How can we be moved by the fate of Aeris Gainsborough?
Everyone has an Aeris story.
You’re fifteen or sixteen years old. Or maybe in your twenties. Or maybe ten. You’re playing your (or your older sibling’s, or your friend’s) PlayStation in a dark room—a basement or a bedroom at night, maybe—bedcovers shoved at the base of the door in a weak attempt to fool your parents (or your roommates, or your significant other) into thinking you’re not playing that game again.
![The Cicada Does Not Know Summer [Podcast]](https://storage.ghost.io/c/25/84/2584b75d-4bd6-4cce-8259-f1d1c65abbb5/content/images/size/w600/2026/08/game-of-possible-lives_kihara_installation-view_07.jpg)
An arcade cabinet in Tokyo writes a stranger's life from census data, and the artist who built it explains why you are allowed to go back exactly once.
Tyler Yin and Kayla Drzewicki revisit the class's hand-built sites: a CD-ROM homage, a hammam of grief, pop-up loops of a toxic relationship.
Allen Riley and Andy Wallace wired a bullet hell into the guts of an image feedback loop, then demoed it on a CRT for the games-research crowd.
A games-native animator, associate director of UCLA's Game Lab, cleared one of cinema's oldest showcases with two haunted minutes about a swan.