ecology
The Places We're Losing Are Becoming Jakob Steensen's Worlds
Danish artist Jacob Kudsk Steensen turns volcanic vents, collapsed glaciers, and extinct birdsong into virtual worlds that blur science, grief, and living dream.
Sound design
Sound design
Sound Design Is the Most Ignored Art Form in Games. One Researcher Is Changing That.
A new study asks why there are so few sound-first games—and what you'd hear if you finally stopped shooting and started listening.
gravity
Why The Dream Logic of Love Eternal Doesn't Need to Explain Itself
Toby Alden traces a line from to ambient DJing to Love Eternal, a gravity-flipping platformer where dream logic and intuition guide every level.
interactive art
Fernando Ramallo: On the boundary of sound and interaction
Fernando Ramallo crafts experimental interactive experiences that blur the boundaries between music, visual art, and play, challenging conventional ideas about game design and artistic tools.
sonic experimentation
Joo Won Park: To listen is to interact
Composer Joo Won Park transforms ordinary objects into extraordinary instruments, challenging listeners to discover the hidden musicality in their everyday surroundings.
Feature
The neglected history of videogames for the blind
The game starts with a black screen. A woman’s voice, speaking in Japanese: “Real Sound. Kaze no Regret. This software brought to you by WARP Inc.” A string quartet, swelling and romantic, begins to play—press the start button, and the music stops suddenly with the sound of a bell. A light hiss of s
News
The threat music and animal sounds of Rain World
The goofy term “slugcat” has been tossed around to describe the creature you’ll control in Videocult’s upcoming game Rain World for a couple of years now. Due to its unique ecosystem set on an industrial planet that’s ravaged by bone-crushing downpours for most of the year (the game takes place duri
News
Return Of The Obra Dinn’s historical fiction gets even eerier in new demo
Lucas Pope, of Papers Please (2013) fame, has been working on his new project, Return of the Obra Dinn, for nearly two years now. Back in October 2014, he released the first build of the game, which ran for 10 minutes in length and showed off its stylistic 1-bit rendering. Updates on the game’s prog
News
A closer look at the audio game console from 1980
Did you know there were such things as audio-only game consoles? We’re going way back to 1978 for the first of these, Mego’s 2XL Robot, which had you insert 8-track cassettes that told jokes, hosted quizzes, and gave you mathematical problems to solve. But that’s not what classic game enthusiast zad
News
Secrets sit behind the devilish sound puzzles of Told No One
“You told no one, right?” This is the language we use when speaking of secrets. Something was found out and it must be kept as unknown as possible. It’s telling that Karachi-based artist NAWKSH uses these words to title his videogame Told No One. For it seems to be a tightly woven secret itself. It’
Article
What does virtual reality sound like?
Virtual reality game developers explain how they create 3D soundscapes that bring digital world experience to life.
News
The Witness won’t have music, and for good reason
The use of silence can be just as important and impactful as a well-chosen or carefully crafted soundtrack. This is the gist of what Jonathan Blow, creator of Braid, has to say in a new blog post on his upcoming puzzle game The Witness. According to Blow, “The Witness is a game about being perceptiv