Mario von Rickenbach just wants you to play nice with others
Swiss designer Mario von Rickenbach discusses Rakete, his one-day cooperative rocket game, and how architectural thinking shapes his approach to physics.
Architecture
Jose Sanchez: Game as a dialogue
Chilean architect Jose Sanchez blends the worlds of architecture and gaming through his studio Plethora Project, creating innovative city simulators that emphasize sustainability, community care, and participatory design.
Will Robertson and Alfredo Salazar-Caro: Transcending the confines of a museum
Two art school friends transformed their frustration with traditional institutions into DiMoDA, a groundbreaking virtual reality museum that challenges conventional exhibition spaces while showcasing cutting-edge digital art.
Mario Mu: Transforming Political Reality into Playable Space
Croatian artist Mario Mu investigates the intersection of gaming, politics, and social dynamics through experimental projects spanning LARP, game development, and participatory art, examining how game mechanics shape contemporary culture.
The secrets of Dishonored 2’s mongrel city
I first noticed it in the windows: their subtle, curving mullions that rise and fall like waves. Those curves lend a romantic lightness to the architecture they are set into. You might not notice them when you first set foot in Dishonored 2’s Karnaca, but you’ll surely feel them. Like a thousand oth
Get ready for the twisty geometry of Euclidean Lands to arrive this year
One videogame that should be on your list of ones to watch in 2017 is, without a doubt, Euclidean Lands. It’s the work of Miro Straka, a Slovenian architecture student at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, who decided to make a puzzle game in his spare time. After a few years he’s coming to a
The influence of Blame! on videogame architecture is rising
Blame! (1998) is getting everywhere these days. The dark, vast architectural spaces of Tsutomu Nihei’s manga series seem to be steadily rising in popularity, like sentient tower blocks growing stories at a time, casting a deeper and deeper shadow over popular culture. Next year it’ll likely hit the
Emporium, an upcoming videogame vignette about suicide
I was expecting Tom Kitchen to be reserved when talking about his upcoming vignette game Emporium. He’s shown plenty of images on the game’s TIGSource thread but not said a lot when it comes to what it’s about, leaving me to believe he wanted to keep it secretive. So I was taken aback when he came s
A theatrical game about the difficult art of conversation
A Ghost in the Static doesn’t tell you anything. All you know is that you’re a figurine constructed out of some sort of wire and are left to explore a dark, mysterious room. Then you encounter another character in the room with you, and that’s when something unique happens. Much of A Ghost in the St
Gravity Rush 2 will have you fight huge, living cities
“Holy shit!” That’s the correct reaction to finding out that Gravity Rush 2 will have city-sized enemies. In fact, they actually are cities—the screenshot above is of a Ghost City, which “eats entire buildings, reconstructing them as limbs as it fights.” That is the coolest shit. This info comes fro
Knotting into Dishonored’s decaying city
Heterotopias is a series of visual investigations into virtual spaces performed by artist and writer Gareth Damian Martin. /// There is no such thing as a total vision of a city. Statistics, guidebooks, politicians, newspapers, tourists, maps, and surveys like to suggest otherwise, but theirs is a c
Artist uses videogame to create an “endlessly mutating death labyrinth”
The wonderful opportunity of videogames for an architect is that they allow for the creation of structures impossible to realize in the physical realm. Sure, for many years, pen and paper has offered the same deal, but not quite. Software lends itself to a virtual space that can be freely explored f
BalanCity asks you to build the world’s most misguided city
BalanCity is a diamond in the rough. The menus and presentation of the game leave a lot to be desired, but the actual game, the act of balancing hospitals atop skyscrapers without accidentally sending your whole city into the ocean, is about as compelling as city-building gets. It’s no SimCity (2013
Oh damn, a game inspired by Albert Robida illustrations is on the way
Zipping along an elevated restaurant and opera house, there are flying cars, buses, and other ships. The sky is teeming with these vehicles, transporting Victorian-garbed folks to and from their destinations. This is the futuristic world envisioned by 19th century artist Albert Robida in Le Sortie d
Bjarke Ingels’s new game is everything good and bad about his architecture
Bjarke Ingels’s portfolio can now be viewed as an online game called Arkinoid, which is an updated version of the classic (and similarly-named) arcade game, Arkanoid (1986). Of course it can—it was only ever a matter of time. That is meant as a relatively value-neutral statement, but inevitably it c
Architecture fans will want to watch out for Pavilion next week
Fourth-person puzzle game Pavilion will be released in two parts, the first of which comes to Windows, Mac, and Linux on September 22 through Steam and the Humble Store. The game will debut, however, on the NVIDIA Shield on September 15. Forgot what the fourth-person perspective was? That’s okay, I
The disjointed Prague of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Heterotopias is a series of visual investigations into virtual spaces performed by writer and artist Gareth Damian Martin. /// To me, Prague has always felt like a city uniquely in communion with the past and future versions of itself. I remember my first visit, a local friend taking me to the once
Castles Made of Castles lets you easily create complex architecture
There’s a sort of serene pleasure that comes from uniform design schemes. Whether it’s a car with two identical sides, a train that could be perfectly split in half, or a skyscraper in an evenly cubical shape; orderly architecture gives off a sense of harmony and pleasure to the viewer. These endeav
Cilvia challenges architects to treat planning as more of a game
Urban planning is a rules-based game. Participants in the planning process have goals they wish to accomplish and constraints governing how their objectives can be achieved. Nowhere is this more the case than in London, where a complex series of regulations and protected sightlines have conspired to
A new autobiographical game that will be set in and around Doom II
I’ve never met JP LeBreton but I know him because he knows the original Doom series. He wrote what is probably the most insightful design analysis of the game back in 2010; before he became a level designer for BioShock (2007) he learned the craft with Doom‘s level editor (and then demade his BioSho
An exhibit for admiring the labyrinthian cityscapes of anime architecture
When I visited Tokyo, Japan earlier this year for the first time, I was struck by its block-by-block awe-inspiring architecture. From the woven-like walls of the Daikanyama T-Site bookstore, or the mirrored, cave-like entrance to the Tokyu Plaza Building on the cusp of Omotesando and Harajuku, Japan
What can architects learn from No Man’s Sky?
Three years after it was initially announced at E3 2013, No Man’s Sky has officially gone gold. Few games in recent memory have created so much buzz. The near-infinite universe that No Man’s Sky offers is plenty reason to be excited but the way Hello Games is creating that universe using procedural
Exit Flatland
This article appears in Issue 9 of Kill Screen’s print magazine. It launches on August 8th, but you can get 10 percent off before that date with the discount code RELAUNCH. /// In 1884, Edwin Abbott Abbott published Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. It was told from the perspective of A Square
Great Fire of London recreated in Minecraft, complete with blaze
Header image: © Museum of London, created by Blockworks. /// The history of a city is littered with fires. Smaller ones that take down neighborhoods and large-scale disasters that change the landscape. The Great Fire of London in 1666 was such a fire. It destroyed the medieval City of London, incine
Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst, a radical city in a failed system
I’ve always been fascinated by the coherence and incoherence of cities. The system and interface of their streets. The network logic of their rooms. In my fifth year in London, buried in basements fashioned to appear as French cafés or Italian bistros, I obsessively traced the shapes of silver ducts