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# Nine game worlds become guided meditations in Waldenstein
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/nine-game-worlds-become-guided-meditations-in-waldenstein/
- Published: 2026-10-26T16:55:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-26T16:54:59.000Z
- Description: Gregory Nachmanovitch's 2018 landscape films screen free online as VRAL 139 through Oct. 29, with an interview on the politics of the pastoral.
- Author: Kill Screen Staff
- Tags: News, #radar-item, #events, machinima, video art, berlin, Dear Esther, landscape, Gregory Nachmanovitch, Milan Machinima Festival

Event details

When

Streaming Oct. 16 to Oct. 29, 2026

Where

Online at VRAL, the Milan Machinima Festival screening platform

Cost

Free

A hunter stands on a hilltop in *theHunter: Call of the Wild*, squeezes a plastic animal call instead of firing, and feebly tumbles off the rocks; then *Dear Esther* murmurs about having given birth to an island. That prologue opens *Waldenstein 1*, which with *Waldenstein 2* streams free through Oct. 29 as VRAL 139, the Milan Machinima Festival's online screening series, introduced by curator Matteo Bittanti with [a long interview](https://milanmachinimafestival.org/vral-screening?ref=killscreen.com).

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The opening of **Waldenstein 1*, filmed inside **theHunter: Call of the Wild*, silent excerpt. [Both films stream free with sound at VRAL through Oct. 29](https://milanmachinimafestival.org/vral-screening?ref=killscreen.com).

Gregory Nachmanovitch, an American artist and game designer based in Berlin, shot both films in 2018 inside nine commercial games, from *Dear Esther* to *Farming Simulator 17*, *Final Fantasy XV* and *Horse Simulator 2017*, treating first-person viewpoints as cameras and the idyllic default landscape as found footage. "All these games were just readymade locations that I walked into," Nachmanovitch says, as happy filming a blockbuster vista as a dollar-bin Steam obscurity. The score is scavenged too: guided-meditation audio Nachmanovitch pulled off YouTube, having "actively sought out the most absurd, most cursed sounding ones available."

Games, Nachmanovitch tells Bittanti, are themselves guided meditations: "the 'meditation' is the act of play, and the 'guide' is the game designer and programmer." And the pastoral is never innocent scenery. Raised in Charlottesville, Virginia, Nachmanovitch learned that the most pleasant landscape "may be hiding a violent history right under the surface," an instinct that travels intact into worlds built to be walked through admiringly. (The title is not Thoreau crossed with *Wolfenstein*, though Bittanti tried it and Nachmanovitch wished it were; it comes from Beethoven's Waldstein sonata, the one said to evoke dawn breaking over a landscape.)

[The announcement](https://www.instagram.com/p/DeqX7WKGz-G/?ref=killscreen.com) catches Nachmanovitch at a hinge: *Mannheim*, a game-engine film five years in the making, premiered at Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg this year, and the film now finishing, *Yours Truly Poliphilo*, may by Nachmanovitch's own account be the last of them for a while. Killscreen was litigating whether *Dear Esther* outdoes nature [back in 2012](https://www.killscreen.com/is-dear-esther-even-more-breathtaking-than-nature-yes-it/). 

Machinima, engine films and the rest of what games become away from the console: Killscreen Radar files it three times a week, free.

[Get the Radar ](https://www.killscreen.com/start/?ref=radar-cta)