, a multiplayer level in Unreal Tournament 1999, became an obsession of mine. It is a level where two teams compete. The landscape floats above earth, with our blue planet on the horizon and at the edge of your view. There are two tall towers with references to ancient Egyptian architecture. You can be at the top of the tower, with a holistic worldview of the level and earth beyond, or you can be on a bridge connecting the two towers—immersed, in the thick of it. I began taking maps apart, remaking them, making my own, and uploading them to forums on the web where I started to chat with other level designers. Several people I know today who have gone into the video game industry—owning studios, making music videos or working on titles—all started modifying games back then. There weren’t many educational formal routes you could take. Facing Worlds is an example of widely imaginative, but also clever and conceptual virtual world-making. It’s a kind of collage iconography, explorations of movement and vision, and how to be imaginative with technology. Hideo Kojima is a pioneer of more cinematic approaches to video games. I became interested in his games when he announced, out of the blue, Death Stranding at Tribeca Film Festival. I was showing at the festival the previous year, and got interested in how it placed game, film and experiential technology makers in the same room. It signals the rise of a new format of which I think Death Stranding is a part. Games today are barred behind many convoluted conventions of gameplay, interaction, male-gaze, stereotypical action heroes of which Death Stranding also belongs. Still, it signifies something new. A third format is on the rise, which I think many artists like myself explore, or like Team Rolfes and Pussykrew also start to venture into, in their own ways. I first thought I wanted to be an animator in video games, but learned when taking the formal test that I had to draw the same character 17 times. This immediately pushed me to be an artist, exploring these tools and technologies in much more visceral and at times chaotic ways. Being introduced to the tools early on means I have deep technical knowledge and I know how to design, create and tell stories through virtual environments. It was always primarily the virtual landscapes, sceneries, that interested me, and the ideologies behind them. This is also how I work today. I venture from research to emotion and imagination—and try to create different perspectives and worldviews with each artwork and virtual landscape I make. One projector never replicates the same perspective as the previous. How you think about how to design—how to create, and the ideologies behind them—will completely alter feelings, moods, spaces and how people interact with them digitally. Behind every virtual space created is an ideology. My work is connected to recent video game history, but also quite removed from it, as I primarily work in the field of exhibition-making; in contemporary art. What interests me about virtual world making is a sense of morphability, spatial poetry, and the ability to manifest in space new worldviews. I get to create with video game technologies, but for very diverse audiences who may never have played a video game. I find it appealing to both make for them, and for people like me who grew up with 3D. You get to make your own rules in a way, when using familiar tools like video game engines outside of video game fields. Though I am working on a game, and have published my work online previously on game platforms, I am interested in what lies beyond the cultural conventions of games,’ using the same tools. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Screen-Shot-2021-08-13-at-8.56.20-AM-scaled.jpg) ***In making ‘Berl-Berl,’ how did you push past creating ‘just an immersive show’—and holistically think about immersion in real, physical spaces? What, if anything, were you hoping to take from the world of games into physical installations?*** The concept of “immersive” shows has gotten a bit of a boom the last five years. It is often associated with large projections, colors in space, and large spectacles and screen effects. For me, I try to make things slow. Extremely crafted, and about a sense of meditation and rhythm. Every work I create is literally created the way I described Facing Worlds as a map in UT1999\. In that way, my work when showing in physical space, actually follows a bit older game design principle. I create entire virtual landscapes. They have physics—things move up, down, to the side, but also through each other, and different plants, rocks and entities can morph into each other, change texture, sound and transform into something else. Things are never static in my work, which is how I try to break the otherwise more traditional approach I have to making maps in games. I draw out on paper the design for different environments, and their feelings, their moods and colors. Is this location supposed to feel enclosed or open and welcoming? How does it connect to the next space, and give a sense of progression in a story (Without words) or a transformation? More traditional 3D world-making can tell stories without words, but through architecture, color, tone, speed and movement. These are qualities you work with in physical space, when the work shows as spatial sound, or when you connect physical performers to virtual worlds, or even how an audience moves through a physical space. Making game levels is like making puzzles for the mind and senses. This logic I take with me when making a work like Berl-Berl. You move through two floors of the building. Each area has a theme: some feel grand and with a holistic view, like the top tower in Facing Worlds. Others feel intimate, emotional, closer and immersed. I think carefully of what you see and hear in the physical space, connected to what is shown and played in sound from the virtual. Material might feel closeup, of fungi underground, roots or leaves, intimate. Or, a camera in the virtual landscape might show an entire landscape on a huge screen, giving a more cinematic and holistic connection to the virtual landscape. I also literally built the entire exhibition first as a multiplayer first person game I use with my team to explore possibilities and to pre-visualize and get a feeling for the final show. I always do this. So any physical show actually also exists as a multiplayer map in first person and VR. Whatever you access a virtual world with, be it in VR, screens, AR, or first-person, connects to the physical site you are in when doing so—especially for museum exhibitions. Museums are often in possession of large open physical spaces you can modify. Modifying them and making a choreography of movement IRL, is very similar to doing so in first person multiplayer games, where multiple synchronized paths of movement are necessary rather than linear ones. I often also adjust the virtual spaces to the physical ones. In Berghain, I have literally built the virtual swamp on top of a 1-1 model of the building I made—so the scale of architecture and imagery connects. Behind the scenes, Berl-Berl is actually a multiplayer game 13 computers play together, moving through the landscape at different paces and in different movements, depending on what screen a computer is connected to, and if it is supposed to feel more intimate or removed and objective, giving different ways of perceiving and feeling connected to the digital swamp of the work. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Screen-Shot-2021-08-13-at-8.57.04-AM-scaled.jpg) ***How did you get to collaborate with Arca on the soundscape for ‘Berl-Berl,’ and how did you factor sound into the overall sensory experience?*** Berl-Berl is made as an instrument. It includes 29 speakers, 13 computers and nine LED walls. Everything is connected to each other, and sends information back and forth. As a result, the building becomes a living instrument. If a branch appears on one screen, the computer tells the server, and it then specializes and playback sounds of that specific branch, in that specific part of the building. Other sounds, like the weather, exist in the entire building as a holistic environmental effect. As screens, each connected to one computer, journey through the virtual landscape together, they trigger different hyper-spatialized sensory sounds, alongside what we refer to as global effects like wind, clouds, frost, and larger transformations that happen in the work as it journeys from forest to undergrowth, and from summer to frosty conditions. These changes happen all the time, at their own randomized pace, creating a kind of living instrument. Everything is very rhythmic and musical in how they have been edited. We connect Unreal Engine to MAX MSP, to Spat—a software that can hyper spatialize sound across the 29 speakers. We used impulse responses—measurements of the building’s natural echo of about seven seconds—to make the sound. Sound naturally bounces around space, making it hard for the audience to pinpoint exactly where sonic aspects come from. Arca is a key component in this instrument. Berl-Berl is based on research into mythologies of lost languages, songs and concepts about swamps and wetlands. From this research, I created notions and words shared with all collaborators. Arca sang words and vocals which refer back to these swamp mythologies. She also sang to the building, as if it was a cathedral, playing with the natural echo. Her voice fills the entire building at times, like when in a church, and at other times appear like soft whispers in different hyper-local areas. The songs are triggered under specific conditions and places in the virtual swamp, determined by the server. So song, and language, goes hand-in-hand with the virtual transformations. The singing also is very sensory, but often without words, but sung as if in a cathedral. This mixes a kind of animistic feeling with something more modern and Christian. Modern religion demolished many of the older wetland cultures and their worldviews, so we mix them into a new form. I am also moved by Arca’s talent and precision, and found it interesting to work in a format outside more conventional music. To me, this has been one of the most rewarding and interesting collaborations to date. It brings song, language and a sense of improvisation to an otherwise fairly complex and large-scale creation using technology. This is where I want to go in the future… towards musicality, performance, and life in technology. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Screen-Shot-2021-08-13-at-8.56.40-AM-scaled.jpg) ***In what ways did the specific qualities of Berghain’s physical space shape the development of the piece?*** The building itself has been central to the creation of the work. I normally live in New York, where I am part of the “immersive” media community, which I love and enjoy. But I am more of a foreigner to Berlin. I have been based here since November making Berl-Berl. I found it important to embrace the iconic building itself, associated with nightclub culture and the more recent post-cold war version of Berlin. This is also why I worked a lot of musicality into Berl-Berl and reached out to Arca. It was important to me that the project felt like it embraced local sensibilities in Berlin, and in Berghain. But I also didn’t want to make something flashy, fast, and clubby. I wanted to make something of a third format, something new, more poetic and slow. The virtual world of Berl-Berl is spatialized exactly to the building itself physically also. But I think the most important thing was for me to make something that doesn’t try to be what Berghain has been in the past, but also not just take it over with an “art” exhibition. It is a tricky place to operate, between different fields and expectations. After the long COVID lockdown, I felt it necessary to both embrace what was in the past, while also signalling something new. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Screen-Shot-2021-08-13-at-8.57.12-AM.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Screen-Shot-2021-08-13-at-8.56.56-AM.jpg) --- ### Credits Interview conducted in August 2021\. Headshot by [Pablo Castagnola](https://www.pablocastagnola.com/?ref=killscreen.com). ### Links [Jakob’s website](http://www.jakobsteensen.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Jakob on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/jakob%5Fkudsk%5Fsteensen/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) ### Darlene Barahona: Narrative design and the path (not) taken URL: https://www.killscreen.com/darlene-barahona/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T01:26:10.000Z *Darlene Barahona is expanding the boundaries of what it means to be a narrative designer. Born and raised in the ‘desert heatscapes’ of Los Angeles, Darlene has a background in technical writing, cultural anthropology, and writing for the screen. She is an advocate of drawing from real life experiences, using the storytelling engine Twine, and a game’s replayability. We speak here about what game narrative can glean from film narrative, how archetypes and mythology can prompt developing characters, and how her time in the Pacific Northwest propelled her into the world of games.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/17-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/20-scaled.jpg) **What got you excited about narrative in the first place?** I grew up in LA, and the city is one of my first major influences in life. My dad was a paralegal—he did lots of driving all over the city. Little Darlene always went with him everywhere. I remember driving to all of these new places in this massive city and always being amazed at the number of places and the different people, neighborhoods. That instilled in me this desire for exploration and travel that laid a basis for my love of storytelling. My favorite parts of narrative that I like to focus on are world-building, environmental storytelling, and character design. It goes back to the traveling I did in my city. I remember my dad would give me a paper map (this is back before GPS) and say, “You’re going to navigate.” Many of those things seeped into the way that about storytelling and the world and how I build out worlds now in a digital space. I was obsessed with *The Legend of Zelda* series. I played the hell out of *Ocarina of Time* and *Majora’s Mask*. Those were the first games that I played where I wanted to explore the world. I want to be in this space and role-play going around—experiencing everything and then finding the little things, talking to the NPCs, seeing how villages were built out and feeling immersed. I did not grow up thinking I was going to be in games. I thought I was going to be an author. It took me a long time to realize that I didn’t necessarily enjoy the passiveness of writing a novel. My favorite part was the interactivity. I enjoy interacting with a world and an environment and with characters and I wasn’t going to get that by becoming an author or a screenwriter, which is why I began to deviate towards games—a space in which I can create spaces for people to explore and to feel immersed in. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/open_book.png) From Darlene's game prototype, "Red's Dead Redemption." ***You studied anthropology with a screenwriting minor. How did these two educational tracks shape your process?*** I essentially dabbled in film when I was in college. I entered as a film major thinking I wanted to be a screenwriter. At that point, I was still trying to figure out my creative and storytelling heartbeat. What I learned in film, I still use today. But it still wasn’t really what I was looking for in terms of writing for games. If there’s anything that I learned from screenwriting that helped in narrative design, it’s probably pacing. In screenwriting, there is a strong need to keep the momentum going, to keep this pace, especially in the specific scene. Film gave me an eye for, “Has this scene in this game gone long enough?” It taught me how to be shorter and almost punchier with my writing so that I am getting in and out fast as they say in screenwriting. If there is anything that’s done more in terms of learning narrative design and writing for games and world-building, it’s anthropology—studying other subjects outside of straightforward narrative design. Anthropology has given me the framework through which to think about building believable worlds. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/HeartofaMonster_Tool_Screenshot-scaled.jpg) A behind-to-scenes screenshot of the tool Darlene used to create "Heart of a Monster," GM Binder. Anthropology is the study of people; culture. When I think about what world I want to create in a game, I think about the things that make it believable. You start to think about society, economics, religion—things that build out a world. I’ve been playing through *Mass Effect* for the first time, and it does one of the most amazing jobs of taking all of those things into perspective, because it creates a believable world. If you look at a lot of franchises that feel very robust, it’s because they have taken all of these facets of culture and society in mind—especially if you’re thinking about sci-fi worlds and fantasy worlds. Anthropology gives me the most tools to do environmental storytelling and create believable characters. I found my place in anthropology. I also think that things like psychology, and even mythology and archetypes are important to storytelling. What roles are the players going to inhabit? Perhaps what other roles are NPCs going to inhabit? That’s a really good foundation for creating not just a digital game but also tabletop games. That thinking about archetypes is a really interesting way of beginning to build out a tabletop role-playing game. When I talk about the archetypes, there are many ways to think about that. Essentially, you have Carl Jung’s archetypes, you have Myers-Briggs, even astrology can be considered its archetypes as well. All of those are really good tools for building out characters because they all inhabit a specific role. They give you a good starting point for thinking about characters and the roles within a party, or whatever you’re trying to build. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Kai_updated.jpg) "Port Madrona." ***What was your first interactive world-building project like?*** One of my first deliberate projects was *Port Madrona*, which was part of my curriculum at the University of Washington. I worked with a team—luckily, we were all very, very into narrative and storytelling. We decided to create an experience that is essentially a visual novel with game elements. That was the first time that I got to think about and implement my love of world-building and character design. I had to figure out how to build texture into a universe—because, world-building, creating characters, creating the NPCs, making something that feels real is adding texture to a world; making it feel tangible. You can interact and make a difference. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/gameplay.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/open_book.png) From "Red's Dead Redemption." ***To build a world, you have to think about so many different scales—there’s the levels, character design, and the meta texture of the world as a whole. How do you think about these levels and scales of the world?*** The first thing is figuring out what the boundaries of your worlds are. With *Port Madrona*, we were under time constraints, so we knew that we didn’t want to create anything too massive, or an entire universe. We picked a location that we were all familiar with, which was a spooky little rural town in the Pacific Northwest. It made a lot of sense, and so we were able to find a lot of the inspiration in our backyards, on road trips that we’ve taken. So, first—what are the boundaries to the world? Second, when I’m creating a world, I already have some experiences in the back of my mind. Maybe it’s something that stood out to me on a road trip. Maybe it was an exchange I had with a random person. Maybe it was a street sign that I thought was hilarious for some reason. World-building continues with the personal. One of the most important things about narrative is to constantly be having very human experiences by traveling, experiencing, going out into the world and talking to people. That gives you an understanding of interacting with the real world? What are the things that stand out? Third, nothing beats a vision board. I will stand by vision boards 100% because they give you the look and feel of what you want to create. You start with the fun stuff—weird little locations, things that you would be interested in interacting with. Personalities that you would perhaps be interested in interacting with, and then also, thinking about those socio-cultural aspects again. What is the culture like? What are people like? What are the reasons for this? Are there any events or rituals that define culture within the boundaries of the world you are creating? The answers to those questions will help build out a believable world; make it something that feels real and interesting to those who inhabit it. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Heart_ofa_Monster_thumbnail-.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Port_Madrona_screenshot1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Port-Madrona_Screenshot3.jpg) Above, "Heart of a Monster." Below, "Red's Dead Redemption." ***Do you have a specific example of a moment in Port Madrona taken from a real experience that you had?*** Even the name *Port Madrona* comes from experiences and things that we’ve seen. There’s a thing called a Madrona tree and it is a real tree that grows in the Pacific Northwest, and this game is supposed to have elements of horror. It’s a dark humor game. We wanted to add in those more spooky elements. This Madrona tree has a red bark and when it rains, which it often does in the Pacific Northwest, it looks like the tree is bleeding. It goes from a light red to a deep red and looks pretty cool and pretty creepy. We thought the name that should define this town—the Madrona tree encapsulates that strange, weird, unexpected feeling that we were hoping to capture with this small world. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Port-Madrona_screenshot2.png) Port Madrona. ***What tools do you use for vision boards and narrative writing?*** My biggest tool for vision boards is Pinterest. It gave us a visual language to understand what we were going for when we wanted to create this world. In terms of what other programs we use, we ended up creating the game in something called [Ren’Py](https://www.renpy.org/?ref=killscreen.com)—it’s a visual novel game engine that lets you build them from the ground up. Normally, I use [Twine](https://twinery.org/?ref=killscreen.com) to build out games. This is the first time I used it because we didn’t want to include visual elements. I normally start with pen and paper, which many other narrative designers might deem crazy. I can’t handle the destruction of a computer and the internet. I normally start thinking about conversation flow and progression through pen and paper. I have a journal that is specific to conversations that I want to write and stories. Once I have my basic structure and I’m not writing out full pieces of dialogue, I’m building out the structure and putting in very brief filler dialogue—at least it gives me something to work off of. [Yarn Spinner](https://yarnspinner.dev/?ref=killscreen.com) is being another really good one that I’ve enjoyed using in the past. I will write directly into those tools and start creating those dialogues. The nice thing about writing directly into a tool is that I get to refine and test the flow as I go so that I’m getting a feeling for pacing. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/1-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/15-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/10-scaled.jpg) ***In traditional screenwriting, people prize ‘show, don’t tell.’ In games, when is dialogue necessary?*** In games you have to give players what’s called player agency. People do have to feel like it came from them. that show don’t tell in a game would be like when do you have a player act and do something? Make it part of gameplay rather than part of the story. Storytelling in a game should be pushed into the gameplay rather than, for example, cutscenes because then you create cutscene soup where it’s like, “I’d much rather be watching a movie at this point.” As a game writer, I also need to know when the game mechanics and the gameplay should carry the story rather than some side conversation or a cutscene. It should always feel like the player is the one making a difference in the world and the player is the one who is pushing forward the story, not some passive listening to this person talk. That is not the thing that should be pushing forward to the story. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/HoaM-mind-map_v1-scaled.jpg) A mind map Darlene created while planning "Heart of a Monster." ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/21-scaled.jpg) ***Your Port Madrona team mentioned how replayability is really important for the game and the players. You can reread or rewatch something, but you’ll have the same ‘experience,’ technically. What do you hope a replayable game can do for a player’s experience?*** Replayability is a way to discover an experience like wider parts of a game or a world. For example, *Mass Effect* lets you experience different moral quandaries, which is very, very cool. In RPGs, you get to make different types of decisions, many of those being moral decisions and exploring the multiple ways in which things could have gone are fascinating. Being a writer, it’s wild to think that someone who plays one playthrough is not experiencing the entirety of the content you have created. I want to experience all of that. I want to see what could have been different and what could I have done differently, how would that have changed, how would that have changed for the world, how would that have changed perhaps NPCs or companions or something like that. Seeing those little changes in a game is very cool. That all lends to the replayability of a game. I don’t think that every game needs to be replayable. Realistically, many players don’t replay games, which is fine. It’s creating a game with multiple branches but assuming that somebody will only play that game once. It builds a very unique experience for a player. They get to build, they get to create the storyline as they see fit. That goes back to player agency where the decisions made affect the world. Sometimes, it’s not necessarily about replayability, but it’s about the things that you chose not to do or the things that you did choose to do. Making a decision and there being consequences, makes decisions feel more impactful. Sometimes, it is replayable because there are many paths that you can take but that’s not the exciting part. The exciting part is, “Oh, my God, I did this thing. Now, it cuts off this other option and now it’s going down this path instead. There are things that now I won’t be able to see because I’ve made a decision otherwise.” It makes decisions carry a lot more weight to know that you have affected the world in this way. Something will happen in this other thing won’t. That’s why a game is replayable—you can explore what you didn’t go through. At the same time, it’s cool to know even if you decide not to replay this, things happened and I don’t know what could have gone differently. --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted by Alex Westfall in June 2021\. [Photography by Katy Pritchett.](http://www.katypritchett.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Links [Darlene’s website](https://www.oncuriosity.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ### A.M. Darke: Games interrogate and explore power dynamics URL: https://www.killscreen.com/a-m-darke/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T01:25:48.000Z *“I’m not married to games. I don’t care about games in this precious way. I just think they’re an exciting medium and a mega medium where you can do everything.” AM Darke is a critical game-maker and professor in the game department at UC Santa Cruz. AM’s project ‘Ye or Nay? operates as a clever spin on the classic Guess Who? In which Kanye West serves as a fulcrum to interrogate Black culture. Among many illuminating topics, we spoke with AM about the illusion of choice in games, decentering the white gaze, and ethical trolling.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/objectif_handpainted.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/insta_objectif.jpg) From "Objectif"—which is described on A.M.'s website as a social game that opens up a dialogue about the relationship between race, gender, and standards of beauty. ***Were there formative moments in your life where you thought you wanted to go into the critical game-making field?*** I have a distinct memory from the LA uprising of 1992, after the acquittal of four LAPD officers who were caught on tape beating Rodney King. I think this was the first time the public had seen a video of police brutality captured by a private citizen. We finally had ‘proof’ of how the police treat unarmed Black men, and the justice system still failed to hold them accountable. I was pretty young, but my grandmother put my mom and me in the car, and we drove around the neighborhood. I remember being this little kid and seeing big strip malls looted, stores on fire, glass everywhere. I wasn’t afraid because it didn’t feel like people were there to hurt each other; it was just private property being destroyed. I watched people taking things they needed, and wanted, in response to an unfair system. I vividly recall a man running past our car with a Super Nintendo under his arm. We only had a Nintendo at the time and I asked my grandmother if I could get a Super Nintendo. She said no. It took years later for me to get into critical game-making. I wasn’t an artsy kid. Inspired by the OJ Simpson trial, for most of my childhood I wanted to be a defense attorney. I was in a Law and Government Academy, and wanted to go to Harvard Law. That dream petered out when I was taken out of high school, and for years I really didn’t know what to do. I took some art classes at community college, but my social anxiety was so bad that I could never finish out a semester. Just after my 21st birthday, I went to Europe for a few months. I saw the Mona Lisa, as you do, and it was so underwhelming. You go in, it’s behind this velvet rope, and everyone else who’s viewing it is looking at it through a screen. Everyone is focused on documenting the fact that they were there. It felt so odd and disconnected from what I thought it would be. I knew then that I didn’t want my work to exist behind velvet rope, to be inaccessible. I didn’t like the physical distance between the audience and the work, and I also felt some contempt for folks who were mediating their experience, further distancing themselves, by viewing it through a screen instead of their own eyes. I figured if people weren’t going to look at the wall, I didn’t want to be on the wall. If people were going to fixate on the screen, then I would work with the screen. Although it really wasn’t about any particular technology, but creating things that were tactile and immersive. I wanted to make work that required focus and active engagement from a viewer. Another moment that influenced my practice happened in Barcelona, when I went to see *La Sagrada Família*. When people talk about the sublime and the sacred, this is it. From there I went to Park Güell and it feels like the complete opposite; it’s a life-size *Candyland*. It’s like walking around a gingerbread house and I loved that playfulness. I didn’t grow up with a lot of access to the world, so my ideas about art were these tropes and cliches I’d absorbed from movies and television. I thought that art had to be cold and pretentious, alienating. Some of it is. But seeing the range that one person had to create awesome things, be it a breathtaking tribute to god or a childlike wonderland, opened me up. I was less self-conscious about what art had to be, who it was for, and who could create it. I loved that you could be inside of Gaudí’s work. I loved the way it held your attention. You could take a picture of it, but the real experience was moving through it, touching it, being present. The concept of immersion clicked for me. I came back from that trip and signed up for five studio art classes. It was the first semester I ever finished. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/bush_flipped.png) "'Ye or Nay?" according to A.M.'s website, allows us to examine the language we use to describe and differentiate Black men: What does it mean to say “brown skin” when all of the subjects are Black? ***How do you think about comedy and satire in your work, given the weight of the themes and material you’re working on?*** I’m inspired by the surrealists and the Situationists.The playfulness of Magritte and Duchamp—I love artists with a sense of humor. I often feel like I exist in contexts that are normal to everyone else, but to me, are operating under the most preposterous logic. Speaking of things that are alienating and pretentious, graduate school was very disturbing for me. I don’t know that I would have made it through without Jayson Musson’s *Art Thoughtz* and Busdriver’s *Fear of a Black Tangent*. Humor makes me feel sane. Maybe because of my class background, I have a hard time taking certain aspects of art and high-brow culture seriously. It’s a luxury to be able to pontificate about art all day, forever. This is basically my life now, so I don’t mean it in a derogatory way. But when I attended UCLA, we had these hours-long conversations about formalism, or the value of net art, and it was all completely removed from the fact that Black people were being killed indiscriminately by the police. It’s not that I can’t enjoy debating the merits of flashing, poorly designed websites covered in neon squiggles. But we never talked about race, or poverty, or the impact it had on who we were, or could be, as artists. It drove me nuts. I still think about the harsh realities of the world I grew up in—a world defined by scarcity, hyper-vigilance, trauma, and survival. I’m still afraid of being pulled back into that life at any moment. The idea of people who are financially, physically, and (for the most part) emotionally safe, talking very seriously about nothing, at least nothing of material consequence, is amusing. Never more so than when I am those people. I was a 15 year old high school drop-out working as a phone psychic to keep heat on in our house; that I know who James Turrell is weird and stupid and hysterically funny. It’s like I’m not fully immersed in my own life. A lot of the humor in my work comes from my skepticism and ambivalence about the contexts I’m working in. Whether it’s academia, art, tech, or games—each of these spaces has a certain normative bent that I don’t want to neutralize my own voice. I have to keep myself somewhat detached in order to make work that is meaningful to me, work that remains authentic to who I am and who I have been. So much of my work is about how I interact with power and privilege, structurally and interpersonally. I use humor as a way to call attention to, challenge, and undermine power, but equally important is the cathartic experience. It’s great for the emperor to realize he’s got no clothes, but, if I’m already laughing, does it matter? It’s hard to fear something when you’re laughing at it. Maybe there’s revolutionary potential in that. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/bluest_ye_00-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Screen-Shot-2020-10-16-at-11.50.43-PM.png) "'Ye or Nay?" ***Many game makers believe that the interactive medium of games and displacing the power from the individual artists to the players. Do you see that as a way of addressing power concerning these ideas about humor you’re speaking about?*** I actually don’t feel like games displace power from artists. I never feel like my players have any power. If you don’t feel like an ancient god who’s trapped your players in a series of arcane riddles, what are you even doing? Even the idea that a player has power in my games is making me anxious, it means I’ve done something wrong. I do think games are great at exploring power *dynamics*. I love starting with a polemic and crafting a way for an audience to bring themselves to my perspective. I like making people aware of the values they are performing within the context of a game system, that, ideally, makes them more reflective about the values they inhabit in consequential life. I feel like the only power a player has is to submit to my rules or not, so when they do, you’ve already got a rhetorical advantage. I think the reason games can feel personal and self-authored is because they require action to progress. But a good designer anticipates the impact of their work, and designs a system that allows for a particular range of experiences. I am always thinking about the emotions I want to elicit when I create work, as well as the ones I don’t. Every choice I make as a designer, from the technology I use, the aesthetics, the gameplay, all of it is there to evoke specific feelings. If you’re experiencing something in my game that I didn’t anticipate and don’t want you to feel, I redesign the game. When I think about how I use polemics and humor in my work, the intent is to create different experiences depending on the positionality of an individual in the audience. I aspire to “comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” My work is most successful when I’m able to shift the typical social hierarchy such that oppressed people are laughing hysterically while privileged people are laughing nervously. There’s a lot of power in that space. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/unnamed-3.jpeg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/FinalHair3Render1_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/unnamed-32_600x700_acf_cropped.jpeg) Renderings by Jovan Wilson (top), Keneisha Perry | TimidClover (bottom left) and H.D. Harris (bottom right) from the Open Source Afro Hair Library. ***How did you come up with the idea for ‘Ye or Nay?*** The pun just struck me and the fully formed game idea came a few seconds later. Such a delight when that happens, though it still took 6 years for me to get around to making it. I like the simplicity of an idea that you can communicate in a sentence because I hate tutorials and rules in games. I hate reading them and I hate explaining them. My attention span is so short and I learn by doing. While most people probably haven’t played *Guess Who?* in 20 years, if ever, the mechanic is so simple. At least in the US, there’s also some cultural familiarity that allows you to imagine the gameplay right away. That familiarity is important because my games are usually asking the player to be complicit in some disturbing, distressing social dynamic. If I just tell you that, you’re going to say no. But if I tell you, “Oh, it’s like *Guess Who?* but with Kanye West,” then you’re immediately charmed. It’s funny, it’s silly, what could go wrong? It’s not until you’re reading about how Barack Obama pretended to drink the water in Flint after it killed 12 kids that you think, “Oh, wait a minute, what did I sign up for?” But by that point, you’re already invested. That’s where humor, nostalgia, and familiarity can work to my benefit. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/gbush.png) ***In your experience, has watching people play the game illuminate new things about your work?*** Yes—especially when ‘*Ye or Nay?* was tabletop, before I digitized it for the pandemic (making it a much better game). It’s a delicate balance that I’m always thinking about: How do you get people to do uncomfortable things that still result in a pleasant and meaningful experience that they’ll want to continue to engage with? Watching people play ‘*Ye or Nay?* is more stressful for me because players aren’t forced to vocalize their thought process in how they identify Black men. It’s harder for me to tell that it’s working because now there’s all this interiority that I don’t have access to, unless people tell me. When people start asking these questions to figure out which Black man their opponent has, let’s say their opponent has Kanye and the only cards left are various iterations of Kanye—I have to read into the pause. Are they trying to figure out how to describe a haircut? Something else? There’s a lot of censorship and maneuvering that happens with ‘*Ye or Nay?* that is equally powerful as the discussions generated by my previous game, *Objectif*, but I don’t get to see it. In ‘*Ye or Nay*?, Awkward questions are easier to dodge. For example, if you’re having problems deciding whether someone is light-skinned or dark-skinned, and it creates this entire cascade in your mind of like, “Oh, who is that? What does that even mean?” You might just not ask that question. The weight of the piece happens in these pauses. Though less of a spectacle to watch, That negative space is also beautiful and interesting. *‘Ye or Nay?* doesn’t center a white gaze, looking in on Blackness. It is a critique and celebration of Black culture that can make other people uncomfortable because it’s not framed anthropologically. It seems like it’s difficult for white people in particular to understand this work outside of the narrow frames of representation and empathy, which really are rather colonizing and obtuse. Within the context of indie games, it feels possible to articulate the power of having to disambiguate Black men and think about the language used to describe Black men, but I’m skeptical that folks can value cultural analysis that isn’t contorting itself to make white liberals comfortable. Indie games can be subversive, and an alternative to the mainstream, but also, this space is still very white with extremely sanitized white politics. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/YoN_gwbWins.jpg) ***You’re both a creator and an educator. How do you see the relationship between play and study, between academia and games?*** They complement each other. I just want to see more thoughtful, self-reflective games and build a culture of critique around games that doesn’t lead to death threats. I think there’s a fear within a significant population of the games audience that thinks criticism means you’re not allowed to like something. For instance, I love *The Last of Us* franchise. I’m a total baby about horror games but I white-knuckled through the hospital in *TLOU2* because the game is exceptionally well-crafted. I didn’t want to miss that experience. At the same time, I want to discuss the way Black people are treated in the series. I want to talk about how brown people are overrepresented in the disposable bodies that you brutalize throughout the game. I want to ask why, even named Black characters, have some of the most tragic deaths. And I want to do that extremely normal thing without getting extremely abnormal responses. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/style_004_600x700_acf_cropped.png) Rendering by Keneisha Perry ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/FinalHair2Render1_600x700_acf_cropped.png) Diandra | SUPERFUSCHIA (left) for the Open Source Afro Hair Library. It makes me sad that even among games students, people who have explicitly decided to study games in a university, there’s a real hesitation to apply critical perspectives to games. As a creator, I want an educated, informed audience. I want players who are capable of engaging with all the nuanced layers of my work, who can fully appreciate my craft, whose feedback is complex and makes me better. When I teach, I get to help create that audience. Although, I also maintain that people who make games don’t have time to play them, so maybe I’m just creating the next generation of frustrated artists. As an educator, I’m not interested in churning out students to enter the game industry. I make games because of the creative possibilities that games afford. I’m interested in teaching ways of seeing and making games differently. In academia, we often talk up the value of interdisciplinarity, that there is great value in being able to take from different fields, synthesize, build upon, and integrate them in new and interesting ways. Games, being a mix of mediums, already lend themselves to interdisciplinarity. That’s why my favorite kind of student is one who says, “I don’t know about games, I don’t play games, I’m not a gamer.” The student who writes poetry, or sings, or rock climbs, or studies Latin America, or is passionate about literally anything else, they are the ones to bring fresh perspectives and craft novel experiences instead of trying to badly clone the same old tropes. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/unnamed-34.jpeg) A rendering by Malika Mutumbo for the Open Source Afro Hair Library. ***What are the conceptual origins behind the*** [***Open Source Afro Hair Library***](https://prettydarke.cool/portfolio/open-source-afro-hair-library/?ref=killscreen.com)***?*** A few years ago, I needed to create a few Black women character models for a VR project I was working on. Not being a 3D modeler, I was using software that was kind of like a character creator in that you could choose from a few basic models and change the look by tweaking different parameters. I was trying to make each character feel distinct even though they were all from the same few starting designs. It was going pretty well until I got to the hair. The software only had one kinky hair option. In order to avoid giving all of my Black characters the same dreadlocks, I started searching 3D marketplaces for Black hair. It didn’t go well. ‘Black hair’ wasn’t a useful search term because sites were interpreting it as a color, not an ethnic or cultural term. I found myself trying to guess the right term for Black (people) so that the search algorithm would understand. It felt like I had to solve the riddle of “how do white people see me?” before I could see myself. It felt inauthentic even before I got to the results. After a few different attempts, ‘Kinky,’ ‘African,’ ‘African-American,’ I settled on the search term “Afro Hair”. This resulted in seeing Black character models, but the results were so low quality and offensive. I’m talking Jim Crow era minstrels and mammies, and still not a single twist-out. There was this one model, clearly Rihanna’s face, but just thrown onto a random body, wearing a bikini. I kept wondering who this was for. I felt protective and uncomfortable with the fact that you could purchase this weird facsimile of Rih. I had the strangest urge to buy all of them so no one else could, but that’s not how digital objects work. It got me thinking about how problematic it is to even be on a marketplace where you can buy and sell digital Black bodies. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to avoid these sites entirely and create an alternative. Instead of adding more Black models or Black hair to these sites, what would it look like to build something that was affirmatively pro-Black, feminist, and anti-capitalist? The Open Source Afro Hair Library has been my answer. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/unnamed-35-e1626907007745.jpeg) An example of Jim Crow-era digital avatars that prompted A.M. Darke to work on the Open Source Afro Hair Library. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/unnamed-31.jpeg) A rendering by Diandra | SUPERFUSCHIA for the Open Source Afro Hair Library. ***What role does ‘ethical trolling’ play in your work?*** There was that big Donald Trump rally \[in Tulsa,\] and all these tickets were being reserved. The organizers were like, “Oh my gosh, this rally is going to be so huge, 100,000 people have bought tickets. We got to get a bigger venue, we got to get a bigger soundstage.” [The day of the rally, it looked empty.](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/style/tiktok-trump-rally-tulsa.html?ref=killscreen.com) It was humiliating. Why? Because a bunch of teenagers, Boomers and Millennials and Gen X had just reserved most of the tickets with no intention of showing up. That is a perfect example of ethical trolling because it was low effort/high impact. Trolling is all about asymmetrical impact. It didn’t cost anything to reserve a ticket, you just had to press a few buttons. But on the other end, those anticipated seats cost the Trump campaign money and manpower, only to result in public humiliation. It’s a brilliant form of activism because it’s emotionally sustainable. To me a troll is more than an antagonist, primarily, they’re someone who’s engaging while being entirely uninvested in the topic. A troll’s sole purpose is to frustrate and exhaust their opponent. Their resources are near infinite because they expend nothing of consequence. If anything, trolls gain energy by getting a kick out of the havoc they cause with minimal effort. Ethical trolling, these same tactics used in service of social good, could be a really interesting strategy for oppressed folks and activists to adopt. Fighting for change, even just surviving oppression, is a marathon, not a sprint. Anything that introduces levity and preserves the spirit is something I support. In terms of how that manifests in my work, it doesn’t. I don’t know what you’re talking about. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/8.jpeg) Rendering by Elijah S. Richmond | Evening Cicada for the Open Source Afro Hair Library. --- ### Credits [Meika Ejiasi](https://www.meikaejiasi.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Links [Prettydarke.cool](https://prettydarke.cool/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Artists to follow from the Open Source Afro Hair Library: [H.D. Harris](http://hdharris.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Jovan Wilson](https://jovanwilson.artstation.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Keneisha Perry | ](https://www.artstation.com/timidclover?ref=killscreen.com)[Timid Clover](https://www.artstation.com/timidclover?ref=killscreen.com) [Malika Mutumbo](https://twitter.com/solvrium?ref=killscreen.com) [Elijah S. Richmond | Evening Cicada](https://www.artstation.com/eveningcicada?ref=killscreen.com) ### Jose Sanchez: Game as a dialogue URL: https://www.killscreen.com/jose-sanchez/ Last updated: 2024-11-22T05:31:44.000Z *For* [*Jose Sanchez*](https://www.plethora-project.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*, the worlds of architecture and games are inseparable. The Chile-born, Detroit-based architect, urban planner, and educator is regarded for his games that emerge from generative design, Block’hood, and Common’hood. Both are housed under Jose’s studio Plethora Project. The former simulates a city builder focusing on interdependence and decay. The latter builds community through a cast of characters facing the aftermath of an economic crash.* *We had the chance to chat with Jose about his games that nurture a culture of care, procedural worlds, and his ever-shifting definition of participation.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/DSC00563.jpg) ***I’m curious about those first moments in your life where you thought you knew you wanted to go into art or architecture.*** I was born in Santiago, Chile. I was someone that had computers and games from the beginning, and spent a lot of time with my brother. My family spent time in the attic and playing and developing relationships through these interfaces. I never thought that this would be my career. I was told that I should let it go, move on, grow up. I grew up in quite a privileged position—I went to a private school. It wasn’t until I started attending the Universidad de Chile in Santiago where you feel this bubble, where you feel there is an important amount of facts that are presented to you in a particular way, specifically, concerning the Pinochet dictatorship in Santiago. The way I experienced the dictatorship was from a family that was supporting the dictator. It wasn’t until I had a chance to go to Universidad de Chile and start seeing the different sides of the equation and taking my steps and my trajectory, where I felt conflicted. It was a long process of reinventing, re-understanding my reality through my sense of information gathering. Most of the social interest in my work today certainly had to do with this sense of awakening; a sense of rejection to the suburban landscape where I grew up. Leaving Chile was also a rejection of a lifestyle that I wasn’t happy with. I didn’t know how to articulate it, and I wanted to study more and get to know the world. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/49.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/77.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/026.jpg) Images from Jose's childhood in Chile. I became an architect. In Chile, you get this professional degree as a practicing architect. I started getting into programming and forms of generative design; using Processing. I started doing video tutorials for people that we’re also learning, so participating in an open-sourced community. That’s why I started the Plethora Project. Through the skills that I had acquired and also some of this childhood interest, I started connecting the dots and going back to the medium of games. I come from a far more participatory way of engaging with computation of thinking of technology as something that was a two-way street—presenting an open-ended system rather than a final product. I wanted to create something that was certainly messier, something that people could touch, manipulate, consider the intuition I’d gained as a designer. I wanted not to code systems as complete systems, but incomplete systems that I could break and move and tinker with. That’s what got me interested in architecture—in how to reject a sense of computation that was antiquated and as a medium and want to have a conversation. It was a return to childhood passions, a sense of nostalgia for the experiences, and the communication that I could establish with others in the medium of games. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/DSC005421.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/DSC00613.jpg) ***You studied architecture as an undergrad. Were you seeing a connection between architecture and games—or for that matter, seeing the Pinochet regime through the lens of architecture and urban planning—then?*** My university was socially-driven. I still feel a lot of my interest was starting to grow back then. I connected with many people and had a strong sense of social justice and issues that were perhaps not important before. It became real for me how people were deeply engaged with social housing. I was thinking about how to deal with social housing as a critical project for the discipline of architecture, that was perhaps less formalist and was trying not to perhaps engage with some artistic expression of architecture so much, but rather it was a necessity for the country. I also wanted things to scale, so I got into computation early on. I started aiming not to have to do everything by hand, literally by drawing everything by hand every time but thinking of systems. I wanted to think about how you plant the seed of a system that could do many things. That has become a trajectory of what I do between architecture and games—systems that could be combined in different ways. When I did my first video game, *Block’hood*, I started thinking, “I don’t want to just do a building. I want to do a video game where millions of buildings could emerge. What are the combinations, and how do people give different values to different arrangements of data?” ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/024.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/032.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/034.jpg) On Block'hood, Jose Sanchez was Director and Developer. He collaborated with Bryan Zhang on Narrative Design, Alan Hung on Animation, and Gentaro Makinoda on 3D Art and Architecture. In *Block’hood,* you had a series of blocks together, and those would be particularly more meaningful than others for a particular community. I didn’t want to impose a metric that would say, This is the right building that you should be building or this is the right design, but different people playing, different places would gravitate to find value in different ways to whatever they do. That brought many shortcomings for the game—I didn’t want to have progression mechanics. I didn’t want to have any of the traditional things you have in a video game that would take a player from not knowing anything about the game to something they would become a master. I wanted to be an open canvas for combining pieces of a city. I was happy with the game, but it didn’t have the other games’ reach. Already, the recipes that the gaming industry offers that the idea of architecture could scale, as a system, what are the ingredients that would allow a participatory system—something an audience would engage with. If you think about the name Plethora Project, it is the first hint to something. With the simple ingredients, we could encapsulate knowledge or construct a system that could grow on ourselves or others. It transitions from education to work and learning about gaming. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/GamingTheRealWorld_26.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/GamingTheRealWorld_39.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/GamingTheRealWorld_33.jpg) Behind-the-scenes of Block'hood. ***Technology and simulators have this history of this infinite promise, but the natural decay process is important to Block’hood.*** I grew up being a huge fan of Will Wright and *SimCity*. When you do a city-building game, you have to think, “Well, what has been done and how have they achieved some of the systems that they’re doing?” I always thought of SimCity as an economic simulator, one where you had to spend cash or virtual cash to purchase a city and then see how it runs. I wanted to focus more on the ecological aspect of a game. I thought, “What would it be like to completely remove the initial cost of building something? If things were free, what would be the challenge of building anything? The answer for that had to do with decay, entropy, with a sense of maintaining something alive or nurturing. It’s almost the idea of taking care of a plant. You have to keep it alive through a series of care actions. Building something became very easy—you could do anything for free, but the upkeep of things is what matters. You have a limited amount of time to ensure that whatever you build will need water, electricity, and a series of requirements. If you’re very ambitious or knowledgeable, perhaps you can do something very complex and take care of that very quickly. In most cases, players would realize, “I need to start slow. I need to make sure that whatever I’m doing is balanced or it has enough resources to be taken care of.” The lifecycle idea became more important than “Do I have the money to purchase or make a decision?” The game was trying to also say, “We cannot do just anything. We need to see the consequences of what we do.” Often, finding the funds for a project, one might think is the most important or most challenging thing to do. But that having a sense of purpose, or a sense of how does whatever we create connect already to the existing systems or how it would be maintained over time so that that investment or that action wouldn’t just go in vain. One of the incentives that I work on and some of the implicit ideas in the game. That was central to making a city-building simulator in the line of SimCity that was focused on ecology, not economy. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/SANCHEZ_FIGURE-4_BLOOM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/IMG_1599-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/IMG_3679-scaled.jpg) "Bloom" by Jose Sanchez & Alisa Andrasek. ***What was the design process like for Block’hood?*** As architects, we have a subset of always shifting tools, but they seem to be quite different from other disciplines**.** For instance, in architecture, people work a lot with Rhino. If they do programming nowadays, they use Grasshopper, a visual programming interface and even within that, Python. When I learned to program in England, I went through a generative design community. I gravitated towards Processing; understanding what a much more expanded range of programming could be in generative design. I was interested in the generative design community because it was not entirely architectural. Still, the moment I started my first research studio in London. I was invited by the chair at the time, Frédéric Migayrou, who is also the curator of Centre Pompidou. He said to me, “You need to bring something to the table.” Around 2013, I took all my code on all the work that I had into Unity. The foundation that I had was Processing, and I was working in ecology simulations, and working with students on the systems. Processing was doing many things, but it wouldn’t allow me to release a game in a much more public way and connect to audiences I was hoping for, so I transitioned to Unity. I was happy with the transition to Unity. I left behind the generative design community to some degree, and I started dipping my toes into the gaming community. I was able to port everything smoothly, and it was a fun process. Both communities have overlapping interests, but many areas are quite different, and there are many crossovers. Ideas that come from generative design become beautiful ideas of games. Unity became central mainly through the capacity to talk to other people. The fact that I could publish a game, the exhibitions that we were doing in architecture in my work was not about steel, or an image or the result of a script, but rather a live demo or a prototype. There were never games that you could publicly play coming from architecture. I felt like there was more room to innovate and certainly have something to say with the medium within this intersection between architecture and games. That became the central identity of my work. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/STORY_DAY_1-0-00-28-37.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/shot_702.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/shot_156.png) ***What excites you about procedural design?*** Games like *No Man’s Sky* have procedural worlds, meaning that you didn’t model a planet or hundreds of planets. You write code that would define every biome, every creature, every piece of geometry in the landscape. I find that world fascinating because it goes back to the notion that you could scale. You have a small piece of code that can be deployed in so many different ways. Games like *Dwarf Fortress* are fantastic examples of a mixture of systems thinking and procedurally generated content. *Dwarf Fortress* is one of those games that has a profound reflection on architecture—the architecture of a fortress; in this case, it’s coupled with almost the psychology of labor of the dwarves. It was also being influenced to think about projects, such as *Common’hood* later down the line. How do we think about architecture through the scope of labor? How do we think of a game that isn’t a tycoon game, as some of the generosity in gaming would describe it but rather, how do you create a socially driven factory or a community that needs to have some economic output, but also has to take care of each other? There’s a sense of humanity at the intersection of the economy of autonomous practices. Games like *Dwarf Fortress* show a path of how games can combine ideas of theology, labor, and psychology. *Common’hood* is starting to bring ingredients from different places to intersect or enquire issues like labor or architecture through lenses that we traditionally don’t do in the traditional practice of architecture, and then also open that up for the conversations that would come from players. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/20200820161035_1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/NRq7Qyrudj.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/5EEu42jxz6.jpg) The team at work on Common'hood. The team behind Common'hood is composed by Zach-Day Scott, Shuruq Tramontini, Max Sabido, Nicholas Di Donato, Dane Carstens, Andre Zakhya, & Selma Mutal. **Do you see *Common’hood* as a follow-up to *Block’hood*?** They’re similar inquiries to what I consider global issues. *Block’hood* had to take more on an idea of systems psychology, which certainly had a more global context, but it was difficult within *Block’hood* to address issues such as labor or care. *Common’hood* receives a foundation of resource management or ecological interdependence, and some of the foundation of *Block’hood*. It expands on that. An economy of material resources needs to be exchanged and transformed, akin to what *Block’hood* was doing. That’s almost the operating system of *Common’hood*, and then on top of that, now you have the life of characters, and those characters have stories. They’re going through some forms of dispossession and precarity. They have their struggles with addiction and other forms of narratives that we often see in the real world. The game wanted to put those two layers or two systems in coalition with each other. It assumes the resource management and balancing of ecologies that you were doing in *Block’hood*. Players are ready to engage with their existence. I find it moving, where you have to make decisions driven by a series of factors. Some of the material, some of the more emotional. That it questions whether all our economic decisions ought to be thought purely mathematically, or are there moments where some of those systems or what we would consider strict rules are broken by a sense of humanity that’s expressed through the lives of characters? We’re trying to develop that experience. We’re trying to create narratives that live within systems—and they’re both feeding back on each other. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/library_capsule.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/7fmPjWu1V7.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/20200626175521_1.jpg) More from Common'hood, which features contributions by Andre Zakhya, Selma Mutal, Vanille Velasquez, Lajos Kolozsvari, SFX Jason Della Rocca, Satrio Dewantono, Kellan Cartledege, Olga Orlova, Kevin Wiratama, and Shaqs Aki. ***What was the narrative design process for Common’hood? There’s the narrative of the game, but also for the individual characters in the game. How much from real life were you taking, if anything?*** It’s still in the making. The script didn’t come before the game. The script has been in the works while we develop the game. We tweak it constantly based on research and research in architecture, research on stories that we see out there, and evictions. That led to the main character, someone who has gone through an eviction process. In the game, you encounter a series of characters at the age of homelessness. They’re navigating their way into the economy as much as they live within this abandoned factory. Research comes from architecture, social studies in architecture. We’re looking at cities like Detroit, there are enough resources to understand a social condition instrumental to portraying characters that feel real. At some point, we were four writers defining narratives and moments of things to bring in and make part of the story. It is difficult to put myself in the shoes of certain situations or to have a larger group of people that could bounce back and forth, different perspectives. I’m open to continuing doing that, especially with players having narratives that resonate with certain identities. I don’t have a clear methodology, but it’s an iterative process. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/DSC00613.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/DSC00528.jpg) ***For your book, Architecture of the Commons, you’re thinking about participation in this theoretical context in terms of letting communities, perhaps, determine and co-create their spaces as well. I’m curious about that line of thinking of participation and then participation through the lens of games.*** The word ‘participation’—it’s strategically moving. One of the first projects that I did as an architect was called *Bloom*, and it was this giant toy that people could participate in and build like a giant Lego. In architecture, the term participation has a strong legacy on community involvement. How do you reach a certain consensus of urban interventions and taking input from communities? I wanted to connect the practice of architecture, its DIY culture, and the ability of self-provisioning with what piece of infrastructure could be a video game. I always gravitated to the different vibrant communities that exist within gaming culture, to tinker more and transform software to become the tools for potentially, in this case, building something in the real world. The primary objective of the *Common’hood* is to become a repository of building tools and designs that people could use to build a tiny house. We want to make that happen, where people would share and team care on designs and take things from the game into the real world. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/DSC00577.jpg) For the book, it was also for me to create a trajectory or a series of guidelines that put forward some ideas I felt I was not able to capture completely through the work of my studio, in terms of games and architecture—but rather, your brain can move so much quicker than your hands sometimes. By laying down this framework, I was suggesting that parts are important, both digitally and physically, to combine and create designs that could be participatory digital platforms, such as video games and others are the facilitators for such recombination to happen. If those tools, structures, or patterns are owned by those who participate in that organization, we are talking about a form of self-provision that could lead to a social structure called the commons, which comes into the game world *Common’hood* well. It’s trying to talk about the stewardship that players or communities might have for their production. Architecture and gaming are intertwined in how to further advance self-provisioning towards production, which is a political position. It’s certainly a position that tries to create a third leg between a public sphere and a private sphere and a sense of what activities could help their autonomy. Even if it starts small, the work that cooperatives or common-managed resources and communities are certainly an avenue that I pursue should be supported more. I dedicate my work to contribute to that. --- ### Credits Interview conducted in May 2021\. Edited and condensed for clarity. ### Links [Plethora Project/Jose Sanchez](https://www.plethora-project.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Jose on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/jomasan/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Lauren Eckert: Between craft and computer URL: https://www.killscreen.com/lauren-eckert/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T01:25:05.000Z # ## *Artist, jeweler, metalsmith, and art conservator* [*Lauren Eckert*](https://lauren-eckert.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *shows us what it means to look at craftsmanship through a contemporary lens. Drawing from inspiration from the objects in video games, religious iconography, and classic science fiction VFX, Lauren’s work gives metals and jewelry a life on screen—and similarly, digital objects a physical life. Whether through wearable pieces or digital triptychs, Lauren’s projects make a space where past and future, alchemy and technology, collide.* *We speak here about the magical process of anodizing metals, the material culture of the video games she grew up with, and her role as budding art conservator.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ADS00670.jpg) ***How did you come to the material culture of games as a medium?*** I had been into science fiction in the arts for a long time. When I was little, my first video gaming console was the Gameboy Advance. I would play *Pokémon* and *Zelda*. I was really into horror movies, for a while, I still am really at heart. I liked all the special effects that John Carpenter would use—silicone, plastics, tiny models. Those were materials we were working on in school. I liked horror movies with *real* special effects. I went to Tyler School of Art, and there’s a strong CAD-CAM program there. I liked how technology-focused the program was. They had a substantial 3D printing lab. That shiny technology was beautiful to me because. I went to school, and I got really into 3D printing and technology. I also learned how to work with metal and different plastics and the art form. Small sculptures were really attractive to me because I could use almost any material I wanted. I went to Peter’s School of Craft. I learned more about the historical background of craft. From there, I’ve just been more interacting with content for the contemporary craft field at large, which has led me to where I am today; my work in art conservation. ***Tell me a little about your first experiences with metal and jewelry and bringing that into the virtual space, and vice versa.*** My professor would 3D print these forms for his jewelry because you could not make them by hand. That was the appeal of 3D printing, in small sculpture and jewelry: you could make things that were so complicated because the computer would do all the work for you. You just have to tell it what to do. You could still use digital tools and have the presence of your artistic style in hand with that. What sold me was we 3D printing wax and then casting it with traditional metal casting equipment. Molten metal becoming something that I saw on a computer was so cool. That sealed the deal for me. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Hyper-light-drifter-inspo-2-1_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/hades-inspo-1_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Pokemon-inspo-2_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Zelda-inspo-1_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Some of the games that inspired Lauren growing up: **Hades, Pokémon, Zelda, and Hyper Light Drifter*. ***What is the importance of the physical process of anodizing?*** Anodizing is when you run an electrical current through titanium, and it creates the chemical reaction creates an oxide layer on the metal, which is a bright color, depending on how much electricity you run through it. It’s a process that you can use to make your materials colorful. I had been doing these illustrations, and I’d taken inspiration from these saturated colors. I jumped at the opportunity to use it in my 3D work. Sometimes, it can be difficult to get like metal see a lot of different colors. Sometimes you have to use patinas that are strong chemicals. It can be hazardous from a studio perspective if you’re doing it a lot. You don’t want to expose yourself to all these different chemicals all the time. With the anodizing process, you don’t need any crazy chemicals. From a studio safety perspective, anodizing was helpful. It’s really easy to replicate it with the same consistency because it’s a scientific process, so you can standardize all the different elements so that you can make the same thing over and over again. You have like a little power box—an anodizing machine that provides electricity. Then you put your piece in water so that the water will carry the electricity evenly over the entire surface. The part that I’m touching gets colored is connected to the power source. When you touch the metal, it completes the circuit. When I remove my hand, that’s when it stops because the circuit is no longer completed. The anodizing process goes through a whole spectrum of colors because the oxide layer becomes thicker and thicker, refracting light in different ways. So if you stop at any point in the process, that’s the color you’ll get. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-03-at-5.32.18-PM_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-03-at-5.31.45-PM_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-03-at-5.31.37-PM_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-03-at-5.31.57-PM_600x700_acf_cropped.png) The anodizing process. ***The Planes of Mystic and Material Memories* is a digital collage. How does a piece like this get interpreted into metalwork and jewelry?** I was looking at a lot of medieval art and stained glass. I am a big fan of Hieronymus Bosch, so I wanted to make a triptych. I also wanted to use it as an opportunity to do some world-building. I wanted there to be a lot of density of information. The middle panel is this gateway, it has these keys, and then there’s an actual arch. The three-pronged object is a reference to a dowsing rod, a divination tool that people would use to find water sources. The middle panel is about searching and finding this gateway to this dimension where I’m doing all my world-building. I’m imagining all my objects in my body of work, all coming from this strange, timeless dimension. That’s the middle panel, and then the left and the right panels are the different facets of this world. The left panel has more natural imagery; creatures, the mystic plane. The right panel has more material things like objects and gems and bottles of vessels and candles. That’s the more tangible side of this world. The mystic and the material are two sides of the same coin. They’re opposites, but they go together, especially if you’re thinking about something magical like alchemy. **We typically think of craft as not a screen-based medium. When you were first working with jewelry and technology, did you get any pushback?** That perspective does exist in the field where it’s like, *Okay, well, this is like a traditional medium based in the tangible. All these technological things are taking away from the tradition of the medium.* I don’t think it has to be a dichotomy; there can be a little bit of both to make something greater than the sum of its parts. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-03-at-5.28.17-PM.jpg) "The Planes of Mystic and Material Memories." ***Can we talk about the origins of your piece, Synthetic Relic?*** I’m still using the computer to make these types of objects. I will lay out all my metal fabrication on a 2D plane so that when I cut and saw it all out, it’s easier for me to fabricate. But so the process starts digitally but ends up being tangible in the end. Conceptually, I was thinking about how pendulums are a divination tool and the magical side of it. I was thinking about something that you might arrive at during some journey. The illustrations on the piece are celestial. I was thinking about that otherworldly dimension. The claw references the medieval fantasy world. I use anodizing for it to make the different colors. I’m trying to connect my like, tangible, like fabricated metal pieces, to my more virtual illustrations taking inspiration from this 8-bit style. I called the whole series synthetic relic because I wanted it to be like something a little bit from the past. And then which is like the relic part, and then something a little bit from the future. So a lot of my work, looking to imagined futures from different science fictions. Imagining these futures like that action is happening in the past. And then I was also thinking about, as an art conservator, how we carry the past into the future. That connects to my other pieces in that these pieces all come from this world where it’s a little bit, it’s a little bit timeless. My work is like a time portal. The objects I make I hope are something you would like to arrive at and maybe be like an event in a story. I imagine somebody taking it off like a wall—maybe that causes something to happen, like Indiana Jones when he takes the thing off the pedestal and then all of a sudden, the temple starts to collapse. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Lauren-Eckert_Synthetic-Relic-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Lauren-Eckert_Synthetic-Relic-3-Detail-1-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Lauren-Eckert_Synthetic-Relic-Detail-scaled.jpg) "Synthetic Relic." ***There’s been a deeper interest amongst game designers in the use of 8-bit. And some of that’s a function of games that people grew up with. What does the pixel represent for you?*** I was attracted to it because of the nostalgia. Because the information is dense with pixels, that is concise. It allowed me to make these little symbols that I like to use. I like how hieroglyphics would work, how you can communicate a lot of information. I have a maximalist approach to color. So I was trying to carry that over to my metal. The density of information works when you’re trying to make something out of fabrication because then you don’t have to try and make it. ***Game makers are often creating digital objects, and they want those digital objects to have a tactility. For folks making video games right now, do you think they’re actively thinking about objects in this anthropological way? These objects in the game have inherent meaning. And they’re not necessarily constrained by the real, so this meaning exists in real-world objects to like people have, like sentimental attachments to objects.*** In Pokémon, the Pokéball everywhere because it’s what catches the Pokemon. Sometimes these objects also function as symbols. Objects carry meaning, and so the object can function as a shorthand; it communicates a lot without words. That is why things become very popular for a franchise or a game. It means more than just the images, the colors, the pixels. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Synthetic-Relic-in-progress-Rhino-schematic.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Woven-Pixels-2-fabrication-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Synthetic-Relic-concept-sketch-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ***You’re studying to be an art conservator. How are you finding that balance between like, conservation, which is a past-facing practice, and with the work you currently deal with regarding looking at speculative futures?*** In the actual day-to-day, my artwork is the processes are technical and scientific. That anodizing process was scientific because you have to do all the, you have to make sure you’re anodizing bath is the same. Art conservators have to know a lot of chemistry so that the day-to-day is really similar between my art practice and then becoming an art conservator learning all the science. Conceptually and thematically, art conservators are researching the past. The purpose of all that is to make the object last into the future; you’re trying to make these objects last longer than you’re participating in something that isn’t so immediate in the past and the future. So you’re doing all this work for the future. That relates to my art practice of thinking about the future from the point of the past as well. I’m acutely aware that physical objects will live on past whatever happens with ZBrush, Rhino, or any digital programs. A huge issue in digital conservation, where so much of it’s tied to these commercially available tools. There is something beautiful about thinking about creating something either digital or physical that will live on past our lives? That’s what I like about science fiction is you’re thinking about the future. The current moment can seem immediate sometimes. When you think about all these traditions, you’re thinking about the past. It makes you a part of something greater than your current moment. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ADS00622.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ADS00623-1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ADS00654.jpg) ***Some of your work references stained glass. What interests you about religious, spiritual, and alchemical research and motifs?*** Stained glass is inherently beautiful. I like all the religious themes that people use to use glass; one way people use stained glass in churches is when the light comes through, it is like heavenly references. It makes visible people’s connection with God because it uses the light to make it more ethereal and illuminates these stories. I’m attracted to the rich storytelling that people use stained glass and all the imagery. Religious art is appealing to me because people would make religious art and be patrons of religious art because they wanted to be a part of something greater than themselves. --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted in April, 2021\. Photography by David Evan McDowell. ### Links [Lauren’s website](https://lauren-eckert.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Vincent Morisset: The poetic spontaneity of interactive storytelling URL: https://www.killscreen.com/vincent-morisset/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T01:24:08.000Z *Director Vincent Morisset is known for many things—for making what is considered to be the first interactive music video for Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, Sigur Rós’ live experience INNI, and the Sundance-acclaimed Way to Go. Under his boutique creative studio AATOAA, Vincent churns out many projects that communicate some of the deepest human experiences through myriad forms that tread on the boundaries of games, public spaces, cinema, and the Internet.* [*Motto*](https://motto.io/?ref=killscreen.com)*, one of these unclassifiable pieces, is a poetic choose-your-own-adventure for which users only need their phone. Zig-zagging through visual contributions by players, each playthrough centers on the disappearance of a ghost named September.* *In conversation with the Montreal-based artist, we do a deep dive into Motto, explore the liminal space between documentary and fiction, and revel in all things Arcade Fire.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-18-at-8.50.25-AM.jpg) ***Was there a moment early on in life when you knew that you wanted to do something creative?*** I grew up on the south shore of Montreal. I had an amateur radio show with a tape deck—inventing or semi-copying existing sketches and making sound effects. The tape recording thing was the first time I had access to technology and completely controlled it. We had a vinyl connected to a two-tape deck, and I knew how to press play, record, and record stuff with the microphone with the sound effect behind it. It was magic—being able to create a world on a tape. I was inviting friends and asking them to do other funny voices. That was the first time that I understood that through these machines I could do creative things. You rewind then record—it had that linear real-time quality to it. At the beginning of my professional career, I defined myself as a programmer. My early professional days when I was doing CD-ROMs for a telecom company were not necessarily that exciting in the early 2000\. But also, I was making short films. At one point, I was seeing it as a bridge between cinema and technology. Showing a short film on a computer can allow other features or you can engage with the spectator differently. I was approaching that medium from that perspective and finding myself as a director between mediums**.** I’ve always continued with this Frankenstein DNA—parallel to the video game world that I know not that much about. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-18-at-8.50.17-AM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-18-at-8.51.46-AM-scaled.jpg) ***What did you study and how did that shape your creative practice?*** In high school, I discovered theater, narratives, and building sets. Then I decided to go into science. I was, again, interested in understanding how things function. There was some frustration about the creativity, so I shifted in communication and started to learn how to film, to take pictures. I wanted to go into cinema. That was the end of the ’90s. It was one of the two years where it shifted—we learned how to do audio editing with a razor blade and tape, and the next year we were editing a film on the computer. It was like that year where it was analog, so quick to digital. We were that year where there was this schism between two realities; analog-digital work. When we had to choose our specialization, the school opened up this brand new program called Multimedia, and we were the guinea pigs. This was the age of the CD-ROM HyperCard. It was that moment where I learned how to use sound editing, video editing, graphic design. That’s where I started to experiment with interactivity. Parallel to that, I was helping a guy who was doing a project on birds, and he asked me because I’m a birder. He asked me for my ontological insight and through him, they became a mentor for that multimedia world. Birding was also my entry point to that digital interactivity technological world. We were the first generation. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-18-at-8.52.05-AM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-18-at-8.51.33-AM-scaled.jpg) Vincent using Motto on the streets of Montreal. **One of your earliest or earlier projects after graduating were these collaborations with Arcade Fire. So I would love to just hear more about those projects and the landscape for music videos at the time and the interventions that you were hoping to make by making interactive work and then the realm of music videos.** They asked me to help them do a website and they are a product of that cultural shift. The iPod was relatively new—it also challenged the notion of artwork and your engagement with an artwork, a booklet, and a music video. It was also a point where MTV were less and less showing music videos. It was the golden age of *Pimp My Ride*, Hulk Hogan, all that stuff. Early on, they wanted to do something that felt different—not that utilitarian, but more creating the world and this visual companion to their music, so that’s how we approached everything we were doing online. It was not about showing the dates of the shows or the lyrics on the early website, but more an excuse to create a mythology around an album. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Arcade_Fire_Just_a_Reflektor_19.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Arcade_Fire_Just_a_Reflektor_9-1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Arcade_Fire_Just_a_Reflektor_21.jpg) Behind-the-scenes from Arcade Fire's "Just a Reflektor." That’s how we started to do the more ambitious content, and the Neon Bible Interactive video. The band asked me if I was interested in doing a classic music video, and I was like, where will it screen? It won’t screen on TV—so it will be seen online, but it was a time where YouTube was still pixelated. I was a flash coder, so I thought, “Maybe we could do something that reacts to what we do.” I could see they could understand but they trusted me. That was a leap of faith—I tried to explain what I wanted it to feel, but since there was no precedent, it was hard: “Imagine the TV news anchor that turned to you and looked you in the eyes. That’s what it will feel like.” In the video, Win’s hand moves while you’re clicking. This project completely changed my path. I define myself as a director; I was not just a programmer. Many people thought it was silly to say that to direct a website, but for me, I was doing the same thing that I would do on a short film. It changed how people see how this medium could be something different than just buttons and content. It could be something I can alter. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/waytogo4.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/waytogo3.jpg) From "Way to Go." ***When you’re about to start on a project, where do you usually begin? Are you always sketching, or are you taking things from life?*** When I look at my body of work, it’s eclectic and diverse in form and aesthetic. I like to put myself in danger—stimulate myself artistically and intellectually. I like to get out of my comfort zone, but fundamentally at the time, the starting point is often the feeling I want to make people have. Often, there is an alchemy of mediums. For *Neon Bible*, I wanted to create a connection between a virtual being and a spectator, and think about what interactivity can bring to a narrative. It was trying to define some non-linear grammar, but from an animation film perspective. Often it’s this simple premise or intuition that is difficult to explain. Rather than being a director with a clear vision, I have an instinct and then surround myself. The way I work is to create a context that is good for exploration and experimentation, but without losing ourselves and just filtering the gems and then sculpting a project out of this. Each journey is different. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/neonbible.jpg) From Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible." **With Motto, you talk about this distinction, or blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction.** In terms of exploring the lines between documentary and fiction, I like that vagueness or openness keeps the whole team afloat. Because they are constantly developing, bringing things to the table and that so often—the visual aspect, the technological aspect, the narrative or the sound all come together. I’ve never worked in a game studio, but there is that interactivity, prototyping, but also having the tech and the story from day one. I work horizontally and also in small teams. I often have two or three years to do a project, which is quite a luxury. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/arcadefire_sprawl2_5.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/arcadefire_sprawl2_4.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/arcadefire_sprawl2_3.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/arcadefire_sprawl2_2.jpg) "Sprawl" for Arcade Fire. ***You mentioned that your process usually starts with a feeling. For Motto, was there a specific feeling that started the project?*** I was interested in serendipity—this idea of juxtaposition of things that create poetry. A project that impacted me a couple of years ago was called astronaut.io. These coders scramble YouTube and just push you to videos that have less than 100 views with no names. Just the juxtaposition of random stuff up from around the world, but I thought, “Wow, this is almost one of the best editing I’ve seen of just so unusual and surprising.” We are in an age where we’re bombarded with moving images; there’s something that is homogenized in it. I was interested in making people engage with their world—but instead of engaging in a virtual world, I make them engage in their apartment, or outside in the streets. Then, they find things that they will capture through their web camera, and put this together with content that other people around the world have collected and create the story that bridges all this. It was also the idea of transcending what social media is. There’s this randomness, but we kept that sensibility and DNA that we’re used to in this relationship. We have with this raw, homemade material. It becomes intimate. It’s a parallel palette or grammar. With social media, I liked the fragility and the spontaneity of some of the content. I tried to make these people in this context and capture things, but with no fuss. I don’t want players to make their images crazy with filters, but to just capture moments or things that they like. The project was also to deconstruct online performance. In 2021, we’re more careful about what we post, what we record. It was also, for us, an interesting reflection of how we can establish a level of trust, a safe space. It’s meaningful, it hopefully goes beyond a gimmick. It elevates what you bring with other people, and makes something greater. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/motto_epk_3840x2160_mosaic_titlebig-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/hand_machevuoi_txt.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/faces_txt-1.jpg) ***I’m curious about the narrative design process.*** We worked on Motto for three years. The first year was the usual at work team, Caroline Robert, Edouardo Lanctot, they would normally do design or visuals. We were trying to define a form. We wanted to record and then use that recording into an edit in real-time and juxtapose user content generated with content that we would have shot. It was the defining of a format, but we didn’t know what would be the story—it was again more about the feeling and what works, what doesn’t. At this point, it was the beginning of the democratization of AI tools. We were excited about exploring that new palette that conveyed the body like. We explored broadly the potential of AI and machine learning. At the beginning, we wanted to make it more about the system analyzing each video and creating this machine poetry. It was hit and miss. Sometimes the machine did this funny weird poem, but 70% of the time it was just lame and boring. Then we started to put away this technological approach, but keep that clunkiness or that ranit domness about the association. Motto kept that essence and it can feel like it’s AI-edited. We needed something much more simple. It feels like AI but we’re using machine learning to cover the face of people, and that was one of the things that we thought was important so that people don’t feel self-conscious about what they shoot, then will people see themselves. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/motto_pres_4_stories-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/motto_epk_storyboard_ghost_en_3840x2160-1-scaled.jpg) A behind-the-scenes at the narrative design process for Motto. In the project, everything you post is anonymized, so it was a design choice, but for the rest, we just kept tha association or juxtaposition—that is what the internet is all about. We browse that way, it’s becoming their natural way to distill content. I was interested in how the brain connects the dots and creates meaning. That was one of the things that drove me. After a year, we had something of a skeleton of the project, something that you can record and associate. We invited Sean Michaels, a Montreal novelist. We shared with him what we had, and tried to define the story; what we could ask people to record. One of the things that was important is that it’s universal—it’s on the web; It’s free. I’ve wanted it to work in Cairo, Paris, or New York, I wanted to work if you’re inside or outside. The premise was almost a list—universal things like electric plug or lights or the sky. Sean would say, “What could we tell as a story for anyone, anywhere?” He had that flash of the friend September as a ghost. Then, the journey in the story builds—that is similar to game design. Since you’re in the project, we wanted people to feel that they are themselves and not others. The relationship with September needed to have that openness. There’s an ambiguity about that relationship. Is it a friendship? Is it love? The gender of September is a flip-a-coin thing. Half the people who will do *Motto* will have September as a woman and the other half of the people who try *Motto* will have a man. We kept that ambiguity in the text so that anybody could project themselves in that relationship with the protagonist. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/idfa_motto_livevisuel_2-1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/IDFA_MottoLive_v2.jpg) ***Have any user contributions or responses in Motto surprised you?*** The things that touched me the most are the face; seeing the smiles or just seeing the hidden faces. People that engage in the project accept that secret invisible handshake. It’s always awesome. If you do the whole project, maybe a hundred moments that you record and they’re so diverse. If you do a chapter inside, at one point you get asked to draw stuff, as you go out for a walk, you get to pick stuff, do some rituals. The whole project is snapshots of moments. It’s a project that evolves, like a beast feeding through moments and different parallel realities. Then we play with that editing effect of juxtaposing the participant shot with other people’s shots and just seeing these diverse proposition or similar things. Still, by accumulating five or six from different contexts, it’s like, “Wow—this communal ritual is simple, but quite satisfying.” Motto was made before the pandemic, but it was released when we were stuck home. We were not allowed to see people. The project resonated with that reality since it’s an adventure where you can live anywhere and in time, but at the same time you have a sense that you’re connected with other human beings around the world. --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted in April 2021. ### Links [Vincent’s website](https://vincentmorisset.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Studio AATOAA](https://aatoaa.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Vincent on Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/vmorisset) ### Chlöe Bass: Without participation, the public falls apart URL: https://www.killscreen.com/chloe-bass/ Last updated: 2025-12-01T21:09:11.000Z *Multi-disciplinary artist* [*Chloë Bass*](https://www.chloebass.com/artist-statement?ref=killscreen.com)*’ practice is a long-term investigation on what it means to interact with and form intimate connections with one another. “*[*Wayfinding*](https://www.chloebass.com/wayfinding?ref=killscreen.com)*,” now on view at the Pulitzer Art Foundation, utilizes public signage to poetically interrogate our private relationships with public space through constructed sites of encounter. “*[*The Book of Everyday Instruction*](https://www.chloebass.com/book-of-everyday-instruction?ref=killscreen.com)*,” an investigation of interaction in eight chapters, takes the form of both an exhibition and a physical book. Orbiting around various one-on-one relationships—whether an individual and an institution, or a body in space relative to another—the multi-pronged project celebrates and challenges togetherness.* *We speak with Chloë about being the Ultimate New Yorker, her fluid conception of participation and play, and how not documenting preserves a moment’s authenticity.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-10-at-7.36.46-PM-scaled.jpg) Chloë at "Wayfinding," installed at the Pulitzer Art Foundation in St. Louis. **Was there something about growing up in New York City that shaped your worldview and practice; that informed your experience about making art with a public in mind?** I’m so obviously very much a New Yorker, for better and for worse. I don’t think that that’s better than being anything else. I joke that I’m the Ultimate New Yorker because I’m a fourth-generation Jewish, New York-born-and-raised person on my dad’s side. But also, my mom is an immigrant from Trinidad, so I’m also a first-generation New Yorker. That is what New York is. The city is driven by both of these things in equal measure. This always has been, and hopefully always will be, structural. There’s an inability to let go of the fact that other people might be in the exact same place as you, at the same time, but having a very different experience. Once you’re aware of that, you start to imagine what those experiences might be. That’s powerful for me, even though I don’t necessarily hold to the idea of empathy as a good way of understanding how to make political decisions or how to operate in the world. Understanding that other people’s experiences are not the same as yours is valuable when we start to think about things like law, safety, or any public outcome of politics. I grew up in a very creative family. My mom is an artist and a poet. My dad is a psychoanalyst, philosopher, and translator. Both parents are writers and thinkers, and my mom is a maker as well. I grew up seeing a lot of art. My parents kept a journal for me when I was little. I would dictate my day and write down what I said. There is evidence that we went to [*FOOD*](https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/dining/21soho.html?ref=killscreen.com), the Gordon Matta Clark restaurant project, when I was three. Now I’m like, “Wow, that art history… I was there! When I was eight, my parents took me to a sculpture show at The Guggenheim of [Rebecca Horn](https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/rebecca-horn-2269?ref=killscreen.com)‘s work. She makes interactive sculptures, performance art, and body-related work. You wouldn’t think that a little kid would necessarily think, “Wow,” but I thought, “This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I want to stay here forever.” My interaction with the object-as-a-body and the body-as-an-object blew my tiny mind. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/CRB1986.jpg) ***You studied theater and performance studies as an undergraduate. How did you make your way from that realm into the realm of social practice art?*** If people had been talking more about social practice when I was in undergrad, I would have gravitated towards that. The educational institutions I attended supported me well in my interests and capacity to do research. In art departments, however, what people were talking about felt fairly rigid at the time. I was asked to think about things that are skills-based—perspective drawing, copying a painting, and \[memorizing\] standard Western art history. These are good things to know, but they didn’t interest me that much. I wanted to make projects more about direct engagement, about collaboration, about bodies. I did an apprenticeship with The Royal Shakespeare Company. It doesn’t get more straight, standard-theater than that. I loved it—even when you’re working in those very normative capacities in the theater, there’s extensive engagement with other people. It’s not even necessarily the outcome, but the process of theater being made that I love. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/08_LingerLongerToast.jpg) From "The Linger Longer Toast." ***How has your understanding of participation may have shifted in the years that you’ve been working in social practice and direct engagement?*** I come to participation from many perspectives all at once. It’s worth braiding those together explicitly, because New York City is highly participatory. Whether you want it to be or not, it participates in you. You have to be very stealthy for that not to be the case. There’s the form of participation in what it means to make an artwork together—or collaboration. There’s the participation that happens through education. There’s voting, lobbying, protesting—all of this I consider civic participation. There’s what it takes to maintain a public system of any kind as participation. For example, the MTA in New York is a mess. It’s even more of a mess when people don’t ride it. The library system is amazing, but it’s really difficult to access or maintain that amazingness without participation. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-10-at-7.38.47-PM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-10-at-7.38.20-PM.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-10-at-7.38.34-PM.jpg) Chloë at "Wayfinding," installed at the Pulitzer Art Foundation in St. Louis. I’m invested in public-ness and the public. Public to me is what falls apart without participation. In my work thus far, my sense of participation has been more like, “What am I asking people to do?” or, “What am I subjecting people to?” I don’t know if going forward, that will be true. I feel very motivated to create conditions where participation is actively encouraged and tactically made present—where you can bring \[something\] to the work \[as a participant\]. I’m not telling \[participants\] exactly how to participate or how to feel. I don’t like maintaining power structures through secrecy. It’s not because I’m trying to implicitly maintain my own power; it’s more that I am leaving an open space—that you look more closely, \[a project\] is more rewarding or different. If you look more closely than that, it’s even more rewarding. It gets you to a place within yourself that I hope is non-coercive. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Bass_Chloe_10-scaled.jpg) ***Your practice orbits around intimacy and private life through one-on-one interaction. In “Book of Everyday Instruction,” your chapters centered on one-on-one relationships, as well as preserving the authenticity of that experience, the ephemeral. Can you speak to your intention behind not documenting?*** There have been different projects and products made out of those interactions. Still, there is no documentation or presentation of what happens between me and my participants in a formal setting. None of it is recorded or directly photographed. The chapter that did have descriptions of engagement was based on taking Polaroid notes, but never of their face. This was a way of marking our time together by taking instant photos. Later, participants completed surveys, as did I. From those answers—which were really about how they felt during our interactions, and forms of engagement—I created non-documentary recollections of the exchanges we had in our moments together. *Book of Everyday Instruction* has its own cataloging journey that is still only for me, if it exists. Documentation really does shift what my participants are willing to do or say—or how they feel and what I can do. Most of those interactions with people were scripted, but they didn’t know that. They weren’t privy to anyone else’s experience; they didn’t know that I was saying some of the exact same things in the same ways to everyone on purpose. That’s also where theater can come into it, where that too can take on its own kind of naturalness over time. Once they feed their own content into that shell—the script that I have prepared for the engagement we’re going to have—I respond from there. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Bass_06_BOEI.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Bass_10_BOEI-1.jpg) The exhibition and process of "Book of Everyday Instruction." ***When you write a script, do you anticipate responses or behaviors from your participants or co-collaborators?*** I don’t think we can ever honestly say that we leave things completely open. We’re guided by our biases, our lack of understanding, our gaps. The way that you ask a question impacts how you get the answer. \[For *Book of Everyday Instruction*\], I tried to be myself in a scripted way. I tried to also leave space for if I was giving the same thing to a wide variety of people, that could work for them. The interactions I had went in different ways. In one chapter, I asked everyone the same six questions. Then there were other projects where people had no idea that their engagement was that mechanized at a certain level. That’s a form of participation too. You are not the artist of this experience, but what you put in as a participant of this experience shifts what it is, and what it becomes. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Bass_09_BOEI-scaled.jpg) "Book of Everyday Instruction." ***“Wayfinding” is a collection of pieces that centers on one’s private experience in a public space. How did you go about setting up these sites of encounters for people?*** I talk about this set of sculptures as a choreography of objects. When you start to think of \[a project\] as bodies in space instead of an exhibition in a gallery, you make decisions differently. Because *Wayfinding* is so much about the encounter, it’s like encountering another body—but the body is the material, and the material has words or an image on it. That idea \[then\] brings you back to yourself. ***In the latest install of Wayfinding in St. Louis, were there specific decisions that were particularly exciting or memorable to you?*** The thing about working specifically with the Pulitzer Art Foundation is that it’s a Tadao Ando building; it’s just beautiful. They trusted me hugely, but it was also a huge responsibility. At the same time, I was like, “I want to have one of these massive billboards right in front of the building,” but the whole time, I thought, “They’re going to say no, because their building’s perfect.” I’ve never had so much infrastructure for me before as an artist. We had a huge crane, a huge van, and a heavy billboard base. But there was also this light feeling, because they maneuvered it into space so delicately, millimeters at a time with this machine in front of this perfect building. The whole time, I was just holding my breath, \[hoping\] that it would complement its environment. That billboard reading *H*ow *much of care is patience?* wound up in front of the building. \[I was thinking about\] how it works with the architecture of the building and the neighborhood. It’s the lines of the environment, but it also reflects what is across the street, which is the other part of the project—an outdoor park site, where a lot of *Wayfinding* is installed. And how that brings that outdoor space, and the sky and the neighborhood behind it, which is someone’s house, a hospital, a parking lot, and non-picturesque back to that perfect minimal—fluid but impenetrable—building was special to me. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-10-at-7.37.06-PM.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-10-at-7.37.37-PM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-10-at-7.37.48-PM-scaled.jpg) "Wayfinding." ***You talk about thinking of these pieces as, or this piece as bodies, or the experience of encounters as bodies in space. Do you think of your work as narrative, or having a temporal quality to it?*** Because I come from theater, time and bodies are the performance elements. That’s all it is. It’s like saying that flour and water is bread. I am always thinking about the temporal framework in my work. In *Wayfinding,* maybe some things are visible to people as they drive by. Maybe that’s the only way that they saw it. Frameworks of intimacy are not always long-term. There can be very intimate things that can be very valuable that happen very quickly. \[On the other side of that,\] my grandparents were married for 72 years. There’s a lot of range there, but I don’t value one duration over another always. I don’t think it has to be that obvious to be interesting. ***How has your work been an educator shaped the way that you think about your practice?*** As an educator, I am disinclined to believe something that some artists do believe and say, which is the end thing is obvious or speaks for itself. I feel it’s my responsibility to both carry and unpack a lot of canonical cultural material, and to shift that canon as well. As an artist, I feel that’s my responsibility, but in a less didactic or narrativized way. If you’re not putting yourself in a position where that is possible for your work, maybe that’s okay for you—but I have a hard time letting that be okay. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-10-at-7.37.27-PM.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-10-at-7.38.00-PM.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-10-at-7.36.58-PM.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Screen-Shot-2021-06-10-at-7.39.18-PM.png) "Wayfinding." [***You regularly make playful experiments***](https://www.chloebass.com/interactions-play?ref=killscreen.com)***. What does play and playfulness mean to you and your body of work?*** For these short-form experiments, it was all about leaving space for myself to operate clearly within a framework—which is this intimacy practice. Also, they exist to say, “Sometimes, I just want to do something else for two days. I don’t have to hide it or make it make sense. Here’s a space where I can do that.” That has been just important as a way of giving myself freedom, or leeway, because the system that I’ve set up is relatively exhausting. I have a tendency to do exhausting things. That’s who I am as a person, but I’m trying to be a little bit more forgiving with myself. I have also been so schooled on what I don’t know about play in the last year because we have an almost five-year-old here. That’s my standpoint right now, after 14 months of pandemic-ing with a kid; I am not qualified to talk about play. As an adult, you think you know, but you don’t remember. I’ve never felt so much like an amateur \[laughs\]. ***What have you been all playing together?*** It’s impossible to explain. For a while, we were playing a game called *The Game. The Game* is either going to last for four months, six months, or until he’s 16\. We have been working on the narrative. The child plays two characters, and I am currently playing 17, or so characters. He’s very clear that we’re working on this together, and that I’m allowed to make suggestions about the direction in which it goes, but most of my suggestions are vetoed \[laughs\]. It’s a very long narrative, episodic, multi-character quest, which has had many kidnappings in it—most of which get resolved relatively quickly, because we don’t know where to go from there. We have lots of little plastic toys that are our characters, so they’re talking. Sometimes we get so tangled in the plot, we just have to back out, like there’s no solution. Come back for further episodes of The Game! --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted in May, 2021\. Photographed by Chris Bauer in St. Louis, Missouri. ### Links [Chlo*ë*‘s website](https://www.chloebass.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Chlo*ë* on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/publicinvestigator/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Chlo*ë* on Twitter](https://twitter.com/chloerbass?ref=killscreen.com) ### Prashast Thapan: To live and die URL: https://www.killscreen.com/prashast-thapan/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T01:22:56.000Z *What if there was a game with multiple playthroughs built into it…and each playthrough involved cycling through an entire life? Artist and game designer Prashast Thapan is working on it. Titled* [*1000 Deaths*](https://www.1000deaths.tv/?ref=killscreen.com)*, and set to be released under his studio,* [*Pariah Interactive*](https://pariahinteractive.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*, Prashast’s game is an “intertwined web of stories where you’re forced as a player to let go of this idea of the main hero. It forces the player to consider varied perspectives; to understand points of view that may be different from where they started.”* *We speak with Prashast about what it means to ‘break’ immersion, how he came to make a game for his undergraduate thesis in graphic design, and why games these days are too long.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/MG_0686-2-scaled.jpg) ***Could you talk about your upbringing and your childhood? Was there a moment growing up where you knew you wanted to do something creative in your life?*** I’ve been drawing since I was an infant. There was always this inherent attraction to making stuff. It was a good way to channel my introvertedness. I grew up in India, New Delhi specifically. West Delhi, where I grew up, felt like an auxiliary part of Delhi; contrasting starkly with the uptight, sophisticated South Delhi part where I went to school. Looking back, having that perspective from West Delhi to South Delhi gave me the appreciation for contrast that makes me tick. Our school was a civil services school, so many kids were traveling internationally all the time. I loved getting this gamut of people to be around at home and school. When I think about it, that’s been informing my work. Even until today, understanding the gamut of experiences available and having that perspective that’s just beyond one’s self. As you know, India has 1,000 dialects, tons of languages—you cross a state border, there’s all sorts of different food, fashion, and culture. There’s stimulation and colors everywhere, so my creative process became more collage-based. I got into that, picking things from here and there and putting them together into something new. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/MG_0858-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/MG_0878-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/MG_0935-scaled.jpg) ***You went to RISD for Graphic Design.*** ***I’m curious about what that program was like and how you ended up doing graphic design and making your way into interactive work.*** I wanted to go to school for animation initially, but I took an animation class my freshman year. Although I liked the product, I just didn’t like the process. I respect the process, but it just wasn’t for me. I chose graphic design because it seemed like a discipline where you can combine a bunch of disciplines. You’re working on a computer, but you can mix photography with painting. To me, it felt like collage. It was a little frustrating in the beginning because the program was geared towards formal considerations and nothing else. It was a lot about working with the grid, setting type, layouts, and things like that. Through this frustration with the program, I started to push myself beyond. I took classes in architecture, painting, animation, even music classes at Brown, just trying to absorb as much as possible. I had friends working in more tangible majors like printmaking, glass, furniture. They would very generously let me use their facilities. I’m happy that I found a way to expand out of graphic design. I had my initial instinct that this discipline is a place to combine media started to become true. I started presenting work that was this amalgamation of other things, which led to really good discussions in the classroom. I started experimenting with Unity. At the time, it was pretty new, and I was trying to make interactive experiences for my work as much as possible. Somewhere in the middle of the Graphic Design program, I realized we were being taught to communicate information clearly, but to me, that felt one-sided. Using game engines or making interactive experiences allowed an opportunity for your audience to give you feedback. There’s something magical that can happen there where the audience can feel a sense of agency. That’s how I branched off of the traditional graphic design path. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Screen-Shot-2021-05-19-at-6.44.52-AM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/MG_0023-2-scaled-e1621421785882.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/MG_0044-2-scaled.jpg) ***Static Lagoon, a VR game, was your undergraduate thesis. How did this project come about?*** We had access to the very first Oculus headset. I was taking classes in the Digital+Media graduate program. I took as many opportunities as I could to use that equipment for various things, culminating in that thesis. The project was driven by a question which was, “What do you want?” It was driven by this choice anxiety that aspiring graduates have of like, “We’re going to get out of school, get a job.” The possibilities for what we can do are limitless. Back in my parent’s generation, you could be a doctor, lawyer, or engineer…especially in India. Now, the gamut of jobs outside college is so vast. I could feel this anxiety with my peers. I ended up thinking about simulations as this safe space to practice making decisions without real-life consequences. You can see your choices play out and see the consequences. That was the driving concept behind it. The RestBox was this cushion you could plug into your computer with a USB. The only choice you make in the game is whether, at a given moment, you’re sitting or you’re standing. In the moments when you’re standing, you’re taking this action. When you’re sitting, you’re on this on-rails experience, but you have the opportunity to stand and branch out of it and go into something else. It seemed simple, but from a technical standpoint, for someone who didn’t know how to code it was quite a challenge—the physical computing and the software aspects. There was a hardware and a software component. I didn’t know much of either. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/RectPromo_bigsize.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/cab-2.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/cab-1.png) "Static Lagoon" *Static Lagoon was* when I started to consider breaking immersion. The whole world has no walls. I love that idea because it lets you know that this is not supposed to be real. All my work now is driven by the surreal, which is inspired by breaking the fourth wall and providing critical distance. Surrealism does that inherently, because I was disenchanted with these hyper-realistic recreations of reality. They’re technically impressive but can be quite boring. I don’t think it uses the medium to its full potential because you can make anything happen in a simulation. Why would you want to make something that you can see anyway in real life? The surreal helps to ground that for me. How can you remind the user that they are in a simulation at all times? This notion of questioning how immersed you are in any given moment drives all my work. It all has something to do with breaking immersion. ***Are there multiple ways that one can ‘break’ immersion?*** I don’t think it’s a tried and tested formula. There’s always an opportunity to break immersion with anything. Using physics that don’t make sense is a way to break immersion. Using audio that doesn’t quite make sense is breaking immersion. It’s a thin line because it could be perceived as unintentional, but the challenge with any of this stuff is how do you make it seem intentional, and for every different project, that’s its problem to solve. I try not to leave any piece untouched without a little bit of that sauce of breaking immersion. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/staticlagoon-babycastles-1--scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/staticlagoon-babycastles-2--scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/staticlagoon-babycastles-4--scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/staticlagoon-onview-scaled.jpg) "Static Lagoon.". ***How did you transition to freelancing full-time?*** Post-grad, I couldn’t find a job for a long time. All that changed when I moved to New York and started couch-surfing with many friends—hopping around, living with different people. I got a small opportunity at *PIN-UP Magazine*, then at another small graphic design firm I found on Craigslist. After that, I moved to Interbrand on Fifth Avenue, then I was at OKFocus, now a retired web development company. I moved into MTV as an animator. I did print and digital, mostly focused on motion graphics work. I moved to Vice Media where I was working on their new TV channel, *Viceland*. Throughout these three years out of college working in television and all graphic design things, I was constantly pursuing game design and development, either in a freelance capacity or collaborating with people. The place that kicked it off was [Babycastles](https://www.babycastles.com/?ref=killscreen.com) in 2014\. It was the launch of Julian Assange’s, book *When Google Met WikiLeaks.* I remember M.I.A was on Livestream there. She was hanging out with Julian, and it was packed. I kept coming back to the space. They had these bespoke arcade cabinets with all these interesting games, and I loved it. I wrote to them saying, “I have a game, I’d like to show it, I’d like to have a launch party.” It was *Static Lagoon*. I had a launch there, which was fun. One of the cofounders, Kunal Gupta, invited me to dinner. We walked up to 32nd in K-Town at a food mall. He suggested I start being part of the team volunteering, which led to this parallel career. I got the chance to collaborate with all sorts of artists—building interactions for the space, setting up physical computing experiences for the space, curating eventually, shows at Babycastles, booking music events. All this was happening in parallel with my graphic design/television career. At *Viceland*, I realized my time in the U.S. was so limited, and eight hours of my day were spent in Vice’s basement making videos. That’s when I bit the bullet and quit with a few freelance gigs on my side and transitioned to being a full-time freelancer. I was collaborating with people after hours at *MTV*. I would sneak them in, we’d use their nice computers to do work on side projects. While I was at *Vice*, I had my studio. I would bike over there after work and stay there overnight. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/MG_0332-2-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/MG_0288-2-scaled.jpg) Prashast in his current studio in Hawai'i. ***Now, you run a game design studio, Pariah. How did that begin?*** Pariah is a name that I could attach to the project because I knew this would be something beyond myself. There was a point in time where I realized that I’ve collaborated with so many people on this big game project. It wouldn’t make sense for me to put it out as a solo developer, so I wanted the company for that reason to have a name that my collaborators can get behind and feel proud to publish under. Having a company in this American structure of capitalism is more beneficial to individuals under that company than being an individual. Those are the two reasons. When it started, it was me getting paid as the company. A few months in, I started to hire contractors as needed for the needs of various projects. Last year, I started working with Movers & Shakers building AR experiences. Pariah built a few things for them, including *Kinfolk*, an AR app where you can place unsung heroes from Black history in your AR space and learn about them in a nutshell. Developing for Movers & Shakers gave us the boost we needed, and now we have a full-time team of four. The company has come a long way. When I started Pariah, I thought it would be a label to put on *1000 Deaths*, but it’s become more than that. It’s blurred the line between my practice as well. Right now, running the company is my practice because I’ve had to learn so much, all the different aspects of business. Right now, my job is to find answers for my clients, my team, for myself, for the company. I’d like to have more time to explore and ask questions. There’s an ebb and flow to it. Some moments in your life you’re asking questions. For me right now, it’s the stage where I have to continuously find answers. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/1000-Deaths-Cover-Art-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Pic1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Pic2.jpg) Process stills from "1000 Deaths." ***Forcing the means of production to be part of the work itself feels very important.*** That’s the business model now. We make the client work, and whatever funds we get from that, we channel it towards the game, which is our investment and our product. In the future, I want to see the company making games. I love everybody I work with. I would love to see us being a game developer and making a mark in that way. ***What can you tell us about Pariah’s ongoing and upcoming project, 1000 Deaths?*** It started with this idea of, “What if we got rid of this notion of a main protagonist?” That’s so common to most games. You follow this one character throughout the narrative. What if we got rid of it, threw that out of the window. Instead, make it so that you have a cast of characters you care about equally, and you play all of them? What we found happened was the beliefs and ideas of the character that you’re empathizing with or relating to, in the beginning, that may not matter by the end of the game because you switch characters along the way and grow. You go through these different life stages from baby, to teen, to adult, to elder. At the end of every playthrough, death is guaranteed. This happens in about 15 minutes, maybe half an hour if you take your time. Then you start again. You can make new choices, and that will take you to a different character, perhaps. Imagine you start with a character with certain beliefs that you empathize with and then you switch to a character that has completely the opposite beliefs and you’re forced to reckon with those. That’s the conceptual framework of the game. It’s a culmination of all the thinking I’ve done in the realm of decision-making, and this notion of breaking immersion I’ve been talking about. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Pic3.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Pic4.jpg) Process stills from "1000 Deaths." I think games are way too long these days. I saw this opportunity to make a bite-size game that you can pick up, play through in a short amount of time. You can choose to keep doing it, but you can also sit with that one experience for a while to unpack it because it does give you so much to unpack, even in that 20 minutes. Also, many of these narrative games that have decision-making, the actual plot doesn’t change that much. If you take something like Telltale Games’ *Walking Dead*, the general plot stays the same. In *1000 Deaths*, when you decide, the whole world is radically different from the next branch of the story. That’s why you can take away a lot even in 15 or 20 minutes for a playthrough. It gives you a lot to think about after you put the game off. To me, the game may be escapist in the beginning when you’re playing it. Still, when you put it away because it points to reality so much throughout the game, players of all shapes and sizes will see takeaways that relate to the human experience after they put the game away. ***Is there a political end to the game?*** All of this is open to interpretation from the player. At the end of the day, whatever our intentions are as developers don’t matter. The players will take away whatever they need to take away. That said, perhaps the hope is players playing this game can remember that there is a wide gamut of beliefs and ideas that others have built over their life. People around us introspect for long periods to solidify their beliefs. It’s served to remind the player that just because someone disagrees with you doesn’t mean that to them, they’re not coming from a place of truth. The game has an outlook of counter-intuitively diving deeper into considering perspectives that may not align with our own, rather than dismissing them as invalid. --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted in April 2021. ### Links [Prashast’s website](https://www.prashast.in/?ref=killscreen.com) Follow [Prashast](https://www.instagram.com/akaprash/?ref=killscreen.com) on Instagram Follow [Prashast](https://twitter.com/akaprash/?ref=killscreen.com) on Twitter [Pariah Interactive](https://pariahinteractive.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [1000deaths.tv](https://www.1000deaths.tv/?ref=killscreen.com) ### LaJuné McMillian: Towards motion witnessing URL: https://www.killscreen.com/lajune-mcmillian/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T01:22:35.000Z [*LaJuné McMillian’s*](https://laja.me/?ref=killscreen.com) *body of work is evidence that physical movement can become a social movement. Blending their passion for figure skating and immersive media LaJuné’s* [*Black Movement Library*](https://vimeo.com/451600697?ref=killscreen.com) *(BML) exists as a creative resource for artists and activists—a library of motion capture data from Black performers and character base models. Beyond responding and reclaiming the material in existing movement database, it stands as an archive of Black existence.* *We speak with LaJuné about unraveling the appropriative biases inherent in immersive technologies, the importance of skating for themself, and what it means to reframe ‘motion capture’ as ‘motion witnessing.’* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_7554-scaled.jpg) **You have a background in figure skating. How did that shape your life?** I grew up in New Jersey, and I started skating in third grade. I begged my parents to let me start skating, maybe because I would watch it on TV with my nana, and I thought it was a beautiful sport. I had my ninth birthday at the ice rink, and then after that, I took lessons. I’m starting to process what it means to have grown up in such a white space. I grew up in a predominantly white school, but I have friends from various backgrounds. It was not a good time, and I was depressed all the time. I kept skating, and one good part about skating was that I didn’t have to go to school. I could be quiet and do me. But then some of those other perks of being in a different community on the ice came with its politics. **How did you get to merging art and technology?** I thought that I wanted to become an engineer. I went to what was then called NYU Polytech, which is now NYU Tandon School of Engineering. New York was stressful. School was a traumatic experience being there. I would get comments like, “Oh, you don’t look like you should go here.” By the end, I was like, “I don’t know why I’m here either.” I switched my major in my sophomore year. That whole year it was mind-opening because I didn’t know that you could make work art with technology. Also, it was very overwhelming because we were learning so many technologies at one time. So it was like learning 3D modeling, 3D animation, video editing and creation softwares, creative coding, installation classes, game design, physical computing, virtual reality, motion capture. I’d come from thinking that you could have a career in one thing, and you’d have to learn one thing. I realized that no, that’s not the only available path. You can build, and craft a route of your own if you try to figure out what you want that to be. I gained the courage to call myself an artist. That’s what I do. That’s who I am. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_7351-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_7481-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_7585-scaled.jpg) ***What are the driving ideas behind Black Movement Library?*** I did a residency at both Eyebeam and the [Barbarian Group](https://wearebarbarian.com/?ref=killscreen.com), who wanted me to create a motion-capture performance in their office space. I worked with Jeremiah Johnson, a creative director; [Nala Duma](https://tisch.nyu.edu/research/news/nala-duma?ref=killscreen.com), a music producer; and [Renaldo Maurice](https://www.alvinailey.org/alvin-ailey-american-dance-theater/renaldo-maurice?ref=killscreen.com), a dancer with Alvin Ailey. I thought to do interviews with both Renaldo and Nala. Those interviews were embedded into these sounds peak that you perform. I used my time to do interviews with them, learn more about their movement journeys with their practices. It opened the door for me to realize that I didn’t want my work to be just data. That’s pretty much how data is presented to us—as a list. I realized that I needed to build out a space that was more dynamic, multifaceted—a space that could hold information in various ways, and not through the data itself. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/NalaBMP_1802.jpeg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/berlinarltink-Black-Movement-Project-2019-IV-copyright-LaJune-McMillian.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/berlinartlink-lajunemacmillian-Nalabmp.jpeg) Stills from "Black Movement Library." In current motion capture databases, you don’t see how data is recorded. You don’t know who’s the motion capture actor, and you are given the motion capture data to use. That’s a dehumanizing process. When linking this work to the history of what it means to be Black in the United States, I didn’t want to further objectify us through a digital landscape. I didn’t want to be a part of that. I didn’t want to open the door for further exploitation, further erasure, and dilution of Black folks in our culture. There’s enough of that in the world. It transitioned my thought process from using us as tools to creating a space, to using a space where we can transition the work that we’re already doing into these digital landscapes—to navigate digital spaces to bring our full selves into these digital landscapes. We can define and understand what that fully means and what it means to be protected in these spaces. I realized the performance could serve as a combination of things, it could be held alongside the data so that if people do use that data for their projects, they know where the data is coming from. When they use that data for their projects, they’re not using it in this way that erases who they are…but rather, brings them along with them. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/antidoteTwo1353.jpg) Stills from an upcoming project, "Antidote." ***What does it mean to rename and redefine motion capture as ‘motion witnessing’?*** I don’t want to capture people, or the likeness of people. That’s not the type of work. But I am interested in witnessing people, in creating an archive of that witnessing work. I’m interested in that witnessing work through different levels. Through learning about people from how they talk about themselves in their lives—how they move not within performative aspects, how did they move through the world? It’s a way of transitioning my role from this person who is capturing and putting all those captions into this place. And to someone who is taking the violence out of that relationship and working towards that. It can be hard, especially when working with digital technologies with a history of ‘capturing. The idea that Blackness can’t be captured helped me in a research sense to understand what’s happening to us, our bodies, and how we move through space. We all have a sense of what cultural appropriation is, but sometimes what gets in the way of that conversation is why it is bad? These technologies take away this essence of something to put it into this process of commodification so that you can then sell it to the masses. That’s really what American culture is today, it’s this violent commodification of various cultures, and that process is linked to colonialism and slavery. So what does it mean to operate outside of that and outside of those terms? It was weird because a large conversation that I was having before I was thinking this way was like, “Maybe I could sell this motion capture data and pay the people who are moving.” But then I was like, “Is that operating within of commodification of somebody’s data?” I realized I don’t want to participate in that. But I do want to participate in the liberation of Black people. I do want to participate in our collective liberation. I want to participate in the abolishment of systems that perpetuate these situations. When I say Black Movement Library is a library of the future, I am also saying that it needs to operate through a futuristic lens. A future without these systemic oppressions. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/unnamed-1_600x700_acf_cropped.jpeg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/unnamed_600x700_acf_cropped.png) LaJuné coaching at Figure Skating in Harlem. ***What is the importance of physical movement in your daily life and practice?*** Coaching is not actually moving, and it’s helping others to move. But I wasn’t taking my own advice, and I wasn’t taking my own lessons. So I had stopped moving for such a long time, and I didn’t realize how much that was connected to trauma or how much connected to everything that had happened—all of the other things that were piled up through that college experience. So I was doing this work to make this movement library, but I wasn’t moving. For such a long time, the performance work that I was doing was featuring other dancers and not me. Deneane Richburg’s work inspired me because I’d never seen a Black skater looking at skating through a critical lens. And I feel like it’s so needed, especially for folks who have gone through this process of being a skater in a sport that can be very discriminatory depending on where you are in the skating world. So to find another skater who is looking at skating through this lens was really amazing to me. That inspired me to reconnect with my movement practice and journey. It told me that I needed to do that, to show up better for this work. Now, I take lessons, and it feels so good to skate again. Not to go to the Olympics, not to do any competing, but to skate for myself. Brownbody hosts these transformational residencies. It’s been a group of Black skaters, and us really deep healing, and necessary movement work, and reconnecting to our bodies differently. My skating life is a refuge for me. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/aethervrearth_1500.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/AetherVR_1500.png) Stills from "Aether." ***You’ve talked about how it’s a dream to develop an alternative to biased immersive technologies one day.*** I want to launch the website this summer. It will have to be various round tables with the folks that I’ve been working with. To see how they’ll feel comfortable with me maybe sharing, not sharing. People were seeing, viewing, how do people engage with this information. I’m turning the workshop into an online workshop that will include the movement portraits and the community-based aspects of the library work. Two years from now, I see the Black Movement Library as an actual library. So a library that you can go to, and engage with all the various research that has gone into this, the books, the readings. And also access to the technology. I’m creating a library of technology. I’m hoping to get more access to motion capture technologies, various motion capture technology. I’m hoping to get more access and hands-on access to all of these tools to put into this library so that folks who don’t have access can go to this place and make something. If you don’t have a real relationship with a handful of powerful institutions, it is really hard to get your hands on these tools. Through having access to these tools, the research, and all of the information through the layers of how it comes, they’ll be able to make tools if they want to too. So it’s not me thinking up and dreaming, but other folks having agency in that space as well, having the power to do that too. Hopefully, I can build the library as an institution that can support that and be a space to cultivate new tools together. It will be a space of convening. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Pink-and-Red-Organic-Illustrations-Personal-Anti-valentines-Valentines-Day-Instagram-Post-4.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/59722224_207006570274639_3572777424186110533_n.jpg) ***What do you hope people get out of the movement portraits you’ve created?*** With the movement portraits, it’s a way to share more information on the folks contributing their Movements to the library space. How do we find ways to humanize and also virtualize this process of data collection? They’re pretty dynamic in how they’re made. They’re first seen as a live performance, even with this recording of motion capture or motion witnessing in real-time. So they’re seeing this real-time motion witnessing data collection space. They’re basically invited into this process. Also, in that performance, they’re seeing these live visuals that I’m creating with Unreal Engine, and basically, I’m creating visually abstract projected experiences based on their movements. In the audio, they’re listening to the interviews spread throughout the actual space. I created two 10-minute videos from those performances. What I find interesting about these video works is that you don’t know, straight on, that they are from a live performance when you look at them. So this is the data from that performance, but I’m re-representing them as this sort of 2D video experience. So it doesn’t directly reference the performance. So if you didn’t know that the motion capture data was recorded and all the stuff that happened during those performances, you would think that you are looking at this movement portrait through this different medium. I’m interested in the transition between live medium versus video… a medium like VR. And how to create an experience for each platform, that is, for each medium, specifically. How do I retell the story through this medium? How do I virtualize that experience? How do I form this in a process that allows me to reconnect to the people I’m working with even if it is recorded from them? ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_7701-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/IMG_7862-scaled.jpg) I want to keep movement portraits multi-medium, mainly because I want to make work that can reach multiple people, who have access to multiple tools, not everyone has access to VR. Making a VR piece, even if it’s 360 video, I feel like it sometimes can leave people out of the conversation. The people I want to get to are the people that I talk to, which I don’t want to do. I want to always work on ways to open the door wider. I want that video to be an immersive experience too. I’m hoping that as I get more momentum, more resources, that I can give some of this work to other artists to make movement portraits. I hope that I’m bringing more Black folks into those spaces for all of us to work together. --- ### Credits Photography by [Yodith Dammlash](http://www.yodithd.com/?ref=killscreen.com). ### Links [LaJuné’s website](https://laja.me/?ref=killscreen.com) ### alpha_rats: Virtual reality is a dream state URL: https://www.killscreen.com/alpha_rats/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T01:23:15.000Z *Between their complex combination of personal and freelance work, alpha\_rats wears all sorts of hats. Whether it’s VR development, illustration, prototyping, designing levels, and more, the Russian-born, French-raised artist’s practice is living proof that fine art and technology can live hand-in-hand. Their technical and creative prowess coalesces and culminates in* [*Celestial Reactors*](http://alpharats.com/project/celestial-reactors?ref=killscreen.com)*, a room-scale VR experience that simulates a research experiment that takes place in the biosphere of an artificial planet.* *Alpha called us from their current home of Tokyo. We speak here about the relationship between utopias and dystopias, why virtual reality shouldn’t be thought of as an empathy machine, and the alchemical quality of technology.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/headshot_1-1-scaled.jpg) Alpha's avatar headshot. ***What was the landscape like where you grew up? Was there a defining moment in childhood when you knew you wanted to do something creative with technology?*** I grew up first in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Russia, then in the Czech Republic for a year. I spent most of my life in France until I moved to Germany at 19\. I don’t know if there was a decisive moment where I decided I wanted to work with something creative or with technology. I was always drawing or writing stories. As soon as we had a computer, I was on it all the time and doing all kinds of things. I became pretty tech-savvy quite early on. When it came to virtual reality, a lot of it came from anime and science fiction books—reading them and seeing the stories got me excited about VR, which was not a thing. It started to become available to the large public during my late teens, so it began to form around that time and crystallized around this. I can quite clearly trace why I wanted to get into VR, but not exactly why I went into computers or drawing. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/alpha_rats-quantcept-menthol-screenshot2.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Eda-screenshot-2-2.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Eda-screenshot-10.png) Some of Alpha's early game jam games. Growing up, I was inspired by everything to do with the space race. I was exposed to it through monuments, posters, or commemorations I saw when I was a kid. I grew up not in the USSR anymore, but it was still something you’d see in cartoons or different buildings. It fueled my interest in technology and science fiction and this idea of thinking of outer space and outer worlds. I had an obsession with this kind of stuff. As a teenager, I became inspired by [William Gibson](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/11/william-gibson-i-was-losing-a-sense-of-how-weird-the-real-world-was?ref=killscreen.com) and his books. He described in quite visual terms what virtual reality could be. Both this space race utopia and the cyberpunk books were inspiring because people were trying to imagine the future. But, of course, the future they envisioned is not what I want to express or the one I’m trying to manifest. When you do something like VR, that’s a bit like you try to manifest an idea of a word that you have in your mind. In my case, it’s fueled by this futuristic imagination idea. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/another-dream-screenshot-store-1.jpg) Still from "Another Dream," a commissioned project. ***I would love to know more about some of the games you were making initially. What drew you to the space of VR after making those games?*** I was quite methodical back then when it came to learning the craft. I’m self-taught, but I was quite structured. I learned to program, then I did some games, and was doing game jams because it was good practice. I also got excited by it because I like the challenge of making something in a very short amount of time. I made a different type of game for game jams for a while, but somehow in my mind, I was not fully free; I was not doing whatever I wanted to do. I still had this idea that, at some point, I might work in the gaming industry. I started making html5 games, browser games and then switching to Unity to start to do 3D, from 2D to 3D. The first games I did for the jams were more like different experiments, and I mostly did them to learn the technology. I had a bigger game project at some point that I abandoned which didn’t see the light of the day at the end, which was maybe more ambitious and more personal. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/corpus-misty-screenshot-store-10.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/corpus-misty-screenshot-store-8.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/corpus-misty-screenshot-store-26.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/corpus-misty-screenshot-store-1.jpg) Stills from "Corpus Misty." ***In your experience, what’s been the greatest difference in transitioning from working in 2D and 3D to VR?*** I still draw. I tend to go back and forth between mediums. I’m not interested in doing something photorealistic or doing something super well-rendered. I would be more concerned with the shape or the composition of the scene I’m building, and the colors, and the overall mood, but I don’t care about anything which looks realistic because when I draw a lot, I end up finding a style that fits what I wanted to express I constantly go back and forth between both. It’s not superior to do 3D versus 2D animation or drawing. If you want to make a world where people are immersed, you have to use 3D tools. Even when you draw something, somehow, the scene exists in your mind under a different form. The way I feel it, and the reason why I don’t see it as such a big deal difference, is that before you draw something or before you make it in 3D, you have a vague idea of what this thing exactly is. It has an atmosphere, and it has colors. You have a feeling you want to express, and you have a general image in your mind of this space you want to represent. The moment you put it into 3D or 2D, that’s where you start to discover what this landscape you had in your mind has to show you. For me, using 2D or 3D to explore doesn’t make a huge difference. Maybe drawing is faster, so you can quickly get something down; get a general sense of where you’re heading, but you also don’t get the immersion you’d have with 3D. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/preview-wands-3.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/preview-swords-4.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/preview-cups-1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/preview-coins-4.jpg) Alpha's illustrated tarot deck. With some of my early prototypes, there’s this feeling of being inside the particular space because once you’re inside, you start to think about what else there is in this dimension. I’m in this space, and my mind starts to think, “Oh, what’s behind this door? What’s behind this here? Oh, I wanted to go up there.” Then, I go up there, you didn’t build the rest of the space, so you have to start thinking, “Okay, what should I add here?” It’s a similar exploration of this initial intuition I had. Even if it’s maybe a bit more impressive by drawing because I often get this feeling that you start drawing, you finish drawing, and then you look at it, and you’re like, “What is this?” It’s the same for code—you start coding, you end coding, and you’re like, “What have I done?” My vision of technology evolved with time. I used to have this idea of technology being something that pushes people into the future because that’s also a bit behind my early inspirations. Now, my vision of it is different. For example, blockchain technology seems nice on the surface, but there is an ideology behind it. There is an economy behind it. The idea we have of technology usually is quite far away from what the technology itself is. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/DAL-__-Artificial-remnants-process-5-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/pasted-image-0.png) Stills and process from "Artificial Remnants." There is this idea of VR as this empathy machine. I was not really into this idea. I’m still not really into it. When I began work on VR documentary projects, my perspective about it changed. Relative to NGO documentaries, and in particular with the context of funding, I ended up seeing VR as something manipulative toward the audience actually towards the end. I don’t see at all that VR is superior to another medium. It’s just attractive to me because it’s a sensory experience, and that’s what I aim for. I like this sense of awe that it can provide, this idea that it’s a separate space from the world we’re in. In one of his books called *Dawn of the New Everything*, [Jaron Lanier](http://www.jaronlanier.com/?ref=killscreen.com) expressed the idea that when you’re in VR, you’re giving the VR system control over your feedback loop. Because not only do you see things, but you can interact with things, and you get this feedback, and it overrides the perception you have of your environment. It sounds scary to say it like this. VR is a solitary experience—it could be social VR, but you isolate yourself in this bubble. It’s a medium that requires time. You need to have the time, and you need to be emotionally available; you need to be in shape because it’s a bit physical to be in this virtual space where you might be flying around or teleporting. These qualities make VR interesting for me—it’s really good to create a meditative and contemplative state of mind, which is what I like to push for. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/sketches.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/CelestialReactors-MainVisual2.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/CelestialReactors-MainVisual1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/CelestialReactors-MainVisual3.jpg) Stills and process from "Celestial Reactors." ***I appreciate the sentiment that VR is not an empathy machine. Technology doesn’t erase people’s identities or the power dynamics that structure society.*** For me, VR feels more of something that isolates you and makes you look inward, rather than this empathy machine that allows you to step into someone’s shoes. It can erase your ego to some extent because embodiment is a big part of the ego. ***I’d love to hear about your creative process for your practice. I’d love to hear about Celestial Reactors and how that project came to be.*** My friend, a writer, came to me with a story and said, “I would like to do a comic book,” and I love comics books, and I love drawing. I tried at some point to do some comics when I was younger. I came back to them and said, “Let’s maybe try to make a VR out of this story.” I started building in the world. We did some research, found some visual references because it was a lot around the idea of the sun. That was the core symbol. We researched iconography. The story ended up changing as I was making the VR as well. It started as a comic book idea and then turned into a VR, and then we thought, “Okay, let’s still also keep the book,” because I realized the way I translate stories in VR or different mediums is abstract, and I’m not that good with narration. I see every project as an experiment. I don’t draw a strong line between different media because, for me, if it’s visual, I feel like I can do it, even if it’s a wrong idea. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/CR-type.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/installation-view.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/early-concepts-e1621017407468.jpg) Stills and process from "Celestial Reactors." ***What draws you to the ideas and aesthetics inspired by space exploration and ecological issues as central themes?*** I find biology and the natural world fascinating. Not only because it’s beautiful, but because it’s interesting. It’s difficult for me not to feel sad about what’s happening to our environment and what we’re doing to it. I tend to express these concerns in what I make. I believe that nature can provide us with beauty and knowledge. If we destroy it, it doesn’t mean that there will not be other sources of beauty somewhere else or that we can’t find knowledge somewhere else. Still, it’s the idea of humanity being the only thing remaining on the planet after destroying everything is very haunting. For example, the Soviet idea of going to space is a utopia, but much of the cyberpunk stuff I was inspired from is more on the dystopian aspects. I don’t want to fall into the dystopian sense of, “Oh, here we are, we are in the survival game, fighting.” Survivalism thrives on this idea of destruction—this power fantasy of you as a human surviving all these odds. I like to explore more of the idea of a world without humans anymore; instead of this survival, we will build technology to bypass everything. In *Celestial Reactors*, it was the idea of some forms of technology persisting in the same way that we imagined that nature will persist after us if we ever disappear that would rebuild itself in some form of way. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/CelestialReactors-KG-player-scaled.jpg) The physical experience of "Celestial Reactors." ***What was the importance of hand tracking in Celestial Reactors?*** Now, some of the latest Oculus headsets have built-in hand tracking. I was using an additional sensor that records the gestures of your hands. The idea behind is that to move through space, and you would look where you want to go, and you would make this gesture aim. Then, when you release, you teleport to where you’re looking at–so, there is this connection between gaze and movement. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/PRINT4-2_AGENTS-smaller-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/PRINT4-3_NETWORK_smaller-scaled.jpg) Posters for "Celestial Reactors." That was the idea. Now, I’m working on a version of the game to release so making a version which was the switches with controllers. I ended up removing the direct gaze connection because it’s more difficult to manipulate. Changing it for controller-only support It loses a bit of its psychological impact as well, so it’s a trade-off like it’s more usable. Still, it’s less impactful in terms of direct experience because I felt this direct connection between gaze and movement was quite strong, actually. I ended up having dreams where I would be in space, look somewhere and be like, “Oh, I would like to go out there” and find myself there. It’s really; somehow, my brain registered it as something that it can do that it can look somewhere and just end up here, and I’m sure it came directly from this VR interaction because I was working on it at that point. Just like in my dreams, there’s this idea of technology as magic. It’s very believable for your brain when you’re in VR. I often compare it to a dream state. This is quite accurate because, in dreams, you have a memory of physical sensations, but you don’t have them. You don’t feel the burn. You feel the fear of the burn. I don’t remember waking up from a dream where you’re hurt and feeling physical pain. It’s an extreme example, but in VR as well, you have this visual world—if you’ve touched something spiky, you might have the psychological reaction of “Oh, this is a spiky thing.” It’s dangerous, but you will not feel the pain exactly. --- ### Credits Interview conducted in April, 2021\. Edited and condensed for clarity. ### Links [Alpha’s website](http://alpharats.com/?ref=killscreen.com) Follow [Alpha](https://www.instagram.com/alpha%5Frats/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) on Instagram Follow [Alpha](https://twitter.com/alpha%5Frats?ref=killscreen.com) on Twitter ### Uzoma Orji:The spiritual undertones of virtual reality URL: https://www.killscreen.com/uzoma-orji/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T01:21:49.000Z [](https://twitter.com/home?status=https://killscreen.com/uzoma-orji/&ref=killscreen.com) *On the homepage of* [*Uzoma Orji’s website*](https://uzomaorji.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*, users have the choice of viewing the work of ‘Uzoma the Artist’ and ‘Uzoma the Techie.’ These simultaneous threads have intertwined into practice that spans photography, virtual reality, websites, and physical installation. “I want to explore the ramifications of present-day technology to ancestral beliefs,” Uzoma tells us. “How can these help us situate ourselves in the world that preceded this one that we live in?”* *Uzoma called us from his home in Abuja, Nigeria. We speak here about anti-colonial notions of time, what it means to create an ‘ancient African future,’ and why everyone should be ‘tech-agnostic.’* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/UZOMA_00288-scaled.jpg) ***What was your childhood like, and the landscape you grew up in?*** In Nigeria, you’re from where your father is from. I grew up in Port Harcourt, an hour away from Owerri, in the Southern part of Nigeria. My childhood was a very creative one. My mom really created a bubble for my siblings, and me to live in. It was like many childhoods—it was full of play, adventure, and exploration. We weren’t really aware of what was going on in the city or town around us. Port Harcourt in the 2000s was becoming progressively dangerous. It’s the heart of the oil-producing parts of the country. We eventually had to leave because there were a lot of kidnappings going on. We weren’t really aware of that. There was a lot of tension there, but we didn’t know all that. We were living in our fantasy world. Our games involved world-building and imagination. We had this one game called the ‘wrestle drill’ where we would pretend all adults were really into WWE, like *SmackDown* and *RAW*. We would pretend that all adults were wrestlers, and they lived in this community of wrestlers. Everyone was a wrestler, and their lives revolved around their wrestling, obviously, but they all lived together in the same community. Outside of the wrestling matches, like what goes on on the day-to-day. We had imagined that each of us was the president of our own imaginary country. World-building and creating alternate realities really resonated with me. I can see how it has continued with a lot of my work now. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/UZOMA_00318-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/UZOMA_00421-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/UZOMA_00413-scaled.jpg) ***I’m curious about your studies at LCC and how that has shaped your practice.*** I feel like a hybrid being in that I have inhabited both these worlds, which of course, have such intertwined histories. I’ve experienced both in a way that people from either of those worlds haven’t. I have cousins in the village who maybe haven’t been outside of our town or the country. I have friends in London who were born in London, grew up in London, but they’re Nigerian. I can understand both realities and my cousin and my friends are coming from and act as a bridge almost. It’s an interesting place to be with your perception of the world and your understanding of the world and references, things you can reference. My course was very theoretical. I felt disconnected from what I was learning, to be honest. It’s a great school for Media Arts. My education was really from being in the city, being in London. Those three years, the growth happened outside of the classroom or outside of the institution.” Having to navigate the city as this 18-year-old kid from Nigeria. I’d never been out. That’s where the real learning was. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/UZOMA_00439-scaled.jpg) ***When did you first learn that you could bridge art and technology?*** Programming started towards the end of high school. I had this idea for a social app where the ideas actually get you off your phone, offline, and into the real world. I told my friends about it in school, they were really excited. I had meetings with technology companies in the city. “Okay, I have this idea how much would it cost to build this?” Then they give me these ridiculous bills that I obviously can’t afford as a 16-year-old. I’m like, “Okay, screw this. I am going to do this myself.” That’s what started me down this exciting journey of trying to figure out computers. I remember learning HTML and my mom’s pink HP notebook laptop. That was the beginning. I went to South Africa for two years for A-Levels, but I still taught myself how to code. I went to London for this programming boot camp called [Makers Academy](https://makers.tech/?ref=killscreen.com), and I spent three months there. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/UZOMA_00436-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/UZOMA_00410-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/UZOMA_00426-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) With arts, it’s almost like a simultaneous alternative timeline that happened when I was in London. I have a friend who is an amazing photographer. I would dress up, I’m really into fashion. I do costume design as well. She was like, “Let’s start taking pictures of you putting on Instagram.” From ordinary fashion shoots that evolved into, I’ll develop these concepts for the shoots. It wouldn’t just be to wear clothes and take pictures, there will be a story. From conceptual photography, it continued evolving into whatever it is now. I was interested in bringing those two sides of my work together. That’s what birthed this interactive media path that I’m currently on. It’s exciting to see how interwoven these two things can be. I’m excited about interactive experiences like immersive exhibitions, to see people engage with things unique in an artistic way. It drives me. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Screen-Shot-2021-05-06-at-10.43.16-AM.png) The homepage of Uzoma's website. ***You mentioned that your education at LCC was theory-heavy, but you need this practical knowledge to make something with technology. When you’re about to start working on a project, Does it come from this world of ideas, or are you experimenting with the tools first?*** Your [interview with Salome Asega](https://killscreen.com/salome-asega/?ref=killscreen.com) was amazing. She mentioned being tech-agnostic. I see that I am committed to the idea or to the concept, and I will do whatever it takes to make the concept happen. If I need to learn something new, if I need to reconsider using the tool that I think I already know how to use, I will do that. Anything that is in service of the idea, I will do. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/UZOMA_00404-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/TBOAIM_VR_Installation_5.jpg) \] ***That speaks to how “Baptism of an Igbo Man” exists as both a photo series and a virtual reality experience. That simultaneity feels important—it proves that the work is in service to the idea. How did this project come to be?*** The concept is really simple. It deals with the idea of colonialism and how that completely transformed value systems, ways of seeing and being in the world, ways of understanding our place in the world. Which is something that I think about a lot. In the images, it’s one man who’s wearing a red hat. That hat is called an Ozo hat. It’s worn by Igbo elders. If you were initiated into the committee of elders, you’re privy to wearing that hat. This man is wearing the hat. He’s submerged in water, the process of baptism, and he emerges from the water. He’s wearing a more English bowler hat. Obviously, the symbolism is in the hats and how they changed through baptism, which is a symbolic process in the Christian faith. I like the idea of using these simple visual metaphors to express complex social or philosophical concepts. That’s what I was trying to do there. I like to start from a visual place, just because it’s easier to think that way. With that project, almost simultaneously, as I’m thinking about colonialism, the effects of colonialism. At the same time, I’m also thinking about translating that to visuals. That thinking is happening simultaneously—I like to create the visuals first because it now opens up so much more possibility when it exists. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/baptism2-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/baptism1-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/baptism3-scaled.jpg) The photographic component of "Baptism of an Igbo Man." For [Abuja Art Week](https://abujaartweek.com/?ref=killscreen.com) in 2019, there was a physical space that I created. You come into space, and on the one hand, there’s a traditional Igbo shrine where you can do a divination process and all of that. As you move through space, you encounter the baptismal river. That’s where you put on the VR headset, and you’re transformed. Then the final part of the room is like a Christian altar. I decorated the space to sort of reflecting that journey. All of that just begins with having the visuals first. That helps me think about all the different forms that the work can take. I like to work that way. Simultaneously, it’s also with technology to offline. My most recent project, “Welcome to Instaland,” exists as a website. That’s the first form it took. Now I’m working on a physical exhibition that borrows concepts from the website, but it’s not online. It makes physical the website so you can walk in the space—and interact with the website as if it were a physical thing. I like the idea of starting from somewhere and then seeing all the different paths that you can follow to realize the work to the fullest. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/TBOAIM_VR_Installation_2.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/TBOAIM_VR_Installation_4.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/TBOAIM_VR_Installation_1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/TBOAIM_VR_Installation_3.jpg) The physical installation of "Baptism of an Igbo Man." **Working in VR, did you find that there were certain biases in the technology or challenges in creating something that is meant to be transcendent, spiritual?** I’m currently a Digital Earth fellow with my partner, Sheila Chukwulozie. Our work is concerned with creating a mathematical interpretation of Igbo proverbs. For that project, that has been at the front of my thinking. Proverbs are so spiritual and poetic. Creating an algorithm around them seems like boxing them in and defeating the essence. That permits all the confrontations between technology and ancestral practices an ancestral spirituality. That being said, I was having a conversation once, and the person I was talking to mentioned that modern media and technology, especially VR and AR have spiritual undertones. The map very well to a lot of ancestral practices because they allow you to embody a lot of what ancestral practices promoted or put forth. I’m reading *Starbook* by Ben Okri. He talks about how we are no longer heirs to the people that came before us. Somewhere in the process of colonization, there is a severance between people and cultures of the so-called ‘third world.’ There’s a disconnect between who we are, where we are now, and those who came before us. I’m interested in seeing how the digital technologies we are comfortable with and are used to get more familiar with how those can help understand those worlds we’ve been cut off from. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/TBOAIM_VR_Installation_6.jpg) The VR component of "Baptism of an Igbo Man." Those tensions exist on the surface. Digital technology can be construed as un-African depending on the lens one adopts to look at it. I think it’s about your intentions and how you approach them. This is why art is important—we can co-opt it almost to what we’re trying to do with it. I recently came across this exhibition called [Ancient African Futures](https://www.a2omag.com/african-ancient-futures?ref=killscreen.com). Already, just that title speaks to what we’re trying to say. The work is all about what future exists without acknowledging all our past or where we come from? That’s how we got into this mess in the first place. I look around where I live: in contemporary Nigerian society today, there’s so much systemic denial which trickles down to individuals and society. There’s a denial of where we come from, and that’s the success of the colonial project. They typecast things in a negative light. That has negatively affected us because we’re shooting blanks, shooting in the dark. We’re taking foreign concepts and applying them. We’re not passing it through a filter that’s relevant to us, based on understanding where we’re coming from. It’s like, “Oh, this works here, like boom, boom, boom.” There’s such an identity crisis that arises from that. The idea of Ancient African Futures, or this idea of what you’re saying, like alternative history, alternative timelines. Also, what is time? ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/WTI-7.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/WTI-4.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/WTI-3.jpg) "Welcome to Instaland." ***Time is colonized.*** Time is colonized! The concept of time that we’re currently inhabiting is very colonized and doesn’t serve us. That idea of devising alternative futures is exciting. I think the digital is an amazing tool to help us even conceptualize that. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Welcome-to-Instaland-BTS2-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Welcome-to-Instaland-notes-1-scaled.jpg) Notes for "Welcome to Instaland." ***Time and technology have contributed to the erasure of history. So what happens when we use those same tools to unerase what has been erased? Speaking of possible futures, what are you currently working on?*** I just completed a project called “Welcome to Instaland,” which is about the social media landscape that we currently live in, which is very algorithmic and is driven by algorithms that serve corporate interests to the detriment of peoples’ souls. These things are harming us. I’m happy that I could express many of those thoughts in this interactive way because there are so many ways. I’m thinking about this project that explores an alternative—I hesitate to use the word utopia—but explores an ideal African reality, a physical reality that people can visit and interact with firsthand. I’m thinking of long-term, setting up space where you can walk in, interact with the buildings. It’s like an urban space where you can come in, interact with the buildings, interact with people, go to the market and do all the things like you would in a normal city. It’s an artistic interpretation of what an alternative African future would look like, free of all the ills of neoliberalism and then all the corruption and everything we face now. I’m also trying to do this VR project with kids. We’re calling it “The Nigeria of my Dreams,” and we’re going into local school communities; organizing workshops where we get primary school-age kids to engage in dreaming work: “What kind of community do I want to live in? What kind of city, what kind of country do I want to live in?” Then creating their imaginations in virtual reality and having them explore those spaces. That could be big in terms of opening up horizons and inspiring hope. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/UZOMA_00374-scaled.jpg) --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted in April 2021\. Photography by [Ajay Abalaka](https://www.ajayabalaka.com/?ref=killscreen.com). ### Links [Uzoma’s website](https://uzomaorji.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Uzoma on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/uzomaorji%5F/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) ### Maya Man URL: https://www.killscreen.com/maya-man/ Last updated: 2024-12-06T00:54:49.000Z # Seeing yourself in the data [](https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://killscreen.com/maya-man/)[](https://twitter.com/home?status=https://killscreen.com/maya-man/&ref=killscreen.com) *For* [*Maya Man*](https://mayaontheinter.net/?ref=killscreen.com)*, there was “not at all a single moment where it clicked” when it came to bringing together her passions for dance and creative code. The convergence just came naturally—and it has led to collaborations with choreography legend Bill T. Jones, using Unreal Engine to capture movement, and countless browser-based, interactive experiences.* *Maya is now a Creative Technologist at the Google Creative Lab and continues to work on personal projects that address our intimate relationships with our devices and translate human movement into data in a beautiful, dynamic way. We speak here about telling stories through pose estimation, the politics of performativity, and making work that pushes past dance on screen.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ADS09620-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ADS09622-scaled.jpg) **How influential was your childhood to your creative development?** That realization came that I wanted to be an artist late for me. I grew up in Central Pennsylvania, in suburbia. I was very interested in math and science—I loved the logic of it. It was so satisfying to me to problem-solve that way. For college, I decided I wanted to study physics; that’s what I applied as. During that whole process growing up, I was drawn to dance. I was in a company; I was in the competition, dance world—if you’ve ever watched Dance Moms, that world without the drama… in my life at least \[laughs\]. I gravitated toward dance, naturally—I am always moving, and it was a good outlet for me. A couple of weeks before I went to college, my mom said, *Hey, people who like math like computer science and coding. You should try it.* I did a two-week coding bootcamp. We built one website, and I was completely hooked. It had the logic and problem-solving that I loved about math and physics, but I could actually output a creation of my own, conceptually make it my own thing. I went to Pomona College and studied Computer Science and Media Studies. When I started studying CS, everyone around me was interested in becoming a software engineer at a big tech company, to generalize the trajectory most people went along with. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ADS09578-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ADS09616-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ADS09619-scaled.jpg) I was dancing, excited about art and design, but they felt very separate in my life. Growing up, I always thought that artists were people who were really good at drawing and painting. I didn’t have a holistic sense of what art could be. Going into my sophomore year of college, I met Lauren McCarthy and Taeyoon Choi at the first [p5.js](https://p5js.org/community/contributors-conference-2019.html?ref=killscreen.com) conference—community of artists and educators who thought about code, art, and design. They really prioritized inclusivity in a tech-oriented space, which was, at the time, very radical. I always felt like in tech spaces that I needed to prove myself—that I was already being underestimated. This conference totally opened my mind to what you were able to do with a technical background in the realm of art and design. CS was technical, math-based, and Media Studies talked a lot about technology and its effect on society and culture. A lot of my intersectional education was DIY came a lot from learning on the internet resources that were free and online. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ADS09686-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ADS09716-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ADS09709-scaled.jpg) ***You have a family history in tech!*** My grandmother was an AI researcher. She studied computer science. At the time, it was very early, especially for a woman, to study those things. My uncle, [Ken Goldberg](https://goldberg.berkeley.edu/?ref=killscreen.com), is a professor at Berkeley and works a lot at the intersection of robotics and art. Everyone in my family has been very driven and in the specific thing, they’re interested in, whether AI research or robotics. Even having those role models growing up, I didn’t fully see myself doing it until I entered that Processing community. What excited me the most about working in this space was that I could envision a project and then bring it into existence myself with my coding background. I realized the available technologies or what was available to me to start to explore dance. I was excited when I saw work that combined Processing with the Kinect, and people had things on screen reacting to their movement in space. Discovering [PoseNet](https://www.tensorflow.org/lite/examples/pose%5Festimation/overview?ref=killscreen.com) was exciting—it was this in-browser machine learning model that was able to understand where you are in space; where specific parts of your body were on screen. Whenever I am introduced to a new technology that enables me to make something reactive to my movement on the screen, it’s really exciting. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ADS09593-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ADS09669-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ADS09670-scaled.jpg) ***Your work challenges this conception of using your computer as a very passive experience. Does the physical act of dance and the physical act of programming feel different for you?*** Dance is such a nuanced, human, organic art form. Those are not words I would necessarily use to describe machines or programming. I struggle with the conflict between these things. Programming and dance are part of my own identity and things I like to engage with, but at the same time, sometimes they don’t work together in the way that I always want them to. They feel distinct to me, but that’s what makes it so exciting to try to combine it in a lot of my work. I’m not interested in *just* putting dance on screen. I’m interested in what can be done when you introduce code that can’t be done when you watch dance offline. Nothing I make will ever replace the feeling of dancing or going to see dance in physical space. Still, there are many exciting ways to combine them that allow you to perceive movement or think about movement in a way that you just might not be able to without the augment of the program you’re building. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ADS09630-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ADS09631-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ADS09638-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ADS09633-scaled.jpg) ***What was it like discovering PoseNet for the first time?*** The version that runs on TensorFlow is JavaScript-based, so it will run in your browser. Previously, any interaction with motion capture body tracking that estimation technology was not as easy this…now, I can click on a link on a website and just have it on my computer. Before, I needed a Kinect camera, a wholly separate piece of hardware that I had to acquire. With PoseNet, I could try something out in the browser like I would click on any website. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/HERO.jpeg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/EXPERIMENTS.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/manifesto.gif) From "Body, Movement, Language: AI Sketches with Bill T. Jones" PoseNet has been trained on thousands and thousands of images of humans, but for the most part, humans doing very pedestrian things. So, they’re standing, sitting, it hasn’t been trained on dancers with their leg by their head. When dancers would do something that was outside of the scope of normal human day-to-day movement, it would often get confused. We also had to brace ourselves for it to glitch or not pick up on something and obviously can tell where a person is in space. Working with \[choreographer\] Bill T. Jones and his dancers, we wanted it to feel like an exploration, not like a final answer to the question of, *How would you combine this new technology with dance?* I brought the [PoseNet Sketchbook](https://mayaontheinter.net/posenetsketchbook/?ref=killscreen.com) to Bill and his team—they reacted to it in a way where they felt frustrated that they couldn’t see the nuance of the dancers’ movement in those points on the screen. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/PROCESS.jpeg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/BILL_VINSON.jpeg) They said, *Technically, it’s very cool, but where’s the meaning in this? What is the dancer’s role in this?* Bill posed this question at the beginning. We kept coming back to what he was saying. *Can these dots on screen make somebody cry*? That was a moment working in technology and constantly around people who are like, Wow, the machine-learning models running in the browser. That was the moment I realized that the point of making something with Bill, this incredible artist, is that his story and what he’s trying to say can come through. The experiments that are part of the project with Bill, we stripped down a lot. So they’re very simple; they’ll use a couple of points on the wrist, and we really leaned into using language, in addition to the PoseNet model, Bill was interested in speech and how that can interact in a live performance setting. The dancers were able to say things that would appear on the screen and then attached to their bodies somehow, and they could move things around. Now, I think about how the concept necessitates the technology I use with any work I do. Am I trying to use the technology in a way that actually doesn’t add meaning—more of a demo of the tech—versus a powerful concept? ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/1-1.jpeg) ***When you are in front of the camera or AI technology, does it feel different as a dancer, compared to when you’re aware of the technology?*** Definitely, it feels different. Dancing in front of a computer with the intention of your movement showing up on a screen somewhere versus a stage performance—you form this reciprocal relationship with the technology you’re using. The technology responds to you and your own movement, but you are also responding to the technology. With Bill, we were doing experiments where they could say something and then hold the words they said on-screen between their hands. They’re not just improvising and doing whatever movement that they want. They’re really thinking about their hands then—how they’re going to hold them in a way that will make the text legible on screen, or make it larger or smaller depending on how they move to depend on the program or intention. It gets into your head and affects how you move, which I don’t think is a bad thing. Especially in a situation like that, where that’s the intention, but it’s hard to completely separate your movement from the reason you’re performing it. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ADS09624-scaled.jpg) ***You have a piece in the latest*** [***Feral File show***](https://feralfile.com/exhibitions/social-codes-pcl?ref=killscreen.com) ***called Can I Go Where You Go. How were you thinking about this as an interactive piece?*** I was excited about Feral File because it was an exhibition that was going to take place in the browser. I wanted the piece to be interactive and highlight the fact that the code was running in-browser. It’s exciting about software-based work—that that distinguishes it. Digital artwork exists as an image or video or a GIF—where the code isn’t necessarily running, so you can’t interact. What would the process look like of someone interacting with my form on the screen? I was playing around—putting my moving form actually on the person on the mouse, like X and Y coordinates. My digital body moves wherever your mouse is moving on a screen. I was tethering myself to this anonymous person who would be viewing my work in the future. It connected me to them. I was interested in risograph colors—they’re very vibrant laid out on a page. I made the colors these bright pink and purple hues. I filmed the video generating my format in a friend’s studio in Red Hook. I had to get the most perfect contour ever because I’m using background subtraction, which depends on the pixel’s colors. I bought a black suit that would mostly cover my body to dance in. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/FERALFILE-scaled.jpg) "can I go where you go?" is now on view in Feral File's Social Codes show. My favorite thing about that piece was after the launch, seeing other people use the piece. Each time, it’s different depending on how someone moves their mouse. Some people would move slowly and draw little squiggles. Some people would cover the whole screen. Some people drew hard. Some people drew straight lines. It was interesting to see how different it could feel and look depending on who was interacting with it. The piece doesn’t really start until someone moves the mouse. In JavaScript, it’s called a user event. I wanted it to feel like me and this person on the other side of the screen was performing the piece together. That connection was important. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/CANIGO.gif) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/mm_canigowhereyougo_2_ig.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/mm_canigowhereyougo_6_ig.png) **You do choreography and movement work for music videos. How do these experiences filter into your larger creative process?** This past year I worked on [*777*](https://vimeo.com/472199853?ref=killscreen.com) by Joji, directed by Saad Moosajee. And that one was a really wild experience because you don’t see me in the video, but I did the motion capture for all of the characters in the video. It was a real challenge for me as a choreographer and a dancer to think, how can I create these movement vocabularies for these different types of characters and then convey them solely through the data that’s going to be captured in the motion capture studio. As a performer, I’m very expressive on my face. For this project, I didn’t have any of that. I could come off as these different characters depending on who I was trying to perform for each take. I would send videos to Saad of me trying something out to the song. We did two different days in the motion capture studio. The wildest part was there was one day where I was performing moments where the characters interact in the video. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/PREVIZ-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/UNREAL.gif) Behind-the-scenes on Joji's 777 music video. We used Unreal Engine in the motion capture studio. They would import movement; I would see that on screen, which was myself, and then I’d be in the suit reacting to that character on the screen in real-time. It was a really strange experience knowing that it was me, this avatar on screen. But it was the movement that I had generated, and the movement was pretty high fidelity. Compared to other ways I’ve worked with the Kinect or especially with PoseNet, in the data, I could really see myself and recognize my own movement, which doesn’t happen to me with some other motion capture technology. In the end result, I’m seeing my movement on this muscular white male, or these bodies that don’t look like my body, but the movement looks like mine. It was a mind-blowing process. I thought about what it means to put myself on screen and what it means to represent my own identity in my own appearance in pixels. That was a far-out experience, seeing myself represented by my own movement, but physically in a completely different way. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/MOCAP_UNREAL-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/MOCAP-scaled.jpg) ***Your project, Glance Back, addresses a presence there—your computer or your webcam is capturing you in a moment, but it’s. Also, there’s also a past to it…users create an archive of intimate moments with their devices. How did this project come to be?*** I was thinking about that feeling when someone’s staring at you for a really long time, and you’re not staring back, but you can like feel them staring at you. It’s awkward. After I started working, I thought, that’s how my computer feels—I’m just staring at it all day, and it’s not staring at me. I need to give it a chance to engage. At least once a day, we need to have a little check-in. I’m really interested in self-documentation. I would ideally love to be really consistent and journaling or taking a photo every day, but I often start those endeavors and fall off. I’m pretty reliably in my browser every day on my computer and Glance Back will go off automatically. I was really interested in the difference between the way we represent ourselves on-screen versus how we actually look while we’re looking at our screen—which is, at least for me, dead face, no expression. I was interested in that raw capture of how we usually appear when we’re looking at our screens versus how we tend to aspirationally render ourselves on social media. Initially, I made it for myself for all those reasons. Once a day, it would take a photo of me and ask me what I’m thinking about. Other people would see it on my computer screen and ask me if they could use it so I released it publicly as a Chrome extension. I’m interested in those moments of intimacy that we share with the computers that we don’t usually share online with the rest of the online audience that we might have. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/question-scaled.jpeg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/GLANCEBACK_PEEK_01.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/GLANCEBACK_PEEK_02.jpg) Stills from Glance Back. ***The original version of Glance Back was made pre-pandemic?*** Way pre-pandemic. I launched it publicly in January 2019, but I had made it and was using it in fall of 2018 myself. So yeah, it was so funny. I can see when I scroll through my past all my archive of Glance Backs, and it really has tracked things nicely. You can track just my mental state too. A lot of people’s relationship with their computers and their phones is super intimate. In the pandemic, I’m constantly using it as a portal to something less intimate that is like work calls and even hanging out with friends on a big zoom, or those types of things. This is not a unique feeling. I find it very draining because what I do on my computer feels internal. To have to externalize so much via my computer and via these video calls is very tiring. Just going into the office, I would always think of it like that. And so having this extra layer of where the computer is, mediating your interaction, you can actually see yourself. I find that really exhausting because not only are you going through the exercise of performing the social interaction, but also, seeing yourself on screen, perceiving yourself. It’s this exhausting mental loop that I’ve found I need to step away from as much as I can afford to, especially this far into this time. I don’t think performativity is inherently bad. It’s part of just living, but it exacerbates the situation with things being on Zoom calls all the time. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/editmode-scaled.jpeg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/gallery-scaled.jpeg) ***How do you see the relationship between your work as a creative technologist at Google and your personal practice? Do you see them as separate?*** More and more of my personal work is really interested in performance and intimacy and, and these things feel very precious to me that I don’t feel ready to explore in a work context. Working in an office setting, there are many dynamics in addition to you just wanting to do your work and make your own work. I like to keep my personal practice very separate from my engagement with work, especially at this point. But they definitely inform each other. One of my favorite things about working at the Creative Lab is that it’s not like working on an engineering team on a product where I work with many other engineers. I’ll often be the only technologist on a project. I’ll be working with a writer, a designer, a team lead, and a producer, and they are all great at what they do, but also, what they do is very different from what I do. I’m constantly learning from them and also pushing myself to grow technically. So it’s taught me a lot about figuring out how to build things myself with my own chosen technical stack. That’s really valuable to me. That exercise is something I carry into my personal work a lot because I can think of an idea. Even if I don’t know how to build it, I feel like I have the tools to teach myself how to build it. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/WINGSCROPPED.gif) ***What else are you working on at the moment?*** I’ve been working on this new project with [Heidi Latsky](https://heidilatskydance.org/?ref=killscreen.com), a choreographer in New York. She called me pretty early into the pandemic and said, “All of these dance companies are just putting up videos of an on stage performance.” She was not really interested in that. I’m thinking about how I can build an experience on screen, but it is unique to my dancers, my company, and not just a YouTube video or Zoom recording. I was really in the same thing—the idea of translating what was meant to be an onstage or in-person performance onto a computer screen was not that interesting to me. We both were really excited about engaging the idea of building from the ground up. A piece that was meant to be a dance piece that was meant to be viewed through the browser. We’ve been working on a piece called *Recessed*. It’s browser-based. I built a system that allows us to choreograph pop-up windows. When you click on certain dancers, pop-up windows will come with videos of them moving inside. The videos were filmed at home in their apartment or local neighborhood—it is very intimate look into the dancers wherever they were quarantining and also the type of movement that they were doing at home and this time, rather than in a public performance setting. Our entire experience is embedded on the internet. It’s exciting to think about building a dance piece native to that platform. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/JSR-7-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/JSR-6-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/JSR-10-scaled.jpg) --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted in April 2021. ### Links [Maya’s website](https://mayaontheinter.net/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Maya on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/mayaontheinternet/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Maya on Twitter](https://twitter.com/mayaonthenet?lang=en&ref=killscreen.com) ### Nick Murray: The intimacy and expanse of interactive narrative URL: https://www.killscreen.com/nick-murray/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T01:20:32.000Z *Memory, loss, dreams, and isolation—these are just a few themes that game designer, artist, and producer* [*Nick Murray*](http://www.nickmurray.horse/?ref=killscreen.com) *seeks to address. While these are heavy subjects, Nick’s work carries a levity to its form—whether it’s through a Tamagotchi seance or a magical analog telephone. This makes for an emotional depth that captures what it is to be human in a world mediated by the digital. With a background in poetry publishing in performance and music composition, the London-based creative also serves as a producer for* [*Now Play This*](https://nowplaythis.net/?ref=killscreen.com)*, an experimental games festival.* *Here, we speak with Nick about his practice that ties together his passion for poetry, music, and games. We also speak with Nick about the immediacy of an interactive narrative experience, an immediacy that feels similar to witnessing a live performance.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Screen-Shot-2021-04-23-at-12.51.28-PM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Screen-Shot-2021-04-23-at-12.51.39-PM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Screen-Shot-2021-04-23-at-12.51.49-PM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Screen-Shot-2021-04-23-at-12.51.59-PM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ***Could you talk about your upbringing? Was there a specific moment when you knew you wanted to do something creative in your life?*** I’m London born and bred. My parents are immigrants to London; I’m first generation here. There was always a filter of discovery that came secondhand through my mom, specifically of feeling out what the city is like through her stories and reinterpreting that as I grew up. I’ve been creative from a very young age. I started out playing classical music really young; I was trained in violin and viola. As I got older, I was a precocious teenager. I decided that that was too stifling and wanted to try something else. My teens led to performance and sound art. I started collecting art forms and was doing a bit of everything. They’ve all stacked on top of each other over the last 15 years to become interactive art. It feels like the natural culmination of all of these other things. Performance, digital art, poetry—it’s all part and parcel of the same thing, which at the moment, my medium has become interactive arts and games. When I was exceptionally young, I remember being fascinated by the violinist [Joshua Bell](https://joshuabell.com/?ref=killscreen.com)—he seemed like a really approachable person and cool and played what is traditionally quite a stifled or stuffy medium. That led me down this route of wanting to play and share music with other people. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Screen-Shot-2021-04-23-at-12.50.23-PM.jpg) A huge influence is the poet [Ross Sutherland](https://www.imaginaryadvice.com/about?ref=killscreen.com), who straddles both page and performance poetry. Often, his work is about the nature of digital connections and how the world can be mediated through the digital interfaces we have now. Often, it’s serious. Sometimes, it’s really playful. It was one of the first instances I saw where poetry could then come into this unique space that I’ve never seen before. All through this, I was playing games, but it took quite a while to discover the indie and art game scene. When I was younger, the closest thing to that was the demo scene. I got into this idea of people creating these little demos and sharing them around. It’s not necessarily an interactive thing; it’s a showcase of skill. That wasn’t something I wanted to pursue myself. My inspirations are highly performative artists instead of interactive artists up until last, six, seven years when I’ve been doing this kind of thing. It’s really broadened out to the interactive and art game scene. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Screen-Shot-2021-04-23-at-12.50.57-PM.jpg) ***Was there something about the form of poetry, like the line breaks, or how that text is scattered on the page, that made you want to carry it over into a new medium?*** Previously, I was working in poetry publishing. I was working with a publisher called [Penned in the Margins](http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/?ref=killscreen.com). A big part of my job was live literature and the performance of poetry. There’s so much that can be done with the form on the page. There’s a bit more interactivity if there’s someone performing in front of you—the immediacy of a person in front of you, even if you’re in the audience and you’re not actively reacting, or you’re not invited to do things that change the performance…it’s still interactive. There is a passive interaction in any kind of performance. That still is fascinating to me, the idea that interaction can come in so many of these different levels. That’s when I started going into interactive poetry. I spent a few years doing my own performance work, which was very text-based but very physical, real-world. People sat down in front of me—it was really testing out the boundaries of where text and interactivity can be. It was also the start of instructional work—giving people instruction so that we’re creating aspects of this work that form a structure around where the work can go. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/WRG5-copy.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/WFG4-copy.jpg) Stills from "Waiting for Godot: A Simulator" ***It sounds like your experience in publishing and as a musician coalesced into your current practice. Do you code your games yourself?*** I have coded all of my games. It’s creative coding because I’m a bad coder. And so, it’s like whatever works. It’s very much duct tape and chewing gum on the back end. There were few very strictly interactive poetry or connected poetry pieces that are creative coding. There were definitely moments of dabbling with that code in the back end, just to see what could change and reiterating on these different little snippets of code and changing it around to see what could happen. ***Some self-described creative coders talk about how the physical act of doing the coding almost feels like the act of performing. What does it feel like to be working on a game versus performing music? Are there similarities to the ways those two experiences feel?*** There are definitely overlaps. If I’m performing music, it’s a lot more intuitive. There’s an element of letting it happen—just by the nature of having done it for so long. It’s muscle memory, feeling my way through it. With coding, it feels almost like a game in itself. I put these pieces together, see what will happen, and work through it like that. While coding is definitely fun for me to do, it is a means to an end. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/derwent3-copy.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/derwent1.png) Stills from "Walk With Me to Derwent" ***Generally, how does a project come to fruition for you?*** I’m always taking notes. It’s thinking a sentence is particularly interesting, or reading a book, or hearing a talk, and just pulling all of these bits together just so I can come back to them. It means that I end up having almost dozens of Post-Its, which I will push around to see the different connections between things and find interesting. We’ve all used a Notes app on our phones. Which is often interesting to come back to because I’ll quickly write something down and come back a week later and have no idea what it means. Maybe something interesting will come out of that. I consider games to be a medium in the same way that painting or performance might be. I’ll start with the idea that I want to explore, and the nature of the interaction or the visuals will be almost secondary. I’ll flesh out an idea through the narrative or how I want it to be experienced. That might be as simple as I want people to feel a particular emotion. I’ll be trying to convey a particular emotion, and then a world expands out of that. Coming from poetry and publishing, I was reading lots of poets and prose writers, and there was a moment when I suddenly realized that you’re given these emotions through a piece of work. There are many emotions that you can’t get in the same way if you’re not interacting. You can read a book, and you get excited because something amazing is happening, or you feel sad because a character died. If you’re playing a game, you’re suddenly given access to things like guilt and pride. These emotions are around responsibility—as soon as you choose, the emotional palette changes from these passive emotions, where you’re emoting on behalf of someone else. As soon as you do it, you have to respond to your own choices. That’s where a lot of my games are coming from now, which is why a lot of them are bummers. I need to make a happy game at some point \[laughs\]. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/20191114_153435.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/20191114_153211.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/20191114_152930.jpg) **I would love to hear about how* *your analog phone-based project Dial 5555 came to be.** I designed this branching narrative piece that explores loss and grief in digital spaces. I was trying to work out how to give people something to latch onto in terms of this quite amorphous idea. That turned into a semi-physical location, or this almost dream location. You never get a definite answer as to whether it exists. But within the game, people are there. People live there. At Now Play This Festival a couple of years ago, we decided to show the game *Dream Phone*. It’s this game from ’96—you have a big pink phone, and you have to dial your perfect dreamy, hunk boyfriend. With no hint of irony, I think that *Dream Phone* is perfectly designed to the point where I’m trying to make a spin-off version, my own fan version, called *Dream Horse* where you have to find your perfect horse.We were putting this out, and I got fascinated with the objectivity of it. The fact that there is a physical presence beyond the board… you’re playing a board game, but to all intents and purposes, it’s not really an object. It’s very flat. It’s essentially an image that you’re projecting something else onto. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/dreamhorse.png) Still from "Dream Horse" *Dream Phone* has this big old pink phone. It got me thinking about the idea of making the whole game housed within an object. The physicality of that really adds to the intimacy—it very much has started as an art project as opposed to a game that could go industry-wide. The idea that you know that only one person is playing this and having this experience in the world. You are dialing into this space that doesn’t quite exist. And so, I spent some time really looking into the physicality of that and bought a ton of phones, handsets, all these old 90s handsets. Turns out you can buy really cheap handsets on eBay. That was very useful. I was lucky at the tail end of 2019 to have a small grant from the Arts Council to explore the crossover of poetry and video games. And so, I was using some of that as a time to develop this game as well. I was working out the physicality, whether it needed to be housed in something. At what point does this phone become real? Do I want it to become real? Because none of the numbers you dial are the real length of numbers. They’re all five digits because I thought that would be just easy for people to remember as you go along. I wanted the phone to look as real as possible. Once I do that, does it have to be plugged into a wall to feel real? How much of it had to be theatrical? I started thinking about whether it needed to be in a phone booth—that was far too much. I dialed it back down to just being a phone and then went back to the narrative and story going on inside. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/20200205_122923-scaled.jpg) This branching narrative follows six voices, one of which is an automated clock, like how you used to be able to dial in and have the time be told to you. That evolves into all these strange dreamscape poems told through the voice of this clock. A shopping channel, you can dial up a shopping channel that gives you these hints of this world. The others live either in the city or in a neighborhood nearby. You get snippets of how these people are either bolstered or ground down by their surroundings; why they might want to shift to another. Through these different narratives that you get by literally dialing numbers that you’re told through these messages, I hope that the player starts to get this sense of almost a kind of melancholy. I’m trying to tow this line between dreamy in a very almost dream-pop sense, use musical stuff, and more poetic melancholy. What connects all the characters, including the clock and the shopping channel, is that they all talk about loss. Throughout eight or nine messages, every one of them explores a different aspect of loss and how they deal with it in a world where they can’t quite connect. I started making a digital version that you could access just on your phone, on your mobile phone, but it doesn’t quite do the same thing. I found that it doesn’t have to be all audio now. There are moments where the same story suddenly breaks off, and you have a text-based game come up, or something that looks a bit like *Snake*—but you can’t move the snake, and that’s very frustrating, but purposefully so. It’s split off into these two different worlds that I now have to work out which one is more important in telling the story. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/20200104_202111.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/20200306_211907-scaled-e1619209442696.jpg) ***It almost has this David Lynch feel to it.*** That’s very high praise. ***This feeling of mystery or loss—someone entering a space or returning to space and not really knowing what the change is or discovering what the change over time has been as you go on in the story.*** I love the idea of mystery, but in the sense that you could end a mystery and find your own answer. That’s just as satisfying as someone else’s answer, which might be completely different. You don’t have to reach a concrete goal. Spoiler alert, there’s definitely not going to be a happy ending at the end of *Dial 5555*. Even if it’s not happy, it’s satisfactory. You can reach the end, and put the phone down, and then feel like you’ve taken in enough of these people’s lives to feel like it was worth it. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/20200117_154739.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_20190805_190355-1-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/IMG_20190719_210613.jpg) ***I’m curious about the narrative design process for Dial 55555\. Earlier, you spoke about Post-It notes as a nonlinear way of organizing.*** I put the whole story into Twine, a text-based game engine. Twine is brilliant for particular things but actually trying to work something out, it doesn’t quite have that workflow. So I’ve tried other things online. I realized that I just made Post-It notes again! I had just made digital Post-It notes and turned the computer off. So, went back to literal Post-It notes on the wall just spread out because the narrative of Dial 5, Even though it’s a branching narrative can still have linear moments, like you’re going from A to B to C. But within this game, you don’t have to do that. You can start with any particular character and jump between them in different orders. It’s not chronological. To an extent, it’s not topographical either. There, you can go to different places at the same time. I needed to be able to physically do that in writing the narrative. Having a very physical medium was essential, just putting things in different places and seeing how it felt to me to be able to take those journeys. If I were to give unsolicited advice to anybody, it would be to do everything… If you’re making games, don’t make them on the computer to start with. You can spend so long choosing the right tool, and actually, that can be just such a hindrance. Just work out what it is, or play around with what it is you want to do. And then, try and make it. We have all of the tools to make perfect games at our fingertips always, and then you can just make those more colorful or have some nice melodies and things like that once you’ve taken it into another space. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/20191203_210931.jpg) ***As a producer for the game festival Now Play This, I imagine a lot of the work is curatorial. How has the exposure to game artists have filtered into your creative practice?*** I feel so intensely privileged to have access to all of these incredible artists, writers, producers, just people interested in furthering this particular discourse around games as a medium for expression, for, yeah, unique and innovative expression. If we’re exhibiting an artist, there’s a whole dialogue around how and what that should look like—the experience of coming into an exhibition space and then being presented with a game. That’s a real special moment. There’s something really tangible in that that is not the same when you’re at home. Anyone can turn on their computer and access a game and play it. That’s a beautiful thing in itself. You can take in a story. If you’re coming to an exhibition space, something happens at the front door where the world changes, and you’re now giving yourself rules for that world that you need to follow for whatever’s going on. We’d have wonderful moments of creating these cabinets or custom controllers for particular games and thinking about the placement in between other games, and what relates to each other, and how long we want people to stay in a room. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/tama1.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/tama2.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/tama3.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/tama4.png) Stills from "Tamagotchi Seance" A couple of years ago, we had a game called *Malapropic Karaoke* in which an AI re-presented karaoke tracks but with nonsense words. It’s a really wonderful piece. It came to us housed in a little arcade box. That was great, but we really wanted to push the fact that karaoke is this amazing party moment. Karaoke is a great leveler. And so, we ended up fully tinseling an entire room, and getting disco balls in. It was a massive hit. It felt really silly to do it, but actually, every step of it was the right choice. Every time I would walk past, people were having the greatest time singing the most nonsense. That was brilliant. It’s little things like that that really have helped with my own practice as well, to be able to help other artists in terms of their platforms, both digital and physical, and really explore that physicality of what playing games in a space that’s public or a space that’s not yours is. Even in the online festivals, we’ve had to go fully online in the last two years, this year and last year. There are moments where, if we’re streaming something, say on Twitch, there’ll be some artists who suddenly break off and have this huge chat in the Twitch chat that turns into a further reading or extra studies on the games that we’re playing and how they can be enriched. Now Play This has allowed me into a far wider discourse of games that I definitely didn’t have before. Hopefully, I’m contributing to it, too. It’s a huge back and forth. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/BTS-Tamagotchi-Seance.png) The narrative design for "Tamagotchi Seance" ***What are you working on currently?*** I really took the lockdown of being stuck indoors to actually take a moment to make some longer pieces that wouldn’t come out for a while. It’s what my entire practice is, but this idea of isolation, and grief, and loss in specifically in terms of the internet how digital cultures changed how we do and don’t remember things… what we leave. The things that we take back in and the things that we put away. My games are all around that at the moment. The thing I’m working on currently is this thing. The working title is *The Falling Man Simulator*. You are just falling through the cosmos. You pick up these stories from other people who might be falling. It’s very much a tale about suburban loneliness and isolation. With contemporary computers, people had almost rediscovered different aspects of loneliness that we didn’t really think about before, because we didn’t have to. Computers and a lot of computer communication were secondary when you knew you could leave the house and see your friends. Fingers crossed, that’s the end of the year. Everything I’m making has this installation aspect and a custom controller that goes along with it so that you’re in the game before it even starts. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/falling-simulator5-copy.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/falling-simulator3-copy.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/falling-simulator2-copy.jpg) ***Will you bring the Falling Man Simulator into physical space as well?*** For games that have quite serious themes, I want to make them as comfortable as possible. The physical element of this will have an aspect of falling, but I somehow want that to be comfortable. I want to create custom seating where you are reclining, and you have very, easy-to-use controls under your palms, wherever they sit. Then, the room has dynamic lighting that changes with the game itself so that you feel as much as you can of the game. I don’t think that the falling itself needs to be scary. It’s not that kind of dream of falling where you know you’re going to stop. It’s that endless fall where you don’t really realize you’re falling anymore. If you were to fall forever through the universe, there might not be points of reference, so you don’t know if you’re falling or don’t know the takeaway of that falling. It’s just happening around you. I’m trying to find a universal way to talk about just the lives we’re living right now. Without being melodramatic, I think we’ve all been falling for a year. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/BTS-Falling-Sim.png) --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted in April, 2021\. Photography by [Abiola Rénee](https://www.instagram.com/abiolarenee/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com). ### Links [Nick’s website](http://www.nickmurray.horse/?ref=killscreen.com) Follow [Nick](https://www.instagram.com/terratrouve/?ref=killscreen.com) on Instagram [Now Play This](https://nowplaythis.net/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Sam and Andy Rolfes put the life in livesteam URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/sam-and-andy-rolfes-put-the-life-in-livesteam/ Last updated: 2025-01-08T22:51:53.000Z Sam and Andy Rolfes self-describe their [work](http://rolfes.team/?ref=killscreen.com) as “overly navel-gazing, obsessed-with-layers, weird.” From [visualizing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc2qWBIToKU&ref=killscreen.com) songs by Lady Gaga and BLACKPINK to facilitating mind-bending, improvisational [performances](https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/5596?ref=killscreen.com) at MoMA, the duo are in a perpetual toggle between real life and the screen. Cleverly using VR, mixed reality, figurative animation, and motion capture tools to highlight the absurdity of life, dream up ironic characters, and make anti-capitalist statements, Sam and Andy discovered and perfected a digital fluency that's uniquely theirs. They also happen to be brothers. Sam and Andy sat down with us to speak about their 3D modeling software from childhood, why improv comedy is seminal for their practice, and the game they’re designing—fingers crossed, the first of many. *This episode was hosted by Jamin Warren, founder of Killscreen.* [*Music by Nick Sylvester*](https://www.tiktok.com/@nickgodmode?ref=killscreen.com)*.* ### Will Robertson and Alfredo Salazar-Caro: Transcending the confines of a museum URL: https://www.killscreen.com/will-robertson-and-alfredo-salazar-caro/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T01:21:20.000Z *After connecting at art school almost a decade ago, New Media artists* [*Alfredo Salazar-Caro*](https://salazarcaro.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *and* [*Will Robertson*](https://wrobertson.net/about/?ref=killscreen.com) *have teamed up to dream up an ongoing project that’s at once a virtual architectural feat, curatorial platform, and artwork in itself: The Digital Museum of Digital Art, or* [*DiMoDA*](https://dimoda.art/?ref=killscreen.com) *for short. With Alfredo creative-directing, Will building the technical world, and a host of virtual reality artists and architects contributing, DiMoDA has become one of the world’s premiere online digital gallery spaces. DiMoDA 4.0, the project’s fourth iteration, takes place in a spiral-shaped building in a post-apocalyptic, Brooklyn. It is set to be released in late 2021\.* *Here, we speak with Alfredo and Will about their collaboration across technical and conceptual duties, working with artists like* [*Jacolby Satterwhite*](https://jacolby.com/home.html?ref=killscreen.com)*, and how a digital museum can operate as a form of institutional critique.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/DJI_0827-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/42-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ***To start, could you both talk about your first creative impulses?*** **Will**: I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. I was three when I started spending a lot of time at my grandparents’ house—they had a piano, and that was the go-to for me. I was very close with my grandparents, and the piano was my first introduction to music. I went to an all-boys Jesuit high school—being a smaller school, we didn’t have enough people in-band to fill out every single part for every piece that we played in concerts. So I would bounce around with different parts. I’d be on a trumpet for one part for one song, and then I’d move over to French horn or percussion. For a long time, music was my sole creative outlet. I was originally not in art school, either. I was studying physics and pre-med and really hated that. The only classes I really enjoyed were photography, film, theory, and writing. I decided that the School of the Art Institute of Chicago was the place I wanted to be. I transferred, which was really the start of my focused drive into creative arts as a career and a passion. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/62-scaled.jpg) Will around his home in Los Angeles. **Alfredo**: I grew up in Mexico City until I was 13 and then did high school in Texas. I drew Power Rangers in kindergarten, and I used to exchange drawings to little friends for juice, candy, or whatever they brought with them. I traded my art for people’s lunch at a young age. I had a metal band at 17 through 19\. Then the band broke up, and I was like, “I’m going to never depend on a band again.” I decided to be individually creative. Like Will, I also went into college to study to be a doctor. I was into neuroscience. That was my jam. I still love the topic, but art classes felt a lot cooler. The things that I was supposed to be focused on felt like a fucking drag. When I started art, it was all about sculpture and installation. I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I met Will, and I also was introduced to media arts. We were both integrated into the Chicago new media scene right away, specifically through something called the Glitch Festival in 2011\. At this festival, people would destroy computers for fun. Will and I, in particular, were enthusiastic about video game engines being utilized for live audiovisuals and glitching. People were approaching it in different ways, but Will and I started coming up with this idea through that process. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/DJI_0423-scaled.jpg) Alfredo on a road trip across the southwestern United States, where he is collaborating with Will on DiMoDA 4.0 remotely out of his vehicle. **Will**: It was a Unity online glitch gallery, and the idea was to use the Unity engine to put together a gallery space and then put it up on web GL and host it online. It started out as a very similar idea to some of the other online galleries that are now out hosting sculpture or video or performance or whatever. It evolved from there. **Alfredo**: It happened to be at the same time that VR started coming out only for developers. There had been VR headsets, but you had to be part of either NASA or some university research lab or MIT or whatever, to be able to play around with virtual reality. And at a certain point, people could just get it to make stuff.” The very, very early Oculus. We decided the most native way to experience the work that we’re interested in is not just looking at it on the screen but being inside of that work because these are words that we’re creating. We decided that we wanted to work in virtual reality. That’s where DiMoDA was born. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/DiMoDA-1.0-Museum-design-by-Alfredo-Salazar-Caro.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/DiMoDA-1.0-Museum-breakdown-by-Alfredo-Salazar-Caro-2-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/DiMoDA-1.0-Museum-breakdown-by-Alfredo-Salazar-Caro-2-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped-1.jpg) DiMoDA 1.0 museum design and breakdown by Alfredo Salazar-Caro. ***DiMoDA is a digital museum, a curatorial platform. In the past, you’ve called it a piece of institutional critique or an art piece in itself.*** **Will**: It really started for us to be a part of that Chicago New Media scene and really have a hard time finding institutional support for the work we were doing and our contemporaries were doing. It’s becoming more and more accepted as art canon these days, which is great because it’s a lot faster than a whole lot of other things that have been accepted into the art community, but the fine art institutional fine art community. One of the initial conversations we had about forming DiMoDA was that we would not be rejected by these institutions. If we aren’t accepted into the things they’re curating, we’ll create our own institution. **Alfredo**: What was happening in the Chicago scene at the time was some of the most fascinating work that was happening, frankly, all over the world. Glitch was composed of people that were coming together from the internet. So our online communities were worldwide. So for us, this was cutting-edge work, but the institutions don’t give a shit.” We realized institutions wouldn’t give us space. We’re going to create the space.” We reached out to a group of people that were all part of that Glitch community to start this project with us, and people were like, “Cool idea.” Nobody followed up except for Will and me. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/DiMoDA-4.0-BTS-2-1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/DiMoDA-4.0-BTS.jpg) Behind-the-scenes of DiMoDA 4.0, the latest installation of the museum—a collaboration with Iraqi architect Ayman Tawfeeq. **Alfredo**: On institutional critique, we were poking fun at the image and aesthetic of the art museum. So we decided to use the same lettering as MoMA. In the early version of the DiMoDA, our mission statement and stuff were literally just copy-pasted from MoMA, The Whitney, and all those museums and just replacing contemporary art with computer art or glitch. Initially, it was a total reflection of that. It’s interesting how it’s evolved because now I wouldn’t exactly call it an institution of its own, but it still emulates that, and we now work with all these institutions. It’s funny how that happens. DiMoDA is a work of art in itself, it’s always been an art project. We decided to name our project the Digital Museum of Digital Art because, for one, we wanted to give it that aura of a museum. The power, because ultimately all these places, whether you call them museums or federal buildings or capitals, or universities, they’re just buildings until you give them these titles of what they mean and they represent socially. We wanted the word “museum” to give DiMoDA that power just by concept versus calling it a gallery. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/1_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/DiMoDA17-02-17_10_01_600x700_acf_cropped.jpeg) The installation of DiMoDA 3.0. ***I’m sure the creative design process has changed over the four iterations of DiMoDA. Generally, what is the process of designing and building the space and positioning the pieces inside it?*** **Will**: I worked for the Art Institute of Chicago for five years in the Digital Department. DiMoDA was ongoing simultaneously. At the Art Institute, the role I had there was a Technical Integration Producer. I oversaw all of the public-facing digital media in the museum. So, everything from digital signage, screens all across the galleries and lobby areas to all of the interactive installations, permanent ones, temporary exhibitions, in the family areas as well, up to the mobile applications. I oversaw the day-to-day operations of the technical integration and design of those into the museum system. The mobile app, for example, is tied directly into the collections database. So in the content management system, if they want to pull in a new work into the app, they pull the records directly from that database so that we always know these are the right images. These are the notes from the curator that will be put into the description. There’s one source of truth. And from that experience, I learned a lot about building things for long-term maintenance, trying to reduce complexity in systems where you can use them to easily maintain them as an individual. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/6-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/DJI_0677-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) **Will**: The Art Institute of Chicago has many very talented people working there; the wonderful audiovisual team that helped set up screens, projectors, equipment. I definitely want to give those people credit. Still, museums don’t have the same sort of infrastructure as Google that can just throw engineers at problems, and you can have these crazy complex systems—where, if something goes wrong, you’ve got five, 10 people who can go and tackle it. Being a technical one-man band at DiMoDA and I oversee all of the integrations of the artist’s work and tying all of the pieces together. What I do in my role is taking on the technical backend side a lot of the time of how we should put the whole system together to maintain it. As an institution, we want to keep these pieces up-to-date and available, and accessible in perpetuity. I’m really taking on a very technical backend role, and then Alfredo is taking on more of a visual and conceptual design role. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/DiMoDA-1.0-interior-building-detail-by-Alfredo-Salazar-Caro-2-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/DiMoDA-1.0-Title-screen-image-scaled.jpg) DiMoDA 1.0 title screen and pediment. **You’ve worked with a line-up of amazing artists over he years. Are there any memorable moments from those collaborations that have helped you understand the power of interactive media, or were just really exciting in how that DiMoDA maybe helped the artists understand the power of interactive media?** **Will**: The first exhibition was the most experimental and the craziest, hardest one to pull off. I was coding the exhibition until half an hour before our opening at Transfer Gallery in New York. That was intense. We had people coming in for a pre-opening preview, and we’re like, “Don’t go on that machine. We haven’t finished fixing the bugs yet.” Working with Claudia Hart was a very memorable experience. I worked with her in the CG studios, in the edit rooms side-by-side, figuring out how we want to bring her piece to life. In her piece, gravity is totally different, so you can do long moonwalk jumps across her space. But it’s not jarring. When we first tested that out and the feeling you get moving through her piece in that way, it was like*, wow, we can really push this and do whatever we want, and that’s okay*. You can’t turn down gravity in a normal gallery. You can’t go over to the museum across the street and just be like, “I’m going to moonwalk.” In Jacolby Satterwhite’s piece, there is a spot where you jump up on one of more sculptural parts of that installation, then as soon as you jump out of it, gravity snaps back, and you zoom down to the floor. It was another really pivotal experience. Anytime there’s somebody who says don’t do something this specific way, we try to break that at least once. Anytime one of our artists does that, those moments stand out for me. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Visitor-at-DiMoDA-1.0-in-NY-2015.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/DiMoDA-3.0-at-MCA-Chicago-1-1_600x700_acf_cropped.jpeg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Alfredo-Salazar-Caro-gives-preview-of-DiMoDA-1.0-at-Transfer-Gallery-2015_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) DiMODA 3.0 on Canal Street. ***You’re working specifically in Unity. Technology has really evolved and changed in the last four years since you started DiMoDA. Have there been any challenges on the technical front?*** **Alfredo**: We usually collaborate on the planning and the ideas of DiMoDA of what’s going to be the next show, who will be in it. When it comes to building DiMoDA, Will is the technical director, so he makes sure that the whole system runs and looks good. People can put on headsets when they get to a gallery, and the piece runs right away without anybody having to do anything. In terms of the design of the actual exhibition space, that’s usually what I do. So in the first two DiMoDAs, I created the architecture and designed how space will flow and how the artists were going to be arranged. For DiMoDA 3, we actually ended up working with SIGGRAPH Asia, and we commissioned an architect, Debbie Ding, to create the virtual architecture for DiMoDA. And then we put it into a context that we created. We put it into this lunar landscape thing. With DiMoDA 4.0, I’m collaborating with Ayman Tawfeeq, an Iraqi architect. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/screen_3840x2160_2018-06-13_11-51-13-1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/screen_3840x2160_2018-06-13_11-54-27-1.jpg) Vicky Dang's work in DiMoDA 3.0. **Alfredo**: We collaborated on creating this new architecture for DiMoDA with a little bit of what the early DiMoDA had in terms of the visual language. Still, Amin’s flavor added to it and a lot of deep conceptual conversations on architecture and nomadic design and immigration. In this new DiMoDA, people will be drawn into the building very quickly. The building itself has this spiral that goes all up inside it and then all the way down, further underground from the city. Then we all talked together as a group with DiMoDA, but we also worked with Christiana Paul, who is the curator for this new DiMoDA, about what the environment was going to be like. So Amin and I came up with this idea in late 2019, pre-pandemic, a concept about this post-apocalyptic scene of Brooklyn that’s been taken over by plants, and there’s this giant building that has crashed in the middle of that scene, and it’s taking over space. You can’t tell if it’s a spaceship, but what it is composed of is the 3D scans of immigrants from all over the world—from Africa, Central America, and the Middle East specifically. Their portraits have been arranged, decimated, and composed in 3D to turn into these weird, organic looking-buildings. So that’s the process of how space gets created and curated to a sense. We invite people to curate as well. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/83-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/DJI_0903-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ***What do you think viewers get out of experiencing DiMoDA digitally, as opposed to a physical museum space?*** **Will**: At the core of it, the works curated for DiMoDA can’t be experienced any other way. A lot of what we’re trying to do is explore how virtual reality can be a means for hosting creative works. It feels really infinite in the way that you have an entire world that you can play with when you’re building something in virtual reality. It’s not just video, it’s not just sculpture, it’s not just performance, it’s not just painting, it can be all of those things and more. Bringing interactivity into work is really exciting and engaging. In a similar way that performance art can bring the audience into the performance, DiMoDA inherently brings the audience into the work. You’re going to experience different things depending on how you engage with each piece. That’s something that we are continually trying to push further. Interactive experiences provide a unique way to connect artists to the audience in ways that are harder to do in other more traditional exhibition formats. --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted in February 2021\. Photography by [Katy Pritchett](http://www.katypritchett.com/?ref=killscreen.com) and [Alfredo Salazar-Caro](https://salazarcaro.com/?ref=killscreen.com#/). ### Links [The Digital Museum of Digital Art](https://dimoda.art/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow DiMoDA on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/di%5Fmo%5Fda/?ref=killscreen.com) [Alfredo’s website](https://salazarcaro.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Will’s website](https://wrobertson.net/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Rui Hu: The infinite futures of games URL: https://www.killscreen.com/rui-hu/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T01:20:11.000Z *Can games predict the future?* [*Rui Hu*](https://www.instagram.com/hooraypublic/?ref=killscreen.com) *works across still images, film, CGI, game design, and physical installation to examine decision-making processes, the unfolding of time, and the independent course memory seems to take. The Guangzhou-based artist takes inspiration from video game culture and real-world events to create thought-provoking work that’s at once ultra-serious and exhibiting a satirical edge. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of Practice in Computational Media and Arts at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.* *Here, we speak with Rui about the educational power of a game play-through, why instant noodles feature prominently across his projects, and why games are definitively a time-based medium.* *\[Content warning: this article mentions art pieces that utilize imagery of school shootings\]* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Copy-of-Hu-Rui_Lifestyle_-3-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Copy-of-Hu-Rui_Lifestyle_-1-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Copy-of-Hu-Rui_Lifestyle_-8-1-scaled.jpg) Rui at his studio at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel Residency. ***Can you talk about the environment you grew up in, and how it helped propel you into the creative sphere?*** I grew up in the city of Guangzhou in the southern part of China. It was a large and populated city, but my family lived in a remote region of the city surrounded by mountains. My mom loves to buy me books, mostly novels, and a lot of them were in translation. I wasn’t out to play much. When I was a small kid, my dad brought back home a super old retired computer from his workplace. I started playing with it— from what I remembered, it was probably a pirated DOS system. They installed a lot of strange things on there—it had a Chinese user interface so you don’t have to type in all the English commands to operate it. Of course, my time spent with the computer was super limited. I had one hour every day. That’s super short when you’re a kid—you get halfway through the game and then it’s like, “Oh, time’s up.” ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/daily04_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/daily02-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/daily03-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/daily01-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Some details from Rui's current environment in Shanghai, where he completed his latest residency. ***I read that you were interacting with game worlds first through walkthroughs.*** I’m a really slow player. Some people can just bang their way through the game and just maybe finish it in… I have to go online and look up information. And if there’s an adventure game, I try to go through all the other routes. I remember playing *Silent Hill.* But when I was playing the game, I had to open all the doors. And even after I had found the item or the key for me to move on to the next thing, I still have this compulsion to still stay in the current area and finish all the un-open doors. So I’m a really slow player in that sense. Later on I wasn’t able to do that person myself because it just took too much time. I would go on YouTube and look at gameplay footage, and also look at commentaries that the YouTubers post. Busy people don’t have time to read books, so there are services that give one minute summaries. In the same way, play-throughs gave me a pretty concise way for me to understand a game and how people think of it. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Hu_Rui_RoomNo.2Don_tGiveIn_desa.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Hu_Rui_RoomNo.3TheFutureIsAHiddenGem_desa.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Hu_Rui_RoomNo.5AModestProposal.jpg) From the Rooms stills series. ***You went to film school for undergrad. How did you begin to create inside game engines?*** At first, I wanted to go into literature. For two years, I studied Chinese Literature and thought I would work as maybe a writer or something. I did a lot of writing—mostly fragments to build character, but then also some poetry. Not very prolific, but I still made a habit of it. I got a bit bored by the teaching style in the university that I went to, and also at a time I started watching a lot of movies and especially European arthouse films—Antonioni, films like that. You weren’t allowed to transfer majors in China at the time, so I did a year of community college in Santa Monica, and then I went onto NYU and finished in the Film and TV department. In New York, I visited a lot of galleries, but the filmmaking models they taught in undergraduate at NYU— they are all in this independent tradition, but still the very traditional modes of filmmaking. I would help out with a friend’s shoot, but if you’re in a non-essential role, I’d go to the set, help set up the scene, and then stay there for an entire day without doing anything else meaningful. I got into animation because that’s something that I could do myself—but I wasn’t really good at drawing. 3D animation allowed me to both work artistically, but also I can complete everything by myself. There are 3D models I can download from the internet. I realized it was the best way to both make moving images and also have it have something to do with video games as well. It’s a language that I’m familiar with. In film school, I started doing a lot of 3D animation and also visited a lot of art exhibitions, so my work at that time has been moving more towards more personal. I learned about a program at UCLA called Design Media Arts. Our neighbors were the Fine Art department and the Architecture department. People in our program did more art with technology—computer programming and then 3D graphics, electronics. At UCLA, I realized that the video game engine was actually something that can be used to make personal artistic work. Also, at NYU, I had to occupy a whole computer lab to do my 3D renderings. I realized the video game engine would be a much more efficient way to do that. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Hu_Rui_RoomNo.4IAlsoWant.jpg) From the Rooms stills series. ***You’re interested in decision-making processes and blending the past and the future into the same space. Do you feel like you have more control over time in a game engine versus a more traditional film?*** That question has always been there if you study film or animation. You can have one shot that lasts for 10 seconds, but then maybe only one second in the story takes place within that animated world. Animators have found a way to compress time and to tell a story that can span millions of years and in a two hour movie. In games, you have this idea of real-time. The game progresses and your running speed tries to mimic the real world—it has this completely artificial, fabricated constraints put on the player to try to mimic the physical world. It intrigues me so much that you have complete freedom in the game engine—but then, people try to mimic the physical world, and then there are all these constraints. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Copy-of-Hu-Rui_Lifestyle_-4-1-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Copy-of-Hu-Rui_Lifestyle_-5-1-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Copy-of-Hu-Rui_Lifestyle_-2-scaled.jpg) Rui at his studio at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel Residency. When we talk about time-based media, usually we use that to refer to film or animation video—it’s something that you can replay. But I’ve started to think, have people been using time-based media to describe video games? If we do, then it’s a completely different kind of time—the event or the progress you made in that specific game is in sync with the physical time that you spend with. Games are a time-based medium in the sense that the passes in physical world. So if you haven’t progressed in the game, then the action never actually happened. It has happened in the system—in the sense that the game has been designed. But that specific play-through would never have happened if the player doesn’t play it personally. A game is unlike a film where if it’s been made, then regardless of if you watched it, it’s always there. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Screen-Shot-2021-04-08-at-11.49.52-AM-scaled.jpg) ***For the project Would you Help Me to Carry the Stone, what invention were you hoping to make in the overall conversation about first-person shooter games and memory?*** My feeling towards that project is a little complicated—it has gone through multiple iterations. I first had this idea in 2017\. The main component of my thesis project at UCLA was actually not this game but a series of still images. In the exhibition, they would be printed out and hang on a wall, more like a traditional photo. The idea was that the virtual world infiltrates the physical world. I thought about how things from the internet or from games, they reach out of the screen and make an impact on the physical world. For *Would you Help Me to Carry the Stone*, I read about the school shooting event in the U.S in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. It was a big, very tragic event. I was reading the local prosecutor’s report and it spent a large portion describing his love for shooter video games, describing his daily routines, how much time he visited the local arcade and played video games, and what’s his video game collection at his house. The conclusion was that his favorite game was *Super Mario Brothers* and *Dance Dance Revolution*, so a lot of the non-violent games, ones that anyone can play. I found it intriguing because obviously it went into details about that description of the shooter—his video game habits purposefully. There was a certain assumption being made, and then also based on maybe the media discussion about games and violence around that time, so then they decided to include that. But the conclusion wasn’t pointing to video game as part of the main driving force. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/MWoods_Install_01-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/MWoods_Install_02-scaled.jpg) "Would You Help Me To Carry the Stone" exhibited at M Woods Museum Hutong, Beijing. Exhibition organized by Plate Space, Beijing. I was just an international student at the time. I wanted to talk about this event, but I wasn’t sure how. As an outsider, it’s almost like I was pointing fingers at some of the things that’s happening in the United States. And that didn’t quite feel right. It took a long time for me to make this project. My idea was about the idea of being trapped by life circumstances—because video games are often seen as escapist. You have things hard to deal with in life, but you try to gain a feeling of achievement in video games. The project incorporated a storyline into the game. The character is waiting for their friends to come play games in a video game motel. They have these motels in China where you can spend the night with friends there and then they have beds, but also four computers in a room. His friends never show up, so he goes on a quest to find them. He discovers that they are being trapped here by a mysterious boss. I decided to translate the project into a video, where I incorporated all the play-through videos of that video game, and added dialogues, texts, and other source material. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/WouldYouHelp_01.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/WouldYouHelp_02.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/WouldYouHelp_03.jpg) "Would You Help Me To Carry the Stone" exhibited at M Woods Museum Hutong, Beijing. Exhibition organized by Plate Space, Beijing. ***A lot of your projects in the way that you incorporate the virtual world into the physical installation. Do you find any difficulties moving from the digital into the physical?*** Making *Would You Help Me to Carry the Stone*, the whole process was really suited for this kind of translation. When I make a work, I always think about this idea of ‘lore objects,’ objects that tell a story or have an emotional attachment to them. I was very selective in terms of what I put into the game, which made the process much easier because anything had a particular reason for existing in the game. Choosing what to bring out of the virtual world into the physical exhibition became more of a process dictated by how the objects look, but also about how they fit into that environment. Last year, I showed that project in the basement of a museum, M WOODS 798 in Beijing. The basement was originally designed to be a nightclub space, so it was not a traditional white wall gallery space. They also had these neon lights that are in the cement wall, very industrial. I used iron tubes that form the main structure of the virtual environment. They form a structure that can be seen as both protective—a pyramid shape that’s almost a protective structure—but also invasive, in the way the shape is aggressive. Also, there are elements from the video game that I made in the physical space: the first aid kits, and the Coca-Cola cans hung on the same wire. The first aid kits are common in shooter games or war games. The first aid kit—something that’s supposed to save your life or help you cure wounds—and then the cola cans on the other end. They’re both red, this idea of emergency and blood, versus the red on the consumer product that’s meant to catch your attention and stand out on the shelf in the supermarket. On the floor, I had a *Dance Dance Revolution* pattern. The arrows on the ground point you towards all these different directions, which means nothing almost. In the Sandy Hook case that I mentioned, the shooter would spend hours playing *DDR.* I remember the report describing him as energetic when he played this. You perform well in *Dance Dance Revolution* by following instructions. Whatever the game or the music or beats tell you to step on, you step on that spot. Also, arrows reference the mouse cursor. There are blocks in the game environment made of the shape of the mouse cursor; that actually form a path for the character to follow. You have many arrows telling you where to go, but then the environment traps you. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/01_edited-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/02_edited-scaled.jpg) Soon You Will Be Deep Enough exhibited at AM Art Space, Shanghai. ***How did your latest project, Soon It Will Be Deep Enough, come to be?*** From 2017 to 2018, I finished grad school and was trying to find work to do. I had been reading articles about climate change and the rising sea level. Also around that time, Los Angeles residents experienced what had been one of the most serious wildfires in recent years. The orange tint of the sky gave the city a doomsday feel. Around that time, an art project platform called Slime Engine, run by four young artists in Shanghai, approached me for a new work—the theme was about airplanes. I also had frequent thoughts about potential plane crashes when taking flights across the Pacific Ocean, made worse by the news of Boeing 737 Max accidents around that time. A lot of things added to the anxiety. But Los Angeles always has a pool party scene and beach culture. I wasn’t able to get the fun from it but was certainly influenced by it. *Soon It Will Be Deep Enough* is both a party and a disaster. The installation of the work at AM Art Space in Shanghai was thought of as an extension of the video work. Nothing in the physical elements were seen in the video, but instead trying to create extra layers of experience or meaning. For example, the wall where the screen was hung was covered entirely by plastic grills, which is a material often used around the edge of swimming pools. There was also an inflatable slide installed on a staircase in the gallery space marked with the word “SOON.” The slide is also meant to be ambiguous and could be two contrasting things, just like the video; it can be either a slide used in a waterpark, or a slide used for emergency escape from an airplane. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/DSC9736b-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SoonDeep_02.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SoonDeep_00.jpg) Soon You Will Be Deep Enough exhibited at AM Art Space, Shanghai. --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted in February 2021\. Photography courtesy of Rui Hu. ### Links [Rui Hu](https://www.instagram.com/hooraypublic/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Rui on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/hooraypublic/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Lana Z Porter: Interaction revolutionizes connection URL: https://www.killscreen.com/lana-z-porter/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T01:19:18.000Z Lana Z Porter is always thinking about interaction. As the Creative Director of [Research & Development](https://rd.nytimes.com/?ref=killscreen.com) (R&D) at *The* *New York Times*, she helps oversee the experimentation with and articulation of emerging technology in service of journalism. From recreating Manhattan landmarks inside Unreal Engine to training machines to answer snap questions about the COVID-19 vaccine, the nucleus of R&D’s work lies in strengthening the proximity between readers and stories. For Lana, it’s “one of the most meaningful parts of the work we’re doing.” Here, we speak with Lana about her prismatic background spanning Theater, Anthropology, and Design, her fascination with fusing memory with imagination, and how her thinking about interaction has evolved to forefront human connection. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/ADS09128.jpg) ***What was your environment growing up like? Do you remember your first creative impulse?*** I grew up immersed in the academic world of Cambridge, Massachusetts. My dad’s an academic, and my mom is involved in the literary world there. From a young age, the most elemental childhood playthings became a medium for me. I was occupied for hours and hours building landscapes out of blocks. I’m also told that I gathered building materials from the area outside my house. Each school project became an opportunity to do something creative. I made board games, created a scale model of the Battle of Gettysburg, or built a model of a bridge. Any opportunity I could to make something tangible, I took it. My parents were incredibly encouraging of my artistic side. My mom went back to school to get a Master’s in children’s literature and a huge influence and inspiration were the books we read. I also remember going to the Museum of Fine Arts with my parents and being blown away by Georgia O’Keeffe’s work. I was mesmerized by artistic expression in general. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/ADS09121.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/ADS09142.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/ADS09133.jpg) ***You studied Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, and Theater. Together, these fields seem to feed into the critical world-building that one does as a Creative Director.*** In the moment, none of these things felt connected to each other. Theater is a space of world-building and suspension of disbelief; it’s a particular skillset and way of thinking sequestered in one part of my brain. The other part was more academic—a practice of getting into the literature, doing research. I went to college with the idea that I would study Archeology. Past worlds were fascinating to me. The Introductory Archeology course wasn’t offered in the fall, so I took Cultural Anthropology instead. I was totally hooked. Anthropology was a framework for understanding how people make sense of the world around them. It’s a practice built on careful observation, on describing and inscribing what you see and experience as a participant-observer. It’s also a non-judgmental practice, which spoke to me. Anthropology, and certainly Archeology, is a past-facing discipline. I became interested in orienting this practice towards things that are happening in the present or even in the future. Many of the things that interested me—design, emerging science, and technology—were forward-looking. How do you apply that lens of the past and present to disciplines oriented towards the future? Leaving school, I knew I wanted to do something creative, but I didn’t know what skills I could apply besides research and writing. I had been doing theater throughout school, especially set construction and design, but it felt like a separate part of me. I ended up working as a writer at a creative production company. It was working there and working alongside folks with a wide range of capabilities—from programming to product design—where I realized writing *is* a medium. But I also learned that there are so many other ways to express ideas. I learned that I wanted to be an active participant in the framing of these projects and ideas. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/ADS09150.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ADS09138_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/ADS09107_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ***You received a graduate degree in Design Interactions. What exactly did this program entail?*** When I was applying to grad schools, I heard about this program at the Royal College of Art from several people who said, “This program will blow your mind.” Its guiding philosophy is about how to use design to create tangible encounters with possible futures. The process and methodology that goes into that are radically different from an anthropological approach, which is more past/present-oriented. Anthropology is about taking something that is already there and making sense of it in some way. But this program asked us to imagine something entirely new—to imagine that anything is possible, suspend your disbelief and envision what future scenarios we might expect to see, we might want to see. As someone who had been super academic, it was challenging. I watched my classmates look at these briefs that were like, “Use a microbe to design a new experience.” I spent a lot of time grappling with why it seemed so easy for my classmates, many of whom had backgrounds in art and design, to wield their imagination so freely? I felt stuck, so naturally, I did what I learned to do in anthropology, which was to ask questions and try to understand. What is the nature of imagination? How does imagination work? In understanding that, maybe I could help myself get unstuck. Most of my time at the RCA was spent grappling with, “What is imagination? How does it work? Why is it so important?” I talked to academics across disciplines, practitioners, cognitive neuroscientists, psychologists, computer scientists, trying to unpack the relationship between imagination and memory. It turns out that that relationship became the crux of my research. There is a lot of rigor to the methodology of anthropology, and the design world felt a lot more radical and open. Design is a discipline built on imagination and speculation. That felt overwhelming, but at the same time, incredibly exciting. Those two things have combined and intertwined throughout my career. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_7207-scaled.jpg) Lana testing sunset lighting effects at her desk in the Design Interactions studio at the Royal College of Art. Image by Lana Z Porter. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/d4230541347767.57a23dd037494.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Beach_11d.jpeg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/52aeeb41347767.57a6021ed2dcf.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/931e0541347767.57a6021ed275c.jpg) A risograph print publication containing research findings, short stories, and outcomes from Lana's MA thesis, "Ethnographies of the Imagination," which explored the relationship between memory and imagination by tracing how the beach came to represent the concept of paradise in the western imagination. Image by Marcel Kaczmarek. ***In your personal practice, how does your creative process begin?*** The start of a project is a head-down, research-driven process. At first, I cast a super wide net, starting from some hunch or brief. I do a lot of research; collect as many references as possible, let myself be drawn down different rabbit holes, and do a lot of note-taking and highlighting. My creative practice is driven by this process of connecting dots, pulling salient pieces of information from potentially disparate places, synthesizing them, then thinking about why these things feel connected to me. The RCA taught me to start making as fast as possible, which I’ve struggled with. It’s easy for me to get pulled into the research and the planning part of a project and kick the can down the road in terms of the idea’s actual expression. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/EOI-in-Parsons-show-1-scaled.jpg) ***Your research interest in this compounding of the past, the present, and the future into one space feels applicable to how time unfolds in many immersive and emerging mediums. Do you bring this temporal thinking into your work at The New York Times?*** When you apply XR or 3D modeling to a journalism context, it’s a different set of objectives. If we’re trying to realistically render a space, we must be capturing the moment in time that the reporter was there. There’s a sense of ground truth, or how that space was at that time, that needs to carry over into the storytelling. At The *Times*, we are operating in a narrower band from a temporal perspective because it is so much about accurately representing a moment in time. There’s less of an ability to play around. That is the hat that I’m wearing now, and a lot of the work we’re doing is to try to explore new ways for journalists to bring readers along with them, to bring them closer to the story. That type of immersive experience can do that effectively, but there’s still the charge of journalistic integrity that we have to apply as well. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/ADS09143.jpg) ***Generally, how does a project come to fruition within the R&D division? How does the team work together to see a project through?*** The R&D team sits within the tech organization of The *Times*. It’s a multifaceted team; we have engineers and creative technologists who work on projects alongside producers and program managers. We have a strategy arm that looks at the potential use cases for various technologies that we think might be important in the near future, helping to scope out what those experiments can be. I have a slightly hybrid role as well. R&D focuses on solving existing problems and developing new capabilities in two categories: reporter tools—technologies that can allow reporters to gather news more efficiently or accurately. Then, there are news delivery tools—ways of harnessing new technologies to tell stories, for example. Our team explores technologies that might be applicable in 18 to 24 months, so a relatively short time horizon. We are constantly experimenting and iterating and thinking about, “What are the tools and technologies that are going to add value for the newsroom that we can apply in service of journalism?” ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/ADS09163.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/ADS09151.jpg) My role is twofold. On the one hand, it’s to help articulate the work that we do, both to *Times* readers and journalists within The *Times*. A lot of the work that I do is storytelling—using the techniques we’re developing to show how technological breakthroughs happen on our team and to demonstrate the potential of that technology. The other side of my role is designing the ways that people actually will interact with these tools, so a more UX/UI set of responsibilities around things like browser-based 3D experiences, or conversational UX for news Q&A. It’s both articulation and design. We don’t want to be academic about the way that we describe our work. It’s applied work, but it’s not remedial. We’re trying to find that sweet spot for how best to express the work in a way that doesn’t assume too much but is also accessible. There are certainly times when we get excited about the possibility of a technology, and we’ll try a couple of different experiments. Maybe it doesn’t work, or it doesn’t reach the quality benchmark that we think is required for something to become a viable newsroom tool. Failure is a natural part of our process. We are inspired by the ideas that come from the newsroom. The story should come first. For us, that means that the tools we’re developing need to be good enough to be seamlessly integrated into newsroom processes with minimal friction. Our work should never get in the way. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-29-at-4.53.05-PM-scaled.jpg) ***I can imagine that it’s an incredibly time-bound, fast-paced production schedule. What are some current projects you are excited about?*** R&D operates by running experiments. There’s a whole body of work we’ve been doing around 3D storytelling. We’ve been building a library of components that allow us to tell 3D stories in a much more efficient way, keeping in mind device and bandwidth constraints. These stories are typically not accessible, so this library gives us advanced building blocks for quickly assembling these kinds of stories. In the 3D vein, we’ve been looking at how gaming engines like Unreal might unlock new capabilities for recreating and experiencing journalistic scenes and information. Interactive 3D content is becoming more and more accessible. Unreal offers a lot of exciting possibilities for 3D storytelling—whether it’s creating super precise, realistic simulations that put readers in the shoes of a reporter at an exact moment in time or visualizing data in more dynamic ways, or even enabling multiplayer experiences around big news events like elections or the Olympics. This is a whole new world for journalistic storytelling, and with that comes a lot of unknowns and ethical questions. We want to explore these questions now, while the capability is somewhat nascent so that when limiting factors like computational power become less limiting, we’re ready. In our experiments with Unreal, we’ve been testing what we can achieve in terms of realism with effects like dynamic lighting, as well as what we can achieve in terms of interaction with things like navigation and points of interest. We want to develop repeatable, reusable UX components so that it’s easier and quicker to build these kinds of simulations in the future. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/unreal_screenshots_02_0004.jpg) R&D uses Unreal Engine to create detailed interactive simulations of journalistic scenes in 3D. The team used a 3D scan of the Strand Bookstore that the team captured in December to test effects like Ray-traced shadows, global illumination, reflections and ambient occlusion and establish repeatable interaction patterns around navigation and points of interest. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screenshot-2021-02-14-115817.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screenshot-2021-01-11-141558-e1617320270346.jpg) Left, building a pipeline to bring photogrammetry models from Reality Capture into Unreal and optimize R&D's workflow in Houdini. The team automated optimization in Houdini to retain as much detail from the raw model as possible, including geometry silhouettes and texture resolution, while reducing the original triangle count by 98%. Right, creating a POI (‘point of interest’) in the 3D scene using Unreal. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/HighresScreenshot00017-1-scaled.jpg) Floor collision in Unreal. The green area represents what is walkable/navigable by the user in the scene. All images in this cluster by R&D in collaboration with Composition X. One of the challenges of Unreal (and large-scale 3D environments in general) has been the size and computational load required to make these experiences accessible to Times readers. Technologies like pixel streaming might make it possible to render simulations in the browser, but we still have a ways to go in terms of performance and cost. But we’ve been able to do a lot of the groundwork to understand the optimal settings and workflows to maximize model quality and limit file size and poly count. We do a lot of work with natural language processing and looking at how we can use ML (Machine Learning) to help connect readers to reporters. In August, we launched a Q&A experience on the Coronavirus FAQ page that’s powered by a tool we developed called Switchboard, which allows us to cluster incoming reader questions and match them with reporter written-answers. We have been iterating on that technology for the last six months. I am constantly in awe of the work that we’re doing. For someone who struggled to use my imagination in the space of total possibility, the breadth of work that’s happening on our team is the best evidence I have that anything is possible. The tools that we’re developing, the technologies that we’re becoming fluent in, have so much potential. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/FAQ_homepage.jpg) The Coronavirus FAQ in the Editor’s Picks section on The New York Times homepage. Still captured by Jimmy Chion. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/model_graph_0_600x700_acf_cropped.png) A visualization of reader questions mapped on a 3D graph. This helps R&D understand how the algorithm is grouping related questions ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Switchboard_NYTApp_2_600x700_acf_cropped.png) The Q&A module on the Coronavirus FAQ page is powered by Switchboard, a tool created by R&D to group incoming reader questions and match them with reporter-written answers in real-time. ***You mentioned the importance of demonstrating the creative potential of a particular technology to journalists. Have there been instances where a journalist has used one of the tools you’ve developed in a surprising way?*** It’s a constant feedback loop. We’ve done a lot of work with photogrammetry—capturing large-scale environments and then allowing readers to experience them in the browser. We released a piece on our website to demonstrate how we think photogrammetry could work. It was explaining the process of streaming these models on the web. From there, we saw some amazing work come out of the newsroom. Michael Kimmelman, who writes about architecture and the city, did two wonderful pieces—[one on Jackson Heights](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/27/arts/design/jackson-heights-queens-virtual-walk-tour.html?ref=killscreen.com), the other on[ Doyers Street in Chinatown](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/02/arts/design/chinatown-virtual-walk-tour.html?ref=killscreen.com). The Doyers Street model integrated archival imagery to allow readers to see the before and after. To your earlier question, that was a nice way of cementing multiple temporalities in a single experience. We are excited when we develop a capability that we feel is ready for newsroom use, and it goes out into the wild, and new things happen with it. The archival imagery is a totally new use case that we had not initially designed for. But it works well. That kind of feedback and iteration then informs our thinking about how to make these interactions and experiences more robust and more seamless. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Kimmelman_stills_0002_Layer-Comp-3.jpg) Architecture critic Michael Kimmelman’s virtual walking tour of Chinatown, “Chinatown, Resilient and Proud,” published December 2, 2020\. R&D used photogrammetry to convert over 4,000 photographs of Doyers Street in Chinatown into a 3D model. In this frame, an archival photograph of the street from 1974 is aligned in 3D space. Archival photo by Michael Evans/The New York Times. Photogrammetry by Sukanya Aneja, Mint Boonyapanachoti, Jon Cohrs, Niko Koppel, Guilherme Rambelli and Benjamin Wilhelm. Lidar capture by Dallas Bennett. Designed by Umi Syam. Edited by Sia Michel. Produced by Alicia DeSantis, Jolie Ruben and Josephine Sedgwick. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Doyers_Side-scaled-e1617320023937.jpg) A point cloud of the Doyers Street model in Reality Capture. Image by R&D Creative Technologist Mint Boonyapanachoti. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/archival_screenshot_Maya_02-e1617320173382.jpg) Here, Boonyapanachoti adjusts the camera path through the scene, in which archival photos are placed in 3D space. Archival photo by Irving Browning/The New York Historical Society. Photogrammetry by Sukanya Aneja, Mint Boonyapanachoti, Jon Cohrs, Niko Koppel, Guilherme Rambelli and Benjamin Wilhelm. ***Since you’ve been at the New York Times, how has your conception of interaction and interactivity shifted?*** As is often the case in the sandbox that is school, I thought about interaction as an artistic expression with a lot of creative potential. In school, the utility of the work that you do is not usually at the forefront. At least it wasn’t for me. It was about exploration and about my own understanding of the world. The mission of The *Times* is to seek the truth and help people understand the world. Part of being in this role and being at this institution has been a process of realizing that now more than ever is when we need to help people understand. For me, interaction has become a way to create novel experiences and new forms of connection. Understanding the world around us has never been more important. The problems that we face require more than explanation. I think we need to find new ways of connecting with ideas and connecting with each other. A huge benefit of R&D is the ability to work outside of the constraints of the day-to-day news cycle and think about how new forms of interaction can strengthen the connections between readers and the information that we’re presenting. Bringing readers closer to the story is, for me, one of the most meaningful parts of the work that we’re doing. Interaction design is integral to how we facilitate those experiences. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/ADS09172-Edit-1.jpg) --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted in February 2021\. Photography by [David Evan McDowell](http://www.davidevanmcdowell.com/?ref=killscreen.com). ### Links [Lana’s website](https://lanazporter.com/?ref=killscreen.com) Follow [Lana](https://www.instagram.com/lanazp/?ref=killscreen.com) on Instagram Follow [Lana](https://twitter.com/lanazp?ref=killscreen.com) on Twitter ### Rosalie Yu: Participatory and embodied photography is feminism URL: https://www.killscreen.com/rosalie-yu/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T01:18:56.000Z March 25, 2021 / Interview by Alex Westfall | Photography courtesy of Rosalie Yu [](https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://killscreen.com/rosalie-yu/)[](https://twitter.com/home?status=https://killscreen.com/rosalie-yu/&ref=killscreen.com) *For* [*Rosalie Yu*](https://rosalieyu.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*, the enclosing feeling of a hug was something she wanted to digitize. The Taipei-born artist utilizes photography techniques—and in particular, the practice of photogrammetry or 3D photographic scanning—to probe interpersonal relationships and create participatory experiences. While her work takes on myriad forms—from collaborative workshops, to resin sculptures, to data visualization—the core of her practice is documenting our interactions with tech and each other to work towards justice. And it’s all about doing this together.* *We spoke with Rosalie about sustaining digital communities, the collaborative process that is photogrammetry, and the importance of quiet.* ***Can you tell me more about your childhood in Taipei? Was there something particular about that city that compelled you to do something creative with your life?*** I lived close by a high speed overpass and large hospital. The part of Taipei I grew up in is pretty noisy, but I was raised in a household that was pretty quiet. There was a lot of empty space, verbally and physically. I think that informed a lot of why I’m drawn to interpersonal experience and physical intimacy—especially the platonic ones between friends and between families, and how different cultures feel them differently. When I say ‘quiet,’ I speak of the interpersonal relationships between my family members. I always feel like language in general failed me in a lot of ways, even in Mandarin. ***Would you say that film was a language that felt more native to you? What drew you to study that at the undergraduate level?*** At first, I wanted to get as far away from fine art as possible. The arts program of the Taiwanese educational system gave me a very rigorous technical training, but at the time I was studying there, creative work wasn’t taken as seriously. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_9235_600x700_acf_cropped.jpeg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-22-at-9.49.32-AM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_9749-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_9620-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Portrait of Rosalie by Yang Ya-chun. Below, Rosalie's studio in Taipei. I had the opportunity to come to the United States and studied at UCLA for undergrad. I recognized the contrast in culture and language—seeing how different I am from everyone else and how to navigate that. That experience is unlike the experience of someone who migrated at a younger age. For grad school, I attended NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) program. I started to think about how cross-cultural concepts shape our understanding of certain topics. I was especially interested in bodies and physical intimacy. ITP emphasized cultivating a creative community. The program director, Dan O’Sullivan, once said something like, “English might not be everyone’s first language, so speak slowly and listen intently.” I’ve been thinking about how brave it is to speak and write in plain English, and how to appreciate the beauty of broken language. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/02_Embrace-In-Progress-Ran-Mo_2015_3D-Printed-Sandstone_7.7x10x9.6-scaled.jpg) “Ran”, 3D printed sandstone, 2015, 7.7" x 10" x 9.6". ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/07_Father_Embrace-In-Progress_1-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/08_Father_Embrace-In-Progress-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) “Father”, 3D printed sandstone, 2016, 8" x 10" x 8". **Was there a specific moment during ITP where you knew you wanted to work within this framework of participatory practice, photogrammetry, and intimacy?** It was gradual. I was always interested in photography as a way of making visuals, which led me to the technique of photogrammetry. It is a way of 3D scanning where you take photos from multiple perspectives and you’re able to turn it into a 3D model. I became interested in photogrammetry because it offered a way for a lot of people to do something together. Conceptually, I was exploring platonic intimacy between strangers, between friends. I turned this idea into a workshop where people could learn how to create a safe space together. I wanted to explore how we could leverage the mechanics of photogrammetry to do something together. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/06_Embrace-In-Progress.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/05_Kyle_Embrace-In-Progress.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/04_Magdalena_Embrace-In-Progress.jpg) ***This exploration of embrace through photogrammetry lay the foundation for your workshop and project Knowing Together. Could you talk about how that project came to fruition?*** At the time, I was thinking about how an embrace can have this monstrous feeling—it feels like it’s taking forever. There’s this feeling of enclosure when someone embraces you. That was why I started to look at how photogrammetry could be a way to explore this. I wanted to explore how there are so many different ways to express movement in sculptural form—how can we apply what’s already established to photogrammetry? I hosted a workshop with about 40 people. We first learned about how to give and receive attention from a complete stranger. The second part of the workshop was to embrace a complete stranger. Then, everyone would surround them. We all took turns with the camera, taking photos and then giving it to the next person. After the workshop, I stitched all those photos into a sculpture. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-23-at-4.22.22-PM.jpg) A 2’ x 20” x 20” version in hand-painted 3D printed sandstone, acrylic paint, dark maple wood, 2017. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-10-at-8.14.33-PM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/03_Knowing_Together1-scaled-e1616545209452.jpg) Capturing process. Design by Kimberly Gim. In “Output No.4,” the participant had an injured leg. What appears to be a dripping liquid is in fact her crutch; a thin, intricate shape is difficult to capture through photogrammetry, resulting in this apparent deformation. Photo by Andrew J. LeVine. The length of embrace for two strangers depends on how long it takes for the camera to travel. Sometimes it will take 10 minutes, so you just have to imagine two strangers, not knowing each other, embrace each other for 10 minutes. The boundaries start to go away—not just the personal boundaries, but physically, you’re fatigued. And so a lot of things could happen. ***Would you say that your process starts with a research question, or are you more interested in exploring the technology?*** I do both; they come hand-in-hand. For example, the project I was just describing is a very iterative process. I try something over, but I think \[my process is more about\] setting up a perimeter to let a result come out. In other ways, it is similar to research-based art practice. More recently, my practice has been more about planning and hosting workshops. I become the facilitator to create a situation or to create a space, to see how things evolve. I’m the person who designed the machine, but I don’t determine how things will turn out. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/03_Knowing_together-scaled.jpg) When capturing this particular embrace, the group members taking photos stood in a semicircle for the initial sequence. Before the second sequence began, the pair accidentally broke their pose, leaving an open space on one side of the sculpture where no images were captured. (Design: Kimberly Gim.) ***For Knowing Together, you facilitated a collective experience. This means that individuals involved will bring in their own subjectivities to the work. Have there been any surprises—moments of unexpectedness that have enriched your understanding of the project?*** Once, there were these two men. They were embracing in the middle and then halfway, they let go. I always collect the photo image and I visualize how the camera travels in the end. When you look at the diagram, the right side of the model is empty. It’s an incomplete model; one side is broken. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-10-at-4.43.59-PM-e1616545674139.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/87_D858989-2-scaled.jpg) Cube generated on each polygon of a 3D model. Right, as a result of the subjects’ movement, as well as uncontrolled factors in the surrounding environment, the output often drifts from the sharp, familiar, coherent surface one might expect. These aberrations remain in our 3D printed sculptures, which are suspended in clear globes of acrylic resin to better preserve these features. Photo by Roy Rochlin. I am trying to see how I can work with missing data, because I’m not as interested in creating photorealistic scans that replicate whatever we see in the real world. I’m more interested in involving people in the process and what we can create together. I want to be truthful to the process. I spent a lot of time thinking, *How can I print the model that’s broken*? In the end, I chose to print in resin, and then I suspended thousands of cubes in the resin. With that material, I could print a model with a side that’s open, because that’s what happened during the embrace—they let go of the embrace of each other. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/7_10-scaled.jpg) “Output No. 7” is the final scan of the workshop, depicting a group of five seated on the floor and leaning inward. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/buffing.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_2953-scaled-e1616545888282.jpg) In order to see what’s inside the resin print, the prints were wet sanded and buffed. ***You’ve touched on the tension between process and product in your work. Do you see one as more important than the other?*** When something is aesthetically pleasing, it is easy to draw people to become interested in the project. Then they can get to know about the process. That is an entry point for people. In that way, I think showing the result or making some object is effective. For me, the process is the integral part of the project. That’s why for *Knowing Together*, I printed out all data sets—all the photos that people have taken and where they’re taken, what time they were taken, how long they took, and whoever took the photographs. I put all of them next to the sculptures. I want viewers to take each project as a whole so that they can understand what happened during the process. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Yu-Rosalie-05-scaled.jpg) Photos captured by each participant were later processed to generate 3D models, and full sets of these photos (as displayed above) were exhibited alongside the sculptures as source material. Photo by Roy Rochlin. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/book_1.png-1-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/book_2.png-scaled.jpg) Source data and diagram of output no.7\. Design by Kimberly Gim. For many artists working with technology, there’s this responsibility to have some transparency. In the art world, there’s an aura or mystique around the artist or artwork that people like—you don’t want to know anything; it just magically happened. It’s mysterious in its secrecy. I’m trying to make sure that just to let people see or to hold participant’s hands to say, “This is what we’re going to do. How are we going to do it?” That’s so important. ***Generally, what is the importance of a feminist lens in your overall research practice? Do you see a link between a feminist framework and one that centers embodied experience?*** There is this emerging field of [Data Feminism](https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/?ref=killscreen.com)—a book just came out by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein. When they talk about feminism, is not really about gender identity; it’s more about, *How do we work toward justice? How do we address the needs of marginalized people?* When I work with technology, I think a lot about that. Even the process of scanning is the extraction of information from a world—it can be seen as very capitalistic. I am always thinking about using technology in a way that’s ‘feminist’—a way that’s just not about extracting information, but about elevating the emotional or embodied experience. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/book_3.png-scaled.jpg) Design by Kimberly Gim. ***What draws you to participatory experiences? We spoke with the artist*** [***Salome Asega,***](https://killscreen.com/salome-asega/?ref=killscreen.com) ***who noted that participation de-centers the role of the artist. Do you think similarly?*** I liked that—’de-centering.’ I think the mechanics of photogrammetry is a way to decenter the solitary photographer—there’s no center or singular point of view. It’s like a multiplicity of different perspectives. I had a opportunity to lead a workshop at the Teachers College at Columbia University. That was a longer term commission; adapting *Knowing Together* as a workshop. They said, “We’re a school for teachers, so we want you to think about how technology could be used in the classroom. I want you to engage with the student and I want you to bring them back to see the result in the forum and exhibition.” The process was elaborate, and a lot of people were involved. After the workshop, students were generous to write to me a long paragraph about how they felt during the workshop, what kind of change it brought to them. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/no5_quote.jpg) Reflection by participant. That was beautiful, and that kind of process is very different from one involving me solely in the studio, or even working on a project with a person I know. Here, it was like I was opening up to people. Doing something collaborative means a lot of labor is involved. Every time I always feel so exhausted! ***That makes me think of how so many so-called ‘results’ of a participatory experience are immaterial—because they’re interpersonal, emotional experiences.*** Many people in my periphery have so much empathy and care in their work and are trying to create communities that focus on collaboration and knowledge-sharing. I’m very much inspired by artists who use teaching as a creative expression such as Taeyoon Choi, who started the [School for Poetic Computation](https://sfpc.io/?ref=killscreen.com). I think it’s true that if you cannot find your own community, then the best way is to create one your own. I have a subsequent virtual workshop called [*Photographic Knitting Club*,](https://knittingclub.rosalieyu.com/?ref=killscreen.com) that has a similar emotional, communal aspect to it. I wanted to reframe digitizing technology as a digital craft, and to highlight the manual labour in the technological process. How can we digitally knit together—use it as a way to create community? That made me think of knitting circles, but in this case, knitting images into a room. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/exhibition_2-1-scaled.jpg) Photo by Roy Rochlin. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/book_4.png-scaled.jpg) Design by Kimberly Gim. I spent a lot of time unlearning and rethinking ways to describe how technology works—to make it more personal and tangible; more rooted in our experience. We tried instructions like, “walk around and use the camera to paint in details of the space,” “overlap each photo like stitching or fish scales,” or “imagine the room as a mixing bowl and scrape out details from the walls.” Although we don’t share the same \[physical\] room, there is something intimate about sharing the same bodily movement and doing this in a space we know so much about. The photos participants capture are knitted together in photogrammetry, but I am less interested in the 3D replica. I use the data to visualize how people move in their own spaces, and turn it into data portraits taken in isolation. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-10-at-5.09.33-PM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-10-at-5.06.20-PM-scaled.jpg) Screenshot from Photographic Knitting Club workshop documentation, conducted with the support from Delfina Foundation. Participants for this workshop include Naho Matsuda, Matt Ward, Chloe Ostmo, Huda Caglayan, Rut Karin Zettergren, and Katie Giritlian. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/indivuals_2.png) Scanning software is used to help visualize where people capture; how they move in their space. The black box is the location of the laptop, the triangle indicates the first photograph taken, and the outer rectangle is the shape of this room. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/PKC_noFrame-1-scaled.jpg) Using screens as an anchor, here individual portraits are layered on the top of each other. The first Photographic Knitting Club meeting was joined by artists from NY and SF, including Francesca Rodriguez Sawaya, Renata Gaui, Pamela Liou, and Windy Chien. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/prints_6-1-scaled.jpg) Data portrait (left) and hand-drawn illustrations (right) by workshop participants Caroline Valansi, Brain Hart, Caroline Sinders, Taline Balian, Ozoz Sokoh, Olha Pryymak, Choterina Freer, and Nisha Desai. ***You’re working on a project that riffs on a camera obscura. This feels like perhaps another iteration of bringing photography into the realm embodied experience…in that you’re literally creating a room that operates as a camera.*** I’ve been working with my friend and collaborator, Charles Berret. We worked on *Knowing Together*, together \[laughs\]. During *Photographic Knitting Club*, we saw a lot of people’s space. We noticed a doubling and distorting of the space happens when there is a mirror presented in participant’s rooms. Mirrors are a known glitch factor in 3D scanning—you know not to include something that’s reflective. Also, mirrors are essential in the camera body—to create a perfect reflection, you need a very nice mirror inside the camera. What would happen if we purposely put a mirror into a controlled environment? A mirror is a great way to reveal the process of working with technology, to reveal the labor. Usually when you do scanning, the person who is taking the photographs, or is scanning the scene, is not present in the final model or image. With a mirror, the data collector can appear in the final model as a phantasm. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/1646_Athanasius_Kircher_-_Camera_obscura.jpg) Illustration of a "portable" camera obscura in Kircher's Ars Magna Lucis Et Umbrae (1645). ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-10-at-5.44.54-PM.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-10-at-5.48.09-PM.jpg) Top, an example of a parallel space emerged because of mirrors. Bottom, The 3D capture process usually conceals the photographer behind her lens, but by introducing a wall-sized mirror as a controlled anomaly, the appearance of the data collector appears in this model as a “glitch.” That speaks to *Knowing Together.* We are interested in the personal limit of the so-called mechanical objectivity. How can we use the mirror as a way to refuse and break the algorithm—to take it apart in order to peek into the black box? So, we are going to build a room with a side full of mirrors and then to capture inside. We don’t know what will come out, but I’m excited. --- ### Credits Interview conducted in February 2021\. Edited and condensed for clarity. Header image by Yang Ya-chun. The Photographic Knitting Club and Path of Broken Patterns received support from the Delfina Foundation and Ministry of Culture, Taiwan. Knowing Together received support from Teachers College at Columbia University and the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. ### Links [Rosalie’s website](https://rosalieyu.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Rosalie’s Instagram](http://www.instagram.com/rosalieyu/?ref=killscreen.com) ### The Rolfes Brothers put the live in livestream URL: https://www.killscreen.com/sam-andy-rolfes/ Last updated: 2025-05-27T20:52:58.000Z *Sam and Andy Rolfes self-describe their* [*work*](http://rolfes.team/?ref=killscreen.com) *as “overly navel-gazing, obsessed-with-layers, weird.” From* [*visualizing*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc2qWBIToKU&ref=killscreen.com) *songs by Lady Gaga and BLACKPINK to facilitating mind-bending, improvisational* [*performances*](https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/5596?ref=killscreen.com) *at MoMA, the duo are in a perpetual toggle between real life and the screen. Cleverly using VR, mixed reality, figurative animation, and motion capture tools to highlight the absurdity of life, dream up ironic characters, and make anti-capitalist statements, Sam and Andy discovered and perfected a digital fluency that’s uniquely theirs. They also happen to be brothers.* *Sam and Andy sat down with us to speak about their 3D modeling software from childhood, why improv comedy is seminal for their practice, and the game they’re designing—fingers crossed, the first of many.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-17-at-10.36.28-PM.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-18-at-1.34.57-PM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-17-at-10.35.59-PM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Photography by Tim Saccenti for Setta Studio, with digital sculpting by Team Rolfes. ***Growing up, your mother ran a 3D studio. Did you take anything from that environment into your practice?*** **Sam:** Our mom had big books of Blender tutorials. She’d be like, *Hey, we need a spaceship for our company.* I remember trying for a few weeks and being like, *This sucks*, *It’s just wireframe meshes, and you’re moving points around*. I moved back to making violent stick-figure animations or something in Flash soon after. All the 3D stuff is roughly from the time we were 10 to 13\. I left it behind until I was 22\. It’s really full circle. **Andy:** We had the very early version of Blender and Cinema4D. It still felt so hard to get into it, so we kept to stuff that was far more expressive—2D animation and our traditional painting training. **Sam**: I have vivid memories of replaying *Half-Life 2* hundreds of times. I would go back into levels as a 10-year-old, and I would direct my playthroughs—almost like a speed run-through, but for style. I’d move my camera so that a certain thing would get highlighted. I role-played with myself. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/adr_probably2005_SpeedySig3b.gif) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/adr_2014_5.-Do-You-See-What-I-See-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/adr_2016_E_Final-Zero-4C_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Details of early painting and digital work by Andy. **Sam:** Getting back to 3D didn’t happen until we came across ZBrush, a 3d sculpting program. The program’s internal logic is completely topsy-turvy. It speaks a language unlike any other 3D software. Once you get a handle at the most basic level, you can squish things. So much of what we wanted was that immediate, responsive squishiness. **Andy:** The learning curve on ZBrush was harsh. I was working at the fashion agency [Two Hustlers](http://twohustlers.com/?ref=killscreen.com). My boss there had me use Cinema4D for making assets. I wanted to see how much I could push it. I then learned ZBrush. **Sam:** I was doing these very ornate, mixed media things where I was constructing stuff and layering oils. I would spend hours on them. They became too overwrought, and the idea got buried. Going digital allowed us to riff in the moment. Finding something that was immediately responsive and expressive was the key for us. ZBrush, Unreal, mo-cap and livestream stuff—our trajectory arises from that immediate visceral response, responding at the moment to whatever external environmental stimuli. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Sam_PaintingsBefore3D2_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Sam_PaintingsBefore3D_600x700_acf_cropped_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Details of early painting work by Sam. ***How did your respective educational trajectories influence the kinds of things you make?*** **Sam:** We both went to school for painting in one way or another. Many of the seeds were planted there but we just ended up being funneled into the *Juxtapoz*\-industrial complex. Just being into a teen boy and say, *Oh, I want to do sick, graffiti, cool figures*. The high school and college art school system didn’t prepare us—we didn’t have the language to work digitally in any real way up until recently. Even when I was at SAIC, I barely did anything with 3D. A class taught Unity, but I stayed far away from it because all the kids were just making the same recreation of a 3D gallery. You could walk around, but it was like, *Okay, we’re reconstructing the white box gallery that I already hate the experience.* It doesn’t have the good parts, which are the alcohol and the socializing. It’s the only reason people go to these things in the first place. **Andy:** I went to the University of North Texas. I got a major in watercoloring before they closed that down. With watercoloring, you have to plan things out a bit, but you’re still dealing with water and pigments, so there will be a randomness. That laid a nice groundwork for being more reactive with artwork than just trying to assign a single pathway. ***How does your collaboration generally work—especially as it pertains to projects foregrounding real-time embodiment?*** **Sam:** Andy comes from a photographic background. He has a consideration of light that I don’t, he also has, but you also have a more realistic figurative nature. **Andy:** I remember Sam sketching out post-humanist, distorted work like back in high school. He follows through with a much more loose sense of form. I am interested in the more tradesman, craftsman-y stuff. I learned proper anatomy and focus on these much more formless elements to break it down later. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/woops.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/image-51.png) 3D modeling process for the Berlin Atonal performance. **Sam:** Andy keeps us grounded in reality. He keeps me from budgeting our project too insane and yelling at me when I get too excited on a call. I promise a lot of work to a client. That’s part of the dynamic. **Andy:** It comes down to our history—me going to state school, Sam going to art school. Sam making a way earlier as a freelancer, and I bounced from internship to internship, to in-house job before coming over to freelance. We’re similar enough where it counts and likewise, different enough where it counts. **Sam:** Our skill sets complement each other, but they’re close enough that we can be pretty unified with the vision. Often we’ll concept together about what the performative perspective? What is the core mechanic of performing through the space that is going to be inherent to the concept? We can brainstorm that together, and Andy’s very helpful in keeping it current. We’ll trade off designed to the characters and then as it goes into production, often I’ll start handling the environments and the arc through the environments, like the choreography, functionally of the camera and the characters and stuff, I’ll start building the environments, blocking them out in VR and walking through them and certain construct, different elements. While I’m doing that, Andy and Alexander Bauman start the whole process of rigging, which is essential to how the characters move. Then, we bring them into the scene and we’ll all together start rigging them. Typically, I’ll do the VR puppetry and maybe—and usually if it’s not a musician or different performer, I’ll be wearing the mo-cap suit and then in the camera. The physical performance is often me; sometimes me and Andy. It’s a matter of improvising within the space and I’ll have roughly mapped out roughly the trajectory through the space. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-17-at-10.33.21-PM.jpg) Photography by Tim Saccenti for Setta Studio, with digital sculpting by Team Rolfes. **Sam:** Spatially, the performance or video ends up being a one-shot. Functionally, it’s like a game playthrough. For us, that gameplay perspective is natural. We’ll start improvising in VR, playing around with the characters, finding what their personalities are. You think they’re going to move a certain way depending on how they’re rigged up. It might be, *Okay, they can’t move very fast before they explode.* Or, *They look really cute when they do this shoulder-shrugging thing.* It ends up being a choreographed dance between both characters. The POV is set up so that we are embodying the camera, so there’s a dialogue between the camera and the characters. That develops throughout 20 takes. I’m recording, honing things in—sometimes I’ll block it out. Often, I’ll perform as one character, then we’ll save that. Then I’ll put on a VR headset with mo-cap and then play as the other character against myself, and then build the pieces from there. We set up the conditions for something to happen—we’re open enough and have enough technical articulation to accomplish that. We feel out what the best thing is for the space. Then, we render it. Andy might help with lighting, and then once we get the scene blocked out, he’ll go in and do passes. Then we render it. We’re editing in-engine, and often, it’s a lot of single takes. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/image-55-e1616098377908_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/image-2_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/image-73.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/image-54.png) Character design for Stranger Vibes: A Night of Art and Technology at MoMA. ***For your projects with a real-time component, how do you think about the relationship between what’s happening on screen versus in physical space?*** **Sam:** We get a suggestion from the crowd—that serves as a catalyst for them to riff on and makes it clear to everybody that this is happening live. We choreograph it in a way where you have to slowly unpack and elaborate the performance language for the audience. It’s very easy to just drop in, do a bunch of crazy shit that people can’t really understand how it’s being generated. So, we take a lot of care to build the performative mechanics directly into the concept and have that story come from there. I always direct the performers. If I’m wearing the suit myself, I do large arm and leg movements. Everybody’s on stage in front of a big LED screen—they’re backlit, in mo-cap suits. I’ll be doing VR camera and moving us through. Andy will be conducting the scenes, triggering the same progression, toggling the lights live, programming transitions. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/P5150382-copy-scaled.jpg) Process and documentation of Sam and Andy's performance at MoMA. Image by Mick Bello. We start out basic. A body moves the thing on screen. So you see the silhouette of my body, you see that it ripple across onto the screen. We got that relation; that’s the introduction. And then we start to abstract it. There are two bodies tied together, with the camera focused on one body. So you’re watching your avatar on screen, which results in a series of levels of increasing abstraction. That allows us to environmentally build in the narrative around them. The characters, the increasing intensity, the environment…all of that is present. Then, it’s all about responding to the music, to each other, and to the audience, and letting that guide us in the moment. For our [Berlin Atonal](https://berlin-atonal.com/?ref=killscreen.com) performance, it was myself and another dancer. It was like, *Okay, it’s not just about the one-to-one relationship of our bodies on screen. Let’s code in a mechanic where they’re a figure in the center..*.its expressions are tied to our closest together as we’re dancing. When it’s abstracted that way, a body that is the result of your movements and another person’s movements defines the movements you do. With the choreography that arises, you’ll start hitting different poses and angles with your body—movements that are completely different than you would otherwise do, inherently from a dancing perspective. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-17-at-10.33.50-PM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-17-at-10.36.39-PM.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-18-at-1.35.44-PM-e1616100247907.jpg) Photography by Tim Saccenti for Setta Studio, with digital sculpting by Team Rolfes. **Andy:** We rely on “show, don’t tell.” You can’t directly communicate with the audience because there’s music playing. We heavily rely on visuals to convey something, but we utilize the relationships to convey and explore these various scenes and set-ups. Each performance has its climax, and then we fall into the denouement. **Sam:** That becomes a method of moving through the scenes, and a way of heightening things as we go. In improv comedy, they establish base reality. They raise the stakes on one absurd element that they’ve written. It’s a continual process of agreeing on a reality, then raising this absurdity. *What if two bodies within this type of space reacts this way, then we heighten it again?* You can build dramatic action this way. In improvisational work, you are given a large latitude to do your thing. **Andy:** Our process has that similar throughline to improv—laying the groundwork that elevation than exploring that. A good adage for environmental 3D work is 90% based in reality, 10% based on whatever is going just pure creativity— **Sam:** —or heightening it. We have both come through the art world, which has its own arguably outmoded values in terms of permanence and auteurism—all this shit that I’m trying to unlearn. Also, we grew up as snobby turntablists—we’re all about technique; we’re anti-pop. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/image-52.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Angle_ATONAL-e1616098653861.png) Mapping the trajectory and designing characters for the Berlin Atonal festival. **Andy:** We grew up with street art, ‘lowbrow’ art. We are pushing away from an old head mentality and being able to grow into new things. How can we apply that into our work? Maybe we can have a nice balance of trying to be serious about a topic or a narrative and keep things fun where we need to so it can actually engage people in more than one way. **Sam:** It’s conversational, dynamic. The broader world doesn’t do that; but we have similar shared interests of culture, music, art, gaming. So where can we situate ourselves in terms of contextual equal footing and be able to do our thing? We’re pretty stubborn, to our financial detriment. There’s a lot of corny stuff that we probably could be doing that we don’t do. Still, we want to speak to a lot of people, and a culture that’s not just a series of micro-niches. How is that sustainable in a world where all communication media are completely captured by capital? ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/IMG_0465-1_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/44247669_10155906886341463_3401035592107032576_n_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ***On that note, what spaces have you found the most successful, gratifying, or accessible for your work?*** **Sam:** Music videos have been the entry point for us to the world of characters and narrative and speaking to people more directly and having specific concepts we try to communicate. Often, it’s about vibe and you’re trying to convey a narrative without dialogue, or if with dialogue, it’s lyrics trying to convey something that may heighten the music. It comes to the added benefit of the current cultural configuration. Music and games—people care about them more, which is understandable. It’s more of a utility throughout their day than visual art. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Berlin_Atonal_2019_Marshstepper_TeamRolfes%C2%A9IsabelOToole.jpg) Team Rolfes in preparation for their Berlin Atonal performance. Image by Isabel O'Toole ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Berlin_Atonal_2019_day-2-Marshstepper%C2%A9%EF%B8%8FHelge-Mundt-1-2-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/69472940_2563483113673075_7162787165074620416_o_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Documentation at Berlin Atonal. Images by Helge Mundt. ***In your livestreams and performances, what is the role of audience input or feedback?*** **Sam:** The audience is the chaos element. That lends itself to comedy. A lot of our live shows are intermediated by the internet. We hit a dry patch when we just start figuring out what this character’s name is. The audience just submits a bunch of trolly shit. Still, it gives us an idea of that character. They were just trying to be an asshole on the chat, but it gave us something to go off of. **Andy:** Foundational work came from interacting. For *Superdeluxe*, [Daniela Hamilton](https://www.producedbyconference.com/los-angeles/team-member/daniela-hamilton/?ref=killscreen.com) wrote and produced this telenovela series. They did it four times over an hour. The audience dictates how the story would play out. That laid the groundwork for our understanding of the audience and how we can play with them as we get better at our own tools. I want to see how we can apply it in different places and keep their spirit going. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/RENDERBENDER_Ep3_Final_PUBLISH_v01_14.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/image-74-1.jpg) Sam and Andy's livestream process. **Sam: We feel best in this experimental space. We’ve been doing so-called ‘virtual production’ since before Unreal had a way to animate like this. For our first videos, I was palming a prototype Vive or Oculus headset in my hand and screen capturing, because there was no sequencer in Unreal to make animations.** We could be in a golden age of non-gaming, interactive stream right now. It just hasn’t happened. I blame that on market consolidation, vertical integration, mega-corporations buying up these studios, and then consider then I understand them thinking that they’re redundant and then asking them. Many people are really, really good, who are internally working at these different companies, and they get fired and have their stuff turned over. It’s not breaking news that a monopolistic con consolidation of these markets is bad for creativity, but that’s been the story for us these last few years. The relationship of doing experimental art within a commercial market of any kind is fraught. And I’m coming to terms with that — we’re really just trying to make a living doing our weird thing. It’s just a matter of making it substance sustainable. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/image-58.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/image-57_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/image-65_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/image-67_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/image-63_600x700_acf_cropped.png) Research and development images for Sam and Andy's in-progress game, which will incorporate player input to foreground co-creation. ***You’re working on a game! What can you tell us about this project?*** **Andy:** We gave in! **Sam:** Functionally, all of our videos or games, right? They’re all playable to a certain extent. It’s just only we can play them, and they’re not very optimized. Games impact people in a much deeper way right now than many other forms—commercially, monetarily, sustainably. Right now, we’re in production building up this game that’s going to be audience participatory lore component where they can determine where the story and functionality goes. Every month we’re going to drop a new update of the game—potentially allowing people to mod it. We can bring it into the main canon arc by allowing people to submit characters or environmental things in that model. And building out a thing throughout however long—build increasingly functional weird experimental game. We don’t like the idea of asking people to just work on spec just for the coolness of seeing their stuff from there. It’s way more interesting to have everyone truly participate and feeling like they have an investment in this story we’re building together. The hope is that anybody who contributes—develop some lore or is really active in voting—buys into a heavy percentage of the game’s overall profits. The hope is that we build up functionality so that how much you get out of it depends on how much you put in. We’re trying to set up something that’s sustainable for everybody to make a fun thing together. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-17-at-10.36.14-PM.jpg) Photography by Tim Saccenti for Setta Studio, with digital sculpting by Team Rolfes. --- ### Credits Interview conducted in February 2021\. Edited and condensed for clarity. Photography by [Tim Saccenti](http://instagram.com/timsaccenti?ref=killscreen.com) for and at [Setta Studio](http://www.instsagram.com/setta%5Fstudio?ref=killscreen.com), New York City. ### Links [Team Rolfes](https://rolfes.team/?ref=killscreen.com) Follow [Sam,](https://www.instagram.com/sam.rolfes/?ref=killscreen.com) [Andy,](https://www.instagram.com/andy.rolfes/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) and [Team Rolfes](https://www.instagram.com/team.rolfes/?ref=killscreen.com) on Instagram ### Skawennati: Nurturing Indigenous imagination in virtual worlds URL: https://www.killscreen.com/skawennati/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T01:14:24.000Z *In 1996, Skawennati logged on to create* [*CyberPowWow*](http://www.cyberpowwow.net/about.html?ref=killscreen.com)*, an Indigenously-determined chatroom and gallery. In the years that have passed, the artist has forged virtual communities through her projects that compound Native histories and imagined futures—notably, through her machinima series TimeTraveller™, created entirely within Second Life. Born in Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Territory, Skawennati belongs to the Turtle clan. She holds a BFA from Concordia University. Together with her partner, artist and educator Jason Edward Lewis, Skawennati directs* [*Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace*](http://abtec.tv/?ref=killscreen.com) *(AbTeC), a research network and educational program made up of artists, academics, technologists, and activists—its goal to ensure that Indigenous people are present in cyberspace. “We would like to also affect the look and feel of cyberspace…to not just be in it, but also shape it into our own image,” the Montreal-based artist tells us.* *We were honored to speak with Skawennati on the cinematic worlds she’s created in Second Life, the biases cultural embedded in the program, and nation-building through art and education.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/2019-12-13-xox-wearing-CC-portrait-scaled-e1615508759707.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/CPW-05-copy.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/CPW-01-copy.jpg) Above, Skawennati's avatar, xox. Below, stills from a gallery space in CyberPowWow (artwork by Rea, Ryan Rice, Bradlee LaRocque, and Melanie Printup Hope). ***Do you remember your first creative impulse?*** I was born in Kahnawà:ke, my reserve and Mohawk territory, which is close to Montreal. where I currently live. I was a very creative young kid. My earliest memory is putting beads on a needle. My great aunt taught me that. I loved staying at her house. Her daughter, Kathleen, was also an artist. She is the person I feel who taught me that I could make anything I wanted. Together, we made dolls’ clothes—little beaded samples and embroidery too. My mom would say to me, “You can be whatever you want.” I remember I wanted to be a ballerina dancer. I love my father—he did not think that a kid with such good marks should become an artist who will be poor when I could be anything I wanted to be. He said I could be a doctor or a lawyer. I think I only realized I could be an artist in my twenties. ***How did your educational experience shape your creative practice?*** I initially studied pure and applied science. I was getting terrible marks, and it was freaking me out. But if I had continued to get good marks, I might have ended up being in sciences instead of in the arts. I then found Concordia University—their BFA in Design Art. All the teachers were artists. I learned so much about choosing materials and why we choose them, the symbolic meaning of a material. I got a graduate diploma in Art Administration. What ended up being the most valuable part of that degree was that I did an internship at an artist-run center called [Oboro](http://www.oboro.net/?ref=killscreen.com). That was it—I found my tribe when I went there, and I found other artists, I found out how they lived. I just knew that that’s where I had to be. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Abbi_Throneroom_001_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Stills from TimeTravellerTM. Above, "A test to get avatar bodies that did not need to be operated by people into the space for crowd scenes." Below, "the city taking shape, plus a weird glitch that made the background beautiful, bright colors." ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/2012-10-02_1054_BlockMan_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/2012-09-14_1042More_bug-1.png) [***TimeTraveller™***](https://www.timetravellertm.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ***is your long-term, episodic machinima project created within Second Life. What was the process like designing the narrative for this project ™?*** I start with writing. I write, write, write; I don’t think about the movie. I think about the story that I want to tell. In \[the protagonist\] Hunter’s case, I knew the main thing I wanted him to be was in the future. I wanted him to be a person who was lost, not knowing if he would make it. I knew I wanted him to learn about who he was and feel a kind of pride and love. I wanted him to be successful. I decided that this movie’s success or this story would be rich and famous because we didn’t see a lot of native people who are rich and famous. It’s not necessarily always what I think is the meaning of success, but it was for this story. I then need to pull out the dialogue, the action, the thoughts. I make a storyboard, and I sketch out little stick figures. It took me two years to make that first episode; the program was a mystery. At the time, there was no manual for machinima. I don’t think there’s a manual now, either! In the first few scenes that I shot, I was just totally dumb. I made my window different sizes, which gave me all these different file sizes in Final Cut Pro. So I had to reshoot everything. \[Also,\] I’ve worked with Nancy Townsend \[a team member at AbTeC\] from (almost!) day one. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/TT-ProductionStill-Stepping-Out-72.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Hunter_Mixed_Clothes-1_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/ProductionStill-Face-off-72dpi-1-e1615270557397.jpg) Production stills from TimeTravellerTM featuring the series' protagonist, Hunter. We were learning how to bring imagery into *Second Life*—how to make a road, how a building. At that point, we were working in other people’s sandboxes or the worlds they’ve created for their own playing or projects. My team figured out that we had to buy ourselves an island. We always think it’s amusing that real Indians spend real money on virtual land. The technology of *Second Life* is idiosyncratic. There are so many things you can do, but there’s a lot of limitations too. You gotta just learn to love it. I don’t love the way the hand often goes through the avatar’s body. You can’t control the facial expressions, either. They’re just on a loop, and they smile beautifully, but not necessarily when you want them to. There are all kinds of stuff like that that we have to play with and figure out through editing. Also, I make character sketches,and then we customize the avatars by buying things on the marketplace. What we can’t find, we make. We also customize things we can buy. ***What were the biases that you first encountered when you started working in Second Life?*** When I was looking for a Native man’s skin, Hunter’s skin was the darkest skin available on *Second Life* at that time, and he’s fairly fair. That’s changed—now you have really dark skin, really light skin. I could never find a Mohawk hairstyle. Finally was very happy, though, finding the ‘dread-hawk’ That’s the name of Hunter’s hairstyle. Over the years, we found a store that made native skins native—specifically supposed to be native North American native people. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Watching-the-news-300-8x14-1-1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Production-Still-Meeting-Ista_001.jpg) Production stills from TimeTravellerTM. ***What led you to Calico and Camouflage and thinking about fashion in the physical and virtual protest spaces?*** I have definitely been thinking about regalia of the future for years and camouflage as Mohawk clothing as a signifier. One of the first pictures of a Hunter that I ever took, and he’s wearing camouflage pants in there, and that was on purpose. In 1990, there was the Oka Crisis. That is when I noticed native people wearing army clothes, especially camouflage, and I’ve been sewing calico since I was a kid. We made a ribbon shirt for my avatar. I thought, Why does it have to look like a 16th or 17th-century blouse? Can we make a different shape? Calico is the little flowers that are on the fabric. I thought, *What is the future of Calico?* When I made episode three of *TimeTraveller™,* I needed to figure out how to make ribbon shirts. And it was hard to figure out because, at that time, the clothing in *Second Life* was still painted on the body. It was another layer of skin. In the marketplace, someone who was making callers and you could stick a collar on your neck. In 2018, I was invited to the first Indigenous Fashion Week in Toronto. I was thrilled. There were all sizes, colors, ages, genders of models smiling, walking. It was this joyous occasion. I thought, “I can do a fashion show in *Second Life*. I’m going to develop a line in the game for my avatars, and we’ll have a fashion show.” I just knew it had to be what to wear to the demonstration. It had to be resistance wear. I wanted it to be clothing that was ours, and to me, that was ribbon shirts and camouflage. For my project, we decided to occupy the mall. Ellen Gabriel did a fashion show with camouflage for her community and asked me to be part of it. I acknowledge Ellen for the work that she has done in putting together fashion, protest, and Indigenous bodies in the same sentence. “The technology of *Second Life* is idiosyncratic. There are so many things you can do, but there’s a lot of limitations too. You gotta just learn to love it.” ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-09-at-2.07.48-PM-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-09-at-2.23.05-PM-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-09-at-2.23.17-PM-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Screen-Shot-2021-03-09-at-2.22.42-PM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Documentation of "Calico and Camouflage" by Naor Toledano and Thierry Du Bois. ***Has your thinking about avatars’ political potential changed in the years you’ve worked in the digital space?*** I really felt like avatars could have a strong political power. I really felt they could be something. I’m saying that in the past tense. I don’t know if I feel that way right now. I think it’s possible again—I see avatars as an extension of ourselves into cyberspace—allows me to go places that my human body can’t go. Especially when I think about *Second Life*, it’s kind of amazing. But the jury is still out for me on how political an avatar can be. An avatar allows us to represent ourselves the way we want to be represented. So perhaps we might want a male body if we are born female. I know I’ve enjoyed walking around in a male body in *Second Life* at times. I’ve also enjoyed walking around with my little tutu—I can’t do that in the real world. There are things that we can say with our avatars. I realize that that’s what fashion does. I’m starting to understand that fashion is also a statement. I’m seeing the link between fashion and avatars and representing ourselves telling stories with our clothing or what we put on top of our bodies. I do see avatars as another layer of clothing if you will. It’s fashion; it’s representation. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/2012-07-16_1211_IslandComplete.jpg) Still from TimeTravellerTM, "the whole island when we had the Alcatraz set on it; you can see the storage locker facility that Hunter lives in underneath it." ***You run*** [***AbTeC***](http://abtec.tv/?ref=killscreen.com) ***with Jason Lewis. Can you tell us about the interventions that you’re hoping to make with these educational programs?*** As part of AbTeC, We run the [Skins](http://skins.abtec.org/?ref=killscreen.com) workshops on storytelling and experimental digital media, a series of workshops for Indigenous youth, many times taught by indigenous youth, in an Indigenously-determined curriculum. We’re trying to show young Indigenous people how they can take their stories, whether they be legends or myths or histories or things that are happening to them right now, or dreams of the future or prophecies… and tell those stories in their medium—either games, machinima apps, or whatever’s coming down the pipe. We want to see young people feeling empowered to use the tools, games, and technology. I don’t think everyone is a producer, or everyone is an artist, but I think it’s important to understand how to use the tools. Traditionally, many native people are not producers—they’re not in Silicon Valley, in the game industry, or in positions where they feel that they can shape the technology. So this is one of the things we wanted to bring to Indigenous kids. We want them to feel like their stories can be transmediated into these mediums. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Glitch-2-2013-01-07-2.jpg) Still from TimeTravellerTM. When we began, Jason and I faced a lot of resistance from the community. The first person we talked to had never even seen a video game. There was a feeling of a huge mistrust of digital and internet technology. Many people said, *No, we don’t want our stories there, because everyone can take or use them.* But other Indigenous people said, *Our kids are already playing video games. We need to meet them where they’re at; otherwise, the stories will be lost.* We want to encourage our students not necessarily to leave the reserve but to work, and they could bring wealth to the community. A handful of young, Indigenous people in our Skins program are thinking about starting a company. When your rent is covered, and you’re getting food, that’s when you can really work toward sovereignty and nation-building. --- ### Credits Interview conducted in February 2021\. Edited and condensed for clarity. ### Links [Skawennati](https://www.skawennati.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Skawennati on on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/skawennati/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) ### Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley creates game worlds from autonomous archives URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/danielle-brathwaite-shirley-creates-game-worlds-from-autonomous-archives/ Last updated: 2025-01-08T22:48:51.000Z What happens when games account for the players’ identities? [Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’](https://www.daniellebrathwaiteshirley.com/?ref=killscreen.com)s work does just this. Traversing game design, performance, and sound art, the London-born, Berlin-based artist constructs stratified game experiences that depend on the player’s privilege. Someone who identifies as Black and trans will have a distinct gameplay experience; someone who identifies as cis and white will have a different one. Being careful about access, Danielle tells us, helps keep the archive autonomous. Her work not only fills in the gaps and ruins in the current archive but builds an archive for the future—one that centers on the Black trans experience. Here, we speak with Danielle about the archive as an always-moving thing, why she’s attracted to low-fi aesthetics, and her new fascination with pirates. ### Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley creates game worlds from excessive and autonomous archives URL: https://www.killscreen.com/danielle-brathwaite-shirley/ Last updated: 2025-10-03T18:55:34.000Z *What happens when games account for the players’ identities?* [*Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’*](https://www.daniellebrathwaiteshirley.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*s work does just this. Traversing game design, performance, and sound art, the London-born, Berlin-based artist constructs stratified game experiences that depend on the player’s privilege. Someone who identifies as Black and trans will have a distinct gameplay experience; someone who identifies as cis and white will have a different one. Being careful about access, Danielle tells us, helps keep the archive autonomous. Her work not only fills in the gaps and ruins in the current archive but builds an archive for the future—one that centers on the Black trans experience.* *Here, we speak with Danielle about the archive as an always-moving thing, why she’s attracted to low-fi aesthetics, and her new fascination with pirates.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/DSC8885.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/DSC8914.jpg) **Do you remember your first creative impulse?** My first in to an art world was the burlesque and performing art scenes. I would go multiple times a week to see queer performers, drag queens, stage performance in small venues. I ended up meeting Travis Alabanza, who introduced me to the word trans. At that point, I was just living my life without having the words to describe what that is. This scene introduced me to different ranges of trans people; people who implemented the experience into song, people creating videos, people dancing, naked people bouncing. That’s when I tried to start making things that were to do with Black trans-ness. I tried to capture what was happening; the forward-thinking conversations in these spaces. I wanted to capture that moment where an environment was made for you. **You’ve cited Telltale’s *The Walking Dead* as an inspiration. What was it about this game that captured you?** It was the first time I encountered something that was as compelling as a TV series in the form of four entire games…where I wanted to watch the next episode instantly; where I was terrified for my characters; where when someone died; I was really upset. It showed me that the format of these video games can do more than just shoot people. *The Walking Dead* uses the simple mechanic of watching what’s happening and then choosing what will happen next. I’d never experienced something where your choices would determine what would happen; the mistakes you made stayed in view forever. The way the game makes those choices matter in a way that spans the generation made me reconsider how games challenge the viewer. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/the-trans-spas0001-1077_Moment.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-03-01-at-11.02.09-AM.jpg) Stills from "BlackTransArchive." **Your project** [***BlackTransArchive***](https://blacktransarchive.com/?ref=killscreen.com) **contains many layers of opacities. How did you go about constructing these different levels of access depending on the level of privilege of the player?** *BlackTransArchive* was my first interactive internet archive. It was a collaboration with a number of Black trans people in London. We also worked with a charity called METRO Transcend. These character choices came from these conversations. The landscapes were also designed by the stories told. The interactions in the game came from a role-play session in which we talked about how these characters would interact with each other in this archive. It was like, *OK, this person wants to burn cis-city, this person wants to talk about hormones, that kind of thing.* Originally, there wasn’t an idea to make a cis game and a Black trans game. When we talked about access, we wanted to ensure that everyone who’s Black and trans can visit this place. The problem with that is once it’s online, anyone can access it. We decided to make choices for each person’s identity so that what they see depends on their identity. That came from the group discussion. An archive is accessible to everyone. It was important to make sure that the person’s identity becomes part of the experience, rather than them thinking that it’s a chance to look through a trans person’s eyes. That wasn’t what we were trying to do. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/we-are-here-because-of-those-that-are-not_DanielleBrathwaiteShirley.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/the-trans-spas0001-1077_Moment.jpg) Stills from "BlackTransArchive." **What can the medium of games offer as an archive, or a counter archive, especially in relation to Black transness?** It comes down to me being tired of people consuming things very easily. We live in a world where the point is to make something consumable. I love access, but I don’t like things being passive. I wanted to make something that told you it wasn’t dependent on your choice. Whatever you chose determined what was shared. It wouldn’t start without you actively being involved—but also, the game could kick you out depending on the choice that you made, because it has a particular terms and conditions to it. Something about this autonomous archive felt safer to me. It’s exciting because it means we can start protecting certain things in the archive. It’s important to ensure that those within the archives are actually centered rather than whoever’s in charge of it. For example, Harvard University owns an archive of slave images; these images are horrible. A woman is [suing them](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/arts/slave-photos-harvard-lawsuit.html?ref=killscreen.com) because the people in some of these photos are her family. Harvard said, *Don’t worry, no one can see these pictures.* *We just have them and they are not accessible to anyone.* Archives should be accessible in some way for them to be seen. At the same time, if you’re archiving violent things, and you use them again in a violent way, then you have a system that perpetuates the violence that the archive itself is a record of…all while pretending to be neutral. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/DSC8857.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/DSC9007.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/DSC8926.jpg) **You used archival material and imagery as textures in the game world.** It’s not my secret, but you’d never know it. At a certain point, 3D modeling became my diary. I would put anything from my day into these virtual environments—whether it’s pictures, sound, tests, hormones—and try to fashion something from it as a way of learning. I was also trying to make something that was for me. That’s morphed into me making environments that feel distinctively Black and trans; from my perspective. This process of using photos I take to make textures has been part of my work for a long time. For instance, I make grass textures out of pictures of hair. As many layers that can be Black and trans as possible, that can represent the person and in a kind of archival sense, means that when I’m writing a story on top of that, there’s the foundation to hold it. I work in excess. That’s who I am. I don’t know if more is better, but I pare down if I’m trying to do something simple, it’s still gonna have 16 choices. The more I try and cram in, the more I will be able to talk about this person. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/I-CANT-REMEMBER-A-TIME-WHEN-I-DIDNT-NEED-YOU-Google-Chrome-11_11_2020-23_16_16-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/I-CANT-REMEMBER-A-TIME-WHEN-I-DIDNT-NEED-YOU-Google-Chrome-11_11_2020-23_15_44-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/I-CANT-REMEMBER-A-TIME-WHEN-I-DIDNT-NEED-YOU-Google-Chrome-11_11_2020-23_15_37-1-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/I-CANT-REMEMBER-A-TIME-WHEN-I-DIDNT-NEED-YOU-Google-Chrome-11_11_2020-23_17_24-scaled.jpg) Stills from "I Can't Remember a Time I Didn't Need You." **You’re drawn to working in a lo-fi poly graphics style. Is that something that you’re still interested in moving forward?** Like a sketch, you can capture something about someone, and also, you can redo it. The style allows you to make iterations. I like when the player uses their imagination to figure out exactly what’s going on. This low-poly aesthetic gives a sense of what’s happening, and then your brain can fill in the rest. For example, the fog in *Silent Hill* supposedly appears because there is evil in the town when the fog obscures your view—but actually, they couldn’t render the city as a whole, so they have to cover it. Things like that for me create an incredible atmosphere. I’ve made a whole game that came from that fog, *I Can’t Remember a Time I Didn’t Need you.* That fog is so thick, consuming. It obscures, but you constantly think as you go down that maybe there is something hidden there. When people were starting to make early graphics, it was just white men. They were exploring white men’s stuff. When I look at these things, I often see many missed opportunities to tell a narrative. I’m trying to think about what this thing could do in terms of a hard-hitting narrative and level structure. Many indie developers see that as an opportunity. I’m interested in that low-storage, easily-pass-around-able file that has longevity. I’m interested in how something that can say a lot about someone can be stored in the smallest bit of data. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/DSC8971.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/DSC8963.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/DSC8966.jpg) **The sonic layering in *BlackTransArchive* creates this almost out-of-body experience. Were you thinking about the human voice as a way of continuing an archive?** Sound sews everything together. My process orbits around making “Praise trans music.” I want to make a song that feels uplifting for trans people and makes me feel good while singing here. I think, what do I want to talk about? I’ll write down three things. I press record and I’ll sing for five minutes. Whatever comes out of my mouth, I’ll sing over that again. Then I’ll sing over that, then I’ll sing it again. I’ll edit that, and then I’ll re-sing again. It’s the process of continually packing the layers again. All I’m trying to do is capture what I’m trying to talk about. Maybe it’s the pain or feeling proud about being Black; maybe it’s thinking about privilege…I’m trying to capture the emotions around that moment. It’s important to create a lot of data. Let’s say if I sang for five hours, I know only 20 seconds of it is probably going to be usable. It’s like when you’re painting, you try to capture this moment, and then suddenly something in the painting will work, and then you recognize, OK, I’m taking that out and expanding it. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/DSC8954.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/DSC9074.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/DSC9093.jpg) I use a free version of the sound program FL Studio, which means that I cannot save anything. I have to make the track all in one go. That pressure is quite important to the work—you explore it, and when the program closes down on you, whatever is left is what you can use. Part of archiving is that you’re constantly losing things—trying to bring them back and replicate them. That frustration needs to be part of the process so that you can get closer to talking about these frustrations of the archive. Using the free version of this music-making program—that’s what the crux is, is that you have limited time to make them. You don’t have stability around how long you can edit it for, so you better get it finished. For perspective, I have 100,000 files on my desktop computer. That’s just the desktop! There’s just this constant outpouring of stuff. You may take a video 10 years ago, and it only becomes relevant now. I love to work in the 360—having enough things around you so that when the right time comes, you can take it and put it in your project. **You’re working on a game about piracy. What can you tell me about the process so far?** There was a particular kind of community agreement when you were on the ship. You agree to the community rules, and they’re different for every single ship depending on your capital. There were also Black ships—people trying to escape slavery or existing before slavery. Queer ships, too—all this kind of stuff that you don’t really get told about. When you think of pirates, you think Captain Hook. But actually, pirates were trying to escape what it was to live in that particular system. I’m interested in this particular history of piracy—what it meant for colonialism, what it meant for the British rule. What it would mean now to have a ship that could hold Black transness? What would you have below the cargo? What would you have on the deck? I’m currently creating a game where, based on the literal family ancestors who you have, you get to sail a particular ship. Your ancestry will determine if you’re allowed cargo or not; what kind of story will be told to you while you’re sailing on the ship? I’m really excited to tell the story of history through and on the sea. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/unnamed-e1614568314518.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/RETURN-IT.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/antiblacknessfake-infected-file-alert.jpg) Works in progress from Danielle. --- ### Credits Interview conducted in February 2021\. Edited and condensed for clarity. Photography by [Laura Vifer](https://www.lauravifer.com/?ref=killscreen.com). ### Links [Danielle’s website](https://www.daniellebrathwaiteshirley.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Danielle on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/ladydangfua/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) ### Making Magic: The Malaysian Artists Decolonizing Fantasy Gaming URL: https://www.killscreen.com/mun-kao-and-zedeck-siew/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T01:13:22.000Z *Thanks to their secret, shared obsession with video games in the Kuala Lumpur creative scene, artist Mun Kao and writer* [*Zedeck Siew*](https://zedecksiew.tumblr.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *now run the creative collective Centaur Games. Based between Malaysia’s capital and the seaside town of Port Dickson, the two work on projects that enhance the tabletop role-playing game experience.* *Their ongoing project,* [*A Thousand Thousand Islands*](https://athousandthousandislands.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*, is a collection of illustrated zines rooted in Southeast Asian folklore that can be incorporated into such strategy games. Fusing archive with imagination, the duo call their research practice a ‘mythic history’—the aim, they tell us, is to decenter Anglo-European settings as the center of fantasy.* *Mun Kao and Zedeck sat down with us to speak about their anticolonial research methods, their collaborative working process between art and writing (‘it’s like growing a tree,’ Zedeck says), and how games, at their core, are a conversation.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/P1080057-scaled.jpg) Mun Kao and Zedeck Siew, longtime friends and collaborators. **When did you first know that you wanted to do something creative with your life?** **Mun Kao**: I grew up in Singapore with very few friends, so I was bored all the time. I drew to fill the time. **Zedeck:** When I was in my twenties, we moved to Kuala Lumpur, the big city. There is an aspiration to make an important work—’the great Malaysian something.’ So, the creative journey for me is makin a return. I moved back to the home home I grew up in, in Port Dickson. It mirrors a relative return to what I grew up loving: this landscape, these trees, these animals. Port Dickson is the juxtaposition of a petroleum and beach town. The petroleum companies used to be owned by Dutch and US companies, Dutch Shell and Exxon-Mobil, and now they’ve been bought over by Chinese and Southeast Asian companies. There’s shift in where colonial power is located. I’m living in a space and trying to figure out what that space means. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/IMG_20210131_160554.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/IMG_20210131_161300.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/IMG_20210131_162550.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/IMG_20210131_161429.jpg) A local beach and mangrove site in Port Dickson, Malaysia. ***How did you meet and begin to collaborate?*** **Zedeck:** Instead of going to college, I started working. My first job was writing for, and then eventually editing, a local arts journal. Being in that scene was how I met Mun Kao. He was emerging as a visual artist in that scene… and he’s obviously very good. **Mun Kao:** I met Zedeck during a period when I was new to the Kuala Lumpur creative scene. The scene is small. What is even smaller is people who play games within that scene. **Zedeck:** It was a dirty secret that you carry within yourself as you’re amongst these champagne-sipping gallery-goers. **Mun Kao:** Gaming was this super smelly, nerdy, cyber café thing. It’s very different now. When we talked about games, we were so excited—the “smell” of playing games never really worn off. Because of genuine interest, but also because of guilt, we turned the games into work. **Zedeck:** We started making analog tabletop stuff, because neither of us had a digital coding background. We also loved grand strategy games. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Monkey-Queen.gif) Mun Kao's process of drawing a monkey queen charging into battle. ***How did A Thousand Thousand Islands come to be? What were the interventions you hoped to make in the way tabletop experiences are played?*** **Zedeck:** We started meeting other people who were into playing games in the Kuala Lumpur scene. One of our friends said, “Hey, why don’t we play *Dungeons & Dragons*?” **Mun Kao:** We played a lot of board games. I stopped drawing for a while. What *D&D* reignited was a love for fantasy—it got me back into visualizing and drawing. I was exploring moving the center of fantasy to Southeast Asia—away from Anglo-European setting. That took two years of drawing, exploring, researching, reading. I’d made a lot of zines before. I wanted to create a fictional world where the drawings that make sense to each other. I was thinking about a river port ruled by crocodiles. What’s also interesting is that Zedeck also was working independently on something similar. He was also exploring Southeast Asia fantasy, and he also had a crocodile adventure or setting. **Zedeck:** It was a mirror of our dark secret of, “We play games as well.” As Mun Kao was making these drawings and doing this research, I had been playing a lot of roleplaying games online, and was part of a community of roleplay game designers on Google+. There was a community that grew up around that. I was writing an adventure inspired by a local Sarawakian story about a man-eating crocodile. I had a draft of that already when Mun Kao came and showed me his drawings. I had to suddenly further expand my imagination! While the initial adventure was subsequently published separate from *ATTI*, I pushed further with Mun Kao, imagining a kingdom ruled by crocodiles. That became our first zine. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-25-at-9.24.47-AM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-25-at-9.24.34-AM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-25-at-9.24.21-AM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-25-at-9.25.02-AM_600x700_acf_cropped.png) Selections from "Drawings Part One," a zine forming part of A Thousand Thousand Islands. ***What drew you to the zine as a medium for game design?*** **Zedeck**: Writing and art is game design. The illustration of a particular character influences the imagination of a roleplaying game as much as the rules you write for it. The way the entries are written for encounters, for example: What does this single sentence make you imagine? How do I write this idea in a way that would get the hypothetical players imagining themselves in that situation? How do I write this sentence so that they would want to interact with this thing that’s going on? How do you make images that draw in the players to what you describe? Tabletop roleplaying games are a conversation; how you get people into the conversation is design. How you describe a particular place or how you’ve drawn a particular character, are equally important as the mechanical rules. “Tabletop roleplaying games are a conversation; how you get people into the conversation is design.” ***How are your respective research processes? How are you thinking about colonial histories, and rewriting colonial history when you’re imagining this world?*** **Zedeck:** On a conceptional level, Mun Kao was pretty clear about how the whole project would be very self-consciously set in the pre-colonial era. The way we addressed Mun Kao’s initial thing about shifting and reframing the center of fantasy, was “Let’s just exclude the conquistadors altogether.” We also excluded the nation-state that came after the conquistadors. The reason we started exploring these images was because imaginings, fantasy, and mythic history in Malaysia are all predicated on a very particular look. **Mun Kao:** They’re all centered along ethno-nationalist lines. **Zedeck**: Malaysia was colonized most heavily by the British. Whiteness, Christianity and all these kinds of assimilation behaviors, the nation-state of Malaysia started imagining these things as stuff we did ourselves, in our past — our previous polities as being these vast Malay, Islamic empires. Even the post-colonial nation-state was a strong reaction to and mirror of colonial power. Both of those things were things that we were trying to avoid. It was just is boring. We had to look for alternative, mythic imaginings. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/16487871_10155771832296679_2150885170398359395_o.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/IMG_20210217_143400-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/16463491_10155771602916679_2263875697882717090_o_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Research photos. Mun Kao and Siew embarked on research trips at museum libraries in Kuala Lumpur. Mastika is a new-defunct local magazine that blended myth and tabloids. Image sources: "Malay Poisons and Charm Cures" and "Malaysia: A Pictoral History." **Mun Kao:** It really doesn’t do justice to the history of this region. If you look at the history, race and nationality is definitely not how people interact with each other. In *A Thousand Thousand Islands*, we very consciously and actively tried to work against the lens of ethno-nationalism. Just to do, create, images that celebrate that fluidity of identity. The porousness. Make fantasy out of it; make it fun. Just try to capture that non-ethno-nationalist view of things. That’s the biggest thing I contend with, with regards to colonialism. I try and read and collect as much imagery as I can. Most of this imagery is all taken by Europeans. So you have to be careful with how you engage with it. This type of thing can be self-fulfilling—the colonialists show this, and then you believe it, and you perpetuate it, and then it becomes real. With *A Thousand Thousand Islands* specifically, I know it’s a fictional world, but also we really do not want to perpetuate anything of that sort. **Zedeck:** We’ve ding-donged about this a lot: How do you portray a mythic history when your only sources are “objective” facts—colonial-era records or epigraphies? We read and consumed as much as we could, but also read with suspicion and with a sense of slyness. The other alternative is that you become a post-colonial historian—that fetishization is also a trap. The conception of objective history is a modern notion. Epic poems in Sanskrit are not actually historical texts; not in the sense of the Western “What happened?”. That’s why the use of the word “myth-history” is very useful to us. It does give us a kind of leeway to imagine. A very big reference for me when I write stories about the past in this region, is a very, very, very colonial text called *Malay Magic*, an ethnographic work by Walter William Skeat. It’s the least woke colonial source. So it’s a collection of stories about magic, or magical practices and magical folkloric practices, in the Malay Peninsula. Then he’s a colonial administrator, so he rubs shoulders with the local princes of the various states, and the Malay gentry,. He says, “Oh, so-and-so says that such-and-such person said that this was the story.” You get the sense that he’s looking at it all like, “What are all these strange and weird things that these savages believe?” ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-25-at-9.43.28-AM_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-25-at-9.41.11-AM_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-25-at-9.42.57-AM_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-25-at-9.43.41-AM_600x700_acf_cropped.png) Details from the world of A Thousand Thousand Islands. According to Kao and Siew, it's "a porous, patchwork reality—where rice grows in blood-red paddies, where princesses romance their spears, where it is a bad idea to mispronounce a crocodile’s name." I like to believe that the people who told Skeat these stories know who their audience is. It’s a credulous white colonialist who wants to share stories of insane magic practices. So there is a sense of the puckish, “We’re going to feed you some bullshit story. Because it makes us look cool, and also it gets the interest. Because I know an uncle who is a real tiger…” I wanted to bring that playfulness to the project. That’s relatively easier for me, because I’m working in text, and there’s the shape of narrative. Whereas Mun Kao’s issues are more concrete. “How would this particular costume look?” Or, “How do I imagine the fantastical cape on this particular kind of costume?” ***What did your collaboration look like on a day-to-day level?*** **Mun Kao:** We have different modes of working. The most common one is I draw a bunch of images, write some notes to Zedeck, and he goes wild with it. Sometimes changing the style, sometimes not changing so much. That’s the general way we work. It’s a mix of stuff that you get from reading books, seeing images, and personal experience. **Zedeck:** There’s a process of composting. Mun Kao reads, hears, and experiences all these things. Out of that compost comes a batch of 20 to 30 images, which he then emails to me with his notes Then I bring my compost to it, what I’ve read, heard, experienced. So it’s very much like growing a tree. **Mun Kao:** Lately we’ve tried swapping the order around, too. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Screen-Shot-2021-02-25-at-10.09.20-AM.png) A pull-out map in one of the zines for A Thousand Thousand Islands. ***Can you walk through the ideal way for users or players to work with the zines that you’ve created, and use that in their roleplay experience?*** **Mun Kao**: The zines are quite text-light. The imagery is half of the work, really. The text is system-neutral, in the sense that there are no mechanics in it. Each zine is a description or an exploration of a particular geography or community. Sometimes they are literally islands, or just one village, or a forest. The frame of the project was “What is Southeast Asia like?” **Zedeck:** The region that we are working in has no center. **Mun Kao:** It’s a bunch of polities or communities trading. So what does this island have to have? What is it known for? Maybe it’s known for this particular kind of sea cucumber that, when you eat it, gives you a particular kind of magical power. That’s how we keep it really short, but really expansive. These books are mainly aimed at people who want to run games, and are looking for an interesting locale or scenario or place to put their players in. ***How does that compare to how people have actually implemented A Thousand Thousand Islands into their gameplay?*** **Zedeck:** I’ve seen play reports of people using the zines—they make me happy, because it’s a vindication that the zines have been used. I know people who have used them in traditional *Dungeons & Dragons* games where there’s lots of combat. There’s also people who have run it in storygames, which are games that are more about players coming together and workshopping a narrative. Imagine a bunch of screenwriters sitting down and talking about where the characters are going—that’s the game. Two of the zines that we published so far have just been purely images—collections of drawings that Mun Kao has made of people and places and things. There was someone who said that the Southeast Asian setting is sometimes difficult for people to grok. If this was a group playing in the West, for example, they say, “Oh, I don’t feel comfortable imagining that space.” But, so, this person said, “I just gave my players this zine of drawings, and that was the key that let them play.” You get a sense of the costuming or the ways the tools look. One of the drawing zines has a description of fire starting or paddy harvesting tools. Those concrete details about the world really help players into the imaginative space. It was a point of pride for me. **Mun Kao:** It’s surprising and humbling to see people do the work to incorporate our zines into their game. It’s not like you can say, “Okay. I didn’t do any prep. I’m going to put this zine down at the table, open it up, and I can run a game for my players immediately.” It’s not that kind of thing. What we wanted to do was create an experience or a collection of imagination that is fuel. It’s gratifying to see that it’s working the way we wanted it to work. The reviews say that the zine is that kind of powder-keg fuel—where it is a key to you imagining a world that you didn’t imagine before. --- ### Credits Interview conducted in February 2020\. Edited and condensed for clarity. ### Links [A Thousand Thousand Islands](https://athousandthousandislands.com/about/?ref=killscreen.com) [Support Centaur on Patreon](https://www.patreon.com/athousandthousandislands?ref=killscreen.com) ### Rachel Rossin: Entropy to Infinity URL: https://www.killscreen.com/rachel-rossin/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T01:12:43.000Z *How do we account for the tension between technology’s infinite, unrestricted promise and the impermanence of being human? Rachel Rossin interrogates this slippage. Floating between painting, VR worlds, holograms, and more, the Brooklyn-based artist carries with her the essence of what it means to be alive. Rossin’s work meditates on and pushes the boundaries of human perception, the tenderness, and the vulnerability of empirical experience. Here, she speaks with us on her childhood underwater, the illusory nature of immersive technology, and the need to return to entropy.* *Rachel’s new project, I’m my loving memory, is in Rhizome’s traveling show,* [*World on a Wire*](https://worldonawire.net/?ref=killscreen.com)*.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ADS08524.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ADS08454.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ADS08482-Edit.jpg) ***Was there something about growing up in Florida that drew you to virtual worlds?*** Many young people are attracted to technology in the first place because there’s usually something to escape from. My community and my home environment were both really intense environments. To cope with that, my young mind went towards spaces that felt safer. There was a very therapeutic necessity. Also, I grew up so close to the ocean and spent a lot of time underwater. It just felt so similar in a way. There’s this thing that was just out of reach beyond this surface. The surface tension of the water felt very similar to the surface tension of the virtual screen. When we first had dial-up internet, I moved into coding and doing small visual experiments online. That’s probably why it felt so native. My great-grandfather worked as a typewriter mechanic, and then that he was at the Burroughs Adding Machine company. He was a high school dropout— a mechanic when that turned into IBM. He was given a bunch of IBM computers that were then just left in our garage once he died. Those were things that I could tinker with—basically garbage. Especially in the 90s, people didn’t know what to do with something like that. That’s how I started building hardware. The first experiments were small drawings with the dot matrix printer. I was making shapes on the computer and then printing them out and making drawings. I was also breaking things, doing ASCII art, which I didn’t know at the time. Trying to open the operating system, then I’d have to figure out how to fix it, or I’d get in a lot of trouble. I was fascinated with the world that came with the Windows 95… those maze or pipe screensavers. I was trying to figure out how to make simulated environments. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ADS08554.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ADS08503.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ADS08510.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ADS08531.jpg) ***What was the BFA program like at Florida state? Were there particular professors or classes that helped shaped your practice?*** It’s a football school, so the teachers are doing their best—my Professor [Owen Mundy](https://owenmundy.com/site/information?ref=killscreen.com) showed me Ryan Trecartin’s and Jordan Wolfson’s work. I started to understand that there was a dialogue that was happening with artists that were alive. Before that, I thought that Leonardo da Vinci was the same as Bruce Nauman. For me, there was more access to spaces like DeviantArt or manga. Luckily, I was encouraged to do experiments, but the program was very separate in the practices. I was secretly making AR experiments with image-based recognition. I would show the painting an image, and it would recognize itself. Those were my first early hybrid works. **You cite Hannah Arendt and Robert Smithson as influences. What draws you to those thinkers?** I think a lot about Gretchen Bender’s and Susan Sontag’s writing. Robert Smithson’s ideas go beyond the novelty of the medium. That’s the essence of all writers that I’m attracted to working in the language of what it means to be human. I don’t work in the language of technology. When you think about it, technology is the promise of being able to live forever, ideas of utopia. Whereas being human is very much rooted in loss…which, in shorthand for Smithson, is entropy. It’s the tender, vulnerable, and fleshy experience is of being alive. I’m looking for something that’s essential to our lived experience—what it’s like to have a body, what it’s like to lose people that you love, what it’s like to be a part of the messiness and contradictions of that. It goes beyond the medium. That’s why those people are compasses. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2020-1-22_TheSkyisaGapImage04_RachelRossin.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2020-1-22_TheSkyisaGapImage17_RachelRossin.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2020-1-22_TheSkyisaGapImage32_RachelRossin.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2020-1-22_TheSkyisaGapImage61_RachelRossin.jpg) Stills from "The Sky Is a Gap." ***When you were starting out working with these ideas, were there biases in the technology that you had to get around?*** I look at where the most resistance is and try to press on that. I think about the piece *Man Mask*, which was this piece where I led a body awareness meditation from inside an avatar I hacked from *Call of Duty*. With Lauren Cornell, who curated that series, I was talking about this experience of pretending to be male because it was just easier to hide in plain sight instead of being harassed. Looking back on those experiences, I was thinking, where are the pressure points or the points of pain, where’s the knot in the muscle? With virtual reality, when I made *Ghost Hand*, I felt like there wasn’t enough. People were putting on these bubbles on their heads, and they weren’t able to express their embodiment—they’re on these rides. So to combat that, I was having the user scrape part of the piece away as they burrowed through it. With all technologies and media in general, the most interesting thing for the medium usually is the thing it’s most suited for. The question that I had was, why was I using virtual reality? If I was just using it as a novelty or trick, there was no point if I was just going to be making something that could be a film. They wanted 360 videos for the virtual reality piece because of the app’s constraints and the amount of money they had. They couldn’t really host interactive things. The reason a lot of new media work never touches people is that they get seduced by the novelty or the newness of something without expressing anything that comes from its core. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Rossin_IN6762_MirrorMilk_2015_60x72_3000px-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2020-6-30_ICameandWentasaGhostHandInstall2_RachelRossin-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Rossin_IN6708_SelfPortrait_2015_48x38_M-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Details of paintings, "Self Portrait" and "Mirror Milk" as part of Lossy. ***For projects where you have both a digital and a physical component, are there challenges in the translation that you come up against? Do you think about moving between these two spaces as translation?*** Form follows function. So much of the way that I’m working or making the reference images for the paintings or just any of that is in a virtual space. It’s the same way that you’d make a maquette. I’m using a lot of 3D software already. It’s quite easy for that to be the kombucha starter for what the other parts of the piece will be. It’s the most effective way to communicate on that level is to show the different facets of the practice. It’s pretty natural. For [*Stalking the Trace*](https://www.zabludowiczcollection.com/exhibitions/view/rachel-rossin-stalking-the-trace?ref=killscreen.com)*,* the presentation at the Zabludowicz Collection, I wanted the video piece on the outside and the structure of the installation to feel like the lobby or the waiting room or the opening to the VR work. That was a challenge because there’s no way to elegantly program interactive things in the physical space. To solve that, I used the zoetrope format, so that when you walked around physically in that area, there would be the illusion of a before or after image or walking through what felt like an animation device. It was an optical illusion—a sleight of the hand. That worked nicely for me because it’s talking about the body—the inherent frailty and how easy it is to fool ourselves into believing that all we need is an accelerometer in this virtual world. VR is very different from what it is to be in reality. We all know that because of how uncomfortable it is to have a headset on. That was a nice way of talking about the guts of the piece; the sleight-of-hand of what a lot of visual-based technologies are doing to us. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2020-6-30_ICameandWentasaGhostHandCycle2Image7_RachelRossin.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2020-6-29_ICameandWentasaGhostHandImage10_RachelRossin.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2019_StalkingtheTraceInstall3_RachelRossin-scaled.jpg) Above, stills from "I Came and Went As a Ghost Hand." Below, install of "Stalking the Trace." ***You spoke about control and freedom on your end for*** [***Stalking the Trace***](https://vimeo.com/394948496?ref=killscreen.com)***. Was that something you were thinking about for the participant too?*** The thing about these larger-than-life immersive installations is that there is a sensationalism built into it that lends itself to the user being overwhelmed. It’s the reason the video piece in *Stalking the Trace* is 15 minutes long. It’s the way that I’m controlling the user’s attention. There are a lot of these hotspots in the video. There’s a Baton that moves around the outside of the piece, which relates to the virtual reality piece. As the users move around, there are these after images that are happening every now and then, so there’s the element of surprise and seduction of what these big immersive installations bring. You see that in really high production commercial installations—so overwhelming the user or at first, and then in the alleyways, it’s quiet. That was the intention in the presentation of the work. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/me30-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) a page from Rachel's high school yearbook ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ADS08495_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Rachel demo-ing a new holographic piece in her Brooklyn studio. ***Is there a binary between observation and embodiment that you’re trying to collapse?*** When I’m starting paintings, I do an exercise called recursive live drawing. You sit with your body in virtual reality. If I’m stuck on a problem, what I’ll do is I try to draw or represent the body the way it, the way it feels instead of the way it looks. I can feel when I do a scan really fast. It’s like, For some reason, the backs of my lungs are more prominent than the rest of the body, so it’s like drawing. And how do I express that? This very internal space that’s really based on recursion or using the language of technology to understand something further. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ADS08446.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ADS08523.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/ADS08450.jpg) ***Your process involves the physical act of painting or the corporeal experience of existing in a virtual environment. Could you talk more about the body and corporeal movements as important to you?*** Time moves differently in the virtual world. I love programming, the puzzles in making something interactive. Most of the interactive pieces that I make always have the user or the viewer as the arbiter. So in [*The* ](https://www.altkino.com/writing/rachel-rossin-the-sky-is-a-gap?ref=killscreen.com)*Sky is a Gap*, the viewpoint and the physical position of the user drove the piece. It was tracking the viewer’s gaze and progress to move time forwards and backward, for instance. The viewer’s gaze acts as this entropy laser eating away parts of the piece. You would leave the piece with a different experience—there’s this element of the interactive work, this intrinsic human quality, of what it is to move through space. When it comes to the painting, it teeters into a seesaw where the work influences itself or each respective aspect. It literally becomes, what is painting? It’s marking my own time and my perspective. When you learn how to read a painting, you can see where the painter is standing. You can see the way that they’re moving through time, based on the style they have, but then it becomes very literally about embodiment. When I’m working in those spaces, the arbiter is myself instead of the viewer. The hologram combines become these annotations or windows in an even more literal way, like filters layered on top of the paintings. The holograms combine what’s happening in a lot of my interactive works as tone poems. That’s exactly what the works are about—the relationship between the perception of this fleshy, vulnerable thing, and then this idea of infinity, which is totally a farce. --- ### Credits Interview conducted in February 2020\. Edited and condensed for clarity. ### Links [Rachel’s website](http://rossin.co/?ref=killscreen.com) Follow Rachel on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/rachelrossin/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Rachel Rossin makes entropy from infinity URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/rachel-rossin-makes-entropy-from-infinity/ Last updated: 2025-01-08T22:42:09.000Z How do we account for the tension between technology’s infinite, unrestricted promise and the impermanence of being human? Rachel Rossin interrogates this slippage. Floating between painting, VR worlds, holograms, and more, the Brooklyn-based artist carries with her the essence of what it means to be alive. Rossin’s work meditates on and pushes the boundaries of human perception, the tenderness, and the vulnerability of empirical experience. Here, she speaks with us on her childhood underwater, the illusory nature of immersive technology, and the need to return to entropy. Rachel’s new project, I’m my loving memory, is in Rhizome’s traveling show, [World on a Wire](https://worldonawire.net/?ref=killscreen.com). ### Mario Mu: Transforming Political Reality into Playable Space URL: https://www.killscreen.com/mario-mu-transforming-political-reality-into-playable-space/ Last updated: 2024-12-20T22:07:42.000Z *Can games seep into the political, social, and cultural realms of life? Across projects that fuse game development, filmmaking within game engines, LARP (live-action role play), and more,* [*Mario Mu*](http://mariomu.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *interrogates this question. The Croatian-born artist now lives in Berlin, where he conducts research about games, labor, and memory and helps publish architecture books. After a career illustrating for commercial brands such as Doodle Jump and Gestalten, Mario continues his independent creative practice, with all projects he thinks of as ‘extended gaming platforms.’* *Here, we speak with Mario about studying under Hito Steyerl, cancel culture, and how Trump is a game-maker.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/DSC8237-scaled.jpg) ***What was your first creative impulse?*** I grew up with one foot in Croatia and the other in Bosnia. There is this small town close to Dubrovnik on the Adriatic Coast, which is on the border between Croatia and Bosnia, so I was every day, basically, crossing borders between these two states, which was in the ’90s, when I was a kid. The political situation, at that time, was influenced much by Yugoslav wars. There was a substantial cut between the heritage; between the knowledge from the past to the present. I had no idea about the past, but I had a lot of space to invent stuff. I had an urge to make narratives and worlds. ***You have three fine art degrees. What did you get out of these programs?*** I was fortunate to find a program in Berlin where I got into a class with Hito Steyerl, who was extremely supportive. There would be 200 people every Tuesday at the class meetings. It was a very, very dynamic environment with a lot of people talking with one another. When I studied a very classical painting approach, I worked with commercial video game companies, brands like Doodle Jump, SpongeBob, and Adventure Time. I would go to the university from 9:00 to 5:00 or 6:00\. Until midnight, I would work on these video game projects. I wanted to get in more of the liveliness from video games into my practice. Why did everything have to be so tense, so uptight? These two experiences, studying painting and supporting myself as an illustrator in the games industry, made me want to fuse both perspectives into one focal point. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/DSC8477-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/DSC8459-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/DSC8353-scaled.jpg) ***How does thinking in terms of ‘gamification’ inform your creative practice?*** Gamification is the idea of implementing game systems and game tools in non-gaming environments. How can game tools be incorporated in military practices, in education, in science? And in my recent research, how are labor conditions gamified with broader, globalized, neoliberal-driven economies? My first response was a project called *Walkthrough*. This was a continuation of my graduation piece, and a breakthrough for me. The basic idea was how can a group of people, how can they share one character? Usually, in video games, you have one event, and everybody has their avatar. How can a group of people share one character? What are the implications, what are the consequences of this when everybody shares the same history, responsibility, and one body? We worked with 20 people over a few months. I made a straightforward costume, which was malleable and could be tailored to anybody. They could put on it how they felt most comfortable. After using it for a while, and they would leave it, and then somebody else would take over. With every use, a specific history would be impregnated with certain movements and experiences. I documented these changes, which resulted in an animation. What they left is something that feels non-human… a transforming body with a shared history. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/DSC8374-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/DSC8308-scaled.jpg) ***You create projects that are considered LARP (Live Action Role Play). When you’re designing the structure for these, how much scriptedness versus randomness do you work with?*** *Prosthetic Animals* was the first project where I would go to people’s homes, and we would find stuff around their house, and make a costume out of it all. The idea was, how can you you think or believe with your environment? It was based on research about habitat. How does your environment influence your behavior, and how can you approach a context that defines you differently? My approach is similar to improvisational theater and role-playing games, but stripped of the fantasy. It’s more recontextualized. How can we use role-playing, for example, in dealing with trauma, in fighting oppressive systems? All of my projects inspired by LARP share one similarity—the idea that nobody knows what is happening. In all my projects, participants are constructing the whole story together by sharing their experiences with others. The idea is to allow each character to embody a fragment of a broader experience. It’s about designing a game, so the characters interact to fit the whole narrative and come to their conclusions. A fascinating aspect of LARP is giving people so much freedom that they start to think laterally, think out of the box. They speak for themselves. They have to present. They have to perform. Mostly, I make characters that all have some kind of a failure with them, so you have to have empathy towards that character, and then you are more relaxed, but this is the idea: Fragmented experiences, and having a game designed to have those experiences connect, intertwine and make the broader story. It’s always about building up a communal character. Either it is a narrative, an experience, a history, or some kind of theoretical framework for the future. In order to prevent escapism into fantasy worlds, we try to empower each other through the act of sharing imagination. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/P4180125.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_1389-2-normal-size-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/tumblr_p9huh21GIx1vv4jjdo1_1280.jpg) ***How did your research on cancel culture develop into your LARP-based project, Confessional Stage Diving?*** I printed out news articles about canceled people, and this was your character. Before the start of the LARP, everybody would get the article, and they would read it, and they’d have to build a character out of that article. You have to bring in a lot of your information because there is not much given—what’s your gender, where do you come from, and more. So you are building your character immediately. Before the workshop, people would communicate together, and slowly introduce themself to other people. Somebody else asks them questions and helps them to build their character. You have to invent quickly: “How old are you?” “I was born in the 19th century. I’m 200 years old.” Sometimes, you didn’t know completely what you did wrong, or why you were canceled. Not all of the characters were canceled. Some were those who were the ones doing the canceling, and so on. All the different characters are interconnected, so to understand more about yourself, you have to find one other person who would help you understand a bigger picture. When you feel you know everything about your character, you go onstage to confess that story. There’s a detective element to it. Once you know your story, it’s like you are charged to have this emancipatory moment onstage. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/CSD_018.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/CSD_023.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/CSD_020.jpg) ***When you’re executing a project or event like Confessional Stage Diving, do you have expectations for what’s to happen? Do participants defy your initial expectations?*** I was a part of the punk and hardcore scene when I was a teenager, so this is where my fascination with stage comes from. Of course, nobody was forced to stage dive. There is an essential element of consent that nobody gets hurt and that we do it as comfortably as possible. Once you’re onstage, you’re expressing your character. Here is your whole history, the entire sea of knowledge, which is forming, which is very, once when you have it, a figure, a form, elusive knowledge, understanding, you go out as a part of the bigger element, and jumping in as a way of sharing. This is what I was expecting or hoping—that people would take that into their body and run and jump into the crowd, and then the group gets you. Empathy is important in LARP. It is our way to get out of our own body and understand others. The human capacity to empathize with others helps us grow. LARP is this exchange between fragmented experiences and the more overall experience, which is sometimes also abstract. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/CSD_013.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/CSD_015.jpg) ***You think of game engines as an ecosystem, how all these moving parts are working together. How did you come to that kind of metaphor as a way to explore your practice?*** I use the idea of an extended gaming platform—a platform that uses elements of video, theater, choreography, drawing, sound. I’m interested in the idea of a human-built environment. How do people change their setting according to their own needs? This is also my interest in architecture comes from here. What is the infrastructure? What are the support systems for certain types of behavior? It’s not about just video games. It’s never about sitting, and playing, and getting into this interactive cybernetic feedback loop. It’s more about: Where do I sit? What is around me? Paying attention to your environment, in general, is just a good way to get out of your head. To think about ecosystems and the environment is always a good way to get out of our heads, our internal monologues, dialogues, and dramas. Things like theatre and LARP can expand the social capacity of mutual understanding beyond the system that narrows down the human life to a career-oriented experience. How can we find other ways to nurture certain social rituals, which are important for us to be healthy? One individual cannot be healthy if the ecosystem is not healthy. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/DSC8558-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/AWGIT_TRILOGY_STILLS_003-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/AWGIT_TRILOGY_STILLS_002-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/AWGIT_TRILOGY_STILLS_001.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/AWGIT_TRILOGY_STILLS_015.jpg) ***In societal dialogue, games and play are not taken super seriously. But artists like yourself are combating this and think political and social issues through game systems. Can you talk more about this intervention you’re hoping to make?*** I can give one example—the storming at the U.S. Capitol. Memes have circulated depicting the situation as bunch of LARPers storming this temple of democracy. The cosplay has become the method for the aestheticization of politics. It makes them believe that anything is possible if you put on a costume on yourself—you can even storm the Congress room. This is where games and politics can get in a powerful collision with responsibility. Just because those people wore costumes, are they willing to accept the consequences and take responsibility for their acts? What I see, for example, in American politics, is that people can do so much, but nobody takes responsibility for it. It’s about the limits of how far you can go in playing without the responsibility. For me, this is very important. The “bleed” is a term in LARP and game mechanics when an emotional experience from the game takes over your real-life social experience. There is a lot of this bleed now happening. Then this rage bleeds out through people who are, unfortunately, likely in a miserable living situation. This rage is getting more robust and irrational. What happened at the Capitol looked like some kind of a video game environment. To me, Trump is a game maker. How Trump plays is he improvises how far he can go. He constructed one game, which I think is going to damage a lot in the long-term. He made certain conditions of behavior that people embody or feel free to repeat. It will take us a lot, globally, to fix this and establish a healthier way of communicating. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/DSC8511-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/DSC8189-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/DSC8135-scaled.jpg) ***On the converse of that, what do you see as the potential of gamification?*** Games should not be just escapism. There is not enough conversation about games, so they’re are seen as for white, male, nerdy teenager—a nightmarish world where very low energies are exchanged. In reality, it’s completely different. The gaming industry is one of the biggest in the world. I’m sure that different experiences formed within gaming environments will also influence the broader social spectrum in the many years to come. I do hope that they will be different. I do hope that they’ll also get us to a healthier point than where we are now. We are now in a position where we are forced to imagine new worlds, ways of being, ways of interacting and addressing environmental issues. How can we also focus on games as something constructive, which can open possibilities to express experiences where we feel oppressed? How to find the platforms to communicate, elaborate, share experiences, and what to do with this planet. What can we do together to get this planet to a healthier and more sustainable point of being? --- ### Credits Interview conducted in January 2020\. Edited and condensed for clarity. Photography by [Laura Vifer.](https://www.lauravifer.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Links [Mario’s website](http://mariomu.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Mario on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/mariomu.o/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) ### Gareth Wrighton: Breaking Fashion's Virtual Reality URL: https://www.killscreen.com/gareth-wrighton-breaking-fashions-virtual-reality-2/ Last updated: 2024-12-20T22:17:00.000Z [](https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://killscreen.com/gareth-wrighton/)[](https://twitter.com/home?status=https://killscreen.com/gareth-wrighton/&ref=killscreen.com) *For Gareth Wrighton’s final project at renowned fashion school Central Saint Martins, those parading his garments weren’t statuesque models. They were zombies roaming around a derelict shopping center. While his peers crafted printed magazines or designed websites, Wrighton presented his designs through a post-apocalyptic, anti-capitalist computer game titled The Maul. Viewers traverse a decaying 3D environment built in Unity, interacting with Wrighton’s knitted garments as lo-fi, pixelated, digital objects. Since then, The Maul has manifested as a* [*tangible runway collection*](https://vimeo.com/393457661?ref=killscreen.com) *and will re-emerge later this year as an expanded online store.* *For the London-based designer, it is critical to think of garments both as objects and images. We sat down with Gareth to speak about what it means to make work with digital dirt and detritus, how glitches in game engines serve as design inspiration, and how fashion is inherently—and has always been—virtual.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-06-at-5.23.50-PM.jpg) ***You went to Central Saint Martins for Fashion Communication, and The Maul was your degree project there. Can you talk more about the origins of that work?*** I applied to Saint Martins in 2011\. I thought I wanted to do fashion design, but you try everything out when you get there. I realized how much I loved fashion photography, and there’s a great pathway within the Design degree called Communication. It’s everything except making clothes—the imagery, websites, styling. The people in my class are some of the most exciting young talents in fashion now. It was a proper, old-school fashion education. The outcome of the course is to make a magazine. It takes a whole year—you find your passion project. I got this itch to do a video game as a magazine. There were loads of impetuses to it, but the main one was this idea that printed magazines are bound by a spine; a cover. There’s a linearity to the way you go through it. I thought, *Oh, that’s so stale*. It’s the same with fashion film; there’s a final render or edit with a beginning, middle, end. So I thought, *Well, what if I built a 3D environment?* It’s up to the audience to explore it in their own way. I latched onto the idea of dead malls, which are dying because of online shopping. I thought it would be beautiful to recreate the architecture of those spaces as destroyed, decaying. What would it mean to build that meticulously in a game? To make something that’s falling apart and defunct, with the character you play running around it wearing clothes that I had made? ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-08-at-2.35.27-PM.jpg) The physical jumper rendered in "The Maul" (2016), ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-06-at-5.24.04-PM_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-06-at-5.23.52-PM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Stills from "The Maul," 2016. ***You’re also a self-taught computer programmer and video game designer. How did this DIY education shape the more rigid, formal education at CSM?*** I hated studying design at college because it focused on designing clothes I wouldn’t want to wear. I watched lots of knitting tutorials on YouTube. The clothes I make aren’t innovative or groundbreaking, but it’s what’s going on within the materiality, which is where my ‘journalism’ is. I’m making jumpers, and the power in that is that jumper is pixelated. I made *The Maul* on Unity, which I also learned through YouTube tutorials. I’m reluctant to call it a game … the plot is there is no plot—it’s this decaying monument. Anytime I had to do something new in the engine, I was YouTube-ing it. It was amazing, the YouTube Unity scene in 2016\. **The way you use decay and degradation as a motif throughout your work is interesting because digital has a connotation of being ‘perfect’ or technical; seamless or sterile.** I’ve been obsessing over what is the grunge equivalent to digital fashion. That’s what I really want to play with—not remaking grunge, but the ethos of grunge, the apathy, the angst, the lo-fi. What is digital dirt? That’s what *The Maul* is to me—it is falling apart at the edges, amateur. It reminds me of the way kids made album covers on a Xerox machine. Unity is free—it’s such an accessible tool! I couldn’t afford to fly a plane to an American shopping mall, so I had to make it digitally. That was the impetus behind making *the Maul* as a video game: using whatever’s around you, downloading free third-party assets. It’s the same as cut-and-paste collage. I was also obsessed with apocalyptic cinema—Michael Bay movies and narrative tropes in video games. It’s such a fun motif to play around within the fashion sphere, which is refined and crisp. That’s something I doubled down on when I started showing tangible fashion shows. How can I embrace these horrible, dark themes with a flippant attitude? ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-06-at-5.33.06-PM.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-06-at-5.32.37-PM.jpg) Environmental details from "The Maul" (2016). ***The Maul started as a video game. This past year, you re-fashioned it into a tangible fashion show on the runway called ‘A Day at the Maul.’ What was this translation process like from the game space into the real world?*** The live-action *Lion King* was in the cinema at the time \[laughs\], and I thought, *I need to remake one of my projects*. With the original iteration of *The Maul*, I spent 120 hours hand-knitting a jumper, but you could only interact with it through playing the game—so it was this degraded pixelated, blurry object. And I thought, I’ve done the animated one, let’s do the real thing. Let’s take advantage of the runway. That was *The Maul* live-action. **On the topic of remaking, your process often incorporates multiple rounds of interpretation; of translation across digital and physical mediums.** [**One jumper** ](https://www.instagram.com/p/B8pH9zygt4L/?utm%5Fsource=ig%5Fembed&utm%5Fcampaign=loading&hl=en)**is your interpretation of Jenna Marbles interpreting a Bob Ross painting—it’s similar to computer programming in how it’s iterative. Can you talk more about these layers of translation in your pieces?** Jenna Marbles is an iconic woman. She is the 2010s to me; the perfect reference of that time. It’s an intricate jumper—a virtual landscape, one that’s come from my head, and no landscape in particular. I was watching Jenna Marbles following a Bob Ross painting tutorial. Then people started uploading videos of themselves following Jenna Marbles following Bob Ross. It’s that shared thing on YouTube where it becomes a web, and things get so spread and disparate. I thought, *It’d be so bloody meta if I followed on my knitting machine, Jenna Marbles following Bob Ross.* It’s a blurring of the online and the offline, and I don’t always get away with that successfully. That’s one of those pieces where I thought, *Everything I want to say is in this piece*. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-1.24.31-PM.jpg) Gareth's jumper inspired by Jenna Marbles' interpretation of a Bob Ross painting, as posted on the artist's instagram ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/IMG_5972.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-08-at-10.29.05-AM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-08-at-10.28.54-AM-scaled.jpg) As shown on the Fashion East runway **It’s similar to the** [**t-shirt you’ve made that says “Lamps in Video Games Use Real Electricity,”**](https://www.gettyimages.co.nz/detail/news-photo/model-walks-the-runway-at-the-gareth-wrighton-show-during-news-photo/1206433537?ref=killscreen.com) **which draws attention to the relationship between online and offline, too.** I remember seeing [that meme](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/e2x6mo/lamps%5Fin%5Fvideogames%5Fuse%5Freal%5Felectricity/?ref=killscreen.com) and thinking, *I’m not into printing memes on clothes*. I see memes like it’s someone’s original work. The night before the show, I was fed up and thought, *let’s put that on a tee-shirt*. It was an important statement to put in front of a fashion crowd in particular. The people who come to my shows aren’t the people who know the video game memes. It makes me think of how I opened my second show with a knitted mocap suit. It’s one of my knit balaclavas, but it’s got these felt balls. The idea of someone mistaking a mocap suit for *a look* asks if digital fashion would replace the runway. I was onto something because fashion had to become digital for the last five months. To open a show with that suit and just say, *Y’all ain’t shit, this could change at any time*… and it did. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-08-at-10.29.26-AM-scaled.jpg) ***How do you generally go about your research process? How do you come across these precise historical moments and decide to create a look or line around them?*** That first show was Autumn/Winter 19, and it was the 50th anniversary of [Altamont](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont%5FFree%5FConcert?ref=killscreen.com)—the disaster festival that ended the swinging 60s. The impetus for that collection wasn’t videogame-y at all; it was thinking about the grander narrative of the failures of free love, environmental catastrophes, and the hypocrisy of Americana. What would that look like through my British eye? The initiative I was with, Fashion East, gives you three shows. So I thought, *Let’s do past, present, future*. For the second show, I read about [Jessi Slaughter,](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/jessi-slaughter-youtube-video-viral-troll-damien-leonhardt-2010-myspace-a6959436.html?ref=killscreen.com) which is more in line with contemporary ideas of virtuality and digitality. I was thinking about video game girls and the men who played with them behind the screen for that collection. For the final show, I thought, *we’re going to do the future, it should be a remake of the Maul*. So already, it’s this meta thing. In the West, the mall is seen as the end spot for the horror movie. It’s full of canned goods and ammunition (and that’s why it makes it such a great video game location!). It’s shelves of ammo, health packs, and medical kits. I was also thinking about the iconic zombie flicks of George. Those three shows are this little ‘American Trilogy,’ I call it. As I was making it, it became my own language, and those references manifested into a coherent idea. I’m being antagonistic by saying to the fashion crowd that these things mean something. It was a big commentary on contemporary Americana, but also when I’m showing a forest fire on the runway, it means something to the industry. It says that we’re using up the earth in a way we can’t keep up with. There are so many layers to it. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-08-at-2.36.45-PM.jpg) One of Gareth's knitted jumpers, posted to the artist's Instagram page. **Can you talk about how working in Unity has shaped your process? What are the greatest challenges in the engine?** I made headpieces out of Cheetos. When you’re making stuff with a video game engine, and you drag the wrong texture to the wrong object, you accidentally re-materialize the material. An armchair texture becomes a big Cheeto or something. I thought, *It’s that glitch in the matrix that tells you that something is wrong.* I make bonsai trees out of Cheetos, or a whole cardigan covered in guitar plectrums or jingle bells. It was this idea of these really straight-faced objects going down the runway in a corrupt way. Like, *this file’s incorrect.* There’s nothing more tasteful than black trousers and a cardigan with a little bow tie. But then the cardigan is encrusted in *kawaii*, girly hair clips. To me, the original material is lost in translation—that’s the phrase that I’ve landed on now. The second something goes viral on Twitter, the initial intention is out the window, people have already made up their mind about it. They know what they want to say about it to a fault. I hate that, but that’s the world—you put something in the framework of the runway, it takes on its different meaning. I was into the idea of showing on a runway because it frames the pieces in a certain way. Ultimately, I want to show clothes as a video game—that is the future of fashion communication—but I wanted to put it on the runway first to show just how much it doesn’t want to be there. I’m fighting back. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-08-at-10.34.04-AM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-08-at-10.33.48-AM-scaled.jpg) ***How does casting models for a tangible runway show compare to building an avatar or model online?*** I work with casting people who have good eyes—they can actually get people to arrive for the show on time, and that’s good enough for me \[laughs\]. Within that, a lot of the models in my shows are art and fashion students, just kids. My friends have told me that my models look like me, which is funny, but it is true. It’s almost that narcissism thing, of you projecting yourself on your model. The way that I send looks down the runway is how I dress anyway. The childhood game I grew up with was *The Sims 2*–it’s the perfect game to me. Casting \[in the real world\] feels like you’re playing *The Sims*—you’re playing dress-up, and you’re creating characters. Each runway look is a little story within it. The second show we had, the Sailor Moon look, is the classic trope of video games. The idea was combining these little virtual girls \[the garment\] and then the seedy boys \[the models\] playing with them. When I’m making a virtual model wearing a virtual garment, it’s like puppeteering. It’s the current huge thing happening within the fashion industry of talking about treating models with respect—asking for consent for them to wear certain looks. You know, *Can I fix your bra*? You don’t have that when you’re dealing with a virtual avatar model, which is weird. You lose touch with reality. I remember it falling into a dark place when I was making *The Maul*—it became that cliche of the artist with his doll’s house. It’s a pure manifestation of someone’s vision that’s not altered by the circumstance of things. When it’s me making a virtual environment, it’s a hundred percent my vision… sometimes I think no one man should have all that power \[laughs\]. It’s easy to get lost in it. Showing with real models brings you back down to earth. These people are bringing them themselves to your world, and I find it incredibly humbling. Also, you have to pay real models—so suddenly, you’re down on the ground when your free virtual avatar doesn’t take a day rate today. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-08-at-10.30.59-AM-scaled.jpg) Looks from Gareth's A/W Collection, as published on the artist's website. ***How do you see the relationship between making work digitally and with your hands?*** I’m incredibly tangible and hands-on. For all my digital work, I have to print out, cut up, and stick it in a book. If I can’t see it, if it’s not in my periphery—if it’s in a folder on a desktop—it doesn’t exist to me, it escapes me. I’m very much *notes, sketchbook*; hands-on. My desktop is the messiest thing, but I think that adds to my work. My work looks like the work of someone that has poor organizational skills \[laughs\]. It looks like all my open tabs on the browser— a clusterfuck of reference after reference—disparate ideas, no linearity at all, just like the web. I have massive respect for these designers that do a whole collection in one color or one fabric, and it’s a collection. That’s why I’m hesitant to call myself a designer. It’s not a collection. It’s this abundance—a thrift store—of objects. That’s the only way I can talk about contemporary issues because everything goes now. You can dress up as a goth one day, and then you dress up like a cyberpunk kid the next—there’s no one style anymore. That’s what my work is about. It’s a style-surfing of the 2010s. ***What happens to all the tangible garments that you make that are meant to just be shown online?*** They are all in a big wardrobe, and sometimes they get called in for photoshoots. I love it when celebrities wear them. It’s like pop art. Tim Walker just shot [Dua Lipa wearing my cap full of ice cream](https://www.wmagazine.com/story/dua-lipa-future-nostalgia-interview-music-issue-2020/?ref=killscreen.com). She looks like a video game avatar wearing it. ***Much of your work is viewed online through social media or videos. How do you think about your different audiences? How has the reception been on social media versus the fashion world?*** It’s so different. My tangible shows are part of Fashion East. That’s the show at London fashion week where they give kids a small budget, and you put on a show, and the world’s fashion press comes to it. These are people that go to 80 shows in a month. They see the same things—the same clothes walking down the runway, the same models. So I tried to use my shows to do none of that, like a *cut the crap* spectacle within those confines. We closed *A Day At The Maul* with a model covered in ketchup and mustard. It’s cheesy gory, but it’s also warpaint. But it doesn’t actually mean anything—it’s the model-as-hotdog as a thesis. So the fashion audience is going to love you for trying, and they’re going to tell you to get the fuck out of here and never show your face again. \[My work\] lends itself better to social media. That audience can’t get into the show because they don’t have the credentials, and not everyone can get to London. I’m terrible at social media. I like making physical works, I valued them way more than Instagram. I need to work on that because, for someone obsessed with digitality, I’m scared of it. Maybe it’s because I respect it so much. ***Even on platforms like Instagram or Twitter, which are meant to be neutral or non-hierarchical, there’s still algorithms or a grid, for example. Those are still structures you have to work around.*** All I want is to make these little video games, but it’s hard to share it with people. There is no Instagram for gaming. I end up sharing a video of a game, and I’m like, *I don’t want to do that because it’s now you’ve ruined it… now you’ve made it linear*. The whole point is that you’re bringing your audience in, and you’re making them complicit. They’re participating in it. Maybe the next generation of technology will make that possible. All I want is an Instagram for gaming where I can share these little interactive moments with an audience, and it’s not rendered into a file. I did this commission for this online store Browns in June, and I made a pixel art video called [After the Goldrush](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUwh-hv5aBk&ref=killscreen.com). But it’s a video, not a video game. My struggle with that was like, *I just want this to be a game.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-08-at-10.38.20-AM.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-08-at-10.38.49-AM.jpg) Stills from "After the Goldrush." ***You’re expanding The Maul into a more developed e-commerce platform for the web. Could you talk more about that?*** I’m excited to relaunch *the Maul—*to apply everything that I’ve learned in the last four years to it. It will exist within the browser—it’s vital that it’s no longer a downloadable object for the desktop. At the same time, I understand that technical limitations will inspire what makes the project good. Of course, so much of my audience interacts with my work through mobile. You click the link on Instagram, and it takes you to the mobile website, and that’s another limitation. You can’t have that video game experience on mobile Safari in that way. But I’ve got the content there, I’ve got a body of clothes that I want to share. The act of selling is also the piece. It’s not the clothes, it’s *The Maul*! It’s this cursed online shop; fashion’s worst nightmare, chaotic. A big inspiration point for the relaunch is that every online shop has these white backgrounds. It is the gallery wall of our time. How can I play with that image? How can I make my online shop this horrible space that’s half-flooded and with a sparking vending machine? I’m a fine artist more than anything. It takes talent to design clothes, you know—I knit and make offensive t-shirts \[laughs\]. I just respect designers too much to call myself a designer. I know what I want *the Maul* to be like, it’s making it happen is hard because I am so self-taught. I stop and think, *What if I studied video game design? What would I be doing? What if I studied knitwear—would I be making a better caliber of product?* But I realize every choice that I’ve made has added up into this body of work. ***There’s something exciting about being neither here nor there.*** My work is corrupted, it’s wrong, it doesn’t fit. It’s not compliant and refuses to participate in the bullshit. The more I add to it, the more it makes sense. At the same time, I should relish the fact that I actually don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I should lean into the fact that *The Maul* is this horrible video game, an online store that doesn’t run on any device and will blow up your computer. Once, I was showing *the Maul* at a university. I ran it on a Macbook Air, and it totally gave the computer asthma. It was running so hot! And then the whole presentation just shut down. I thought, *Maybe that’s the point…that’s just the most inept online store you could ever imagine.* “Once, I was showing *the Maul* at a university. I ran it on a Macbook Air, and it totally gave the computer asthma. It was running so hot! And then the whole presentation just shut down. I thought, maybe that’s the point.” ***Where do you see the fashion world headed in terms of virtuality or digitality?*** I’ve learned through these concrete runway shows that I’m obsessed with virtuality, but virtuality has nothing to do with digitality. The definition is in essence, but not in actuality. You can’t buy anything because the Maul was not open. It’s just an idea in a moment in time. Fashion is inherently virtual. On online stores, they’ll bulldog clip a dress tighter to the model, and then they forget to Photoshop it out. So the models are posing with these bulldog clips down their backs. The dress doesn’t fit that way, but they want you to think it fits that way. On my 3D models in *The Maul*, I’m still going to render virtual bulldog clips on them. It should be this perpetual banter between physical and digital. I like the idea of the CGI garment that doesn’t fit properly. *The Maul* should be the worst online shop every step of the way. It’s like buying a pair of stonewashed jeans with holes in them that are brand new, but they’re meant to look worn. The more you pull at the threads, the whole world of fashion unravels. It all comes back to this idea of virtuality. --- ### Credits Interview conducted in October 2020\. Edited and condensed for clarity. ### Links [Gareth’s website](https://www.garethwrighton.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Gareth on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/gareth%5Fwrighton/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) ### Salome Asega on cultivating the ecosystem of art and technology URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/salome-asega-on-cultivating-the-ecosystem-of-art-and-technology/ Last updated: 2025-01-08T22:40:01.000Z "Embodied” may be the best word to describe the projects of artist, researcher, and educator [Salome Asega](http://www.salome.zone/?ref=killscreen.com). She has created VR experiences that evoke the channeling of diasporic spirits, a Kinect lesson that reinstates a dance form’s history, and a roulette wheel that sends participants to lesser-known corners of a world-famous museum. Experiences that physically engage the body are clearly at the heart of the artist, researcher, and educator’s work. Trained in creative technology and social practice, Salome’s work also centers the communities she is part of. Based in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood, she’s a director at [POWRPLNT](https://www.powrplnt.org/?ref=killscreen.com), a digital art ‘collaboratory’ in neighboring Bushwick, where she also leads creative workshops. Salome told us about her hyper-real upbringing in Las Vegas, the trials of working within the uncharted territory of art and tech, and the power for participatory work to destabilize the long-held role of the artist. ### Colombian heritage shapes Leo Castañeda's gaming universes URL: https://www.killscreen.com/leo-castaneda/ Last updated: 2025-10-03T18:55:40.000Z *There is a standardized set of interactions in most first-person games: players walk around, jump, maybe they pick something up.* [*Leo Castañeda*](http://www.leonardocastaneda.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *is building a game that pushes past these norms; that challenges the crux of what it means to interact. In “Levels and Bosses,” a game first conceived of through a series of paintings, players will interact with their environment through a vast spectrum of actions. A player observing their environment for a long time might lead to camouflage; touching an object for a long time might lead to a violent action. “I’m thinking of the environment more of as ‘everything is part of an integrated ecosystem,’” the Miami-based artist says.* *We speak with Leo about the South American artistic landscape he grew up in, the feedback loop steering his practice between physical and virtual, and how concept art is an art form in itself, one that straddles the fine art and game world.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-29-at-9.59.43-AM.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-10.38.03-AM.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-12.45.14-PM-scaled.jpg) ***You grew up in Colombia and a multigenerational family of artists and architects. How did this upbringing push you into a creative practice?*** I grew up in Cali, Colombia, a city with a pretty small art world. The landscape around my city is very mountainous, and we had areas up the mountain with a lot of fog, liminal spaces where the ground and sky would meet. It was a lucky upbringing because I grew up around all these artists in their 60s and 70s. My parents met through architecture school, so I grew up around my parents’ architecture practices. But they both wanted to be artists. My dad’s favorite painter was [Roberto Matta](http://www.artnet.com/artists/roberto-matta/?ref=killscreen.com), a surrealist from Chile. My dad would always show me those paintings—these sci-fi space stations that were abstract. My maternal grandmother is a painter from the Brazilian Amazon and met my grandfather in Rio de Janeiro in architecture and art school. I grew up around my grandma’s painting studio. She does abstractions of the Amazon. I started drawing when I was two. I would tell my dad, “Draw Batman,” and he would draw Batman. And then I’d say, “Draw Batman again.” And he would draw Batman again. I would tell him, “Again, and again, and again.” Then I started trying to draw Batman, and I was frustrated because I couldn’t draw as well as my dad. So he helped me. That’s when I first did doing art-based experiments… repeating characters from the media with my parents. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-10.59.01-AM.jpg) Drawings from Leo's childhood ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Maria-Thereza-Negreiros-Grandma-Igapo-3-1979.png) "Igapo 3" (1979), a painting by Leo's grandmother, Maria Thereza Negreiros ***You attended the Cooper Union, an art school with a rigorous conceptual curriculum. How did the particularities of that education lead you down the path of working in game engines and art?*** I credit Cooper for spurring my interest in art and video games. It was both a product of the education at Cooper and a reaction against it. I was choosing between Cooper and Art Center in California—their program for entertainment design. In high school, I loved to draw spaceships and sci fi-characters. I felt technically confident in drawing from my imagination. I lacked more on the conceptual side, so I went to Cooper to become more well-rounded. If I wanted to one day, I could go back to concept art. Studying the framework of what art could do was pivotal, but Cooper’s conceptual foundation can sometimes be a little heavy. For some people, it can get you to the point of not liking to make art. You question every decision so much at that age, even though it’s an incredible learning experience. It happened to me. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-1.37.45-PM-1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Level-03-2009-1.jpg) Paintings from Leo's time at the Cooper Union. I started the video game painting series while on exchange in Barcelona. The curriculum there was super loose and only met once a month. It allowed me to decompress what I had learned at Cooper: creating these conceptual frameworks around every medium or idea. In Barcelona, I combined that with more intuition and brought back joy into making art. There, I thought that structure of old video games where you create worlds without justification—you’re like, Level One could be anything, Level two could be anything—could be an aesthetic itself. It’s a progression of one world to the next world to the next. I was already a painting major at Cooper. A couple of weeks before Barcelona, I did some stereotypical video game paintings. I used old-school video games with a colored-grid-type aesthetic and turned them into paintings. I then added speakers behind it to make sounds to guide the viewer through them. I did a couple of those, but they felt like dead ends. I was trying to find a space or structure that could lead to a sense of freedom. Before I got to Barcelona, I thought, *Okay, maybe the framework of these worlds was justification.* I could come up with a story over time, but I had to wander first. With the series in Barcelona, it felt like I was infusing that Cooper conceptual framework into a painting series to create a hybrid of what I would have been doing if I went to the Art Center, where I would’ve been studying entertainment design. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-10.58.30-AM-scaled.jpg) Leo working in his home ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-10.57.14-AM.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-10.58.44-AM.jpg) An arrangement of feedback-loop collages from the "Levels & Bosses" series, and home bookshelf featuring works of family and friends: Juli Castañeda (feeddock), Levy Castañeda, Hernando Tejada, Wei-Xiaoguang, Edny Jean-Joseph, Travis Iurato, and Juan Travieso. ***You describe your project “Levels and Bosses” as a feedback loop. It’s an ongoing work that oscillates between the physical world and the virtual game world. I’m interested in how you’re thinking about this circular relationship between the digital and the tangible. Do the paintings precede the game or vice versa?*** In the project’s early phase, before I ever started working in tech, it was more linear. It was adopting the process of concept art into a painting practice. How will level one look? I worked in many painting processes, mixed with art history, video game history, and cinema history—all of this into paintings of these future virtual worlds. The limitation was that I didn’t know how to use Unreal or Unity. It was a hypothetical—*like, Oh, one day “Levels and Bosses” could be a virtual space, but it’s just a painting for now*. I learned Unreal and 3D modeling on YouTube and other online resources, and the project has become more of a feedback loop. Sometimes I paint something that can turn into a virtual space or a texture. Other times, I’ll create the space inside the game engine or as a 3D model, then use it as a reference to make a painting. Currently, I consider myself to be in a position that I’m slightly confused (and excited) about painting because these realms prove painting as the catalyst for the virtual space. Then there’s the other realm, which is remaking a digital image through painting, but this tangibility almost enhances it. There’s a further step that I haven’t yet reached, which is this hybrid approach. Interestingly enough, I’ve met some concept artists that have gone through Art Center, and it seems like concept artists within the last few years have also ended up with a hybrid approach for these 3D models to help with lighting. Then they go back in and use different textures from different parts of the internet. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-10.35.32-AM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-10.57.28-AM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-10.57.39-AM-scaled.jpg) ***Now, you are building the game version of “Levels and Bosses” and have even formed a game studio to distribute it! What have been the most significant challenges in this process of translation?*** The game will be a surrealist, AAA, sci-fi, multidimensional mythology and world. The main challenge has been to assemble a small team—as of now, in game development, it’s only a programmer and myself ([Jaime Soto Kure](https://jsk.codes/?ref=killscreen.com) and previously [Gwen Lofman](https://lofman.io/?ref=killscreen.com) thanks to grants from Miami’s [Oolite Arts](https://oolitearts.org/ellies/?ref=killscreen.com) and [Locust Projects](http://www.wavemakergrants.org/?ref=killscreen.com). I don’t have a coding background, so thanks to Unreal Engine, I’ve learned how to do Blueprints, which is a visual scripting language. Without a programmer, it would have been a lot harder for me to do this. So it’s been rewarding and challenging to be like, *All right, now there are slightly fewer limitations, so how will I communicate with a programmer?* The difference between doing something by myself and having someone fully studied in computer science is so great. I want the game to be playable from a gamer’s perspective, not just be an ‘art world only’ experience. I want it to be something that can be on Steam, at the game store, or on PlayStation. It will have spectacular graphics infused with art history (and beyond western art history)—like a Trojan horse-type experience. My hope is for gamers to be like, “Ooh, the graphics are really good, let me try that.” And it ends up being more of a philosophical experience. I asked my grandma if I could do a whole level based on her Amazonian abstractions, and she agreed. So we started working on that a year ago. I went back to Colombia, and she taught me some painting techniques, and I brought my laptop with Unreal Engine and started looking at her paintings to create a space. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/01_Levels-and-Bosses-Level-One-visual-target-2018-LeoCastaneda-1-e1611208736539.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/06-Demo-changing-abilities-2021-LeoCastaneda-1.jpg) Process stills of "Levels and Bosses," the game. ***How do you think “Levels and Bosses” the game will push past ‘typical’ interactive experiences?*** It’s been rewarding but challenging to come up with gameplay mechanics beyond just moving around a space. I’ve been studying many game systems and trying to figure out what the core of interaction is. So do a lot of charts of different interactions and figuring out what the essence of interaction in this game will be. It is not just a binary interaction where in many games, you press a button, and you have an on-and-off version of a button. You hit something, or you jump. I want to work with spectrums of intensity. For example, one could touch or caress something, but then you end up inflicting violence when you intensify that touch. Another ability is observation, where you scan the environment, and when you intensely observe, you start camouflaging, so it’s almost intensifying observationally… like assimilation. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-10.35.51-AM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-10.38.15-AM.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-10.57.53-AM.jpg) ***You’ve previously spoken about colonialism inherent in game structures and the contemporary art world. What are the interventions you’re hoping to make with “Levels and Bosses?”*** To a certain extent, the distribution structure in gaming is more democratic than that in fine art. In art, you have objects that are bound by scarcity. Scarcity leads to high value, which then leads to the one percent only having access to ownership…ownership and economic support rely on this limited structure. Video games have that inherent infinite reproduction, and they don’t lose value by having thousands of copies out there. Infinite reproduction and has a lot more potential for impact. I was teaching at a public university in Miami, and many students didn’t have access to go to art museums and galleries. Maybe they lived in the suburbs, so video games and anime were key sources of artistic inspiration. To me, it’s rewarding to potentially tap into this distribution channel as a way for it not to be this elitist circle of ‘art for art’s sake.’ The colonization of capitalistic structures within game design are related to new interaction types. I want to re-think game design as a space for open-ended discovery of new interaction types through iteration on an intention. The intention being to reward or promote interactions, create sustainability and mutualism while having them within a spectrum that can also lead to destruction, domination, or extraction. I’m not creating a game design structure that completely denies the player of having these pervasive structures of capitalism and colonialism of taking things, where you go around a landscape, and you collect or mine. Then you claim, absorb, and defeat. Not necessarily taking that away, but making it more awkward. Maybe it’s not the most efficient way to move around the space, thus rewarding and promoting a more sustainable, mutualistic experience with the landscape, like other entities, bosses, etc. I want to think of spaces and interactions where the self, others, and landscape are interchangeable—where the player-character and world design principles resemble the plants, vehicles, animals, and technology; they’re all kind of mutable entities. Throughout the game, the landscape is often a sentient character, such as Level One where liquids, solids and gasses morph into each other depending on the intensity of player interaction**.** Many Indigenous mythologies throughout the Americas conceive of environments and objects as sentient, so they are revered as equally important to humans instead of playing fields for endless consumption and growth. New mythologies and worldbuilding in games can learn from this. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-10.59.29-AM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-11.01.50-AM-1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-11.01.33-AM.jpg) Leo with partner, writer, and "Levels & Bosses" producer Lauren Monzón playing with a custom VR garment in a Miami landscape ***You have an*** [***upcoming show***](http://www.tileblush.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ***at Tile Blush in Miami. You speak about distributing “Levels and Bosses” more traditionally as a game, so it’s notable that you’ll show the project in a gallery context here.*** Tile Bush approached me for my paintings first then asked to include a video of the game spaces along with them. Right now, I’m working on a demo for *Levels and Bosses*—a vertical slice of the game featuring a variety of worlds to apply for grants. The paintings, images, and videos in the upcoming show highlight the spectrum of interactions and environments in the Levels & Bosses universe. The paintings are a bit diagrammatic, but they also show images of these different demo training rooms. The traditional gallery framework is a good space to have a ‘preview type’ scenario—later in the year, I’ll put the interactive demo out online, so it’s free to access. Tile Blush also specializes in object design, and I’m excited about collaborating with them. With past wearable and interactive VR sculptures, my sister who studied fashion design has helped me actualize many of the sculptures’ fabric forms. I’m good at Legos, but with real materials, for some reason, I’m pretty clumsy. Since Tile Blush has its fabrication shop, it will be cool to see what new objects will come to be—like high-end design meets gamer gear. Also, using symbols and structures from within the video game to influence these objects. As much as I’m interested in the endless distribution of video games, I am fascinated by this hybrid approach of using art institutions or even tech conferences as spaces to do installations. I’m interested in using this installation as a space to combine tech-booth aesthetics and sculptures into one and create a hybrid of sculptural controllers, sculptural seats, and even a sculptural game-playing environment. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tile-Blush-Show-2021-Painting-Demos-Patterned-Room-with-Entities__-1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Tile-Blush-show-2021-Painting-Demos-Scan-Space-Third-Person.jpg) Painting demos for Leo's show at Tile Bush: "Scan Space (Third Person)" (above) and "Patterned Room with Entities" (below). ***You teach game design at the high school level. How has your teaching practice shaped your creative process? Do you see these ideas you speak of about the power of games reflected in the work that your students are making?*** I see that as a feedback loop, too. The open-ended narrative structure of games has influenced how I teach the classes and what I’ve learned from teaching. Instead of having an innate aesthetic preference, having an open structure helps me convey that their ideas are all valid. Then, building to create more connections or figuring out what turns something into art is such a subjective spectrum. That’s been key: thinking about the meaning of game structures and creating more complex things that are not just surface-level. I tried to have open-ended assignments where students can work with 3D modeling or creation, have drawing elements, or rethink how objects are textured. So, it’s not just texturing something to look real, but using the texturing as a conceptual layer potentially. Overall, I want it to be a space to have fun and create out of joy. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-10.38.27-AM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-10.37.49-AM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2021-01-21-at-10.35.12-AM-scaled.jpg) ***What do you see as the political power of games?*** It can be both a critique and an imagining of an alternate future. Game interfaces are arbitrary, often just a collection of barcodes makes the difference between a video game and a scanning device at the supermarket. To an extent, games are like a bunch of switches. So the conceptual structure, visual expression, and interaction range of what those switches become can be a critique or a way of creating a new world. You can choose to have a colonial interaction model embedded into a game, or you can also explore possibilities of interdependent play. Growing up in the political and social contexts of both Colombia and the US I’ve also been thinking about how the inventory of games can have economic implications. For *Levels and Bosses*, a scanning system assimilates with the landscape, but I’ve had the thought of, Can I scan infinite sets of landscapes and have infinite storage of these pictures, or is there a limit? If one has an infinite ability to collect items, that means something. All those decisions create value structures that can form the basis of a world—from being a hunter-gatherer, nomadic society to an endless consumer, hyper-mansion-type society, and myriad resource management possibilities we’re still learning to imagine. I’m sure gameplay will be more and more influenced by artificial intelligence….worlds where you have AI also creating parts of interaction systems, or part of the worlds themselves. Games simulate political and economic values, especially revealing how we relate within the worlds that we design. And they can be iterated and re-iterated forever. --- ### Credits Edited for length and clarity. Interview conducted in January 2021\. Photography by [Vanessa Diaz](https://www.vanessadiaz.co/?ref=killscreen.com). ### Links [Leo’s website](http://www.leonardocastaneda.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Leo on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/leocastaneda%5F%5F/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) ### Gayatri Kodikal excavates the ruins of history, time, and play URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/gayatri-kodikal-excavates-the-ruins-of-history-time-and-play/ Last updated: 2025-01-08T22:43:35.000Z On a walk around Old Goa, artist [Gayatri Kodikal](https://gayatrikodikal.com/?ref=killscreen.com) chanced upon an archaeological dig in progress. Her curiosity swelling, she jumped over the fence to see what was on the other side: a mysterious severed hand thought to belong to an ancient Georgian queen. This object spearheaded a multi-year, multi-pronged project spanning research, storytelling, forensics, and game-making. The Travelling Hand, inspired by this archaeological mystery, takes players on a labyrinthine journey through time, space, and civilization, to unveil the story behind this ancient artifact. Part of [an ongoing project](https://tthgame.tumblr.com/?ref=killscreen.com), a meditation on the methodology of game-making in critical practice, The Travelling Hand offers a reminder to the struggle of holding onto heritage, identity, and ethnicity. Gayatri walked us through her [immersive installation at TENT Rotterdam](https://www.tentrotterdam.nl/en/tentoonstelling/the-travelling-hand/?ref=killscreen.com)—the latest iteration of The Travelling Hand—which is on view until February 17th, 2021\. Made up of a constellation of stories about religion, colonial/imperial power, archaeology, geopolitics, marginal histories, and resistance, the game board is set for three players. Each play is unique and lasts one hour, and there are multiple storylines to explore at the same time. Here, Gayatri speaks with us about the simultaneous specificity and freedom that comes with working in games, disrupting western notions of time and progression, and how the concept of shapeshifting guides her work. ### Yasmin Elayat believes art drives innovation URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/yasmin-elayat-believes-art-drives-innovation/ Last updated: 2025-01-08T22:46:32.000Z [Yasmin Elayat](http://elayat.com/?ref=killscreen.com) is a self-proclaimed ‘hybrid’—she’s a new-media documentarian, a creative technologist, a collaborative storyteller, and a spatial designer. She co-created [*#18DaysinEgypt*](http://beta.18daysinegypt.com/?ref=killscreen.com), a collaborative documentary centered on the Egyptian revolution; co-directed an interactive documentary set within the New York City subway system, [*Blackout*](http://elayat.com/gallery/blackout/?ref=killscreen.com)*,* and [*Zero Days*](http://elayat.com/gallery/zero-days-vr/?ref=killscreen.com), a VR film about cyber warfare that won an Emmy for Original Approach in Documentary. Along with James George and Alexander Porter, Yasmin is also the Co-Founder of [Scatter](https://www.scatter.nyc/?ref=killscreen.com), a New York-based entertainment studio that creates tools and collaborates with artists to ‘volumetric filmmaking:’ storytelling through immersive technologies. Scatter’s [Depthkit](https://www.depthkit.tv/?ref=killscreen.com) allows its users to create accessible storytelling experiences through 3D capture. Here, Yasmin tells us about how working in a museum space led her to spatial and volumetric filmmaking, demystifying the role of creative technologist, and what it’s like to run a tech company fueled by creativity—one that continually redefines itself alongside its community. ### Gayatri Kodikal: Excavating the ruins of history, time, and play URL: https://www.killscreen.com/gayatri-kodikal/ Last updated: 2025-01-08T22:43:55.000Z [](https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://killscreen.com/gayatri-kodikal/)[](https://twitter.com/home?status=https://killscreen.com/gayatri-kodikal/&ref=killscreen.com) *On a walk around Old Goa, artist* [*Gayatri Kodikal*](https://gayatrikodikal.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *chanced upon an archaeological dig in progress. Her curiosity swelling, she jumped over the fence to see what was on the other side: a mysterious severed hand thought to belong to an ancient Georgian queen. This object spearheaded a multi-year, multi-pronged project spanning research, storytelling, forensics, and game-making. The Travelling Hand, inspired by this archaeological mystery, takes players on a labyrinthine journey through time, space, and civilization, to unveil the story behind this ancient artifact. Part of* [*an ongoing project*](https://tthgame.tumblr.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*, a meditation on the methodology of game-making in critical practice, The Travelling Hand offers a reminder to the struggle of holding onto heritage, identity, and ethnicity.* *Gayatri walked us through her* [*immersive installation at TENT Rotterdam*](https://www.tentrotterdam.nl/en/tentoonstelling/the-travelling-hand/?ref=killscreen.com)*—the latest iteration of The Travelling Hand—which is on view until February 17th, 2021\. Made up of a constellation of stories about religion, colonial/imperial power, archaeology, geopolitics, marginal histories, and resistance, the game board is set for three players. Each play is unique and lasts one hour, and there are multiple storylines to explore at the same time.* *Here, Gayatri speaks with us about the simultaneous specificity and freedom that comes with working in games, disrupting western notions of time and progression, and how the concept of shapeshifting guides her work.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Gayatri-TENT-Mark-Bolk-15-of-20.jpg) ## **A HISTORY OF HIERARCHIES** ***Tell me about your upbringing and the first time you thought you might want to be an artist.*** I was born and brought up in South India, next to a big city. It was like living in the wilderness, so I have more exciting stories about things like catching snakes \[laughs\]. Near the house—a half-hour walk, or running through a couple of people’s fields—there was a nice place with rocks. I would go there with friends to stargaze. I didn’t have the opportunity to use the internet until very late and even games until very late. The first time was probably when I was just passing out of a high school, 15 or 16. Back in India, I was always trying to surround myself with creative people—theater actors, writers, and poets. They were so animated in the way they would talk about their work. Because my parents are doctors, I had to look for people I could connect with, and I was interested in this world where imagination comes alive. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Gayatri-TENT-Mark-Bolk-1-of-20.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-21-at-3.28.04-PM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Gayatri-TENT-Mark-Bolk-2-of-20.jpg) The Travelling Hand installed at TENT Rotterdam, in which players "enter the Time Temple beaded with film molecules, that spiral across different times knotting together multiple narrative threads." ***You have degrees in psychology and film production, and a Master’s from the Dutch Art Institute. How have your academic interests have influenced the work you engage in?*** Psychology was quite some time ago, but it has influenced how I negotiate social situations that I encountered during my creative process and film production. I had a real problem with the power dynamics when you’re doing a film—what exists between camera and director, and director and crew. I wanted to always do away with hierarchy—everybody works on the film together or a small team. I got into experimental filmmaking because of that. Quite naturally, I got into being an artist by making games. ***We’ve talked to creators who use game-making as a part of their creative practice. Some grew up playing video games, then found their discipline coming out of a love of it. Some people became interested later in life. How did you find your way to games as a way to express yourself?*** A story started haunting and following me—I became obsessed with it. I realized that it was just not one story—it exploded into many, many stories. I felt like games somehow embraced that form like no other—you know, rather than compacting a story into a linear film form. So I started looking at how games can help me share the same experience of investigating multiple stories. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Gayatri-TENT-Mark-Bolk-11-of-20.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Gayatri-TENT-Mark-Bolk-8-of-20.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-21-at-3.27.48-PM-scaled.jpg) ## **INFINITE NARRATIVES** ***There are multiple ways that you can approach games as a player. You have agency to explore, which is very different from many other art forms where there’s a one-way relationship. The Traveling Hand sounds like something that you began thinking about in one way, and then moves towards games as a more final and complete way to express an idea. Could you tell me about the origin story for The Traveling Hand and how games became part of that particular piece?*** I was working on an experimental documentary in Goa about many villagers playing a game or ritual with a semi-divine being. While working on and researching that particular game festival or ritual, I came across these huge ruins that I wanted to shoot a film about. They’re majestic—huge, beautiful ruins. The whole roof had collapsed to the ground. One story of this semi-divine being goes through Goa, through these Portuguese ruins, and into the sky. The ruins were closed to the public, but I jumped over the fence and saw an excavation in process. The archeologists were quite friendly, and they shared with me what they were working on: a displaced hand of a queen from 17th century Georgia, landing in Goa through some obscure macabre event. This image started haunting me, and I wanted to research more on that. The archaeologists must have thought I was a student of archeology or something \[laughs\]. I stayed in touch with them—in fact, the case hadn’t yet closed. They were still trying to prove whether it was this Queen’s hand. The archaeologists were actually not looking for this hand. They were doing a clinical survey architectural survey of these particular ruins. They were from the biggest church built in Portuguese Goa at that time. The biggest church of the Portuguese Empire in the East. In a way, I was doing a parallel investigation, following a lead I had of a Georgian filmmaker who came to Goa. I went looking for his footage, then I would come back to the archaeologists, and we would share updates with each other. I started thinking of a video game… naturally \[laughs\]. I realized that the game, the world, and the story was huge. It kept growing over the years. I thought it would just \[stay in\] the 17th century…but then we brought in Soviet Georgia in the 80s, then Persia, then Portugal. I thought, *Okay, the story world is growing really huge, and I won’t be able to make the video game I want to make.* So I pivoted to a hybrid table-top game, with my own console. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ASI-excavation_Gayatri-Kodikal.jpg) Documentation of the archaeological DNA analysis at CCMB Hyderabad, 2018 ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ASI-Archive1-scaled-e1608537816282.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Men_playing_Backgammon_in_georgia_Gayatri_Kodikal--scaled.jpg) Photograph of backgammon players in Georgia from a research field trip in 2010. ## **UNSTABLE INTERACTION** ***What is the player experience like for The Traveling Hand?*** I have my own lexicon for the [board game](https://vimeo.com/260591086?ref=killscreen.com). \[Players\] explore this mangrove game world, which is itself modular, so it can be any shape. You plot the game world from the start, and you have to excavate for resources, which I have called Time, Memory, and Stone. You have to resurrect these ruins, which are small ‘pop-up’ ruins modeled from actual ruins in Old Goa. That’s when you find a film molecule: a small segment of the film inside these glass enclosures. Film molecules can only be detected by this console. The console then opens up like a puzzle, which you have to solve using knobs—like the kind you have for electronic pedals. I wanted to make the interactivity unstable…since the movements you make with these knobs are very precise, almost surgical. They change the way you’re breathing, the way you’re interacting with this console, as well. This oscilloscope-like puzzle allows you to unlock or unfold a film molecule, and you are witnessed to some archival footage, images, and history. Then you have to choose your own investigative path from there: Are you more interested in the secret fresco, or are you more interested in the person who actually found the letter, which is the first \[piece of\] evidence? Eventually, players understand that they have to play against the board to complete the investigation successfully. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Gayatri-TENT-Mark-Bolk-3-of-20.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-21-at-3.27.12-PM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Gayatri-TENT-Mark-Bolk-4-of-20.jpg) ***Where do you sit between fiction and pure documentary or history?*** With this kind of historical fiction, I try to keep the actual pieces of evidence true to the case, which is not yet solved in reality. You make your own hypothesis at the end. It is the queen’s hand or not, or is it still traveling somewhere? These in-between places where you don’t have any documentation are where you’re trying to figure out how things connect. When I am thinking of historical fiction, I tend to move more towards a magical-realist or a science-fiction-y space. I was excited when I found out about the Soviet part of the story—for me, that was like, *Oh, I can start looking at some Soviet sci-fi aesthetics*. Magic aspects come in quite smoothly here and there, but I try to make the actual evidence quite true to what happened. The story itself is quite unbelievable. ***What were some of the tools you went down to create this particular experience? I’d love to hear a bit more about how you went from the initial concept to the final installation in Rotterdam.*** The main set of game testing actually happened with the hybrid board game, which was much earlier in 2018\. That took quite a bit of game testing—discarding ideas and inventing new ones. The installation was more about translating the essence of this hybrid board game into a full-scale room or installation, which was quite a difficult task. My main aim was to stay true to what I had already done in the hybrid board game. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Gameboard_map_Process.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/SAM_8286-scaled.jpg) The gameboard floor map of the Time Temple for The Travelling Hand installation, TENT Rotterdam, 2020 ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/SAM_8379-scaled.jpg) The Travelling Hand hybrid board game at Gallery Guild, Mumbai, 2018\. Photos by Sameer Tawde. ## **SMOOTHING OUT THE FRICTION** ***When games are in an installation context, there’s an acceptable amount of user friction in the commercial games world—if they don’t understand something, you try to smooth those out. It’s not necessarily the same in your context, where you want players to not know everything or figure things out independently. How did you find the balance between wanting it to be a “smooth” experience for people who play at one level, but also not wanting to feel constrained by making it too easy or accessible?*** That is a hard negotiation. This particular installation is at TENT, which is an art space. The audience that comes to an art space is not exactly ready to invest in that kind of energy and time. So you have to warn them that it takes an hour to play. *The Travelling Hand* is not really an interactive artwork—it’s a game. You have to invest time in understanding the rules of how to play. You must also understand and give time to play it out and complete it. That’s not something in many art institutions yet. Even for me, it’s new to work in an art space with a game. I had to tell \[TENT\] that *The Travelling Hand* cannot be something that too easily becomes an interactive art piece. Games require some thinking and decoding, and that’s where the fun is. Also, there has to be a game master or a host, which is quite important to the experience. Very few people are comfortable with entering, reading the rules, and figuring out how to play. It’s always nice when there’s somebody there to guide you in the beginning. So that’s one thing that the institution had to invest in. “I’ve encountered games in my life through mythology. There’s a lot of creation, myths, and mythology, and stories where people are playing games, and when you enter the game world through these narratives. I really enjoy that part of the game process of the game thinking.” ## **PEN-AND-PAPER** ***You started with pen-and-paper prototyping. From a design standpoint, was that something you taught yourself, or were you engaged with other game designers during that process?*** I’m comfortable with writing and making diagrams. When I started working on the prototype, I roped in [Dhruv \[Jani, of Studio Oleomingus\]](https://killscreen.com/studio-oleomingus/?ref=killscreen.com), and I was like, *Hey, you have to help me think through these things. I cannot do this on my own* \[laughs\]*.* It is hard because you don’t know how everybody will think when you’re working out game mechanics, and you can’t always play with yourself. It’s always nice to have somebody else also play. Dhruv and I were exploring this new form of tabletop game design together. Then he went back to video game design with his work, and I continued working with this game. ***It is rare to have someone use game design as part of their practice without going to the game design school. Dhruv’s’ background was in exhibition. He’s not trained as a game designer, although there are some adjacencies there.*** That’s true. I met him just after he wanted to drop out of exhibition design. And he was just starting with the story of [*Somewhere*](https://www.pcgamer.com/the-story-of-somewhere-a-game-that-might-not-exist/?ref=killscreen.com)*. Y*ou can say we parallelly grew together and exchanged a lot of notes with each other. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Gayatri-TENT-Mark-Bolk-17-of-20.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Gayatri-TENT-Mark-Bolk-19-of-20.jpg) ***You describe your project*** [***Extinction Narratives***](https://gayatrikodikal.com/Extinction-Narratives-I-Tigress-Kali-Score?ref=killscreen.com)***, as a “game-world reading.” Can you describe that particular work, and what a game-world reading looked like in a performance context.*** I’m interested in shapeshifting. It’s how I embody myself in performances: as a shapeshifting creature. In *Extinction* *Narratives*, which was performed last year in Berlin at [The Silent Green](https://www.silent-green.net/?ref=killscreen.com), I worked with this story about a forest conservationist who loses the signal of a GPS location of a tigress. She has to go on foot or with this old technology of a Very High Frequency Telemetry. You send out a frequency to try and catch signals from the collar attached to the animal. The conservationist waits to hear the ineffable beep. In the story, the tigress actually disappears into the ultrasonic and spawns many cubs. I was working with the idea of where the tigress wins and escapes being captured by surveillance. It was a way of trying to figure out whose world is getting extinct—and how can we as humans gracefully go into extinction? I narrated this through oral storytelling. I played with a lot of sound waves in the performance. That’s how I’ve built up this idea of game-world reading, where I’m trying to engage with the world itself through performance. There was a bit of improvisation, but I stuck to a script. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Extinction_Narratives.jpg) Gayatri performing "Extinction Narratives" in Berlin, 2019. ## **THE PRODUCTIVITY OF PLAY** ***The words ‘game’ and ‘video game’ carry baggage with them. I’m curious about your deliberate use of these words—at the end of the day, the terms are quite fluid.*** I’ve encountered games in my life through mythology. There’s a lot of creation myths and stories in existing games, and players enter the game world through these narratives. I really enjoy that part of the process, which is quite complex. I realized there are so many things that happen when you make a game. I’m not interested in, *Oh yes, I finished this one product, and that’s the game.* It’s all these other things that feed into it, too. ***In the United States, there is a mechanical view of leisure. Everything has to be useful and productive, and that often works against games as a medium and play as an activity, because it’s viewed as being unproductive. Is there something about the environment in which you grew up that made it easier for you to step into game spaces?*** My cultural context definitely has influenced how I’ve thought about and encountered games. While working on a documentary commissioned about the pottery tradition in the Kutch desert region of India, I took some footage from the Indus Valley civilization, which is also in the desert. There, I encountered game pieces in the display of a museum, and I was intrigued by how those pieces could be played. I was surprised that even then, people were thinking about games! I’m driven to look at games in a very open-minded way—how games are thought of and how stories weave into them. With video games, too—why are we addicted to certain kinds of games and not others? It’s still a very young space. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/harrapaboardgame-e1608537873765.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/harrapadice-e1608537314841.jpg) The ancient dice and game pieces, circa 25th century BC, from Mohenjo-daro, similar to pieces in Dholavira, in India's Kutch Salt Desert. Photos from ASI Archive, New Delhi. ***How has this point of view influenced your way of thinking about game systems as it relates to time?*** In Buddhism and Hinduism, we have something called karma. This whole idea is almost an unconscious rulebook we follow, a giant game. If you don’t play in a certain way, then you have certain choices when you die. You could become an elephant or an ant. This choice is dependent on your karma. While I was teaching myself how to make games, I realized that if I had to tell this long story, it would have to be a long game. That means that the mechanics have to be complex and interconnected. For *The* *Travelling Hand,* I was thrown into the deep end, thanks to this story. How can games change the way we look at time? Games can expand time to many, many hours. They make time richer. I have a very idealistic expectation from games, especially because we are used to thinking of history in a very linear way. There’s this thing called chronopolitics: chronology has a certain politics embedded into it. Consequently, we think of futurity in a way where progress is only marked by certain people or ideas. I want games to critique how we look at history or chronology. Can it disrupt this chronopolitics, and completely change the way we think of future worlds? ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Gayatri-TENT-Mark-Bolk-13-of-20.jpg) --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted by Jamin Warren in December 2020. ### Links [Gayatri’s website](https://gayatrikodikal.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [*The Travelling Hand at TENT Rotterdam*](https://www.tentrotterdam.nl/en/tentoonstelling/the-travelling-hand/?ref=killscreen.com) [Mark Bolk](https://www.markbolkphoto.nl/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Zahra Rasool: Immersive stories through justice and journalism URL: https://www.killscreen.com/zahra-rasool/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T01:39:28.000Z *With a background in documentary filmmaking and investigative journalism, Zahra Rasool heads*[ *AJ Contrast*](https://ajcontrast.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*, Al Jazeera’s woman-led, Emmy-nominated immersive storytelling studio. The studio’s projects center urgent stories about communities of color—their latest work, Still Here, is a multimedia documentary exploring the relationship between gentrification and the prison system through the story of Jasmine, a character returning home to Harlem after 15 years behind bars. Incorporating both AR and VR components—and magical and verité aesthetics—Still Here premiered at Sundance 2020 to widespread acclaim.* *Zahra told us about how she came to the world of immersive journalism, the process of co-creating the narrative for Still Here with the Women’s Prison Association of New York, and why the world of immersive storytelling needs to empower diverse voices.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-10.55.20-AM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ADS08390-Edit-scaled.jpg) Zahra photographed outside her Harlem home. ## **WANDERING BEGINNINGS** ***Can you tell us about your childhood and when you knew you wanted to be a storyteller and artist?*** I spent the first 18 years of my life in Mumbai. I grew up in a very politically active family, so we discussed the news, what was happening internationally all the time. My father made my brother and I read the newspaper every morning, and we had to discuss what we read during dinnertime. That was a daily practice in our house. My parents are artists. My mom’s a painter specializing in contemporary Arabic calligraphy art. My father designs furniture. Art was embedded in our DNA. With us discussing what we read in the newspaper, I was very aware at a young age that as I was growing up, there were wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That was what we watched on *CNN International* or *BBC*. I noticed that many people on screen looked like me and shared a similar culture and religion, but what I saw on TV did not match my personal experience. A lot of the narrative on the news was how Muslim women are oppressed; how Islam is a backward religion, but I grew up with strong women around me. My dad always told me, “If you want to change the narrative, you’ve got to be part of the industry doing that.” At a young age, I knew I wanted to be a storyteller because I wanted to reclaim the narrative of my people and my culture. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-10.58.22-AM-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ADS08401-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/YouTube-Panel_1-scaled.jpg) Below, Zahra presents Still Here at Sundance. ***How has this itinerant history and trajectory shaped your path as a storyteller?*** I grew up Muslim, a minority religion in Mumbai. I had not traveled to the US before coming to the University of Missouri, which I picked because it was the best journalism school. My perception of the US was based on what I’d seen on screens. I thought, *Missouri will be exactly like NYC.* Lo and behold, that wasn’t the case. Coming at a young age and having no family here made studying in the Midwest incredibly tough. My university was predominantly white, and there were very few Muslims studying there. People’s interactions with me were based on what they’d seen in the news about Muslim people, about women of color. I was confronted with my identity in a way that I never had been before. In India, everybody looks like me. We have the same skin tone, different variations. I’m not saying there’s no racism there—it just manifests in a less visible way here. I double-majored in broadcast journalism and international studies. Part of my course was anchoring at the local TV station, and it was painful. Everybody around you is white, and your accent is very different from their accent. It’s uncomfortable when you are expected to conform and change your image and voice. Being confronted for the first time that I looked and dressed differently from everybody around me was a powerful experience—by no means was it easy. I was depressed in the first few months—all I wanted to do was go back home. But studying in Columbia—this small college town in the Midwest, surrounded by cornfields—I experienced a part of the US that many living in the cities don’t experience. I did my undergrad and my master’s there, so I spent a significant amount of time in Columbia. I did a semester in London and summer school in South Korea. I traveled the world through my education, deployments as a journalist, and with my mother when she traveled for her art shows. This all informed who I am as a person. I’ve experienced many different points of view. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-10.51.01-AM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/BTS-for-the-VR-Shoot-in-Harlem-with-director-of-360-videos-Naima-Ramos-Chapman-and-DOP-Alan-Bucaria-scaled.jpg) Behind-the-scenes of the "Still Here" VR Shoot in Harlem with director of 360 videos Naima Ramos-Chapman and Director of Photography, Alan Bucaria. ## **INSPIRED BY INVESTIGATIVE STORYTELLING** ***Gistory was your first project that included a web-based interactive component. What compelled you to start this project?*** My education trajectory does not conform to what a traditional Indian person’s education career would be. I did a semester of my master’s and realized I wanted to get real-world experience. So I started interning at *Al Jazeera*, which, like many other news channels at that time, was very slow to adopt social platforms for storytelling. I was frustrated by that. I told my professor that I’d consider returning if I could work on a startup as my master’s project. I recruited two computer science students and a friend who was a designer. We started building [Gistory](https://twitter.com/GetTheGistory?ref=killscreen.com), like “gist of the story.” The idea was to give the gist of breaking news stories worldwide, with people living in those parts of the world telling them. There was a 300-word summary of an earthquake in Delhi but written by somebody who’s from there. We’d verify that news through local sources, correct it for tone and voice, and then put the story brief on an interactive map of the world. You could visualize where the event happened. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/AboutPage_ScreenByScreen-05.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Gistory-Screengrab-e1609386563512.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/AboutPage_ScreenByScreen-08.png) Gistory brings you the gist of news around the world through complete, concise and contextual story briefs. ***What did some of your initial encounters with immersive storytelling look like at*** [***RYOT***](https://www.ryot.org/?ref=killscreen.com)***?*** After sleeping on friends’ couches and living the startup life \[laughs\], I got an offer from RYOT to come on board as a managing director. They were working in emerging technologies for storytelling, a space I hadn’t worked in before. I didn’t know anything about VR and AR at that time. It felt like a good challenge. RYOT had three parts: branded content, films, and editorial. I managed the editorial. Three-sixty videos were starting to get popular, and my job was to determine the type of projects we would take on. Four months in, *The Huffington Post* acquired RYOT. So my job description changed quite a bit, from managing the editorial for RYOT completely to now working part of *The Huffington Post* team. I was still creating editorial content in 360°, but now within a much larger corporation. One of the most memorable projects was a 360° video from a Trump rally. I went and interviewed people at a Trump rally. Videos like that have been done a lot—at that time, it was novel. We also went to Puerto Rico to report on the economic crisis there. Before joining RYOT, I didn’t know how to use a VR camera or edit VR footage. I learned on the job. RYOT very good at using the technology, but that journalistic perspective was what I was tasked with bringing into the storytelling. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Director-Zahra-Rasool-with-DOP-Alan-Bucaria-in-Zaatari-Refugee-Camp-in-Jordan.-1-scaled.jpg) Zahra with Director of Photography Alan Bucaria at the Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan. ## **CREATING CONTRAST** ***At what stage was AJ Contrast in when you joined?*** While I was at RYOT, I got increasingly frustrated by what I was seeing. Many stories that used the medium were told about communities of color or the developing world. It felt voyeuristic, like, *Let’s take you inside a refugee camp in Jordan, so you can experience what it’s like to live there*. I noticed many narratives crafted in this medium were through a white lens and created specifically for a white audience. I’ve seen that in the industry time and again, whether in investigative journalism or fiction movies. I was frustrated that the same issues in other parts of the media industry were being replicated in the immersive space. Now even more severely in this medium because of its immersiveness. When *Al Jazeera Digital* wanted to create an immersive storytelling studio, they had heard about the work I was doing and asked if I would be interested in imagining what that would look like. I presented what I would like to do if I came on board—and how I would like to do it. I wanted to craft an editorial that collaborated with the people whose stories we were telling—to me, that was what was missing in the work done at other places. It was an editorial approach that told the stories of communities hit hardest by inequality, but through collaborating with them to tell their stories. I wanted to hire my entire team, and they agreed. I joined *Al Jazeera Digital* to create AJ Contrast. It stems from the feeling I had growing up that people who share my background were not represented, and wanting to change that. I strive my best to make sure somebody else doesn’t feel that same way. I try to rectify that in every single project that I do. That’s the essence of who I am. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/AJ-Contrast-Senior-Producer-Viktorija-Mickute-on-set-at-the-Rohingya-refugee-camp-in-Bangladesh.--scaled.jpg) AJ Contrast Senior Producer Viktorija Mickute on set at the Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/AJ-Contrast-Senior-Producer-Viktorija-Mickute-on-set-in-Malaysia.-scaled.jpg) Viktorija on set in Malaysia ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-12.11.54-PM-scaled.jpg) Zahra on set in South Sudan ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/On-set-in-South-Sudan-with-director-Zahra-Rasool-and-DOP-Alan-Bucaria.-scaled.jpg) AJ Contrast editor Maria Fernanda Lauret in Morocco. ***What do you think an immersive documentary can do for telling co-collaborated stories with communities hit hardest by inequality, compared to a traditional documentary?*** I enjoy working in the immersive medium, but I always caution that immersive technology is just a storytelling tool. Some stories are more powerful when told in those mediums. At the end of the day, the focus is always the story that I’m trying to tell. I just happen to do it in VR or AR. It is incredibly important to ensure that a diverse set of people is using these immersive technologies. What happened initially in the industry is that, because the technologies are expensive and required a certain skillset, it was only used by a tiny group of people with a particular worldview. So you got those stories being told. With every AJ Contrast project, we make sure that those tools are being employed by people who would not have had the opportunity to use them. We need those stories to be told. Just because certain communities are hit hard by a certain lack of access to resources doesn’t mean that they should not know that these tools exist to tell the stories. It’s such a great way to inspire younger people; to get them excited. For AJ Contrast, we’ve done two documentaries in Yemen. We worked with local Yemeni journalists who we trained on how to use 360° cameras. I understand telling a story in 360° is not their priority, but now they have a new tool to use if they need it. They can continue to train other younger people in the country and increase their knowledge and skill base. That’s how you pass storytelling on from generation to generation, through the narratives and tools we have in our tool kit. I shouldn’t be the only one who knows how to use them. Others should, especially those less privileged than I am. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Akram-15-years-old_360-still-from-doc.jpg) Still from "Yemen's Skies of Terror" of Akram, 15 years old ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Jamalida-Begum-washing-her-clothes-at-the-Kutapalong-refugee-camp-in-Bangladesh_360-still-from-the-doc-scaled.jpg) Still from "I Am Rohingya" of Jamalida Begum washing her clothes at the Kutapalong refugee camp in Bangladesh. ***It sounds like the educational process is so seamlessly integrated into the storytelling and editorial process.*** We spend more time at AJ Contrast doing that than creating stories. To me, it’s more important. ***In general, how does a project come to fruition at AJ Contrast?*** Sometimes, freelancers pitch us, and we decide which story is good for our audience. For some documentaries done in collaboration with other institutions or organizations, it’s a conversation. They come to us and say, “We are working on refugee rights in Jordan or deforestation in Malaysia. What story can we tell?” We then come up with the angle that would be best suited for us—our stories are in the social justice and human rights space. That would be a collaborative discussion regarding their needs and what we can say from a journalistic perspective. The two Yemen documentaries, the initial Rohingya documentary, and the Uyhigur documentaries are the urgent issues of our time and need to be told. Those are funded by AJ Contrast’s editorial budget. Those are decisions that we make ourselves. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Ahmad-Al-Gohbary-Yemeni-journalist-filming-in-Sanaa-Yemen.jpg) Behind-the-scenes still from "Yemen's Skies of Terror" of Yemeni journalist Ahmad Al Gohbary filming in Sanaa, Yemen. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/DOP-Alan-Bucaria-and-Jamalida-Begum-inside-the-Kutapalong-refugee-camp_BTS-scaled.jpg) Behind-the-scenes still from "I Am Rohingya" of Alan Bucaria and Jamalida Begum inside the Kutapalong refugee camp. ## **THE IMMERSIVE WORLD OF STILL HERE** *Still Here* was special because—we wanted to do a story that was important to young people in the United States. *Al Jazeera* has a huge audience in the US, but it also has a massive international audience. For many of the stories we try to tell, we ask how it is interesting for an American audience and relevant to our global audience? We thought of gentrification because it’s an issue that many young people worldwide can relate to. As we dug deeper into the issue of gentrification in the American context, we realized that gentrification is so closely tied to incarceration. We couldn’t just touch upon incarceration—it’s a huge topic in itself. So we decided to tell the story about the intertwining of gentrification and incarceration. That was the genesis for *Still Here*. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/FINAL-HORIZONTAL_Still-Here-Poster.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-11.22.42-AM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-11.22.42-AM_600x700_acf_cropped-1.jpg) Naima Ramos-Chapman, writer and director of 360 videos and Carvell Wallace, writer of the AR story watching "Still Here." ***What led you to incorporate both VR and AR components into Still Here?*** We decided to tell the story of incarceration through interactive VR. We were focusing on the process of re-entry. It felt apt to use VR because when somebody re-enters, the idea they are free is not entirely true. Even though they’re coming out of prison, their lives are still so affected by the systems in place, the lack of resources they have, and the other obstacles that don’t allow them to fully integrate into society. There’s this illusion of freedom. They’re free, but they’re not really free. That’s what VR is, too. When you put somebody in a headset, you think you can go anywhere; you can move anywhere you want. But we—the developers, the producers, the directors—decided how much freedom we’re giving you. We set those bounds. So the metaphor of restriction within the VR headset and what it is like to re-enter fits well in that medium. We included augmented reality because we wanted users to feel like they were on a street in Harlem while listening to the audio story; to see the changes happening around them. The AR filter afforded that. The photographs, graphics, animations, and journalism included in those filters give an in-depth, historical perspective of gentrification that complements the fictional narrative. It was a very conscious decision to use VR and AR. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/StillHere_BTS_01-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/StillHere_BTS_02-scaled.jpg) Behind-the-scenes stills of "Still Here." ***At what point did the collaboration with the Women’s Prison Association come into the process?*** The collaboration with the WPA was there from the start, and it is why *Still Here* is what it is. I cannot emphasize enough that over 50 people worked on the project. Yes, I am one of the project’s co-creators—Sarah Springer is the other co-creator—but we also had so many producers and creatives—like Naima Ramos-Chapman, who wrote and directed the 360° videos, and Carvell Wallace, who wrote the script for the audio story. Once we decided on the format, we decided to tell the story through a composite character—one that would be a collection of the experiences of different women—because it will afford us a lot more creativity to tell the story. That’s where we developed a partnership with the Women’s Prison Association. That was the first thing we did. We met with the women. My first workshop with them taught them about VR—showing them how videos are made, what post-production looks like. Trying on headsets, too. With time, we storyboarded the script with them and included their feedback in the drafts. Some were present on set when we were filming the 360° videos. They were part of the post-production process, as well, and two of them were present for the premiere at Sundance. These are women who’ve been part of the project from start to end, and they’re still part of my life. They’ve been incredible. My first workshop with them taught them about VR—showing them how videos are made, what post-production looks like. Trying on headsets, too. With time, we slowly brought in the scripts, which they helped write. Some were present on the sets when we were filming the 360° videos. They were part of the post-production process, as well, and present at Sundance. These are women who’ve been part of the project from start to end, and they’re still part of my life. They’ve been incredible. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/WhatsApp-Image-2019-01-30-at-6.06.47-PM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpeg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/IMG_6721-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/WhatsApp-Image-2019-01-30-at-6.06.47-PM-1_600x700_acf_cropped.jpeg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/WhatsApp-Image-2019-01-30-at-6.06.47-PM-2_600x700_acf_cropped-1.jpeg) Zahra leading virtual reality workshops with students at New York City's Women's Prison Association (WPA) in January 2019. ## **SPECULATIVE STORIES** ***I’m curious to know about the relationship between documentary and fiction in Still Here. There are many marvelous supernatural, or speculative, or fictional elements in the VR clips.*** This project pushed the boundaries of the journalism we do at *Al Jazeera*. If anybody knows *Al Jazeera,* they are a serious, hard-hitting news organization. They haven’t done anything like that before. But while we are the innovation studio, and we can take those liberties, we were intentional in our innovation. For me, visual treatment and how something looks are as important as the narrative that we are crafting. We wanted it to be a composite character to include the stories of several women, not just one woman’s experience. If we did a composite character, it had to be scripted. We also wanted to show the anxieties, fears, and obstacles without being too on-the-nose. My biggest concern was, “Am I creating this project for the non-Black community?” If there is a Black person who’s had this experience or had a close one go through this experience, will this project be relevant to them? Will they be interested in watching it? If it’s too on-the-nose, they’ll be like, “Why am I watching this? This is my experience.” That’s happened to me so many times. There have been projects that I have seen—for example, about the difficulty of entering the US every time you go through immigration—that I’ve watched. I’d think, *Wait, why am I watching this again? This is my experience every time I’m at JFK*. So I wanted it to also be meaningful to people who’ve had the experience, for them to appreciate the different aspects of it—whether the narrative, the storytelling, the direction. If we did a straight documentary, it would feel less relevant to people who had that experience. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/BTS-for-the-VR-Shoot-in-Harlem-with-DOP-Alan-Bucaria-scaled.jpg) Behind-the-scenes of the VR Shoot for "Still Here" in Harlem with DP Alan Bucaria. “I remember the feeling of not being represented or represented inaccurately growing up. I strive my best to make sure somebody else doesn’t feel that same way. I try to rectify that in every single project that I do. That’s the essence of who I am.” ***How did you balance incorporating the narrative aspects—both fictional and investigative—with the XR technologies in Still Here?*** I wanted people to write the story who had the relevant experience. Even if they didn’t know how to use the technologies, we would bridge that gap. Naima had only worked in VR once, and Carvell had never worked in the AR medium, so we spent a lot of time educating both of them about the technologies. Naima’s personal story was that her father served 15 years incarcerated. She came with that breadth of knowledge and personal connection to the story. It was collaborative. Along with Naima, Sarah and I decided what the story arc should be since we were crafting the interactivity. So much of the process was, “This doesn’t work for the interactivity. Let’s go back and write something else.” We decided what story makes sense—of course, using the women’s experiences that we had interviewed so robustly before Naima even took a stab at writing the script. The women’s stories are the basis of the entire script. In the VR piece, we have the 360° videos; then, we have the audio snippets attached to the animated infographics. All of the infographics and audio pieces are based on our journalism. Through the 360° videos, we are telling you one woman’s story, but then we are zooming you out, and through the infographics and audio, we’re telling you, “This is her story, but there are thousands of other people who are facing similar issues.” With the AR, we’ve done a similar thing, where you Jasmine’s personal narrative, crafted by Carvell. Through the photographics, animations, and graphics that we have in the piece, we’re showing you the historical context—how what you see today is connected to what happened during slavery or in the Civil Rights era. We need to do that journalism to draw those connections. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Still-Here-AR-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) LinkNYC "Still Here" campaign for Black History Month in 2020 ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/LinkNYC-Still-Here-campaign-for-Black-History-Month-2020-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/StillHere_FullSundanceExhibit-scaled.jpg) The multimedia installation of "Still Here" at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. ***In terms of audience, reception, and getting the stories back to the communities that helped create them, how do you think about the distribution process?*** We had many plans for showcasing *Still Here.* Unfortunately, all of them have been put on a back seat because of COVID-19\. Distribution still is important to me because access to projects like this is limited. We wanted to show that we can do it differently—not just in pre-production, production, but also in distribution. I was able to show that in the production and post. I envisioned this three-tiered distribution system for *Still Here*, where on the top of the pyramid are the film festivals and museum spaces around the world that we were going to showcase *Still Here*. The second tier was collaborating with public spaces—places like community centers, or churches—to showcase this project. We have to take the project to where the community is—people living in low-income communities are not going to come to a gallery or a film festival to watch this project. There are very few people who go to those kinds of spaces. So we thought, how can we set up the project in already-frequented places? In the third tier, we would have a traveling van that would station itself outside public spaces in communities around the city. Anybody could line up and go inside the traveling van and watch the experience. The idea there was: how do we take it to the community, rather than expecting people to come to us? ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ADS08383-Edit-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-10.53.49-AM.jpg) ***Looking forward, what do you hope to see more of in this realm of immersive storytelling and justice-oriented storytelling?*** I would love to see more collaboration happen—with the community; within mediums. Distrust in the media has been increasing. So has the polarization in this country. The only way to tackle those problems is to collaborate with people whose stories we are telling. It’s good to get excited about technology and new tools, but it is about people at the end of the day, and it is about their stories. We’ve got to make sure we’re doing a good job at being representative and authentic of people’s stories, especially when people share their stories with us. We’ve got to ensure that we are upholding the trust that people have given us in a righteous, just, and equitable way. You can be using the most advanced tech and do the most amazing immersive work with it, but if we’re not collaborating with the oppressed, suffering and those with the least power who are at the center of our stories, then those tools are not of much use. I would love to see more of that being done in the immersive space. --- ### Credits Interview conducted in November 2020\. Edited and condensed for clarity. ### Links [AJ Contrast ](https://ajcontrast.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Body, Spirit, Code: Salome Asega's Participatory Digital Art URL: https://www.killscreen.com/salome-asega/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T20:55:03.000Z *“Embodied” may be the best word to describe the projects of artist, researcher, and educator* [*Salome Asega*](http://www.salome.zone/?ref=killscreen.com)*. She has created VR experiences that evoke the channeling of diasporic spirits, a Kinect lesson that reinstates a dance form’s history, and a roulette wheel that sends participants to lesser-known corners of a world-famous museum. Experiences that physically engage the body are clearly at the heart of the artist, researcher, and educator’s work. Trained in creative technology and social practice, Salome’s work also centers the communities she is part of. Based in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood, she’s a director at* [*POWRPLNT*](https://www.powrplnt.org/?ref=killscreen.com)*, a digital art ‘collaboratory’ in neighboring Bushwick, where she also leads creative workshops.* *Salome told us about her hyper-real upbringing in Las Vegas, the trials of working within the uncharted territory of art and tech, and the power for participatory work to destabilize the long-held role of the artist.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-1.03.16-PM-scaled.jpg) Salome in her Bedford-Stuyvesant home and studio. ***How did you make your way into merging art with technology and participation?*** The path to working in this hybrid way is totally winding. I went to NYU for undergrad, and wanted to have a public and socially-engaged practice. I was studying participatory methodology and interaction, long before I learned anything about tech. I graduated and did a bit of traveling, some community organizing projects with people locally and in other places, and was seeing all of this amazing work happening at the local level. I wanted to find a way to connect people on the ground. That’s when I became more interested in technology and started to build websites on my own. I learned how to code and was so geeked by what I was learning. It’s so satisfying when you do things with some numbers, you hit ‘run,’ and things actually work. I pursued an MFA in design and technology, and that’s where the door was just busted open. I fell in love with physical computing and interaction design that incorporated emerging technology. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-1.06.03-PM-scaled-e1609394341607.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-1.05.33-PM-scaled.jpg) Participation is a lens that challenges where the artist is centered in their work. I didn’t want to be the artist that was helicoptered into a site and made something, dusted my hands off, and walked away. I wanted to understand deeper levels of engagement; to work with an audience to develop a story or a narrative that is specific to place. All of my projects unfold once they’re removed from the site they were made for. That’s because they were made with very particular people and places in mind. For me, participation is a de-centering of myself or self-awareness of where I sit in relation to my work and other people in place. Growing up, I was mesmerized by artists like like Rick Lowe. What has happened with Project Row houses where a community came together, bought debilitated real estate in a neighborhood that was theirs. They wanted to redirect the narrative of their own neighborhood—the idea that your collective creativity can have infrastructural impact. There are things that this artist center does for the neighborhood that are I’m sure beyond anyone’s original dream when they first started. It’s a cornerstone of the neighborhood and of the city. That was the art that I want to make with people, things that have lasting effect. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-1.00.04-PM-scaled.jpg) ***How did you translate that participatory point of reference into the work that you started to build as a technologist?*** I suddenly had all this exposure to goodies that I could tinker and play with. If I wanted to maintain this methodology for making, I knew I had to widen the aperture here and ensure that other folks had access to the same tool. The most obvious path for translation for me was to develop a workshop curriculum. At the same time that I was learning how to code, how to wire, how to solder. I was taking notes and thinking about how to teach this. So the minute I would learn something in a class, I would package that up and be like, *How do I do a workshop with this*? In workshops I’ve hosted, I’ve been thinking there’s an added layer of application—really thinking about the real world implications of the things we’re making. Being intentional and deliberate, too, with what we’re coding, how we’re coding—how we’re even naming variables! Every piece was couched in, *This can become something in a real world context*, whereas when you’re in a lab, or a program, you can just mess around. The point is to break something apart, and learn the mechanics of it. I think of my workshops as, *We have limited time together. Let’s really be intentional about what we do at this time, and imagine a new world.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ADS08333-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-12.58.41-PM-scaled.jpg) Details from Salome's studio. ***For*** [***“Level Up: The Real Harlem Shake,”***](http://www.salome.zone/levelup?ref=killscreen.com) ***you used the Kinect. It is a great embodied piece of technology, one that can felt magical for a lot of people using it for the first time. Where did the inspiration for this project come from?*** This project was made at a time artists were hacking Kinect and trying to figure out creative applications for this tool. There were tons of documentation online, and I wanted to be part of that work. I partnered with a curator and dancer Ali Rosa-Salas, and Lightfee founder [Chrybaby Cozie](https://www.instagram.com/chrybaby%5Fcozie/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) to develop this game. It was through a residency at New Museum and a dance company called [AUNTS](https://auntsisdance.com/?ref=killscreen.com). We came together and started talking about the Harlem Shake. The group of dancers Chrybaby Cozie works with are from uptown, so the Harlem shake means a lot to them. They feel as if they’re the last keepers of the dance. We were talking about DJ Baauer who made [the song that created the viral trend](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV0LHCHf-pE&ref=killscreen.com) where people in their offices were just shaking wildly to this music. You’d have to go pages and pages into a YouTube search before you could find videos of the ‘real’ Harlem shake. We were talking about the erasure that viral trend had caused. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/titlePush.gif) The start screen from "Level Up." So we asked ourselves*, What educational tool can we make to bring back and celebrate the original dance forms*? We brought in a bunch of dancers and mapped their shoulder movements using Kinect. We took over the theater and basement space of the museum, and had people coming in and out all day dancing. It was truly celebratory, and highlighted the stakeholders of this dance form in New York City. We aimed to give voice and movement and face and visibility to these people. The conversations around algorithmic bias have further developed—have been more nuanced, more rich. You see projects like LaJuné McMillan’s [Black Movement Library](https://www.eyebeam.org/residents/lajune-mcmillian/?ref=killscreen.com), where she uses motion capture to create a library of Black movement vocabulary. It’s exciting to see that in the four or five-year gap between our two projects just how much farther this conversation has gone. It’s really beautiful. ***There are apocryphal stories about who invented the dance for the Harlem Shake—but I don’t think there’s a single person who started it, right?*** We heard so many creation myths during this game’s development—one that went back as far as tracing it to traditional Ethiopian dancing. I’m Ethiopian, so I was ready to claim that history \[laughs\]! ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-1.36.04-PM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ScreenShot2014-10-08at2.36.03AM.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ScreenShot2014-10-15at5.46.05PM.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ScreenShot2014-10-15at7.05.40PM.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ScreenShot2014-10-08at2.34.36AM.png) Stills from "Level Up" of Chrybaby Cozie, founder of the "litefeet" dance style, along with others dancers. [***P0SESSION***](http://www.salome.zone/possession?ref=killscreen.com) ***was an ongoing research project, and you were looking to connect virtual reality with some of the West African and Caribbean spiritual systems. Were you looking at VR as a tool first, then thinking of a project to map onto it?*** I had seen a series of sculptures of Yoruba practitioners in the process of spirit possession. These figures are so mesmerizing; they’re human beings that have a floating orb around them. During spirit possession, the Orishas and deities mount practitioners through the head. When you see this process, you see practitioners getting ready to put something on their head. I was thinking about spirit possession as somewhat similar to the experience of putting on a VR headset, and being transported to a different world. I created these VR sketches where a person can enter a space and put on the headset, which takes them to a very specific Orisha’s world. The first in the series is for Mami Wata, who is this deity spiritual figure who is just so regal. She lives in the water, and comes to shore. When she sees you, she promises you abundance, wealth and attractiveness, but you just have to follow her into the water. You’re worried when you see her because you’re attracted to these things that she promises you, but you actually don’t know if you’ll come back to land. You don’t know if her underwater palace, which has tons of riches and gold, is a trap. She’s this femme fatale figure who is really strong and lavish. The Leo in me loves it \[laughs\]! I’m also named after another femme fatale figure, so I appreciate Mami Wata. She’s the center of the world for this first possession experience. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/MAMI_Install38-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-1.12.56-PM-e1609395272111.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-1.13.33-PM-scaled.jpg) Installation shots of the Mami Wata virtual reality experience as part of "P0SESSION." ***In both projects, there is a sense of body and movement connected technology as a conduit for this thing that people were already doing. Do you have a running backlog of other ideas where you’re like, I hope they create a piece of technology I can use to express this idea?*** I should start sketching out the tech I need, but I think I’m just interested in unusual participation in a gallery or museum setting. There is a standard performance that we all do when we enter cultural or artist spaces. I want to break that—for people to know that they can be loud in a museum, to know that they can touch things in the museum, to know that museums are social. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ScreenShot2016-07-27at12.41.53AM-1.png) Still from "P0SESSION." Courtesy of the artist. **On the development side, you’re using the Kinect and the Oculus Rift. What were some of the challenges using those particular technologies in a “non-authorized” way? Was there something that you faced that you could work your way out of—maybe left unresolved, or incorporated into the work itself?** The Kinect itself is so sensitive to light. It was fast-tracking and realizing, *Okay, you’re making a work that you won’t be able to sit next to every day.* *Level Up* is meant to be installed in a museum, and it’ll travel, so it will be subject to so many various kinds of lighting conditions. I appreciate that project so much because it made me smarter about code—it beefed up how I consider the logic behind a project. With both projects, I had the hardest time figuring out how to package things so that they didn’t have to exist on any of my hardware—that other folks could easily access the game experiences I was making. With each of those projects, I hit a wall. I needed to bring my suitcase of things everywhere, for people to play or use. Everything felt really delicate, and it would be hard to swap out anything. It was very ‘homebrew.’ I’m not an expert coder—I’m very tech agnostic. All of my projects are about the story first, then figuring out the best tools to tell that story. I also run into issues around trying to find the right sites for my work. Right now, I’m a Technology Fellow at the Ford Foundation. The exact challenge area that I’m exploring is that museums have a hard time exhibiting or presenting work like mine, because of an internal lack of capacity. There isn’t much knowledge about how to show extremely interactive works. It requires someone on staff to care for. It’s a capacity issue, and often you’ll see work like this presented as a public program or through the education department or something that is time-limited because it’s hard to maintain in a longer exhibition. “There is a standard performance that we all do when we enter cultural spaces. I want to break that—for people to know that they can be loud in a museum, that they can touch things in the museum, that museums are social.” [***Little Wheel Souvenirs***](https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5192?ref=killscreen.com)***, your showcase at MoMA, was inspired by your upbringing in Las Vegas. In some ways, this project is a break from some of your other more technologically-driven work. Here, you focus more on a raw, non-digital form of participation. What was it about casinos that seemed like a unique place for you to play?*** I was born and raised in Las Vegas, and I was thinking about the roulette wheel. MoMA’s collection is wild and massive. There was something about chance that was really interesting to me. Being able to point your finger, all willy-nilly, and land on something really beautiful and great. Casinos were my introduction to cultural artifacts. I grew up walking up and down the Strip. That was a huge part of my experience growing up because both of my parents, my extended family, worked in casinos—which, by the way, are more than just table games. There are malls in there, movie theaters, places for kids to hang out, roller coasters around the Statue of Liberty \[laughs\]. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-12.55.47-PM-scaled.jpg) Visitors at The Museum of Modern Art participate in "Little Wheel Souvenirs." Before I was able to visit New York, I saw a reproduction of the Statue of Liberty. I saw the Venice canals at The Venetian, or the statue of David at Caesars Palace. I’ve now seen the original of these things—but growing up, I had an understanding of a hyper-real world. We didn’t have contemporary or modern art museums in Vegas when I was growing up. That was a way of understanding and making sense of a world. I was in the inaugural cohort of artists with a social practice in the MoMA’s education residency, which had artists create interactive experiences that got audiences to explore the collection in deeper and more meaningful ways. I wanted to create that chanceful experience for audiences. I had a roulette wheel that corresponded to different works in the museum’s collection that were currently on view in the museum. Audiences could come and spin the wheel—which by the way, drove everyone wild. People were like, *Oh, I can actually spin a roulette wheel and not have to put down any money. Great! I’ve always wanted it to do this* \[laughs!\] ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-1.10.01-PM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-12.56.38-PM-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-1.04.25-PM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Detail shots from "Little Wheel Souvenirs." ***Being able to touch a roulette wheel is indeed a big deal.*** That was the hook. Folks would land on a number, and it would send them on a goose chase around the museum, trying to find this work. They would come back to the gallery, where the roulette wheel is. There, they would win a souvenir or create their own souvenir based on the work they just saw. ***How did you decide which pieces you’d highlight across all of the floors at MoMA?*** I wanted to make sure folks hit all corners of the museum; places that they might quickly walk through, and have them take a moment there. It was a combination of that kind of geographical mapping, and selfishly, personal interest. Works that really speak to me that I wanted to focus on—not work that was part of ‘MoMA’s Greatest Hits.’ We looked at Travelocity and TripAdvisor reviews of MoMA. So funny. People get upset when there are works of art that are really conceptual, and *Starry Night* isn’t on view. The thing that they know that is representative of MoMA—when you go to the shop, you see it printed on plates or key chains or magnets. We saw reviews of a David Hammons piece and people being confused and upset that it’s there. I was like, *Okay, I want to send people to the David Hammons, and then come back and get a souvenir of it, or an Alma Thomas piece, or something like that*. I was interested in unpacking the cultural imagination of a place. MoMA shows up on any tourist map of Midtown. Before visiting, you have this image of what you think the place or what a New York art world will be like because you’ve seen the reproductions filter out… You’ve seen *Starry Night* on almost anything and everything. So you’re going to MoMA thinking, *I’m going to see Starry Night*. That was like the most interesting part of creating this experience is that I wasn’t sending people to *Starry Night*. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-1.06.38-PM-scaled.jpg) ***POWRPLNT is a digital arts lab that you run. What are you hoping to do with space, and what role do you see it play in the lives of creatives in Brooklyn?*** POWRPLNT is what we call a digital art ‘collaboratory’ in Bushwick. It was started six years ago by my friend Anibal Luque and Angelina Dreem. Back then, it was a mobile digital art school that floated between tiny residencies and galleries in Brooklyn. It eventually found its way to the Red Bull Studios in Chelsea, through an exhibition that Ryder Ripps was doing. From there, we developed strong youth partnerships and found our way to the Hunter College gallery in Harlem. It had an interesting trajectory—from very small gallery spaces, moving into more formal art spaces, and then landing in an academic institution. From there, I came in as a partner, and we set out to start a brick-and-mortar space. We found this bright orange beauty salon in Bushwick. We began the work of renovating—shout out to [Materials for the Arts](https://www1.nyc.gov/content/mfta/pages/?ref=killscreen.com), which was an amazing warehouse space in Queens where cultural institutions from around the city would donate unused material and other folks could scoop it up. That’s where we got the tiles for our space. The tables and more equipment, too. We did a modest $5,000 Kickstarter campaign to buy some used computers, did that successfully, and then set up shop as a community computer lab. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/POWRPLNT-outdoor-Bushwick.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/POWRPLNT-indoor-Bushwick-e1609393229153.png) POWRPLNT functions as gallery space, internet lounge and an environment where people from all backgrounds may learn the skills necessary to express themselves creatively in today’s networks. We had open hour time. Then in the evenings, we had sliding-scale and free workshops for young people taught by local artists and musicians. What PWRPLNT has been doing really well since our start is the open computer hours time and the artist-run workshops. Now in the time of COVID-19, we’ve shut our doors like everyone else. But they’re slightly open because we have free resources available to the community, especially during the summer protests. We’re taking donations from people to give to protestors. A lot of our programming, however, has had to shift. We have always been so place-based—so going virtual has allowed us to make thoughtful partnerships with mission-aligned organizations across the country. We recently brought together six or seven collectives and organizations to host a program—a weekend program called ‘Power Up’—where we taught six or seven workshops for young people worldwide. We’re a non-profit, so most of the funding comes from individual donors—people who really rock with us believe in us. Then some grants come from local foundations. I’m hoping that doesn’t stop in a post-COVID world. I actually found it beautiful that we all came together to do this. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-12.57.53-PM-scaled.jpg) "Now in the time of COVID-19, we've shut our doors like everyone else. But they're slightly open because we have free resources available to the community." **How are you seeing a tie between the work that you’re doing at PWRPLNT and at the Ford Foundation, to bring us up to speed with the present?** I’ve been doing this work with PWRPLNT for a couple of years. I’ve been seeing how hard it is for groups like us to really find footing—groups that sit at the intersection of art, design, technology, social justice. Groups that are community-minded but just don’t have enough resources to do their work. At Ford, I’m looking at groups like PWRPLNT, School for Poetic Computation, and Stephanie Dinkins’ AI.ASSEMBLY project. These groups are so community-rooted. There’s not enough cultural infrastructure to really support all of us. I’m thinking about what is needed to really care for this ecosystem of artists and technologists. Maybe it means more grant opportunities specific to people who make in the ways that we make. Or more fellowships that help us distinguish us in our careers, that can really give us a platform for what we’re doing. Or more residency opportunities that cater to research and design, help us figure out new languages, and new ways of working. Also, making sure that we’re propping up people who are observing this field of practitioners. So really helping curators and critics to be able to talk about what is happening. A lot of the work I’ve been doing at Ford thus far has just been exposure—getting arts funders or directors of various institutions to see the work themselves. It’s also been to build literacy, to really understand all the tools people are using and how artists come to use those tools in their practice. Also, what the costs are associated with that. From there, actually interviewing artists or art and tech organization leaders to understand their needs. We ask, *What is missing from your work? How can we help you? How can we show up for you and make sure that these two sides meet each other*? We’re in this moment with technology that feels really dark. So we need to prop up and platform artists working with technology. --- ### Credits Interview conducted in December 2020\. Edited and condensed for clarity. ### Links [Salome’s website](http://www.salome.zone/?ref=killscreen.com) [POWRPLNT](https://www.powrplnt.org/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Salome on Twitter](https://twitter.com/suhlomay?lang=en&ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Salome on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/computers%5Fputing/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) ### Ines Alpha:The future of makeup is 3D URL: https://www.killscreen.com/ines-alpha/ Last updated: 2026-03-23T17:43:29.000Z *You might recognize her otherworldly, translucent face filters on Instagram, or her gleaming, snakelike adornments on Charli XCX’s Charli. Paris-based artist* [*Ines Alpha*](https://inesalpha.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *has spearheaded the realm of virtual makeup for years, crafting images and experiences that enhance and extend the limits of beauty and self-expression through 3D modeling and augmented reality software.* *We’re grateful that Ines sat down with us to chat about how growing up in Paris has shaped her, how she uses 3D rendering software like paint brushes and canvases, and why self-love and self-care are crucial in the world of virtual makeup.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/DSC_0041-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/DSC_0014-1-scaled-e1607587747289_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/DSC_9875-scaled.jpg) Ines at her home studio in Paris. ***When did you first know that you wanted to be an artist?*** I grew up in the suburbs of Paris. My parents were fashion designers, and took me out to exhibitions to build my education and artistic vision. My father wanted me to be an architect—so I didn’t want to be an architect… precisely because he wanted it. That’s basic teenager stuff \[laughs\]. I was scared of wanting to have a creative career because I was scared of not being able to earn a living. I went to an applied arts school, but not somewhere like Beaux-Arts, where I’d learn how to make *truly* artistic work. I thought I could learn some web design and some more practical skills to still work a creative job. After, I went to a management school because I still wasn’t confident enough to find a job after the applied arts program. I did a management and design master’s at a fashion institute in Paris. There, I learned all the jobs around the fashion designer, except for being the designer. I learned everything that could help someone bring their project to life. Everything except being the creator itself, because I was scared of being that person. I worked at an advertising company for seven years as an art director, specializing in luxury, beauty, and fashion. That was quite comfortable for me because I could be creative, but not involved personally and artistically. I could do fun work, but if it wasn’t any good, it would never be my fault. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/DSC_0082-scaled-e1607591043728.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/DSC_9837-scaled-e1607587818765_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/DSC_9894-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ***What kinds of garments were your parents making? Were there other creators or artists that were inspirational to you growing up?*** My parents had their women’s ready-to-wear fashion brands, with looks inspired by Lolita and Kawaii fashion in Japan, but with a Parisian, French twist. The style was cute, girly, and classic simultaneously—not too colorful, not too childish. It depended on the period of the year, on the trends. There was a woman called Eileen who worked for them, and she would make the catalog for every collection. She’d use paint for one collection, then another collection would be with paper collage. I was fascinated by this. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/IMG_0450-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/IMG_0443-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Designs dreamed up for the fashion line of Ines' parents. ***What did your background in advertising teach you in terms of your current creative practice?*** I learned how to be patient with the people you work with. Also, how to sell my work, how to sell an idea. I started working with 3D while at the advertising company because I met [Panteros666](https://www.instagram.com/panteros666/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com), who was just starting his career as a music producer. This trend of digital art and 3D software was just beginning to be more accessible to everyone. I started to make video clips with Panteros, as well as visuals for his EP. Before having learned 3D software, I used to work only with Photoshop. Once I had some 3D rendering knowledge, I applied it to some of my advertising jobs. I worked on many cosmetic still-lifes. The downside to that was that I’d make mocaps, and then the clients say, “Yes, I love the concept.” Then I’d do the photography—and the problem that I got is that my 3D still-lifes looked way better than the final Photoshop collages I’d make! The client would always say, “Hm, but the 3D looks better. I want the same thing as the 3D work.” After lots of these back-and-forths, I realized one day that I was ready to do my own work. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-11-30-at-7.27.10-PM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-11-30-at-7.28.43-PM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-11-30-at-7.26.43-PM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-11-30-at-7.26.33-PM-scaled.jpg) Ines' music video collaborations with Panteros666, her first foray into rendering in 3D. ***Do you remember the moment where you first had the idea to work with 3D makeup or beauty?*** I experimented with 3D, making videos and live performances with Panteros—but I was still looking for my vision and my way of expressing myself. I was looking for something to say. I would copy things from other artists I liked or was inspired by. I did this to experiment and technically train myself to work in 3D. [*The Codex Seraphinianus*](https://www.holybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/CodexSeraphinianus.pdf?ref=killscreen.com) is a great inspiration. It’s a book made by a 70s artist, Luigi Serafini. It’s a huge volume about a planet that some guy discovers, and he makes a list of all the creatures and plants living on this planet. Everything is in another language—one that no one on Earth can speak, and he draws all the plants and the creatures. This book fascinated me, so I tried to reproduce in 3D those plants that were illustrated. So that was my first experiment— I thought, *My vision is to make this book come alive, to make those plants appear as though living in our world.* I was just starting in 3D, so my knowledge and my skills were ‘beginner.’ ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/inesalpha_3DbodyMakeup_stillface2.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/inesalpha_3DbodyMakeup_stillface1.jpg) Ines in her own 3D makeup design. My day job was to study beauty photography. All day long—beauty photographs, images from makeup artists, and doing Photoshop work with those visuals. I already had tons of beauty-centered visuals—images of skin, and the texture of physical makeup—and I was fascinated by that. I thought, *Why couldn’t I take these pictures and add 3D elements on those faces? That would be makeup, but made using 3D software*. So it was an accident through which I created this 3D Makeup concept I’m still working with. I’ve always liked to augment reality by making it fantastic. So I started with video clips, adding creatures into the landscape. Now, I add 3D elements onto faces to make them more fantastic, weird, or different. Little by little, I’ve gained more experience with 3D. I began making videos using 3D makeup—which seem more real because it’s attached to the moving face. Then, AR software for the filters developed. So it felt very natural to do my creations in AR, so everyone could wear them. When you make and publish only one video—it’s out, but nobody can wear what you’ve designed. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Alpha-Munroe_Still01.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Alpha_aboutyou_pat-scaled.jpg) 3D Makeup still lives: "Munroe" and "About You." ***From the perspective of someone who puts on 3D makeup, what do you think they gain from wearing it as opposed to wearing ‘real-life’ makeup?*** 3D software enables you to create stuff that you can’t do in the physical world. 3D and digital software and filters enable people to express more diverse definitions of beauty that we don’t have access to in the physical world. With 3D, you can create your reality—your own rules, the textures you like, and the shapes you like. You don’t have to use something you need to buy at a shop. When I started 3D makeup, my initial goal was to do something in 3D, then to do the physical version—an exhibition, for instance. I thought, *But I have so much more freedom in the digital world!* So, I decided I would focus on the digital world; to focus on what is not doable in the physical world. That’s what’s interesting to me, and why people are very attracted to wear digital experiences. There are very different styles of digital makeup and filters—mine is very sci-fi-ish, more futuristic. Other creators focus on things like distortions, deformations, beautifying effects, or transforming you into other creatures or animals. 3D makeup enables you to transform yourself into whatever you want in a second. And that’s a kind of magic. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ALPHA_NANA_still.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ALPHA_LOKI_still.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ALPHA_ESTELLE_STILL01.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/alpha_MINTSEV_stilllife01.jpg) ***When you’re about to start work on a filter, how does the creative process begin? Are you sketching on paper or having conversations with people?*** I collaborate with musicians, performers, drag queens, makeup artists; sometimes, they let me do whatever with their faces. Sometimes they already have makeup on, so I think, *How can I construct something around this existing makeup?* It’s inspiring to add 3D to something that isn’t just basic makeup, not just eyeshadow on the face. For instance, there is a performer, Fabijan, who drew geometric shapes on her face. I added elements so those shapes would come out of the drawings she made on her face—so that was interesting to give life to what she’s already done. When I’m working on something more personal, like on myself or a more blank canvas… for example, I collaborated with a Korean actress Ah-sung Go, and she was super excited to do something with me. She said, *Here’s my face. Do whatever.* For those situations, I think, *What do I want to learn?* Maybe I want to learn a new technique in 3D. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ALPHA_FABIJAN_still1.jpg) Ines' collaboration with Fabijan. I don’t sketch a lot. Sometimes I sketch for clients, but I like to start with my software. Like, I said, *What do I want to learn?* Or*, Is there a plugin I haven’t tried in my software? Is there something new I could try that could help me bring another idea to life?* Sometimes I want to work on something with a round look. So I start tweaking my software, drawing lines and adding volume. Then I tweak some parameters, and I’m like, *That looks cool!* So I keep working in that direction. I build something with experimentation and randomness, changing some software parameters. I change the colors, gradient, and then some transparency, and little by little I’m like, *That looks good*. Most of the time, I have no idea how personal projects are going to look. I often come up with shapes I hadn’t thought of from the beginning. I like working that way, sculpting with software. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Alpha-nicole_still1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/alpha-nicole_still2.jpg) ***You’ve previously said, “People think 3D design is primarily technical, but to me, 3D software is the new canvas and brushes.” It’s easy for creators who work with certain software to separate the technical from the artistic.*** In my practice, I love to get ideas from playing with software. Sometimes, I change things I’m not supposed to change—it’s not made for that purpose, but it can create glitches that look great or are interesting. I like to use a tool meant to make something look realistic, but if you use it to do something different, then it can spark some ideas. I like working this way. I understand that some other people will stick to technique, and work the other way and say, *I want to convey this idea—how am I going to do this exactly?* ***You’re talking about possibilities in glitching, and in using software in the “wrong way.” On the converse, do you see any limitations with with the softwares you work with?*** I work mostly with Cinema 4D for 3D modeling and animation. When it comes to filters, I work with Spark AR and Lens Studio. Lens Studio is for Snapchat, and Spark AR is for Instagram. They both have their limitations. I cannot do AR with Cinema 4D, but I can do hyper-realistic renders. I cannot do hyper-realistic renders with AR—which is limited because it has to work on a phone. Also, the animations for each work differently, so some animations are very tricky to do in augmented reality, whereas some animations are possible to do in Lens Studio but not in Spark AR. I myself have lots of technical limitations. With these softwares, I don’t know how to do so many things, especially in AR. I get a lot of help from other creators to help me code. At the same time, technology evolves fast, and software is getting easier and easier to use. Even Spark AR and Lens Studio have many tutorials—now anyone can make a filter! I see that as huge progress. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/DSC_0115-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/DSC_9815-scaled-e1607588301561_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/DSC_0127-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ***Future Gloss is the first AR lens filter you made for Snapchat. Can you tell me what it was like to work in AR for the first time?*** *Future Gloss* was the first filter I adapted from the video I did with the Korean actress Ah-sung Go. I was playing with her features and created this cyborg-ish mask. Like you said, it was my first attempt at doing an AR filter. I did a lot of 3D makeup involving dynamics like cloth moving with the face’s movement. Things like this are quite difficult to reproduce in AR. Also, liquid-y things are super hard to produce in AR. I started with 3D makeup because I thought it was quite easy to adapt to AR. I managed to do it, and I was super surprised that I could handle all of it. I kept postponing trying to learn the software, because I was scared of learning something new. I thought I couldn’t do it, but in the end, I could. I got some help from other creators, but I managed to learn and do this first filter myself. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ALPHA-ASUNG-KO_Still04.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ALPHA-ASUNG-KO_Still03.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ALPHA-ASUNG-KO_Still02.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/ALPHA-ASUNG-KO_Still01.jpg) Ines' filter for Ah-sung Go. ***I’m also curious about your collaboration with Charli XCX and what that process was like working with her to make her album designs for “Charli.”*** The creative director of her album contacted me, and he told me, “We’re going to shoot some pictures of Charli and the musicians she’s going to collaborate with. I would love to collaborate with you to create the 3D makeup on her body.” Charli’s creative director wanted something super metallic. I would make the shape of the line, and, then I asked him whether he liked the design of the line to be twisted, round, or square. We started with one visual—then for a month, I had two visuals a week to make. I’d receive the picture and then a message saying, “Can you do it in two days?” It was at the beginning of my 3D Makeup career, so I had to handle everything, the management, the contracts, everything by myself. Every visual was made in two or three days maximum—it all happened super fast. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/BLAME-IT.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Charli.jpg) Ines' 3D makeup for Charli XCX's album art. ***You’ve also worked on filters for*** [***Lil Miquela***](https://www.instagram.com/lilmiquela/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com)***. Did you find that process different from working with the face of a ‘real’ human?*** Lil Miquela interviewed me over text for *Dazed*. I proposed to the magazine, “If you send me a portrait of Lil Miquela, I can add 3D makeup on an image you can use for the article.” That was quite funny, to add 3D makeup onto someone that is already made digitally. They gave me her astrological sign. They told me, “It’s a sign inspired by nature, plants.” I had total freedom in creation. So I sent some variations of one design, a couple of different textures. And they said, “This one looks great!” ***How has COVID-19 and mask culture affected how you think about filters?*** During quarantine, I did a series of 3D makeup inspired by the anti-COVID masks. I was imagining a digital version of the anti-COVID masks. The only problem with the real-life mask is that you cannot wear a filter while wearing it. On Instagram, at least, it doesn’t work. If you wear a mask, the technology won’t recognize your face. But with Snapchat, it recognizes your face. It struggles a little bit, but you can wear a filter wearing a mask. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/alpha_lilmiquela-still1-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-10-at-4.23.20-PM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Ines' 3D makeup for Lil Miqaela. I know that Snapchat had already thought of that problem because they did some lenses with a country from the Emirates. A lot of girls there wear veils, so they did a filter that could work through tracking only eyes. Their technology is more advanced to work on and recognize eyes, thanks to that. Filters are something that people use a lot in their intimate life. It’s something personal that you do with your phone at home. I haven’t seen any difference in people wearing my filters or my creations since COVID. Maybe brands are more attracted to make filters because it’s an easy way to do a campaign. After all, people are still using filters despite their wearing a mask, or the fact that there is pandemic. “3D makeup enables you to transform yourself into whatever you want in a second. And that’s a kind of magic.” ***Have you seen anyone use your filters in unexpected ways?*** I’ve seen people plan how they dress with my filters. I love it when they do that. It was not always on purpose, but sometimes they wear the filter because they think it goes well with how they’re dressed. Once, I saw two girls, they were all painted in blue, and they were wearing my Future Gloss cyborg mask. So it was more or less the same color as their skin, which was painted in greenish-blue. So that’s so great when it complements, and the filter lives on their face and in all the garments around. It becomes almost like an accessory. ***How do you see 3D makeup influencing the contemporary culture of beauty and real-life makeup?*** Both physical and digital makeup will evolve together at some point. Now, you have digital makeup on one side, physical makeup on the other side. I hope to make work that shows a collaboration or complementing of both these sides. I do believe digital makeup will grow more important. Technology is growing, evolving fast, and people on their phone more. You should only follow your own beauty standards and be whomever you want and however, you want. Filters can help people express themselves in a more diverse set of ways. You can’t avoid the beautifying filters that make you look like a Kim Kardashian-type person. It’s a shame because I can only see people mostly using those filters—and it’s sad because it’s that same model that is being shown to people. You have one model of beauty, which says you need contouring, blush, eyeliner, and you need your jaw like this. You begin to believe that that’s the only definition of beautiful in the world. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/DSC_9972-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/DSC_0180-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/DSC_9929-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Filters are a symptom, and we need to focus on the cause, which are beauty standards. Those need to evolve, and we need to show more diversity in beauty, in both the physical and digital spaces. Digital makeup is another tool to transform yourself—it’s like physical makeup, in the sense that it can do you good, or it can do you bad, depending on how you use it. I hope that people will be able to wear digital makeup in the future, but still like themselves for the body they were born with. I think of *Years and Years*, the BBC television series. There’s a teenager character who wears a filter on a plastic piece on top of her face, which means she wears a filter all the time. I hope that humanity will not evolve in that way, and that people will use filters for fun, or just to see themselves differently for some time, but still learn to appreciate the face that we’re born with. For that, physical makeup can be a good way of expression. But it’s important to mention that physical and digital makeup can live together. Soon enough, we’ll see everyone wearing 3D makeup with our own eyes wearing holographic glasses, nanotechnology contact lenses. When that time comes, I hope people will be able to remove that screen from them and still love themself. --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted in October 2020. ### Links [Ines’ website](https://inesalpha.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Ines on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/ines.alpha/?ref=killscreen.com) [Alexandre Haefeli](https://www.instagram.com/alexandre%5Fhaefeli/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) ### Jacky Connolly: Mining memories for suburban fantasies URL: https://www.killscreen.com/jacky-connolly/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T02:40:24.000Z *“Livin’ Large.” “On Holiday.” “Superstar.“ “Makin’ Magic.” The expansion packs for the inaugural edition of The Sims signal ideas of escaping familiar realities; of satisfying unfulfilled desires. Fine art filmmaker Jacky Connolly, however, utilizes the game to re-enact and re-imagine moments from the past. Predominantly shot within The Sims, Jacky’s films are inspired by her upbringing in New York’s Hudson Valley, an environment enveloped in kitschy charm and sublime nature. Composed of leisurely-paced, suburban vignettes, Jacky’s films brim with mood and atmosphere—spotlighting images of alienation and discovery as one comes of age.* *We spoke with Jacky about the slippage (and possibility) that occurs when a Sims avatar has a life of their own, the surreal charm of the Hudson Valley, and her upcoming films made within the worlds of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/13.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/21.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/27.png) Stills from "Ariadne," one of Jacky's films shot predominantly within The Sims. ## **ORIGINS IN ART AND UPBRINGING** ***Which games did you play as a kid that helped kickstart your creative process?*** When I was younger, games like *American Girl Premiere* were like paper dolls on a stage. It’s a keyframe animation program—you are essentially directing cinematic production of these dolls. I was always into playing with dolls and making elaborate productions with them. When I was a little older, I was into early PlayStation games, like *Silent Hill*, for the Gothic horror atmosphere. But *The Sims* was the one I was obsessed with. It was one of the most exciting days of my life when I got the first version of the game. ***You have both a degree in Fine Art, but you also have a Master’s in Information Technology. How did these two disciplines inform each other and your creative process?*** My mom’s a photographer. In high school, I was into shooting digital photos and posting them on Myspace. I quickly went through a traditional, large-format darkroom photography education, and made artists’ books and collage work. That brought me to the video space—I began to use found footage to make video collages. I studied art history in undergrad, and photography was my studio focus. I’ve had a pretty self-taught trajectory with video—eventually, when I went to Pratt, I studied it a little more formally, taking classes in advanced animation. With library science, I’ve just always been really into computers and archiving and organizing information. My program allowed you to do both at the same time. I thought I would work as a librarian immediately, but then I solidified my artistic vision. I returned to *The Sims* because I wanted to make animations and films, but I knew immediately that I didn’t have the resources to animate a feature-length film as a one-woman show. You know, for most animation students, their final project is two or three minutes long. The technical aspect—the craft of what I do—is essential to me. Still, the ability to quickly iterate through ideas or gather inspiration is more important than studying film or 3D modeling in a traditional program. When I thought to download *The Sims* again, it became my life \[laughs\]. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/37.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/39.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/31.png) More stills from "Ariadne." ***What was it like growing up in the Hudson Valley—what particularities about that environment have affected your creative process?*** One of early America’s first art movements is the Hudson River School. They were concerned with the sublimity of nature—paintings of gorgeous sunsets over the river with clouds. It’s not my art style, but it refers to the weird juxtaposition of nature and bland suburbia of where I grew up. I grew up near Sleepy Hollow. There’s lots of fantastic supernatural lore, different myths about the Native American history of the area. There are lots of ghosts and weird energy, allegedly lots of UFO sightings. There’s a potent mood to the area with how beautiful the river is, too. ## **RE-EXPLORING THE SIMS** ***So what first compelled you to make a film within The Sims?*** My family was in the furniture business, so I spent a lot of time in these huge showrooms meant to look like living rooms. I would go to work with my dad and sit in them, which I think started my fixation with these fake interiors. I was in a computer programming class, and I wanted to make an animation that would allow you to navigate virtual rooms. I thought of building rooms in *The Sims—*you drag a box, then do the same with the furniture. It felt like coming home to this earlier obsession from my childhood. I first played *The Sims* after my family’s house had a fire. We moved into a temporary house—it was bizarre, very modern, and had all these glass windows. That was a poignant, weird experience. Later, I found out that Will Wright thought to develop *The Sims* when his house was affected by a fire. He had the idea to make this game like a virtual dollhouse—his virtual home—creating the interiors and everything. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/bp16.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/hvr24.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/bp7.jpg) Stills from "Basement Puzzles/Rune Rooms" and "Hudson Valley Ruins." ***When you start a project, what is the first step? Is it the narrative you’re writing in your head, or are you playing around with design within the engine?*** Typically, the narrative comes somewhere in the middle or is somewhat after-the-fact. My early films were based on moods or atmospheres from my childhood…I intended first to build a virtual Hudson Valley in *The Sims*. Building my sets within *The Sims* is such a big part of the process. I have to spend time creating the film world before I shoot scenes in it. It starts with the places I choose in the game and the characters I design or find that already exist within the game. Certain elements like the weather, too. The action is often subtle. I’ll notice a certain way the characters walk or how it feels when someone enters or exits this space. Eventually, I narrow it down, and think, *This will be a vignette where this specific action happens*. So I work from this constellation of vignettes, and I eventually decide on the narrative. It’s drawn from how these things all relate to each other. ## **SURPRISES ‘ON SET’** ***Would you say that there’s part of it that is improvisational? It’s almost as if you’re speaking of the process as if you’re shooting a documentary film.*** It’s intuitive—I’ll have a vague idea of what I’m going to film. What’s interesting about filming in the game is that it’s similar to filming on location in that it’s is unexpected. Things happen. The game is moving all the time. Avatars you aren’t controlling are walking around on their own. Or maybe the weather changes. I’ll notice that a Sim will do something random related to their AI about being hungry or feeling embarrassed. I’ll try to capture it as it’s happening, or else I’ll recreate or re-enact it. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/24.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/45.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/46.png) Stills from "Ariadne." ***Is there a concrete distinction between playing the game and making your projects?*** Usually, I don’t play. Although, each time I start a new project, I spend some time where I catch myself playing it out of curiosity. \[The game itself\] is not that fulfilling, but it’s important to once in a while return to the game as intended. There’s a community of obsessive, master Sims builders, who show their creations online. What’s cool about the gameplay is that so much of it is about creating the world. I also like not to be too influenced by what the game signifies to other players, but I don’t want to be alienated completely. When I do play, I find it is pretty boring! It’s different when you’re a kid; you’re like, *Oh, I’m going to be a grown-up, I’m going to drive a convertible, I’m going to have all this cool stuff.* Then, when you’re a grown-up; you’re like, *I’m not going to go to work and make 10 million*. It’s less exciting when you’re an adult—you’re simulating this other shitty version of adulthood \[laughs\]. ***Do you think that has something to do with why you return to the past and turn to memories as a narrative way into a project?*** It is so linked for me to that period of my life. I was making more childhood-focused stories in my early work. The game lends itself perfectly to a suburban story—precisely because it is such a suburbia game, living that suburban fantasy. ***The unhurried pacing of your films is also so powerful.*** I wish my projects didn’t have to be feature-length, but they *have* to be, you know? I spend so many hours myself in the game that the temporality of each film is so much about spending the time in the world, and as it passes. What I get from the game world that I want to convey in my films is the long duration. I want the viewer to feel the dread of it, in the way it interacts in their reality. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/18.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/hvr16.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/hvr18.jpg) Stills from "Hudson Valley Ruins." ## **INVENTING WORLDS** **Where do you get inspiration for designing the objects, fashion, and furniture in your films?** In cinema, there are archetypes. I think, *What’s my version of that character type?* David Lynch’s movies are a perfect example. It feels like \[Lynch\] type-casts based on a headshot. They’re vessels for an archetype—you know, that type of guy, you’ve seen him before. So I think, *What does a high-school school bully look like in 1999*? ***When you made Hudson Valley Ruins, what was the process of recreating your hometown? Were you corroborating between the real space and the virtual environment as you were building it?*** The starting point is almost always a real place, then I try to create a more bizarro, surreal version of it. A few things are replicas from reality. One of the girl’s bedrooms is almost a literal remake of my room as a teengaer. Mostly though, it’s these little snippets of design motifs I remember. The film is not officially set in the nineties—when it is set is ambiguous to me—but the aesthetic developed because I was thinking of a certain place and time… the nineties and early 00s. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/10.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/hvr15.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/hvr19.jpg) Stills from "Ariadne" and "Hudson Valley Ruins." ***Can you talk about how Anhedonia came to be?*** I switched to a newer version of *The Sims*. At first, I didn’t like the quality of the animation in it. *The Sims 3* is this open map. It’s a much bigger world than *The Sims 4*, in which you are playing at your house; you only can walk around your culdesac. *The Sims 4* much slicker, influenced by reality TV \[aesthetics\], almost. But I got into it over time. That newer aesthetic gave into the dissociated feeling of the story. It made sense to work in this more sterile animation style, one less jagged around the edges. The first *Sims* everyone used as a kid is so rudimentary—the game is in 3D, but it already felt outdated even when I started using it. In that way, it lent itself to telling stories from the past. The newer *Sims* feels very ‘of this moment.’ It looks similar to the mass-produced Netflix animations that kids watch now. When I use the new one, I still mess with it to make it look my way. “Filming within the game is similar to filming on location in that it is unexpected. Things happen, the game is moving all the time. Avatars you aren’t controlling are walking around. Or maybe the weather changes.” ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/anhedonia1a.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/anhedonia4.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/anhedonia12.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/anhedonia2a.jpg) Stills from "Ahnedonia." ## **VIGNETTE-BY-VIGNETTE** ***How did you go about structuring the narrative for Anhedonia?*** I wanted to experiment with making something with short chapter. The entire idea is this feeling stuck and anhedonic, anything associated with spending too much time inside (which is pretty pertinent to right now!). I wanted to play with it being this catalog of different chapters for distinct afflictions, all starting with the letter A—amnesia, et cetera. ***What drew you to incorporate live-action filmmaking in Ariadne? What was it like including yourself, in addition to the virtual version of yourself?*** It was an experiment to see how my vision would translate to live-action. I wanted to see if it was possible to create a hybrid project. I wanted real people to act Sim-like. It’s interesting, some friends said that it felt like the live-action was what felt more dissonant or virtual, and that the animated world felt more familiar or relatable. Also, the location was important—we shot at this bizarre swingers hotel. They’re almost all out of business. In the Hudson Valley, there used to be all these love hotels with heart-shaped hot tubs and stuff. Coincidentally, the heart-shaped hot tub is one of the objects from the first *Sims*. That was the object that prompted me to think, *I want to go somewhere that feels like a live-action Sims environment.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/47.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/53.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/59.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/60.png) Live-action stills from "Ariadne." ***What was the process like for your Weather Lamp series? The lamps are vessels of images, or scenes, in a way—there’s a narrative quality to them.*** I wanted to make something that worked well with the *Ariadne*. In the film, there’s a lot of religious imagery… there’s this feeling of seeking a certain spirituality, a ‘dark night of the soul.’ It’s this feeling deadened and homogenized. I am especially fond craftsman-style lamps—Frank Lloyd Wright made amazing ones. In the Hudson Valley, that craftsmen motif is everywhere. From seeing that aesthetic around so much and loving stained glass, I wanted to make an object that had movement to it. I love how light creates this feeling of something moving, or having a life to it. The challenge was to figure out how to incorporate the images into the geometric design of the stained glass. You don’t see it that often in lamp design, but I wanted it painted like the way that church has painted windows. In a way, the lamps become these religious healing objects. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/jacky-connolly-artist-ariadne-exhibition-downs-ross-gallery-new-york-nyc-lamp-stained-glass-earth.jpg) One of Jacky's weather lamps. ## **SONIC FUTURES** ***How do you create sounds for your work, and what is the importance of silence in your work?*** I combine or manipulate sounds from the world of the game. A lot of it is the \[digital\] weather, ambient room sounds, and sounds from my real environmen. Interestingly, the sounds sampled in the game are real. They’re not fabricated but are these compressed, low-quality, little samples of a recording of weather or traffic cars moving. I’ll take those and mix in \[my own sounds\] if I want a better Foley at a certain part—you know, someone walking or a door slamming. I’m so low-fi! I’m constantly ripping sounds from YouTube, but that digital sound quality combines well enough with the visual style. The thing that I have not resolved is the characters’ voice. I’ve tried drafts with voiceover, but to me, the silence and ambient sound speak so much in the work. It’s a fine line of not wanting to interrupt that process. ***Can you talk a bit about the projects you’re currently working on?*** I want to find a way to be freer and put less pressure on myself. I create these long, detailed, and baroque projects that usually take at least a year to make, so I’m always struggling with wanting to inject new energy and to have it feel like something new. I’m lucky in that there already is something speculative or otherworldly about my work. A lot of it’s contingent on the way it feels to be on earth right now. There are so many different moods right now that make it hard… the future’s in such a limbo makes it harder to imagine different futures. Currently, I’m working on a couple of projects. I’m doing a short in Blender with scratch animation. I didn’t realize the burden of this medium—the time it takes to render! It can be weeks to create a two-minute video. I’m also working on a project filmed in *Grand Theft Auto* and *Red Dead Redemption*. It’s new for me because it’s more towards documentary-style shooting. I’m using more of the materials that already exist in the game. The process for this project is more about finding the marginalia of the game—especially minor characters that aren’t a part really of the main structure. For instance, there isn’t any female character isn’t a nagging wife or a prostitute \[laughs\]. As I find more characters, I find myself more interested in creating many-voiced or transpersonal stories, usually centering women. This is the first film that is definitively not set in the Hudson Valley. Rather, it’s like I’m going to Hollywood. I’m making my LA movie \[laughs\]. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/install4_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/install6_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/install12-scaled.jpg) Installation views of "Hudson Valley Ruins," "Anhedonia," and "Tales from the Borscht Belt." ***You work in this liminal space between fine art, cinema, and games. How have people within these different fields responded to your work?*** My favorite context is for people to be watching it in a physical space, but I show most often in another country, where I’m not there in the screening context. In the gallery, there’s the worry of people’s distractedness or attention. And in galleries, you often see if video works are shorter or more ambient; they’re less of a ‘cinematic’ experience where you have to sit down and spend a lot of time with it. I’ve found that there’s something magical about the animation. It captivates, draws people in to start watching it. I’ve gotten good responses from a few young teenage girls being like, *Oh my God, I can’t believe you made this!* One of my favorite messages was from a Sims YouTuber. She said, *I thought that I would have to give up making Sims videos when I went to college. But my art teacher showed me your project, and now I’m going to study film.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/install8_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/install7-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Installation views of "Basement Puzzles/Rune Rooms" and "Tales from the Borscht Belt." --- ### Credits Interview conducted in October 2020\. Edited and condensed for clarity. ### Links [Jacky’s website](http://www.jackyconnolly.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Carson Lynn: Sculpting with virtual light URL: https://www.killscreen.com/carson-lynn-2/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T03:12:36.000Z ## *“If I go into a video game and I take a photograph, there’s no lens there… but why should I be excluded from the definition of photography?”* [*Carson Lynn’s*](https://carsonlynn.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *body of work dwells on the concept of refusal—the refusal to define photography in conventional terms, the refusal to use game engines as intended, the refusal to tolerate heterocentric virtual landscapes. Consequently, the artist’s series of Machinima films explore what it means to queer both gamespaces and real-life landscapes. Proposing the glitch as a site of potential, their projects also push the definition of image-making deeper into the digital realm.* *We spoke with Carson about the synonymous relationship between photography and game worlds, the sublime landscapes surrounding their childhood, and the power of introspective, ‘stop-and-smell-the-flowers’ moments within gameplay.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/90C6511-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/90C6490-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/90C6529-scaled.jpg) ## **MAKING WITH MACHINIMA** ***Where did you grow up, and when did you know that you wanted to be an artist?*** I grew up in the suburbs of Calabasas. My first foray into art was making little machinima videos using *Halo*. There was this one show called *This Spartan Life*, which is a talk show within *Halo 2*. They would bring actual players on as extras. I was part of this community. When the director would want the people fighting in the background of their interview shot, I would come on. There’s only one shot made into the final show, where you can see my blue avatar in the background shooting his gun into the air. That show dealt with a lot of higher concepts about media theory. Being 13 at the time, I didn’t understand any of it. But it’s seeped into my subconscious in this exciting way. In high school, I started doing photography and Photoshop work. I got my undergraduate degree in photography and imaging. Halfway through, I realized I didn’t want to be a commercial photographer. I wanted to be an artist. I started taking inspiration from digital imagery, combining video game worlds with real worlds and really playing around with how much of a photograph needs to be created from reality to be considered a photograph. Around 2012, there was a real shift in the photography world of defining what photography was—phone photography was getting really popular. All my teachers would say, “Oh, you took it on a phone? It’s not a photo. Anyone could take that. You have to take it with a real camera, or you have to take it on film for it to be real.” I pushed back. A lot of my projects at the time were either phone photographs or manipulating photographs that include 3D imagery. It wasn’t until last year that I rediscovered machinima and game art, took my photographic eye, and applied it to virtual worlds. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/sfweb_05-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/sfweb_07-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/sfweb_04-scaled.jpg) Carson's large format photography work. ***You studied at ArtCenter for both your BFA and your MFA. How do you see your practice being shaped by both these programs and these curriculums?*** ArtCenter has definitely helped me to analyze my artwork from every single angle. One of the downsides, though, is that ArtCenter is also a very commercial school. You’re only able to convince people that what you’re doing is good is when you can convince people that there’s either an audience or money in it. When I was doing game art, no one was taking me seriously. And then when I was like, *Oh, no, I’m doing machinima. Here’s the history of the medium*. Once I did one piece in machinima, and people were on edge. And then I got it at the Milan Machinima Festival. People were like, *Oh, this is a thing.* The plight of any game artist convinces people that game arts is a thing, or it’s also the inverse of just accepting that some people will never accept game art as a thing and instead of focusing on people who know about games. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/CarsonLynn_Still1-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/CarsonLynn_Still2-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/CarsonLynn_Still3-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/CarsonLynn_Still4-scaled.jpg) Stills from "Walking Simulator," a game and series of photographs "inspired by the common video game glitch that occurs when there is no skybox present; the sky turns into a repeating pattern of what is visible." ## **DIGITAL LIGHT** ***Was there a moment that marked the shift from working in more traditional photography to photographing within the game space?*** I hear people refer to photography as a lens-based medium. I always take offense to that. Many people don’t use lenses in photogram work or creative darkroom work. If I go into a video game and I take a photograph, there’s no lens there, but why should I be excluded from the definition of photography? I consider photography more of a light-based medium. I even would go so far as to say virtual light is part of that. In high school, I learned about tricolor separation, a technique where you take three photos, one with a red filter, a blue filter, and a green filter. You then recombine them to create a complete color image with bizarre, layered rainbow colors. It was how they made color photography before the invention of color film. That was the first time I thought about manipulating light. I revisit tricolor separation quite often because it has such a unique visual style to it. I’ve been experimenting with being that in games that have a day-night cycle. You can get this weird gradation of colors. Especially when you zoom in to 100%, you get these little differences in the image’s noise. You zoom in, and it’s this entire rainbow gradient. Tricolor separation images taken in real life pose an interesting problem: you need to keep the camera still during each of the three exposures. So, if you want to take a tricolor photo and utilize the movement of the sun, you have to wait for the sun to move. However, many games either have a truncated day-night cycle, or allow you to move the sun where you want it. Your camera never moves without your input, so it’s much easier than taking these images in real life. But also, these images can feel a bit too perfect; too clean. When you use physical captures for tricolor photography, you can zoom in to the pixel level and see that every single pixel has a rainbow hue. The camera captures even the slightest quantum change in light, which is not something video games can emulate yet. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/nwgzpng_07-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/nwgzpng_06-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/nwgzpng_03-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/nwgzpng_02-scaled.jpg) Tricolor separation ***How has the landscape of Southern California impacted your work?*** The mountains of Southern California definitely have an impact on me. I grew up on the side of a mountain, higher up. You can see more mountains in the distance. I remember one particular moment of watching the mountains as the fires came by, and you could see the fire going by and the smoke coming off of it. A couple years ago, I went to Pennsylvania for a vacation. I was like, “Everything so flat. There are no mountains. What’s going on?” The presence of those mountains is one reason I like video game landscapes so much, especially in games like *Destiny*. They take extreme care in making sure that the landscapes can almost work as waypoints. In some of the developer commentary videos that they’ve posted, they refer to these landscapes as postcards, where essentially you get to a location, and then you look out, and you see the giant landscape in front of you. Then there might be a building often at a distance that has light from it. That’s the postcard shot. *Destiny* and the *Halo* games have also been very aware of the impact of landscapes. It was *Halo 2*, which first introduced the lowered reticle. The aiming reticle is not in the center of the screen. It’s slightly lower, which means that the gun model is not completely in your view. But also, you can see more of the landscape. In *Halo 3*, the landscapes become a lot more developed. They introduced this lowering of the reticle so that you can see more of the landscape. It’s also because you get a higher, vertical view. So, if there’s something up above, you’re able to see it more clearly. There’s a photographer named [Bryce Bischoff](http://www.bricebischoff.com/?ref=killscreen.com), who did this series called Bronson Caves, where he basically went to these man-made caves in LA and created ghost images. They’re 15-minute exposures. He dressed himself up in these giant sheets of colored cardstock and would dance around and do his performances. These multicolored ghosts are supposed to represent the ghosts of the movies that had been shot at these caves. The old *Batman* series was shot there, as well as a bunch of other old western films. It showed me how much you can push photography, how much you can glitch photography when you use it in an unintended way. A lot of my work earlier on was about glitching photography, even the definition of photography. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/fictionhearted_06-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/fictionhearted_05-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/fictionhearted_04-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/fictionhearted_03-scaled.jpg) "Fictionhearted," which "focuses on our obsessions with symbols and avatars" to create "something that does not ... establish a hierarchy between virtual and physical, but instead utilizes the spaces between discernible contexts to spawn new fictions." ## **THE BIASES IN LANDSCAPES** ***The history of landscape photography is strongly tied to the history of colonialism, of conquest, and in American landscape photography, the idea of the ‘manifest destiny. It seems that landscape photography is a neutral art, but in reality, it isn’t. What are the specific ways you see technologies, narrative strategies, and landscapes in video games as non-neutral?*** In reality, anything that is created by a human is not neutral. Many game creators treat games as this space that shouldn’t be intruded on by outside parties. So you get this feedback loop of, “Oh, we’ve been doing this, and we’ve been doing this, and we’ve been doing this.” And then people don’t think about why. *No Man’s Sky* doesn’t think about the colonial aspects of going to a planet with a name, then discovering it, and then naming it your own. It’s weird, too, because you see the artifacts of other civilizations there. You look at that and go, oh, well, this mine now. *Minecraft* has a little bit of that too, especially with the villages, or you can go in and raze a village. And take all the resources. *You never think, Oh, what I’m doing is wrong somehow.* Yeah, a lot of game mechanics are treated as being neutral in that way. But in reality, they are much more loaded. I think my work is a critique of *some* game systems. Game systems are not neutral. Some systems need to be addressed. Because I feel like many games are like, *Oh, well, all first-person shooters have sprinting. So, we need to sprint.* Can that be done in a more interesting way, or can this be done in a way that is more accessible? Every game system should be open to being examined for change, but it’s a case-by-case basis. You can make an argument for some of the game systems that I like. Like the first-person shooter, you could say, why does it need to be a shooter or something like that? Why does there need to be violence at all? There’s something about those games that are appealing to me. I don’t know if I’m ready to critique that aspect of it yet. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/h2videomainv2114.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/h2videomainv2190-1.jpg) Stills from "Oddball," a machinima film with all footage taken from Halo 2. ***How does your creative process usually start?*** Normally, I find a technique that I find some sort of aesthetic interest in. Then I go from there. With [*Oddball*](https://carsonlynn.com/Oddball-2019?ref=killscreen.com), it was that I could remove the HUD (heads up display) in the game through this particular mod. Then it was exploring what I could do with that from there. That’s been my artistic practice for a while, where I basically find a technique and then explore it. Then I figure out the concept I want to portray with that technique afterward. That started with photography, where I find a Photoshop filter or something weird to do with the photograph or the camera. After experimenting with that for a while, I think about what I want to say with this technique. That’s been mostly working for me. There are some instances where I find a technique, and I’m like, *Okay, this is great. What can I do with this?* And then I cannot find a way to create a theme or a reason for that technique to exist. Then that goes on the back burner. My thesis show[ *I Want* ](https://carsonlynn.com/I-Want-2020?ref=killscreen.com)uses the normal mapping colors. That started back in 2016 as a photo project because Photoshop released the filter where you could turn a photo into a normal map. I just like playing around with that. I really like the way this bluish lavender color was something that was underrepresented in art. It provided this soft palette that I haven’t really experimented with before. I tried combining it with film photography and getting these weird textures. But it wasn’t clicking. It was only until *I Want* where I discovered a mod that I could implement into the games and create that visual style on the fly that I thought, *Oh, I can combine this with machinima. It can play into the idea of what’s going on underneath these games.* It’s revealing of how the games work. Then I started playing around with that and bringing in the color palette to the concept. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/h2videomainv2194-1.jpg) "Oddball" appropriates text from real conversations between Halo players, taken from YouTube videos uploaded between 2006 - 2010. ***Your machinima film, Oddball, utilizes found text of people playing Halo 2\. What was your process for this—specifically, how did you go about incorporating text, silence, and image for this piece?*** *Oddball* first started as this ambient landscape shots of these *Halo 2* multiplayer maps. I decided to focus on the homophobic chats that I’ve encountered in these games. I was thinking about how *Halo* has a text feature that is normally used for the kill theme, showing X player killed X player. The way that text comes on screen—it pops on, stays for a second, and then slowly fades away. There’s part of that felt like this, being there, where it hits you and then fades away, but it’s still kind of there. So I re-created the text in Adobe Premiere to match this effect. That was a big moment for me, using the actual game systems to decide its aesthetics, rather than putting my own aesthetic in. I’ve been beginning to use a lot more text in my work. Using the game systems to the side also makes it so that the text fits with the world. The game developers chose that color text for a reason; it fits really well with the color palette of the game. It’s visible pretty much every time you look at it, except maybe when you look at the sky. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/90C6561-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-10-at-11.22.54-AM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ## **THE ORIGINS OF I WANT** ***I Want was an online show due to the pandemic, but it was originally intended to be a six-channel video installation. At what point in your process do you decide the final form or medium of a project?*** *I Want* was my graduate thesis show at ArtCenter. The installation was bound to the room that I had been given to have my thesis show in. That influenced how I did the project. I thought, *Okay, how can I show this in a room that size?* How many TVs do I have access to? I was supposed to have my final review on the 18th of March. We closed our school on the 14th of March. So I thought to put the projects in unity and remake the building, and then put the videos up, and then I can work on it through there.” Once I had the base of this re-creation of this building, I started incorporating the concepts that I was exploring in the project or in those videos. I then brought them into the virtual installation because I was much more open. I had all these options to me outside of the gallery. It doesn’t have to be a courtyard that exists outside of the physical gallery. It could be a giant rainbow landscape that you can wander around in. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/3-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/2-scaled.jpg) "I Want," a six-channel video installation which asks, if it is "enough to just inject queerness into the code of the game." ***What were the concepts you wanted to explore in I Want? I’m especially interested in the idea of refusal—of using technologies in ways that they’re not meant to be used?*** A lot of that has to do with the glitch and refusal, especially in terms of the glitch in relationship to machinima. *Halo 2* machinima was mostly only possible due to a glitch where you could get rid of your weapon. That allowed you to open up the entire screen to create videos with. The project’s inspiration was this moment where you can throw out your weapon, refuse to give into the game systems, and instead use the game for something else. It was also inspired by a particular moment I had while doing a raid in *Destiny 2*, where raids are these six-player high-level activities where it has to be super tactical. You have a lot of communication between people. I was wandering past the landscape. Then I stopped and looked at it, and I sat there for a little bit. So, I was mesmerized by the landscape. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/7-scaled.jpg) Digital renderings of the installation of "I Want." Many of the landscapes in *Destiny 2* were inspired by Caspar David Friedrich and the sublime artistic movement. I was admiring this landscape. And then a player came up to me and was like, *Hey, we’re playing. Get moving*. But he also had a couple homophobic slurs in there because apparently, sitting around makes you gay, which was a moment where I thought, *Oh, is this not normal—to want to sit and enjoy a landscape.* The motif of stopping and smelling the flowers is the impetus for *I Want*. But it also spawned out of introspection as to why I like the avatars that I like so much. If a game allows me to hide my face, I always hide the face of the avatar. I like giant, bulky armors that never show signs of the human on the inside. I was looking down like, *Oh, you think that could be for a reason. I’m hiding from something.* That’s why there are images of my *Dark Souls* avatar and my *Skyrim* avatar, and then the *Halo avatar* because they all have these big bulky armors that have no sign of the human underneath. They’re all “edgelord” exteriors that are meant to shield from potential damage. Why do I gravitate towards that when I know so many other players create themselves in the game? And then they go around and ask themselves, versus me and, I don’t want to be this. “In reality, anything that is created by a human is not neutral. Many game creators treat games as this space that shouldn’t be intruded on by outside parties. So you get this feedback loop of, *Oh, we’ve been doing this, and we’ve been doing this, and we’ve been doing this.* And then people don’t think about why.” ## **THE GLIMMER IN THE GLITCH** ***I love the idea of the glitch being a tool for liberation. Are there other examples of glitches in games that you’re experimenting with at the moment?*** There’s a glitch where it repeats the pixels that you see. It repeats them over and over again. That was the inspiration for one of my photography projects, *Walking Simulator*, which I then took those photographs and turned into textures. But then I made a game that uses that glitch. Wherever you look, it fills in textures based on whatever pixels you are looking at. So, you’re able to create your own abstractions with it. It also depends on how fast your computer is and how big the resolution of your screen is. Everyone has a different experience with it. There are these specific glitches in *Halo 2* called super bounces, where essentially you walk into a corner for a specific amount of time, and then you fall down. For some reason, the game doesn’t know how to calculate your change in elevation. So, it pushes you up to the very top of the map. Those glitches, you can use that to then get out of bounds and explore different things. In a lot of older games, it’s like, “Oh, I can explore these weird, unfinished areas, these things that aren’t meant to be explored.” *Destiny 2* is full of glitches, which I feel like some people don’t like, but that’s probably the main reason I like it so much. There are weird holes in geometry that you can just jump into pretty easily. It’s like no one playing normally would find it, but you have to be looking for it. Then all of a sudden, you’ll find this hole. You can just go in there and see how the actual game is made, and landscapes are crafted. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/90C6639-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-10-at-11.23.59-AM-scaled.jpg) ***What are you working on now?*** I’m doing a project about homophobia in game spaces. One of my teachers said, *Well, why do the words hurt you so much if you’re also getting killed in the game?* I’m like, *Those are two completely different things.* The violence is not something that gets desensitized, but it’s a part of the game mechanic. If there wasn’t any violence involved or anything like that, there would still be the same core mechanics. But the language is something that passes through every single game. It’s something that seeps into your psyche, causing internalization of homophobia and stuff like that. So, it’s something very different from virtual fake violence versus real, vocal violence. --- ### Credits Interview conducted in November 2020\. Edited and condensed for clarity. ### Links [Carson’s website](https://carsonlynn.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Katy Pritchett](http://www.katypritchett.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Nicole He on talking to computers URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/nicole-he-on-talking-to-computers/ Last updated: 2025-01-08T22:36:00.000Z [Nicole He](http://nicole.pizza/?ref=killscreen.com) is a creative technologist whose work lives in the space between video games, physical computing, and witty conceptual art. With experience advising projects for Kickstarter and imagining projects for Google, she’s programmed AI to converse with Billie Eilish for *Vogue*, physical sensors that help users swipe on a dating app and a Twitter bot that regularly photographs her growing fig plant. As Nicole embarks on two long-term interactive projects—one is an arts-funded experimental game that uses voice technology, and the other is a commercial indie game—she finds herself more and more interested in immersing herself within the world of games. Here, we speak with Nicole about what distinguishes the industry of video games and that of creative technology, the particularities of one’s voice as a method to activate technology, and how behind every digital project is a living, breathing human. *This episode was hosted by Jamin Warren, founder of Killscreen.* [*Music by Nick Sylvester*](https://www.tiktok.com/@nickgodmode?ref=killscreen.com)*.* ### Francis Tseng: Towards just futures through simulation URL: https://www.killscreen.com/francis-tseng-towards-just-futures-through-simulation/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T03:49:50.000Z [](https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://killscreen.com/francis-tseng/) *Simulations offer us a way to understand the world we live in. Sometimes, they allow us to critique the present; other times, they let us imagine alternate futures. Straddling design, games, activism, and research,* [*Francis Tseng*](https://frnsys.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*‘s work does both. In 2016, Francis made* [*The Founder*](https://thefounder.biz/play/?ref=killscreen.com)*, a web-based game that ushers players through the founding of an imagined Silicon Valley startup. Accented by a cheery color palette and narrative design steeped in satire, players are led through a multi-level decision-making process that poignantly mirrors capitalism’s far-reaching presence in our lives.* *Francis has taught courses on game design at the New School, worked on interactive media projects for* [*The New Inquiry*](https://thenewinquiry.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*, and now researches at the* [*Jain Family Institute*](https://www.jainfamilyinstitute.org/?ref=killscreen.com)*.* *We spoke with Francis about what a game’s ‘God view’ can reveal about real-world power dynamics, the possibilities and terrors of machine learning, and the entangling of critique and imagination.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Francis_11-scaled.jpg) ## **SIMULATION AS EDUCATION** ***When did you know you wanted to have a creative practice in your life?*** Growing up, I always wanted to play video games. I have distinct memories of my dad growing up playing the early *Civilization* games as well as *Dark Castle*. But my parents also wouldn’t let me get a console. It was that kind of household. Many people I grew up with had Nintendos, and we had a family PC, so I could get some games for that. But gaming didn’t become a really big part of my childhood until a bit later than most people in my generation. The most creative outlets growing up were things like Legos—so many building worlds and making up my own stories. That became one of the main ways that I related to the world. Over time, I was drawn to projects that would let me exercise that. ***Which games and artists did you absorb growing up?*** This was when AOL chat rooms were big. As you surf through those, you encounter a lot of people who do things like role-playing. I would hop in and lurk and see what was going on, though I was never a very active participant. At some point, I did start playing video games, and that became a very big influence, things like *Final Fantasy VII* (the remake came out recently, so there’s been a lot of nostalgia around that for me this past year!), or *Age of Empires*. I have a distinct memory of my dad playing it himself, and there was a teacher parent-meeting at school, and he tried to pitch to the teacher to use this game to teach history. Games had this secondary educational effect in that way. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/the_founder_office_map.jpg) The office map in "The Founder," Francis' dystopian business simulator game. It also became clear that games are a really important way of forming people’s ideas of how the world works. It was not merely recreation, but people build these understandings and mental models about how history, nations, militaries, and economics work. That made it clear that these more systemic understandings are important. As I learn more about history and how inaccurate these games can be, I realized that games became a way for both reinforcing these hegemonic ideas of how these systems work and how they should work and can work. In *Civilization*, you could pick different governments. It seemed like those were the only possible ones that could ever exist. If you chose, say, anarchism, it would be that the government was overthrown… it was always a bad state of things, and you had to quickly restore order. That helped me understand video games—and media in general—as sites that inform our ideas, and they become deeply embedded, especially at a young age. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/the_founder_technologies-scaled.jpg) Design for imagined technologies in "The Founder." ***How has studying cognitive neuroscience in undergrad impacted your current practice?*** I was a really bad student in school. I originally applied as an economics major, but I was also interested in design and general behavior. Economics has a very baked-in set of ideas on how people behave or what drives people’s decisions. Design was becoming more flexible in understanding that people behave differently in different contexts. There are broad values in different cultures, which means that one understanding of an economy doesn’t necessarily apply to another place or people. Cognitive neuroscience felt like a way to explore that without getting bogged down by these other disciplines set on assumptions on behavior. I’ll be honest. I don’t think I got that out of the program. But that desire to understand behavior and all its different forms it’s persisted through. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Francis_04-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Francis_08-scaled-e1606894237824.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Francis_09-scaled.jpg) ***In what ways do you think about the relationship between critique and imagination with respect to games?*** Games and simulations are pretty synonymous. For that category of interactive media, there are two kinds of ways that they can be valuable. I’ve found the process of developing games and simulations to be the most useful—especially really detailed simulations—because you have to be explicit about how whatever system you’re simulating works. You can’t make any hand-waving assumptions. Once you start to dig into the material, you realize how much you don’t know. So the process of developing a simulation is similar in that respect. That’s one side of it. The other side is the actual experience of playing a game or simulation. Putting you in a decision-making position can be really important. Sometimes, when we talk about decisions that other people make, it’s hard to really understand the context in which that decision was made, and what the competing interests and considerations were, and so on. Video games can help situate someone in that decision making context in a better way. That’s what I had in mind when I made *The Founder*. It wasn’t meant to say that Silicon Valley people are evil because I don’t think that is useful. That doesn’t provide any path to actually dealing with the issue at hand. *The Founder* exists more to show that you’re going to adopt these malicious behaviors within a certain context or situation. It’s not about removing a person from power. Still, it’s about effecting a more systemic change that doesn’t put people in that situation where these malicious decisions are rational or necessary in a perverse way. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Francis_05-scaled.jpg) ## **STARTING UP WITH THE FOUNDER** **What was the development process for *The Founder* like? You note that Sim City inspired you—what did you take from that game, and what aspects did you leave behind?** I lived in the Bay Area very briefly. When we first moved there, I was interviewing at different companies—talking to founders and trying to get hired–so I saw that aspect of it too. I worked at Ideo, a design firm that has relationships with many of these big tech companies in Silicon Valley. The tech culture of San Francisco was another exposure I had to it—people would only talk about their startups at parties \[laughs\]. When I originally came up with the idea for the game, it was much more benign and simple. I had wanted it to be a mobile game, so the first year or so of development, I was making it in Unity. I had a lot of frustration with Unity as a platform, though, because I don’t think it’s really well-tailored to that kind of game. I was constantly worrying about what platforms it would be on, how people would access the game. I decided that making it a web game would be easier because anyone with a browser could play. I was more comfortable with all the coding and tools for browsers. Simulations have this top-down “God” view. I understand that—when you’re dealing with a big system, the most intuitive way to do it is from a system-level view. What I liked about Silicon Valley or startup founders as a topic is that making that game from a “god view” is part of the critique: these founders have a disproportionate amount of power in deciding what happens within these companies. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/the_founder_character_design_2.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/the_founder_dog_animation_2-e1606894308183.gif) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/the_founder_doggo.gif) Character design for "The Founder." Part of what draws people to startup culture is this feeling that you’re part of something that’s growing and progressing. That’s why there are these upgrade mechanics and pathways. When you have a character and unlock these skills over time, you’re invested in the character in the same way you’re invested in this company, it becomes part of your identity. You have a much stronger attachment to it. Also, the “god” view works not only on a mechanic level but also as part of the critique I was trying to show. ***What was the process like for conceiving the illustrative and aesthetic features of the game?*** A lot of the aesthetic, especially the 3D stuff, was mostly practical—low-poly modeling. I have very basic 3D modeling skills, and it was about what I could accomplish. Then the simple color palettes were also easy to work with. I made the employees cone-shaped figures because I had no idea how to make them humanoid, and animating that would have been really tricky. That was why they’re cone-shaped people \[laughs\]. In terms of the interface, I wanted to make it look really naïve and cheery, and colorful because I thought the contrast with what the actual material of the game was dealing with was really interesting and also reflective of how a lot of Silicon Valley web design works. It’s meant to look very cheery and friendly, but usually, the actual workings behind the scenes are much more insidious. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/the_founder_custodial.gif) GIF capture from The Founder. ***What constitutes success in The Founder in your eyes? I imagine it might be different for players because each player has their distinct priorities.*** When I originally made the game, I didn’t want there to be any win condition. The point was that this is a system that expects endless expansion and growth, so there’s never really an end to the game. You just constantly have to hit that return rate. Then, I felt obligated to have some end in it. I thought it would be interesting to have that ending become this true ending, where you develop an AI that’s supposed to increase the company’s productivity and profitability until it ends up replacing you. I don’t know if that would be a success in the game, but it’s the only ending as far as I remember. The point of the game is no one really wins in that situation. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/the_founder_old_minigame_design.gif) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/the_founder_event-1-e1606896079799.png) Minigame design for "The Founder." ## **INTERACTIVE FORMS OF CRITIQUE** ***I’m also curious about your involvement in The New Inquiry and the different interactive design projects that you worked on there. What led you to decide that certain projects would need an interactive component versus a more traditional, written critique?*** When I was there, we developed this idea that we ended up calling rhetorical technology or rhetorical software. The idea there was that these software projects could embody a critique in the same way a written one can. Written critiques can have a very powerful impact, but software critiques or rhetorical software can have different kinds of impacts that feel a bit more direct. The primary example of that was with the [Bail Bloc](https://bailbloc.thenewinquiry.com/?ref=killscreen.com) project because it’s at once a critique of the bail industry and the prison system, the justice system, and at the same time, it actually has functionality as part of that critique that’s meant to alleviate some of the harm caused by the criminal justice system. Joining direct action with critique was one way to summarize the guiding principles of those projects. We were contrasting the gulf between the criminal justice system—that, with cash bail especially, criminalizes poverty—and the cryptocurrency world, where obscene amounts of wealth were (and are) generated through currency more fictitious than the kinds we’re used to… Basically creating wealth by doing nothing. The people who get wealthy off cryptocurrency are those already well-insulated from the criminal justice system. Bail Bloc tries to close that gulf in some way by tapping into the money the cryptocurrency space was generating and redirecting it towards bail, by doing “nothing.” We were also interested in using the computing power of institutions that may have some complicity in the prison industrial complex (for instance, universities with pensions that have investments in private prisons). Cryptocurrencies were trendy in mainstream media at the time, but talking about the bail system wasn’t. Connecting cryptocurrency to bail gave journalists a hook to report on a topic they normally wouldn’t, and get it in front of people who normally wouldn’t seek it out, like on a cryptocurrency news site. The hope is that the project not only exposes people to this critique and changes their minds but also actually bails people out of jail. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/bailbloc.png) "Bail Bloc." ***What draws you to the world of AI and machine learning? Especially with regards to your project, Conspiracy Bot?*** I became really fascinated with machine learning in 2014\. I was especially interested in how natural language processing could be applied to journalism and the news. I had a very hard time keeping up with the news regularly—if you miss stories as they come out, later stories make little sense unless you spend time catching up on them. I thought I could make a system that would keep up with the news for me, and then when I was ready to read it, it would provide a summary. It seemed ripe for some of these technologies in other spaces within journalism—dealing with comment sections, for instance. Over time, I became very cynical about AI. I still am. These technologies are expensive to develop and deploy. You need large research budgets, a lot of computing power, and so on, and it seems like it’s going to disproportionately benefit people who already have a lot of resources and power. We’ve pretty much seen that to be the case, so that’s one reason I’ve become sour on the topic. There’s a lot of really important work that people are doing in pushing back against that, to trying to come up with ways that are more socially valuable applications of the technology. [*Conspiracy Bot*](https://conspiracy.thenewinquiry.com/?ref=killscreen.com) was made after Trump was elected. I found it interesting that in the same way we deride conspiracy theorists for having these misinformed and actively harmful understandings of the world, AI, through its own shortcomings, can develop conspiracy theories equally as harmful. The idea there was to use the fact that a lot of these object recognition and facial recognition algorithms have pretty high error rates—to use them as if they didn’t. Those error rates function as a conspiracy, seeing patterns where there aren’t really any. I haven’t really done much AI work lately because I’m pretty pessimistic about it, and I’m always worried that any work I do would be used in a harmful way. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Francis_03-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Francis_13_bonus_scallions-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ***You mentioned that there were some cases of people who you think use AI technology for a socially-just reason.*** Medical applications in terms of image recognition, identifying tumors early—those seem like reasonably good applications. I’m interested in when people do aikido—flipping the opponent’s momentum against them. A couple of weeks ago, people were using facial recognition technology to identify police officers in streaming footage and stuff and track police officers with, especially violent behaviors. Those are promising applications. I should also mention a project I worked on with the artist Sean Raspet called [matter.farm](http://matter.farm/about/?ref=killscreen.com), which was a critique of how pharmaceutical R&D works, but also potentially where AI can help challenge that. One of the given reasons for why drugs are so expensive here is that drug development is costly, which it is. It’s so hard to find compounds that actually have a pharmaceutical purpose. There are 10 to the 60th power possible chemicals, which are more atoms than make up all planet earth. It’s an obscenely large number. Essentially, what the pharmaceutical industry does is have to sort through this massive amount of compounds. As you can expect, there’s a lot of research effort into figuring out if AI can help identify promising new compounds. We took some of those algorithms and built a system that would continuously propose new ones. A recent court decision has now changed this, but at the time, our understanding was that if you publish those compounds on a website, then they’ll count as prior art. This means that if it does turn out to be a useful compound, a pharmaceutical company can’t patent it, and it remains in the public domain. That was the general idea—the fact that you can use AI for public research and protect the privatization of socially valuable things. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/matter_farm_2.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/matter_farm.png) "matter.farm." ## **INFINITY AND ASYMMETRY** ***On your blog, you*** [***propose a version***](https://spaceandtim.es/etc/the%5Finfinite%5Fccg/?ref=killscreen.com) ***of Magic: The Gathering that incorporates an infinite set. What do you find limiting about the game’s existing version?*** *Magic: The Gathering* was a big part of my childhood. I still play with my brother. It’s a relatively limited ruleset, but it can be endlessly entertaining. Even with all the variation that does happen, it can feel stale after a while. That’s why they keep making new cards and adding new mechanics—they don’t want the player base to get bored. I like games that are unpredictable in a way and pressure you to think on your feet or strategize on your feet. I like the creativity that comes with coming up with new strategies for a game like *Magic*. In a way, it’s a lot like programming. Someone wrote a blog post about how you can make a computer out of the rules of *Magic: The Gathering*. People have done all sorts of really wild algorithmic stuff with *Magic*, coming up with some of the largest possible numbers. I thought it’d be interesting to have a meta-layer to that in which new rules and new mechanics and new cards are constantly printed or generated, such that you can never settle on a single strategy because the landscape is always changing. You would have to be really dynamic in your thinking. I enjoy that challenge. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/card_generator.jpg) An imagined infinite set for Magic: "The Gathering." ***You’ve also explored what you call an ‘asymmetrical game.’ What would it mean to include multiple lenses within a single game?*** Usually, when you play a game, it’s really limited to one perspective, in a sense. For instance, with *Sim City*, you’re usually playing as the city planner. You can go into an individual resident’s view, but you don’t really have any meaningful decision-making power in that context. I thought it would be interesting to show two games that look like they are two separate games, but they are one and part of the same game. Imagine in an arcade setting. You have one half of the room in this game that has something to do with finance or trading, and there’s another side of the game that’s more *Sims*\-like, more at the level of a household or individual. People playing that finance game—they’re having a blast, they’re trying to maximize their rate of return. Their decisions in that game, however, are screwing over the people that are playing this other one, to link these two systems that are presented as isolated and actually have them influence each other directly. The asymmetry there is that the people in finance have, without really realizing that that’s an important part of it, a ton of influence over the *Sims-like* side of the room. People on the *Sims*\-like side of the room basically have no influence over how the finance people are playing. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Francis_07-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Screen-Shot-2020-12-02-at-3.14.16-PM-scaled.jpg) ***Can you tell us about your current role at the Jain Family Institute? Generally, how you see your research practice influencing your creative one?*** At JFI, I have two main roles. One is more technical, building tools, and visualizations for ongoing projects there. Lately, that’s been a lot of mapping visualizations, satellite imagery stuff, which is creative in a sense, not in the same way as designing a game, but it is pretty satisfying. Especially because the topics they work on are important to me, so I’m happy to contribute to that. The other side is the more open ended-research that I do. I want to understand the basis of production for all the material elements that make up our lives. I’m researching tetra chemicals in plastics, like climate controls. In particular, air conditioning is really interesting, especially with climate change and the role it has there. Then, remediation—how do we take all these damages, degraded landscapes, displaced peoples, all that and turn the clock back on that? What’s the process for reconciliation, remediation, regeneration? This connects to all the speculative future work that I’ve done. I really want to have a solid understanding of all the problems with how we produce our material lives today and what a more ecologically and socially-just version of that would look like in the future. What’s a rough sketch of a path to that? My focus is mostly on the engineering and technological side of it—what technologies compose that world. That’s kind of where my head is at now. There’s a game that I’ve wanted to make for several years, but I haven’t had a concrete idea. It’s called *Fugue*, as in repetitions of a theme in music and as a dissociative state. The idea there is to tackle some of what I’m researching now. I’m interested in competing theories of change. Most of the internet arguments we see, at least on the left, are competing theories of change. For instance, people getting angry at others for pursuing electoral routes, or other people who would rather focus on mutual aid or receding into your own community as ways to better lives and a better world. This game is how I want to explore those two sides of the world. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Francis_02-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Francis_06-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted in November 2020. ### Links [Francis’ website](https://frnsys.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Francis’ blog](https://spaceandtim.es/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Francis on Are.na](https://www.are.na/francis-tseng?ref=killscreen.com) ### Milan & Neilson Koerner-Safrata: The myth and poetry of game engines URL: https://www.killscreen.com/milan-neilson-koerner-safrata/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T04:15:41.000Z *They’re identical twin brothers, but be sure not to confuse* [*Milan* ](https://twitter.com/milanimalism?ref=killscreen.com)*and* [*Neilson Koerner-Safrata*](https://twitter.com/neilsonks?ref=killscreen.com) *for a dynamic duo. Though the pair houses their game work under the studio* [*SCRNPRNT*](http://scrnprnt.ca/?ref=killscreen.com)*, they are “more like two parallel game designers,” Neilson explains. Between the two, however, they’ve utilized the game engines they grew up with in innovative ways—refashioning Age of Empires into an anthropogenic critique, imagining Counter-Strike’s Dust II in a playerless future, and more.* *We spoke with Milan and Neilson as they debated the role of games in society, championed the poetic elements of game engines and virtual worlds, and how they’ve learned to ‘unlearn’ all they’ve been taught about games.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_0930-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Screen-Shot-2020-11-23-at-10.06.42-AM-scaled.jpg) Neilson (above) and Milan (below). ***Can we begin by talking about your upbringing and when you first knew that you wanted to be a creator or an artist?*** **Milan Koerner-Safrata**: I was sucked into lush game worlds, like [*Machinarium*](https://amanita-design.net/games/machinarium.html?ref=killscreen.com) by Amanita Studios. When it came to creating those game worlds myself, I realized that the gargantuan process of making an environment was less interesting than what happens inside it. I moved from a more visual fine arts perspective to think more about the logical ends and action space inside the game worlds. From then on, my engagement with games and reasons for making art inside them have been about re-investigating what was seductive about them when I was younger. I’m also thinking about creating games that are more reflective of mental space versus a physical environment. **Neilson Koerner-Safrata**: There is a common theme where we have an unlearning of what we saw was so enchanting about games. When I was 10, I thought my entire life would be making video games. We’re from the second generation of game developers, but many myths about game development persist… Things like it’s a new medium, and you can make your mark, and there’s so much that hasn’t been explored that hasn’t been done. We had to unlearn what was seductive and addictive about games when we were young. That’s why deconstruction is a tool that I commonly use when looking at games. There’s so much there, and we’re still trying to pick apart our early experiences to see what was exciting and interesting, instead of thinking of games as this new thing—for me at least, not for Milan. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/DustnetNeilsonKoernerSafrata1.png) Still from DUSTNET. ***Can you talk about the games from your childhood that marked your coming of age and how your work aims to deconstruct them?*** **Milan** *:* One of the biggest turning points was *Minecraft*, which is hugely commercially successful. It had that feeling of limitless potential built into the game system, and I could experience that as I played it. I got everything I wanted from the sense of big promising virtual worlds and the low-fi nitty-gritty. *Age of Empires* played a huge role in my childhood. Maturing past that into some more personal relationships in the game world, versus, in that example, an incredibly exploitative reality. **Neilson**: Our practice is about taking our digital and virtual experiences and trying to relate them back to our lived experience. Now, Microsoft is now trying to take *Minecraft* and pull it out of the computer to sell augmented reality products—whereas Milan wants to explore more of the interior experience. All games are kicking and screaming as they get pulled into the real world. They’re being forced out of their little shell, like *Minecraft* being used for commercial means. I’m interested in how the games from my youth are aging with me. *Age of Empires* is still an ongoing intellectual property that Microsoft develops and will potentially spawn my entire life, from *Age of Empires 1* to *Age of Empires 20.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/The-Garden-of-Earthly-Delights-SCRNPRNT-1.jpg) The Garden of Earthly Delights. ***Milan, you attended art school before going on to NYU’s Game Center. Neilson, you went through the more industry-oriented interactive media program at USC. How have these distinct tracks shaped your concepts of creation?*** **Neilson**: I’m part of the generation who said, “When I go to college, I want to get a game design degree because this is what I want to do.” I went through USC in their Interactive Media department. There are many great people there, but I was less sure about my desire to spend a lifetime making video games by the end of the program. That’s the unlearning I’m still trying to do, because that didn’t quite satisfy me. I’m looking for the part of the world where game design work then meets some larger, broader structure instead of the interior bubble. It’s part of a larger movement to fit game engines and digital experiences within larger systems. **Milan**: I spent a year at RISD before I transferred to Brown. When I was there, I began to feel like the center of any artistic practice I was in should understand the material. I was mostly doing abstract painting work, and I was enjoying the feeling of working with the media. It was drawing or painting; it was making marks… Small-scale stuff that would lead to larger impressions. At Brown, it was a mixture of things, but chiefly among those was Digital Language Arts, which is this interesting academic discipline that evolved out of hypertext writing. Much of the work being done in that space, like concrete poetry and hypertext writing, looked at the different material dimensions rather than the language and the text. Also, the whole group of people inheriting tools from this big tech explosion. The same way that concrete poets were taking apart typewriters and whapping the keys on paper. Coming from that program, I was carrying this feeling of, *What kind of small decisions can I make inside a game engine? What kind of materiality already exists there that can be operated on?* At NYU’s Game Design master’s program, I looked at doing these abstract smaller experiences, doing many prototypes there. The first big project that I did on a team was this Dada-influenced game that was mostly a collage piece where you’re stomping through these generated worlds, amassing items, and wading through a series of sprites. For me, that was throwing everything at the wall and seeing what would stick. Since then, I’ve been trying to pare down my ideas and look at games in their most abstract sense to see what kind of experiences I can recuperate. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Stellations7_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Stellations6_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Stellations5_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Stellations4_600x700_acf_cropped.png) Stellations. ## **SCRNPRNT AS A TESTING GROUND** ***What compelled you to start working as SCRNPRNT and say, “Okay, let’s start making things under this name?” I’m also curious about the name SCRNPRNT.*** **Milan**: It’s a play on \[the\] print screen \[key\], which we now realize was, unfortunately, a trendy start-up technique of removing vowels from a name \[laughs\]. **Neilson**: It has to do with the analog-digital interplay of screen printing as a practice, and the digital means of copying. **Milan**: The mechanical, repetitive nature of game development games and computers is what made us conceive of it as SCRNPRNT. It felt inevitable that we should come together and put our ideas under this umbrella. We were both unique in trying to come at games from different angles, even if we don’t necessarily agree. **Neilson**: It’s a testing ground as we continue exploring things. Milan’s current project is [*Stellations*](http://scrnprnt.ca/Stellations.html?ref=killscreen.com), and I’ve been working under the vector of [*DUSTNET*](http://scrnprnt.ca/DUSTNET.html?ref=killscreen.com) and [*The Garden of Earthly Delights*](http://scrnprnt.ca/TheGardenOfEarthlyDelights/?ref=killscreen.com), which are the deconstructions. I want to start moving away from the deconstructions and into the game engine explorations of simulation. I’m exploring real-time art and game engines as installations in an institutional context. **Milan**: Adopting the studio format for the sake of presenting games as arts felt important. I’m looking to do more traditional art-making and collage and copperplate etching. Having that housed under that name is important for me to have a certain professionalism about it to begin fleshing out this constellation of ideas. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/The-Garden-of-Earthly-Delights-SCRNPRNT-Install-1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/The-Garden-of-Earthly-Delights-SCRNPRNT-Install-2.jpg) The Garden of Earthly Delights. ***When working on projects, is there a conversation that’s happening; are you checking in with each other? I’m curious about the degree of collaboration when you’re working on something together.*** **Milan**: It’s mostly arguing about the way that the thing should work. With *DUSTNET*, I was repeatedly angry that Nielson wasn’t trying to create this Tower-of-Babel style thing on the online server. I wanted it to be a grotesque labyrinthine server. He was more like, “No, I’m going to play it straight.” **Neilson**: Arguably, we’re bad game designers. We’d rather dink around in game engines. Most of our conversations are hashing out more of, *Does this do what you want conceptually? Even if it’s not fun or it sucks, is it pushing its rhetorical point successfully?* These are usually most of the arguments that go on. **Milan**: We disagree on what the effect \[of projects\] should be. I thought that *DUSTNET*, more than anything, should be this great artifact. The effect Nielson was looking for was more of a playground XR. So I was already thinking about it as a 3D world versus a set of tools and platforms. **Neilson**: As you can tell, the collaboration’s very light. It’s mostly asking about opinion. Very rarely do we step into each other’s repositories and actually dink around with the code. That’s not to say it won’t happen. ***It seems strangely ideal that you both have your own lines of thought and ways of making things, but that you still also have each other as sounding boards. I had a question about how the general creative process begins, but I’m sure it’s very different for both of you.*** **Neilson**: This is actually a similarity between us. We both do start with a visual. Milan, would you agree with that? **Milan**: I find it hard to work on a project until it looks okay. I absolutely hate game engine default settings. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/DUSTNETServerEntrance.png) The server entrance for DUSTNET. ## **EDENS AND ABSTRACTION** ***Garden of Earthly Delights reimagines Age of Empires into a Hieronymous Bosch triptych. How did this combination come about?*** **Neilson**: It was a very rare collaboration between the two of us. **Milan**: My visual was getting the animals all frolicking together in the engine. Then, more of the Eden-esque idea came around. That’s how our ideas developed, and our ideas around the pastoral fantasy games started leaking in. Then Bosch, because why the fuck not? It’s iterative. The big shift was once we realized we wanted it to be less about the frolicking and more about the humans in the space doing the hunting. Then adjusting that to be the triptych after it happens. **Neilson**: Most games these days are image-making. Luckily, we come from a visual background in a sense. Visuals and image-making are the most rewarded part of the process. If you get a visual, the rest comes along. **Milan**: There is a cynical viewpoint of games that they are like systems that have skinning applied to them. I don’t agree with that—whatever the skinning, the framing, and the lens you use will have a huge impact on how the player receives the game. Having that be correct for me is more important than getting networked multiplayer because every multiplayer game has that. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/InstallationRender1Night.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/InstallationRender2Night.jpg) A 3D rendering of Lullaby installed. ***I noticed a monochrome, bare-bones aesthetic thread across some of your projects, and I’m curious to know if there’s a reason behind the stark black-and-white visuals.*** **Milan**: More than anything, it’s an aversion to the games that are trying to be representative. In the case of *DUSTNET* and *Stellations*, it’s about having this conception that the game is closer, down to the circuitry… Having an aesthetic that feels like how we imagine computers render environments as wireframes and polygons. Creative abstraction is huge. **Neilson**: Abstraction is huge. *DUSTNET’s* simple aesthetic felt closer to the server’s digital primitivism. Things like map editors of 3D cubes, spheres, and pyramids, or the basic game elements of air, water, lava. Playing with all these *Counter-Strike* things, where when they stepped into the space of Dust II that they remember from thousands of hours of playing the game, it doesn’t matter that it’s not wireframe. You still intuitively feel the shape and form of the map, even without the texture. That gets down to the idea that these spaces don’t function as their aesthetic rendering. Once you’ve spent enough time in these spaces, you can fill them out. You know the shape of the corner and a hallway, and you can walk through it blindfolded. **Milan**: The reason to do it black-and-white, in my case, is that there are features in games where you have UI elements, environments, text. But having linework and letters feels like everything exists in the frame together. The way that [*Kentucky Route Zero* ](https://store.steampowered.com/app/231200/Kentucky%5FRoute%5FZero%5FPC%5FEdition/?ref=killscreen.com)did their single-pixel thin lines and aliased edges. It feels like these things exist in the world together. For me, it’s important to try and feel that the renderer isn’t treating things differently in the game—like the way in *DUSTNET*, the chat feels like part of the world. Using 3D modeling software, as well as Adobe Illustrator, you have all these little outlines, and selectors, and wireframes—sometimes I look at that in the creative tool and think, “I want that to be how the game looks.” **Neilson**: The game engine defines the style. When you play *Counter-Strike*, you are actually playing the deeper meta game of the Source Engine. Gabe Newell said something like, “The only company we’ve ever met that kind of kicks our ass is our customers.” ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_0927-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Screen-Shot-2020-11-23-at-10.05.35-AM-scaled.jpg) ***Stellations is a game based on muscle memory and thought loops. How was this project conceived?*** **Milan**: I was thinking about what it was like to be trapped in game worlds. *Stellations* is about mapping this excessive energy that players bring to games. It’s about trying to look more at the process of play versus the actual goal-oriented play. Going forward, I’m wrapping it in this aesthetic of my maps or feedback loops, diagrammatic language. Still, it’s not about taking those diagrams at face value. It’s about how, by moving through them, you can internalize them. It’s 100% a kinesthetic experience. I led with the 800 Dash Challenge in [*Hyper Light Drifter*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/257850/Hyper%5FLight%5FDrifter/?ref=killscreen.com) because it was all about this incredible repetitive motion that was synced to a metronome pretty much. At one point, I was playing it with a metronome in the background so I could get the button presses right. That hypnotic element was very compelling to me. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/DustnetNeilsonKoernerSafrata2.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/DustnetNeilsonKoernerSafrata4.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/DUSTNETServerLargeBW.jpg) A 3D rendering of DUSTNET installed. ***Can you speak more about what you find significant about the emotional connection as one plays a game?*** **Milan**: We both grew up in engaging virtual worlds where you have lots of time and muscle memory and emotions wrapped up in that. There’s a whole generation of people that have grown up like this. There is lots to excavate there with how we’ve got these mental models floating in our head that are entire game worlds. Right now, I’m interested in reverse engineering that process of how people get to that point. In contrast, Neilson’s games have been looking at existing virtual worlds. I’ve had people tell me that with *Garden*, the experience of being back in *Age of Empires* is such a loaded gun. **Neilson**: You do believe there’s still a mythical element that lives somewhere in the ritual of game engines. I’m not on board with that reification idea… Anyway, Milan told me not to throw too many rocks while standing in a glass house \[laughs\]. **Milan**: I was speaking about psychogeographies of games, that’s one thing. I’m interested in thought loops and in the fact that games are this incredibly repetitive medium and wield this repetition so bluntly. I was also interested in poetic relationships between game loops and thought loops. That was my elevator pitch for *Stellations*—figuring out what that poetic relationship was. I’m still in the process of figuring out. At times I’ve thought about it as games I model, like how we learn and our brains are perfectly mapped to it. The spectrum, when Neilson talks about disenchantment—it’s that games are like a strawman. They’re another heuristic false consciousness, a way of misunderstanding the world. Whatever the truth is, or whatever particular game model happens to be—that’s not the point. The point is that something is gelling here and that’s what’s important is figuring out the aesthetics of that process. It’s like, why do we get to put on these rails; how do we get hooked into the loop? ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Screen-Shot-2020-11-23-at-10.06.11-AM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_0868-scaled.jpg) ***Which artists, game designers, studios, and thinkers serve as inspirations for you?*** **Milan**: *Minecraft*, *Starseed Pilgrim*, and *Tetris* allow you to have this discrete navigable world that people shape using the operations in the game. That design paradigm inspires me to no end. Some studios do work that’s more what I like to see in the arts, such as the [Playables](https://playables.net/?ref=killscreen.com) team—their work has a certain obliqueness. I want to play [*Promesa*](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1345370/Promesa/?ref=killscreen.com) as soon as possible. Games where they’re doing stuff that’s not as one-to-one logic, like player input, game output, put it in a spiral. I take inspiration from both camps. **Neilson**: We pay respect to the games industry’s true craftsmen who are creating phenomenal design experiences. That’s not our strength or interest. **Milan**: Right, I don’t want to make a game where the loop is perfect. I want to make a game where you’re trying to enter into the loop, about the experience of getting there. If I made a game that worked well as a game, I wouldn’t need to think so hard. I like [*Static*](https://ihavefivehat.itch.io/staticihavefivehat?ref=killscreen.com) by Dennis Carr. He’s a classmate I had at NYU. He made this incredibly loud, abrasive first-person shooter talking about some of the things I want to talk about in *Stellations*. But instead of flow as the golden promise of fun and challenge, it’s more like flow as anxiety. **Neilson**: I look mostly at people outside games still. I like the craftsmen, but video art is my true heart’s calling. **Milan**: You like Hito’s videos. **Neilson**: Oh, I love Hito. I saw [*Factory of the Sun*](https://www.moca.org/exhibition/hito-steyerl-factory-of-the-sun?ref=killscreen.com) in 2015 in Los Angeles. I was blown away. It was the first time I walked into a museum and seen video games, and they were situated as I had never seen them before, all these ideas that were being handled with such grace and witticism and humor. I’ve never seen anything like that before in a gallery. It stuck with me. *Factory of the Sun*, you can’t find it online. I’m still trying to find a copy. --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted in October, 2020\. Photographs of Neilson by Wade Montpellier, photographs of Milan by David Evan McDowell. ### Links [scrnprnt.ca](http://scrnprnt.ca/?ref=killscreen.com) [Milan Koerner-Safrata](http://milanks.com/?%5F%5Fcf%5Fchl%5Fcaptcha%5Ftk%5F%5F=501f2f53842eedc6d74b7202385c273a3989ff9f-1606098708-0-AbjWUB6mW6cjR9JFSEFTOC9hTJBzFde5SAGSEbAKaoruUDxsnWJp3QJSZInySEUHua-xeq6n7vwUxtMKn3V2WJ84tAhpFLPKk79MSxWS-HAeBssdRrIHfQkgaLAUojhAS3D4OoNWuCmruv4Ud0At70VpnB6-0XHynhYoFyGZwqRv9k7UfpDiaI%5F34n3AHqVlKbd6Bgk%5F5tE-e-Q3vLkF2ZxRZyWgngR9Xv%5FwYrwS4aAAyQC7hxMaZ9LLSsw9ri7TVfjRf93v6%5FkdwVnJfuFVNCuXtLjwje9d85nuSQWFIpUoEs3GBKxoSnoABacvGxvlklOC6x4AhVLVtDjs7fJcGsMWmIrKfdQHJQIrdKI5QDf4ZFsPf6Y2DpucSMBdT%5FxnY0KFvrCqXURBTP1zRNyRtkYbSeu7xM-%5F39jNu0qHGTFYiamPH26qiyQaZ2bY91YHRtyWOVMpcvnNO7jcbZ48xJzAuErZ8dZJs-nroA6vdHTWld98g91hXqrrMSCl8Rne0CR0JkiDGTgFewYZA2aYU7A&ref=killscreen.com) [Neilson Koerner-Safrata](http://neilsonks.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow SCRNPRNT on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/scrn%5Fprnt/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow SCRNPRNT on Twitter](https://twitter.com/SCRN%5FPRNT?ref=killscreen.com) ### Foreign Objects: Creating artifacts from our networked world URL: https://www.killscreen.com/foreign-objects/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T04:42:19.000Z *Composed roughly of an architect, a software developer, an art and tech writer, and an electronic engineer,* [*Foreign Objects*](https://www.foreignobjects.net/?ref=killscreen.com) *coalesced as a multi-disciplinary research and creative studio that explores what it means to live in a networked world. Through participatory workshops, designing games, and interactive installation spaces, Foreign Objects’ multifaceted portfolio brings us closer to critiquing through play the Internet’s strong presence in our lives.* *Their latest project, a web-based game called* [*Bot or Not*](https://www.foreignobjects.net/bot-or-not?ref=killscreen.com)*, challenges players to figure out if their online chat partner is—as its title suggests—a bot or not. Here, we speak with FO’s members based between Toronto and London about their origins at MIT, deception inherent in chatbot interfaces, and translating across creative disciplines.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/KILLSCREEN-3-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/KILLSCREEN-4-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Killscreen-6-1-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Killscreen-13-1-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ## **FEELING FOREIGN** ***Can everyone share a bit about their independent creative and intellectual practices outside of Foreign Objects?*** **Sam Ghantous (SG):** My background is in Architecture. I teach at universities between Canada and the US. My independent practice doesn’t have a particular name but generally deals with the entanglements between contemporary media and architecture. **Kalli Ratzepi (KR):** I work as a designer and a software engineer. I’m interested in questions about interfaces and going back and really reading the history of computation, and understanding the interfaces we interact with—their histories and how we can re-imagine them. **Agnes Cameron (AC):** My background is in electronic engineering. More broadly, I’m into computers through a real interest in simulation, which also bears an interest in games and zero player games and ideas about that. For the last year and a bit, I also had an independent technical consulting practice where I worked with artists to realize artworks. I work for the [Knowledge Futures Group](https://www.knowledgefutures.org/?ref=killscreen.com), which came out of the MIT Media Lab, where Kalli and I studied. They’re broadly working around semantic and decentralized web stuff, which is also something that I’m pretty into and interested in. I mostly do software development, but I’ve also had a past in fabrication and engineering. **Gary Zhang (GZ):** I originally studied painting, but broadly, my education is somewhere between that and literature and philosophy. I also freelance as a writer within art and technology—that cursed pairing. And an art practice that is adjacent to technology but a little bit more conceptual. At the moment, I’m interested in social infrastructure, especially around finance and insurance. I am a researcher at the [Berggruen Institute](https://www.berggruen.org/?ref=killscreen.com). I run a research cluster called Non-human Networks and Markets, which is part of a program called the Transformation of the Human, which is broadly art technology philosophy. Just trying to restart this great synthesis of sorts that started in the 60s. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Killscreen-10-1-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/KILLSCREEN-8-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped-1.jpg) ***How did Foreign Objects emerge? Were you influenced by existing collectives, or was a space that you needed to carve for yourselves—something you didn’t see in the world?*** **GZ:** We all met at MIT. Sam was already a year out of architecture and teaching by the time that the other three of us met at the same time as Agnes and Kalli were in the media lab. I was downstairs in the visual arts program in the same building, in the basement of the old media lab. We started as friends, really. It wasn’t obvious that we’d start working together. We’ve been friends for much longer than we’ve been working together. The [Decentralized Web Summit](https://www.decentralizedweb.net/?ref=killscreen.com) in 2018 was probably a big moment for us, both practically and methodologically. So meetings and also community-wise. That community brought us to that and continued to be the discourse and a group of people we would work amongst. **SG:** We should also acknowledge that we’re also two couples, maybe. \[Everyone laughs\] **GZ**: It’s like a long double date. **AC:** We didn’t name ourselves until quite a long time after. We did this first project, [Internet As a City](https://www.foreignobjects.net/internet-as-a-city?ref=killscreen.com), a facilitated game and workshop made for Decentralized Web Summit’s art track. Kalli and I had both been doing a lot of work in the crypto space. We had many frustrations with this idea of everyone inventing social systems and assuming that you can name a set of rules in a technology, and the social system will follow. We had been frustrated with that and wanted to trouble that a bit. The way we chose to do that was really to look at spatial practice. People have been thinking about how spaces could use rules and protocols to interact with one another for such a long time. We used that metaphor as a way to explore. You can make a structure, but it doesn’t mean that people will use it like that. So we brought people to collectively make all these spaces together. **SG:** It took you all finishing school for us to recognize that we all were in a sort of precarious situation when it came to visas and work, which prompted us to formalize this collaboration to practice. **AC:** The name Foreign Objects also had its roots in the office that Kalli and I shared, which our adviser used to refer to as the foreign office. I really trashed a whole day, very elaborately vinyl cutting the foreign office logo, sticking it on the glass. It’s still there because it doesn’t really come off. **GZ:** That was some kind of medium specificity fallacy in naming ourselves Foreign Objects, as though by identifying ourselves as by nature foreign in the US, that would by revealing that somehow change the situation, and we would no longer be subject to all of the pitfalls on that. We just ran out of Visas. It’s been impossible to get back in because all the Visas are on hold. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/KILLSCREEN-13-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Killscreen-7-1-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Killscreen-11-1-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ## **INTERDISCIPLINARY EXPLORATIONS OF THE INTERNET** ***There’s so much that Foreign Objects encapsulates—interactive design, research, software development, and more. Can you explain in your own words what Foreign Objects is?*** **SG:** It is the coming together of four people from completely different disciplines. **AC:** We all have come to the places that we are through quite circuitous routes and have never really felt like particularly at home in a discipline or a practice. Because of that, we enjoy working together and have a fairly weird perspective on things sometimes—which is the other half of where our name comes from. We’re both foreign in the US and somewhat foreign to the places we’ve ended up. **GZ:** On different days in February, we were a branding agency, an architecture studio, a game maker, a space maker, web designer. Back end, front end, whatever. When you end up defining yourself negatively against so much of the things that you’re supposed to be doing, you have to make a space. At least some kind of little shop front that you can hide behind to be recognized as an entity and have a logo and build an LLC so you can pay taxes. You want to be creative and critical in all these ways, but it doesn’t seem to fit anywhere, necessarily. **SG:** We’re also generally committed to working around referencing and awareness about the Internet. **GZ:** The more genuine line we have used somewhere is that we’re interested in making artifacts for ways of living in a networked world. What we gravitated towards with *Internet as a City*, was ways of learning together—to look at the Internet, look at this piece of technology as a question of how we want to live together. That’s obviously a social and political question. It’s also a question of how do we build infrastructures, what those infrastructures mean, and so on. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/KILLSCREEN-14-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Killscreen-27-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped-1.jpg) ***You’re coming from these different backgrounds, and some sort of consensus has to be reached initially to start a project. How do these conversations happen, and what compels you all to say, “We want to do this project” and follow through with it? There must be many ideas being tossed around.*** **KR:** If the project contains a technical component, Agnes and I will take the lead there. We’re all pretty opinionated. This back and forth is very much how we did things. In the end, we just converge to something. **AC:** Everyone has their shtick. There’s a period of initial touzle, and then eventually, things take shape, and everyone goes along with them. **KR:** Humor is the way to go forward because I would assume my ideas would be, “Oh yeah, let’s think about interfaces.” Then, as we play, “Oh, it’s a simulation for sure.” **AC:** “Let’s make an operating system.” **KR:** Then we think about the space. Then I think, “Okay. What can we design?” **SG:** It’s four languages that require some degree of translation. Be it references or ambitions for what we care about in the world and the format it should take. So there is this period of trying to understand the other person’s thing or find shared ground, shared affinities. **KR:** More concretely, writing things down or just creating images, sketches is integral and has been very helpful, in particular cases. Obviously, you get excited about something, and then you cannot get it out of your head. **GZ:** We’re all researchers. We’re all discussing together while also pursuing our own research, which may or may not actually result in work in our minds, but through sharing Are.na channels and throwing ideas together. Agnes will be looking at the history of operating systems, and Kalli will be studying interfaces. I’ll be looking at some random bullshit in finance or something, and Sam will be thinking deeply about space. What might mark our difference is that we are really interested in the archives, in representing this piece of technological history that really defines the development of so many of the ways we use computers today. We think about networks, and so on, and that has built America’s infrastructure more or less. A lot of it comes from wandering around and talking to people. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IAAC_workshop_4-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IAAC_workshop_3-scaled.jpg) Documentation of "Internet as a City" workshop. ## **HOW BOT OR NOT WAS MADE** **The game *Bot or Not* is a playful critique of online chatbots. What drew you all to the medium of a game for this project?** **AC:** The genesis of the project started as a joke. Mozilla had put out this open call for proposals relating to truth, AI, and disinformation. One of our lines was, “Oh, you can have a truth or dare Turing test.” That was the original title of the project. From there, it became more of a fleshed-out idea of a game. A lot of what goes into making chatbots effective is not the chatbot itself, but it’s the context you put it in. It’s a clever engineering of context, and a bit of sleight of hand is what can make these things really effective. Games are wonderful because everyone knows the rules. You can pick a well-known game. You already have a lot of infrastructure put in place, so you’re working within this medium where suddenly questions and answers are expected, or there are expected ways to digress from a model. The framing of a game is really helpful in creating any work with a chatbot. A lot of what you have with it if you’re talking to the bot is kind of a scam in that there are lots of things that pretend to be smart. AI is not very smart at all. A lot of AIs are humans pretending to be computers. Or these bots rely on an assumed idea of context. Or really on 50% of the time they’ll get it right and 50% of the time it won’t, but half of the people leave with the impression that this thing is really smart. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/desktop_mobile_combo.png) Still from "Bot or Not." ***What were the different technical steps involved in building the game?*** **KR:** It’s essentially a [Dialogflow](https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow/docs?ref=killscreen.com) implementation. The app is a simple front-end that is mobile. It’s talking to Dialogflow in the backend. I remember one detail that we had to omit, which was in the initial proposal, that this would be a game where you would be paired up with either human or bot. You didn’t know what it was, but you could also record audio.There were dares in \[the initial version\]. **AC:** The backend was actually two components, and it got quite sticky at one point. Basically, whenever you’re chatting to the bot, things you say go through this pipeline. Initially, whatever you say is screened for really common sentence structures. For example, if you say something really shitty, the bot will also pick up on that. So there’s a handler at the front, which responds to very recognized, very structured questions. For example, if you propose a ‘would you rather’ question to the bot, Dialogflow is really not very good at dealing with structured syntax. It won’t recognize keywords from a sentence structure. There are some little bits on the front end that will recognize shapes like that and then respond. So if you ask it a would you rather question like, “Would you rather kiss your sister or eat a brick?” It will just pick out one of those—sometimes with horrible results. Dialogflow is a weird platform because it’s intended for writing customer service bots. Our project really tested the limits of Dialogflow as a medium. By the end, we had almost written our own chatbot. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/truth-space.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/jesus.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/diagram-simple.png) In-process images for "Bot or Not." ## **COMBATING AND CRITIQUING THE AUTOMATED WORKSPACE** ***What did you learn from the process of creating the bot and writing the content?*** **AC:** Dialogflow is a nuanced context passer, like a dialogue tree. It was interesting to see the assumptions that get built into how these platforms are meant to work. Something we wanted to talk about with this project, is the labor dimension of automated agents, especially in a workplace—for example, a customer service workplace. Half of the people that you encounter on a day-to-day basis won’t be people at all in the next 25 years. It’s already happening with a lot of workplaces that are becoming semi-automated—Google Home making calls to hairdressers; things like that. All of these things are very rapidly coming to dominate particular professions, automate them, and make working conditions, in some ways more precarious and tougher (not that they are great in a lot of these places). It was interesting to work directly with a medium by which people are being automated because Dialogflow is a *Fire your secretary? Use us!* kind of platform. You can then just get something to respond to you really quickly. It’s interesting to prototype with it. We were reading a lot about [ELIZA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA?ref=killscreen.com), which is Joseph Weizenbaum’s psychotherapist chatbot, which is a wonderful example of using context to make something that’s utter shit. ELIZA works so well because there’s this very nuanced exploitation of contextual tools in that. That project really gave us a lot of good ammunition—if the bot doesn’t understand what’s happening, it just asks you a question and tries to change the subject. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_1346-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_8482_mindy-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_9352-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_9363-scaled.jpg) Chatbot creation workshops run by Foreign Objects. ***It sounds like the bot is an educational tool to train humans to recognize what is human and technology. Were there any surprising conversations within the game or responses from players?*** **AC:** One of my big regrets was that we took quite a moral stance to record people’s conversations in that we didn’t. Other than people telling us, we don’t know what people have said to the bot. **GZ:** It was something to do with doing the right thing \[laughs\]. **AC:** A friend of ours sent it to his friends, and one was like, “Wow, I thought this was going to be my new boyfriend. What the fuck?” So with some people, it worked really well. **GZ:** So much of \[reception\] relies on—concerning games—the idea that people want to have an emotional connection with technology. Broadly speaking, our game always requires you to have some kind of effective connection with this otherwise entirely artificial thing. You’ve got to suspend disbelief. The wider chatbot industry is that how many of these technologies that are being massively invested in are about exploiting this innate desire to believe, rather than disbelieve in the authenticity of another voice or another agent. To an extent, that was also the trick that we were playing—to raise a little bit of awareness as well. **AC:** We ran a workshop called Botchat, which was also very informative in the early bits of development. We did it at NEW INC and with undergraduates at Rutgers University. We got people to embody bots, so we would, throughout the workshop, talk about different philosophies as bots, and then get people to essentially train themselves as art critic bots, and then respond to artworks. They got a bunch of artworks to critique and would come up with programmatic ways of responding to them, and then they would be shown as a list of artworks that they’ve never seen before and would have to use their program to critique them. You got some great ones like if someone stared at the paintings about Jesus. It’s silly, but we were thinking—what does it mean to be one of these agents, your embodiment, and how do you occupy a person’s space online? Especially since a lot of these bots are being used to replace people. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IAAO_Objects_4.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IAAO_Objects_3.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IAAO_Objects_2.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IAAO_Objects_1.jpg) Stills from "Internet as an Object." ## **REIMAGINING THE WEB** **Can you elaborate more on *Internet as a City*? What compelled you to imagine the web as a space?** **KR:** Sam is an architect, and I was always interested in finding parallels between what we see in the tech world, and specifically the web, architecture, urbanism. When we started, I went through a phase of reading from one discipline and finding out if there are parallels in a completely different discipline. Talking with Agnes and later, the four of us led to asking questions like: If a website is a building, how would the building be? Or, Is the web some sort of city in the same way that historically cities were created? People inhabited them, and they developed specific behaviors. Do we see that on the web today? We also took a more clear political stance against whatever building Facebook would be, for example, or tried to identify behaviors that we see in real life. **SG:** We are using architecture or objects or cities here for metaphors for the purpose of communication. The biggest thing with *Internet as a City* is how do you have a conversation or even an interaction about this topic, web access, and privacy, these issues with people of different disciplines. Quite literally, the workshop we did was with blockchain technologists and artists. The city is something everyone has a familiarity with. Streets and roads and how things connect, and it’s used as a way to produce access or communication or have a conversation about these internet issues. **GZ:** The city is an interface to live in general for most of us is a familiar metaphor. It makes it easier to understand the Internet, not as the other things it is: a bunch of wires, a series of corporate structures, a series of communication protocols. We understand it more as a space that we engage with through interfaces, socially and personally. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IAAC_game_2-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IAAC_game_4-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IAAC_game_8-scaled.jpg) Stills from "Internet as a City." ***And the project took the form of a participatory workshop and game, right?*** **GZ:** The workshop centered predominantly around this stakeholder game essentially a simulation. We designed these 300 cardboard pieces, which were these differently-shaped blocks which could be used to literally build up a space using these cardboard objects, and they could be used to represent different things that the players intended. In each space, there were four roles: the public, the private sector, the governments and was there like an anarchist kind of role \[laughs\] It was a two-by-two of interested stakeholders in this collective space that everyone shared, or it was like a governance experiment. People took turns to build—to put down a cable to put down a part of the city and the Internet, but in their own kind of vision. Then the next person would come over and maybe dislodge that and say, *Actually, we need all of the communications running in the direction of my building*. Eventually, people started inventing their own roles. There were definitely more destructive ones that came about by the time that. Half an hour in, people had built up these quite massive Lego structures using different blocks in this space, and it was carnage by the end. We didn’t really reach an equilibrium. **AC:** The last part of the game was that all of the different groups had to collaborate with one another to make a meta-structure. Collaboration is definitely one word for it, but it descended into mayhem pretty fast. There were some generative and interesting conversations that people were having during. And there were many ridiculous little play-fights that people would have but also equally, there were some genuinely nice things that people took away in terms of social collaborations around networks and what that can look like. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Gathering_1-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/200505_Scenes-07.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/200505_Scenes-04.png) Stills from "My Hearth Will Go On." ***What is Foreign Objects currently working on?*** **SG:** We’re the first digital artists-in-residence at the Bard Graduate Center. We’re working on a project about the kitchen’s social politics and how that changes under smart technologies. We discovered that, historically, the kitchen was this sort of centralizing space. It was not only the kitchen—it was a hearth. People slept around the hearth—they cooked food together. There wasn’t a social hierarchy; everyone was contributing and working collectively. In architectural history, that becomes more separated from the other functions from the house and is more distributed into smaller heating elements. Now, you have a toaster, a microwave, a stove, an oven, and a crepe-maker. Smart technologies have a social function, but do not require our presence or co-presence in this space. They barely require our contribution! We hope to find a way to regroup all of these individual eating elements. Maybe we produce a party around a new kind o hearth, a set of social rituals, or habits for making food that really requires a group of people in the space and out of the space. We’re taking the worst of these new technologies, finding redeeming qualities for social coexistence and new environmental consequences—’environmental’ being the space of the house in domesticity and so we’re trying that out across different mediums. Still, it will likely be a narrative website of sorts that has mildly animated images that depict this new set of relationships and rituals and spaces. Hopefully, it will also involve a recipe for distributed cooking: if it takes 15 people to cook a grilled cheese, what would that look like as a recipe? --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted in October, 2020. Photographs of Sam and Kalli by Zachary Harvey. Photographs of Agnes and Gary by Abiola Renée. ### Links [Foreign Objects](https://www.foreignobjects.net/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Foreign Objects on Twitter](https://twitter.com/foreignobj?ref=killscreen.com) ### Alfatih: Cracking open digital utopias URL: https://www.killscreen.com/alfatih/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T20:54:41.000Z *Based in Fribourg, Switzerland, artist Alfatih’s work brushes against interaction, in all forms and senses of the word. Sometimes, he works within the world of a game engine: he’s collaborated with clothing designers*[ *Party Chat*](https://killscreen.com/party-chat/?ref=killscreen.com) *to ‘hack’ GTA with their collection; he’s filmed his own vlog diaries within the Los Santos environment. In other projects, he creates ‘ping-pong’ between the digital and the physical realms—elements like 3D-printed wearable prosthetics, screens rolled on wheels, or Alfatih-themed AR face filters. Though ever-expanding, the core of Alfatih’s body of work lies in the following question: How are identities formed and conditioned between the physical and the digital? “This back and forth \[between the physical and digital\] is what’s interesting to me,” the artist notes.* *Alfatih made time to speak with us about the non-neutrality of the web (and of his homeland), what it means to be working on the fringes of games, fashion, and fine art, and the theory of ‘Strange Familiarity’ as it relates to the digital avatars he creates.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/5-onvacation-ingame.jpg) Screengrab from "On Vacation," 2019. ## **NON-NEUTRALITY** ***Can you start by talking about your childhood, your origins, and your upbringing? When did you know you wanted to be an artist?*** It was a cliche childhood. I was constantly drawing on a board. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I was just drawing and creating things. I became curious about architecture, industrial design, and animation as a pre-teen. This was the time I started working more with CGI and 3D software. I started by creating speculative buildings or objects, and later got into making characters. I was also interested in this idea that 3D softwares offered a lot of freedom but incorporated constraints as well, in that it borrows characteristics from the physical world—you can apply physics rules or simulate materials and lighting. I then went to ‘visual communication’ school, which I thought was art school, but realized it was an advertising program once I started. It wasn’t that bad. a lot of what informs my practice today comes from there. Before diving into contemporary ads and campaigns, we were studying art history—not just as a set of references, but how images actually communicate and their effect on a given audience. Then I went to pursue a BA in interaction design, which is quite an open program. Some people come out of the BA and go into ‘startup mode,’ building apps or IoT. But you can also create installations and other free projects. This is where I met Jamie from Party Chat at the end of last year. ***How has growing up in Switzerland shaped your worldview as an artist?*** Where I live isn’t exactly the countryside. It’s more like a locality, but still five minutes away from farms and cows. There is a vending machine that pours fresh milk \[laughs\]. That kind of environment. I spent a lot of time on the internet as a kid. Switzerland is a place where a lot of wealth is flowing. It makes you aware of your privilege. There’s also this narrative of Switzerland being a neutral country. In a similar way, I think of this myth about the digital space, where you can be and do whatever you want—but this is not true. Because you’re conditioned, and it’s not neutral. Each platform, each website, even the network itself—it’s so-called neutrality isn’t true. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/2-base-services.jpg) Still from "BASE Services," 2020. ***At school, were you faced with the choice of attending the media interaction program versus a more traditional Fine Arts program?*** I attended that program to have the actual knowledge of the tools and media theory. During the second year, there was a point where I had a clearer idea of the work I wanted to make, but it didn’t always fit the program. Whether it’s at school, at a job or any institution, you’re always conditioned within the rules and definitions given by that place. One needs to find ways of navigating and negotiating these boundaries. Sometimes, it’s better to quit and go somewhere else. I wasn’t going to leave six months before the end of the BA. My graduation project was rather informed by these experiences—so is the rest of my work. ***Which video games did you play growing up?*** I grew up as an avid gamer. I would say mostly, my first experience was playing on Nintendo 64 at some friend’s place, and Game Boy. The first console I owned was the first PlayStation. I was also interested in PC gaming; I didn’t have a type. Growing up, the game that marked me the most was *Metal Gear Solid*. Because it felt so different at the time, the way it was breaking the fourth wall and had a lot of narrative content. I got it when I was five years old, even though it was intended for a mature audience. I remember loving the cover at first sight in the gaming shop. I finished it many years later. *Hideo Kojima* was a fascinating figure growing up. I’ve been playing less lately, but tried instead various games that focus more on gameplay or specific topics. I became interested during the last few years in games like *Gone Home* or *The Stanley Parable*, where the player is treated as a subject, with the emphasis put on the exploration of the space. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/7-prosthetic-1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/7-prosthetic-2.jpg) "Untitled," 2020. ## **THE WORLD OF GRAND THEFT AUTO** ***What drew you to work within Grand Theft Auto as a medium or as an environment?*** The internet was created with utopian ideals—with it came the idea that you can do or become whoever you want in it, which turned out to be less true over time. It’s still early for me to draw any conclusions of what has changed during the current pandemic in that regard, but I felt there was a greater shift in collective consciousness, where even more people realized that this utopia isn’t true. This *GTA* work was done before the pandemic and flirted with these ideas. I chose to work within *GTA* as it is an open world, exposing all the possibilities offered to the player and giving the illusion of agency. It takes place in a contemporary setting that mirrors the physical world. I considered the act of modding as a way of challenging the boundaries in a given game, and find alternative ways of navigating through it. With that, I explored performative behaviors that take place in digital spaces. It is interesting to explore the game as a social space and not just as a game anymore. As an example, when we used to play too much as kids, my mom could simply tell us, « Stop playing and go outside ». It was fine since we mostly played offline. But now, games are social spaces on their own in the mainstream. — My little brother is constantly connected with his friends when playing *Fortnite*. If I tell him to shut the game down, I’m in a way telling him to stop being with his friends, which can cut him off from his group. ***You’re working within game engines and with code. What do you see are the significant differences between these two modes of construction?*** I worked more with Unreal than Unity lately. Unity has an advantage when it comes to creating quick prototypes. I like using code because of the way it connects to many different mediums. When you work with code, you can create interactive content, music, or visuals, and so it blurs the line between disciplines. Some artists define themselves as painters, sculptors, etc. I can use code and integrate it into an installation or a sculpture and not define my practice by a medium, but rather by some processes or intentions. I then use the right tool for it. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/8-untitled-1-scaled.jpg) "Untitled," 2019. ## **THE DIGITAL GARMENT** ***You also have work that provokes very kinetic or physical interaction with the viewer. How are you thinking about how wearing a garment might be an interaction?*** We used to upcycle clothes with a group of friends, or play with random found objects that we used as garments. There are aspects of fashion that interest me, like the way it’s constantly evolving and tries to forget previous collections. There’s this perpetual question*, What is fashion*? that keeps coming up, as something that is constantly looking for itself and is always redefined. Later, it collided with the work in *GTA*, which was generally more about the myth of becoming anyone in the digital space, but also how one’s identity is built and conditioned. Fashion in that context was used as a bearer of value and relating to one’s identity and status. I consider that a physical garment is already digital in a way because it already has a kind of digital value. When buying a luxury shoe for example, it has a certain value online with the ‘clout’ it brings you. ***We spoke to the designer Gareth Wrighton who designed a video game within Unity, and showed his fashion collection in the game. He hand knit a sweater for hours so that he could render it in unity. His whole thing was the fashion scene or sphere is inherently virtual; he’s interested in the image of objects too. Does this resonate with you? What draws you to creating virtual garments?*** That’s what’s interesting—not to consider only physical, only digital, but see how both interconnects and one influences the other. This back and forth actually is what’s interesting to me. I was telling you previously that I was ‘trapped’ in advertising school—but it was very valuable to have studied branding, communication, semiotics, and how content flows. The circulation has evolved greatly—before, it did so in a unidirectional way via a limited number of media channels. Now on the web, users are both consumers and producers of content. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/3-bootlegoracle-1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/3-bootlegoracle-2.jpg) Stills from "Bootleg Oracle," 2020. ***What’s the first step in your general creative process?*** It varies. I keep doing research on the side, that can sometimes end up in a project, but not necessarily. I’m interested in how tools and technology evolve. I try to keep up and observe when a new algorithm appears, what it does, and what are its effects in a given social or political context. When working on projects—usually ideas can come through prior experimentation, or can be more conceptual… it then takes the form that it needs to take. ***Is collaboration a big part of your process?*** I like collaborating with people with complementary skills and knowledge—musicians or sound designers, for example. Most of the time, collaborations don’t happen as collaborations per se, but can simply start from discussions and exchanges I have with people. Sometimes, ideas can stem from everyday situations, like a photo taken during vacation, or an object given by a friend. I try to stay open for new inputs from my surroundings—keeping it organic. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1-wallriss-2-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/1-wallriss-1-scaled.jpg) Exhibition views of "Leistung aus Leidenschaft," images courtesy of Norida Ho and WallRiss. ## **BETWEEN THE PHYSICAL AND THE DIGITAL** ***BASE Services* contains both a physical and a digital component as layers in space—physical screens are utilized as ‘windows’ to ‘scan’ tangible garments. How did the project *BASE Services* come to be?** There were certain expectations that needed to be met at the end of my design program. Working with fashion enabled me to be more fluid—it can work in both an art and a design context. *BASE Services* was presented as a fictional fashion service that operates between physical and digital spaces. Garments were presented through different forms. Second-hand clothes were placed on stands. Clothing mods were available to be used in games. And there was a screen on wheels pushed by performers—a window to valorize the thrifted clothes. So \[the project\] is always about negotiating all these subjects that we’ve been speaking about—the ping-pong that happens between spaces. I wanted to break down some of the ideas of that project, and that led me to first start working with shoes. They’re these very cheap slippers with a 3D printed prosthetic on top. Again, it’s this idea of colliding this digital prosthetic that becomes physical through 3D printing, which maybe gives it a different dimension to the already existing shoe. You don’t need to understand the whole process behind it, even though it’s a process-driven work. It can also be appreciated on its own as a sculpture. Works can have different layers in the process through which they’re created, but I also like it when you can appreciate them at first sight. I don’t have a recipe for that, but it’s something I always keep in mind how accessible a work should be. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/4-onvacation-2-scaled.jpg) Still from "On Vacation," 2019. ***Can you expand how you are thinking of these prosthetics in terms of utility? Do you view the act of wearing a garment or performance as a form of interaction?*** I was playing with the language of utility by presenting them as products. There’s a website where you could download the prosthetics. I was extracting parts of luxury shoes, like the Tabi boots by \[Maison\] Margiela or the Jugo boots by Comme des Garçons. Basically, applying a fragment of luxury on existing footwear, like a partial bootleg. Once this language was put in place, I opened up the designs a bit. I took some other shapes like the scorpion. At the show’s opening, instead of being installed, I invited performers to wear them. They were just walking around and out of the gallery. They weren’t ‘performing’, per se, or doing anything crazy. Their performance was them just hanging around and having this shoe on their foot. But with all that, the shoes weren’t very usable. We needed to have straps to attach them properly. So there’s also this humorous contradictory dimension of not really being shoes you can wear, but sculptures in the end. ***Can you talk about On Vacation and what it meant to recreate a personal archive, little memories from your phone, through GTA?*** That was the first project where I modded *GTA*. I modelled myself and integrated in the game. I was recording within *GTA* and then uploading to Instagram actually every few days for a total of five weeks. For those weeks, my only Instagram stories were ‘digital’ adventures within Los Santos. I had plane shots, then arriving in the city, and existing within it. So the project was about *GTA* as a platform, but it was also about Instagram as a platform. There was a mix of things that were staged in the environment, and some elements captured from just walking through the game and capturing things ‘as they are’. And maybe, my avatar’s reactions to them. I was also reenacting performative gestures that are done in the digital space. Things like selfies, giveaways, e-begging, performative activism, footage of protests, those kinds of videos that are quite common on Instagram stories today. I would also take into consideration people’s reactions in terms of how the continuity of the story was built up. It was interesting to make some observations about many subjects because people were confronted with the videos. Some people even thought my videos were of events that really happened! For me, it’s easy to recognize, *Okay. These are screencaps from a game.* Even one month ago, someone asked me, “Oh, so you really tattooed someone on the back?” It’s reactions like these that also inform how, on the smartphone, things can seem more real since they’re less detailed and seen through a small screen. Of course, we’re not all trained visually in the same way. If you’re used to playing games, it’s easy to recognize this footage as CGI. If not, then maybe some shots can feel more photorealistic than others—the same way all the games from the past looked so ‘realistic’ or advanced at the time. That wasn’t planned or part of the project at all. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/6-performer-2.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/6-performer-1.jpg) Performers wearing Alfatih's prosthetics. ## **STRANGE(R) FAMILIARITY** ***Perhaps it’s making a comment on labor as well. Everything thinks Instagram stories of as fleeting moments you film on your phone. The fact that you’re putting in all the effort to create and film a world and then go through the trouble to make it the right dimensions to upload onto Instagram really reveals how narrowly people view the ways social media can be used.*** This is an important point. Instagram Stories are ephemeral and used to be limited to content made in the past twenty-four hours. This unconsciously implied that they were ‘authentic’, made ‘in the moment’ and were not staged*.* But no—it’s all staged. I was staging it even more by making these gestures behind my computer screen, from a computer game. I think a lot about these digital avatars that appeared in the last few years like Lil Miquela and so on. And it’s interesting to see how people react to them and think, *Oh, no, this is fake*. Hatsune Miku was an earlier example too and maybe Gorillaz to a certain extent. I don’t know if they realize that everything is constructed anyway whether it’s CGI or physical. There are nuances, of course, but in the grand scheme of things, however, it’s content that is produced. You’re operating within platforms that condition you in the ways you interact with and present yourself. It’s maybe a generational shift that will slowly happen. Younger people are already less into this constant ‘self-branding’ dynamic. ***Thinking about the identity of the avatar and self-branding—could you speak about the AR filters that you create and Decentralised Identity? What does it mean for you to have your friends and strangers appear as yourself in digital form?*** Projects like these don’t take themselves seriously but are still done in a serious way. This began as a joke among friends—I’ve had the same look every day for the past four years now with my hat, my glasses, and my braids. It became associated with me. Before Instagram filters existed, I made some related projects, coding the look by myself. I was interested in how things become icons through repetition. Eventually, it was launched as a filter. When you put something online, it sometimes takes an unexpected path. What was interesting was when complete strangers were using it because they have no idea about what it is or where it comes from, but they’re still using it so casually. This was the funniest reaction—of my friends sending me the Instagram stories of strangers from around the world ‘dressed’ like me. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/4-onvacation-1-scaled.jpg) Still from "On Vacation," 2019.= I was reading a paper by Theresa Senft on this idea of ‘Strange Familiarity.’ She writes about how in the physical space, there is a specific term \[‘Familiar Strangers’ by Stanley Milgram\] for people that you know—maybe from your commute to work, or maybe you see them at art openings. You might see the same people all the time, but you’ve never actually spoken to them. They’re still familiar faces, and the existence of these is registered for you. You both acknowledge each other’s existence, even though you don’t really know each other. In the digital space, something similar happens. On Instagram or Twitter for example, there are people that are not so far physically from you—you don’t know them, but you acknowledge their existence through the screen. When you meet physically for the first time, something happens because you think if you have a pre-existing knowledge of who they are. So this extends to digital space; this happened with the filter I made. People were using it, not even knowing that it was related to me, and the first time they met me physically, they said, *Oh, you look like that filter on Instagram.* ***What are you currently working on?*** I’m usually working under pressure with multiple projects at once, but trying to slow down now and take more time for personal work. I’m planning a residency next year. I also want to take time to question not just \[the\] subjects \[I work with\], but also my own way of working, my own way of conceptualizing things. I want to come back to making interactive physical objects. --- ### Credits Condensed and edited for clarity. Interview conducted by Alex Westfall in October, 2020. ### Links [alfatih.world](https://alfatih.world/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Alfatih on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/alfatiharufa/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) ### Yasmin Elayat: Building Tools for Tomorrow's Stories: Inside Scatter's Creative Tech URL: https://www.killscreen.com/yasmin-elayat-building-tools-for-tomorrows-stories-inside-scatters-creative-tech/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T18:59:46.000Z [](https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://killscreen.com/yasmin-elayat/)[](https://twitter.com/home?status=https://killscreen.com/yasmin-elayat/&ref=killscreen.com) [*Yasmin Elayat*](http://elayat.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *is a self-proclaimed ‘hybrid’—she’s a new-media documentarian, a creative technologist, a collaborative storyteller, and a spatial designer. She co-created* [*#18DaysinEgypt*](http://beta.18daysinegypt.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*, a collaborative documentary centered on the Egyptian revolution; co-directed an interactive documentary set within the New York City subway system,* [*Blackout*](http://elayat.com/gallery/blackout/?ref=killscreen.com)*, and* [*Zero Days*](http://elayat.com/gallery/zero-days-vr/?ref=killscreen.com)*, a VR film about cyber warfare that won an Emmy for Original Approach in Documentary.* *Along with James George and Alexander Porter, Yasmin is also the Co-Founder of* [*Scatter*](https://www.scatter.nyc/?ref=killscreen.com)*, a New York-based entertainment studio that creates tools and collaborates with artists to ‘volumetric filmmaking:’ storytelling through immersive technologies. Scatter’s* [*Depthkit*](https://www.depthkit.tv/?ref=killscreen.com) *allows its users to create accessible storytelling experiences through 3D capture.* *Here, Yasmin tells us about how working in a museum space led her to spatial and volumetric filmmaking, demystifying the role of creative technologist, and what it’s like to run a tech company fueled by creativity—one that continually redefines itself alongside its community.* [Listen to our conversation with Yasmin on the Killscreen Podcast.](https://killscreen.com/podcast/yasmin-elayat-believes-art-drives-innovation/?ref=killscreen.com) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ADS08093-scaled.jpg) ## **BETWEEN ART AND TECHNOLOGY** ***Can you talk about when you started your path into the field of creative technology; when that first emerged for you as a creative impulse?*** Now that I look back and reflect, I realize it’s always been there. I grew up in Silicon Valley, and my dad had a startup. I was one of those privileged young children who had a personal computer. I remember teaching myself to program at a young age. I was 10 or 11 when I started programming, but I began to program to basically build websites just to show off my drawings and my poetry. I wasn’t trying to be an engineer, actually. You saw it as a means to an end. Even though I studied computer science and worked as a software engineer, I gravitated towards art school and went to ITP at NYU. I thought, *Okay, there’s definitely a way to merge the left and right side of the brain here*. There’s something about knowing the possibilities of technology. I find it liberating that if something doesn’t exist in the world, you can always build it. It’s exciting for me, but I was never excited to be an engineer to solve technical problems. I was always excited about stories that I wanted to pursue—but because of how the creative process in my brain works, it was still not traditional storytelling. I like telling stories in different ways or new ways that haven’t been told before. It’s always been there, but it became more solidified after grad school when I was in art school and in New York. New York is a place where hybrids, like me, could find a place because you can be an artist and a technologist. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ADS08029-scaled.jpg) ## **STORYTELLING THROUGH SPACE** ***Was there something specific from working with the physical space that informed your work later on?*** There was something about the Holocaust Museum. I found that museum space and cultural space actually the most experimental—there was the element of being relevant to audiences, or engaging several generations. It was a new building—beautiful architecture, innovative. They wanted to do everything connected, so we built an entire audio guide to talk about every interactive piece in the museum. Part of it was how do you work with such heavy subject matter? Especially sad stories, very hard, very violent things that—to hear and learn about and translate it into something material, and being sensitive and respectful to the material. Also, trying to tread this balance and doing it in a beautiful and poetic and mature, sophisticated way. That was a significant learning experience. It was also a huge technical feat. I felt like the leader of a team—I understood that I could play these dual roles. It felt natural and fluid to speak to the engineers, but I also learned how to think about spatial narrative. It’s one of the most beautiful marriages of literally designing from the ground up with the architect. Everything was seamless. Everything worked together, from what we designed to how it was eventually laid out. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ADS08038-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ADS08036-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ADS08107-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ADS08085-scaled.jpg) Details at Scatter's headquarters in Brooklyn. ***How did you first make your way into virtual reality? How did those encounters open the door to your work at Scatter?*** There are two critical bits to mention that led me to Scatter and startup into an XR space. After Potion, it was the first time I quit my job and started my own project, my own film, interactive film project supported by the Tribeca New Media Fund and Sundance Frontier at the time. The inaugural class of both of these funds and labs. This project, *#18DaysinEgypt,* was the first time I was working independently. This was at the time when we didn’t have a space for where these projects fit anywhere—I was thinking about how do you tell stories using emerging technology? Specifically, I was always interested in documentaries. The second important beat was that I also started a company with *#18DaysinEgypt* as its foundation. The project was an outsourced collaborative documentary about the Egyptian Revolution, where anyone who’s there on the ground can tell their story. It was like an ongoing story to capture the moment and keep this grassroots storytelling, having the people in their own history or a country own their own histories. We realized that platform that we built for that project from the ground up over a whole year became a company, became a startup. My first company was also a company about storytelling. Those two things were pivotal. I worked as an artist, and then I came back to New York, where I met James. We were both computer scientists, artists with strange films that didn’t fit in a box—but they were both these documentaries relevant to ourselves and the communities we were part of. Before joining forces with James and Alexander, I’d always embraced whatever was emerging technology, whether it was wearable tech or web. I went to ITP when iPhone-based games were the new technology. What’s really cool for me about XR was it’s the first time that I saw a potential ecosystem. When I finally did start working with James and Alexander, how the Scatter started wasn’t straightforward. There’s something about seeing your future as an entrepreneur happening, and seeing what they’re doing with that kid at the time was RGB toolkits. It was 2016, they were moving into productizing it into a company, and that’s when I was also a free agent and looking for my next thing. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/EmmyWinner_Group-1_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Screen_Shot_2020-10-13_at_5.06.32_PM-1-e1604598370336_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) The ZERO DAYS VR team at the Emmys, and a volumetric portrait of Yasmin. ## **BRIDGING TOOLS WITH CONCEPT** ***Throughout your career, the content you’ve worked on informed the tools and technologies you had to create or implement. What does that look like for Scatter now, especially since you’re in touch with both the creative and technological sides?*** We’re an artist-led company, and so we definitely lead with the creative. This is literally how we operate. We believe that art drives innovation. For all of us as founders, that’s what drives us. We actually all come from that kind of ethos before we met each other, the fact that starting a company, that’s how it’s led. Art drives innovation. Even DepthKit was created to serve as a creative project. It was started as an expression between James and Alexander back in 2011, actually. This idea of the beginning and the seeds of volumetric filmmaking started the pursuit of creating this documentary about the creative coding community. It is still true today of Scatter. I really believe this idea of volumetric filmmaking, which is the term we’ve coined, is more significant than just a tool. It’s a new way of being; it’s a new way of telling stories. It’s a new way of a creative process that’s beyond just volumetric capture. It’s a whole workflow. It’s a whole way of creating, and it’s also not built just for arts, but for filmmakers and other types of formats and publishing formats. One primary mission is how to define volumetric filmmaking and see that anyone interested in this space is our collaborator. We don’t use the word customers. We don’t see customers as customers. We see them as our community. We call it our community because it’s the volumetric filmmaking community helping build something that doesn’t exist. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ADS08082-Edit-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Screen-Shot-2020-11-05-at-9.16.01-AM.jpg) Everyone is involved in building it and defining it. Part of that’s what we lead with. Knowing that in service of determining what volumetric filmmaking can be, then we work backwards. That’s what brings us home, is the way to say it, which is our productions, or you can consider them like the R&D arm of what’s next. Then because we’re ‘dogfooding,’ we’re literally building what we know we need and what the future is and defining the future through their productions. Our tool then makes sense because we know we need this. Productions are also testing it in the process of productions, and we’re collaborating with the community. I would say the way we’re building tools is not like a regular tech company because it’s tools we as artists want and need. It’s actually quite poetic. It’s the dream, right? To build a company as an artist where you can do both, run a business, and work on projects you really believe in. It’s not easy and simple. I was one of two women in my class or a few women and always the only female engineer. There’s something that I feel has a responsibility and where this is coming from. I think what we’re doing is intervening at Scatter. It’s about the diversity of storytellers, it’s about accessibility, making sure that both ends the stories that are being told are diverse and representative, and that the creators themselves are too. If you’ve ever been to any of our events, I hope you can see that this is reflected. Also, in the kinds of projects that are being published, it really is true. It’s important to say that because there is this responsibility, which is we’re doing this because it’s a way to intervene and the future of technology and the future of what this space in volumetric filmmaking would be. I believe there’s an element of that. Whether or not it’s explicitly said, there’s definitely something that’s thriving us as a team that comes from that place. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ZERO_DAYS_VR_01.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ZERO_DAYS_VR_09.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ZERO_DAYS_VR_07.jpg) Stills from ZERO DAYS VR. ## **COLLABORATING WITH COMMUNITY** ***What do you find to be the ideal use case for Scatter as a tool? What types of creators are attracted to it, and what do you find them using it for?*** Volumetric filmmaking is a way to capture the real world, but it’s also a way to translate it and play with an aesthetic spectrum. That’s something very important about Scatter. If you look at other reality capture tools, they literally capture tools, or they’re volumetric capture holograms. For us, it’s not that. It’s not just about holograms. It’s about creative expression. That’s why we always support different VFX workflows like Expert. We work with VFX tools that exist, 3D tools, or within Unity, We work with VFX Scrap and the Shader Graph. The documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, who made *Zero Days*, wanted to use DepthKit as a VFX tool, too, in a way that felt native to the language of code or Eminem used in the *Rap God* music video. Also, in the XR space, it is an accessible solution. If you can get started with a machine and a sensor that’s a few hundred dollars versus a lot of our indirect and direct competitors, it’s more complicated. There’s lots of hardware. It’s much more expensive, and they’re not portable or mobile. This idea of accessibility, mobility, and portability is attractive to many independent creators, of course. We have a lot of independent creators in the XR space that have used DepthKit**.** DepthKit has the most published volumetric films in this space compared to anyone. Our most direct competitor has had half of what we’ve published. Not us. Our community is true to what we believe in around diversity and things like that. One of my favorite projects is in Brownsville. It’s a neighborhood in Brooklyn, and these young Black kids wanted to recreate; they rebuilt their neighborhood, they made a video game out of it. They shot hundreds of people in their community using DepthKit to collect their stories. It was like, “We want to own the narrative of Brownsville. Brownsville is our community. Brownsville is people that care about each other. Look at all these beautiful stories.” The human side of it versus what you hear in the news about Brownsville. That’s beautiful. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/home-depthkit3-1-e1604601115562.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/InterfaceScreenshot-1-e1604601057340.png) Using the DepthKit for volumetric storytelling. DepthKits are used in the Middle East and in Africa. It’s hard to get access to the hardware and tools but the fact that filmmakers are using it to make projects, to publish VR projects, or make XR space. It’s meant to be accessible and something that any creator can see themselves using, and we’re trying to make it easier as we go over through the years. It’s still hard and expensive to make XR that works. Still, it should speak to people beyond the XR spaces—any storyteller could see themselves using DepthKit and working in the volumetric filmmaking space because we really do believe it’s the future. It’s like there’s going to be this collision—already, it’s happening with virtual production. There’s a collision between these game engine tools, and the ability that they provide, as well as the craft and sensibilities of making that is—you can never lose. It’s the key. It’s what we lead with. That’s why we call it volumetric filmmaking versus holograms or volumetric capture because we really do believe in that. It is a creative practice, and hopefully, the people it resonates with are using our tool and making things work with DepthKit. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ADS08119-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/PP_08971-1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/PP_09222-1.jpg) Behind the scenes with the DepthKit. ***Do you have a sense of what comes next in terms of distribution tools, especially since not everyone has access to a VR headset?*** It is a big problem. It’s a whole ecosystem; it’s not just the distributions. It’s also which parties get funding, where can you get funding for this work, is there enough profit on the end—on the app store, for example? On the tool side specifically, that’s why we make sure that we support different publishing formats. That’s why the beauty of DepthKit is you can shoot with DepthKit, and then you can use the same asset to make a film. That same, in the format that we shot back then, is actually the asset we used in *Zero Days* VR and built a whole virtual world and around the same shoot. It could be working in both formats. That’s why we support different types of ‘expert’ formats because we understand that it’s a problem. The web is what we are trying to move towards because it’s the most accessible for now until headsets get cheaper, or there’s a larger number of people buying them. AR is a whole other space. I would say that that may be one of the ways to reach audiences, but it’s each technology, why you pushed me means something different, and you’re trying to say something different. Not the same story will translate the right to different distribution models. It’s still something we are cognizant of, and we’re trying to make sure that we’re supporting the whole space versus just the XR space. It’s like, *Let’s support all kinds of creators*, *even if XR is still nascent right now.* It’s still as a market ecosystem you can support all the other types of ways of creating. Then on the production side, it’s a struggle. Right now, even more, so where we have a project focused on the racial justice movements—it’s about the 400 years of American citizens with racial injustice, and it’s a magical realist time travel experience. It’s about how it just evolves but doesn’t really change. It’s magical-realist, Afro-futurist, and very pertinent right now. The reason I’m bringing it up from a production standpoint now in this climate, the traditional way we would have approached distribution doesn’t totally make sense anymore. Like the way film festivals are adapting. We have to rethink and be a little more creative. Because we’re Scatter, we are always like, *Oh, if something doesn’t exist. What is the thing that we need here?* We’re at that moment where I don’t know how to answer yet. At Scatter, we’re always in the headspace of, *What is missing that will help us build and enable a project like this to connect, to succeed, and to thrive*? ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Screen-Shot-2020-11-05-at-9.16.08-AM-scaled.jpg) ## **THE BOUNDARY OF CINEMA AND INTERACTIVITY** ***Zero Days existed as both a film and a VR interactive experience. Do you find that creators come into it with the expectation that they’re to make a film first, or an interactive experience first? Is that something they figure out along the way as they’re in the process of building their storytelling vision?*** Most people come with their own vision. Either they’re working on a film, and there are a few feature films. What they are, they are documentaries or not all documentaries that are or someone is specifically coming in to do this music video or someone is explicitly working in virtual reality. Sometimes people will switch—they will play with VR and an AR component or a mixed reality. It’s only us \[at Scatter\] who’s been dipping our toes in both with projects. Most people either don’t realize it, or maybe they don’t realize that they could work this way or it’s already costly and hard to do one or the other. It could be something that exists in the same world and the same visual space and design metaphors. They’re always building worlds. There’s something there, but now no one has really come out that I can say except us that has done that. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ADS08070-scaled.jpg) ***The model of showing what you can do through creative practice makes an awful lot of sense. Hopefully, larger companies continue to invest in content to showcase what the technology can do, rather than just saying, Oh, yes, creators will figure it out, and they’ll figure out a way to monetize it.*** We definitely believe it. You could be a tech company, or you can be like us, which is, we’re not a traditional tech company. We’re not driven by the demands of just technology for technology’s sake. You build tools differently in that way, and you make choices differently. Also, because we’re in this space and making work, too, these are our peers. They’re not our customers. We have the same needs and struggles as our community. It totally changes how you build and what you’re building it for. It’s also hard. Obviously, that’s why there’s not a lot of companies that are like that. That’s how many Oculus and other companies start that way with this heavy investment and then realize it actually takes a while, so you see the return. It’s definitely not the simplest way to work. It’s true for us. One thing you’ll see is, we’re true to our core and our ethos and our values. That’s something that I’m proud of about us as a team at Scatter. --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted by Jamin Warren in October, 2020. ### Links [elayat.com](http://elayat.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Nicole He: Talking to computers URL: https://www.killscreen.com/nicole-he/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T19:07:19.000Z [*Nicole He*](http://nicole.pizza/?ref=killscreen.com) *is a creative technologist whose work lives in the space between video games, physical computing, and witty conceptual art. With experience advising projects for Kickstarter and imagining projects for Google, she’s programmed AI to converse with Billie Eilish for Vogue, physical sensors that help users swipe on a dating app and a Twitter bot that regularly photographs her growing fig plant.* *As Nicole embarks on two long-term interactive projects—one is an arts-funded experimental game that uses voice technology, and the other is a commercial indie game—she finds herself more and more interested in immersing herself within the world of games. Here, we speak with Nicole about what distinguishes the industry of video games and that of creative technology, the particularities of one’s voice as a method to activate technology, and how behind every digital project is a living, breathing human.* *Listen to this interview on* [*Google Podcasts*](https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8yYjY3NTFhOC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==&ref=killscreen.com)*,* [*Spotify*](https://open.spotify.com/show/2qFFHoVa6UJKjPWf1utieO?ref=killscreen.com)*, or* [*Pocket Casts*](https://pca.st/7q12fog7?ref=killscreen.com)*.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/NicoleHe11-scaled.jpg) ## **FROM ASSISTING TO MAKING** ***How did you first get into making things with computers?*** It was a second career for me. I went to NYU for undergrad, and I studied journalism, but I never wanted to be a journalist. I got a job right after college at Kickstarter. I was doing mostly community management and outreach. Kickstarter exposed me to many different creative communities in food, art, fashion, technology, and games. My job was to advise people on their projects, to tell them how to present them for an internet audience. I had been working there for three years, and I was thinking, *My job is to help people make things but maybe, I want to make things.* Over the years, I had been exposed to this graduate program at NYU called [ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program)](https://tisch.nyu.edu/itp?ref=killscreen.com), which is about creative technology and other weird things. I had some co-workers who went there for grad school. Also, I saw people doing weird shit with technology—really creative, strange things with it. I didn’t set out to become a programmer or anything like that. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/NicoleHe10-scaled.jpg) Nicole's Arduino. At Kickstarter, we had the first [*Killer Queen* cabinet](https://killerqueenarcade.com/?ref=killscreen.com) out there in the world. *Killer Queen* is an incredible 10-player arcade game. It’s also now on Switch, but originally it was an arcade game—a 5 on 5, 10-player cabinet. The problem was the Kickstarter office had two floors. People worked upstairs, the *Killer Queen* cabinet was downstairs, and we were all obsessed with it. We wanted to play all the time, but the problem was in telling people upstairs that somebody wanted to start a game downstairs. I thought, *What we really need is a button that you can push that would notify people to play…* *It’d be great if somebody made that button*. But nobody wanted to \[Laughs\]. One of my co-workers helped me set up an [Arduino](https://www.arduino.cc/?ref=killscreen.com) and taught me a little bit of physical computing and writing a bit of code. We eventually had this giant red button by the *Killer Queen* cabinet that you could push. They would tweet out from an account saying that people want to play *Killer Queen*. Then the *Killer Queen*\-heads at Kickstarter followed that account and got the notification and came down to play. So that was my introduction to making things with technology. I ended up attending ITP and immediately fell in love with programming. As soon as I got there, I realized that coding was a tool for creative expression, and it felt limitless. I could do anything I wanted with it. I was always interested in making things that were playful about technology. By being in school and doing many homework assignments, I noticed a thread through my own projects about the themes I was interested in exploring. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Screen-Shot-2020-10-28-at-12.48.00-PM-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/NicoleHe2-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/NicoleHe8-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/NicoleHe4-scaled.jpg) Nicole's workspace, featuring her Google Home and her fig plant, the subject of her project, "Grow Slow." ***There are so many great examples of people for whom a Kickstarter might be their first creative project. It’s de-risking that portion of it because you don’t have to put the entire thing out into the world—it’s all about if you can raise enough interest to manifest what you’re imagining.*** My job involved a fair amount of traveling to different creative conferences for people in various creative fields. There’s one that stood out—Eyeo, in Minneapolis in 2014\. I remember feeling like my job going there was just to talk about Kickstarter. I wasn’t part of that community, and I didn’t know how to do any of the things that they were doing. The types of things that people were doing there felt like pure magic to me, and also it made me think differently about the things that you can do with computers. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/NicoleHe1-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Screen-Shot-2020-10-28-at-1.15.19-PM-scaled.jpg) ## **FINDING A VOICE** ***After ITP, you became interested in voice technology. What was it about the human voice that spoke to you as a creator?*** At ITP, a lot of my projects were text-based. A lot of generative text-type of stuff, inspired by [Allison Parrish](https://www.decontextualize.com/?ref=killscreen.com), was one of my professors. When I graduated, I got a job at [Google Creative Lab](https://experiments.withgoogle.com/?ref=killscreen.com). They brought me on because they were interested in doing some experiments with their voice assistant, Google Home. They told me, *You’ve done some stuff with text, and it feels quite related*—which is true. Having the computer generate text is the first step towards having the computer talk to you. When you think about voice technology, you think about Alexa or Siri or Google Home most of the time. That technology is not probably the first thing that comes to mind for a creative coder to use. Because again, it’s very platform-specific for these big companies. My introduction was through that way, though. I quickly found it to be a fascinating medium to make creative work with. I was interested in the character of a computer, or the character of an AI in people’s popular imaginations. When an AI tells you to do something or says something, there’s this sense of authority that people ascribe to it, because it’s a computer. The thing that’s interesting about voice in particular, is that you can’t help but personify a voice. When you hear someone talking, even if it has a very computerized sounding voice, your brain can’t help but imagine who that is. It starts projecting things onto that entity, and that’s fascinating to me. I felt like there was a lot of creative potential in interactions, games, and talking to that kind of character. I was always interested in what it feels like to speak to a computer. ***Do you feel like working with voice has impacted what you hear out in the world?*** I definitely pay attention to chatbots, or when somebody says, *An AI said this or did this*. My experience has definitely made me think differently about what people who say these things actually mean. This is true for probably anybody that works with any type of AI technology. You realize how much human effort goes into this stuff. It’s basically run by humans—every single part of it—whether the labor is invisible, outsourced, or not, it’s just computer programs run by people. The thing you notice is that when people speak in the abstract about computer programs written by engineers versus AI, they think about those things very differently. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/unname2d.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/unnamed.jpg) Stills from "Mystery Animal," a voice-activated spin on the game 20 Questions. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Screen-Shot-2020-10-28-at-12.56.14-PM-scaled.jpg) ***Along those lines, in what ways do you think about how people interact with your work?*** Creatively, I’m interested in people’s expectations about technology and how it works. I’m especially interested in the difference between those expectations—which are usually informed by science fiction—and how the technology actually works \[laughs\]. Knowing people have specific ideas already about the technology that we’re using to make something absolutely goes into my creative process. Also, when you’re working with voice technology, you’re essentially designing a character. When you make a computer talk, you’re making a character talk, and there are two sides to it. For voice technology, there is text-to-speech, which is the computer talking. Then there’s speech-to-text, which is the human talking, the computer trying to capture what you’re saying, and then doing things in response. Having both of those things impacts the way that people experience a project. It does not just hear the computer talk; it’s the fact that you use your voice to communicate with the computer. It has a different impact and how we think about the computer that we’re talking to. I’m always thinking about that when I’m doing voice stuff. There are actual technical limitations—voice technology is not that good! The speech-recognition stuff is especially bad. You have to set expectations, and design around that. ***I have Alexa in the house. I had to modify my speech to what it hears—I have to think about what I want it to do. I’ve memorized that string of things that I need to tell it, and then that becomes a way that I signal it. You have to be very, very specific.*** The opposite is also interesting—as you have said, you have learned how to talk to Alexa. You realize that you have to say things in a certain way for it to understand you. A big part of my projects is also subverting those expectations. I’m interested in designing something that can give the illusion of voice assistants understanding you in a way that people out in the world don’t. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/secret-dunny-box-messages.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/grow_slow.jpg) Messages from "Secret Dunny Box" and documentation of "Grow Slow." I was always interested in what it feels like to speak to a computer. ## **ASKING QUESTIONS WITH AI** ***You worked with Vogue on an*** [***interview project with Billie Eilish and AI***](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0c94ghBS4A&ref=killscreen.com)***. How did you sit down and figure out what you ultimately wanted to do?*** *Vogue* had this idea of doing an AI interview with a celebrity for a while. They had pitched it to various celebrities, and nobody took them up on it until Billie Eilish, and I respect her for that. They had some concept about what they wanted, but they weren’t sure how to do it precisely on a technical level. The AI was trained on all the interview questions that people have asked Billie Eilish over the years. We collected all the publicly-available interview questions that have ever been asked of Billie Eilish. I used that to fine-tune [GPT-2](https://openai.com/blog/better-language-models/?ref=killscreen.com) to come up with a list of new interview questions. Then *Vogue* selected some and asked them to her as the AI. The other piece is that we also took all the Billie Eilish lyrics and fine-tuned the model to generate new Billie Eilish lyrics. Obviously, these data sets are very, very small. As things go in terms of actual datasets that you would want to use for training machine learning models. The results were predictably weird, which is what they were looking for. But the result was good because Billie really took it seriously. She answered questions very thoughtfully. At the end of the video, Billie says something like, “*I appreciated these questions coming from the AI, because usually when human interviewers ask me questions. First of all, they ask me the same questions over and over…Second, they’re trying to get something from me. They’re trying to get me to say something that would get them clicks or views or whatever, but the AI doesn’t have that kind of motivation, it’s not biased like humans.*“ I thought \[what Billie said\] was incredible because we’re always talking about how AI is biased, which is true. This was an example of the opposite: humans were biased, and the AI wasn’t. If a real person asked her these questions, it would be weird. One of the questions was, “Who consumed so much of your power in one go?” This would be an odd question for somebody to ask, but because the AI is the one that asked that question, it changes the whole meaning of the entire thing. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/true-love-tinder-robot1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/billiee.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/smsbot-static.jpg) Stills from "Billie Eilish Gets Interviewed by a Robot, "SMS Bot," and "Grow Slow." ***Your project,*** [***ENHANCE.COMPUTER***](https://www.enhance.computer/?ref=killscreen.com#:~:text=ABOUT-,ENHANCE.,of%20surveillance%20and%20techno%2Ddystopianism.)***, has more of an explicit game feel. What was the impetus for that project, and how do you see it fitting into your larger body of work?*** ENHANCE.COMPUTER was a commission for a 2018 exhibition in Melbourne. I had been thinking about that Sci-Fi trope, where people in a movie or TV show are looking at a screen, and they’re like, *Zoom in, enhance*, then \[the computer\] just does that. Usually, they’re investigating something. *Blade Runner* is a classic example, but also police shows do that a lot. It makes sense why they do it in movies—it’s boring to see somebody clicking around a computer. It makes more sense for somebody to say things out loud for dramatic effect, and it’s funny. There’s an [excellent supercut ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk&ref=killscreen.com)on YouTube of many examples of this. They say, *Rotate the image to 180 degrees*, and the image rotates—it’s kind of absurd. It’s a trope people are familiar with. I thought it would be interesting to try to build that program in real life and see what happens. The game is in the browser. It says that you’re a detective, that and someone’s about to commit a crime. You have to look for a secret code in an image and say that code out loud. What is interesting about that game is that predictably, it doesn’t work that well. Yes, you can win the game—it’s not that hard necessarily. At the same time, you can see the places where speech recognition fails a lot. That’s the built-in Chrome [web speech API](https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/demos/speech.html?ref=killscreen.com). It reveals the distance I talked about between our expectations of the technology we see in movies and how they actually work. This project is in many ways on both sides of my work. One side is my creative technology, voice-centered work, and the other my newer video game work. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/enhance2.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/enhance1-1.jpg) Stills from "ENHANCE.COMPUTER." ***You have one project that is an*** [***SMS bot***](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VzUsLofQVlP68wWKzUAmFO701I14hZpBZLIml1aWs7E/edit?ref=killscreen.com) ***that enables people to create texting bots themselves. For this project, you’re building a tool for someone else to create something. How do you see that fitting into your larger body of work?*** I would like to do more of that. That project is a Google Doc tutorial that tells you how to create an SMS bot using Google Sheets. Essentially, you don’t have to program your own code. The purpose of it was that anybody—but hopefully, say mutual aid groups or anybody else who needs to communicate with their community and collect information via SMS—can do it without technical resources. The purpose of the SMS bot project explicitly is for other people to use it. I’ve learned through teaching. I taught a class two years ago at ITP, and I’m teaching it again, starting in a month, about voice technology. It’s called *Hello, Computer: Unconventional Uses of Voice Technology*. I found a lot of joy in the process of creating examples to teach in class and then having the students take those examples, learn from them, and make their own thing. It is very satisfying. Much of that comes from definitely more of the creative technology side, which is a lot more basic technical skills and technical stuff. Giving people those tools to make their own thing is great. I guess a lot of that is as simple as open-sourcing. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/NicoleHe12-scaled.jpg) ## **SWITCHING SIDES, BLENDING PRACTICES** ***In the past, you had to choose to either be a game-maker or an artist. How do you see game making fitting into your larger creative practice?*** There are a couple of concrete reasons why I am focusing on game development now. We have creative technology as one industry, and then indie games as another. The way that people make money is very different, and it affects the things that you make. In creative tech, it’s largely advertising money. A company like Samsung will give you money to make a cool interactive experience for them. Many people who say work as creative technologists do this type of work at studios, or in-house somewhere. You might be trying cool things with new technology that is ultimately meant for a deep-pocketed company for marketing purposes. It’s probably a more stable job than many indie game developers, but it impacts the kind of work you can do. A lot of people have their own artistic practice on the side as well. When people make indie games, they are making products. There are certainly downsides to that if you want to make money off of a game—you have to make it appealing to people because they’re going to choose whether or not to spend money on it. Also, it’s a risk, in terms of how healthy the working practices are. It’s not necessarily good either, because people will spend years working on something that never makes any money. However, you do have to appeal to the whims of the market when you’re making games. On the other hand, you’re not making advertisements for big companies, so there are different types of things you’re able to do. One thing I’ve noticed doing creative technology work is that when you make an interactive experience, people look at it and think, *Oh, cool, that’s cool.* Then they leave. The question is, *How do you get somebody to engage with your interactive experience for more than two minutes?* I guess you call it a video game, and that’s how you do it \[laughs\]! ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/NicoleHe9-scaled.jpg) ***How are you bridging that gap as kind of someone conversant in both of the games and art spaces?*** The way I’m doing it is by working on two games—one which is explicitly an arts game that will be free to play. Getting to do that stuff creatively will take many more risks in terms of the things that can go wrong in that game, and unusual things, too. Versus the commercial indie game that I’m working on—we’re still in the early stages for that—but approaching that very differently. That is going to be a traditional video game. Separating them out into two different projects that have distinct funding, features, styles, and their own audiences is the way that I’m doing it right now. --- ### Credits Condensed and edited for clarity. Interview conducted by Jamin Warren in October, 2020\. ### Links [nicole.pizza/](http://nicole.pizza/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Playing with Purpose: Elizabeth LaPensée's Cultural Game Design URL: https://www.killscreen.com/elizabeth-lapensee/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T19:55:39.000Z *Whether activated through a singing voice, a computer mouse, or one’s own hand, the work of* [*Elizabeth LaPensée*](http://www.elizabethlapensee.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *integrates Indigenous ways of knowing into the act of play. A narrative designer, fine artist, researcher, and educator, Elizabeth’s wholly interdisciplinary practice touches on everything from oral storytelling to the language of memory; from the healing qualities of water to the science of the stars.* *Elizabeth teaches games-focused courses at Michigan State University, leads youth advocacy workshops on Native representation in games, and created* [*Along the River of Spacetime*](https://www.spacetimeriver.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*—an astronomy-centered point-and-click adventure, which was the first-ever game to win a Guggenheim fellowship.* *We spoke with Elizabeth about her material-based design process, if games can indeed produce empathy, and what it means to make a game in which you always win.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/13manoominike.jpg) ## **INCORPORATING INDIGENOUS FUTURISMS** ***Could you talk about your creative upbringing and educational background? How did you first get into game making?*** I was raised in an urban Native community, and I was just playing around with modulators. To change the art, you had to deal with green pixels behind the scenes. I did a mod of *Super Mario*, too. I was just playing as a gamer who wanted to see more native player characters in games. There’s a family, the Bruno family, in my community. They have sons who seriously wanted to make games. Because I had been modding and there wasn’t enough understanding about the difference between modding and *actually* developing games, everyone was looking to me like, *Well, you know how to do this*? I told them, *I’m just an artist. I don’t actually really know how to do this*. The first-ever youth workshop I gave was because of this family. It was really my community rallying together and saying, *We need this for our youth,* that pushed me to learn enough about developing games beyond being an artist to move forward and do that kind of work myself. There’s nothing like having to learn something to teach it to motivate you—to really understand everything about the background of game development. My mom is \[Portland State University professor\] Grace Dillon, and she coined the term [Indigenous Futurisms](https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/looking-towards-the-future-indigenous-futurism-in-literature-music-film-and-fashion-1.5036479/from-growing-medicine-to-space-rockets-what-is-indigenous-futurism-1.5036480?ref=killscreen.com)—she’s the first-ever person ever tenured in science fiction as a field in the world. I tagged along with her to conferences. My one big act of rebellion—because I’m this much of a geek—was pretending to be a graduate student. I’d submit to conferences so that I could go watch the presentations with her for free. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/along-the-river-of-spacetime-7-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/along-the-river-of-spacetime-6-scaled.jpg) Stills from ALONG THE RIVER OF SPACETIME. While I ran youth workshops, I was attending presentations on problematic representations in games. The talks were always so depressing. Someone would be in complete shock because they would have seen what was happening in film, but maybe not what was happening in games. There was something much more visceral about what was happening with games because of the way interaction is incorporated. It always felt terrible by the end of it where I was just like, *This is terrible. That’s all this is ever going to be unless I actually do something about it.* When I really went for making games myself, it was from that place of, *You know what, I can’t just talk about what’s wrong, I have to show what can be done and what is possible.* I’m not just fascinated by representations in terms of art and music or the story which can be conveyed, but also what are the mechanics, and how can those portray Indigenous ways of knowing? It roots back to Indigenous Futurism very often because my mom talks about how their stories are science, or how there’s science in our stories. What is the design of these stories? What can be lifted out and highlighted to change the present interactions we’re having in games? That question set me down this path of experimentation. So I experiment in these microcosms and say, *Here’s one or two mechanics—*and hopefully, there will be attention and support and enough funding. There will be future generations of Indigenous game developers who can push it further. That’s where it goes. Then it loops back around to where it all started, which was in development workshops for youth. As much as my work expresses my voice, I’m so much more excited for what the next generations will bring forward. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/along-the-river-of-spacetime-5-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/along-the-river-of-spacetime2-scaled.jpg) Stills from ALONG THE RIVER OF SPACETIME. ## **REAL-WORLD PROCESSES** ***What’s the first step in the creative process? Do you think about a particular theory or a certain Indigenous knowledge, are you experimenting within the design space first, or do you start with the narrative?*** It’s tangible for me and also very auditory. Something that I’ve come to understand about myself is that I have some form of synesthesia. I do know that I can feel color. I have a tangible interaction, and so different sensory changes that happen for me. The hardest part for me is switching gears. If you’re doing academic writing, and then you’re doing creative writing, and then you’re doing a drawing—once it gets going, it won’t stop. Through the years, I have had to learn how to pull it back and say, *I can set this aside right now and come back to it again, and it’s not going to go anywhere.* It’s not like I’m going to hit a wall. It’s that gear switching that happens very rapidly as long as I have tangible interactions. With games, I always start with paper prototyping. There’s something about it where there are materials or I gather together—It can be something that’s not necessarily design related. For example, with [*When Rivers Were Trails*](https://indianlandtenure.itch.io/when-rivers-were-trails?ref=killscreen.com), I knew that there would be the sounds of a shaker in there. I had rocks from Minnesota, where the game takes place. Then the artist, [Weshoyot Alvitre](https://www.weshoyot.com/?ref=killscreen.com), sent me sand from California where the game ends, and I had a handle, a handle made of Minnesotan wood. I also had a real hide. One of the first things I did for *When Rivers Were Trails* was I made a shaker, putting together these pieces from California and Minnesota, and it was like the feeling of the game. It shows up very little in the game, the sounds from that shaker, but it isn’t about that. It’s about what is the feeling, the resonation of this. That resonation can come through the art, it could come through the stories, it can come through all of these different aspects. The maps of *When Rivers Were Trails* were physically laid out on the floor and numbered on pieces of paper. It’s very hands-on, and my drawing process is still very much like that. I’ve tried to get into drawing digitally, but it just doesn’t communicate to me. When you look at my art, there are layers of pieces of paper. Any given piece is maybe at least four pieces of paper, perhaps a few more. I use a light board to line everything up and make sure it’s all in the right place. I hand-ink, and then I scan, and then I work with everything digitally. All of the textures are made from real water and real copper. These are places I’ve visited or stayed, or this is copper I’ve worked with, or these are trees that I’ve made offerings to. There are always layers of connections that have to happen. I also make a playlist of music and just listen to it over and over again. It’s not so much about that music conveying itself into the work necessarily as it is about getting into some space with it, where for me, above all else, it’s not about me making the work happen. It’s about me being open to it happening, and it’s my responsibility to be receptive. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Thunderbird-Animation-Sketch.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/thunderbirdstrike_sketch_talons-1.jpg) In-process sketches for THUNDERBIRD STRIKE. ***You’ve worked with the digital video game space, and you’ve also worked on tangible board games. How different are these processes? What compels you to turn something into a screen-based work versus a material work?*** That’s a vast place where it happens where what calls for interaction, what calls for visual storytelling, what calls for the need to have a group of people sit together or otherwise. I’m working right now on a tabletop storytelling game that can be played solo or multiplayer, and all it’s going to be is text. That’s going to be in an anthology of tabletop games, which was asked of me. There’s part of the process where a community wants a board game, so we know it will be a board game. There’s the reality of the contract based project. In my personal work, it comes down to what works best to convey meaning or story or express itself. Sometimes that means *No; we need to be touching something and interacting with something and moving something around*. Sometimes that means mobile phones. Maybe the game is calling for something about relaxing or feeling like you can dip in and out—that feeling. That then ties into the mobile work that I do, but it comes down to what fits best. With [*Thunderbird Strike*](https://www.thunderbirdstrike.com/?ref=killscreen.com), I remember a conversation I had where I joke about having a game where you always win. Some people were like, *Yes, I need that in my life. I need a situation in which we always win*, and that’s just how it’s going to go. That’s totally against an industry-standard game. It calls into question the meaning of the game or the very definition of a game—*Well, if you always win, what really are you playing*? What happened with *Thunderbird Strike*, because there’s a split in the past. Either you win by actually taking out the pipeline snake boss, or it deconstructs on its own, and the waters will darken. It’s very subtle, but the waters will darken because the oil is spilling into the waters. There is a loose condition, but it’s not clear because it’s a high score game. Somebody could have the feeling of, *Well, eventually the pipeline snake boss is defeated, but is it because you have removed it, or is it because it has actually not been disassembled*? Then it’s going to deconstruct on its own. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/along-the-river-of-spacetime-3-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/along-the-river-of-spacetime-scaled.jpg) Stills from ALONG THE RIVER OF SPACETIME. ## **ENACTING SOVEREIGNTY** ***You work across many different mediums—animations, immersive reality, and also your physical, sculptural objects. How does game-making fit into your overall practice, and what is it about the medium that excites you?*** What’s unique about games is the player’s ability to enact sovereignty in their actions if a game is designed in that way. In any case, if a player decides, well, I’m not going to play anymore, they have the ability to not play anymore—you’re choosing to enter that space of play and identify with it, potentially. There is a reason why in my own work, there are not explicit native representations. You do not actually see yourself in *When Rivers Were Trails*. In fact, I worked with 30 Indigenous writers for that. The intention was for there even to be no gender references to the player character. You can be male; female. You can be non-binary. There is a whole range of possibilities, and it’s up for the player to imagine that positioning for themselves or project themselves into that role. You don’t do that in a comic you’re reading or looking at and interpreting stories about characters. Whereas with games, you can identify with and put yourself in the role of that player character potentially. *When Rivers Were Trails*, even though it’s a point-and-click adventure, it still has that first-person sense of you looking through the eyes of the main character. In part, this is why Weshoyot Alvitre did the character and environment art, but I did the animal art because it’s through an Anishinaabe lens. This again breaks a certain standard of expectation of industry games: you have to have a consistent art style all the way through. *When Rivers Were Trails* dips back and forth between Woodlands-style Art, that’s very abstracted and more—Weshoyot comes from a comic illustration background. Her work ties in, and there’s always these threads of interweaving comics, games, animations, and *Thunderbird Strike*. The cut scenes are actually stop motion animations laid out at six frames per second. I move everything in Photoshop pixel by pixel, that’s how I animate, and it’s torturous and terrible \[laughs\]—like one month for one minute of animation. I don’t even use a mouse. I’m using my keyboard, clicking the arrow key left 20 times. Sometimes I work on comics because of the joy of complete ability, because I’m at a stage in my career where if I start working on a game, I know it’s three or five years out. As someone who feels the perpetual need for completion, it can physically hurt and feel like, *What am I doing*? *I’m lost, and I’m not expressing myself*. But you are, but it is under NDA, and you can’t share anything. With comics, it gives that feeling of immediacy. With art prints, it’s even more immediate. When you’re working in games, it’s such a strain to just have to maintain this sense of hope that you’re headed somewhere when you can actually really fully see it functioning, and you can’t share it. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Thunderbird-strike-2-scaled.jpg) Still from THUNDERBIRD STRIKE. ## **INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGES AND REPRESENTATIONS** **Could you talk about how *Along the River of Spacetime* came to be?** That started as messing around with a 360° camera and thinking about walking the land and giving offerings. I was very quickly noticing how climate change has impacted these places that I was visiting. I started gathering seasonal footage. I had enough of a prototype of this idea of looking to the stars in a virtual reality game to activate them with patience and focus. They then turn into constellations, and that those constellations reflect back to the land and offer healing. I also had this idea of medicinal plants as florals growing in and imparting constellations, but not the traditional stories like the science involved and interwoven with understanding star teachings, which relates back to the water. I was really honing what we can do now to take better care of the land and the waters. Part of the process was working with Perry Bebamash on translating water teachings from English back into our language *Anishinaabemowin*, and then my voice recording them. I spent over two years gathering 360 footage of different points along the same connected river, which is in the equation, which means where the rivers meet or where one body of water flows into the next. The sad part of the story—which is also important to tell—the whole inspiration for this was this beautiful ice cave, which I came to understand was a place where native people would sleep or stay or camp out at when they were traveling during times of hunting and all of that. Still, also it was vital during displacement. It was a place of safety. It was filled with ice crystals, and it was so inspiring. It never happened like that again because the snow would fall or the ice would freeze, and then there would be this extremely rapid shift afterward, and it would melt and get muddy. I saw plants falling early and then die when the cold would come again. I saw maple sap run too early. Then the season was shortened. Climate change is not changing everything in this direction. It’s the rapid back and forth changes that are so destructive, and the unpredictability of it. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Thunderbird-Strike-1-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/level3_snakeboss-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Stills from THUNDERBIRD STRIKE. The original ice cave shot that inspired the whole thing, to begin with, can’t even be in the game because it never happened again like that. When it had two seasons before, so it was strange to see how things changed. It was very eye-opening, but then it’s the land telling its story then. Using real-world environments, I can’t just draw things and imagine them how I want them to be, which I realized through this. You have to see the truth that’s around you. It was immensely sad but also incredibly meaningful about working on that. That ended up being a shot in the dark to Guggenheim. No part of me thought that I would actually get that. Receiving the award was legitimately life-changing—what I created became the [first game ever awarded a Guggenheim](https://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/elizabeth-lapensee/?ref=killscreen.com). That says so much about games’ capacity to be perceived as an intersection of art and science. If nothing else, that was meaningful, is that now a pathway has been opened for Guggenheim to look at games and consider games for their fellowship. Then the process of *Along the River of Spacetime* really was like hand drawing all the constellations. They are NASA-accurate. I just went to the MSU planetarium because I am working on an extension of the game where the constellations will be up in a planetarium dome. We’re talking about a traveling exhibit with audio recordings. *Along the River of Spacetime* will not be a game in that space. It will be a show about constellations, again not of the tellings of traditional stories that can only be shared when snow is on the ground, and in fact when the lakes are frozen over in a particular way, but sharing the science of them. This constellation is seen when spring has arrived, and it might be a warning of the snow melting and how the water is rushing, and you might get pulled in by an undertow. We can talk about those scientific teachings behind the constellations. It is vital to bring in diverse representations, but what is more important is to bring people in to represent themselves. That’s what the emphasis needs to be. ***How do you see games as producing emotional responses?*** Let’s tackle the idea of an empathy game. How can you develop games that have to create awareness? What is that saying it’s trying to do? Is that really possible? I question the concept of empathy games. I want to caution this next generation of game developers that it is vital to bring in diverse representations, but what is more important is to bring people in to represent themselves. That’s what the emphasis needs to be. The dedicated advocacy work is saying, let’s expand the opportunities within this industry, build capacity, create meaningful opportunities, and hire people as cultural consultants or diversity consultants, but give them roles, not only any part but ideally lead roles. Everyone has the capacity to be a writer, programmer, designer, artist. There are many different forms of artists, animators, level designers, audio. There are many possibilities there, and it might mean more training, but to impart to the next generation of game developers that it’s all of our responsibility. If we really are going to have more diverse games, more people need to be involved in their own self-representations. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/When-Rivers-Were-Trails-1-scaled.jpg) Still from WHEN RIVERS WERE TRAILS. --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted by Alex Westfall in October, 2020. ### Links [elizabethlapensee.com/](http://www.elizabethlapensee.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Elizabeth on Twitter](https://twitter.com/odaminowin?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor&ref=killscreen.com) ### Andrew Thomas Huang: Assembling universes with magic and motion URL: https://www.killscreen.com/andrew-thomas-huang/ Last updated: 2026-05-12T00:16:24.000Z [*Andrew Thomas Huang*](http://www.andrewthomashuang.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *holds as much respect for craft as he does concept. With a background that meshes CGI animation with cinema, virtual reality, and puppetry, Huang molds singular worlds with their own tightly-sealed, labyrinthine logic, populated by bodies and landscapes, both familiar and unfamiliar.* *Huang served as one of the creative directors for Björk’s immersive VR experience, Björk Digital, made the* [*Grammy-nominated video*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkLjqFpBh84&ref=killscreen.com) *for FKA Twigs’ cellophane, and is a current participant of Sundance’s Screenwriters Lab, where he will develop his first feature film, Tiger Girl. We sat down with Andrew to speak about the childhood puppets that kickstarted his creative pursuit, how he will bring his animatronic skills into his forthcoming film, and the breaking from expectations placed on creators of color.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/QNA_image_02_v03A-scaled.jpg) Self portrait by Andrew Thomas Huang. ***Have you always been a creator, or was that something that came later in life? Where do you chart your initial journey into making things?*** As a kid, I made shit all the time. It was compulsive—drawing and painting was my main thing. I also was obsessed with *The Muppets*. I wanted to be one of those animatronic people that made robotics—I would watch the *Labyrinth* behind-the-scenes video over and over. I got the steer from my neighbor, who had a boyfriend at the time that worked at an effects studio. Their advice was, *You should really hone your art portfolio. You should learn to draw well if you want to go into effects*. So I went to USC and studied fine art, but intending to be near the film school to help out. At that point, I had done some digital filmmaking in high school and realized that I wanted to be in charge of my own thing. I made a short film outside of the curriculum while I was in college. I put it on YouTube, back when the site was only two years old, and they would feature like, five videos a week. It went viral and kickstarted my directing career. I didn’t really know what directing was, but I knew that there were people that I admired that made music videos, like [Chris Cunningham](https://vimeo.com/channels/153296?ref=killscreen.com). I thought, *Maybe I could go into directing that way.* I did music videos and commercials for four years, getting my hands dirty. I finally realized, *You know what, I’ve learned enough. I want to scrap everything I’ve done. I want to come out with a new statement*. I made a short film called [*Solipsist*](https://vimeo.com/37848135?ref=killscreen.com), an experimental film that involved puppetry, mixed media, and live-action. Björk saw it, and I worked with her and Thom Yorke that same year—it was a point at which everything crystallized. I’ve done a combination of music video, narrative, and interactive work since and have been able to do so on my own terms. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/portrait_D1_v1-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/portrait_C2-v5-scaled.jpg) Self portraits by Andrew Thomas Huang. ***Was there a Muppet, moment, or skit that sparked your interest in puppetry?*** I was just such a nerd. I would tape all the Muppet show reruns from the 1970s on VHS. I also watched all of the *Fraggle Rock* series. It was the work that Jim Henson did in his later life that was more ‘adult.’ You could tell that he was crystallizing his artistic ways. He spent decades making family-friendly stuff, and then all of a sudden made bizarre, super-spiritual things like *The Dark Crystal.* In these projects, there are the goodies and the baddies, but it’s hippy work. It’s totally inspired by Jung and alchemy. As someone unaware of that, you feel that there’s something magical about the universe. One summer, the Henson company sent two puppeteers to schools in LA to do a puppet program. When I was nine, they came to my neighborhood and taught us how to cut foam patterns and work with some pretty industrial, toxic materials. I threw myself at it. I felt privileged to be growing up in LA; to have access to stuff like that. That was the first moment I thought, *Oh, this is how you can sculpt actual puppets out of foam and use industrial materials to fabricate these things.* Even though I was nine, I still was like, *Tell me what you actually use to make this stuff.* ***Is there something about the craft of puppetry that has influenced your voice as a director?*** Totally. As a gay Asian kid, I never saw myself represented. There was part of me that was a budding thespian—I wish I could act, but I was too shy. The idea of inhabiting something else by proxy was more comfortable. The Muppets are super-queer—they’re beyond human; they’re fuzzy. There’s something that felt more truthful about being a weird creature. I identified with that. Inhabiting something by proxy was an entry point for me and continues to be when I make work. I like that additional layer of speaking through this puppet to tell stories or inhabit a character. That’s what’s so great about \[*The Muppets*\]. The mechanics are so awkward, technical, cumbersome, but the effect is so sleight-of-hand and seamless. I love when all the technicalities disappear, and you’re totally enchanted by this living thing. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/concept_artwork_01_s-1-e1602693181825.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/concept_artwork_02_s-1.jpg) Concept art for BLACK LAKE. Photos courtesy of Andrew Thomas Huang. ***There are things that puppeteers do to make something realistic or natural that are not necessarily intuitive. When you work with digital characters, do you find it challenging to make them look realistic or move believably?*** For sure. When I work with digital tools, I always try to find some human input, whether that’s motion capture or tracking a real performance. I get really upset when I see robotic, lazy CG animation. You see kids shows nowadays produced so quickly and cheaply, I’m like, *Oh, kids are watching this stuff that has no life to it.* People get into animation because they like to see the way things move. They think, *Why imitate real human kinesthetics?* People make *Looney Tunes*, for example, to do all the squishy stretchy things—that is the art of animation. When I see something that feels biologically believable—like when we shift our weight or make something through motion capture—there’s a look to it because it’s doing what kinetically, your body would do. To get that goosebumps feeling, you have to have some sort of visceral human-like input. It’s challenging, but I think as long as you’re mixing techniques and always involving some level of real performance, you’re going to get some of that feeling. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/concept_artwork_07_s.jpg) Concept art for VULCINURA. Photo courtesy of Andrew Thomas Huang. ***You’re conversant in a variety of tools. When you’re sitting down and figuring out what you would like to make next, where does the process begin?*** Usually, it’s drawing that comes native to me, but it depends. Sometimes, it’s a combination of regular pen-to-paper writing and drawing or a lot of research. If I’m working with a musician or another collaborator, it’s a lot of conversation. The music video industry is driven by these darts-on-a-board collaborations where they have multiple directors pitch on a track. I hate it when you see a video, and it has no real authentic threaded relationship with the artist. Whenever I enter a collaboration, I try to get to know them as people and understand what we’re conceptually trying to achieve with their music. *How can I align with that visually?* That’s when it becomes research, drafting, storyboarding, writing…I am a traditionalist in that way. I believe that writing—and, ultimately, pen-to-paper tools—are where I start. One of the best pieces of advice anyone gave me was that when you make treatments or pitches, you want to create concept art that looks as if it had been plucked from the finished piece. So I go full-on. I’ll collage stuff from Photoshop or find images online that just marry together to look like the finished video. Sometimes, we’ll use that pitch and that artwork to raise money or guide the production. As a director, it helps if you give people a visual North Star for what your style is to be trying to achieve. Of course, there’s a script, and every voice that comes on your project will have their own interpretation. But if you’re doing something with world-building, you need the concept art to say, *This is what we want this particular universe to feel like; this is what we’re striving for*. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/StonemilkerRelease_retouched.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/stonemilker_BTS_0.jpg) Behind the scenes of STONEMILKER. Photos courtesy of Andrew Thomas Huang. ***Regarding your collaborations with Björk, what is the process of building something interactive or multisite?*** It’s not like we started out at one moment and said, *We’re going to make Björk Digital*. It was evolutionary. I made a video for her in 2012, and we reconvened a year later, and she wanted to do something different. She had a new album coming out, so we started with [*Black Lake*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGn1pJIpZw8&ref=killscreen.com), which was meant to be the center of her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. It was a combination of ideas and intuition on her part. She wanted to communicate what it was like to be truly in the center of this emotional experience, so she literally drew a stick figure and a dome around them. We tried to make a 360° dome film in the museum, which was not possible financially because building a dome screen is extremely expensive. I shot *Black Lake* with an extensive tapestry format expecting to at least wrap it around a cylindrical screen. But it just didn’t work out. We finished the film, but we were not able to create this immersive experience that we wanted. At the same time, Chris Milk was starting Vrse. works at the time, which evolved into [Within](https://www.with.in/?ref=killscreen.com). My producer during that period also happened to start working with Chris. So they had a prototype of the 360° VR camera rig with the GoPros that they were trying out. In the narrative of *Vulcinura,* *Black Lake* is the death song. It’s the death of her relationship with Matthew Barney. In a way, it was almost appropriate that that was the last project we did in traditional film. For our next piece, it was like, *Fuck trying to make a dome*. We’re going to make an immersive experience with a headset. And so we shot our first VR piece that way, and it was very much an experiment. By that time, the technology was moving so fast. When we premiered that piece at MoMA PS1, it was like, *Now volitional movement is more important—we have to build this in the Vive where you can actually move around*. So for the next piece, we migrated to Unity and made it a proper game, but there was a conflict between the mechanics and making it a new musical narrative experience that changes through time. “Inhabiting something by proxy was an entry point for me and continues to be when I make work.” Programming the landscape to change throughout the song on a particular beat was tricky. As a filmmaker, it was definitely frustrating and challenging. I’d think, *Can’t you just change the color at like one minute and 30 seconds*? And they’d say, *No, we have to program an interface to make that happen.* Even then, it may not have occurred right on the beat because of the way the experience loads for everyone. Then there’s, of course, the question of 4D audio—at that time, it was still a relatively beta version of Wwise, spatialized audio where you attach sounds to objects. That experience was my first true game experience, and I need to credit two developers, [Vince McKelvie ](https://vincemckelvie.tumblr.com/?ref=killscreen.com)and [Peter Javidpour](http://peterjavidpour.com/?ref=killscreen.com). They were incredible problem solvers and both artists in their own right. It was so much to figure out how people come in and experience these pieces. How do we create individual rooms where people can have their own little chambers? I had also heard that sometimes people would experience my piece, but the shaders or the lights wouldn’t load. So as [*Family*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMCOCvrFJgw&ref=killscreen.com) toured around, I wasn’t sure if it was being experienced the way I wanted it to. But we also had byproducts—these avatars made for the experience that can then be used as motion capture puppetry for Björk. I also uploaded FBX files of these avatars up to Sketchfab, and people could actually tumble around these things in real-time. So that was a nice experience of taking what we built and spin out our characters, models, and sculptures in ways that people could experience interactively beyond what we created. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Family_WIP_01_s.jpg) Work-in-progress for VULCINURA album cover. Photo courtesy of Andrew Thomas Huang. ***How are you defining a meaningful interaction for that work?*** There are a couple of realizations that I had. One was how scale is viscerally impactful when you’re wearing the headset. The other had to do with hands. The mechanic of *Family* is that you’re sewing yourself through this journey, and we had these hands initially attached to the controller, but it felt like you were just holding them on a stick. I learned, though, that if you create a delay as you move the controller, the hand drifts, then it would feel like it was really your hand. If it’s connected to the control of your body, there has to be a delay or some kind of disconnect for you to feel like you’re actually controlling something that’s yours. Psychologically, I found that bizarre. When you’re wearing the headset, there’s this desire to inhabit a space. For me, the climax of the video is very much like an Easter story. Björk has died and is resurrected. And once you discover her tombstone in the cave, you ascend through that tombstone and emerge on a sulfur plane—then she emerges as a giant goddess. The climax is her walking through your space; you penetrate the mesh at the height of the song. And you’re like, literally inside a giant Björk. I was touched to hear that people were in tears from that experience—they felt like they were really touching her in that performance and that moment. In a way, that’s just an issue of staging. You can move around, but in the end, you’re still on this magical traveling carpet inside the ribbon sculpture that James Merry made. In a way, it’s still a passive experience where a character walks through you, but at the same time, you can volitionally experience it—you turn your head, and you can look around within that moment of embodiment. I thought a bit more about the way you stage theater or film, how often at the climax of a scene, the camera suddenly flips directions. Bjork walks through you, and the space flips. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Bjork_FamilyVR_still_29.jpg) Still from FAMILY. Photo courtesy of Andrew Thomas Huang. ***Can you talk more about the viewer’s expectations coming into Björk Digital? They’re probably Björk fans and are explicitly trying something new. What’s interesting about coming from a non-interactive medium compared to one where users put energy into it?*** It felt like designing a Disneyland ride. For instance, when you’re riding through *Pirates of the Caribbean*, you’re on a magic carpet, which is your boat, and there are many—Oh, I hate this word, but activation sites. Over there are the women chasing the pirates; over there is the animatronic chicken. And over there is the burning villa, you know? So there was pressure to fill in the blank page. When you have 360 degrees of volitional movement and space, there’s this tendency to want to fill it, but we just can’t, budgetarily speaking. For [*Black Lake*](http://www.xrez.com/?ref=killscreen.com), we flew drones over all the sites in Iceland, and we also did photogrammetry scans of all the landscapes with a company called xRez. We thought, *Oh, we might need these for visual effects purposes.* But we also ended up using them for all the game landscapes in the VR piece. And that also became like when you experienced Björk digital—the home landing page. The photogrammetry scan on the landscape was enough for us spatially, and it was beautiful. I loved looking at the fine detail of this scan of a real location carved by a glacier—just letting the camera fly through. In film, you’re always prioritizing where the eye is looking within the frame…and it’s no different in a game space. You can have an entire room that you enter, but there’s an activation site—a priority space that you’re calling for the game player to be drawn towards. For the latter half of the project, it was Björk’s tombstone and walking avatar. The same is for immersive theater—you can look anywhere, but you’re going to look where the action is happening. I think as long as you just prioritize what you’re emotionally trying to convey—and spatially where you want the user to be looking—then you don’t have to fill in everything. You can focus on what message you’re trying to convey, the action you’re trying to evoke. ***Do you think that game makers are thinking more cinematically, or do you feel like directors are thinking more interactively?*** I have so much reverence for game developers. They’ve been doing nonlinear storytelling for decades now. So hearing filmmakers be like, *Oh, VR is a new pioneering way of storytelling*, I’m like, *What are you guys talking about!?* Game designers have been doing this for so long. The only difference is that you’re wearing something on your face \[laughs\]. My opinion is more directed at filmmakers because I am one and see some of that rhetoric being spouted. Nonlinear storytelling has been around for a long time. I love watching [*Ghost of Tsushima*](https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/ghost-of-tsushima-ps4/?ref=killscreen.com). It’s gorgeous, a total cinematic experience. I love seeing how Unreal is being used now in *The Mandalorian* to make virtual LED sets—that totally took my breath away with it when I first saw it. There’s a really cool convergence happening. I get annoyed when people are like, *Oh, this is the first time anyone’s experiencing something like this.* And I think, *No, it’s not—there’ve been pioneers doing this work already.* I just think it’s a common tendency for everyone in their respective sphere to have their head in the sand and not look at what other people are doing in other industries. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Twigs_Cellophane_stills_-93881.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Twigs_Cellophane_stills_-90500.jpg) Stills from FKA twigs' CELLOPHANE. Photos courtesy of Andrew Thomas Huang. ***Now, there are tools that bridge the gap between what game makers and filmmakers know their respective literacies. Sometimes the game makers can be too invested in making a thing that’s simply an expression of a mechanic rather than trying to tell a good story, which can be just as simple.*** Respective literacies is a good way of putting it. If anything, I get sad that VR is so difficult to share an experience with. After *Björk Digital*, I realized how difficult it is to disseminate that experience to as many people as possible. That’s why I still really believe in browser-based—that’s the most accessible, democratic way of sharing an experience. ***Are you still working in Unity or Unreal?*** The short answer is no. Unreal has been on my list of things I want to learn. I see so many people doing cool things in it, but I’m at a point where I just only have so much time to learn new tools, and right now, I’ve been just trying to get my feature film, *Tiger Girl*, made. Navigating into that space has been a whole new educational experience for me. My years working on *Björk Digital* was a great time of experimenting with this new platform. I think about what they did with *The Jungle Book* where they built the entire forest in Unreal—it was such a cool application of the project. But I have to make a budgetable indie film before I can even get to that level. **Tiger Girl *sounds so different, visually and narratively, from what you’ve made in the past. How do you see this as a new expression of your past work, as someone who’s worked with digital characters, interactive characters, and puppetry?*** I’ve had trouble making the first movie precisely because of that problem. My stuff is visual, which means it’s expensive. It’s just expensive to make fantasy stuff. I would like my first movie to be as rich as *Labyrinth*, but that’s not going to happen. There’s also this dilemma in the way filmmakers of color are marketed and sold or positioned in these labs or fellowships. Sometimes I feel like we’re only accepted into these if we’re telling some confessional sob story about our immigrant background or a kitchen-sink, socially-realistic drama. That’s not really what I want to do either. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/QNA_image_04_v05B_tint-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/QNA_image_05_v04B3-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Self portraits by Andrew Thomas Huang. So, I’m trying to merge these things. Why does telling a story about my family and their history have to be a social realist drama? Why can’t it be as magical as something Jim Henson would do? *Tiger Girl* is about a Chinese girl in the 1960s who discovers the tiger in her attic. There’s going to be a tiger—there’s going to be a puppet, and it’s going to be red, and we’re going to do cool tricks; some CG fuckery. That’s going to make it like mind-blowing, but I still have got to shoot with real people with believable emotions. Nothing’s worse than wooden performances in a visually lush film, and I also really hate it when I see something told with no visual imagination or style at all. So I’m trying to thread that needle. But now, what I have to do is make this a good movie with good writing and good acting. And it’s hard! It’s the same as game design; how do you make a compelling story with beautiful mechanics and an entire world that you’ve created? It’s like learning to be ambidextrous. In order to do that, you have to kind of zigzag—I could stay in this territory where it’s purely visual and technique-driven, but I gotta work on these other aspects. I know, though, that we’re going to make it great. I have friends that are so visually-minded and sensorial, then I have friends that are much more literary, who love narrative and acting. It’s like a different way of thinking. So we’re going to flip over to that territory and then try to marry this stuff together in the end, but it’s going to take time. ***That challenge on the representation side is eternal for creators of color—it’s that balance between what kinds of things you’re supposed to be making. Sometimes, that aligns with what you actually want to make, but sometimes it doesn’t.*** It’s important to tell those personal stories and tell them authentically. I also hope to depict those stories in a visual way that we haven’t seen before. Let’s hope I get it right. --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted by Jamin Warren in September, 2020. ### Links [andrewthomashuang.com](http://www.andrewthomashuang.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Andrew on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/andrewthomashuang/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) ### How Party Chat Turned GTA into a Virtual Fashion Show URL: https://www.killscreen.com/party-chat/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T20:15:08.000Z Started by old schoolmates James Sutherland and Jamie Mcintyre, [Party Chat](https://partychat.buzz/?ref=killscreen.com) is a Glasgow-based unisex clothing brand inspired by the pulsating dance music scene and tight-knit club community in the Scottish city. To publicize their latest collection titled *Work Force*, Sutherland and Mcintyre enlisted new media artist [Alfatih](https://alfatih.world/?ref=killscreen.com) to ‘hack’ [*Grand Theft Auto*](https://www.rockstargames.com/grandtheftauto/?ref=killscreen.com) with characters dressed in Party Chat garb. The result? [A trio of promo films](https://vimeo.com/user108318964?ref=killscreen.com) that operate as a virtual manifesto for the brand—an ode to the driving game’s dark and dreamy atmosphere and with an attitude that pokes fun at corporate culture through the imagined business empire, PC Corp. We spoke with Sutherland and Mcintyre about using *GTA* as a vessel for their brand, Party Chat’s origins in dance music and club culture, and the importance of not taking yourself too seriously. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Partychat2-scaled.jpg) Still from PC Corp promotional video, Party Chat x Alfatih. ## Tongue-in-cheek ***Could you talk a bit about the origin story of Party Chat?*** **James Sutherland (JS):** Jamie was in the year below me in school. We didn’t hang out that much, to be honest—we were different people back then, but we shared the same ideas. Then I moved out to London and worked in marketing and management for experiential events. I’ve been involved with dance music—club nights, warehouse raves, you name it, that’s predominantly my area. But we reconnected in London because we were living in the same area. It’s just this natural way when you get down to London that Scottish people—if you haven’t seen them in years—you reconnect. We were just having a beer one day, talking about this concept. With my music background and my love for clothing and apparel, I thought we could take advantage of a particular market. **Jamie Mcintyre (JM):** I have a design background and worked for six and a half years at [It’s Nice That](https://www.itsnicethat.com/?ref=killscreen.com)—I started there as an intern and left as Head of Creative there. When James and I connected in London, there was this lovely crossover of creative minds. James was very artistic, and I’m a big dance music lover, so this nice hybrid became Party Chat quite quickly overnight. We talked a lot about the creative makeup of Party Chat—how do we create a point of view that’s different from any other streetwear label out there? That was something we were conscious of, making sure we had right before we kicked off. There are so many streetwear labels left, right and center, does the world need another one \[laughs\]? For us, when it came to music, what kicked us off was this space that we felt could be tapped into—for instance, when you go into a record store, and they have some t-shirts hanging, and they’re not given much love or craft. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/PartyChat3-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Partychat10-scaled.jpg) Stills from PC Corp promotional video, Party Chat x Alfatih. For us, there was quite a big gap between High Street fast fashion—like when people put an old Rolling Stones flyer on a t-shirt and selling it, or Nirvana, all of that. Then there’s the other end, the top end, like when Virgil Abloh or Christopher Kane will have a dance-inspired collection once a season. There’s a lovely space between these two ends, like *OK, how can we give more craft and love to the subcultures and communities around dance music?* We want what we make to be highly produced but come at affordable price points. So that was the birth of us from a strategy point of view. I guess there’s the part of us, which is very “Let’s just fuck it and try it.” It sounds very calculated, but we told ourselves, *Let’s try a couple of things, pass them onto our mates, and see how people respond*. It grew quite quickly, the response, didn’t it, James? **JS**: It noticeably grew, especially with where we wanted to take it. We realized that there was more to it than just the music and design. We very much wanted to keep it quite punk. One of Glasgow’s most significant exports is actually music—if you look into many other artists, like [Hudson Mohawke](https://soundcloud.com/hudsonmohawke?ref=killscreen.com), he lived down the street from me. He produced [*Yeezus*](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-album-reviews/yeezus-94536/?ref=killscreen.com); he’s fantastic. Even though many exports are known from this little setting in Glasgow that support this scene, we wanted to fill that void while being forward-thinking. **JM**: Where we started to stretch our legs creatively—not just through what we want to put on a garment, but how we document or capture it—we wanted to make sure that we could produce 10-12 items, and not just churn it out. In terms of our backgrounds in music appreciation and creative work, we care about the craft. Probably our most significant weakness is that we’re not marketers that just want to churn it out. We actually live and breathe the culture that what we’re making is about. The care-taking has a concept to it and has an experimental attitude as well. We wanted to make sure that we were challenging ourselves creatively. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/PartyChat4-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/PartyChat5-scaled.jpg) Stills from PC Corp promotional video, Party Chat x Alfatih. ## Finding inspiration in the Glaswegian scene ***Was there a particular artist, sound, or club that are touchstones for Party Chat?*** **JS**: There’s always been a subculture in Glasgow for dance music—one of the oldest clubs, the most underground dance club called[ Sub Club](https://subclub.co.uk/?ref=killscreen.com) has had pretty much everyone you can think of play through there, and has the oldest residency in the world as well. So it just shows the passion in that dance music scene. When it comes to dance music, it’s very much about the underground side of things. I like the comparison between Detroit music—Detroit music is so big—and there is a comparison between Detroit and Glasgow because we’re both industrial cities. The focus on that music style was essential to people. We’ve had lots of people from Detroit come over. Stuart Cosgrove did the very first article on Detroit techno, and he’s a Scotsman! He went over there, and interviewed big players like Derrick May, Juan Atkins, Jeff Mills in 1989\. That level of dance music is what we’re interested in, it’s not that EDM sort of side of things. **JM**: Glasgow definitely has a sound, but there’s also a community side of Glasgow. **JS**: Some of the biggest DJs on Resident Advisor started working at this record store \[called\] [Rubadub](https://www.rubadub.co.uk/records?ref=killscreen.com), which is right next door to the Sub Club. **JM**: Whenever Boiler Room or someone similar does a doc about Glasgow, they’re like, *oh, let’s go to Sub Club* \[laughs\]. It’s the truest and purest source of many people’s inspiration and where they started their career—maybe not on paper, but in terms of a creative space. **JS**: Friendships as well, that’s what the whole Party Chat element is too. We’re tongue-in-cheek! We don’t take ourselves too seriously, but we take ourselves very seriously. It’s just a Scottish thing \[laughs\]. Dance music was something that very much created communities, and it wasn’t only at the club—it was the after-party, and other places, too. You could be hanging around with someone that’s now, for instance, Hudson Mohawke. **JM:** It’s not that table service, fireworks, EDM kind of backstage. Glasgow is very pure. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Partychat-6-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/partychat7-scaled.jpg) Stills from PC Corp promotional video, Party Chat x Alfatih. ## On hacking GTA ***The decision to use GTA as a vehicle for your brand—that’s really uncommon. How did you decide on that approach?*** **JS**: *GTA* was developed and created in Scotland—not far from Glasgow, in Dundee. The 2D format, top-down… we both grew up with it. Though it’s this billion-dollar franchise now, there’s still that noticeable property that remains throughout; that tongue-in-cheekness. There’s the pop culture references we know so well, and also the soundtracks… I worked with some people that have curated the soundtracks or people we know who’ve been \[featured\] on them. As a vessel, PC Corp was in itself a Glasgow satire. **JM**: We had this fantasy of corporate culture. We’re two guys in Glasgow packing up our garments, shipping them off by hand, walking to the post office—for us, it was this fantasy of what if PC Corp had an office in every city? We really got down to the details, *like what do the employee’s ID cards look like*? We began fantasizing about *how many floors does the high rise have*? Again, it comes back to the irony of Party Chat, and our space and the fashion world. You know, we’re not fashion people, but we like to poke fun at the corporate culture. We created eight different fantasy departments of the company that we then would be translated into a workers’ uniform that they would then wear back in this world. GTA felt like a sweet spot for us to explore when we thought about gaming, fantasy, pop culture, and music. We definitely can’t take the credit for the artistic license of that. Something we often do is connect with experimental fields in art schools. There are some fantastic programs—some people here in Amsterdam doing some mad shit. James and I talk a lot about experiences and digital experiences—how we can influence culture or even an online shopping experience. So we got in touch with [Alfatih](https://www.instagram.com/alfatiharufa/?ref=killscreen.com), who is a fucking amazing artist. We went to his degree show in Switzerland—there’s an art school there called ECAL, they have some fantastic and quite progressive courses there. Often, they bring in people from industry to do workshops every week, they have the luxury to do it quite well. At the degree show, Alfatih had taken some high couture items from Commes des Garçons, and he modeled them onto himself and put himself into *GTA* and drove around, did some naughty things \[laughs\]. We treated the development process like how a feature film lookbook would be treated in the real world. We didn’t want to do a whole *Hey, we’re in Glasgow, we could go around and cause some trouble*. We really wanted to have this eerie, moody, atmospheric lookbook cut together scene-by-scene, which we had a storyboard for, and we wrote the kind of language that’s read by AI-type voiceover. That’s \[read\] by a poet we know from Glasgow, and all that copy she reads out is actually printed on the garment herself. We wanted to tie that loop back to something existing physically—and down to the details of how we wanted it to be read out and augmented into AI-type VO. To translate that story is something we really wanted to do—we imagined these videos in the hypothetical foyer of PC corp—you know, you go in, you tap in your little ID card. So in a way, we put ourselves back into *GTA*. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/PartyChat8-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Partychat9-scaled.jpg) Stills from PC Corp promotional video, Party Chat x Alfatih. ## The sonic worlds of GTA ***There are these roleplaying servers called “GTA RP” where people get together, and they act out a universe of the story—for example, there’s one guy, and he pulls people over and gives them tickets. It sounds like you’re tapping into this much larger tradition in gaming.*** **JM**: Down to character development, we developed a gender-neutral character with Alfatih. We could’ve stuck with a hoodie on a butch guy, which would’ve wholly been the wrong kind of space for us—so we’re really super happy with the outcome. Having this anonymous identity allows you to take more notice of the type of narrative that we’ve tried to build. That’s the kind of thing that excited us. We’re not in that world but one influenced by our background. One of James’ good friends [Big Miz](https://www.instagram.com/big%5F%5Fmiz/?ref=killscreen.com), a musician—we used one of these tracks, sounds like it could be from *GTA*, it’s kind of dreamy… **JS**: Dreaminess, too—most of it was set in the dark, and obviously *GTA* has gone so far beyond, it’s so beautiful now with all that ambient sound. He knew exactly what to do–goes back to that Glasgow community thing, too. He was like, *I’ve got this ambient track’ that would work perfectly with the storyboard you’ve got, and on GTA*! **JM**: Often, with a game, you can put down and pick up again. You can start where you left off, and for us, what we love about these three films we created is that they’re nondescript as well. Though we have a voiceover and mini-narratives, it’s up to the viewer to make up their own mind about who this person is and the journey they’re on. Are they going to work? Are they going to a party? There are different props in each, too—there’s a [phone](https://vimeo.com/user108318964?ref=killscreen.com) in one, there’s a [helicopter](https://vimeo.com/389540922?ref=killscreen.com) and a [motorcycle](https://vimeo.com/389541425?ref=killscreen.com) in another. So it’s like, *Are they commuting? Are they being chased*? You just don’t know. And that’s quite nice, to not have access to be able to see what’s the other side of this. It’s a little bubble in a moment of time, which we really love about \[the films we made\]. ***Ivan \[Pavlovich, who is the soundtrack supervisor for the GTA franchise\], actually ran a Chicago house label before taking the job at GTA. It’s cool that he’s bringing that dance music sensibility to GTA.*** **JS**: The audio experience with *GTA* is so integral to the actual gaming experience itself. And the curation of each radio station \[in the game\] is great. That’s another important thing we loved about using *GTA* as a vessel. **JM**: Last year, some big DJs were stuck in the game, and had a ‘club night’—Black Madonna was one of them. With Party Chat, there’s a level of expectation—we could’ve gone to a club and had a dance—but that would’ve been so expected. So we were delighted with this interactive space here, and doing our own thing. We love music appreciation and curation but didn’t want to get caught up in that space because it’s been done. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/PartyChat1-scaled.jpg) Stills from PC Corp promotional video, Party Chat x Alfatih. ***What do you have planned next? Dance music and dance culture are in an interesting spot right now, and so in some ways, it’s a challenging and unique time to be talking about these things.*** **JM**: We’ve had to put some things on pause, manufacturing-wise. We’re working closely with a designer who helped with the PC Corp line. He’s creating a logotype for us—which we’ve never had—and kind of a visual language around our identity, which we’re really stoked about launching in the next few weeks. Beyond that, we’re getting more into manufacturing our own stuff from scratch. In making clothes, we’ve been printing on blanks, embroidering on blanks up to this point. Still, we’re really excited about this next stage of production and exploration, seeing what’s possible. **JS**: Tech is critical. Technology now with materials and experiences drawn from it—that is really important to us. We’re constantly wanting to evolve with technology and bringing out more things, especially animation. **JM**: Our new icon is a key. For us, we’ve already planted some seeds with our network—*Hey, our new icon is this, take it and mess it up*! Someone said the other day that they wanted to create an AR key that they could open some things with. Maybe it unlocks in due course, secret stuff that certain customers can get access to… otherwise, it’s a metaphor for many things, like a journey. **JS**: A skeleton key that unlocked everything. Or nothing at all \[laughs\]. **JM**: We talked about community at the start here. With a key, you can add things onto it—it really sums up our approach to this whole project. We want to add people to that journey, whether that’s a one-off collaboration or not. We definitely want to include community and friendship as the way we want to move forward with projects and work with people who are just, like, good people. --- ### Credits Edited and condensed for clarity. Interview conducted by Jamin Warren in May, 2020. ### Links [partychat.buzz](https://partychat.buzz/?ref=killscreen.com) [Follow Party Chat on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/party%5F%5Fchat/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) ### Keiken: Towards new collective belief through CGI cinema URL: https://www.killscreen.com/keiken/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T20:45:22.000Z *‘What body would you like today?’ This is the question—and seeming freedom—that confronts the characters in* [*Feel My Metaverse*](https://vimeo.com/412683858?ref=killscreen.com)*. This new CGI cinema work was conceptualized, written, and built by cross-disciplinary art collective,* [*Keiken*](https://www.instagram.com/%5Fkeiken%5F/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com)*. Based between Berlin, London, and Falmouth, Keiken was founded in 2015 by Hana Omori, Isabel Ramos, and Tanya Cruz. Working across filmmaking, VR, AR, and installation, Keiken utilizes magical realist narratives and aesthetics to imagine speculative futures that address today’s most pressing political and philosophical issues.* *Commissioned for* [*Jerwood Arts*](https://jerwoodarts.org/?ref=killscreen.com) *and built in the game design system* [*Unreal Engine*](https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/?utm%5Fsource=GoogleSearch&utm%5Fmedium=Performance&utm%5Fcampaign=an%2AInternal%5Fpr%2AUnrealEngine%5Fct%2ASearch%5Fpl%2ABrand%5Fco%2AUS%5Fcr%2Aexact&utm%5Fid=6645089194&sub%5Fcampaign=UE%5FBroad%5FEN&utm%5Fcontent=July2020%5FGeneric%5FV1b&utm%5Fterm=unreal%20engine&gclid=EAIaIQobChMImP7nro%5FQ6wIVEfDACh1wbwhxEAAYASAAEgI9tPD%5FBwE)*, Feel My Metaverse touches on everything from ancestral mother-child relationships to Kylie Jenner’s beauty empire, from critiquing the overwhelming hold of capitalism on society to the impending doom of climate change. Above all, the film reorients our understanding of reality—the idea that we can forge new future collective belief.* *We sat down with Cruz, Omori, and Ramos—who collaborated with* [*George Jasper Stone*](https://vimeo.com/georgestone?ref=killscreen.com)*,* [*Charlotte Oppenheim*](https://www.instagram.com/mud%5F%5F%5Fbug/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com)*,* [*Sakeema Crook*](https://www.google.com/search?q=sakeema+crook&rlz=1C5CHFA%5FenUS898US898&oq=sakeema+crook&aqs=chrome.0.0l3j69i60.1406j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&ref=killscreen.com)*,* [*Linda Rocco*](http://lindarocco.art/?ref=killscreen.com)*, and* [*Khidja*](http://futura-artists.com/khidja/?ref=killscreen.com) *on the film—to discuss the Metaverse they’ve created, the possibilities of being self-taught techies, and finding humanity in design systems.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Copy-of-21_Feel-My-Metaverse-film-still-05-scaled.jpg) Still from Feel My Metaverse, Keiken + George Jasper Stone. ## Consciousness as experience ***Can you talk about your origin story—how you met and started creating things with each other?*** **Hana Omori (HO):** Me and Tanny (Tanya Cruz) grew up in Cornwall, and there’s not much diversity there. Tanny’s half Mexican, I’m half Japanese. We were the only people who are mixed in all of Cornwall \[laughter\]. **Tanya Cruz (TC):** Then we went to university in Falmouth. We met Issy \[Isabel Ramos\] when we were studying for our Foundation course, and Hana was doing a degree program. We all became good friends there. **Isabel Ramos (IR):** Deciding to start a collective was quite random. We were all in my bedroom, which had pink flamingo wallpaper, trying to figure out what connects our practice. We created a spider diagram that centered the and we all thought: word *experience*. That’s how Keiken was born—‘keiken’ means experience in Japanese. So we began experimenting together and trying to bring our friends into it, too. and we also were trying to bring in our friends into it. **HO:** George \[[Jasper Stone](https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/george-jasper-stone-digital-130720?ref=killscreen.com)\] went to uni with us as well. He’s an ongoing collaborator. One year we shared a studio, and the next year George and Issy and Tanny shared a studio. Since then, we haven’t stopped—the collaboration has continued to grow and transform. ***That word,* keiken*, means experience, but as is often the case with language, experience is a broad word. Is there anything else that textures that word?*** **HO:** We realized that all of us were trying to push the boundaries of experience in our artwork. How do you create experiential artworks? Also, experience means consciousness. In all our work, we say that we are creating meta-concepts. It always relates back to this big overarching idea on how we assign consciousness. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Copy-of-12_Feel-My-Metaverse_Keiken-and-George-Jasper-Stone-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Copy-of-06_Feel-My-Metaverse_Keiken-and-George-Jasper-Stone-scaled.jpg) Stills from Feel My Metaverse, Keiken + George Jasper Stone. ***Were you all working in both the physical and digital realms?*** **TC:** I really enjoy learning about how things are done. We’ve been teaching ourselves a lot of 3D skills. We don’t really have any background in it essentially other than just being self-taught. That’s been anything from figuring out how to do things with augmented reality through this software called [Spark AR](https://sparkar.facebook.com/ar-studio/?ref=killscreen.com) or working in Unreal—for which there’s still so much room for improvement. Often, we don’t stay confined to a medium. We think about what we want to do and then try and learn the medium that feels appropriate for delivering that. **IR:** We see the physical and digital really influence each other. They’re not separate entities at all. We were teenagers when social media was happening, which has likely affected the way we think about technology. **HO:** I don’t have a hand; I have a phone. ## Digital selves ***You’re part of the first generation of digital creators working in a medium that you grew up with. How has growing up using a medium that you were very comfortable with influenced what you all create together, or the topics you decide to explore?*** **HO:** Quite a lot of our works that we get commissioned to do is now through augmented reality, but that software is [made by Facebook](https://sparkar.facebook.com/ar-studio/?ref=killscreen.com). It’s a weird thing because Facebook contacts us, and we talk to them! How weird is that? We are so influenced by social and technology that we literally end up going there \[laughter\]. **IR:** Having grown up with social media is very much integrated into our lives. It’s allowed us to be very multi-platform in the way that we approach and create work. Alongside our conceptual ideas, it’s allowed us to think about creating an eternal network as well. We’re really interested in this idea of creating a ‘[Metaverse](https://www.forbes.com/sites/cathyhackl/2020/07/19/a-day-in-the-metaverse/?ref=killscreen.com#bcb1395fc6bf)‘: a space where you can use the network you’ve collectively built, one that would encompass all these different levels of experience. **HO:** Even in *Feel My Metaverse*, everyone who lives in the Metaverse feels it as real as the earth. But on a cognitive level, people feel so interconnected to the internet, to their digital selves—their profile, their phone. On that premise, we are living in a Metaverse. Throughout this pandemic, it has started to feel as though people are living in a Metaverse. How are we contacting other people? **TC:** One of the main reasons that people feel so immersed in their technology—whether that’s anything online, WhatsApp, or social media—is having communities, all those connections with other people online. That’s how you absorb yourself into it. For most people, that’s what makes it so attractive—especially in our current situation, where there’s not much choice \[laughter\]. ***Unreal is a commercial tool used both by big-budget game studios but also by independent creators. What were some of the biases that were built into that tool when you were working on Feel My Metaverse, and some of the things that surprised you as a creator?*** **TC:** When we were building *Feel My Metaverse*, we also worked with several other softwares to bridge certain elements. For example, when we were doing character animation, we worked with a free software called [DAZ](https://sparkar.facebook.com/ar-studio/?ref=killscreen.com). One thing that we found is that it’s very difficult to build a body from scratch if you don’t have so much experience—but then there’s a lot of assets that are available online. The problem that we run into is that all of those characters’ bodies which you could buy initially and then adjust the features, all of them were so whitewashed or overly sexualized—\[It was\] kind of gross. That was something that we found quite challenging. One of the reasons why we also chose to work with facial scanning of the two main characters is because we wanted to represent them correctly. **IR:** Represent real people. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Copy-of-17_Mind-Body-and-Screen_Keiken_and_Sakeema_Crook.jpg) Mind, Body and Screen, Sakeema Crook + Keiken. ***You weren’t naturally finding humanity in some of the premade assets in software, so you had to create them yourself. Is that right?*** **IR:** Yes. Exactly. **HO:** It didn’t make conceptual sense to use. It also didn’t make sense conceptually. If you think of film compared to gaming, it’s almost like films are always really called out for not representing people properly. But games are also equally behind in some ways—or they do the representation really poorly, and they lose the meaning of the game. ## Self-taught techies ***From a process standpoint, which piece led? Was it plotting the narrative, or was it the possibility of what you could create with the tools?*** **IR:** We actually wrote the narrative as a short story. We spent ages thinking about what these worlds were. The piece was then commissioned through the proposal we wrote, but we’d never actually used Unreal. We’d done a bit of filmmaking before, but this was the first time we were going to really make a full, narrative, fictional CGI film. We were learning to use Unreal through the process. The tools definitely shaped how the film was made, especially because there were certain limitations with being self-taught. ***Game engines are not simple things! You have to figure out along the way what’s possible? There must have been many limitations, but also a lot of possibilities.*** **IR:** We were lucky to work with George Jasper Stone. Before this project, he was experienced in Cinema 4D—however, he was quite new to Unreal as well. To develop the piece, it was a lot of trial and error. What’s amazing about Unreal is that you can build this world, and then you can go into gameplay mode, and then you can test out your scenarios and see *does this part of the script work? Does this character work*? **HO:** We also spent a long time thinking about the characters. We worked with [Sakeema Crook](https://www.instagram.com/sakeemathecrook/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com), a dance artist and a trans activist, and [Linda Rocco](https://www.instagram.com/lindaonmars/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com)**,** a curator. In the film, they both have their own stories. They also understand the movement of their bodies so well. **HO:** Linda had a very successful career from a very young age as a contemporary dancer. But one day when she was 19, she woke up and she couldn’t move, which meant that she couldn’t dance anymore. Since then, she’s had some really interesting sensorial experiences. So if she closes her eyes, even if she touches her body, she can’t sense where anything is. We learned about different ways of seeing and feeling on a very sensorial level with her. Through motion capture, she danced for the first time since. So it was this whole journey that was also so tied to reality in the way we worked with these artists. **TC:** Our relationships and collaborations with Sakeema and Linda contributed a lot to the narrative. Even though we’d designed the narrative beforehand, they really influenced a lot of the outcomes—whether that was to do with those smaller sensorial details, character development, or visual outputs. **HO:** We were also interested in the design concept of the ‘platform-diverse body’ from [Natasha Vita-More](https://natashavita-more.com/?ref=killscreen.com), who is a [transhumanist](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/06/no-death-and-an-enhanced-life-is-the-future-transhuman?ref=killscreen.com). **IR:** A platform-diverse body can live like a future body in both the biosphere and the Metaverse—an upgraded human body. When we were creating *Feel My Metaverse,* it was the idea that you could inhabit different bodies. But you would still have a base body which would be on earth—what we called ‘Base Reality’ in the film—as well. **HO:** You’d have a body on earth and a body in the Metaverse, and they would both be alive at the same time. Basically, one of the protagonists, C, transforms from the generic CGI human avatar to Kylie Jenner. One of the film’s main settings is a reality called ‘Pome Sector,’ which is a corporate wellness world. The idea is that to feel connected to other people when you go to get dressed in the morning, rather than trying on different clothes, you’d have ‘themed’ days. That way, you get to try on different bodies, and everyone would wear the same body to feel connected to one another. For example, there is a ‘Dalai Lama’ day, and everyone in that world would feel really wise that day because they were all Dalai Lama. \[laughter\] We were thinking about Kylie Jenner because of how she sells the idea of herself. How she makes money is for people to look like her…if they bought her product. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Copy-of-13_Feel-My-Metaverse_Keiken-and-George-Jasper-Stone_Install-1.jpg) Install of Feel My Metaverse, Keiken + George Jasper Stone. Photo by Luca Girardini. ## Cyber self-care ***Right—in the past, if the desire is that people would look like you or try to adopt your style, but you didn’t usually have a brand that was associated with it.*** **HO:** Kylie is the youngest billionaire, according to Forbes, but Kylie is also much richer than the rest of the Kardashians and Jenners. She had lip surgery when she was really young, and because she looked so different suddenly, it was this huge transformation. People thought that they could be like that too. In the film, the last scene that you see of Pome Sector is just a load of Kylie Jenners running on water. The whole point is you can only either walk in a straight line, or you can go in a circle. In that world, that’s actually all you can physically do. You can imagine the water in the scenes as a conveyor belt. It’s almost like you’re living in this capitalist space where you are constantly in acceleration, but then you’re fed this wellness of feeling at peace. **IR:** I guess it’s a critique of [capitalist accelerationism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism?ref=killscreen.com). It’s like, *Oh, we just need to do self-care and wellness, and then we’ll be okay. We’ll be fine, it’s not our responsibility.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Copy-of-25_-Feel-My-Metaverse_install-3-scaled.jpg) Keiken + George Jasper Stone, Install view of Feel My Metaverse at Frankfurter Kunstverein. Photo by Norbert Miguletz. ***You’ve also worked with*** [***creating face filters***](https://www.instagram.com/tv/B%5FS2IHYnpWl/?utm%5Fsource=ig%5Fembed)***. What is your approach to working with AR on the face? What kind of possibilities do you see there, and what kind of limitations as well? It seems like a unique place to play.*** **TC:** The feasibility to easily deploy an effect without building your own app—that cuts out a lot of struggle, I suppose. That in itself is a great thing. There’s also something quite nice about them being a ‘short-form’ thing. You can create a piece of work that you can just easily share with everyone around the world, and it can be really accessible. We’ve done performances where we’ve invited the audience to experience the performance through the filter. It adds this layer to the actual experience. It’s a nice way to make an interactive piece as well. In terms of making a piece of work, you basically make something that places the user or the audience directly in there. They can have a very engaging experience. **HO:** When we made the film, we also presented three filters for each of the main characters along with the film. You can put AR on top of the film if you would like, or you could walk away and become a character, which is the substrate of this body. We also staged a performance in which [Sakeema performed in the space](https://www.instagram.com/p/CER6jbHFrey/?ref=killscreen.com) where we first presented the film. She also choreographed and performed a piece as her character, and everyone could become her fantastical creature in AR. **IR:** So even though this is a speculative future, that character actually exists in real life. She is a role model, and you can experience her amazing dance practice in the physical, in reality, now. We recently did a performance where Sakeema Crook performed and the audience [activated AR from special temporary tattoo targets](https://www.instagram.com/tv/CE9730tlbhB/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) on her. **HO:** We’re doing a program with [Fact](https://www.fact.co.uk/?ref=killscreen.com), and we have this website called [augmentedempathy.live](http://www.augmentedempathy.live/?ref=killscreen.com), and each week has secret filters released. Then we do a short video piece with it. Last week it was an [augmented makeup tutorial](https://www.instagram.com/p/B%5Fk129LF0IJ/?ref=killscreen.com). We wanted to explore the subversion Instagram filters- and how social media can be used as a space for exchange and artistic creation. **TC:** We made an elaborate video where we basically pretended that I was putting my makeup on, but through each stage of building the filter. The new exhibition also includes a multi-channel video installation called *ALL WATER IS ONE WATER.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Copy-of-14_Pando_Keiken-and-George-Jasper-Stone_Filters.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Copy-of-15_Screening-Inside-You_Keiken-and-George-Jasper-Stone_Filters.jpg) Pando AR filters by Keiken + George Jasper Stone. Photo by Hydar Dewachi. ## Ecological magical realism ***Can you talk more about the environmental undercurrents that run through the narrative of* Feel My Metaverse*?*** **HO:** Sakeema played Pando, the name Pando comes from the [oldest, known largest living organism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando%5F%28tree%29?ref=killscreen.com). **IR:** They are trees, but they have a shared root system. **TC:** It’s a colony. Every tree that’s part of the colony is a clone of the mother tree; they’re not isolated, they’re genetically identical individuals. **HO:** Pando is Latin for “I spread out.” That’s why in the film, there’s a coded phrase saying, “I spread out, and I come back.” It’s the idea that because we live in such an individualized society, it’s so human-centric. We think of plants dying when climate change happens; we don’t think about humans in the same way. Instead, we always think of ourselves as the superior hierarchical at the top. The Pando subtext reflects our perception, our reality of how we understand how the earth works. Pando is also supposed to represent Mother Nature, the mother tree. ***Certainly, the next stage of problems humans face is not local in nature, but global. They require you to acknowledge things happening on the other side of the earth and require collective action. You need more coordination between people who don’t share the same background or ethnicity or nationality, to fix them—but everybody will be impacted equally because it’s our planet.*** **HO:** You can’t really have empathy for nature. You can be compassionate, or you have a great passion or interest in the environment. With a human, you attach yourself to that because you think of yourself. So Pando represents nature, but she also allows you to feel compassion towards and empathy or this strong connection to our roots. **HO:** We also use a lot of magic realism techniques symbols to represent what’s happening. **IR:** We like to question the belief systems in our own realities. What things exist because we collectively believe in them? It’s hard to recognize that you can actually change your reality. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Copy-of-01_Feel-My-Metaverse_Keiken-and-George-Jasper-Stone-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Copy-of-06_Feel-My-Metaverse_Keiken-and-George-Jasper-Stone-scaled.jpg) Stills from Feel My Metaverse, Keiken + George Jasper Stone. --- ### Credits Edited for clarity and length. Interview by Jamin Warren in May, 2020. Photography courtesy of Keiken Collective. ### Links [instagram.com/\_keiken\_/](https://www.instagram.com/%5Fkeiken%5F/?hl=en&ref=killscreen.com) [Feel My Metaverse trailer ](https://vimeo.com/364746736?ref=killscreen.com) [augmentedempathy.live](http://www.augmentedempathy.live/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Jessica Shamash: Interactive Stories That Remember You Back URL: https://www.killscreen.com/jessica-shamash/ Last updated: 2024-12-21T20:53:54.000Z Jessica Shamash is telling me about ‘haiku’ moments—when a storyteller is able to weave quiet moments into narratives of intense adventure. She says she first heard the term used when she worked on *The Good Dinosaur* at Pixar Animation. Shamash worked closely with Sharon Callahan, the film’s lighting director, who spoke of quiet moments, using the term “haiku” to characterize them. These little scenes nurture the bond between viewers and characters, taking a beat away from the action to remind them of their togetherness. Shamash says she carried this kind of language into her most recent project, *Wolves in the Walls*. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Screen-Shot-2020-09-23-at-9.00.46-AM-scaled.jpg) The Emmy-winning project is a virtual reality experience adapted from the book of the same name by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. It was created by [Fable](https://fable-studio.com/?ref=killscreen.com), an immersive storytelling studio of which Shamash is a founding member. Consisting of three chapters spanning 40 minutes, the experience centers on an eight-year-old girl named Lucy who believes wolves live in the walls of her house. She needs a friend along for the journey, so viewers embark on an adventure with her. “We added a lot of scenes of ‘reconnection moments’ to this character, so you remember why you’re there,” Shamash says. “And I think those were such beautiful, pure moments \[…\] the ones that make you feel nostalgic, those little haiku moments with Lucy.” These were the moments that made you feel like Lucy was your friend. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/24837319_734220810105916_4095606080867628592_o_600x700_acf_cropped_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/24958715_734220803439250_5680868101118676415_o_600x700_acf_cropped_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/5_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/24799385_733911586803505_5399290965356309160_o_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Concept art for WOLVES IN THE WALLS by Goro Fujita, Kory Heinzen, Carlos Felipe León, Adrien Merigeau Shamash began her career at Pixar Animation Studios, a job she remembers dreaming about at 15\. She then went on to work at [Oculus Story Studio](https://www.oculus.com/story-studio/?ref=killscreen.com), the virtual reality division at Facebook. She was intrigued by the challenge of using this new technology to connect with characters. But it wasn’t merely these new tools that were enticing. It was also using them with a medium as timeless as storytelling. “As much as I wish it was the tech that inspired me, it was really just the emotions—connecting to these characters and watching films that moved and inspired me,” Shamash says. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Screen-Shot-2019-11-25-at-8.34.33-AM.jpg) Shamash with Edward Saatchi and Pete Billington of Fable. Fable doesn’t characterize itself as a virtual reality company. It calls itself a virtual *beings* company, a name that centers its primacy on character over technology. Shamash says they call their company Fable because fables teach us lessons about love, friendship, about being a better person—and they want their characters to do that as well. “Visually, we want our new characters to feel like art, to emotionally feel like a friend, and \[to\] be driven by immersive arts and artificial intelligence,” she says. The art of AI imbues characters with machine intelligence to build an emotional connection with their audience. For instance, Lucy is rooted in some AI. This offers intimacy with the viewer, unlike traditional, one-way cinematic experiences with characters on screen. “Memory is the core concept for us in *Wolves.* Everything you do is remembered \[by Lucy\],” Fable founder [Edward Saatchi told UploadVR](https://uploadvr.com/wolves-in-the-walls-impressions/?ref=killscreen.com). “We don’t want Lucy to become a horrifying person from what you do. She has her own journey and her own life and her own story… but she will remember.” ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/26232315_746545922206738_8478220415851521514_o.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/26233697_746545958873401_1382635547725903645_o.jpg) Interactive Flow Diagram by David Huang. Lucy draws the viewer—her imaginary friend—out of chalk so that they can join her on the quest to find the wolves in the walls. On this pursuit, [Lucy follows the viewer with her eyes, talks to them, and remembers what they did in her world](https://uploadvr.com/wolves-in-the-walls-chapter-3/?ref=killscreen.com). Virtual reality affords the ability to break the fourth wall, but it’s AI that offers connection. “What is exciting about AI is that it gives you and the characters a lot more abilities—how it can see you, hear you, understand you. It’s taking these characters that we love and cherish and giving them other attributes. Can they have a memory of you? Can they recall something you said and relate to it? There’s the power of that,” Shamash says. Shamash says that throughout her career, she’s always built these little stories around characters. She characterizes herself as an intuitive creator and is inspired by almost anything. She named a small decades-old heater in her office Sparky (to be determined if we’ll get to see Sparky on the silver screen). Shamash adds that she did an exercise in school where she would look at a famous photograph and write a story around who that person was; what they were going through at that moment. “I think there are so many different ways to create these stories, but for me, it’s trying to understand the energy of a character or an image and defining what that story is.” She says she doesn’t really think about creating stories or characters in terms of milestones or achievements—instead, she creates them so the audience can connect on a one-on-one level, not unlike one’s experience with Lucy in *Wolves in the Walls*. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/24837310_733911616803502_3482508965567237512_o-1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/24313427_733911626803501_8461343894331420944_o.jpg) Concept art for WOLVES IN THE WALLS: Lucy Expression Sheet (Concept by Kenard Pak) and Lucy's Detective Blueprint (Concept by Kory Heinzen). “As much as I wish it was the tech that inspired me, it was really just the emotions—connecting to these characters and watching films that moved and inspired me.” “So many people felt that Lucy was their friend—it brought them back to childhood, and that was the feeling we were going for,” she says. “To have people feel and express that without being prompted—that is the most rewarding feeling as an artist.” Shamash grew up watching Pixar films, and the one that continues to move her is *Ratatouille*. “One of my favorite feelings in the world is a pleasant surprise,” Shamash says, “something you aren’t expecting. In that movie, anyone can cook, even the little rat! ” She says characters that speak to her most are the ones that she can learn from. “I think as a child, I connected to this little rat that was an artist in his own right. I found the courage to do what \[I’m\] passionate about.” --- ### Credits Portrait photography by JR Peterson. Images courtesy of Fable Studio/Wolves In The Walls. ### Links See more of Jessica’s projects [here](https://www.thepelicanrose.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Fable Studio](https://fable-studio.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Wolves In The Walls trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpLR4Y4lsiM&ref=killscreen.com) ### Kareem Ettouney: Imbuing gameplay with Impressionism URL: https://www.killscreen.com/kareem-ettouney/ Last updated: 2024-12-23T21:38:22.000Z [*Kareem Ettouney*](http://www.kareemettouney.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *is a British-Egyptian artist and creative director working between traditional and technological mediums. His painting, animation, and theater production background bring artistic expression to the forefront of the games he works on. Kareem co-founded* [*Media Molecule*](https://www.mediamolecule.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*, the creative team behind the* [*Little Big Planet*](https://littlebigplanet.playstation.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *series. Media Molecule’s latest interactive release,* [*Dreams*](http://dreams.mediamolecule.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*, is a platform that allows players to create games, art, music, and more, with an emphasis on building community, creative education, and curation.* *We recently chatted with Kareem about the link between games and fine art, the importance of emotional sensibilities in play, and breaking open tropes in the history of games.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/000007240006.jpg) ## Formation and family ***Can you talk about your path to Media Molecule?*** My initial training was at a fine arts university in Egypt. I studied interior design, then specialized in film and theater, set design, and costume design. Before I went to university, I was a freelance artist, graphic designer, and illustrator. I always like to say that my training began both in the practical and the theoretical. My advice to younger artists is that it’s essential to have the applied aspects of art hand-in-hand with the academic. I worked for 10 years as a freelancer, which allowed me to jump between visual disciplines—from designing graphics for a restaurant, doing murals in hotels, to children’s book illustrations, to interior designs of houses. Then I got a gig in advertising and made storyboards. I did anything and everything that came my way for a long time. I was initially attracted to cinema and production design, then came across the video game business. I was like, this is the youngest form of media that has a history in the 70’s and is still very fresh. In the late 90s, video game art and videos started going into territory attracting a new breed, if you will. The first breed of artists that work in video games were technologists. They were the art that came out of algorithms and programming. But the type of artists that were starting to get hired in my time were more people from a wider range, and I was hired at Lionhead \[Studios, a seminal video game studio started in 1997\]. I had both British and Egyptian nationality, so I started applying for work in the UK. Lionhead attracted me because they were an out-of-the-box game company. I remember I was in my bedroom in Egypt, and I got a phone call from Paul McLaughlin—one of the greatest art directors I’ve ever met. I had an interesting, colorful CV with lots of range and—but I had zero background in games and technology. But Paul had the insight to see—he said, let’s get this guy in and see what he can do. So I then got my foot in the door, and I was a concept artist. And over there, I met Mark Haley, who became one of my best friends. Many years later, Mark, myself, Dave, and Alex, two amazing programmers from Lionhead Studios and Siobhan, who worked at Criterion Studios as a producer. With Chris Lee, a business director, we all came together and decided to start Media Molecule. ***Did you come from a creative family?*** My dad is a super architect. He was the head of architecture at Cairo University, and he is an urban designer, architect–an amazing artist. So I grew up in the house with my dad drawing all the art books all the time. We both had the same \[drawing\] lines. I have a sort of shaky line that is very identical to his line. But I paint—I’m more expressive and more of an illustrative type of person, and he’s more individual. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/story_wedding_07.jpg) Still from Little Big Planet ***Being surrounded by art and architecture as a kid, were there creators that spoke to you?*** Michelangelo is up there. \[Gustav\] Klimt and \[Egon\] Schiele and \[Peter Paul\] Rubens are all very important to me. Rubens’ \[work\] is more about the paint and the opulence of paint—the richest paint can ever get. From my geeky side, like I like Kent Williams. That’s more the comic kind of thing. So I always had someone from the illustration world in there. I like the beginning of modernism very much. I like the point where classic ended, and modernism began. At that point in the 1900s, the camera was invented, steam trains were invented, and the World War began. Empires were ending, and humanity started seeing everything differently. When Klimt’s career first began, he was a romantic kind of mural painting decoration guy. He and his brother were making frescoes on walls that looked like they were from ancient Greece. And then that art deco thing transitioned very, very quickly into expressionism. I really liked the relationship between architecture and human beings. I liked the ‘high’ design, but I liked the modern temperaments beginning to appear. I like the modernism in Schiele’s body, for example. You can see that he’s taking all the liberty, but he’s still looking at the life around him, and it’s not competing too much with nature. I like abstract impressionism, but I also like realism. Schiele and Klimt represent the final generation that still was as good as Rodin and Michelangelo—the classic-ness. But they had the temperament of modernism. ## Global and cross-discipline aesthetics and influences ***Do you feel like growing up in Egypt has impacted your sensibilities and how you approach your work?*** My stuff is very colorful. Even when I give you my top five artists, they’re all western, but I actually have a vividness from non-western places. My colors are very Mediterranean. So I have a very vivid color scheme that reminds you more of colorful places like India and Egypt. Aesthetically speaking, I like the eternity that lies in thinness. That’s very Egyptian. Another part of Egyptian \[aesthetics\] that I’m really into is a type of stylization that is shape and graphic-based. Size in an Egyptian mural was about spaces, while size in the Greek was about perspective. So I definitely have some of Egypt’s symbolism, some of the shape-based, ‘thinness’ kind of thing. My colors are very, very warm and earthy and kind of African. But I have the anatomical obsession of the West as well. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/000007240011.jpg) ***Could you connect the dots between some of the work that you’ve done with Mark and Alex to kind of bring that sensibility to life in games?*** Mark is a Renaissance man. Alex is a technologist who is very arty; a very sophisticated artistic programmer. Dave is an amazing programmer who loves games and the magic of animation—really, he’s an animator inside a programmer. Siobhan is an encyclopedia of history, pop culture, and media and has a take on all of it that really is unique. And then you have me—I am the least technical person on the planet and still am, but I respect technology as a powerhouse. So it was a very arty group. Little Big Planet was our first baby. We wanted to make a game-making suite that was nostalgic (and quite British, in a way) because of the DIY animations that were popular in the UK at the time. My contribution to that world was taking ideas of paper texture and then mixing metaphors, like trying to not make it just a ‘kiddie,’ cutesy thing. The rendering techniques that Alex had were quite Toy Story-esque. They had a believability to them, which met Dave’s physics and the physicality of the whole world. LBP became a fine art piece—you take combining my concepts with Mike’s rendering and luscious materials, and you get an artistic statement. Dreams is the game I put a lot of myself in. I really wanted a 3D creation tool that didn’t feel like the others. I wanted it to feel more like art—where the way I define art is that your identity comes first and then your craftsmanship. Meaning that if you hold the pencil and you make a mark on the paper, it’s already you, like a signature. Your handwriting is yours, and then you practice to become good at drawing. We wanted Dreams to be very similar to working in pastel or watercolor—to have a sensitivity, rather than only decision making. Most software is made of a sequence of decisions that add up to a certain style. But expression via sensitivity is all about feeling. When you play a guitar or a piano, if you press hard, the sound is louder—that is emotion rather than just a decision. ***Did your experience working in theater has impacted the way you approach games?*** Game worlds are very, very similar to creating sets. In games, you interact with them and expose them from more angles, while theater sets require many artistic choices with lighting. You can have one chair in the room and light it in many ways that make it feel like it’s on a ship and then in a bedroom, just by changing the lighting. I find the relationship between set design and gameplay the most challenging part of video games. You’ve got a lot to draw from, but game interactions are simple, so they almost lend themselves to purist visuals. A play requires more of a literal representation. But game worlds are more like a very high production play or something, like Lord of the Rings. I feel theater naturally trains for the game design world, but the interactions in a play are very story-based. You know Hamlet will see the ghost of his father, while in a game, the interactions and the relationship between set design and game design are more complex. If you look at films like [*In the Mood for Love*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWVDZ98AFhI&ref=killscreen.com) or [*OldBoy*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HkjrJ6IK5E&ref=killscreen.com), and you see the wallpaper even in the scenes are related to the scene’s emotion and the characters. In games, visuals are subservient to the interactions that are happening. It’s like, what’s going on in this room? I am opening a box and collecting a treasure. You can make it look like the Mona Lisa, but you are still opening that box and getting that treasure. I still think that there are deep experiences out there. It might be interesting to see the relationship between interaction and deeper graphic representation. More programmers try to make ‘please-everybody’ kinds of games, but the independent game scene has shown us some very, very moving work. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Dreams-03-Slam_Ball.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Dreams-01-Level_Zero.jpg) Stills from DREAMS ## The emotional worlds of *Dreams* ***The direction that you’re pushing people in is to make things that don’t typically look like other games.*** Absolutely. There is a limitation of technology and tools that lead to a constrained palette. We’re widening that and have opened the game to be much more patterned with the history of art than just the history of games. In gameplay, the hero of the piece is the client—it’s the person who buys the game, the person who plays the game. They’re the ones controlling the interaction. The birth of games came from immediate interaction—in [*Pong*](https://www.ponggame.org/?ref=killscreen.com), you move a straight line, and the ball bounces back. And then platforming began, and that was the genesis of games, like a big obstacle course. The history of interaction has had the greatest influence on game graphics. Slowly, stories then began to find their way into games and magical worlds, more closely tied with cinematography, film, and animation. Interaction gets more interesting when you start seeing therapy or therapeutic type games like [*Flow*](https://thatgamecompany.com/flow/?ref=killscreen.com). Things that don’t necessarily rely on mastery, but they have a mystery to it, and you’re compelled to be in that world. I believe and hope that the trajectory of interaction deviates from just ‘jump-across-the-lava’ kind of thing. I believe form and function are one word. I think the relationship between game graphics and gameplay and the evolution of ‘what does gameplay mean’ has propelled a project like [*Dreams*](http://dreams.mediamolecule.com/?ref=killscreen.com). I feel like our *Dreams* community as well, using the tools, because the best thing giving the tools to the community is that people can do whatever they want. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Dreams-04-Sculpting.jpg) Still from Dreams I believe form and function are one word. I think the relationship between game graphics and gameplay and the evolution of ‘what does gameplay mean’ has propelled a project like [*Dreams*](http://dreams.mediamolecule.com/?ref=killscreen.com). ***So you feel like, with* Dreams*, there’s much more parallel across the different gaming disciplines.*** Yes. When you think of browsing the Internet on search engines, we fluctuate between curiosity for knowledge and then voyeurism or wanting to see what others are up—comparative thinking and creative thinking. The browser in *Dreams* allows you to see what other people are doing and get inspired by them. You can take some of the remixable stuff and then venture into creating something from scratch or customizing other people’s projects. So you can be all those things and because you can build all those things—disciplines are mixed. In *Dreams*, our team saw games users created all about education. Then we saw other games about humor, storytelling, or a meaningful game created between a parent and their child. So definitely, when you have an ‘even’ toolset and also a community, you get to re-question these cliches of the industry. ## The pedagogical dimension of *Dreams* ***You’re asking people to express themselves creatively, which may not be a natural impulse when you step into a game environment. What are you all doing to overcome that reluctance by individuals who don’t think of themselves as creators when they step into a space like Dreams?*** You have asked the ultimate question. We are doing a million things to tackle that problem. People have that stigma around words like creation and creativity. For example, I go to a drawing club every week. If a new student is doing their first lesson, they will be very self-conscious and apologetic. It’s like, “I’m very rusty. I’m very bad.” This is the ultimate tragedy of all creative disciplines. Somehow, history has let us all down by creating words like talent and creative intelligence, which means that someone has it or doesn’t have it. I think you can invest in learning the guitar or drawing and learn it in a year or two. That is what we do in *Dreams*. *Dreams* itself is a ‘Netflix of Games’ type of thing—you have an abundance of people’s creations to play and follow. If that’s all you do in *Dreams*, you will have 100 years of fun doing that. But then you can say, *Hold on. I want to start making playlists of the things I like and show my friends my favorite zombie games*, or, *I want to show the most artistic, out-there games that I’ve found and put them in a collection*. As soon as you’ve done that, you’ve already done a creative act. We also have many tutorials, which again are the next step in showing people whichever area they’re interested in learning. The concept of remixing to make new forms is huge in *Dreams*. You take readymade things and make minor tweaks so that they become your own. So it’s a mixture of curation, self-created puzzles, tutorials, making, remixing, and retouching. The *Dreams* community shares their methodologies, wisdom, and techniques all over the Internet. Kind of like YouTube now—if you want to learn how to play the piano, you will find people who have not only simplified it but people who teach the same songs at all levels and in all methods and methodologies. You get to not only choose how to learn that song. You choose how to learn that song in that particular style, language, or pace. All these things combined, I hope, will address the stigma towards both games and creativity: “I don’t have it. It’s not for me.” --- ### Credits Edited for clarity and length. Interview by Jamin Warren in May, 2020. Photography by Vicky Grout. ### Links [kareemettouney.com](http://www.kareemettouney.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [mediamolecule.com](https://www.mediamolecule.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Studio Oleomingus deconstructed colonial histories of India URL: https://www.killscreen.com/studio-oleomingus/ Last updated: 2025-10-03T18:55:46.000Z *Dhruv Jani makes up one half of* [*Studio Oleomingus*](https://oleomingus.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*, an independent game design studio based in Chala, a town in the Indian state of Gujarat. Blending play with postcolonial narrative and thought, literary translation, and architectural worldbuilding, Studio Oleomingus’ body of work aims to interrogate political histories and dismantle power structures in India and the world at large.* *At the conceptual heart of the studio’s work are questions of memory: whose stories are remembered, who they are remembered by, and who allows them to be remembered. We caught up with Dhruv about the commemorative power of narrative worldbuilding, the legacy of colonialism in the realm of games, and folding contemporary politics into interactive design.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/DSC3394.jpg) ***What was it like training in architecture and exhibition design, and how did it influence your approach to building worlds?*** I started training to be an exhibition designer, and then to become a temporary architect. My final project in school was to create a video game or a video game-like space. That is where I started looking seriously at games—if they could become places where very interesting dialogues could be conducted. At that point, I was not even thinking of video games as a medium. I was so excited to have spaces that were not bound by constraints of working on-site or as part of an architectural process. I’ve never worked onsite except for in college, and I hated it. It was liberating to be able to shift away dramatically and start to use space that’s far more open than a \[physical\] site. That was, of course, quite a while ago. \[Chuckles\] Since then, both in practice and concept, I try to move away from spaces being the dominant lens through which I view a game. I see them as sites of discourse and dialogue. ***Can you unpack what it means for your games to be sites of dialogue?*** When I’m building a game, I’m hoping that it will be played, but I’m also aware that the game can exist without anybody ever playing it. It’s the notion of a player capable of playing the game, but also a dialogue with me trying to wrestle with whatever intended logic or system I’ve built into that particular game, to try and figure some fundamental truths of narrative impulse embedded inside. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/DSC3567.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/DSC3501.jpg) ***Is there a persona or person that you’re making games for? Writers often try to write with a person in mind. Sometimes that person is real. Sometimes that person is imagined. Maybe they’re a class of humans or even a version of themselves. Who is that person for you? Also, how has growing up in India, and having experience with colonialism and its legacy impacted your worldbuilding?*** It’s not so much a player. All our work is adapted from the writings of the character called Mir Umar Hassan, an author who does not exist. In many ways, I want the games to serve as a translation of his works. I imagine him not so much playing them, but being aware of the fact that the game exists as a natural continuation of his work, pushing it towards the kind of completion that was not originally achieved in its original textual form. Each game is an attempt to try and take Umar Hassan’s original pieces and then build upon it within a contemporary context. A lot of the work is rooted in what is happening in India, either what’s happening now or what has happened—and how it is remembered with or reconciled with at the same time. There is always a dominant Indian at the other end who is going to play. ***A lot of game designers talk about their games in this ahistorical way. You’re taking what seems like a very natural point of view because the experience you have is the experience that you have.*** Game tools automatically seem ahistorical and apolitical or at least, atheistic in how they are configured. There’s a tradition of tools and game techniques, styles, control systems, and there’s the legacy you have to follow to be able to end up with what is recognizably a game that people can interact with. But it rubs against an impulse for vernacular control over what it is that you are trying to tell inside games. And I completely understand the impulse to suppress the game-making process entirely from it being rooted from there, but that also makes me deeply uncomfortable. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/04.jpg) Still from A MUSEUM OF DUBIOUS SPLENDOURS ***Digital tools have biases—any form of user interaction has a bias towards something not just in terms of its endstate, but also the thing itself. What were some of those biases?*** There are two dominant biases that we always struggle with. One is language. All game-making tools are in English, and there is a particular kind of English which is very didactic, strict, and sudden. It’s imperious in how it forces you to structure and name and associate your games. Traditional tools can often be even more overwhelming. You have to ask precise questions on forums that are all guarded spaces in very specific ways, not open to allowing discussions beyond certain domains. Literacy seems to be funneled through a very specific cultural lens. It forces everybody to become eurocentric, at least, to begin with, and then work their way back. ***What are some of the things that you feel are unique to your context that add to the larger tapestry of game making?*** There are lots of small details that we embed into most of our games that only reveal themselves to people that have adequate context. If a Gujarati speaker or a Marathi speaker is playing our game, then the main role characters will mean something very specific. Often, something ridiculous, political, or strange. The same goes for motives that you see on walls. Old posters, the titles of books, sometimes shapes of buildings, and how and where they are cobbled together from. Usually, because it is such a dense and energetic mixture of components that we have taken from places around us. Without that context, it becomes a single matter without all these interjections grating you that you need to read it, which also makes them extremely local and requires the players to sort of meet us halfway, by having to learn Gujarati or Marathi. That degree of specificity, even if it makes the game redundant, or even if it makes it unplayable for a lot of people, is very interesting. That lets us wind the story around all these constraints that we have set for ourselves as I’m building it. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/DSC3612.jpg) ***I wanted to ask about story worlds; this idea of these larger universes in which something sits. It seems like you share in that idea because there is a consistent theme, but your approach to it feels much more ‘authored.’*** I’m obsessed with trying to figure out how to tell stories of a place, of Dharampur, the ones in the place that I live in. I’m also obsessed with trying to figure out how to tell stories of a place where the stories have ceased to exist. They simply have vanished. The very few stories that do remain are actively being effaced. The processes of how those stories are remembered, of writing histories of these places but also lived memories of these people are an overwhelming concern. All that automatically results in some kind of a contiguous set of facts and narratives and histories between the games. Some common points of conduct in how we approach games: they are more lore-like. There tends to be a history surrounding the games not already present in the works. They are dramatically different both in approach and intent from a shared universe or an active lore-making process where you write an entire space that’s a counterpart to the real world and posit your stories within it and try and keep them as consistent as possible. I don’t find that particularly appealing as a process. ***You have a unique sense of scale that is hard to replicate in the real world—trying to exceed the eye; giving clarity to the sense that there is something much larger than them. Can you tell me a little bit about the primacy of objects in your practice?*** The scale started as a very physical thing. A very simple tool to jolt the player into a different sort of physical domain, or rather a virtual domain through which they are moving. The scale then becomes the tent pole artifact that you can then navigate around. A giant toothpaste tube simply becomes a feature of the landscape. A while ago I realized that scaling up objects could also become very interesting to the language, like [giant toothpaste tubes](https://oleomingus.com/a-museum-of-dubious-splendors?ref=killscreen.com). If I posit them in the 1960s, it becomes dramatically different from 1842 or 43\. I randomly posit some shapes together and start to see what comes out of it. That was a fascination with scale that the rest of us continue in most of the environments that have started to withdraw from a little bit. I still like putting gigantic objects in extremely small spaces or defining landscapes within very large objects. The scale has to reveal more of what you are trying to demonstrate—the extent of landscape interaction. Tilting it, trying to demonstrate the intent of a population without showing people in the game, and morph it into all these other explorations of scale or volume. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/DSC3506.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/DSC3497.jpg) ***In your games, the objects themselves seem to be generally more universal or they’re identifiable in a lot of ways. I had to look some words up, but the object seems to be at least consistently universal.*** Our games are often set, 60 years in the past, or 120, or even 30 years in the past. And words from that period have survived better than objects have. The generic objects that we use in our games is a ‘language-of-objects’ that is immediately available to me, and it is very different from a landscape that I would set out to recreate if I were to do it historically. It is like an integration between two disparate times, where words harken back to a specific history while the Objects (and landscapes) tend to lock the games into a very specific cultural space. Without such generic objects profusely scattered through our gameworlds, it is easier to slip into forms of appropriation without recognizing that you’re doing so—especially when working with stories and languages that do not entirely belong to me or that I have little familiarity with. With language, at least it is easier to parse through your own writings and then revise them so that you don’t make glaring errors of appropriation—but without the same processes, you would inevitably do that in a visual medium looking to reanimate history, because the temptation is simply too strong. The use of generic objects helps soften that. ***You are a commercial partner with Technicolor, but then also supported by the India Foundation for the Arts. Do you think of yourself more in the camp of other digital artists or do you think of yourself more as a game designer?*** Part of the decision is made for us by who is willing to give us funding for projects and it’s almost always art spaces and so we have to be visual artists. We have to be an art practice studio sometimes. I like to think we work somewhere between writing for a theatre space and then writing very personal narratives. All the visual function and the video game function is the unfortunate accident of having to put that writing in a form you’re comfortable with. If I ever figure out a medium that lets me write faster and in more inventive ways than video games, then I’ll immediately switch \[laughs\]. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/DSC3539.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/DSC3570.jpg) **It sounds like you’re not wedded to video games—you view video games as a vehicle for you to be able to express something but you don’t feel an attachment to the medium to express it.** Yes. What is interesting is despite my resistance towards video games, some of the most exciting work that in the recent past, in the telling of stories, happens to be in video games. Maybe I just resist the usual conversation around video games, especially in India, and the general bias and rejection of video games as valid cultural spaces or even spaces at all of any kind. ***Lots of mediums have faced this pushback but not as fiercely as video games have, certainly from cultural gatekeepers. I think one way around that is tying what you do to other creative traditions, in your case like literature or postcolonial thought.*** It also seems to open up this window into video games both as a practice and a medium of what can we possibly do within the space now that it is there? Once you execute it, however clumsy the execution might be, there is enough dialogue around it for the process to be meaningful. ***Have politics, whether global or in India, influenced the way that you look at your body of work, or what you would like to create in the future?*** Until last year, we were very happy working with processes of history alone: at least our history in India, and solely within the area that I live in, the Dharampur region. With the actions of the government that we are currently under—a right-leaning and often authoritarian government—has implemented a series of policies that have been extremely violent and extremely discriminatory, especially against Dalits and Muslims. It started a series of protests in the country last year, and then a series of retaliation by the government against the protests. These are protests we slowly started to contribute to, we are now trying to understand through our work. The last game that we built, became a game about the demolition of the [Babri Masjid](https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/witness-destruction-remembering-babri-mosque-demolition-191206132402226.html?ref=killscreen.com) and the eventual Supreme Court judgment which essentially gave the right to the land effectively to the same people who demolished the Masjid that once stood there, thereby validating the erasure of history. We are still concerned deeply with ideas that we were previously animated by and are trying to understand. It is still the same set of authors that we process it through. It is just that there are sudden and dramatic shifts that are happening in the Indian political landscape, that we feel compelled to respond to. Modern political discourse is happening on the internet or spaces created through internet-based intervention. All of it is ordered and structured in ways that are not dissimilar from how video games are structured in their narratives, and how hypertext works. By thinking deeply about how video games tell stories—and what you can challenge within video games—perhaps we can start to intervene in what seems to be these overwhelming digital hierarchies which are currently very susceptible to propaganda or misinformation and so on. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Screenshot_03.jpg) Still from UNDER A PORCELAIN SUN ***How do you find other people who share a point of view, or that can inspire you outside of where you are currently?*** Where I’m based is a very small town. There are no other creators in my vicinity, but we’ll travel, when possible to Bombay and Delhi, especially when we are showing up where—or respond to festivals and gatherings. Most of the people that we talk to, or write to, and then discuss things with, happen to be artists. Either people who are architects, fine artists, or authors. Rarely game developers. When I started making games there were a few people who had started making games as well. They were not looking at the same things we were looking at. They were also working on commercial games. For one reason or the other, all of them shut down over the years, or have drifted into all kinds of practices altogether. Somehow we just lost the connection, the habit, with people who are building games in the more traditional domains. You don’t want to pander to an audience at the cost of what you’re trying to say, but there is some grain of intrigue in legacy systems and in what games have done before and what you can make them continue to do. Especially, with text and how it is shown and represented and interacted with. I think a game like [*80 Days*](https://www.inklestudios.com/80days/?ref=killscreen.com) did it beautifully, where it can do a set of revivalist colonial fiction embedded into the structures in other ways. ***What comes next for you?*** We’re working on a game called [*Under a Porcelain Sun*](https://oleomingus.com/under-a-porcelain-sun?ref=killscreen.com). We want to talk about language and movement. It is also one of our more ambitious projects, in terms of the number of spaces and the scale of space and what we do within it. So this one that I’m very excited about—we’re thinking about the privilege of movement in the light of the migrants in India not being allowed to return home during the lockdown. The government fears it will cause an economic crisis because there won’t be cheap labor available in cities. Last year, there have been many explicit and inhumane goings-on, even in small and secluded places like Daman close to where I live. Akin to state restriction on people’s movements leaving the migrants trapped in cities, there have been protesters barricaded in places like derelict schools, activists and lawyers imprisoned under draconian laws, and without bail for resisting this authoritarian government. I’m developing thoughts about such fundamental injustice through a partition story—a very small parting story about an old lady living in a house, wanting to leave to travel across the border as the country is split, and having already said goodbye to her home where she has always lived, who finds that she can no longer leave, that she’s trapped in her house. So yes—working on that. --- ### Credits Edited for clarity and length. Interview by Jamin Warren in May, 2020. Photography by Ronit Sarkar. ### Links [oleomingus.com](https://oleomingus.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Neil Mendoza: A life beyond the screen URL: https://www.killscreen.com/neil-mendoza/ Last updated: 2024-12-24T20:15:54.000Z *A hungry digital chicken, a living room made of trash, an armed My Little Pony figurine. The work of UK-raised, US-based new media artist* [*Neil Mendoza*](http://www.neilmendoza.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *reaches into the digital realm from the physical, combining sculptural objects and software systems to provoke humor, nostalgia, and reflection on the ecosystems that govern us.* *Mendoza has taught courses on art and technology at Stanford University and UCLA. He has exhibited at the Barbican Center, Kinetica, Minnesota Street Projects, and has worked with clients such as Adidas, Nokia, and Wired Magazine.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/23-1-of-1-1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/31-1-of-1.jpg) *When did you start to find your voice in creative coding—combining art with technology?* When I was in high school, I was into sculpture and making stuff with clay. When I went to university, I studied math and computer science. I didn’t know you could do creative, ‘art-y’ stuff with technology. The course I did was very theoretical. After that, I ended up doing various things: working with computers for a video game company, doing web design—working for a bank, even. At one point, I was working for an advertising agency, and I saw someone there working with [Processing](https://processing.org/?ref=killscreen.com). I got inspired, realizing that there was a whole world of creative coding and electronics I didn’t know about. So I started playing around, making art installations on my own. My first publicly-shown art piece in 2009 was a big, physical piece \[built\] around a multi-touch interface—before multi-touch was a thing on phones. Then in 2014, I got my MFA at UCLA. After graduate school, I started to think about the conceptual elements of my work more. When you’re making art with technology, it’s easy to get trapped in technical rabbit holes—to spend more time working out how to do a thing at the expense of why you’re doing it and what it should look like. *What is your creative process like? Do you start with a message that you want to convey and then find a way to convey it through an absurd use of technology? Or do you reverse engineer it?* I’ll start with the technology or a movement that appeals to me from a purely dynamic or aesthetic point of view, and build from there. For instance, I made a piece called the “[Hamster Powered Hamster Drawing Machine](http://www.neilmendoza.com/portfolio/hamster-powered-hamster-drawing-machine/?ref=killscreen.com)” which started with a fascination for creating a drawing machine where the drawing was encoded mechanically. Then it’s like, *okay*, *what’s it going to draw?* It’s going to draw a hamster. Then it’s like *okay, why a hamster*? Because it’s going to have a hamster powering it and be a self portrait machine . Why should only human beings have access to selfies? I think it might make more sense to work from a place of ideas rather than making. Although with the way my mind works, I like to be hands-on, to be building things. It helps subconscious ideas to come out when my hands are creating stuff but my brain is whirring along in the background, trying to work out what the thing I’m making means to me. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Screen-Shot-2020-09-02-at-2.05.49-PM_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/robotic_voice_activated_word_kicking_machine_2_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Robot Voice Activated Word Kicking Machine *There’s also a sense of humor that arises when watching your machines re-contextualize human actions, especially when they seem to fumble or act in surprising ways. How would you characterize the playfulness of your work, and why is it important for your pieces to possess a distinct sense of humor?* I don’t start out with an explicit intention of giving them a sense of humor. But maybe humor lets you address some slightly darker, more uncomfortable topics. I have a project called “[Fish Hammer](http://www.neilmendoza.com/portfolio/fish-hammer/?ref=killscreen.com)” that empowers a fish to smash up human habitats. Humans spend a lot of time destroying fish habitats. When you create work that explicitly addresses these types of topics, it can feel didactic. When you have this off-kilter, fluid approach, it sticks with people longer. I’m interested in using humor and absurdity as a gateway into the psyche. Modern life is absurd, but we don’t see the absurdity of it because we’re caught up in it. *Your pieces leave room for randomness, entropy, or even audience input as a variable. How do you mediate between designing these pieces with a specific intent but still leaving the space for \[chance\]?* If you want to keep people’s attention, there has to be this tension of not knowing about what’s going to happen. People are good at figuring out how systems work. You see it a lot with “magic-mirror,” interactive installations. People work out what the system does, and once they’ve done that, they’re tired of it pretty quickly. I like having this entropy, this randomness. In some of my pieces, the random variables are quite simple. I made [a piece that you speak into](http://www.neilmendoza.com/portfolio/robotic-voice-activated-word-kicking-machine/?ref=killscreen.com), and your words become a part of a projection mapping. Your projected words and then interact with the real-life robotic foot and get ‘kicked’ occasionally. That was a nice example of creating a simple system that people can interact with in unpredictable ways. Some want to have political messaging, some want to fill it with swear words. Above all, it’s nice co-creating with your audience—even as the artist, you don’t know where it’s going to go. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/24-1-of-1-scaled.jpg) *A lot of your pieces are centered around iconic objects—the rocks in* [*Rock Band*](http://www.neilmendoza.com/portfolio/rock-band/?ref=killscreen.com)*, the fish in Fish Hammer, the toys in* [*The Ponytron*](http://www.neilmendoza.com/portfolio/ponytron/?ref=killscreen.com)*, for instance. How do you identify which objects to add to your creative lexicon?* Objects that have a place in my heart appeal to me. Maybe it’s stuff I was into as a kid, or that seems to me to be ingrained in my psyche. If you choose objects that are already in people’s psyche, it’s easier to connect to them. Then you hijack that connection and get them to think in different ways through this relationship they already have. I worked on [a printer orchestra](http://www.neilmendoza.com/portfolio/printer-orchestra/?ref=killscreen.com) once—and I feel like people connected to that because the printers were from the 80s and they occupied a place of nostalgia in people’s hearts. I like objects that people have already an interesting relationship with. I can subvert that relationship a little in order to connect with them more deeply. In addition, iconic and funny objects appeal to me…things that maybe you might find Wile E Coyote making traps out of for Road Runner or something you might find in Monty Python or a Terry Gilliam cartoon. *I wanted to ask about your residency at* [*Recology San Francisco*](https://www.recology.com/recology-san-francisco/?ref=killscreen.com)*. What was the process behind scavenging for these materials, and where would you go to source all of your resources?* The residency gives you a studio, a stipend, and access to the PRRA (Public Reuse and Recycling Area)—where people drop off old technology, furniture, and building materials. They give a training course on how to safely scavenge. It’s a crazy environment because you’re surrounded by all these earth movers pushing trash into a huge mountain. You’re only allowed to go to the side of the mountain and pick stuff up. If you’re not at the trash mountain when something awesome arrives, it gets crushed into oblivion. Because we were in San Francisco, there was some insane trash—I found drones and 3D printers and computers. For example, one of the pieces I made there was a [musical living room](http://www.neilmendoza.com/portfolio/house-party/?ref=killscreen.com)—I was looking for specific objects like an 80s television or horrible, kitschy looking couch. It was a sobering experience as well to see how much perfectly good stuff ended up there, cast off. The discovery process was the thing that guided me most. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/fish_hammer1.jpg) Fish Hammer *What are the more challenging aspects of working on projects that span multiple media? You’ve got work that is based on coding, but other parts of the process require your hands and physical input.* The physical part is the most challenging. If you’ve designed something in software and there’s a bug, you can change a couple of lines of code, and it’s fixed. If you have a physical bug, maybe you need to redesign your mechanism, or order some parts and wait. It’s a slower process. When I’m making something physical, I like to be away from the computer as much as possible and work with my hands. It’s like trying to strike a balance between the process that is going to inspire you to make the best product, but that’s also engineered well enough to stand up to use and abuse by viewers. I find stuff I make digitally, like designed in Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and then fabricate, tends to be able to stand up to use. Often, however, that process can take away some aspects of creativity. *What is valuable about representing these that could technically be conveyed digitally as physical objects, pieces that people can see and interact with in person?* It’s about engaging more senses than just people’s eyes. As soon as you create something that’s purely on a screen, you’re using the same medium that people use for everything else in their life—social networking, email, spreadsheets. As a result, you become part of this homogenized landscape. It’s hard to make something lasting if it’s purely digital because it’s so easy to access digital content nowadays. It’s worthy content for a couple of seconds and then… it disappears. I like making things that have a life beyond the screen. I’m interested in using humor and absurdity as a gateway into the psyche. Modern life is absurd, but we don’t see the absurdity of it because we’re caught up in it. *I wanted to talk about the piece “Robotic Voice Activated Word Kicking Machine” that you mentioned earlier, which references customer service chatbots and automated vocal programs.* Alexa, Google Home, Siri—all of these smart systems are now on our devices. It’s easy to think that you’re just talking to a friend and they’re just answering back and being helpful. In reality, though, it’s disappearing into the cloud, being sucked up by their servers and used for whatever ends they see fit. My piece is a physical manifestation of that. You speak—and rather than the piece answering back, your words are sucked into this other world where they’re possibly abused by this robot’s foot. In short, it’s a manifestation of this phenomenon we have of speaking to digital assistance; forgetting that our words are disappearing into some corporate servers somewhere. *On the growing presence of automated smart technologies in our lives, where do you think things are headed?* At the moment, it seems to be going to a slightly dark place. These technologies are being used to manipulate politics and maximize corporate profit, often at the expense of worker rights and data privacy. I hope that we start on a slightly less profit-driven path. There’s exciting stuff happening with technology, though. It’s got amazing and also dark potential. I hope that we manage to break out of this ‘device addiction’ stage of technology; that it helps rather than hinders our daily lives. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to go both ways with that, too—it could enhance our experience of the world, but it could also be something that you spend the whole day distracted by. To sum up, I think It’s important for artists to have a role in where it’s going to go. Unlike companies, their driving motivation isn’t profit—it’s experimenting with these systems and seeing where the edges are, what unexpected things they might do. Humanizing these systems is another area ripe for artistic exploration. On the flip side, art can be a useful tool in bringing the dark side of these systems to light. --- ### Credits Edited for clarity and length. Interview by Paolo Yumol in December, 2019. Photography by David Evan McDowell. ### Links [neilmendoza.com](http://www.neilmendoza.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Monument Valley's Lea Schönfelder on designing within constraints URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/monument-valleys-lea-schonfelder-designing-within-constraints/ Last updated: 2025-01-08T22:33:18.000Z When we look at our phone screens, we typically aren’t thinking about the borders. We don’t notice the edges of our phones and how those boundaries limit our experience. It’s no wonder Apple’s crowning achievement for the iPhone X was adding a teeeeny bit of space to the edge of the phone. But that little frame for designers is everything. Things you could do on a giant 4K screen in your living room, you simply can’t do on your mobile phone. [ustwo games](https://www.ustwo.com/work/ustwo-games/?ref=killscreen.com) knows these boundaries intimately. They are a mobile games design studio housed inside of a larger global digital product studio called [ustwo](https://www.ustwo.com/?ref=killscreen.com). The design shop ustwo is based in London and was initially known for their client work for folks like Google, Ford, Samsung and more. So when they started ustwo games six years ago, there was already a lot of accrued internal knowledge about how to work with small screens. ustwo games’ Monument Valley was a smash hit for a few reasons. It’s delightfully colored. It uses space in a novel way. And most importantly, it’s simple! That’s not a pejorative. It’s very easy to understand almost immediately. In [*Monument Valley*](https://www.monumentvalleygame.com/mv1?ref=killscreen.com), you’re a silent princess on a quest for forgiveness. In [*Monument Valley 2*](https://www.monumentvalleygame.com/mv2?ref=killscreen.com), you play as a mother and daughter on an adventure together. We spoke to Lea Schönfelder, a game designer on *Monument Valley 2*, about the differences between games and experiences, the difficulty of designing something easy, and how limits foster elegant design. *Edited by Anthony Martinez. Music by* [*Nick Sylvester*](https://twitter.com/nickgodmode?lang=en&ref=killscreen.com)*.* ### Videogames, conspiracy theories and the American imagination URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/videogames-conspiracy-theories-american-imagination/ Last updated: 2025-01-08T22:29:57.000Z *We recorded this long before QAnon took hold and the President of the United States was advising people to inject disinfectant into our veins. Since then the relevance of conspiracy theories has become more important. This was recorded live in 2016 at the Killscreen Festival.* When I moved to California from New York a couple years ago, I’ll never forget driving through Texas. It was huge and expansive. It was quiet. It was dark. It was mysterious. And for anyone else who’s explored America, you know, it’s a really really weird place. For this podcast, I staged a conversation between two people who are making beautiful work at the intersection of magical realism and Americana: Jake Elliott of Cardboard Computer, the studio behind *Kentucky Route Zero*; and Joseph Fink, creator of the podcast *Welcome To Night Vale*. Jake’s approach to mystery made him a perfect pair for Joseph Fink, co-creator the podcast Welcome to Night Vale. It’s about a fictional radio broadcast reporting on the strange events that occur within it. It’s been describer as "caught somewhere between Weird Twitter and 'Tales of the Unexplained'.” ### The Stanley Parable’s Davey Wreden on breaking the fourth wall URL: https://www.killscreen.com/podcast/the-stanley-parables-davey-wreden-on-breaking-the-fourth-wall/ Last updated: 2025-01-08T22:27:23.000Z When people ask what it means to make a game, they typically point to a standard set of devices: points, scores, levels, and so on. It’s rare that story makes the list. And yet, gamemaker Davey Wreden was able to move the medium to new heights with a deep exploration of story in his breakout freshman title [The Stanley Parable](https://www.stanleyparable.com/?ref=killscreen.com), a tale of an office worker who veers from the script. With [The Beginner’s Guide](https://thebeginnersgui.de/?ref=killscreen.com), Wreden flipped the post-modern switch with a fourth-wall breaking effort that evoked Cervantes and his favorite director Charlie Kaufman. We talked to Wreden about his design process, why games need an emotional core, and why film school isn’t for everybody. \-- **Resources:** \+ [The Stanley Parable](https://www.stanleyparable.com/?ref=killscreen.com) \+ [The Beginner's Guide](http://everythingunlimitedltd.com/?ref=killscreen.com) **Host:** Jamin Warren **Credits:** [Anthony Martinez, producer](https://twitter.com/martinez%5Fa?lang=en&ref=killscreen.com) [Nick Sylvester, music](https://twitter.com/nickgodmode?lang=en&ref=killscreen.com) ### The Swing and the Super Ball URL: https://www.killscreen.com/swing-super-ball/ Last updated: 2024-12-24T20:21:43.000Z ## How the world-famous duo Ray and Charles Eames pulled design inspiration from children’s toys Polybutadiene is a synthetic rubber used in most car tires. There’s very little that’s fun about it, all on its own. Still, polybutadiene is a useful material: flexible, strong, resilient. In 1964, a chemist named Norman Stingley was fiddling around with the material, mixing it with hydrated silica, zinc oxide, stearic acid, and some binding agents. He then heated the mix to many thousands of degrees, binding the materials together—a process known as vulcanization—and produced a small, hard sphere: a ball. The ball was very, very bouncy. When Stingley held it out at arm’s length and dropped it from shoulder height, it practically boinged right back into his hand. Stingley wasn’t quite sure what to do with his creation. He showed the ball to his employer, the Bettis Rubber Company, but his bosses at Bettis weren’t sure either. And, besides, they found the ball had the unfortunate tendency to shatter if it was thrown or bounced too hard, which, inevitably, one ended up doing because—wow, this thing could really bounce. Eventually, Stingley took the ball to Wham-O, the Southern California-based company already famous for the hula-hoop and frisbee. The folks at Wham-O knew exactly what to do. They fiddled with the rubber ball some more, upping the vulcanization temperature, strengthening it. The improved ball could now withstand being thrown at the ground with some force. They soon found that the ball could, when hurled in this fashion, bounce right over a three-story building, like Wonder Woman. The folks at Wham-O named Stingley’s rubber ball the Super Ball. When it was released, in 1965, the Super Ball sold spectacularly: some 170,000 balls a day at its peak and six million by year’s end. Super Balls were a major fad. A force in the culture, even. The founder of the American Football League watched his kids playing with Super Balls and wrote to the league commissioner about their plans for a championship game. “I have kiddingly called it the ‘Super Bowl,’ which obviously can be improved upon.” Which, obviously, it could not. One of the Super Ball’s biggest fans was the designer and architect Charles Eames. Charles and his partner Ray—his wife, business partner, constant collaborator and co-creator—are two of the 20th century’s most important and influential designers. They designed furniture, mostly chairs, mostly out of artfully molded plywood and fiberglass. They also designed houses, showrooms, exhibits, and toys; they created patterns for fabrics and made films. Their work was well-known globally, winning them the prestigious Royal Gold Medal and the Industrial Designers Society of America’s Twenty Five Year award. But beyond the already huge catalog of tangible household items the pair designed, their overriding philosophy and approach to the work has had the longest, strongest influence of all. The Eames’ were among the first designers to think of design as we do today, not as a luxury item but as an approach to all aspects of life. Two of the late 20th century’s most influential designers, Dieter Rams and Apple’s Jony Ive, have credited them as an influence. If a mass-produced affordable plywood chair could be the stuff of great design, so could anything, and everything. If you are sitting inside practically anywhere at this moment I’d wager you see the Eames’s direct hand or indirect shadow cast somewhere within your line of sight: in a friendly curve of wood or a scooped chair; in the play of bent metal wire and aluminum of a table leg—or, at this very moment, for me, in a coat rack I’m staring at, bolted to the wall by my back door, with colorful wooden knobs that I just now realized are nearly exactly the size and shape of a Super Ball. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/2.jpg) For years, Charles carried Super Balls around with him, giving them out on his travels, gifting them to all his grandchildren. Ray had a similar affection for chewing gum. She carried it with her everywhere, gave it out often. It was, she said, something “fun.” Ray also collected toy tops. Charles held a fascination with toy trains. They made two excellent short films, nearly silent save for their soundtracks by Elmer Bernstein, about each of these toys, imbuing the objects with a liveliness that feels, at times, almost mystical. Though the Eames are best known for their furniture, they also designed exhibits. One of these exhibits, right around the same years as the Super Ball’s meteoric rise, was about Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister of India. At the exhibit’s opening, in Washington, D.C., at the Smithsonian, Charles disappeared into the men’s restroom for a suspiciously long time. He then emerged, grinning, and beckoned for his brother, Maurice, to follow. He wanted to show Maurice a trick he had been practicing. The bathroom stalls were high marble slats, close enough together that, when he bounced his Super Ball at just the right angle, it would ricochet up the stall’s walls. He sent the ball bouncing down, then up off the walls, then down off the ceiling, back down to the walls, back to him, and then, with a flick of his wrist, another bounce, and on and on the ball went caroming up and down the marble stall. He and Maurice eventually emerged from the restroom to rejoin the party, cackling in delight. The play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith called these private play moments “paracosms”—the virtual worlds we create out of our serious, concentrated play. Both Charles and Ray had a fondness for the kind of toys we might call open systems, without rules, the kind of toys we might today call simple but really are the opposite. These are the toys that allow us to begin to remake the world or view it with fresh eyes. Of course, this is something we all do all the time—remake the world in our minds. Children are particularly adept at it, but adults, Sutton-Smith points out, fantasize as well. We just call it something other than play. Often, we call it daydreaming. “Children and adults may not really be so different in their use of fantasy play. The difference lies in the concreteness of symbols” Sutton-Smith writes in his book “Toys As Culture.” Through toys and play you might see the world not as it is but as it might one day be. Charles and Ray Eames knew this to be true, and knew that concrete symbols could be incredibly useful, especially to adults. A toy is a tool for imagining, and play is the act itself. Together, you might solve a problem, sure. Better still, through toys and play you might see the world not as it is but as it might one day be. Charles was fond of pointing out that electricity had been a source of amusement—a game—first, before it became much more serious: a source of power. “There is a certain relationship between playfulness and art, and there is a relationship between playfulness and science, too,” he once wrote. You needed play, and toys, to explore different intellectual levels of a problem. “Toys,” he was fond of saying, “are not really as innocent as they look. Toys and games are preludes to serious ideas.” Toys were dangerous because they made new ideas, and new worlds, possible. Perhaps the best example of their fascination with toys, games, and specifically the Super Ball, is the exhibit Mathematica, which is still on display half a century after it first opened. “I think of how my brother and sister and I went to the opening,” Lucia Dewey Atwood, director of the Eames Foundation and Charles and Ray’s granddaughter, told me on the phone. She went on to describe one of the first experiences you encounter in the exhibit—the Probability Machine. The Probability Machine is a floor-to-ceiling 200-peg grid. From the top center of the grid, a plastic ball drops. Then another. And another. And on and on for 15 minutes and 30,000 plastic balls, slightly larger than ping pong balls, nearly exactly the size of can you guess what? Yes. A Super Ball. The balls fall and ricochet off the pegs, seemingly at random, depositing some to the sides, a few to the far sides, and most in the middle. After a few minutes, a familiar bell curve begins to appear in the ball pile. Atwood described standing there with her brother and sister, delighting in the bouncing balls, then noticing the curve, and having a lightbulb moment about probability. “I remember thinking, ‘oh my gosh, it really works!’” It was a visceral experience, she said, “the active process of learning. And it made the information stick.” ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/5202350614_c9945b48f3_o-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/5202345506_388303cb21_o-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/5201738589_824014032e_o-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/5201741013_601223cd76_o-scaled_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Eames' Mathematica exhibit (photos by Matt Cottam) Her grandparents were obsessed with the visceral experience, Atwood told me. This is what drove their work, which was impossible to separate from their life. They wanted to pass on their own visceral experiences—of delight, or insight, or both in the same moment—to as many people as possible. Which is why the films and the exhibits and the expansive nature of their work. Design, it turned out, could be applied to any and all aspects of life. Atwood asked if I had been to Charles and Ray’s house yet. I hadn’t, I told her. “You should really go,” she said. The house had been their living laboratory: a work space, play space, life space. “Charles and Ray had this concept of the beauty of common materials. It was one of those things where, when you approach a body of exploration as though it were play, it frees your mind up to go in directions that you might not have really thought of.” The house and its surroundings, she said, were filled with spaces for these explorations, as well as their results. One morning this fall, I drove across Los Angeles to see it. On the drive, as the freeway jogged northward along the Santa Monica Bay, I thought about how it is that someone goes about designing a life: the spaces for work, the spaces for play, the spaces for the stuff in between. How would each of these spaces look? How might they be different? Or similar? But as soon as I began wandering the grounds I realized just how wrongheaded I’d been to ask these questions in the first place. The house is tucked away, set back from the street, among a eucalyptus grove, on a bluff above the Pacific Coast Highway. It is a two-story rectangular prism with a smaller, cube-shaped workshop behind. The inside remains exactly as it was on the day Ray died in 1988\. The late architect Robert Venturi praised Charles and Ray for resurfacing “good old Victorian clutter” into modern design: old baskets and clay pots lined up beside plants and toy tops and dolls. There is far, far more stuff—more objects, more life—in the Eames house than in most mid-century design meccas. But what interested me most was the area off the house, down a slope toward a flat clearing, before the bluff gave way and opened up to the Pacific. There in the flat clearing, Ray had found a perfect spot for a swing. The swing was one of just two objects on the grounds that docents explicitly told visitors not to touch. The other was a bell, hanging by the front door, with a rope dangling off it. I could see why the docents gave their warning. Both the bell and the swing called out to be pushed or pulled, to be played with. The swing in particular—even the slope of the bluff and the view in the distance seemed to pull you inexorably toward it. Near the swing was a little rocker of a toy elephant the pair had designed. Standing in that spot, I thought about Ray, swinging there, looking out at the sea, in quiet, playful contemplation that, I realized, was what Charles and Ray also called work. Designing their lives to be filled with work and play didn’t mean designing discrete spaces for work and play. It didn’t mean anything like what I was thinking, which was a particularly modern way of thinking about play: that the act needed to be somehow useful, that even our leisure time needed to be filled with the work of self-improvement. This was the rhetoric of play Brian Sutton-Smith called “progress,” which is the kind of play that helps children become adults. But in a well designed—which is to say, well-lived—life, work and play could look like—no, they could be—the same thing. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/3.jpg) --- ### Credits Written by [Ryan Bradley](http://www.rfbradley.com/?ref=killscreen.com). Edited by Jamin Warren. Art direction by David McDowell. ### Links Illustrations by [Mafer López.](https://www.instagram.com/laborregaviuda/?ref=killscreen.com) Eames’ Mathematica Exhibit by [Matt Cottam](https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattcottam/?ref=killscreen.com) [(CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/?ref=killscreen.com). ### Fernando Ramallo: On the boundary of sound and interaction URL: https://www.killscreen.com/fernando-ramallo/ Last updated: 2026-09-02T22:06:58.000Z *When we sit down (or stand!) to play games, we give little thought about the devices in our hands. In the same way that the QWERTY keyboard is disconnected from our experiences browsing the web, the game controller feels disconnected from the activity of play.* [*Fernando Ramallo*](https://fernandoramallo.github.io/2019/?ref=killscreen.com) *sees that interaction between player and play devices as central to their work. Ramallo was born in Argentina and now teaches in New York City. They are intensely focused on custom physical devices and creative systems that can engender new forms of play.* Their game Panoramical with David Kanaga pushed the boundaries of what you can draw from [interaction with music as a play space](https://www.killscreen.com/oneohtrix-point-never-talks-futurism-nostalgia-and-the-videogame-music-that-haunts-him/). It even supported a MIDI controller as it uses 18 different inputs to control each scene. ## Making a way into play ***Do you want to tell me a little bit about how you made your way into games?*** I never really thought about making games up until I left home. I went to school for what was called audio-visual design. For example, it’s a mix of animation and video film. In other words, it’s just a broad spectrum of different things related to science and technology, and explicitly outputting work into a screen. When I was studying in Buenos Aires, a local company did this workshop, and I ended up working with them as a designer. They had a lot of faith in me because I wasn’t a game designer at all. Afterward, I started making prototypes for them and got to learn the whole industry while working on all these little experimental games. My parents are programmers. They make software, and they do accounting software for local companies where I grew up. When I was a kid, I would ask them if they could make a game for me with that accounting program. But they were outliers. None of my classmates, none of their parents, even worked with computers. Because there were no computers around, I felt like computers were this rare thing that a few other people and we knew about. There wasn’t a lot of access to it, and it was still very new. But since my parents had already been working with technology, it had been more common for us. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/PANORAMICAL_2015-08-20_15-45-40.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/PANORAMICAL_2015-08-23_09-20-09.jpg) ***Could you tell me a little bit about maybe some of the things that were happening during your childhood in Argentina? There was a massive depression towards the end of the ’90s, and since then there have been monetary issues.*** Every 20 years, everything goes to shit. People get to the end of the month, and they can’t pay their bills. As a result, everything costs more currency, and there’s inflation. In other words, there’s always this presence of a depressed economy, having a hard time feeling like the future is not very certain, or you’ll be able to stay. Growing up with that around always made me curious about what other ways people lived, what other countries were like. Growing up with that uncertainty made me more curious about what life is like in places where you may have less economic insecurity or just a different way of living. It’s hard because, of course, I really love it over there. There’s a lot of culture and food and family, and even the way you interact with people that I really miss. However, it’s hard, especially with technology, since it feels a little bit isolated. **I certainly see that millennial creators and designers. The backdrop is a financial depression here in the United States, and just generationally, millennials in the United States** [***are way behind where their parents are***](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/27/millennial-recession-covid/?ref=killscreen.com)***. You’re doing worse than your parents are, and that’s only the calculus about even becoming a creator. It changes a lot when you’re having to think more actively about your own future. I can certainly imagine that.*** ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/MG_0020-copy_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/MG_0043-copy_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/MG_0059-copy.jpg) ***Well, tell me a little bit about some of your early work.*** *Panoramical* was this period of my life when I had encountered the independent game scene and all these creators that were doing the work that I wanted to be doing. For instance, it felt exhilarating, and I really wanted to be a part of that. I wanted to prove to myself that I could make a bigger game, where I have control over it. David Kanaga and I made this little prototype. I actually didn’t like it at first. I thought it wasn’t enough. It needed more gameplay, or it needed more of a complicated mechanic or something to do. David convinced me that it was good enough, that it was good; that it was interesting; that the interaction was interesting enough. **We had a conversation with** [***Cassie McQuater***](https://killscreen.com/cassie-mcquater/?ref=killscreen.com)***, who’s a digital artist here in Los Angeles. She said one of the things that’s nice, compared to some of the gaming conventions or selling games on the App Store, is that people at art galleries have more patience and tolerance for things that they don’t understand.*** If I had shown the game as an installation, I would have felt like it was enough. I would see how I could create something that I can show to people in that environment. My challenge for *Panoramical* specifically was: how do I bring the things that I would like, or the things that I find interesting about making an art installation, and try to sell it to gamers? Can I actually make a commercial game that’s basically an art installation? That was the challenge. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/MG_0095-copy.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/MG_0029-copy.jpg) ***Music is often thought of as being something in the background, and you’re not making just a visualization, right? It’s more complicated than that.*** I used [Winamp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winamp?ref=killscreen.com) a lot growing up. At one point, I was super into the visualizer, and I thought they were great. With *Panoramical*, I really wanted the visuals to not just be hooked into frequencies. I wanted the movements and the shapes and everything to be more curated, or more handcrafted; this tie between the image and the sound that I wanted. I wanted my hand to be in it, and not necessarily have to come up with maps to drive whatever sound I was getting from David. A lot of people would ask us, “How did the reactive visuals work, and what was the code that drove the visual play from the sound?” And there’s actually no connection between the shapes and the sounds. They’re just running in parallel and responding to the same input. That alone makes it feel like there’s a secure connection, and there’s more complexity behind it than there actually is. I went to piano school for my entire childhood. The next logical step would be to go to a conservatorship or an actual music school and make that my life. But then I was already playing with computers. I swore off music altogether because I was overwhelmed by the pressures that everyone was putting on me about making it part of a career. I was just doing it for fun. With *Panoramical* in particular, in my head, it was music that was David’s thing, and I was going to focus on the visuals. But it was informed by the fact that I appreciated music a lot, and I like music, and I always thought it would be half of the experience. “Can I actually make a commercial game that’s basically an art installation?” ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/PANORAMICAL_2015-08-22_17-21-33.jpg) ***You describe yourself as creating playful interactive art.*** I’ve been playing a lot of flight simulators. There’s this flight simulator-ish project in the back burner. ***Flight simulators, and sims, simulators as a category, are excellent. They’re open-ended. It’s really just about personal experience.*** What I like about them is that you have this very complex simulation, or system, or machine, and it only takes a little bit to learn to actually know how to control it. But then if you want to learn more, there’s an infinite depth of knowledge that you can have about how to communicate, and use the radio, and flight planning, and different planes, or whatever. But at the same time, there’s this space for introspection, and just the experience of actually flying the plane is so slow. Nothing happens that you don’t have a choice but to be content with it and contemplate the landscape. I just really love that relationship with landscapes, and with beauty, that you have when you’re flying a plane. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/MG_0010-copy.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/PANORAMICAL_2015-07-10_19-19-45.jpg) ***You’ve been working in VR, and also with Looking Glass holographic displays. Tell me a little bit about the process of moving into those spaces as a creator.*** When VR came around, I liked the technology, of course, but I noticed how it was being sold as this big next thing, so I was also skeptical. ***There’s optimism about the tool itself, even if you’re skeptical about uses.*** The interface itself is a game-changer. When I first started playing around, I just got so many ideas for different interactions. I was really hoping that it would become more common, so you could experiment with more different interactions. ***Unlike creators in other mediums, you’re creating with commercial tools at the end of the day that is bought and sold and change over time. If you’re a sculptor, you have to worry about clay no longer becoming a feasible medium or becoming obsolete because someone bought the right to it.*** I think about that a lot; all the time. I’m always low-level, in the back of my head, thinking about how can I make the work that I’m doing and the tools that I’m learning more stand the test of time? I’m starting to feel less and less comfortable with the pace at which things become obsolete in whatever, anything related to technology. I interact with all these tools like 3ds Max and Unity, Blender, whatever. These tools are designed to let you do as much as possible and be very professional and precise. What I’m interested in is having a tool that’s *less* precise, where precision and control isn’t what the tool is trying to do. I was looking at a lot of creative tools for kids that came out of the ’90s. Microsoft went through a series of tools, including one called [Creative Writer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative%5FWriter?ref=killscreen.com). There’s a history of tools made for children. The goal here is it’s not like Photoshop. The goal here is not necessarily accuracy, it’s just pure expression. The tools I am using every day—what are the values that those tools have? And how can you make tools for other people, and for yourself, that is more aligned with the values that you want to have when you’re creating. Unity’s going to be very easy for you to make a third-person video game. But maybe it’s going to get in your way when you’re trying to use it differently. There’s s also a problem with ownership, right? When you’re working with the tool, you’ve made the most fantastic thing, but if people can’t take the artifact that they made out of it, and own it, then there’s something lost there. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/MG_0079-copy.jpg) **We worked with MoMa on taking games into the permanent collection of the museum. Their design curator Paola Antonelli** [***said***](https://killscreen.com/paola-antonelli/?ref=killscreen.com)***, “Code is more fragile than porcelain.” It’s such a massive challenge for archivists, and even for the artists themselves, to ensure that their work is still going to be available for future generations.*** ***It’s just an extra burden for being a digital artist, having to think about your legacy, or what happens to your work after it’s gone.*** I’m thinking about tools, thinking about access. It’s like you have to build your easel, your paintbrush, and figure out how to create the pigments and the paint before you start thinking about what you’re drawing. There are all of these things that you have to stress about when you’re working with digital stuff. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/DaveM22_DaveM22-R1-E009.jpg) --- ### Credits Interview by Jamin Warren on December 20, 2019\. Edited for clarity and length. ### Links [Fernando Ramallo](https://fernandoramallo.github.io/2019/?ref=killscreen.com) [*PANORAMICAL*](http://www.panoramic.al/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Vassiliki and Navid Khonsari: Making mediums the message URL: https://www.killscreen.com/vassiliki-navid-khonsari/ Last updated: 2024-12-25T01:18:48.000Z *Jack of all trades, master of…all of them?* *Navid and Vassiliki Khonsari are co-founders of* [*iNK Stories*](http://inkstories.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*, a Brooklyn-based immersive entertainment studio. At a time when mediums are converging, the Khonsaris are perfectly equipped to take advantage of the new world as they straddle the line between traditional cinematic storytelling and interactive design. As a result, they’ve earned notice and praise from technologists, game designers, and filmmakers with awards and nominations from Facebook, Sundance, Tribeca, and BAFTA.* *“We’re developing TV shows, film, virtual reality, augmented reality,” Navid says. “We let the story take the medium rather than pigeonholing ourselves.” Their newest work* [*Fire Escape* ](https://bit.ly/FireEscapeSTEAM?ref=killscreen.com)*is a thriller driven by your wandering eye.* *We spoke to the Khonsari’s about merging mediums, telling real stories, and search for “ecstatic truth.”* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Document-Name_1920_webai_600x700_acf_cropped_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Document-Name_1920_webak_600x700_acf_cropped_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ***Could you both tell me a little bit about your respective backgrounds in storytelling and interactivity?*** **Vassiliki**: I studied cultural anthropology and film, and I got my master’s in visual anthropology in the UK. My interest was always in using different platforms to convey cultural information and close those cultural perspective gaps between other individuals being the storyteller and the audience and using various forms for that. I started at The New York Times Television here in New York City, then moved into the more feature doc world for Discovery, TLC, VH1, and all those things. I ended up directing and producing a couple of documentary feature docs about the human condition in niche worlds. One of the documentaries was called Bang the Machine in ’99\. Ee thought we were documenting the end of the arcade era, but we were actually documenting the birth of esports. That was about the best *Street Fighter* players in the US. That film was all of the live audio and Super 16 on film. All of the audio was in our office, which was across from Building Two of the World Trade Center. 9/11 hit. The office was basically incinerated, and so we lost the audio, and the film didn’t really have a future, unfortunately. Navid and I met each other, and he was coming from the world of the games, and we founded iNK Stories. The DNA for iNK Stories was always pulling together the ethos that Navid picked up working at Rockstar Games and engaging a broad commercial audience and combining that with an anthropological documentary approach of looking at the human condition. How could we pull the two together and really usher in the next wave for games telling *real* stories and really emphasizing people, but not losing the fun entertainment factor? How do we bring the best of all of these disciplines and worlds together to push on the boundaries of the platforms we’re exploring and experimenting with? ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Document-Name_1920_webo_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Document-Name_1920_webh_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Document-Name_1920_webw_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Document-Name_1920_weba_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) iNK Stories' Offices in Brooklyn. **Navid**: I graduated from film school and shot my first indie feature in the late ’90s. I had a foundation for cinematic storytelling, which is what opened the door for my opportunity to work at Rockstar and come on board as the cinematic director for *Grand Theft Auto* trilogy in the PS2 generation for *GTA III, Vice City,* and *San Andreas*. I was the cinematic director and the head of production. I got this incredible experience while the company was just growing exponentially and got to work with A-list talent as well as a multitude of development teams across the globe. It was a phenomenal experience, and I decided to go back to my film roots after having done an extensive amount of work with Rockstar. Vassiliki and I met and worked on a couple of feature documentaries together. I was able to grow with the storytelling methods in the upcoming, updated hardware generation. I grew up in Iran and felt that the subject matter of what took place between this country that’s quite polarized with the US. But this really intimate relationship had not yet been told through the medium, and nobody was actually backing a game as the medium to tell stories that are depicting real events and real people. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/blindfold-normal-hero-background-01-ps4-us-23jul19.jpeg) A companion to 1979 Revolution, Blindfold places you as a photojournalist suffering an intense interrogation. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/blindfold-screen-03-ps4-us-20aug19-1_600x700_acf_cropped_600x700_acf_cropped.jpeg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/blindfold-screen-02-ps4-us-20aug19-1_600x700_acf_cropped.jpeg) ***I wanted to talk a little bit more about iNK Stories’ mission. Whether documenting the Syrian civil war, the Iranian Revolution, gentrification in Brooklyn—your work evokes plenty of overtly political themes and things that are often relevant to phenomena that are occurring in the present. How do you settle on the subject matter for your work, and what kinds of stories interest you?*** **Vassiliki**: As a collective, we work as a narrative writing room developing user experience, game mechanics as part and parcel of story and narrative development simultaneously. What we all have in common is —not to sound corny—but we want the world to be a better place. We dive into the human condition and look at critical matters and allow people to complicate the truth; to not deliver with the same black and white messaging that we see so often represented in media. How can we complicate our understanding and not underestimate our audiences? We see that in games and films: The audiences are way more sophisticated than a lot of the content allows for. We want to be that little pebble in someone’s shoe, but at the same time, bring them that aha moment. **Navid**: For us, we are looking to bring about pivotal stories to audiences who are yearning for something different. But also, we’re coming from the key pillars that have made games like *Grand Theft Auto* successful: to entertain, to engage, and to have that high production value. “We want to be that little pebble in someone’s shoe, but at the same time, bring them that ‘aha’ moment.” ***Could you please tell me a little bit more about Hero?*** **Navid**: *Hero* is a location-based experience that puts you on the streets of Syria. It allows you to take in that world, not for the single images that have bombarded us through the press of the devastation, to actually show us in parts of the world suffering from the proxy wars and the civil war. The Syrian people are no different than us in terms of their daily activities. They need to eat. They need to drink. They embrace their neighbors. We wanted you to take all the way that in with a devastating attack. When everything settles and everything that you felt on your skin, the heat, the sense of smell, you’re asked to go and help that one young girl who you’ve become friends with. In that process, the technology, the graphics, all of those aspects melt away. And you are in it. In the end, you’re asked to save this young girl. What will you do to help this young woman?: **Vassiliki**: It’s not a piece with an agenda, it’s a universal human story. It’s looking at the shape of civilian violence and the responsibility that we have as human beings to connect with one another. ***Why do you want it to be this location-based experience with robust audio and haptic design?*** **Vassiliki**: At the time, Syria was in the news, and there was decided compassion fatigue where you would read these atrocities in the news. There were a number of documentaries, news clips. And yet, it felt like it just became part of the backdrop of the world we’re engaging with. At the time, over 70,000 barrel bombs were dropped in Syria. We were thinking, how can we actually take something that people feel like they get it and have this experiential design to allow people to understand. That was both our challenge, and I think what turned into our opportunity. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Document-Name_1920_webh-1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Document-Name_1920_webf.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Document-Name_1920_webd-1.jpg) The newest title from the Khonsaris is **Fire Escape*, an homage to Hitchcock's Rear Window. ***What were some of the specific challenges you’d faced in designing this experience, especially when compared to the experience of creating your past work?*** **Vassiliki**: My background as an anthropologist means we are really, really concerned with authenticity and representation, so we worked with Syrian refugees. We did a number of interviews with them in a collaborative way, devising the actual narrative of the experience. And in doing so, we motion-captured Syrian actors and also did 3D scans of the refugees, so they’re actually populating the world. Part of the challenge is when you’re working with sensitive material, there is a lot of R&D. You want to make sure that you are setting out with good intentions and not ultimately creating something that’s a misery machine. The experience has to be able to capture this higher universal truth of what you’re going after. Leaning into Werner Herzog, our motto of the company is we’re not accountants of the truth. We were after the ecstatic version of the truth. And so I think that was the more conceptual story challenge. **Navid**: You do have a responsibility as you take people through this journey. As a storyteller, you also have an obligation to provide them with the ability to see that there *is* hope, that there is a call to action, and that we can bring about a change. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Document-Name_1920_webac.jpg) --- ### Credits Interview by Paolo Yumol. Edited and condensed for clarity. ### Links [iNK Stories](http://www.inkstories.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [*Fire Escape*](https://bit.ly/FireEscapeSTEAM?ref=killscreen.com) ### Paula Rogers: Crafting a world of emotional survival URL: https://www.killscreen.com/paula-rogers/ Last updated: 2024-12-26T18:39:31.000Z *In Neo Cab, you play as a Lina, a rideshare driver navigating a future city. As she picks up passengers and converses with them, she has a biofeedback device that tells her how she’s feeling throughout. But when her friend goes missing, talking to passengers is all that she has.* *When we ask writer* [*Paula Rogers*](https://www.paulacreative.com/recentwork?ref=killscreen.com) *to describe Neo Cab, she uses an interesting turn of phrase: “emotional survival.” In many video games, your health and resources are limited or are the currency you use to navigate your world. But for Rogers, it was more interesting to explore the interior life of the characters that she and her team breathed to life.* *We spoke to Paula in her Austin home about writing science fiction for the first time, harnessing the conflicts in the gig economy, and what makes a good ending.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Snapseed20.jpg) Paula at Createscape in Austin. ***How did you get involved with writing for Neo Cab? You have a background in writing with KQED, and Salon, and NPR—how did you make that jump over into writing for a game?*** I have been a writer for almost 15 years now and dabbled in a lot of different things. I moved to Austin to get my master’s degree at UT in screenwriting. I had a lot of experience with writing and different formats, and narrative as well. That really helped me with dialogue, and I really learned about that approach to storytelling. I was working in screenwriting stuff, doing freelance writing, and a friend of mine from art school, [Vincent Perea](http://www.vincentperea.com/?ref=killscreen.com), was the art director on the game. My screenwriting and editorial background are super focused on structure, but I didn’t have a lot of actual game experience. This is the first game that I worked on, and then also I hadn’t played a lot of games. I really didn’t know that there was this whole world of sophisticated narrative games happening. That was a blessing, and also gave me a bit of a learning curve. It was interesting to apply the editorial principles that I’d had for years into this new medium. For *Neo Cab*, we had a really unique setup where we have a massive cast of characters. We have Lina, our protagonist, our main antagonist, and then we have about 20 passengers, or “pax,” that you pick up and meet through the course of the game. We wanted Los Ojos to really feel like a city. We wanted those to be people from any walk of life that you could conceivably meet, and so that meant we had to have a really diverse writer’s room. We wanted to bring as many voices and perspectives as possible through the pax, and to make Lina seem like a real, well-rounded person. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Allie_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Savy-Exterior-Shot_600x700_acf_cropped.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Luke_600x700_acf_cropped.png) Some of the many characters of Neo Cab. I put together the character bible for Lina, for the antagonists, and worked with Patrick \[Ewing\], our creative lead for *Neo Cab*, on the story structure and the plot. Then in the narrative design, we parceled out the rides and how we’re going to do the plot development throughout the game. And then, I would assign characters to the writers, or they would come to Patrick and me with ideas for characters. We would say, “Hey, we need a character that fits this kind of a *blank.* Writers, give us your best pitches.” We had guidelines for what the rides would be and what the length would be. We would say, okay, yes, we do have room for a person that worships a worm. That became Agonon, written by [Robin Sloan](https://www.robinsloan.com/?ref=killscreen.com). I had to really work to make sure that she wasn’t just a character that lived in my head. I had to make sure that she was real to the writers as well, so they could internalize her voice, and feel some ownership. Our thesis of the whole game is “stay human,” which is how empathy and humanity are increasingly threatened with the rise of AI and tech-driven economics. How can we show how terrible things could get if we don’t protect those things? So it was like, no, let’s just take that thesis, and go one level lower. How do you stay human in romance, in religion, in economics, in masculinity? All of those characters started from this conceptual place, and every character began with the thesis. What do they need? What’s their bio that we might never even see in the game? We wanted them to feel like real people. “This tech-driven race to the bottom is a trend that we’re all very concerned about, and it was a natural place to start.” ***Can you tell me a little bit about what you were hoping to say about the relationship that we have to labor, and what that might look like in the near future?*** Our comment on the gig economy was that we really wanted to fight the idea that companies like Uber, or in our fictional world, Capra, have, that a human driver could be replaced by an AI driver—and it would make no difference. So Lina is a human driver in this city that’s being overtaken by AI self-driving cars. What does that mean for her? The passengers that seek her out do so because they crave human connection, and the humanity of Lina, at least as her conversation, her empathy, provides this vital service that people can’t get elsewhere. We wanted to comment on the emotional labor involved in the gig economy. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Capra-Capsule-Hotel.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Lina-Side_600x700_acf_cropped.png) Lina’s job, even if it seems like it’s just a gig, is very replaceable. But it’s deeply personal to her, and to her experience. Everything that she’s bringing from her life into that moment—you can’t put a price on it. It’s incredibly valuable, and it gets overlooked in this economy where it’s about asking: how quickly can we do something? How cheaply can we do something? This tech-driven race to the bottom, in terms of wages, and valuing labor is a trend that we’re all very concerned about, and it just was a natural place to start telling that story through. I read a lot of science fiction, but I had never written science fiction before. I always had really liked it, but I read some classics like Ray Bradbury. I didn’t read cyberpunk because I didn’t want to be influenced too much by it. I had written a lot of historical fiction, though, and I realized that they’re similar. I’m just researching *forwards* instead of researching backward. I looked up the projected census data for 2050\. What will the population look like? That’s interesting. Where will people be living? I read a study on the future of dating, and they’ve projected what they thought dating apps will be like in 30 years. It was a little scary. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Snapseed4_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/MG_7356_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ***How do the characters that you pick up, how does it affect the final storyline, and how much of that is communicated to the players in advance?*** There’s actually a ton of branching in *Neo Cab*. It’s a hundred thousand words roughly. Everyone gets a very different experience based on which pax you pick up, and every pax has three parts to their story. You don’t have to complete the arc of each pax, but you can, and so that affects who you meet. My brain is getting scrambled, just talking about it again. It was this labyrinth of so many characters and so many options of who you could pick up at any given time. But we have these essential plot moments that you have to hit. If Lina’s too happy, sometimes options are closed off to her. That’s the main mechanic of trying to navigate her emotional labor and protect her while also giving the pax what they want to get that five-star rating. And so, you can definitely say the wrong thing to pax. We did an audit close to the end of the game where we were like, how many endings does this ride have? How hard is it? Is it a three-star ride, or five-star? Is it a five star, and a one-star? There’s definitely a good ending and a bad ending. The good ending is difficult to get, but it involves Lina learning her big character lessons. ***Is that what you’re hoping that players will walk away with? That the good endings are hard to find?*** I think so. I mean, I hope that’s not mean. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Snapseed2.jpg) --- ### Credits Interview conducted by Jamin Warren on December 19, 2019\. Edited for clarity and length. Photography by [Julie Thompson](http://juliebthompson.com/?ref=killscreen.com). ### Links [Paula Rogers](http://www.paulacreative.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [*Neo Cab*](https://neocabgame.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Zach Gage: Dreaming of systems URL: https://www.killscreen.com/zach-gage/ Last updated: 2024-12-26T18:53:08.000Z [](https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://killscreen.com/zach-gage/)[](https://twitter.com/home?status=https://killscreen.com/zach-gage/&ref=killscreen.com) *I first met* [*Zach Gage*](http://stfj.net/?ref=killscreen.com) *ten years ago when I was living in NYC, and he was teaching at NYU. One of the things that excited me about game-making in New York was the interdisciplinary approach that many creators that had taken. In the absence of a large commercial video game making scene, like the one found in San Francisco or Montreal, video game creators often floated in and out of other mediums like architecture, graphic design, and interaction design. There was no big game studio that was looking to swallow up game creators, but there were plenty of other influences on the space.* *Gage’s work since then reflects an itinerant nature that’s jumped from fonts to sound design to performance. Oh, and there’s some Proper Videogames thrown in there like Typeshift, Really Bad Chess, and Card of Darkness. The throughline of all his work is a deep love and exploration of systems and the generative behaviors that they create in players.* *I spoke to Zach about jumping in and out of video games, learning from his audience, and the nervousness of watching people play with your work in front of you.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/MG_0007-copy_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/MG_0023-copy_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/MG_0010-copy_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DaveM22_DaveM22-R1-E003-copy_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Zach at home in his NYC studio. ***How did you get into creating things? Did you come from a family that did that?*** *My great-grandfather was a painter, and my grandma did painting and show posters for Broadway. My grandpa was an art director for advertising, and my mom is a painter now. My dad was a carpenter. Everybody was into art or an artist.* ***Did having that background impact the way you viewed the arts?*** I never really thought about that. It almost certainly is true, at least of my mom. We would go to a lot of art museums. My entire understanding of art was framed in her explanation of painting to me, and art, and what’s interesting about it. That’s become my perspective, so it’s difficult to separate what her perspective would be. I don’t know if this is what everybody learns about art or not. For me, the main thing about art is that pieces operate as lenses. They’re a thing that shapes the way that people see through them, and not a presented concept. Thinking of things as lenses really opens up what a painting is, or what a sculpture is. It makes it a lot friendlier because it’s not about you understanding it. When you look through a lens, you don’t think about what the lens is. You think about what you see through the lens, and that’s what art is. That’s what’s magical about it. It’s a very welcoming and open perspective. College was where I was doing a lot of interactive conceptual art. That’s the time where I was really thinking about the theory and how I talk about stuff. That’s where I figured out a lot of my art language, and I would apply that stuff to the games. For example, during that time, I learned how to make something that someone will walk up to and use in the gallery, which is a very weird thing to do. Nobody’s expecting to interact with anything in a gallery. Being able to set up a context and present helps people feel comfortable—like they’ve mastered the thing—so that they can perform it. Performing is what they’re doing when they’re surrounded by other people who are watching them interact with the work. That concept is so hard in a gallery, and it’s so much harder than a game, but it’s what I think when I make a game. I’m thinking about how someone’s going to interact with this thing over time. That’s where I learned that skill. ***When did you start dipping into games more formally? And then back again?*** I did a little dip into games, and then after I went back to more traditional art. The first piece that I made was called [*#Fortune*](http://stfj.net/index2.php?project=art/2013/Fortune&ref=killscreen.com), which was this little box that searches Twitter for a bunch of different phrases and then uses them to generate fortunes for you. When you interact with it, it’s a box in a gallery and a button. You push the button, and it pops out a little fortune, and then you laugh. I had scattered a bunch of fortunes on the box itself to get people comfortable and understand that this a thing. And then they interact with it, and as soon as one person does it, it draws a little crowd, and everybody’s really happy. It’s the joy of pushing a button and then getting a joke, which is really a very game-y mechanic. That’s the core of loot boxes and all kinds of components of games. When I dip back in art I use the language of games. And in games, I use the language of art. So the loop is complete. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/MG_0100-copy.jpg) #Fortune (2013) pulled tweets from the internet and printed them on slips of papers for viewers to take home or leave behind for others. [***We had a conversation with Cassie Mcquater***](https://killscreen.com/cassie-mcquater/?ref=killscreen.com)***, and she was saying how much harder it was to show games at gaming conventions because people aren’t as willing to be confused. In an art context, she said, viewers came in with a mindset that it was okay to not quite know what was going.*** That’s true when anyone walks into a gallery unless they’re like an art collector or a historian. \[NYU Game Center Director\] [Frank Lantz](http://www.franklantz.net/?ref=killscreen.com) has said that the joy of going to galleries is that you don’t really know if the thing you’re looking at is good or bad…and you also don’t understand it. You’re trying to figure out all of these things together. But the thing that is happening in games, the reason why people have this expectation of understanding, is that literacy in games is so much higher. Literacy in art is criminally low. It’s impossible to totally grasp everything in art because that’s what art is about, pushing further and further. But also most people go into The Museum of Modern Art, not expecting to understand what they’re going to see and that sucks. It feels like people should have a stronger sense of how art works. I frequently think about how I rarely see journalism about art in everyday life. You see journalism about movies and games and politics, but almost nobody’s ever writing or talking about art. Gallerists have somewhat been incentivized to mystify it. I learned how to make something that someone will walk up to and use in the gallery, which is a very weird thing to do. Nobody’s expecting to interact with anything in a gallery. Being able to set up a context and present helps people feel comfortable—like they’ve mastered the thing—so that they can perform it. Whereas games, there is actually massive literacy amongst gamers. It’s a commercial format, and it’s a relaxing format, so people are expecting to get the thing that they expect, that will comfort them and chill them out. They have a very high understanding of what the pieces of the game are and how they interact with each other. Even if, as developers, it often feels like people who are complaining don’t understand. But really they do, compared to a lot of other things. The literacy of videogame players is as high or higher than most of the people who are listening to music or watching television, in terms of how those mediums are structured and interact. I had this moment a very long time ago with a piece that I did called [*Lose/Lose*](http://www.stfj.net/index2.php?year=2009&project=art/2009/loselose&ref=killscreen.com). It’s this game like Space Invaders, but the aliens kill your files on your computer when you kill them. I never expected anyone to play it. I didn’t really expect people to talk about it, because it flew in the face of the expectations of people who play games to such a degree that they were enraged. But there were only thousands and thousands of threads of people calling me an asshole and being really upset. I read all of these comments. It was amazing to me that people cared about the thing that I had done. Buried in one of the forums, one player was describing art to another player and explaining how Lose/Lose was art. But they never used the term art, because they didn’t really know what art was. They had stumbled onto this concept. It was so mind-blowing to me that someone could put that together. All these people, thousands of people know what art is! They can discuss it and talk about it, even if they don’t think of it, in that way. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/06_600x700_acf_cropped_600x700_acf_cropped.png) **Typeshift* (2017) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/really-bad-chess_600x700_acf_cropped_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) **Really Bad Chess* (2016) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/card-of-darkness-1_600x700_acf_cropped_600x700_acf_cropped.jpeg) **Card of Darkness* (2020) ***How do you describe what it is that you do, then?*** I usually say I’m a conceptual artist, and I make videogames. A long time ago, when I was trying to figure out if I should stop doing as much traditional art and start making more videogames, I was worried that I was going to do something that was not important. I was giving up something that was maybe really cool and interesting and unique and meaningful, to make entertainment for people. I definitely still dread when people ask me what I do, and I say I make videogames, and then they say, “Oh, what platform?” And I say, “Mobile games.” That sucks. I wish that mobile games had a better reputation because they’re the most interesting, most important context for games that we have right now. Now that I’ve made games and I have an audience, and people write to me and talk to me, I hear a lot more stories about the way that people use games. They tell me how meaningful games can be to get people through tough times in their lives or as a part of daily rituals, in a lot of ways that I didn’t understand. I really have enjoyed videogames, and I know games can bring people together. Still, there were a lot of nuances to the way that games and entertainment fit that is much more important than we give it credit for. There’s a lot of that that gets embedded into these objects. Games and art are creating these historical objects that document the way that games have moved through culture, what people have resisted, and how those things can be interrogated. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2024/12/ImScaredOf_600x700_acf_cropped_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2024/12/HowTo_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2024/12/AllMyFriendsWantTo_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2024/12/HomeHome_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Glaciers (2015) generated unique poems daily from Google auto-complete prompts. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/2024/12/inatall4_lg--1-.jpg) **Glaciers* (2015) generated unique poems daily from Google auto-complete prompts. (Photo: Tamas Banovich / Postmasters Gallery) ***Games are this commercial medium that lots of people can purchase discretely and at a low cost, compared to art. How have you navigated that balance between selling a lot of a little thing and a little of a lot of a thing?*** I had a series of pieces called [*Glaciers*](http://www.stfj.net/index2.php?year=2016&project=art/2016/Glaciers&ref=killscreen.com). A big part of that piece was that I wanted to create something purchasable but still felt unique. It was frustrating to me that most of the work I was doing was one-offs and that it had more emotional value to me than tangible value to anybody. A lot of the work that I’ve done recently has been about thinking of ways that people can repurpose things that they already have as frames for interactive works. What are the ways to use all of these old phones or tablets that everybody’s accumulating and turn them into sculptural works? Like a guerrilla usage of old things. ***Last year, you did some installation work. How different was that from working in a digital context?*** *Transit Meditation* very much was a game structure. It’s a labyrinth. It’s a game that only has only one path through it, but yet you can lose. *Transit Meditation* is, expectations-wise, sort of like a Kaizo Mario game (hyper-difficult user-designed versions of *Super Mario Bros*. games). You start it, and it seems like “Oh, this is easy, I’m going to walk this path.” Then you are walking it for about 30 seconds. You’re like, “Oh my god, wait a minute. This is not what I expected, this is way longer than I thought. Do I even have time for this? I thought this was going to be a quick thing. This is very boring.” Either you duck out under the barricades, or you go, “Well, I’m not going to be beating by a bunch of stupid barricades. I’ll get to the center, then I’m going to walk back.” By the time you get to the center, you feel this accomplishment about having done it and having resisted this pull to bail. And it’s very cathartic, and as you leave, it feels much shorter than you went in because you’re not fighting a fight anymore. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/IMG_3147_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/IMG_3115_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ***Is it harder for you to make games in public or video games?*** It’s still terrifying to release a video game, but the consequences for people not liking it are pretty low. But if you made a 10,000 square foot labyrinth in the middle of a big courtyard and buildings, and then it turns out it’s boring to walk through—and there’s no upside—it’s very scary. With the [*Glaciers*](http://www.stfj.net/index2.php?year=2016&project=art/2016/Glaciers&ref=killscreen.com) show and then again with [*Transit Meditation*](http://www.stfj.net/index2.php?year=2016&project=art/2016/Glaciers&ref=killscreen.com), the weirdest thing about doing physical installations is there’s no analytics in real life. You never really know how things are—if people like them or if they don’t? You do something in the real world, and I’m watching people, and they seem like they enjoy it. Is it a lot of people? Is it a little people? I don’t know! No one knows! ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/DaveM22_DaveM22-R1-E007-copy.jpg) --- ### Credits Interview by Jamin Warren on Februrary 19, 2020. Photography by [David Evan McDowell](http://www.davidevanmcdowell.com/?ref=killscreen.com). Photography of *Glaciers,* courtesy of [Postmasters Gallery.](http://postmastersart.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Links [stfj.net](http://www.stfj.net/index.html?ref=killscreen.com) ### Emilie Baltz: Cooking with the future URL: https://www.killscreen.com/emilie-baltz/ Last updated: 2024-12-26T19:09:04.000Z [](https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://killscreen.com/emilie-baltz/)[](https://twitter.com/home?status=https://killscreen.com/emilie-baltz/&ref=killscreen.com) Food is a precarious material to work with. It can crack open, ooze, spoil, decompose. A harsh contrast to technology, which is hard, cold, almost unforgivably unyielding, and a toxic scourge on the earth. Just ask food technologist Emilie Baltz. In one of Baltz’s earlier food design projects, she worked with gelatin, creating a giant gelatin speaker by embedding a sensor into a gelatin mold of a hi-fi speaker. The hope was that when someone touched the speaker, it would trigger a sound and, because of the sound waves, wiggle. Only Baltz didn’t take into consideration gelatin’s melting point (and the fact that people really just want to stick their finger inside of a gooey mold). So over the course of a few hours at room temperature with the added human heat of people’s hands, “the whole thing melted.” Baltz now uses agar, another jelly-like substance used in cooking as a vegetarian substitute since it is obtained from red algae, which is more temperature stable. “Gelatin doesn’t really like to be touched,” she said. “Talk about choosing two things that never work, food and technology,” Baltz said. “They’re like oops, the broccoli didn’t ship today and this sensor is actually pressure-sensitive, shit. Nothing ever works as planned.” ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/TRACES-3_600x700_acf_cropped_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/TRACES-1_600x700_acf_cropped_600x700_acf_cropped_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/TRACES-4_600x700_acf_cropped_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/TRACES-2_600x700_acf_cropped_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) **Traces* is a 2014 eating experience that uses the table as canvas, tracing the interactions of guests by engaging them in a hands-on dinner. Baltz doesn’t consider herself a chef or a game designer, but food is her medium and creating interactive experiences is her endgame. She first studied screenwriting and contemporary dance, so she comes from an education in storytelling, and then received her masters in industrial design six years after graduating college. She stumbled upon food as a material design while she was working as a waitress, and in 2005, this was largely uncharted territory, using ingredients as a medium for interaction. During the rise of molecular gastronomy in 2004, much was happening in the world of food. Chef Wylie Dufresne’s wd\~50 was perhaps the most prominent example of molecular gastronomy in America, which operated on the Lower East Side from 2003 through 2014\. “The kitchen, just a few blocks from the restaurant, has become a lab for subjecting ingredients to extreme conditions,” [the New York Times wrote](https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/26/dining/time-to-face-the-music.html?ref=killscreen.com) just ahead of the restaurant’s opening in 2003\. Duresne and his team used non-traditional cooking techniques fused with science such as “slivers of calamata olives are withering to a crisp; \[…\] pineapples festooned with peppercorns and vanilla beans are completing a three-day braise; in the freezer, tubs of lovage await an undetermined fate.” Other New York chefs followed suit [and around the world](https://robbreport.com/food-drink/dining/molecular-gastronomy-wd-50-wylie-dufresne-2855731/?ref=killscreen.com) they continued to open up wild restaurants that really explored and challenged how we think about food. Think kitchens turned R&D labs. “There is a real need for experiences that force us into these spaces that are physical, that are real, that aren’t mediated by huge amounts of tech” Other New York chefs followed suit [and around the world](https://robbreport.com/food-drink/dining/molecular-gastronomy-wd-50-wylie-dufresne-2855731/?ref=killscreen.com) they continued to open up wild restaurants that really explored and challenged how we think about food. Think kitchens turned R&D labs. “\[Food\]could be an idea. It could cause an intellectual conversation,” Baltz said. “It could be science; it could be romance; it could be so many things because of the way the material was treated.” She started to think about how food could be applied to human design principles. “Chefs here were using it still as an ingredient in a dish,” she said, but she wanted to explore how it could be used to build social relationships and relationships to our environment. “It fed my curiosity to no end because there was no research at that point.” Food is our only multisensory material—we see it, we hear it, we smell it, we taste it, we feel it. It lends itself to intimacy, shared experiences, emotional and cultural nostalgia. Tech, these days, is more often attributed to an unfeeling, alienating phenomenon. A [study published in 2018 in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181108164316.htm?ref=killscreen.com), for instance, found a causal relationship between Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram usage and increased depression and loneliness. “The screen has done such a disservice to all of us,” Baltz said, adding that when she teaches, she sees that reality in her students, and how technology has bound their creativity. “There is a real need for experiences that force us into these spaces that are physical, that are real, that aren’t mediated by huge amounts of tech,” she said. “What food does when you introduce it is it really grounds you in your body and you have to feel things in public with other people.” ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/16112018_Doclab_EatTechKitchen_NichonGlerum-1_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/16112018_Doclab_EatTechKitchen_NichonGlerum-2-1_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/16112018_Doclab_EatTechKitchen_NichonGlerum-7_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/16112018_Doclab_EatTechKitchen_NichonGlerum-13_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) For EAT TECH KITCHEN, guests were encouraged to create unexpected culinary experiences that shuffled definitions of technology, ritual and consumption. Baltz doesn’t usually pick a food or ingredient first and then go from there. Her projects usually start by asking how she wants to make people feel. (Though she did say she does want to do some work with bioluminescence, the emission of light from a living organism. Like a firefly.) Food might be the play object, the controller, but how that interaction will make you *feel* is what Baltz is after. “If you think about walking down the street and drinking versus sitting in a cafe and slowly sipping your cup of coffee, they may be the same chemical composition, but you’re going to experience and feel that coffee in different ways because of the interaction and choreography around it,” she said. “That’s usually how I start, and then find food and flavors that complement that.” Baltz is tapping into a larger cultural vein. Eddo Stern, a Professor of Design Media Arts within UCLA’s Game Lab, said there is a cultural moment unfolding as people are growing hungrier for experiences that aren’t purely digital. More people are gravitating toward board games, for example, and in general, toward games that are more personal. He cites alternative controllers as an example of catering to that desire for a more humanistic gaming experience. Stern himself has developed a number of games with alternative controllers and twists on more mainstream virtual spaces—he’s designed a “[Triple Mouse](https://eddostern.com/works/runners-eq/?ref=killscreen.com)”, [hard plastic 3D skins](https://eddostern.com/works/waco-resurrection/?ref=killscreen.com) of cult leader David Koresh, [sensory deprivation head gear](https://eddostern.com/works/darkgame-1/?ref=killscreen.com), and, like Baltz, [gameplay that incorporates food](https://eddostern.com/works/crumb-lord/?ref=killscreen.com). ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/MG_0053-copy_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/MG_0047-copy_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) “In my own work they were serving a particular purpose, usually to bring focus to the body while playing,” Stern said. “So much about computer games strives for deep immersion and disembodiment,” he said, citing virtual reality as an example, but his projects focus on bringing that awareness back to your relationship with reality, they “make you aware of your body, of who you are, what you’re doing.” Baltz also wants to create experiences that deepen people’s understanding of their body, their motivations, their emotions. Eat Tech Kitchen, her recent project, asks people to cook dinner using a basic chatbot embedded in Google Home. “The idea is that you’re cooking recipes that are coming from the future of humanity and the irony of it all is that the recipes are really, really stupid and they look at humanity through this lens of contemporary culture.” People are asked to do things like use their phone as a plate or lick a Twinkie as many times as they liked a photo on Instagram. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/LICKESTRA-2_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/LICKESTRA-3_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/LICKESTRA-4.1_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/LICKESTRA-5_600x700_acf_cropped.jpg) Lickestra is the performance played by a series of conductive ice creams that trigger various baselines and tones when licked. “It mixes all the language of digital behavior and digital culture and in exchange asks people to make these little snacks together,” Baltz said. Food is used as a medium for play here, “but it also serves as a familiar way of being able to engage people in critical dialogues with themselves using a recipe.” It’s this nudge to get people to look at themselves, to laugh at themselves and with each other, and to critique themselves through a gameplay that is familiar to most of us—following a recipe. And it’s hopefully a nudge further from this alienation of tech and closer to looking up and connecting with others, and with yourself. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/MG_0028-copy.jpg) --- ### Credits Photography by [David McDowell](http://www.davidevanmcdowell.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Links [Emilie Baltz](http://emiliebaltz.com/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Mario von Rickenbach: Intuiting instruction and interaction URL: https://www.killscreen.com/mario-von-rickenbach/ Last updated: 2024-12-26T21:27:40.000Z *Zurich-based game designer Mario von Rickenbach uses technology to create playful experiences that delight the senses and invite audience members to observe and participate at once. With filmmaker Michael Frei, He co-founded the media company* [*Playables*](http://playables.net/?ref=killscreen.com)*, which has produced such award-winning projects as* [*Plug and Play*](https://mariov.ch/project/pnp?ref=killscreen.com) *and* [*KIDS*](https://mariov.ch/project/kids?ref=killscreen.com)*. As an instructor at* [*ECAL MID*](http://www.ecal.ch/?ref=killscreen.com)*, von Rickenbach also groks the ways in which interactivity and play intersect with the acquisition of that thing we call knowledge.* *We spoke with Mario about architecture, puppets, and how to make a game even your grandmother will love.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Mario-at-Desk-Color_final.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Mario-writing-in-notebook_color.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mariovonrickenbach2020%E2%80%93Akosua18.jpg) ***Can you tell me a little bit about your background in coding and game development?*** I started making games when I started *studying* making games. I was curious about how things are made, but I’d never actually tried to do it. I started studying architecture first and then, at some point, I just understood that it’s not the thing I wanted to do. So I found this other thing I could study at design school, game design. It was more like a second choice, so to speak, to find something with more interactivity or, in a sense, something where I could really work on a product and not just plan something. That’s how I started. And so I studied game design at the Zurich University of the Arts, did some projects during that time, and then started doing my own projects. I also worked together with other people on different things. That was almost ten years ago. ***What kinds of game development projects most appeal to you typically?*** I often work on projects where how it feels to play is more important than what you actually do. One of the main interests, I would say, is to really find compelling interactions and put them together in a thing that is easy to understand and which can be explored by anyone, even someone without any real interest in or previous knowledge of games. ***I wanted to ask, how did you originally get in touch with (film director)*** [***Michael Frei***](https://michaelfrei.io/?ref=killscreen.com)***?*** In 2013 I think it was, he contacted me. He had [*Plug and Play*, a short film](https://vimeo.com/118453180?ref=killscreen.com) that he was trying to make interactive. He wanted it to be possible to play with it and not just watch it, so it could reach a different audience. So we discussed what are our interests, like what kind of things do you like, and we understood that we both liked very similar types of projects, like games or toys that the other liked, like the projects by [Vectorpark](http://www.vectorpark.com/?ref=killscreen.com). One project was [*BLA BLA* by Vincent Morisset](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LRF7ff-RJk&ref=killscreen.com), which we both really liked. And this was a starting point of our collaboration, that we had some very similar interests. “I often work on projects where how it feels to play is more important than what you actually do.” We started to work on [*Plug and Play* the game](https://plugplay.ch/?ref=killscreen.com). We started to take the content we had from the short film and find ways to make it playable. And this was really an interesting period at the beginning of our collaboration because we had to really figure out how we could work together, especially from our different perspectives. Like how could we make something that worked for me as a game designer and Michael as a filmmaker. Later, we kept working together on some smaller experiments and then also, during the last few years, we worked on the more recent project, [*KIDS*](http://playkids.ch/?ref=killscreen.com), which we really planned from the beginning to have a game but also a short film as a product. ***I know that KIDS takes the form of an animation, a playable experience, a physical installation in art galleries. Was that something that you had gone into the project knowing that you’d wanted to do? Were you aware that it was going to take so many different forms when you started working on it?*** Yeah, I think our goal from the beginning was really to have a project that could be shown in different ways. So the game and the film were the main part. But the idea to also have some physical installation, to *show* it, was somehow very close to the project since the beginning. I think it was just that our work was spread out over all these different formats. So it was really different in the sense that we didn’t finish one thing and then do the next. It was more like we did everything at the same time and didn’t define what it was until we’d finished everything, which made it a bit hard. Compared to *Plug and Play*, we didn’t have the film, which was just fixed, finished, and a complete project. And with the *KIDS,* you had all these different directions to go at the same time, which probably in the end made it take longer to find what worked. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mariovonrickenbach2020%E2%80%93Akosua24.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mariovonrickenbach2020%E2%80%93Akosua32.jpg) ***Why did you want the experience to take so many different forms?*** Partly it’s because of how we work together. We have our format, like I know how to make a game, Michael knows how to make a film. So this was a very practical reason. But also in terms of what it is about, I think, because it’s a topic that could work not just in a linear format but as an interactive format and also in a physical space. We thought if we could do it, it would be interesting because we could have very different people interacting with the project. This is just a very interesting part of it. So you have, really, these people who just like to watch a film at the short film festival and people online who just want to play a game and they don’t care about the other formats. I think there are many practical reasons why we did that. Also, it’s interesting to find what’s the core of the project if you have to show it in different ways; at some point you have to kind of agree on some kind of minimal thing, what it *is*, so you can say, “this has to stay and the rest can change.” For example, for the physical installation, it doesn’t really matter if the figures don’t do anything or if they work differently or look a bit different. It was more about having them as the main characters in the installation and that they have the same qualities as in the game or in the film. That they are heavy, for example. This was one of the things that we tried to keep while, for example. What happens in the scenes is a bit different in the film and in the game and also in this installation. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mariovonrickenbach2020%E2%80%93Akosua36.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mariovonrickenbach2020%E2%80%93Akosua24-1.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mariovonrickenbach2020%E2%80%93Akosua28-scaled.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mariovonrickenbach2020%E2%80%93Akosua25-2-1.jpg) ***When you design these experiences for smartphones, sort of keeping in mind that this could be a mobile experience for people, who are you imagining as your audience? Who do you think are the kinds of people that would be interested in picking up something like KIDS and playing with it?*** Generally, we tested with some people who don’t really download apps or who think that they would never like something like that. Especially in the film, let’s say, when you talk to animation filmmakers, many of them they just don’t play games that much, which is a great target audience, I think, because they care about interesting things, but they maybe don’t have a connection to games. And generally, Michael always did this test with his grandmother, which was always a nice one. If his grandmother could play it, then it was probably working. We also showed it to children who really don’t even know how to play games well. It was interesting to see what they would do. It was more like as a visual to test, to see if you were looking at the right things when you played it. At the end, we didn’t define it really well, like who should play it, but it should not require any knowledge about how to play a game. ***Do you sense that the work elicits different reactions from people depending on whether they’re watching it as an animation or whether they’re playing it as a game?*** Yeah. It depends, really, on the context. If it’s a serious cultural context, in the sense that you go somewhere to watch some interesting films and maybe get a bit experimental, then people will look at it very differently. Of course they’re going to have more elaborate thoughts about it. But in the end, when somebody just plays the game or watches somebody play the game, you have very simple feedback sometimes, which is also very interesting. I think it really changes a lot, not just depending on if it’s a film or the game, but depending on who is interacting with it. If it’s people acting as consumers of a product, or if somebody is really looking at or playing the game… you would rather have very different feedback, you know what I mean? But I think both directions are interesting. And of course there are also people who just really can’t understand, or really are not interested in this kind of project, which is also interesting to hear about. We had these feedbacks, people who would really say, “yes, I know what you want to do, but I really don’t like it,” or people who somehow didn’t like the basic idea of this project. ***What were some of the challenges you faced in designing the experience for a physical location? Especially a gallery space where you have to consider so many physical aspects of experience?*** The first time we showed the project was at the [Museum of Digital Art in Zurich](https://muda.co/zurich/?ref=killscreen.com). We didn’t yet have the game finished or the film. So we had this month and we showed the project. We were not completely sure how best to show the project yet, so we had it in this case, like a projected installation of an interactive film. And we had these puppets and the game to play. So there it was about filling the space with this project in different ways. You could spend more or less time depending on your mood, you could play the game, you go into the room with the projections, or you could just carry around some of these physical puppets. And this is interesting because people connected with different things first. Some were really interested in the game, some were more interested in this projection room. Other people, they just carried around these puppets as a starting point, but then they started to also explore the other parts of the exhibition, which was interesting. So it was not completely done; we didn’t design it in a way that defined what you should do first. It was more about figuring out how people could connect to this experience through the thing they’re most interested in first. Then they could explore the other parts later. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mariovonrickenbach2020%E2%80%93Akosua14.jpg) ***Were people given instruction at all? For instance, were people told that they could pick up the puppets?*** It depends a bit. I think most people intuit the instruction; they just get a puppet. So somebody gives them a puppet and says, “you can keep this puppet or not,” just so it’s clear that the puppets are meant to be interacted with. They are not a decoration. They’re really there to hold or to be moved, or you can also just leave them somewhere. And this was interesting because it already, at the beginning, somehow made it clear that the visitors should just try to figure out what to do themselves. Even in this space, it was not like there wasn’t a clear order of things. So they just had this puppet and they walked around. I think this works very well. We were not sure about it at the beginning—if it worked, if people were interested in that or not. But, in the end, I think the fact that it is something very physical and heavy makes it easier to look at the digital parts. You still have some kind of object that is not just the screen, but is a part of the same world. ***Did you notice that people reacted a certain way because the piece was presented in a serious art gallery context?*** They took much more time than other people. If you see the same thing online, you’ll take much less time. Being in the art gallery, you expect more or you expect that there is something to think about. So there was for sure this expectation, but we didn’t know who actually would go there, like who would come to such an exhibition. And it was interesting to hear the people’s feedback about it because they did perceive it in a very different way than somebody who had just played the game. Interestingly, the overall experience was much more important than, let’s say, playing the game. The game was really a very small part, but it was not this thing they probably remembered after. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mariovonrickenbach2020%E2%80%93Akosua22.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mariovonrickenbach2020%E2%80%93Akosua12.jpg) ***Were there any memorable moments that you experienced while observing people interact with the installation in the gallery setting?*** We had this space where the puppets were arranged mostly, so the ones that people didn’t carry around. And often there were a few children there and they just played with the puppets. So it felt more like a place to hang out than an art gallery because we had some benches where you could just sit there. People just stayed there, not really looking at something, maybe talking to each other because it was a nice space to just be in. And there were all these puppets, people just held them in their hands while talking to each other about something completely unrelated, which is nice to see. So it was more like a space than just a serious project. I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t expect that. I expected people would look at it and then, when they thought they’d seen everything, they would probably leave, but they often stayed surprisingly long. ***Why do you think people were compelled to stay?*** I don’t know. Maybe it was that nothing was expected from them, so they felt okay to just be there holding these puppets or doing something with them, building piles or arranging them. I think people probably have a very simple connection. So it is a bit less about the intellectual connection to the project and more about it being nice to touch and physically move things around there. I don’t know, for me it’s very hard to understand how, for example, I would perceive this space if I hadn’t known the project before. I think I can just say it was nice to see that, but I don’t completely understand why it was like that. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/mariovonrickenbach2020%E2%80%93Akosua30.jpg) --- ### Credits Interview conducted by Pao Yumol. Edited for clarity. Photography by [Akosura Adu-Sanyah](https://www.akosuaviktoria.com/dark-chlorophyll?ref=killscreen.com). ### Links [Mario von Rickenbach](https://mariov.ch/?ref=killscreen.com) [*Plug and Play*](https://mariov.ch/project/pnp?ref=killscreen.com) [*KIDS*](https://mariov.ch/project/kids?ref=killscreen.com) ### Sougwen Chung: Co-creating with robots URL: https://www.killscreen.com/sougwen-chung/ Last updated: 2024-12-31T16:51:25.000Z *Sougwen Chung foregrounds human-machine collaboration in her research and multi-disciplinary art—combining performance, installation, AI training, and drawing-by-hand in such works as* [*Drawing Operations Unit: Generation I (mimicry)*](https://sougwen.com/project/drawingoperations2018?ref=killscreen.com) *and* [*Omnia per Omnia.*](https://sougwen.com/project/omniaperomnia?ref=killscreen.com) *As Monaco’s 2019 Woman of the Year, a former research fellow at MIT’s Media Lab, and a recipient of a Google artist’s residency, Chung has exhibited and performed her works in galleries and cultural centers around the globe.* *We spoke with Sougwen about what collaborating with a robotic arm was like, the beauty intrinsic to both human and machine fallibility, and what auto-suggestions have to do with our sense of agency.* > “If you wanted to have an existence on screen then, you had to engineer everything yourself.” ***I wanted to ask first about your background in both art and in coding.*** My father is an opera singer and my mother a computer programmer, so I started off pretty young. I was a violinist. And I think I coded my first website when I was nine. That was my introduction into the world of art and tech, pre-social media. If you wanted to have an existence on screen then, you had to engineer everything yourself. I am a self-taught programmer and designer—as well as a formally trained musician from a young age. I gravitated towards early internet culture and software tools. I went to interactive art school Sweden, worked in several creative studios, and always engaged in music culture. Eventually I found my way into MIT Media Lab. Really, it’s been a fairly organic journey, but it started off with the web and violin. ***When did robotics enter the picture?*** I started working with robotics when I was a researcher at the Media Lab. I was drawn to gestural interfaces. Prior to my time in the Lab, I was creating installation work using projection and interactive coding, thinking about drawing and embodiment. In my installation practice, I had been feeling like there was a division in the process of performance and programming visuals that felt alienating. I knew I wanted to evolve beyond that separation… so I began to experiment. I only knew I wanted to connect the two a little bit more. Particularly inspired by the research being done at [Fluid Interfaces](https://www.media.mit.edu/groups/fluid-interfaces/overview/?ref=killscreen.com), it stimulated my thinking about what computation could be. I began to think about the potential for robotic as kinetic sculpture and the personalities we ascribed to robots, that anthropomorphisation, seemed to resonate too. The early explorations, and really all of the work, is largely driven by curiosity and instinct. Its probably a peculiar way of approaching an engineering problem, but I’ve come to embrace it over the years. It’s the messy beginning of how I got interested in these systems. ***When you were coming into your own as an artist and a coder, were there conversations taking place across those disciplines or were you treading un-navigated territory?*** Actually, I was really struck by how a lot of our thinking about machines was communicated in media, in that they were really separate from the human element. And I just saw the potential to do something a little bit different. That’s sort of where the origins of this idea of collaboration really sparked my interest. You know, we’re used to seeing robots and machines on an assembly line and that image speaks to control in automation, which is what we’re really accustomed to. I just saw the possibility for something different, something more about co-creation and working side-by-side. I didn’t really see anything like that out there and just got interested in seeing what that could mean for my practice. Actually, I was struck by how our thinking about machines was influenced by media narratives and how divided they were from the human element of creativity. I just saw the potential to do something a little bit different. Robots are often contextualized in the frame of control and automation; most of our images of robots are located in factories on an assembly line. I was interested in a new way of seeing a familiar object and genuinely excited by the possibility of something different… an image of human and machine interaction that spoke more to co-creation and working side-by-side. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/SOUGWEN-CHUNG-EPK-00.jpg) At the time, those images weren’t prevalent in the public consciousness. I wanted them to exist and was curious about what pursuing that image and creating a real process of making alongside it could mean for my practice. ***I wanted to ask about Drawing Operations Unit: Generation\_1 (mimicry) or D.O.U.G.\_1\. Where did the idea come from and how did you go about executing it?*** *Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1* was a response to seeing a lack of dynamic imagery involving robots and human beings. I was interested in what I could do in that space. When we prototyped *D.O.U.G.\_1*, the generation’s focus was on mimicry. Sort of like follow-the-leader between man and machine, using a really simple patch in Max/MSP, and an open-source robotic arm design. Then it was just about seeing what would happen. In 2015, I performed with the unit in Chelsea. It was such a departure from the previous work; I don’t think anyone knew what I was doing at the time. I certaintly didn’t. Prior to *D.O.U.G.\_1*, my art was highly organic, pristine and immersive, using sound and projection and different types of sensors to catalyze light and music in an installation environment. With this new project, I’d shifted into sitting on a table and drawing with a robotic arm in relative darkness, with no music and only one light. I think maybe people thought I was going crazy. When I look back, I realize I wasn’t thinking too much about whether it would make sense given my previous body of work. *Drawing Operations* came from this desire to know how it felt like to make something with a robotic unit and show that process of making to an audience. To this day it still feels very honest, a bit crude, and very real. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/SOUGWEN-CHUNG-EPK-12.jpg) ***Could you go over the technical processes behind D.O.U.G.\_1, D.O.U.G.\_2, and the future generations of D.O.U.G.?*** *D.O.U.G.\_1* was the mimicry generation. We used a simple overhead web camera connected to just a laptop hidden behind the stage. The system runs on a Max/MSP patch called Jitter, which tracks a red marker on the end of my pen from positional data is logged. The coordinates are then fed back into the robot. There’s a little bit of latency, but close enough to feel close to real-time. I learned that the limitations of the robotic arm itself created a more compelling, unexpected performance. I used to say that the glitches, the bugs, weren’t bugs they were features, but it feels cheesy to say that now for some reason. In its simplicity, I think there is a kind of vitality to the performance. The arm I was performing with was very much a prototype, especially when I started. It would falter and move in strange ways. The materiality of working with robotics was so new to me and made me realize that that which exists in simulation, in the software, could deviate wildly once translated to the physical world. It was fallible. And that fallibility became an element I could react and respond to. The drawing inter-operation with the robotic unit became this creative catalyst for my drawing, forcing me to adapt to what was emerging on the page. *Generation II* came about while AlphaGo was getting a lot of press. Alphago was a system developed by DeepMind to play an ancient chinese board game called GO. The system, in a much publicised match, beat the top player of Go, Lee Sedol, in five historic matches several years ago. When I read about this match, I was struck by Lee Sedol describing his loss poetically, with appreciation for the beauty of the non-human move. It revealed to him a different way of playing the game. I was inspired to exploring this idea for myself, and what working with an AI-powered robot could be for my art practice. How would drawing with a system trained on my own drawing style feel? ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/sougwenChung_photoByMichaelGeorge.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/sougwenChung_photoByAkiAki-2.jpg) ***Where do you locate autonomy in your work, either for you as a performer or for your robots as performers?*** That’s an interesting question. I don’t think so much about autonomy when performing. It’s very much about responding to the marks being made in space. It’s about collaboration and the act of co-creation. Beyond the human-machine dynamic, collaboration is a universal idea. Collaboration, at its heart, isn’t about control. You could argue that the best collaborations are derived from balance and the recognition that authorship, even between humans, is complicated. This is particularly true in *Generation II*, because the model which drives the drawing style of the robotic unit is trained on my own work. That sort of becomes a machine-mediated agency, you could say. In the third generation of the project, *Omnia per Omnia*, I explore collaboration with a multi-robotic system connected to the flow of the city. It suggests a plurality of movement, as the drivers of robotic unit’s drawn lines aren’t linked to a single person but rather the collective positions of a crowd in an environment. It’s a kind of social sculpture in a way, a new creative process that I learn through, which also functions as a site of speculation. ***I noticed during performances of the “Drawing Operations” you demonstrate this intimacy with your machines that feels distinctly human. I was wondering, how would you characterize your own relationship to your machines when you perform with them?*** It’s been characterized a lot *for* me, which I find funny. I’ve heard “Mother of Robots” thrown around, which is probably not what I would use for myself as I’ve always described the robotic units as collaborators. Maybe kin, on some level, a la Donna Haraway, could be a bit closer. But children, probably not. I mean, if that were the case, I would have twenty-six robot children, which is far too many. Think of the electricity bill! More seriously, however, I’m open to all characterizations of the project. For myself, I’ve come to think about projects as a process of thinking about and shaping conversations on human and non-human relationships. And that’s enough for me. > “Beyond the human-machine dynamic, collaboration is a universal idea.” Its derived from engaging in the practice of art-making as a microcosms for thinking about the dynamics of humans and systems. On a subliminal level, I’m probably drawn to projects like *Drawing Operations* and *Omnia* because they help me work through ideas about control and authorship in the safe space that drawing provides for me. I also think it’s worth extending such consideration to our authorship and agency within some of these larger systems that may not be strictly designed for the purpose of art-making, such as social media platforms. Our interaction with some of these software tools that sarcastic air quote “help us create” in certain ways. There are ways in which our interactions with these systems cause a relinquishment of authorship. I was always skeptical of that and kind of continue to be so. Hopefully this project creates some dialogue around where our agency begins and the software ends. ***I was struck by some of the questions that you pose on your website, a couple of them being, “what does it mean to collaborate with the spaces we inhabit, the tools we build?” and, “where does I end and we begin?” How do you perceive authorship in your work and in a piece like Omnia? Where does I end and we begin, for you?*** The more I work with these systems, the more porous I realize these categories of *I* and *we* actually are. In the work, I deliberately use and *have used* the same color paint as the robotic units as a means of interrogating the origins of the markings and the exploring the question of who made what. For *Omnia* in particular, I became interested in this idea of collective authorship. The *I* in the work is complicated: I am responding in a site specific space to the movement of a multi-robotic system linked to the movement of crowds captured by public cameras in New York City. The flow of the city, as depicted through an optical flow algorithm, becomes a collective *I*. I translating that flow into physical space as paths being drawn by the multi-robotic system, which I then collaborate with through my own drawing movement. It’s an exploration of the vision of human, machine, and the city. The performance shows the feedback loop, the performance artifacts become a swathe of organic blue lines. It collapses the distinctions between human, machine, and the city, as it traces the process of intra-action between the three on canvas. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/SOUGWEN-CHUNG-EPK-03.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/SOUGWEN-CHUNG-EPK-01.jpg) Framed in another way, where do my thoughts end and ours begin? In part, the projects responds to the observation that ideas themselves are becoming increasingly less attributable. I’m curious about the origin of ideas—and what the fragmentation of those origins can mean for our own creative processes and our notion of whats true and whats not. There’s an ambiguity about what is true, and how we establish our ideas about things, that can be read as both fresh and interesting or dark and despairing. Its probably both. Both interpretations can be equally true. I think I’m drawn to that complicated, philosophical space. It’s an idea amplified by the construct—the feedback loop—of human and machine. The subliminality of the auto-correct complicates authorship, but it’s so ubiquitous that its influence has become invisible. I believe it is something we should pay attention to: our thinking and our authorship, as modulated by those recommendations, becomes fascinating for me. I’m frequently daydreaming about these questions and creating work that I think might help me expand my thinking about them. Over the years, it’s become part of creating a shared space for dialogue about the systems that I—and we—use every day. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/sougwenChung_photo2ByMichaelGeorge.png) --- ### Credits Interview conducted by Pao Yumol in November 2019\. Edited and condensed for clarity. ### Links [Sougwen Chung’s Works](https://sougwen.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Sougwen’s TED Talk](https://www.ted.com/talks/sougwen%5Fchung%5Fwhy%5Fi%5Fdraw%5Fwith%5Frobots?ref=killscreen.com) ### Theo Triantafyllidis clashes real-time graphics with live performance URL: https://www.killscreen.com/theo-triantafyllidis-clashing-real-time-graphics-with-live-performance/ Last updated: 2025-11-18T19:01:48.000Z Architect turned multimedia artist Theo Triantyfillidis doesn’t just push boundaries, he collapses them. In the mixed reality experience *Anti-Gone,* actors’ VR avatars are at once fabricated shadows and genuine embodiments of human drama; in *Role Play,* his augmented sculpture series, seeming polarities such as the virtual and the physical dissolve into one another; and in *Twister*, a site-specific VR experience, audience members’ interactions with the exhibit become part of the exhibit itself, inviting them to graduate from passive viewer to active participant. The breadth of ideas and materials Triantafyllidis employs in his art is only matched by the reach of his creations, which have been exhibited in Beijing, Paris, Tangier, and Santa Fe, to name a few places. We spoke with Theo about 3D-modeling, the desert, sports, and how a given environment impacts the way we make and perceive art. ***All sports, by definition, are nonsensical. People playing basketball doesn’t make any sense. It all feels kind of random at some level, even though it’s not.*** Also, just seeing in the history of video games how many games exist that are great interpretations of physical sports… it’s quite a big production and a long lineage. ***That’s a good point.*** So, [*The Shape of the Internet (Org*y)](https://www.vice.com/en%5Fau/article/78empx/ucla-students-explore-memes-in-the-modern-era?ref=killscreen.com) was more like a really funny interactive installation. I started thinking a lot about game controllers and what this connection is that we draw between the player’s body and the game world, and how this is the intermediate we’re connected through and, also, trying to obstruct interaction in its lowest or purest form where it’s just motion one-to-one. For [*Still Life With Yumyums*](https://www.vice.com/en%5Fau/article/3d5yyj/this-digital-sculpture-is-crawling-with-simulated-life-forms?ref=killscreen.com), it’s important that this is happening right now and it’s a real-time thing. The piece is evolving over time. In this simulated environment, there is a population of these creatures generated randomly when the piece starts and each one is given a randomized DNA. This DNA includes information on how the creature behaves and its overall characteristics. It’s kind of like typical video games—stats, basically: strength, agility, perception, intelligence. Then these are translated into their way of understanding the world around them, the way that they can move. The DNA also includes information on how they look and what kind of mini-objects they are composed of. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/image45.jpg) Their sole purpose in this environment is to reproduce, so they’re going to look for an ideal mate and reproduce and create children that are a combination of their DNAs. So, over time, the most effective ones at surviving in this environment are going to reproduce more. I didn’t want to have a hard cap on how many creatures are going to be there. There is this red worm that’s flying around that’s trying to prevent gigantic orgies and overpopulation, but I didn’t want to make it deterministic. Sometimes it will manage to control the population. Sometimes, if a specific overactive string of DNA achieves a certain number of a certain population, then it will get out of control and the whole space will get filled out and the computer will gradually slow down and crash. “It’s important that this piece is happening right now and it’s a real-time thing.” ***It’s interesting, given a lot of the conversations about the limitations of our planet, and very Malthusian. Are you creating these objects from scratch?*** Some of them are sculpted from scratch and some of them are found from different online 3D libraries. A big part of my practice is looking through this library the whole time. At this point, I feel like I know everything that’s in it by heart and I’ve looked up every single creator and what’s their background. I try to see why this person made it *this* way and why this person made it *that* way. With my personal way of working, I’m not going to sit and 3D-model something unless it doesn’t exist out there. I think it’s also a good way to push me to not spend time making something that’s very cliché or exists hundreds of times out there. It’s more like, “Let’s try to make something that is really strange.” Here, everything is happening procedurally right now. There is a library of fifty or sixty objects. Some of them are more static and some of them have behaviors attached to them. The hand is looking for things to caress and poke and slap. The knife is looking for things to cut. The small animals are trying to avoid danger and stay out of the way of whatever is happening. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/image46.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/image42.jpg) Triantyfillidis's "Studio Visit," a site-specific mixed reality installation (above) and "Nike," an augmented sculpture (below). ***Is this similar to the previous piece where the machine is creating the environments?*** Yes. There is the first part that is trying to make visually interesting compositions with the randomly picked objects. Then, the static composition is left to do its thing because some of the objects are alive. Some of them are going to stay where they are, so it’s a completely dynamic composition. Also, I think there is a very specific way that people edit videos on YouTube for maximum attention-grabbing, so I try to decode some of these editing techniques and use them here. Originally, I decided to use YouTube as a platform for sharing all this work, sort of like having an extended preview of all these works online because I like the idea of people randomly stumbling on them. ***On the one hand, the beauty of digital art is that it can be shared widely, in a way that physical art cannot, but you’re also working in a context where scarcity has a value. This puts artists like you in a very tricky spot, where the promotional value of availability is still very high.*** The nice thing about this kind of simulation work is that, on the one hand, you can have a ten-minute preview on YouTube, but, on the other hand, that’s not the actual work. It’s good enough for someone to understand what the piece is about, but also good for a collector to be like, “Oh, I have the software that can produce endless hours of this.” “I think the nice thing about this kind of simulation work is that, on the one hand, you can have a ten-minute preview on YouTube, but, on the other hand, that’s not the actual work.” ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/image55.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/image52-1.jpg) Images from Triantyfillidis's "Anti-Gone," a performance in mixed reality. The way I like to think about it, and the way I’ve tried to structure my practice, is that I have some work that is meant to be shown in a gallery and it’s protected by scarcity, in a way, because it’s a physical installation and I can’t practically make too many of them. On the other hand, I like to have at least one or two interactive experiences that are available for free online and where people can experience the whole thing. ***Fundamentally, that’s the difference between game design and what you’re doing as an artist. There are game designers that are like, “I want to sell this thing and, if I want to use Twitch as a marketing vehicle, I have to create something to support it.”*** Yeah. You never get that kind of engagement from an art audience. Nobody is ever going to actually talk about the work in that very elaborate way. The piece that you saw earlier with my self-portrait was also for VR, originally. [Staphyloculus](https://www.nrw-forum.de/en/exhibitions/unreal?ref=killscreen.com) is another VR piece for which I went out to Joshua Tree and took the whole VR setup, headset, trackers, computer, and power generator. Then I did a quick 3D scan of the area using a DSLR and a drone, and finally placed myself in the same exact position in the reconstructed scene. It was more like a mind experiment to see what happens when you are in this simulated world, but you still get the physical sensory input. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/theoxks_jbobe_selects-21.jpg) Triantyfillidis with his sculpture "Mountain" (made from ceramic and laser-cut acrylic). ***So much of immersion is obviously visual, but we also have all these other senses that can be powerful for creating a sense of realism. So, feel the crunch beneath your feet.*** And the sunlight burning your skin… that kind of stuff. Then there are a few other things going on in there. There are these creatures that will start attacking you. This began as an experiment of me doing that, and then I tried to recreate the sensations that I felt as a stand-alone VR experience that someone can see somewhere else, but then a lot of the experience itself is informed by this original experiment. Another important aspect of the project was these pink creatures and thinking about embodiment in VR and how, by default, you don’t have a body and are this floating camera in the world. ***It’s like a form of dysmorphia.*** In the beginning of the experience, you don’t have a body and you are just standing there not knowing what to do, and these creatures will have pretty elaborate behavior, where they are shy in the beginning. They will look at you and, when you try to look at them, they will hide and will keep doing this for a little bit. Then they’ll start attacking you and attaching to your body. After a while, you become this amorphous person and then, after a bit of playing with them, they are fully, physically interactable, so you can play with them. Then they will start popping off and disappearing. And then you’re left without the body again. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/image37-1.jpg) Triantafyllidis's "Staphyloculus," or "The Paradox of Site Specificity of Virtual Realities." Recently, in 2018, I did this whole series of works as this Ork avatar. I designed this avatar for myself and set up a virtual studio in VR, kind of influenced a little bit by a particular paint brush and these kind of VR experiences. Basically, I made my own tools for working in VR and for six months I worked inside VR, in this virtual studio building a bunch of sculptures. The sculptures are also made from found 3D objects and new objects that I made, which were then physically printed on plywood as these 2D cutouts. I designed it in a way so that when you would first enter the gallery, you would maybe for a second think that they are three-dimensional. ***Right.*** Then I made this portable display unit, which is for looking at AR on your phone. This whole monitor is tracked with a VIVE controller, and people can drive it around in the space. I have done a lot of shows with VR headsets, but I kind of hate how they operate in the gallery, how people have to wait in lines to see them. ***So this gives you a sense of it not being as “immersive” as everybody wearing a headset, but it’s a great way to show the work?*** Yeah. In the virtual scene, there is a motion capture recording of me creating this sculpture, as in my avatar. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/theoxks_jbobe_selects-2.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/theoxks_jbobe_selects-25.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/theoxks_jbobe_selects-16.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/theoxks_jbobe_selects-5.jpg) ***It’s like a behind-the-scenes.*** Basically. It’s a little bit of hide-and-seek because I am moving a lot in the space, so you have to constantly be looking around to find the character and then you also see the process. There’s a whole narrative that I am talking through. ***So it’s like an interview with your avatar?*** Yeah, and then I make a painting. There is a little bit of art theory in there, and then the painting is recreated to scale, one-to-one, and printed on plywood with some layered things. Then there’s the video of it playing. I always like to consider how the work operates inside a gallery or inside a popular viewing space. None of my other VR works have that physical installation component to them, but are more about choreographing the player to do something interesting for the others to watch. For the one in the desert, people will do really crazy stuff with their bodies when they’re trying to play the experience. [*Anti-Gone*](http://slimetech.org/anti-gone/?ref=killscreen.com) is what I am currently working on. It’s a Mixed Reality Performance. I see it as a mish-mashing of the ideas that we talked about, but presented live in front of an audience. There is something super interesting about game engines and real-time graphics clashing with a live performance. It’s an hour-long performance and it’s based on the [comic book](http://koyamapress.com/projects/anti-gone/?ref=killscreen.com) by Connor Willumsen. It’s a complex story very related to virtual reality and this idea of constructed environments. It’s set in a post-climate change world, where a city is halfway submerged into the ocean and tropical vegetation is overgrowing the city because of the extreme heat. It is premiering soon at [Sundance New Frontier.](https://www.sundance.org/projects/anti-gone?ref=killscreen.com) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/theoxks_jbobe_selects-17.jpg) --- ### Credits Interview conducted by Jamin Warren. Edited for length and clarity. Photography by [Jennifer Bobé](https://www.jenniferbobe.com/?ref=killscreen.com). ### Links [Theo’s website](http://slimetech.org/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Rami Ismail: Advocating for games globally URL: https://www.killscreen.com/rami-ismail/ Last updated: 2024-12-31T17:23:09.000Z *Rami Ismail is charting his own path and helping others around the globe do the same. After co-founding* [*Vlambeer*](https://vlambeer.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*, the Dutch independent game studio behind such critically acclaimed hits as* [*Ridiculous Fishing*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzKcJ8QFbMk&ref=killscreen.com) *and* [*Nuclear Throne*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LSs1bj41P4&ref=killscreen.com)*, Ismail became involved in opening up the game industry for communities in emergent territories.* *With an eye on shifting away from a US-centric model, Ismail has become a spokesperson on diversity within the rapidly growing game industry, an advocate for accessibility within this major creative sector, and a wellspring of resources for aspiring game developers.* *We spoke with Ismail about pan-continental collaboration, public speaking, the trickiness of unionizing, and his work on* [*gamedev.world*](http://www.gamedev.world/?ref=killscreen.com)*.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Rami-Ismail_Cover-Photo.jpg) ***What are you seeing at a global scale, in terms of independent gaming communities? And have you seen anything that’s surprised you from your travels over the past year or so?*** In general, there’s been a lot of change in the industry. There’ve been a lot of opportunities created and a lot of doors that were closed have been opened. Also, there have been a lot of doors that were opened that have closed. It’s been a strange year. I think for a lot of communities around the world, the question they’re asking has grown from “Can we do this?” to “How can we do this sustainably?” With minor exceptions, I think most countries around the world acknowledge that this is a thing. Game development is a thing, and there are no longer many communities that remain unconvinced they can do this. The people that are doing it are doing it out of pure passion, without reluctance. That’s very exciting. It’s hard for people in the United States or Europe to even imagine that this could be a question because a lot of creative people ask themselves, “Is this a real job?” But part of us knows that somebody in our vicinity has done it. Somebody in our country has done it. Somebody in our context has done it. In other countries, that’s not necessarily true. There are tons of stories of developers who are the first success story in their country, tons of stories about people who are the first developer starting a meetup in a country or a city or for larger countries. You see that there are amazing initiatives in South America where they have a latent game developers association that’s sort of a pan-continental collaboration between the major countries and major players there. Southeast Asia has a lot of collaboration happening now. North Africa is a little wonkier, but you’re starting to see some more collaboration there together with the Middle East. Parts of southern Africa have banded together in meaningful ways. ***There is this emphasis, which I always found curious coming from a more general arts and culture background before jumping into the game space, on starting companies as opposed to completing projects. Companies have payroll. There’s an institution there. And there are lots of other creative industries. In music, for example, musicians will come together; they do a single. In fact, they all have their own little LLCs. They’ll do a project, and then they’ll complete it and move on. In film, there’s a production company, which tends to be pretty small.*** ***And then there’s the studio, but the creatives are all freelancers. They come together. They do their thing. They get paid either up-front or in some form of residuals. That model on the independent game side always seems more tortured, like there’s this emphasis on starting a company and creating the next Nintendo.*** Games are a strange medium. They’re a complicated mix of art, audio, and interaction. And they’re not necessarily an accepted medium in a lot of ways. For a lot of art, for example, there are grants. There is understanding of creativity. There’s understanding of money. There’s understanding of how those interact. And yeah, for sure, some people do that as a hobby, and you’ll find that in games as well. But the required structure to create a game for a lot of people is complex enough that when they find people they like working with, they want to make sure that they can work together. And that quickly turns into a legal question, like, “Okay. So if all five of us are working on this, what is the legal context of working on this?” ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/ridiculousfishing_031413_1600.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Screen-Shot-2019-12-10-at-11.57.53-AM.png) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Screen-Shot-2019-12-10-at-11.59.21-AM.png) Stills from "Ridiculous Fishing" (above) and "Nuclear Throne" (below), two of Ismail's major releases through Vlambeer. Eventually, you get to this point where, in the US at least, there’s a very strong push towards co-ops or a less hierarchical structure. The whole unionization push is a very interesting thing because, obviously, from my perspective, there’s a lot of complication when you start looking at it on a global level. If US companies unionize, what does that mean for collaborations with a studio in India or a studio in Vietnam? How does that affect that? Do they need to unionize? Can they unionize? In some countries, it’s extremely dangerous to start a union. And then there’s this interesting counter-push which always happens in terms of what content is getting made. There was a period of time where everybody was making roguelikes because of Twitch, and now we’re at the point where everybody’s making narrative games with geese in them. ***Is there a particular country that you’ve been surprised by or you’re starting to see something unique in terms of either creative structures or the type of work that gets made there?*** I was in Colombia the other day, and you can definitely tell that those games are from Colombia. They’re not games that would have been made in Boston or Paris or something. But in terms of the fingerprint, what I’m starting to see is that a lot of people do these commercial projects that are a little strange but you wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell that they’re from a particular place. You have to sell ten thousand copies to be able to fund that, while for Western studios, that would maybe cover the studio for a year. So that’s interesting. Obviously, there’s all sorts of interesting stuff happening. The Arab world is doing a lot of work right now. I ended up looking at Dutch games for a while, as well, because I’m like, “There must be a Dutch fingerprint, right?” But there is. It’s Dutch design. It’s sort of self-condescending. It kind of pokes at the media. But it’s stubborn. It’s provocative, and I think a lot of Dutch games are like that. So I don’t know. It’s still there. It’s just different now. “Games are a strange medium. They’re a complicated mix of art, audio, and interaction. And they’re not necessarily an accepted medium in a lot of ways.” ***I want to ask you about your experience with Game Dev World and, obviously, the diversity of talks. Can you tell me a little bit about some of the motivations that you had for first starting Game Dev World and what you’re hoping for it and, overall, what the experience was like?*** These events are incredibly important in terms of access. Being able to access knowledge is critical, and especially if you’re already facing a language barrier in the code that you have to write. The tools that you have to use being in English, having access to information about how to run those tools, and how to use those tools in your native tongue—these things are huge. If English isn’t your first language, then you’re going to have a hard time understanding those tools. I remember years ago there was this Game Developers Conference talk that was meant to be kind of tongue-in-cheek, and I came across a studio in Uruguay a year and a half later. They had structured their studio based on that talk because they had missed the tongue-in-cheek part. There’s no other place in the world that has that rapidly emerging, fast-growing territory where almost every country in the area can just talk to each other. There’s no translation required. It’s incredible. But yeah. For me, part of Game Dev World was to show people that knowledge is everywhere. I go to these events around the world. I was in Russia this one time and I gave my keynote. Everybody came out. It was an incredible, incredible audience and the talk was super well received. Every seat was taken. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/72640003.jpg) An hour and a half later, I realized that I had forgotten my headphones. So I go back, and there’s this guy onstage. I’ve never heard of this person. I have no idea what they do. But the room is twice as full, and I was the keynote speaker. So I’m like, “What is this talk?” And he’s speaking in Russian. I don’t understand a word he’s saying. The person next to me speaks English, and they just hold up their phone and they show me this game. They’re like, “He made this.” And I’m like, “What is that?” They’re like, “Oh, this is everybody. Everybody plays this.” I’m like, “I have never seen this game.” There’s something particular in hearing two people talk or hearing somebody monologue about games in a language you don’t inherently understand. So I also wanted to give everybody that experience because it’s just an awesome, humbling experience. I figure out which other countries have had similar problems. I think about how they solved those issues. I connect them as necessary, and I let people know how this got resolved in another place. And then they can take that information and use that. Taking me out of that equation seems very healthy. I can’t do this forever, and I’m in a very unique position to do this. There’s not a lot of people who can do this. I’m an independent game developer that was raised biculturally, that has always cared for this sort of thing, and that also has been lucky enough to make games that earn enough money that I can self-fund this. This specific combination of things that needed to happen for me to be able to do this means that there aren’t a lot of people like me that can do this. And even if they could, you have to *choose* to do this. It’s not necessarily an easy thing to do. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Closing-Image-of-Rami.jpg) I’ve had thoughts of, “What happens if I can’t do this anymore or if something happens to me?” I’ve never documented any of this. I’ve never found a way to write things down, and it’s a little scary because things won’t fall apart without me or anything. People are going to be fine. But there’s a lot of useful knowledge, I think, that you can get from being able to connect people that speak different languages. And Game Dev World is a structure that does that. It just *does* it. It makes part of what I do completely superfluous. If we can pull that off in a way that is structural and that is something that, if necessary, we can pass on to other people to continue it, then that problem is solved. Now people can talk. Even if it’s once or twice a year, they can talk across language barriers, learn from each other, teach each other, see perspectives and opportunities, realize that there are things they can do that they would have never thought of—just because this exists. It was also just the hardest thing I’ve done in my life. Let me tell you, if you ever have the idea to do this, don’t do it. Diversity is easy when you look at the part of the globe that’s similar to you, sort of tilted forward with the Atlantic Ocean in the middle. You’re going to get West Europe and North America. That’s easy. They mostly agree. But if you tilt the world twenty-five degrees, now you suddenly have Eastern Europe and parts of the Middle East on there. Good luck finding middle ground there. We all like making video games, I guess. --- ### Credits Interview conducted by Jamin Warren on October 30th, 2019\. Edited and condensed for clarity. ### Links [Rami Ismail](http://ramiismail.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Vlambeer](http://www.vlambeer.com/?ref=killscreen.com) [Game Dev World](https://gamedev.world/?ref=killscreen.com) ### Saskia Wilson-Brown: Investigating the experience of scent URL: https://www.killscreen.com/saskia-wilson-brown/ Last updated: 2024-12-31T18:02:50.000Z *Working at the intersection of perfumery, olfaction technology, and art ambassadorship, Saskia Wilson-Brown is the founder and executive director of the* [*Institute of Art and Olfaction*](http://artandolfaction.com/?ref=killscreen.com) *in Los Angeles. At once expanding the independent perfume industry and opening its traditionally guarded practices up to the public, Wilson-Brown’s work embodies a spirit of accessibility and experimentation. Since the IAO’s inception in 2012, she has launched the* [*Art and Olfaction Awards*](http://www.artandolfactionawards.org/about-2/?ref=killscreen.com)*; produced and co-curated the* [*Experimental Scent Summit;*](http://artandolfaction.com/projects/ess?ref=killscreen.com) *created a dynamic selection of* [*scent-focused courses*](http://artandolfaction.com/programseducation?ref=killscreen.com)*; and been featured in the documentary film* [*Language of Aroma*](https://languageofaroma.com/?ref=killscreen.com)*.* *We spoke with Saskia about what access looks like in the perfume industry, the role our sense of smell plays in our survival, her experience in the film industry, and what it’s like to work in a medium known for its intangibility and ephemerality.* ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/MG_0010.jpg) Saskia at the Institute of Art and Olfaction (IAO). ***Could you tell me a little bit about your own personal background? I know it’s extended far beyond your work here, with film and everything.*** Well, I got a Master’s in art, and then I was in London doing art for a while and then I came back to LA and I got a job. I was broke, so I got a job doing production design assistance, like, *assistant* assistant—shoveling props and doing laundry. I was doing that for a while, in art departments, and then from there, I started working for this film festival here in LA. And then I started working at this TV network, and I found myself in TV. Film kind of wasn’t my thing, but I became really interested in independent practices in TV and film, film specifically. It was right at the time YouTube launched, so it was an interesting time in film and TV. For a bunch of years, I worked at a TV network, but then it got bought by Al Jazeera. And previous to that, everyone had gotten laid off, including me. But they gave me a severance, and that gave me a nice little time to start thinking about, “Well, what did I find interesting about film and TV?” And it was really that independent practice. I’m interested in subverting dominant paradigms, wherever I see them. And at the same time, my buddy had given me a book about perfume. I put two and two together, and I thought, “maybe I’m a little burnt out on the film and TV industries or whatever, but here’s another industry that is years behind even film and TV, in terms of creating space for different voices and information sharing.” Because YouTube had changed everything in media, but the perfume industry was really, it still *is*, very much a top down, corporate industry. So I became interested in perfume, in that capacity. Like, “Okay, well, what is this industry that has no space for outsiders? And how can I make space for outsiders, in it?” And that’s what inspired me to start this place. So, kind of wide-ranging. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/MG_0072.jpg) IAO's illuminated logo. ***I know it might be a broad question, but could you talk about how perfume, scent, and aroma are important to you?*** It doesn’t sound very nice, but I think smelling, like any other sense, is important. Smelling, back in the caveman days, was possibly more tied to our perception of our environment and to our survival. I don’t know if there’re facts to back that up, but there’s this basic purpose to smelling. Which is, “Okay, this meat is rotten, I’m not going to eat it.” There are things like that, that smelling really services. I think as humanity has developed and de-natured itself, like gotten itself less and less in touch with the natural world, the sense of smell has become more of a tertiary value to us. And I mean, this is supported by philosophers. I think it was Plato, somebody, who said that scent was the lowest order of the senses. But that belief about scent has really carried us through the years. And what I think is important about scent, in particular of the senses, is that it really requires you to be there. You have to be in the place to experience it. You can’t digitize it. It’s the antidote to the world we’re living in, of all this constant stream of information. And that actually was the first thing that really drew me to it, when discovered it. One, there was the political angle of like, “Why is there no access?” ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Saskia-at-Work.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Fan-image.jpg) “You have to be in the place to experience scent." But also there was just the pure exhaustion of being human in the world, right then, where I was, especially working at a TV network, just constantly processing media and these digital files in this really disembodied sort of life. And smelling was like, “Okay, you have to be there. You have to take a minute. You have to think about it.” When you’re consciously smelling, it’s almost like meditation. And that’s what I think smelling brings to people, or focusing on smelling, this, “Okay, let’s take a moment and think about what we’re smelling. Let’s be here. Let’s try to use words.” It’s very hard. “Let’s try to use words to communicate what we’re experiencing.” It’s extremely challenging, but it’s a good mental exercise and it really makes you *be*, you know? ***Could you talk about some of the work that you do here at the IAO, and how some of these observations manifest in the work you do here?*** Most of the work we do is really based on this idea that we need to create access to the materials, in order for people to enjoy their right, if art is a human right, you know, and if perfumery is, or working with scent is an art, which many people claim it is. Then it would follow that we have a right to work with scent, and to work with its materials. It’s sort of like telling people they can’t make paintings because the paint is owned by people who don’t offer access. “Too bad.” That’s sort of how it was. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/SWB_18.jpg) ***No, it definitely answers my question. And I think that, often it seems as though scent goes unacknowledged, or maybe un-investigated in a lot of different artistic media, whether it be music or film or even more locational ones, like theater or performance.*** Or installation art, yeah. ***Exactly. I’m wondering, what would you say to an artist who maybe hasn’t considered the relationship between scent and what they do?*** I would say you’re missing out on a very powerful way of communicating with your audience, and a way that is almost so subtle that sometimes they won’t even notice. So I mean scent *can* be obvious. You could be like, “Let’s bombard people with the smell of skunk.” Okay, that’s a very great way of communicating something, to somebody, and as an artist that can be a really empowering tool to use in your practice. Because it’s just another way of communicating, you know? ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/MG_0046.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/MG_0041.jpg) > “When you’re consciously smelling, it’s almost like meditation.” ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/MG_0064.jpg) ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/MG_0022.jpg) But also you can do really cool things with scent, because it’s so hard for people to place and verbalize scent. Oftentimes people don’t even really *investigate*, as you said, but that’s exactly the word. They don’t investigate their experience of smelling. And this is an example I give often, and it’s a pretty obvious example. Let’s say you’re doing an installation in some Italian palace, or something. And you’re surrounded by luxury and it’s a very luxurious space. And you’re doing an installation about luxury, or whatever. You could easily, very subtly, pump in a jarring smell or something that doesn’t compute as a luxury. And that would kind of subvert people’s experiences in a way that you wanted. Because it could make people a little ill at ease. And maybe, as an artist, that’s what you want. Or, conversely, if you’re doing an installation that’s really difficult for people to experience, you could add a little element of calm or pleasure by inserting a smell that most people like. So there are just things you can do with smell, and it comes down to communication. So for artists to use smell, it just gives them another tool, another medium in their arsenal of mediums. And why not? But people haven’t used it, I think, because up until fairly recently, it’s just been inaccessible. People didn’t know they could. And that’s changing a bit. ![](https://149362454.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/MG_0065.jpg) --- ### Credits Interview conducted by Pao Yumol on November 5th, 2019\. Edited for clarity. ### Links [Institute of Art and Olfaction](http://artandolfaction.com/projects/ess?ref=killscreen.com) [Art and Olfaction Awards](http://www.artandolfactionawards.org/?ref=killscreen.com) [Language of Aroma](https://languageofaroma.com/?ref=killscreen.com), a documentary on scent _Includes the latest 500 public posts. Use `/sitemap.xml` for the complete archive of public content._