game design

Podcast

The Cicada Does Not Know Summer [Podcast]

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.

Playing Models

Playing Models brings its AI symposium to SCI-Arc

Architects who work in game engines gather in Los Angeles on September 18, free to attend, with an image open call closing August 31.

School of Machines

An evening of alt-ctrl games closed a Berlin summer school

Press Play capped a month of hardware-and-play experiments at School of Machines, with Niklas Roy, Chloe Desmoineaux, and Lorenzo Pilia among the instructors.

Rising

Tomo Kihara Will Not Sit Comfortably in One Chair

A cabinet in Tokyo runs a language model that writes a stranger's life from census data, and its maker is still deciding what to call the work he does.

Currently Making

The Pink Game About Corporate Violence

Catmilk wants you to go a little wild at work.

climate change

What is the Environmental Weight of a Rendered Frame?

Kara Stone and Joshua Dawson are making work about a world in crisis. They're also reckoning with what it means to build inside the systems driving it.

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.

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.

Andrei Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky's Stalker taught a geographer how to write about damaged landscapes

Geographer Caroline Tracey credits Tarkovsky's Stalker with teaching her to foreground damaged landscapes—a lesson game designers have been learning on their own.

sports theory

What Tottenham's Collapse Teaches Us About the Corruption of Play

What happens when capitalism corrupts play itself? Tottenham's historic collapse explores what game theory reveals about the soul of sport.

game cities

The Secret to a Believable Game City Isn't What You Think

I sat down with a SimCity historian and a real urban planner to ask: what makes a game city feel alive—and what happens when designers get it wrong?