Vinny Roca transforms everyday objects into digital devotional beings through game engines, exploring the intersection of religious labor, industrial processes, and virtual ritual.
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.
Artist Theo Triantyfillidis merges virtual and physical realms through interactive installations and mixed reality performances that question digital embodiment and spatial boundaries.
I missed the latest game by Brendon Chung (creator of Thirty Flights of Loving, Quadrilateral Cowboy) when he released it last month, but it’s certainly worth highlighting. Called Acre 6, it’s a deconstruction of the classic RPG, full of jest, made for the Procedural Generation Jam. It starts you ou
Clément Duquesne has made a bunch of impressive games and digital toys using procedural generation, but one of his latest is particularly striking. Called Accurate Coastlines, it lets you scroll your mousewheel to zoom infinitely inwards on the shores of an unspecified island. You can target your cu
No Man’s Sky has been knocked by players since its release for false promises—advertisements featuring fighting factions, developer interviews that discuss rare occasions where players can meet on distant planets (which has seemingly been disproven), and more. As a result, Sean Murray—the public fac
Like the procedural culture experiments currently going on in Ultima Ratio Regum, a recent mod for the grand strategy game Crusader Kings II (2012) is trying its hand at procedurally generating a whole world. The mod, created by user Yemmlie, manufactures history “from its first exodus from Africa”
Ultima Ratio Regum, Mark Johnson’s epic 10-year roguelike project, aims to do a lot of things, but first and foremost it aims to reinvent how we approach procedural generation in lore-heavy games. The traditional view of algorithm-based writing is that it hits roadblocks between expansive possibilit
You drift slowly into the unnamed planet’s atmosphere, eager to set your spacecraft down and explore the endless possibilities put forward by the procedurally generated landscape. The ship begins to shake gently as you make your descent, the view outside reduced to a motion blur of saturated colors
I remember making a mental note when I read that Sean Murray’s “favorite thing” in No Man’s Sky were the space station windows. On two separate occasions, he even went so far as to take people directly to the same window, as if it was one of the prime features of the game. “I’m going to show you the
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. These Monsters (PC, Mac, Linux) BY STRANGETHINK Monsters with a psychedelic Rorschach test for a face. There are loads of them, sitting in framed portraits all around the walls of Strangethink
In his recent book Spelunky, Derek Yu writes about the process of designing his 2008 (and 2012 remake) game of the same name, and often refers to the difficulties introduced by the decision to generate levels randomly. He describes trying to make sure that every time a level is generated, it is new,
You come to, upright, in the middle of a room swirling with color. Quickly, you realize the stripped wallpaper isn’t actually moving. It’s you, swiveling your head around, trying to figure out where and who you are—how you got to this ugly room in the first place. The neon walls overwhelm, but not n
Proteus creator Ed Key and artist Nicolai Troshinsky of Twisted Tree Games have only talked abstractly about their upcoming experimental narrative game Forest of Sleep before. But now, a few months after its initial announcement, the pair have cut into the specifics of what they mean when citing “em
Mirror Lake is a strange little thing. Made in a week for Procedural Generation Jam, it creates static black-and-white landscapes, nestled inside a giant patterned bowl and suspended in space. Sometimes the space is dark, dotted with stars and the occasional sun or moon or comet; sometimes it’s a va
Everyone shuffles in, somehow looking both non-committal and excited. The space is tight-knight, vaguely dingy, and hot from all the breaths and bodies. People are talking, but not real talk—at most, small talk, to diffuse the tension of waiting. Then, the lights go black and everything stops for on
“So what do you actually do?” It’s worrying that this has been the biggest question surrounding No Man’s Sky for the duration of its public existence. At the same time, that mystery is what has probably kept us engaged for the past two years. Every time one of its features is outlined it’s like a ma
Mark Johns is chasing a ghost. This is what he tells me. It’s not quite the truth. The spectral quality of this “ghost” isn’t immateriality; interfacing with it isn’t a problem, Johns has done that thousands of times. The hard bit, and the bit he’s after, is understanding it. The ghost is actually S
The best poetry alludes to a kind of magic. After all, as one classic tweet had us recall, the act of reading is to “stare at marked slices of tree for hours on end, hallucinating vividly.” It seems a bizarre activity when worded as such, but it’s the truth, as the power of finely tuned stanzas is e