Ina Chen Charts Her Family's Journey From Mao to Migration
Artist Ina Chen uses deepfakes, family archives, and interactive technology to bridge generational gaps in a moving performance about Chinese history
documentary
Vincent Morisset: The poetic spontaneity of interactive storytelling
Director Vincent Morisset bridges technology and storytelling through innovative interactive experiences, from pioneering the first interactive music video with Arcade Fire to creating Motto, a participatory narrative that blends user contributions with poetic serendipity.
Zahra Rasool: Immersive stories through justice and journalism
hrough AJ Contrast, Zahra Rasool leads Emmy-nominated immersive journalism that centers marginalized voices. Her groundbreaking work "Still Here" examines incarceration and gentrification through collaborative storytelling with formerly incarcerated women.
Vassiliki and Navid Khonsari: Making mediums the message
iNK Stories founders Vassiliki and Navid Khonsari blend documentary storytelling with interactive design to create immersive experiences that illuminate real-world narratives.
New documentary focuses on the struggle of making independent games
Devolver Digital has published a new documentary on Steam called Surviving Indie. The idea of the documentary is to bring more attention to the struggle of being an independent game maker. In some ways, it feels like it might be a response to Indie Game: The Movie, which has been criticized by some
From Darkness, an interactive documentary about African refugees
The keyword for the Austrian art group goldextra is “experience.” The group presented its online multiplayer game Frontiers with a sentence that fed this idea: “Don’t just watch, experience the news yourself.” Frontiers had virtual recreations of spaces in the Sahara, southern Spain, and Rotterdam s
A short documentary about the future of women in videogames
When Laila Shabir moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to start school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, her Pakistani father told her to live her life as if she were a young man—to live her life without fear, something young women around the globe aren’t always taught. Shabir is the founde
The Oxenfree alternate reality game you probably didn’t know about
It all began with a phone number hidden within Oxenfree’s in-game radio stations, or “anomalies.” When called, it played the song “Beacon Beach,” by artist scntfc, the composer behind the game’s soundtrack. Well, so what? Go back and listen again and you’ll find lines of morse code in the song, with
Zoe Quinn’s making an erotic-comedy FMV game, includes sexy unicorns
Chocolate milk cowboys. Velociraptor billionaires. Unicorn butt cops. Bigfoot pirates. These creations are the basis for the works of erotic novelist Chuck Tingle. “The Tingler”—the name Chuck gives to his erotic books—are also the foundation for the newest game from Depression Quest (2013) creator
New documentary hopes the “indie” game invasion of Japan is a good thing
One of the first things that Anne Ferrero says to me is that her new documentary isn’t “Indie Game: The Movie [2012] in Japan.” She tells me this as she’s aware that many people will assume that to be the case. But it’s not just a matter of a director looking to ensure that her potential audience is
Short documentary details the creation of a “fine art videogame”
“What do you get when you take a painter with a penchant for the peculiar and a programmer fluent in pixels?” That is the question posed by JJ Walker’s short documentary, Canvas+Code, which follows Ryan Ford and Brad Henderson, the painter and programmer that make up Globhammer. The documentary has
The loneliness of the professional gamer
If you haven’t heard of Jonathan Sutak, producer and director of The Foreigner, a new documentary about professional StarCraft II (2010), you can take solace in knowing that you’ve probably seen some of his work. Not, mind you, the two independent dramas—Up The River (2015), a romance, and Don’t Wor
Documentary outlines how Cities: Skylines is being used to plan real cities
Having enjoyed a brief sneak-peek at Austin, Texas’ SXSW art and technology festival last weekend, My Urban Playground is an upcoming documentary from game publisher Paradox Interactive that tells the story of popular city-building game, Cities: Skylines (2015), and the fans who are using it to plan
That Dragon, Cancer documentary turns to crowdfunding for wider release
While last month’s That Dragon, Cancer is, itself, an artifact worth discussing on a number of levels, especially in terms of its handle on faith and loss, there is more to the story than what the videogame contains. Some of that story can be found in the documentary Thank You For Playing, which is
Interactive documentary has you use the world as a musical instrument
The world is an infinite musical instrument. This is the prevailing idea across the interactive documentary Soundhunters. And it doesn’t mean in the way as I understood it in my college days, drumming out beats onto desk corners with my fingers; it’s less deliberate than that. The idea is to listen
New episode of Let’s Play takes games beyond the screen
The first three installments of Laurent Checola and Thomas Kimmerlin’s micro-documentary web series Let’s Play invited viewers to examine the new frontiers for game designers, how they are participating in controversial conversations, and how they can challenge conventional notions of play and succe
Our documentary look at the art of videogames continues
The first two episodes of Laurent Checola and Thomas Kimmerlin’s collaborative micro-documentary Let’s Play introduced the emerging communities of developers experimenting with how to create exciting new experiences and tell emotionally resonant, even controversial stories within games. The third in
See how games are taking on the world in the next episode of Let’s Play
“Change the Rules”
Presenting Let’s Play, a documentary about the art of videogames
“We didn’t want to make a movie about games, but about people creating games and people playing them.”
The documentary on That Dragon, Cancer is an invitation to play through grief
You can catch an excerpt screening of Thank You For Playing at Kill Screen’s one-night film fest at the Two5Six conference in May /// There’s a scene in Thank You For Playing, a documentary capturing the emotional journey behind the creation of That Dragon, Cancer, which summarizes both projects pre
Documentary on sound in videogames explores human/machine divide
Rage with the machine. Not against it. “8bit captures the tug and pull between computer and player, the interaction between an unforgiving system and your racing heart.”
Is this the first glimpse of Dark Souls 2’s world map?
I believe it is. You can scope it on a dry erase board at From Software’s studio at the 4:23 mark of the mini-documentary Namco Bandai released yesterday. It’s hard to make out much—some castle ruins scribbled chaotically in red and blue marker, possibly a shrine with a Japanese symbol I can’t read
Watch the devs of The Last of Us wrangle over the differences between film and games
The Last of Us has been getting a lot of buzz lately, with the Left Behind DLC and whispers of a sequel whetting our appetites for a second helping of what may be the grimmest buddy film/game. Luckily, you can sink your teeth into this nearly two-hour documentary on the making of it. There’s a lot
Gran Turismo as proof of The Singularity, and other things gleaned from KAZ
The pursuit of perfection.