Killscreen

Exploring the future of interdisciplinary play 🌉 bridged from https://www.killscreen.com/ on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/

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Longform Stories

The Pink Game About Corporate Violence

Catmilk wants you to go a little wild at work.

18h ago·2 min read·202 words

Escape from New York

Read on for a Backrooms dissertation and pink corporate espionage

18h ago·11 min read·2163 words

The Big Chill

Maybe the video game violence people have a point

18h ago·2 min read·281 words

What Does Violence Look Like in Pink?

Catmilk has spent four years building Gossamer Matrix, a pink-drenched corporate shooter that deliberately refuses to optimize for fun. I went to find out why.

22h ago·4 min read·701 words

What to Play This Weekend: June 4

Dance my pain away

5d ago·1 min read·183 words

Your Body Is Being Compressed

Lisa Jamhoury on Lossy, Grief, and the Digital Body

Jun 3·2 min read·226 words

Something lost, something found

Read on for a new take on collage in games and a world of felt and clay

Jun 3·8 min read·1409 words

So It Goes

Lisa Jamhoury's Lossy is a memorial to the physical body in the age of the digital body—and a reckoning with what we lose when we let ourselves be averaged.

Jun 2·6 min read·1113 words

Where did all the bees go?

Read on for French dungeons and a game as big as the planet itself.

May 27·7 min read·1392 words

Telling the Bees: Kyriaki Goni on Building a Game from a Stranger's Gift

In this episode, I talk with Greek artist Kyriaki Goni about Telling the Bees — her in-development game about a character called the Bee-Seeker, searching for the last surviving bees in a near-future …

May 26·1 min read·160 words

What Would You Do If You Had to Find the Last Surviving Bees?

The Athens-based artist Kyriaki Goni on a woven basket gifted to her at 18, the ritual of telling bees about deaths and births, and building a speculative video game set in a near-future Aegean.

May 26·7 min read·1269 words

May 22: What to Play This Weekend

Something short for a long American weekend

May 22·1 min read·51 words

The Places We're Losing Are Becoming Virtual Worlds

Plus: Faker as religious experience, strategy guides to non-existent games, and a very fancy date spot in Barcelona

May 20·7 min read·1365 words

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.

May 19·10 min read·1808 words

May 14: What to Play This Weekend

Playlist #278 brings a hotel from out of this world and a geomagnetic storm?

May 14·1 min read·69 words

What happens after the internet is gone?

Also: Kim K, game engines for fka, and read on for shredding

May 12·1 min read·19 words

Lou Faroux on Digital Apocalypse, the Kardashians, and Hollywood's Closeted Golden Age

French artist Lou Faroux uses game engines and AI avatars to ask what the internet did to us—and to resurrect Hollywood's closeted Golden Age.

May 12·1 min read·36 words

What Happens When the Internet Goes Out?

I sat down with Lou Faroux—French artist and filmmaker—to talk about growing up on The Sims, why she spent years making films before she ever touched a game engine, and what it means to treat internet…

May 12·2 min read·371 words

Playlist 279: A crime scene and what it means to be a bird

What to play the weekend of May 8

May 8·1 min read·21 words

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.

May 4·1 min read·36 words

I watched a fabricator pour Kurt's hand—now I want to play it

Wiredfly Studios' Out of Words builds its world from hand-sculpted puppets, silicone hands, and ball-jointed feet—stop-motion craft as game design itself.

Apr 29·1 min read·33 words

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.

Apr 28·1 min read·38 words

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.

Apr 28·1 min read·36 words

April 23: What to Play This Weekend

Something martial, something masculine

Apr 24·1 min read·11 words

Why I Can't Stop Thinking About Grandma, a Game Boy Eulogy

Zhou Yichen's Grandma is a Game Boy-style elegy for his late grandmother—and a quiet argument for interactive media as a native form of mourning.

Apr 21·1 min read·35 words

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.

Apr 20·1 min read·36 words

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.

Apr 20·1 min read·37 words

April 17: What to Play This Weekend

Into the unknown

Apr 17·1 min read·10 words

The Living Archive: Jakob Kudsk Steensen on Art, Ecology, and the Game Engine

In this conversation, we'll trace the arc of that practice through Otherworlds, Steensen's survey exhibition at Centre PHI in Montréal, which gathers five installations across five distinct spaces and…

Apr 17·1 min read·48 words

Symoné is putting the body back in play

London-based interdisciplinary artist Symoné merges circus, pole dance, and live game design into a production that asks what your body knows that screens never will.

Apr 11·1 min read·33 words

Why Don't We Have Better Furniture For Board Games?

Armani Casa's new Borgonuovo games table is gorgeous—but it made me wonder why we don't design furniture for the board games we actually play today.

Apr 9·1 min read·34 words

A New Opera Wrestles With A School Shooting. Could Games Ever?

A review of Innocence at the Met raises old questions about aestheticizing pain—and newer ones about whether games could handle it differently.

Apr 9·1 min read·33 words

Building Worlds While the Actual World Burns

On April 17th, I'm bringing together two artists who are both making work about the climate crisis—and both are reckoning with what it means to build within the systems driving that crisis.

Apr 6·1 min read·39 words

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.

Apr 2·1 min read·33 words

Anna Nygren's poetry book treats language like a multiplayer game

Swedish writer Anna Nygren's blush / river / fox treats language like a game system—where translation gaps become mechanics and meaning emerges from interplay, not definition.

Mar 31·1 min read·36 words

Some Russian

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has a different story to tell

Mar 31·1 min read·14 words

Did Competition Dance Train Us to Perform for Algorithms?

Maya Man's StarQuest turns AI-generated dancers and Dance Moms into a mirror—asking whether commanding digital bodies is an act of cruelty or creation.

Mar 19·1 min read·32 words

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.

Mar 16·1 min read·30 words

Jonathan Coryn's Good Grief

Jonathan Coryn spent six years building a game where you caress grieving figures—and somehow made touch feel like the most radical mechanic in art.

Mar 11·1 min read·28 words

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?

Mar 5·1 min read·39 words

Online Talk: What Do Game Cities Want?

Join Jamin on March 5th with game urbanist Konstantinos Dimopoulos and author of "Building SimCity" Chaim Gingold for a a talk about urban systems in games!

Feb 23·1 min read·33 words

I Am King of the Ogres [KS01]

A Love Story

Feb 21·1 min read·10 words

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.

Feb 20·1 min read·35 words

Can AI-Powered Games Actually Teach Anthropology?

Anthropologist Michael Hoffman uses AI to transform ethnographic fieldwork into playable text adventures, bridging the gap between academic research and accessible learning.

Feb 13·1 min read·28 words

He Fed a Classic Anthropology Text To Make An AI Game. Here's What Happened.

In 1922, Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific changed anthropology forever, introducing the world to "thick description" and the rigors of deep fieldwork. A century later, re…

Feb 13·1 min read·84 words

What Happens When You Preserve Your Games While You're Still Making Them?

Simon Flesser of Simogo preserves 15 years of iOS games not as you remember them, but exactly as they were—a radical act of fidelity over nostalgia.

Feb 6·1 min read·38 words

Go to Diskokina to See the Future of Live Performance

I’m exploring Diskokina, the new vanguard of live performance that blends commedia dell'arte and the club. Artists are using game engines to redefine what theater can be.

Dec 10·1 min read·37 words

What Happens When You Can Do Nothing in a War Zone?

Alan Kwan's new game, Scent, offers you a role not as a soldier, but as a lone dog wandering a desolate war zone. You are simply a witness without power.

Dec 3·8 min read·1412 words

"La vraie vie" Asks What It Means To Be Real In A Fake Place

French filmmakers follow actor Victor Assié through a role-play server in Arma 3, creating a documentary that blurs the line between virtual and real life.

Nov 4·1 min read·39 words

Ina Chen Charts Her Family's Journey From Mao to Migration

Artist Ina Chen uses deepfakes, family archives, and interactive technology to bridge generational gaps in a moving performance about Chinese history

Oct 1·1 min read·31 words

Alice Bucknell Soars From Pollination Simulators to Quantum Love Stories

We speak with Alice about why plants make good dance partners, how black holes are really about the wavelength of desire, and why more game artists are trying to "f*ck it up" in multiplayer design.

Sep 26·11 min read·2091 words

Teddy Pozo Explores Loss, Life, and Identity Through Interactive Clay

Artist Teddy Pozo transforms clay and circuitry into intimate gaming experiences, exploring transgender identity through sculptures that respond to human touch.

Sep 23·1 min read·31 words

Harriet Davey's Glossy Aliens Reject Gaming's Binary World

Berlin-based artist Harriet Davey transforms game engines into laboratories for queer identity, creating luminescent alien creatures that challenge gaming's aesthetic norms.

Sep 9·1 min read·29 words