Concrete poetry is the method of using a poem’s shape or visual arrangement to convey meaning or, at least, to form an image relevant to the poem’s themes. A famous example is Silencio (1954) by Eugen Gomringer, which repeats the world “silencio” (silence) 14 times to form a square block with a void
It really is as if you were playing chess, except Pippin Barr’s newest game It is as if you were playing chess doesn’t include a chess board. There are no pawns, Kings, or Queens. No pieces at all, really—just instructions. Move this dot here. Look here. Now here. Tilt your head and cringe. Move aga
Juegos Rancheros’s Mystic Western game jam, held between June 16th and June 30th, was a beautifully prolific two-week international event that gave birth to 50 games about the West and the weird things that happen within it. Alongside projects like Black Gold and To West was Independence, Missouri,
When I was born late into 1990, the Super Nintendo had already been released in its home country of Japan. Over here in the States, Super Mario Bros. (1985) had already been entertaining my parents for years. Pong (1972) had entertained my pastor, and Tron (1982) had already hit theaters to the coll
My grandmother cannot be seen. She is in the room but hardly visible—consumed by the beige. Her gradual decline into camouflage was incidental; the result of years spent sunk in her yellowed sofa, watching afternoon quiz shows and staining the walls with a million cigarettes. “Nan?!” I call out into
The town of Marfa is a repository of modern art and little else in the middle of the Texan high desert. “Whether you aim to remember history or forget it,” reads the first line of the welcome message on its website, a blockish, primitive piece of Internet. That is not the most promising of taglines,
A room enclosed on all sides sits naked in grayspace. Inside is a trunk, a bed, a tube, a radiator, a light, and little else. A sharp sound swells and suddenly the room snaps out of place. Now it is upside-down. You can’t even enter through the open doorway, barely able to peer inside through the wi
Hugo Arcier’s FPS is about last year’s attacks in Paris, though it is not immediately clear in precisely what way. We know this because the artist says as much on his website: “FPS is a post November 2015 Paris attacks art piece. The artist deals with blindness hijacking video game codes, in particu
Back in 2013, Lady Gaga quit smoking by employing the “Abramovic Method” during a three-day retreat in New York. It led to this extraordinary (and NSFW) video, in which Gaga is seen chanting into an empty room, stood blindfolded in a river to feel the rain drops against her skin, and getting intimat
The puzzle island of The Witness, released back in January, contains a theater in which you can unlock and watch movie clips. Among the documentaries and interviews about science progression and spiritual awakening is the last 10 minutes of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983). Since it’s been disco
Pippin Barr is a stalwart example of a videogame scientist. He’s one of only a few who fit that title—people who constantly experiment with videogames, testing their boundaries, remixing their components, taking curious lines of thought to their furthest iteration. Take his latest as an example. Cal
In the narrowest of senses, Pippin Barr’s A Series of Gunshots is a shoot ‘em up. All you do is fire a gun. The game has no other mechanics or activities. It is, however, the farthest thing possible from a traditional shoot ‘em up. A Series of Gunshots is composed of a series of gunshots. Who’d have
When 3D spaces were popularized in videogames it led to a new kind of energy bubbling up through creative pores. Those who worked within the medium had a whole new avenue to explore—all this extra space, and what to do with it? No longer did illusions have be figured out, but actual working 3D space
Fans of Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic adaptation of Stephen King’s horror-drama The Shining have obsessed over the finer details for years. You don’t have to search for long to find some of the wilder theories. There’s an hour-long documentary called “The Shining Code” about how people have decoded me
If you’re a parent, or have been a parent, then Pippin Barr’s Jostle Parent will be a familiar experience. If you—like me—haven’t had kids of your own yet, then this will only put you off the idea completely. It’s what Barr rightly determines a more tragic riff on the concept behind Octodad: Dadlies
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. SOUND SYSTEM II (BROWSER) BY PIPPIN BARR Music and videogames go together like peanut butter and jelly: the visceral experience of play magnified by an equally sensorial accompaniment. In So
What does a videogame sound like? That’s the question Pippin Barr has been trialing as of late. It might seem absurd at first—we know what games sound like, don’t we?—but he doesn’t refer to diegetic sounds or sound effects that go towards making a convincing world. What he is interested in is the i
The game maker Pippin Barr once wrote a fantastic article for us on his experience playing Painstation, a modification of the classic game Pong, which whips you, burns you, and/or shocks you when you miss. That should give you an idea of the type of games he makes. That’s the type of game Durations
