Playlist
What To Play This Weekend: April 30th
Buzz buzz, and close your eyes.
Latest
stop motion
I watched a fabricator pour Kurt's hand—now I want to play it
Wiredfly Studios' Out of Words builds its world from hand-sculpted puppets, silicone hands, and ball-jointed feet—stop-motion craft as game design itself.
graphical fidelity
How low-fidelity pixels expose games' emotionless arms race
A new film shot on a 2008 cell phone has me convinced games have been losing an arms race they shouldn't be running—pixels and feeling were never the same thing.
live performance
What Happens When 100 Strangers Share a Single Controller for Eight Hours?
Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim built a game that hands its labor back to the audience. asses.masses is eight hours of collective donkey revolution.
Playlist
April 23: What to Play This Weekend
Something martial, something masculine
grief
Why I Can't Stop Thinking About Grandma, a Game Boy Eulogy
Zhou Yichen's Grandma is a Game Boy-style elegy for his late grandmother—and a quiet argument for interactive media as a native form of mourning.
speculative fiction
Is Project Hail Mary secretly a game designer's novel?
I came to Andy Weir expecting sci-fi dogmatism and found a writer who thinks like a game designer — mystery as mechanic, worldbuilding as a systems problem.
Sound design
Sound Design Is the Most Ignored Art Form in Games. One Researcher Is Changing That.
A new study asks why there are so few sound-first games—and what you'd hear if you finally stopped shooting and started listening.
Playlist
April 17: What to Play This Weekend
Into the unknown
Emergents
Symoné is putting the body back in play
London-based interdisciplinary artist Symoné merges circus, pole dance, and live game design into a production that asks what your body knows that screens never will.
furniture design
Why Don't We Have Better Furniture For Board Games?
Armani Casa's new Borgonuovo games table is gorgeous—but it made me wonder why we don't design furniture for the board games we actually play today.
opera
A New Opera Wrestles With A School Shooting. Could Games Ever?
A review of Innocence at the Met raises old questions about aestheticizing pain—and newer ones about whether games could handle it differently.