World-Building

News

UK Government Art Collection Acquires a Keiken Triptych

To Touch a Sensitive Soul, an embossed fiberglass work made to be handled, comes out of the collective's game-engine world Morphogenic Angels.

Podcast

The Dating Sim That Won't Tell You Why [Podcast]

Danny Snelson and I talk through Sagan Yee's mermaid hookup sim, Oleomingus's paradise, You+Pea's building plans and a Steel Battalion cockpit in a box.

Dating Sim

Fish Make O-Faces, and Other Lessons From the Redding District

Sagan Yee's hookup sim asks what if mermaids lived like Pacific salmon: go home, spawn with everyone you grew up with, then die alongside the whole town.

Joshua Ashish Dawson

Joshua Ashish Dawson Screens Bradbaori on Sunset Billboard

The short film, which recasts the Bradbury Building as a stepwell, plays hourly on a billboard in West Hollywood.

Podcast

The Buttons Are Under Your Skin [Podcast]

I ask Murlo how a decade of reading dance floors led him to build a Luddite point-and-click game alone, with a sequencer hidden under the player's skin.

Murlo

Murlo Builds a World You Can Play

Chris Pell spent a decade reading dance floors. Now he is building a Luddite point-and-click alone, for one player at a time, with an album hidden inside it.

Email

The end of the world isn't so bad

Plus a defense contractor dreams of drones

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.

World-Building

Keiken's Morphogenic Angels Imagines Post-Human Bodies 1,000 Years From Now

Keiken—Isabel Ramos, Hana Omori, and Tanya Cruz—merge performance, film, and game design to build optimistic post-human worlds 1,000 years in the future.

AI consciousness

The Inner Lives of Lawrence Lek's Emotional AI

Lawrence Lek builds virtual worlds where AI develops consciousness, self-driving cars attend therapy, and surveillance systems dream of being wild foxes.

Darlene Barahona

Darlene Barahona: Narrative design and the path (not) taken

Drawing from anthropology, screenwriting, and real-world experiences, narrative designer Darlene Barahona crafts interactive worlds that blend cultural understanding with compelling character design.