Why I Can't Stop Thinking About Grandma, a Game Boy Eulogy There's a moment in Zhou Yichen's _Grandma_ , a Game Boy-style game about caring for a dying grandmother, where your character falls asleep from exhaustion. I had walked the narrow hallways and simply needed rest. In the next instant, she is away and on the wings of a bird, and all that is left are memories. "Thank you for taking care of me at this time," she says. And then she is gone. The setup is simple and personal. In early 2024, Zhou's grandmother fell and couldn't move. He moved into her house to take care of her until she died that October, and _Grandma_ is what he made afterward—a small, looping world where you chat with her, bring her water, watch TV together, help her to bed. Eventually, she leaves. You remain, wandering the rooms she used to fill, triggering memories as you interact with the objects she touched. The game just finished a run as part of the “Worthwhile Trip” public welfare exhibition at the Today Art Museum in Beijing. What interests me here isn't that a game can be sad. Plenty of games are sad. It's that Zhou is working through a question games rarely take seriously in their own medium: how do we hold onto someone _after_ they're gone? And for how long? _Grandma_ is part and parcel of a larger question of memory. He's been converting his new media works onto physical Game Boy cartridges, hand-drawing the cover art, building a small archive. Over 60 of them now. "Every time I see my works lying dormant in my computer as virtual files," he has written, "I feel a pang of melancholy." Yichen's "collection" ## Why Zhou Yichen is putting his games on physical cartridges I find that the second act is as moving as the game itself. Zhou is doing with his own artistic output what his character is doing with Grandma inside the game—trying to bind something ephemeral to a physical object so it won't disappear. The cartridge becomes a reliquary. The game becomes a eulogy. And the whole project asks what happens when a generation that grew up on interactive media begins to mourn through its native form. The received wisdom about games and nostalgia is that pixel art cheapens it, that 8-bit aesthetics are a shortcut to feeling. _Grandma_ uses the Game Boy's limitations differently. Memory here isn't a style—it's the subject. The grainy green-on-green frames don't look backward; they look like how grief actually works, your memories are condensed into a tiny window, that compesses each moment–a single walk–gets replayed on a loop until the edges fade. You can play it in your browser.

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.

Is Project Hail Mary secretly a game designer's novel? I'll admit it upfront: I was not predisposed to like Andy Weir. I'm not much of a science-fiction person, and I often find the genre's dogmatism—the lore-first piety, the worldbuilding as compliance test—overwhelming. I enjoyed _The Martian_ , sure, but mostly the way I enjoyed Denis Villeneuve's _Dune_ : vibes-y, atmospheric, a thing I didn't need to study to feel. The night before I got to Gilbert Cruz's Book Review Podcast interview in the New York Times with Weir, I sat through René Laloux's Les Maîtres du temps at the Philosophical Research Society here in LA, and what stays with me isn't the plot— it's Mœbius's line work and character design, holding the whole universe up on its own. I was delighted, then, to learn Weir hasn't read _Dune_. It tracked with the kind of sci-fi I actually like: work that is more interested in texture than in catechism. What I didn't expect was to come away from the interview thinking Weir sounds, to my ear, like a game designer. ## Mystery as a mechanic, not a reveal Two things got me there. The first is his approach to mystery. _Project Hail Mary_ opens with a man waking up in a coma—no memory, no context, nothing to do but figure out where he is and why. Weir is explicit about the strategy: pile up the unknowns at the start, trust the reader to chase them. This is an absolute hallmark of great systems design–balancing uncertainty with desire. Eric Zimmerman writes that great design "needs to keep uncertainty alive until the bitter end, even though every step along the way has to exhibit a clarity of action causing outcome." ## Speculative biology is worldbuilding as a systems problem The second is Rocky, his alien, built through what Weir calls speculative biology. He picked a real exoplanet, calculated atmospheric pressure, worked out what kind of light would reach the surface, and reverse-engineered a creature that could plausibly live there. He is insistent that an alien should not be "a guy in a suit." This is worldbuilding as a systems problem—rules first, content second, character as a function of constraint. It's a decidedly different approach from Mœbius's open-ended dreamscapes, but it avoids the trap of being stuck in the middle— rigorous enough to feel intentional, but not so open-ended that it generates actually interesting characters. I loved how little he had visualized what Rocky had looked like, given that he is a self-described aphantasiac with little visual imagination. That his work would give rise to films is really interesting. None of this makes Weir a game designer. (In fact, he was fired from Blizzard for not working hard enough and complaining about overtime.) But it does suggest that the most interesting science-fiction writers working now are those who have quietly internalized the logic of one.

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.

Sound Design Is the Most Ignored Art Form in Games. One Researcher Is Changing That. In _Red Dead Redemption 2_ , you can hear a whippoorwill before you see one. The call drifts in from the left, maybe behind a stand of pines, and if you're paying attention—really paying attention—you might notice that how the sound changes changes depending on where you are in the game's map, the rustle of your steps, the holler of crows, and the beating of distant hoofs. Vadim Nickel wants to know what happens when you stop shooting and start listening. Nickel is a researcher at Concordia University's Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT), and together with his advisor Gabriel Vigliensoni, he recently published "Sonic Lead: A Survey of Sound-First Games" at DiGRA 2025—a paper that attempts something that sounds simple but turns out to be surprisingly difficult: cataloging every game where sound actually drives the experience rather than decorating it. The scarcity of sound-first games tells you something. It tells you that games, for all their sensory ambition, remain stubbornly visual. We talk about graphics, about art direction, about frame rates. Sound, when it gets discussed at all, tends to get filed under "polish"—the thing you notice when it's absent but rarely celebrate when it's present. Nickel's paper makes the case that this imbalance isn't just an oversight. It's structural. Games like Red Dead Redemption 2 can offer an entry to meditative reflections on nature, even if virtually. For Nickel, the path into this work started with _RPG Maker_ as a teenager—building small games, hearing melodies in his head, wanting to put them somewhere. Piano lessons didn't take, but music production did, and eventually the two interests converged. The crystallizing moment came in 2014, when he played _Fract OSC_ , "framed using a gently sloped learning curve designed to introduce non-musicians to the world of electronic music production," Killscreen wrote at the time. ## The Three Ways We Hear — and Why Games Only Use Two of Them What makes the paper useful, beyond the taxonomy, is the framework Nickel and Vigliensoni borrow from film sound theory to describe how players actually listen. The three modes—causal, codal, and reduced–to describe ways to engage with sound in games. Causal listening is about identifying the source: where is that sound coming from? Codal listening is about meaning: what does that sound signify? And reduced listening is about the sound itself, independent of source or significance—its texture, its grain, its weight. Games are reasonably good at the first two. Every shooter teaches you to locate an enemy by footsteps. Every _Zelda_ game trains you to associate a chime with progress. But reduced listening—that deep, contemplative attention to sound for its own sake—is almost entirely absent from game design. As Nickel puts it, the environments are too dense, too fast, too full of things demanding your attention for any other purpose. A first-person shooter is not going to pause so you can appreciate the timbre of a ricocheting bullet. __Fract OSC__ simulates the feel of creating live electronic music. ## Why the Loudest Rooms Leave No Space for Listening To wit, a couple weeks ago, my friend Estevan invited me to a performance by Sara Devachi and Robert Takahashi Novak at the Broad Museum here in LA. Both contemporary experimental musicians demanded an extraordinary amount of concentration from me as one of the several hundred attendees crammed into the Broad’s atrium, facing each other instead of the performer. Novak washed the space with found sound and pulses, but Devachi’s work was truly meditative. Two trombonists walked towards each other and, through the audience, played notes of near-imperceptible distance that phased in and out as they echoed through the ripples of the atrium ceiling. It was nearly an anechoic experience as I could feel my blood rushing, and the tones were only punctuated by the occasional creak of a chair. It was absolutely fascinating and not something I experienced in media, especially in games. Nickel outlined some technical reasons why games have been slow to walk the labyrinth of sonic reflection, but even with better tools now available, the flood of sound-first games hasn't materialized. The golden era of music games—the _Guitar Hero_ and _Rock Band_ years of the mid-2000s—came and went, and the market correction that followed may have left a residue of skepticism. But Nickel's point is subtler than that. The innovative sound-first games that do exist—titles like _Blind Drive_ , which asks you to navigate traffic with your eyes closed, or _Unheard_ , which has you solving a crime by listening to layered audio recordings—don't even register as music games. There's no Steam tag for "sound-focused." There's no category, no shelf, no search term. If you want to find these games, you don't even know what to call them. Games like the audio-only __Blind Drive__ are a rare breed. ## The Sound Walk Was Invented Long Before Video Games What Nickel's work points toward—and what he's building in his own practice-based research with a game called Soundgarden—is a design space informed by traditions outside of games entirely. He talks about R. Murray Schafer's concept of acoustic ecologies and the practice of sound walks, where you move through a physical environment with deliberate attention to what you hear. (Yoko Ono’s 1962 _Map Piece,_ for example, reads, “Draw an imaginary map. Put a goal mark on the map where you want to go. Go walking on an actual street according to your map.”He talks about Pauline Oliveros and deep listening (who actually co-scored 2014’s exploration game NaissanceE_),_ who wrote in 1974: "Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.” These are practices rooted in mindfulness, in slowing down, in treating the sonic world as worthy of the same sustained attention we give to the visual. It occurs to me that this is something players could already do, even in games that weren't designed for it. You could take a sound walk in _Red Dead Redemption 2_. You could put down the controller, stop pursuing objectives, and just listen to what Rockstar's sound designers built—the whole ecology of birds and wind and distant hoofbeats operating like tracks in a piece of generative music, overlapping and evolving. Brian Eno coined that term, "generative music," to describe compositions that are always changing, never repeating. A game world, if you attend to it the right way, is already that. We just don't have the habit of noticing.

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.

April 17: What to Play This Weekend I've been noodling on different email formats and trying to figure out which structure and cadence work best. This is both an experiment and something old. Many, many moons ago, this email newsletter used to be called Playlist, and I used to send it out each week with a couple of game recommendations. I always liked that format, and now, given the thousands and thousands of games and experiences released every single month, it can be incredibly helpful to have someone winnow that down. At a broader level, I used to feel a lot more pressure to feel like I needed to be on top of everything and keep a really wide net cast. As a result, I felt like, at times, Playlists would cast too wide a net, or we would struggle to find something that was really worthy of people's time. As games continue to develop as a medium, it's become more apparent to me that that's simply impossible. What you ostensibly come to Killscreen for is not just a point of view on all games, but a very specific point of view and taste-making sensibility for specific games, not just "indie games" with a broad brush. What I'll be doing is scheduling this email as a members-only recommendation email, with a selection of something you should try this weekend and something to keep an eye on. These are the guardrails. If you like my thinking, do consider becoming a member. ## **Games should be short(ish)** I have come to believe over time that games struggle with a length problem: they demand so much of you. I think game makers and players take for granted that these markers exist in literally every other medium except for games, and it's often within limits. I believe that at this stage, the most important thing game designers can do is figure out how to make their medium make sense within the context of so many other competing and frankly _equally_ worthy interests. What happens is that game makers, big and small, aspire to make something as long as a season of television, and I think that leaves a lot of people on the sidelines. I've written quite a bit about this. So all my recommendations will be something you can actually finish in a sitting, maybe two. If you're trying to maximize your time for the lowest possible unit of value, then I'm not a good fit. ## **Games should have a distinct visual point of view** One of the saddest outcomes of the pop in indie games about 15 years ago was that the term 'independent' failed to serve as a _diverse_ visual marker. At first, the retro aesthetic was something distinct, and then it became a default. A similar thing has happened with "cozy" games and now with PS1 aesthetics. While game systems can be extremely beautiful, nothing should ever prevent the expression of those visual systems, even those with complex designs, from being visually compelling. To do so, I think, is a reflection of taste, so finding things that look good on your shelf or on screen is incredibly important to me. If you want deep, crunchy systems games where the look doesn't matter, there are lots of other places you can go. ## Games should be in dialogue with culture Finally, the recommendations will be focused on games that are intertextual in some way, meaning they engage with another medium (music, architecture, and so on), and I'll be explicit about calling that out. It also means that there's media _outside_ of games that reflect on games as an art form, so I'll make that recommendation as well. So what should you spend an hour doing this weekend? ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

Into the unknown

Online Talk 4/28: The Living Archive: Jakob Kudsk Steensen on Art, Ecology, and the Game Engine Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen has spent the last decade doing something unusual: treating the video game engine as a medium for ecological fieldwork. His immersive installations grow from years of on-site research—underwater volcanic vents near the Azores, collapsed ice caves in the Swiss Alps, experimental forests in Minnesota—transformed into virtual worlds that sit somewhere between scientific document and living dream. 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 spans roughly 15 years of work. We'll get into Psychosphere in particular—a virtual world built from photogrammetry of newly discovered submarine volcanic landscapes, where fossils and living species and unknown life forms coexist in a space that is neither documentary nor fiction. And we'll talk about The Song Trapper, his recent commission for the Fondation Louis Vuitton, which introduces the first character in an expanding video game world called Evoker—a mute figure who collects vanishing sounds and carries them across ecosystems. What does it mean to use game technology not to simulate play, but to preserve ecologies? How do you build a world that holds both scientific observation and imagination without flattening either? Join me! Loading...

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 spans roughly 15 years of work.

Symoné is putting the body back in play _This is part of a series on_ emerging voices_in contemporary game-based arts._ There's a moment in the early days of my arcade days that I revisit from time to time. I used to watch a guy at my local arcade play _Killer Instinct_ —he'd execute a 64-hit combo and then walk away from the cabinet before the round even ended, a mic drop performed for an audience of teenagers who understood that games were, at their core, a physical act. Your posture, your gestures, the way you slapped the buttons—all of it was performance. When games came indoors, that entire language of the body disappeared into couches and headsets. Symoné is bringing it back—though not from any direction that games would have predicted. The London- and Kent-based interdisciplinary artist has spent the last decade building a practice that fuses circus, cabaret, pole dance and roller skating with experimental game design. Her most ambitious project to date, Nullspace Motel, is a 40-minute live art production that places audience members in an orange lounge chair, controller in hand, while two dancers—a pole dancer and a contemporary dancer playing lovers named Dusky and Hayden—perform a fractured love story onstage. The choices players make in three philosophical mini-games ripple into the narrative unfolding in front of them. "The design wasn't so much winning or losing," Symoné told me, "but it's the shaping of a narrative that is affecting the story." The piece centers on Ish, a bio-digital being who can only communicate through a 3D character onscreen or through voiceover. Ish has lost parts of their memory, and the audience is tasked with retrieving them across a dreamy, nonlinear road trip. The performers have their own timeline. The game has its own timeline. "The piece feels very much like a collage," she said, "where the dance and the game are happening, the audience is there, and they have this intersection and timeline and narrative, but people can interrupt in their way." 0:00 /0:29 1× Raised across multiple countries by a military father, Symoné moved to London at 18 to study anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She had no formal training in performance. Instead, she fell into the circus through underground parties and a mentor at the Roundhouse, London's legendary performing arts venue. Her first show was the 2012 Olympic Torch Relay at King's Cross Station—an eight-minute hula hoop performance with a troupe of about 10 performers, staged on one of the upper levels of one of the busiest train stations in England. "I remember getting off stage and thinking, _wow, I love this_ ," she said. "That introverted part of myself was feeling this new way of expressing, and movement felt like a superpower for me." Games came later. Growing up, Symoné played whatever her father brought home from GameStop—mostly first-person shooters and _Tom Clancy_ titles. "My mind at the time was associating like, this is what games are," she said. "It's first-person shooters or platformers." Then, at about age eight, she spotted a wacky, colorful box on a shelf: _Katamari Damacy_. "I remember playing that game and thinking, what—this is so weird. Like, games can be _weird_." It rewired something. But it wasn't until 2019, when friends pushed her to play games again, and she encountered the breadth of what games had become, that she began studying game development through Code Coven, an accelerator for marginalized developers. "I had realized how far they had come," she said, "and how games can be emotional; philosophical." Credit: John Hunter ## When the Stage Becomes the Interface The seed of _Nullspace Motel_ came from a 60-page Google Doc that Symoné and her collaborator, sound designer and writer Sammy Metcalfe, filled with observations about performance and video games. One of the genesis ideas was deceptively simple: the characters we love in games feel real. We want to be friends with them. That emotional attachment—that sense that a digital being has weight and presence—became the spine of the piece. Playing with that emotional attachment, though, requires an act of care and a moment of vulnerability from the audience. She wanted players to feel the mild discomfort of being called up from the audience—but she didn't want to put them on the spot. Early conversations included the idea of a live camera feed on the player projected onto the screen. They dropped it. "There's something about not putting players on the spot too much and watching them in such an intense way that felt right," she said. The piece was meant to feel like 2 a.m.—dreamy, cozy, surreal—not like a game show. And the controls were kept intentionally simple. "I really wanted to attract people who feel like games are not for them," she said. "People who don't play games, but they're interested." ## Welcoming The Unwelcome That instinct—designing for the uninitiated theater-goer rather than explicitly game-players—connects _Nullspace Motel_ to a broader movement in game design that foregrounds personal experience over systemic complexity. When the primary goal is communicating something about identity, memory, or queerness, elaborate mechanical gates can work against the art's own politics, especially in a live setting. It's impossible to build a skill-based activity for an audience member who is sitting down, learning a system for the first time, in front of a bunch of other people. Symoné calls her work "anti-games": goal-adjacent, emotionally driven, built to charge people rather than challenge them. There was a moment during an early prototype—a one-on-one performance piece in which Symoné guided conversations with individual audience members—that crystallized what the work was really about. She can't remember the exact question she asked, but the person she was sitting with paused, their e _yes_ began to glow, and they vibrantly reminisced about something that had happened almost two decades earlier. "I could feel from the way they expressed that it was really special to them," Symoné told me, "that they had unlocked this part of their mind that they hadn't connected with in 20 years." She's now planning a 2027 UK premiere tour for _Nullspace Motel_ , with stops from Scotland to the south of England and possibly into Europe. Some venues have told her they're excited, but their audiences are risk-averse—not ready for a game onstage. She's undeterred, offering workshops alongside performances to introduce alternative approaches to game design. Technology gets recognized for its intelligence all the time, Symoné told me. "We just forget the body has its own."

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.

Why Don't We Have Better Furniture For Board Games? Check out the Armani Casa "Borgonuovo" games table, an art deco-inspired ebony wood piece adorned in luxurious taupe leather, but it boasts a central top that spins to reveal the playing surface It's named after the Milanese street where Giorgio Armani lived, and it debuted at Salone del Mobile 2026 as a kind of love letter to chess and backgammon—two games whose spatial footprints have barely changed in centuries. There are hidden drawers for pieces, pull-out cup holders, and satin-finished brass edging. It's gorgeous. Not to dismiss the many chess and backgammon enthusiasts out there, but allow me to ask the question: So why don't we design furniture for the games the rest of us play? Chess and backgammon have become furniture archetypes precisely because their boards are fixed, their dimensions predictable, and their material needs stable. When you find an old chess set with a table, you know exactly how it should look. A designer like Jean-Michel Frank can build an entire aesthetic language around those constraints. The game becomes a formal problem with a known solution. That's a gift for furniture design. Courtesy: Armani Casa But walk into any modern game night, and the reality is chaos. _Wingspan_ sprawled across a dining table never meant to hold four player mats and a bird feeder tray. _Gloomhaven_ consumes an entire room for weeks. _Settlers of Catan_ 's hex tiles slide around on whatever flat surface you can find. The contemporary board game renaissance has produced an explosion of spatial and material diversity, and furniture hasn't kept up. We're still playing on dining tables, coffee tables, folding tables—surfaces designed for eating, not for play. There's an entire cottage industry trying to solve this. Companies like Wyrmwood and Rathskellers build beautiful custom gaming tables with recessed vaults, magnetic rail accessories, and reversible play surfaces. These are thoughtful, often stunning objects. But they're designed as generic play containers—a nice box to put any game in. What I'm more curious about is the opposite question: What would it look like to design a piece of furniture around a _specific_ game the way the Borgonuovo is built around chess? Courtesy Armani Casa Imagine a table whose surface is contoured for _Azul_ 's factory displays and pattern-building boards. Or a console designed to hold _Pandemic_ 's world map at a slight angle, with integrated slots for city cards and cure markers. It sounds absurd, and maybe it is—the diversity of modern tabletop games makes standardization impossible. But that impossibility is also what makes the question interesting. Chess got a table because it stayed still. Our games won't sit still, and that restlessness might demand an entirely new relationship between play and the objects we play on.

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.

A New Opera Wrestles With A School Shooting. Could Games Ever? I've been sitting with Justin Davidson's review of Innocence at the Met this week. Kaija Saariaho's final opera before her death in 2023 takes a school shooting and renders it in gorgeous orchestral detail—elaborate staging, a superb cast, an intermissionless two-hour sweep through grief and aftermath. Davidson describes wanting to run from the theater. Not because it failed. Because it succeeded, and that success felt unbearable. His discomfort centers on what he calls "the aestheticization of pain." Opera has been doing this for 400 years—taking the worst things humans do to each other and setting them to music that audiences line up to experience. So has cinema. So has literature. The question _Innocence_ raises is whether there are categories of violence so raw, so ongoing, that no aesthetic frame can hold them without becoming complicit in their spectacle. I keep returning to games here, and not for the obvious reasons. There have been various attempts over the years to render the unthinkable in game form, although it's been more of a contemporary concern over the last 15 years for the young medium. The attempts range from placing you as the character enacting violence, watching horror unfold on other characters, or narrating a difficult subject. But in most cases, games still borrows its emotional grammar from film. The gun fires. The body falls. The weight is decorative. Davidson's review made me wonder if games will be able to carry the gravity of something as present and as difficult to comprehend as a school shooting. Aside from the care required to tell that story well, there's the additional burden that games shouldn't wander into those spaces, because the agency opens players up to something too intimate or too raw. Or flatly, that games just _shouldn't_ be because they are "fun." So we usually end up with games that use fantastic environments as shorthand or fantastical environments, without even attempting to convey a difficult fiction. Even so, perhaps there are simply places that no medium should go. In spite of the opera's precision and performance, Davidson simply can't wrap his head around the idea that a song does such a tragedy justice: _We turn to opera so we can mainline someone’s inner life with a drip of narcotic music, regardless of whether the character is a death-row inmate, an 18th-century nun, or the king of Sweden. In this case, though, I can’t accept the urge to decorate the mass slaughter of children with a flourish of beguiling sounds. Certain truths should not be delivered in song._ I leave the door open for games, if only because we should be comfortable with abandoning "fun" to tackle things that are true and painful in this world. Not because they simply need to check the box of tackling sensitive subjects, but perhaps they could offer something other mediums cannot. We're not there yet. The writing isn't there. The framing isn't there. But the form is. And what strikes me about Davidson's review is that his objection to _Innocence_ isn't really about opera at all—it's about the limits of any medium that asks you to sit still and watch. Games don't ask you to sit still. The question is whether we'll ever build something worthy of that difference.

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

[Talk 4/17] Building Worlds While the Actual World Burns I'm hosting a live conversation I've been thinking about for a long time. 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. Kara Stone runs Solar Server from her apartment balcony in Calgary, making low-carbon games on a solar-powered computer. Her latest, Known Mysteries, asks a simple question: if we know how to solve the climate crisis, why can't we act? Joshua Ashish Dawson documents ghost towns in the Atacama Desert — villages that lost their water to copper mining and are now being fitted with solar-powered server farms. His film Loa's Promise calls it what it is: greenwashing dressed up as adaptation. Sign up below! Loading...

I'm hosting a live conversation I've been thinking about for a long time.

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.

Kara Stone runs Solar Server […]

Tarkovsky's Stalker taught a geographer how to write about damaged landscapes Caroline Tracey has a PhD in geography and a new book about salt lakes, but the writer she credits most for teaching her how to see the American West is Andrei Tarkovsky. In an essay for Literary Hub, Tracey describes how _Stalker_ —his 1979 masterpiece set in a cordoned-off industrial wasteland called the Zone—reoriented her understanding of what a landscape can hold: > Though _Stalker_ critiques the environmental harms of the Soviet Union’s rapid industrialization, it does so not by focusing on the ills of factories, but by reaching deep into Stalker’s heart to show their affinities with nature. What was most inspiring to me was that Tarkovsky could make this feel so clear in such a damaged landscape. What struck me reading Tracey's essay is how much Tarkovsky refused to treat the environment as backdrop. Where Hollywood directors used Monument Valley as scenery—a stage for John Wayne to stand in front of—Tarkovsky pushed the ruined marshlands of the Zone to the foreground, making the land itself the moral and emotional center of the film. As evidence, he spoke of Monument Valley. “It’s not American. It’s another world, not the material one,” he said. “It wasn’t put there so westerns could be shot, but as a place to meditate.” In an era where game-makers and world-builders have so much access to digital environments, as players, we need to take a step back and breathe more in the places we inhabit. Tracey's essay is a reminder that the vocabulary for foregrounding environment over narrative has been developing in film long before games found it. The connection is worth sitting with. Her book, Salt Lakes, is out now from W.W. Norton.

Geographer Caroline Tracey credits Tarkovsky's Stalker with teaching her to foreground damaged landscapes—a lesson game designers have been learning on their own.

Anna Nygren's poetry book treats language like a multiplayer game I've been thinking a lot lately about what happens when you treat language itself as an interactive system—something you don't just use but _play with_ , the way you'd play a game. Anna Nygren's blush / river / fox, just out from Milkweed Editions, does exactly that, and the way it came together feels closer to collaborative game design than traditional publishing. Nygren is a Swedish writer, artist, and translator, and this is her first book published in English. Rather than treating her non-native fluency as a limitation, she and her editor Morissa Young leaned into the gaps between languages as generative space. Translation became a kind of mechanic: a word in Swedish carries a sound that echoes an English word from a completely different context, and suddenly those words become what Nygren calls "parallel siblings"—linked not by dictionary definition but by feel. It's the sort of emergent meaning you get from a well-designed system, where the interesting stuff happens in the interplay rather than in any single element. What really caught my attention, though, is how Nygren describes the editing process. She and Young worked through the manuscript over Google Docs, and for Nygren, that collaborative back-and-forth felt like meeting as "careful strangers" in a shared "word-world." (I loved that term.) Young describes the editorial process as building an internal grammar together—one based on wordplay and linguistic overlap, where they'd break rules to expand the language and follow them only when things got too slippery. It's less copyediting and more co-op puzzle-solving. The book is divided into three sections— _blush_ , _river_ , _fox_ —each with its own emotional register and mode. _Blush_ deals in childhood and desire. _Fox_ grapples with more-than-human language. _River_ sits between them as translation itself: stitching and tearing apart simultaneously. The whole collection is threaded with drawings and the color pink, which Nygren connects to an extraordinary web of Swedish wordplay involving roses, crayfish, cheeks, and the sea: _“The word PINK, and also the word KISS, means PEE in Swedish. The Swedish word for the color pink is ROSA, like a rose is a rose, but it is also one of the most common names for cows, like individual cows named Rosa. There is another, maybe older, word for ROSA that is SKÄR. SKÄR also means CUT. It is like a soft cut and a blushing cut a rose a romantic thingcolorword cutting across. SKÄRKIND is the name of the village where I was born. KIND has a meaning in English yes! In Swedish KIND means CHEEK, so SKÄRKIND is like a pink cheek like blushing but also a cut, in the cheek. It is like hurting. SKÄR also means a rock in the sea, I don’t know the English word, it is like a stone a thing in water it is cutting it is a rose and it is. And the sea._ It's a reminder that some of the most interesting interactive work right now isn't happening on screens at all. Here's one section from Poetry_:_ 7. one day we find a dead rat under the hay in the stables it pulls somewhere inside me we bury it in in the grit it gets a pile where the ground don’t want it inside it

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.

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

Did Competition Dance Train Us to Perform for Algorithms? About a year before ChatGPT was involuntarily foisted upon us, the writer Ted Chiang was asked about whether or not AI could achieve some form of consciousness. This was still a novel, popular question and reflected the quaintly dominant way of thinking about "AI" in the ambitiously general sense—not the narrower LLM sense—as machines more like humans. Chiang cast a sharply skeptical tone, suggesting this would never be possible (I generally agree), but he took a step back to ask the Oppenheimer question: whether we should. His hang-up was about a fundamental part of what makes us human: suffering. "Suffering precedes moral agency in the developmental ladder," he observed. Dogs and babies, he pointed out, are not "moral agents" but can experience pain and thus, our behavior towards them is generally ethical. Conversely, the process of creating a general intelligence system would require us to engage in an act of cruelty. "In the process of developing machines that are conscious moral agents, we will be inevitably creating billions of entities that are capable of suffering." As we spend more and more time in front of chatbots, Chiang's question takes on renewed resonance: what do we owe to what we command? That question reemerged for me during a lecture performance of artist Maya Man's StarQuest at LA Dance Project earlier this month, co-presented bitforms gallery, SOOT gallery, and the Future Humans program at the Berggruen Institute. I had parked across the street from the strip club, directly adjacent to the venue, and walked into a voluminous space lit simply—bleachers and rows of chairs, a large projector throwing the performance against the back wall. After an introduction from curator Alice Scope (also, a former dancer), Man entered, and the performance began: she lectured through her process of developing the work, interspersed with her own careful postures and flourishes. "I used to think I wanted to be a dancer when I grew up, but you often don’t end up becoming what you dream of being when you’re young," she opens musingly. "Look at me, now, doing this for _you_." _StarQuest_ grew out of a larger interest in finding ways to express the human body through computers, and Man's entry point to the work was autobiographical. She grew up in Mechanicsburg, Pa., and trained as a competitive dancer from age three." It is impossible for me to remember the first time I ever stepped on stage, just as I cannot remember the first time I saw myself on screen." But her grandmother was also an AI researcher, and her uncle works at the intersection of robotics and art. "Everyone in my family has been very driven in the specific thing they're interested in, whether AI research or robotics," she told Killscreen in 2021. The body as data, in other words, has been the family business. A through line of Man's work has been capturing the ineffable qualities of human movement through kinetic digital systems — she has worked with choreographers Bill T. Jones and Heidi Latsky and donned a mocap suit for Joji's _777_ music video. _Dance Moms_ , the Lifetime reality series that first aired in 2011 and sits somewhere between satire and sadism, opened a pathway to revisit a show from her childhood through new eyes. 0:00 /1:00 1× Snippet of __StarQuest__ ## How Competition Dance Trained a Generation to Perform for Algorithms "Imagining myself being watched and adjusting accordingly has always felt like a condition of living for me," she says. She grew up, like the girls on _Dance Moms_ , in Pennsylvania — spending nearly every night at the studio, watching herself grow up in floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Returning to the show as an adult, she became interested in how competition dance functions as a training system: one that conditions young girls to hold their bodies in anticipation of judgment, to perform flawlessly, to make difficulty look effortless. As she grew older, she found the platforms like TikTok and Instagram prized the behaviors she had so honed during her childhood. "The sense of performance that these platforms encouraged, the quantifiable feedback delivered in the form of likes, comments, and followers, felt natural to me. It was a familiar experience to operate in anticipation of judgment. Posting felt like performing choreography." This is not a coincidence. Man's dance lineage runs through TikTok's biggest early stars, Charli D'Amelio and Addison Rae, both of whom were competition dancers. "This specific slice of training perfectly primes a young girl to post online for an audience," Man opined, "employing her moving body as a medium for content production." The work that gives this argument form consists of 111 eight-second clips — each generated using Google's Veo model—that run inside a custom web application Man built herself. The app never plays the clips in the same order twice, so the piece has no fixed duration. It loops and reshuffles indefinitely, mirroring the algorithmic logic of the platforms it examines. And contrary to any perception of AI video as turnkey production, the process was painstaking. Man manually captured hundreds of screenshots per episode of _Dance Moms_ to identify shots she wanted to restage. Working with technologist Tina Tarighian, she built a custom shot-list management application to organize them. Then she translated each reference image into a written prompt—the AI model never saw the screenshots directly—and generated somewhere between 10 and 100 clips per prompt before settling on a final take. "Unlike when working with code, when running a prompt over and over with a generative AI model, the output is never exactly the same." She describes the process as addictive, like gambling: "What if the next one is just a little bit better? It's hard to know when to stop." ## The Question _StarQuest_ Holds Up Like a Floor-Length Mirror What started as an attempt at self-representation shifted during production. Man tried repeatedly to prompt a mixed-race dancer to stand in for herself, but the model couldn't render the concept of "mixed" consistently. (I felt this acutely as a "two or more races" box-checker.) Through that failure, she came to understand her actual role in the work: not dancer, but coach. "I rule over my digital dancers with my directions, my opinions. I shape them in my vision, pushing them to become stars." It's the same dynamic she had been examining in Abby Lee Miller all along — and, she suggests, in the systems that run the internet itself. "In a world that increasingly mimics reality television theatrics and images are used as weapons to manipulate opinions, culture, and political thought? What's real? It doesn't matter. What matters is what is powerful. And who can use that power to win." > What if the next one is just a little bit better? It's hard to know when to stop. There is a long lineage of coaches pushing performers to their limits at tremendous personal cost—Debbie Reynolds famously danced until her feet bled during the production of _Singin' in the Rain_ , driven by a co-stars who wanted more. In Man's case, the performers aren't real. But does that make the act of demand any less consequential? Are we not cosplaying the very thing we aim to critique? During the Q&A with Scope, Man was clear that she does not believe the AI figures are conscious—a sentiment I share. But the process of creating _StarQuest_ raises the question of whether the performance of a command, by an artist or an AI chatbot end-user, reflects, in some small way, the same demanding absolutism it sets out to examine. As a game player, I am now confronting even the distant possibility that the avatars I send hurtling over cliffs, diving for cover, or exploding outside an airlock might, in some small way, reflect an actual violence, if only a shade. You've probably spent time looking at a digital avatar and thought: _who is that little person in there?_ If it's even a glimmer, what are our responsibilities to the things we create and put out into the world in agentic form? _StarQuest_ doesn't answer that question. But it does hold up a floor-length studio mirror—and ask why we're so comfortable not asking it. _You can watch_ StarQuest here. _All photos: Maya Man, StarQuest (Performance-Lecture), 2026, co-presented by bitforms gallery, SOOT gallery, and the Future Humans program at the BerggruenInstitute at L.A. Dance Project. Photo by Yuchi Ma._

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.

What Tottenham's Collapse Teaches Us About the Corruption of Play _This is an article about sports as part of an ongoing series looking at_games and theory. > **You don't have bus parades for healthy bank balances. - Europa League champion and ex-Tottenham Hotspur coach Ange Postecoglou** Forgive me if you've already taken the off-ramp after seeing a quote from a soccer coach. I don't write very much about sports, but bear with me. On the one hand, sports' relationship to games is orthogonal. They're both comprised of players and rules. I'd actually argue that playing games makes you a _better_ sports fan. It preps you for the actual nature of sport: the expression of rules through interactive human dynamics. But per the landmark decision of Jocks v. Nerds (Time immemorial), games and sports don't often comprise overlapping fandoms. That's unless you play a lot of sports or competitive games. As someone who grew up in an extremely sporty family (my father and my brother both played college football) and a lover of games, I still hold a fondness for sports, and so should you. It's simply out of the joy, the hysterical joy of watching victory over defeat. Over the last couple of years, I've turned down my American football watching and exchanged it for watching European soccer, which seems nearly infinite in its output. I find it's fun to root for a particular team, even if you're just getting started, to achieve that sense of stakes, and, given I didn't grow up with a soccer-loving family, I asked a friend for the nearest analogue to my beloved Philadelphia Eagles. "You should root for Tottenham Hotspur," he texted. In retrospect, this was a filial act of violence, and I can hear those of you who _do_ watch soccer snickering. The argument, as it goes, is that both teams had long championship droughts in their DNA while generally boasting maddening middling form. I was skeptical of the rationale, of course, but Dunning-Kruger dictated that I should spend a year watching a bunch of Spurs games. It was tense at first, and then last year, I realized something strange about this club. One thing you'll hear other soccer fans levy against a sports team is that "they don't know how to win" in a cosmic sense or "don't have championship DNA" in a genetic sense. It's one of those truisms like "They've just got the dog in 'em" that belies statistics or reason but points to something innately feral and chaotic about human sport that borders slightly on wish manifestation. There _is_ something scientific about the sentiment; fans do have an impact by harangueing referees, and the brain's ability to do something is bolstered if you've done it before. There are so many photos like this. ## How Play Gets Corrupted But with Spurs, there is something much deeper. They are generally not good, yes, but they really shouldn't be _this bad_. Tottenham Hotspur is one of the wealthiest clubs in Europe and one of the most valuable franchises in the world, yet over the last 18 months, they have posted one of the worst records in European football. "Relative to financial security, sporting expectations and basically any other metric you could care to mention, this Tottenham Hotspur season has more than a fair shout at being the worst by any team in English football history," writes Tom Chambers at ESPN. The problem is simply that Tottenham has decided to attempt to undermine the nature of play itself. In 1958, French writer Roger Callois penned _Man, Play, Games_ , an exploration into why we play. He, along with Dutch philosopher Johan Huizinga, set up some of the formal frameworks for how we think about contemporary games, and one of his chief concerns was how play gets corrupted. Specifically, Callois called out the intrusion of mundane reality and professionalization as threats, the latter he described as "a contagion of reality." The point is that play should be free and unburdened, and introducing real-world financial stakes pollutes what should be a carefree, soul-affirming activity. One of the joys of play is that ostensibly there should be no connection between what we do on the pitch and what we do for work. Tottenham embodies the Callois critique. Despite having enviable resources, the team's owners have decided to prioritize profit over the sole purpose of sport: winning games. Instead of signing new players, they built a stadium to host six nights of Beyoncé (who is amazing but does nothing for soccer). They charge some of the highest ticket prices in Europe. They rarely compete for "ready-made" world-class talent; instead, they focus on "investment players"—younger prospects with high resale value. They even cut their senior citizen discount. Of course, all of this would be forgiven if Tottenham could build on past successes rather than wring every last ounce of profit out of their beleaguered fans. They now face the threat of something that was once unthinkable: relegation. * * * ## How the English Relegation System Is Actually Brilliant Game Design One of the things I really like about English soccer is its relegation system, which is super unfamiliar to Americans. In the United States, teams are functionally fixed concerns and are never really added (with the exception of college football, which is a strange edge case). In English football, by contrast, there is a long-running tradition known as the "English pyramid." Functionally, it means teams are broken into divisions, and those at the top of their division move up, while those at the bottom move down. And going down can mean missing out on hundreds of millions of dollars in TV and advertising revenue. Even if you don't watch much soccer, you've likely heard how Rob Mac and Ryan Reynolds have turned a tiny Welsh football club into a national contender. The difference between American and English systems boils down to what game designer Marc LeBlanc calls "feedback loops." The American system is generally a "positive feedback loop," because winners can generally compound their wins over multiple seasons. There are some counter-measures, like salary caps that limit spending, but the structure of the league can feel more like a late game of _StarCraft_ where one's resources are simply too depleted to complete. This isn't all bad—"positive feedback systems are sometimes useful for dispelling uncertainty, bringing about the climax, and creating a sense of finality and closure," LeBlanc writes. By contrast, LeBlanc would describe the English system as a _negative_ feedback loop. Negative feedback loops help maintain equality by pulling up the bottom and pushing down the top. So, the infamous blue shell in _Mario Kart_ is a well-known execution of this system. The key contribution of negative feedback loops is _tension_ as the overall contest is ostensibly unknown until the very end. Positive feedback leaves little to the imagination, but negative feedback takes its time. English football (and European football generally) isn't just a competition for the top—it's simultaneously a survival game at the bottom. This doubles the number of teams with something urgent to play for at any given moment. It keeps more matches meaningful deep into the season. As I write this, _90%_ of the 20-odd teams in the Premier League are playing for something, either to win the league, qualify for bigger European competitions, or simply not fall apart. That's a product of excellent design. But good design works both ways. "Feedback systems support meaningful play by making the game responsive to the ongoing state of the game," write Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in _Rules of Play_. But Tottenham, one of the richest clubs on the planet with a terrible record, may, in fact, go down a division, something that hasn't happened to them in 50 years. It's total appointment viewing at its worst, and the owners of Tottenham absolutely deserve it. > It's total appointment viewing at its worst, and the owners of Tottenham absolutely deserve it. ## Why I Can't Stop Watching — And Why You Shouldn't Either Since the Premier League was founded over 30 years ago, the amount of money invested in the top flight of English football has continued to balloon. And thus, soccer owners now have mixed feelings about the relegation system. On the one hand, the drama is obviously good for the global game, but in terms of value creation, it's a tenuous way to operate a for-profit business. If you are wealthy, nothing bothers you more than the whims of providence or defeat determining your wealth, especially in such a low-event affair as soccer. As a consequence, you're starting to see more and more English clubs looking with jealousy at the system we have in the United States, a Congress-authorized cartel system where new teams are rarely added. The cartel system basically protects owners' investments, because there is simply no punishment for losing. Economics dictate that value comes from scarcity, and there are simply only so many tickets to own an American sports franchise. As more American owners have also started buying soccer clubs in Europe over the years, there have been attempts to mimic the U.S. and abandon tradition. (You can guess who's been part of leading this charge.) The issue with Tottenham really cuts at the heart of what it means to play, and what we're seeing in English football is a warning to us all about what can capitalism can do to sports. The turn to abstract the game of sport into a profit-and-loss calculation is the end result of decades of neoliberal excess that atomizes individuals and reduces every human interaction to an economic transaction. Leaving aside all the values and importance of local fandoms as potential connective tissue in an era of increasing loneliness, the idea that the only value in winning is financial is a complete corruption of play, leaving me wondering what the hell we're doing here. Or put another way, "Fandom isn’t being nurtured anymore. It’s being mined," wrote Joon Lee in The Times. The silver lining, of course, is that this particular strategy that Tottenham has pursued—winning enough to deliver returns to its shareholders but never doing anything truly daring that would deliver sustained joy to its fan base—may cost the club $260 million if its performance doesn't improve. In the meantime, I can't help but watch with sick glee. One of the wealthiest clubs in the world losing their shirt and being forced down to spend a Saturday night playing against Deadpool and the guy from _It's Always Sunny_. The beautiful game, indeed.

What happens when capitalism corrupts play itself? Tottenham's historic collapse explores what game theory reveals about the soul of sport.

Exploring Jonathan Coryn's Good Grief _Of the many senses that games often engage, one of the most common is touch. It is what happens when we pick up a controller, when we run our fingers over a thumbstick, when we feel the light impact of buttons. In many ways, touch is also one of the senses that we know best from games past life as physical deisgns._ _But capturing the intimacy of touch is an entirely different story. Holding hands, running fingertips along the curve of someone's neck, or even one of those chaste chest-out good-bye hugs. These are all moments the games have sadly struggled to capture: to hold a friend when they're crying, to say goodbye to someone who's dying, to initiate the spark of something new._ _The central mechanic in Jonathan Coryn's Player Non Player is caress. You touch characters—hold them, stroke them—and through that contact, you begin to understand how they grieve. It's a disarming premise for a game, and Jonathan Coryn spent six years building it, mostly alone, out of his fine arts training at the École nationale supérieure d'arts de Paris-Cergy and a collaboration with the French electronic duo Agar Agar, whose album shares the game's name and its lore._ _The result is a unforgiving island populated by four tormented figures, a landscape that borrows its desolation from Iceland and its visual grammar from Fumito Ueda's PS2-era worlds. It won the Most Amazing Game award at A MAZE. Berlin in 2023 and has shown at Centre Pompidou and MUDAM. I spoke with Coryn about mortality as a design material, the tension between tenderness and game logic, and what it means to make a space that feels like it's clipping at the edge of reality._ **_When did you first start thinking about death as a concept to work with in_ _Player Non Player_?*** I didn't arrive at death as a theme all at once—it surfaced over the course of the game design process. But I knew quite early on that the game was about intimacy, because the core mechanic I built was the gesture of caressing. That's something I had already worked with during my fine arts studies, and I knew it was a powerful way to create closeness without relying on traditional narrative. From there, death became the element that sharpened everything. For me, intimacy is never as intense as when it's placed next to mortality—when it's fragile, temporary, at risk. That tension between desire and disappearance is what gives it weight. It's essentially that old dialogue: Eros and Thanatos. **_Did you have any personal experiences with grief and longing that informed the work?_** I find this question interesting. There's often an expectation that a piece dealing with death must come from a specific personal event, a trauma of some kind. I also notice this question tends to come up more explicitly in video games than in art in general, where death's often treated as something natural. For me, the focus isn't tied to an exceptional or violent loss so much as to something universal: death concerns all of us, constantly. **_Noted! I stand corrected._** There's a line in the _Silent Hill 2_ Director's Cut that stuck with me: Sato Takayoshi says, "Everybody is thinking and concerned about sex and death every day." That's true for me. I think about death every day, even though I haven't experienced what you might call a major or catastrophic bereavement. My grandparents have died, I've lost pets, and I've gone through breakups. But my parents are still alive, and I haven't lost close friends. And even those so-called ordinary losses have been deeply painful. What strikes me is how intense and unjust those losses already feel, even when they're supposedly in the order of things. I find death profoundly unfair, and the human condition incredibly harsh. I struggle to imagine the death of my parents, the death of people I love, or my own. That difficulty, that resistance, is precisely what keeps death present in my thoughts—and inevitably, in my work, as a form of catharsis. **_What did you see as the connection between the characters? Who was the hardest to realize fully?_** In the game, the characters are essentially facets of a single character. Each one articulates death from a different personal angle: the fear of one's own disappearance, the end of romantic love, the idea of losing one's parents. Once the caress mechanic was in place, it became a natural language for writing those perspectives. The only character that was genuinely difficult to integrate was the dog, because it isn't anthropomorphic—I didn't want to force a human interiority onto it. That's why I treated the dog more as an emotional-care presence: a being shaped by attachment and memory, grieving its owners in a wordless way. **_The inclusion of a hoverboard and some of the mini-games are moments where the game-ness of the work breaks through. Are these concessions to an audience that's looking for something more traditional, or something more subversive?_** I understand why the hoverboard might read as more "gamey"—it draws on a vocabulary players already recognize, because traversal is a classic design problem in open worlds. But the hoverboard was primarily a practical choice: a way to move through the landscape easily, pleasantly, and clearly, without breaking the contemplative pace. In that sense, it's less about adding challenge and more about supporting how the world is meant to be experienced. That said, _Player Non Player_ does include moments that are unmistakably more gamey. Because the project was made experimentally, without a prewritten design document, it gradually became a kind of collage—an existentialist approach to game design in which the work becomes what it is through the process. The result is that some elements can feel almost contradictory, or even clash with each other, and I've come to see that tension as part of the game's beauty. It also serves the theme: grief isn't consistent; it's full of abrupt shifts. So when the game suddenly drops you into a very difficult obstacle course in an experience that is otherwise relatively accessible, that contrast becomes a texture of the whole. **_I'm wondering about the landscape. There's a sparseness in many games that feels either aesthetically incurious or a function of ability. You're doing something really interesting in capturing what feels like both a nod to an older generation of games and a real place. Was there a real place you were looking to?_** Thanks! I spent an enormous amount of time on the world itself—honestly, probably half of development—modeling the landscape and building its shaders, because I was very attached to achieving what I call "torn 3D": a mix of painterly realism and a deliberately rough, almost released quality in the 3D. That feeling comes strongly from _Shadow of the Colossus_ —not just because it's a PS2 game, but because to me, Fumito Ueda and his teams are visual geniuses. They achieved a kind of 3D that doesn't obsess over micro-detail but instead leans into pictoriality, into something almost metaphysical: a threshold space that still feels intensely present and materially beautiful. I almost think of it like paint layers, the physicality of pigment, like Jackson Pollock throwing paint onto a canvas. Ueda's worlds, in _Shadow of the Colossus_ and _The Last Guardian_ , have that material quality even though they're fully 3D. And the PS2 era helped, because the geometry stays visible and angular. You can clearly feel it's 3D, but when there's presence, the tension between that rough structure and the image's beauty becomes incredibly powerful. That's what I tried to capture in _Player Non Player_ : something that nods to that older sensibility but with contemporary surface work—normal maps and so on. As for real-world references, the place that gave me that sensation most strongly was Iceland. I think there's a reason so many games borrow from Icelandic landscapes—they're incredibly beautiful and inspiring. But what struck me most when I was there wasn't just the scenery. It was the feeling of being in an edge-world, as if reality itself was slightly clipping, like you could almost pass through it, while at the same time experiencing an overwhelming sense of presence. You feel lost and alone, at the edge of the world, almost at a threshold between life and death—which is exactly where the game's themes live. **_The game has both open space and clearly defined visual zones that you revisit again and again. How did you design these zones to be open-ended while still encouraging players to dig in deeper?_** The recurring zones and the open landscape were influenced by _Breath of the Wild_ , which I played intensely right before conceptualizing the game. I found its approach to pathing through space incredibly refreshing, and I pushed it toward something more minimalist. Even though collecting orbs is necessary to finish, they're intentionally distant from a traditional progression curve. The game stays lightly gamified, closer to a contemplative form of movement through space—almost like Land Art. You inhabit the environment, interact with it sensitively, and the reward loop remains modest on purpose, to keep things mostly contemplative and sensory. **_It was interesting to see some players read the game as a dating simulator, which I think requires familiarity with that genre or the ability to read romantic interest into the interaction. Certainly, with the shirtless swimmer, there's an immediate suggestion of intimacy, but with the others, not so much. Tell me about whether you intended players to connect affection or friendliness as sexual overture, or whether that's something you wanted to leave more ambiguous._** We sometimes used "dating simulator" as a communication label, because it was the closest familiar frame for players, even though the structure is actually a puzzle game. The Love Bar borrows dating-sim codes aesthetically, but functionally, it's feedback for a lock-and-key logic: what a character dislikes blocks you, and understanding what they like becomes the key that lets you progress. The swimmer leans into the dating-sim register most—more suggestive, tied to romantic grief—and he's also designed as an easy mode, where almost anything counts as a key. That ambiguity is part of the point: tenderness and sensuality can still feel taboo in games, and it's been interesting to see players feel most uncertain with the simplest character. _This interview was conducted over text and edited for grammar and clarity._

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.

The Secret to a Believable Game City Isn't What You Think I was playing _Grand Theft Auto IV_ a few years ago when something small happened that I’ve never been able to shake. I’d just finished a heist, jumped out of a plane, pulled a parachute, and landed next to a prison. And there, right beside me, was a gardener. Just a gardener, trimming the hedges, completely indifferent to the man who’d just fallen out of the sky with a sack of cash. It was procedural—he just happened to be there. But it spoke to something essential about what a game city can be when it’s working: a place thick with parallel life that doesn’t care about you at all. That moment came back to me during a recent conversation talking with Chaim Gingold and Konstantinos Dimopoulos. Gingold is the author of _Building SimCity: How to Put the World in a Machine_. Dimopoulos is an urban planner turned game designer whose writing on game urbanism has become essential reading for anyone thinking about built environments inside screens. I wanted to sit them down together because they approach the same question—what makes a game city believable?—from opposite directions. One comes from the history of simulation, the other from the practice of actually planning real cities. _You can watch the conversation_ _here_ _._ ## Why Do So Many Game Cities Feel Like a Facade? JAMIN WARREN: Games do a lot of different things. You get invested in the characters, you get invested in the stories. Approaching them through the lens of the constructed environments inside them is very specific. Games treat cities as backdrops, as sets. What do you feel is actually missing when a designer thinks of a city as an arrangement of buildings rather than a functioning system? KONSTANTINOS DIMOPOULOS: Sometimes, leaving things out is unavoidable. But it's very rare for us to see public spaces that _are not just streets_. A square can be a fantastic place. A park can be fascinating and packed with life. Generally, this whole life-and-functioning-society aspect tends to be missing. People forget that cities are historical places. They need to feel dynamic, to showcase that they have been around for a while. An older building, something under construction—those are simple things often forgotten. CHAIM GINGOLD: A counterexample is _Jet Grind Radio_. You're skating around, and there are crowds of people just hanging out. They all jump out of the way, and it's part of the pleasure. That makes me think about who makes the games and what gets represented, but also the quality of the travelogue and how important that is. DIMOPOULOS: If we approach game cities as something to be visited—besides something we're meant to be playing in—they can offer a different level of enjoyment. But there has to be some thought poured into things. Credit WARREN: When _Grand Theft Auto V_ came out, I was living in New York, and my wife is from Los Angeles. We started playing it together. It was really surreal for her to see the city depicted in miniature. Now living in Los Angeles, I realize how much that game captures of Southern California—the same way a film like _One Battle After Another_ is a love letter to California. The idea of games as places you can go, even if you can't go in real life, they should offer some perspective on the actual place, both for people who live there and for people who never get a chance to visit. ## What Functions Make a City Come Alive—Even in a Game? WARREN: You've written about urban functions—commerce, housing, transportation. I get the sense sometimes that game makers approach cities in terms of the physical environments, as opposed to the systems that undergird them. Even if you're not making a simulation game, there's still the idea that someone has to take out the trash, that there's still municipal government. What are some of the functions of a city that make game cities come alive? DIMOPOULOS: When you think of what people need to be doing at a specific place, that helps you not forget crucial things. If you forget functions, you tend to create places that feel like Disneyland—a facade you just cruise through. People know that crowds move to the square on lunch breaks, and kids will be at the playground after school. Those simple things lend a real sense of authenticity. Warren Spector's _Deus Ex_ didn't model thousands of unhoused people in a future dystopia. He just showcased five around a barrel. And you instantly get the idea. WARREN: You don't need so many things, just enough. Players fill in the negative space of what's implied by the existence of certain characters. I finished a heist in _Grand Theft Auto IV_ and jumped out of a plane with a parachute. I landed next to a prison. There was just a gardener doing their thing as this guy landed with a big sack of cash. It was procedural—he just happened to be there. But it spoke so much. For me as a player, there's this whole other universe of things happening. I'm this crazy outlaw adding a level of chaos, and there are just people going about their daily lives. ## What Made SimCity Revolutionary as a City Model? WARREN: What makes _SimCity_ special as an object? You'd be hard pressed to find another person who knows more about the game and its origin. GINGOLD: The advertising leaned into the city-is-alive—the living city in your computer. Cars moved, buildings developed, and smoke came out of smokestacks. Fires would unfold across the map. And the scale was huge for the time. You'd scroll around this giant map, and it was alive everywhere. That scale and massive detail and aliveness are very intrinsic to what a city is—sprawling, dense places filled with parallel activity. Then _SimCity_ puts the player in a god-like position, and that juxtaposition of the giant living world with that positionality is what made it so engaging. Plus, it's silly. Serious technical stuff like zoning and tax rates, but also a Godzilla-like monster. Serious but silly—that's a very Will Wright design sensibility. WARREN: Walk me through the argument in _Building SimCity_. The thing that was most interesting to me was the web of influences. The book is broken up into the history of simulation, the business environment for Maxis, and then a deeper dive into the design of _SimCity_ itself. Can you walk through the interdisciplinary context that made it stand out? GINGOLD: Will Wright didn't just sit down and make up an incredible city model. He built upon work done over many decades. One tradition is cellular automata—Conway's Game of Life is the most famous example. It's very good at rippling spatial simulations, entwined with questions about what is life. Then there's Jay Forrester's system dynamics. Forrester worked on Whirlwind in the 1940s, the first interactive real-time digital computer, then pivoted to MIT's school of business, simulating social systems—firms, then cities, then the whole world. Conway's Game of Life (1970) His urban model got enormous media attention in the early '70s, contemporaneous with the crisis of the cities—civil rights, the Watts uprising. If cellular automata gave _SimCity_ its bottom-up texture, system dynamics gave it top-down cohesion—the economic structure tying residential to commercial to industrial demand. Wright smashed it together with the graphical user interface and video games, both relatively new mediums. He put complex simulations traditionally for specialists in the hands of everybody. WARREN: There's thankfully a long history of games being the mechanism by which virtual reality, social networks, or artificial intelligence become playgrounds for deeper ideas. If you have the mindset that games are not so unserious that they can't generate very serious inspiration, you end up in interesting places. Dimopolous argues that sign-posting in games can be helpful for real world cities. ## Does SimCity's Ideology Actually Matter? WARREN: You brought up that some of the philosophical ideas about what cities should be are baked into a game like _SimCity_. In a review of Chaim's book, Celine Nguyen in the _Los Angeles Review of Books_ talks about the ability to see a system clearly as a precondition to manipulating it—in some ways, a game like _SimCity_ gives you all this power. But it also has a bias towards certain types of cities. You can't raise the tax rate too high, or people will riot. You can build lots of cities, but you can't build all of the cities. How much do those critiques really matter? GINGOLD: _SimCity_ tries to have it both ways. It's a serious living city, but also—there's the monster. It's just a toy. That's a brilliant rhetorical move. Alan Kay has argued it smuggles in ideology, but I think that distancing—it's a toy, it's real, it's not—makes you aware it's a representation. Will Wright sees everything as materialist representation, like a filmmaker. Unlike Forrester, who thinks he's an engineer solving the world's problems. DIMOPOULOS: It's also something created in the United States. It makes sense for someone in a country that has been creating places _ex novo_ for the duration of its existence to start on an empty field. If I made a European city game, I would start with a pre-existing town—Roman, Byzantine, medieval. There's already a tissue. GINGOLD: _SimCity_ has a colonial, American ideology baked in, too. There is no _ex novo_ here either. It was a settler orientation—just this empty land. ## How Could Self-Driving Cars Change How We Build Game Cities? WARREN: I live in Los Angeles, and one of the newest entrants to our built environment has been Waymo. The self-driving car could change how cities are organized. You can see a world where parking disappears, or road widths shift, or pedestrian space expands. How long before something like that filters into how game designers depict urban space? Are there assumptions that the self-driving car exposes about the cities we've been building in games for the last 40 or 50 years? DIMOPOULOS: This is at best a taxi. What would change things would be investing in proper mass transportation. But the gameplay possibilities of a self-driving vehicle are immense. GINGOLD: It feels like such an American idea, extrapolating forward from our transportation logic. What if all that technology were refactored? I'm much more excited about the little robots around Berkeley's campus delivering food with animated faces. There are so many other configurations possible. My hope is that it lets us make an urban landscape that is less terrible. WARREN: It doesn't have to be a self-driving car. It could be a self-driving bicycle or rickshaw or some other mobility device. It doesn't _have_ to be a Jaguar.

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?

Online Talk: What Do Game Cities Want? Cities in games have always been more than backdrops. They encode assumptions about how people move, where power concentrates, what gets built, and what gets torn down. They are systems that speak — about economics, about politics, about what a society values enough to simulate. This conversation brings together two thinkers who have spent their careers at the intersection of urbanism and interactive design. Chaim Gingold, author of _Building SimCity_ and collaborator with Will Wright on _Spore_ , has traced how simulation games don't just represent cities—they model them as arguments about how the world works. Konstantinos Dimopoulos has built a discipline, game urbanism, around the idea that a city in a game must earn its believability the same way a real city earns its character: through coherence, history, and the texture of daily life. Together they'll examine what cities want from the games that contain them, and what games want from the cities they build. What gets lost when urban complexity is abstracted into mechanics? What gets revealed? And as game engines increasingly shape how a generation understands space, density, and civic life, what responsibility does that carry? Register Here! * * * Konstantinos Dimopoulos was born in Athens, Greece, where he studied to become a rural and surveying engineer (with a focus on infrastructure and urbanism) at the NTUA. He then earned my MSc on urban and regional planning at the NTUA School of Architecture. In 2010, He received my PhD in urban planning and geography. Since 2002, he has worked as an engineer, researcher, and lecturer, while publishing papers and contributing to scientific publications. Chaim Gingold is a designer and theorist whose work has been featured in _Wired_ , _CNN_ , and the _New York Times._ He worked closely with Will Wright on _Spore_ and designed the _Spore Creature Creator_. Jamin Warren founded Killscreen as well as Gameplayarts, an organization dedicated to the education and practice of game-based arts and culture. He has produced events such as the Versions conference for VR arts and creativity, in partnership with NEW INC. Warren also programmed the first Tribeca Games Festival, the groundbreaking Arcade at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Kill Screen Festival, which Mashable called "the TED of videogames." Additionally, he has served as an advisor for the Museum of Modern Art's design department, acted as cluster chair for the Gaming category for the Webbys, and hosted Game/Show for PBS Digital Studios.

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!

I Am King of the Ogres I can’t even listen to Kings of Leon anymore without thinking of the grind. Caleb Followill’s voice gravels out of our little iPod stereo, and I’m back in Duskwood, in Azeroth, where I farmed out the recipe to make Elixirs of Greater Agility. For hours I ran back and forth between the Yorgen Farmstead and Addle’s Stead, killing every Defias I could find, waiting for a drop that would never come. _I shouldn’t have bothered_ , I say to myself, chuckling. _The extra 8 Agility really wasn’t …_ “What,” Megan says. She’s futzing around in the bathroom, cleaning up, and heard me chuckle. “Um. Bananas,” I say. “They’re rich in potassium.” “Aha,” she says. She shakes her head at her poor, tragic husband, and goes back to cleaning. If there’s a picture of our summer, this is it: an exasperated Megan churning away at the steady work of living, and my mind tumbling with uncertain purpose through the implausible landscapes of Azeroth. It started around Christmas, when I realized that it had been a year since I’d gotten _The Burning Crusade_ , the first expansion pack for the obscenely popular online game _World of Warcraft._ I’d quit about a month later. Now __ I was starting to miss the game, and I was painfully aware of how much content I hadn’t explored. Plus, my best friend Dave and his wife, Zarqa, had started playing again, and it seemed like a good way for us to hang out. Megan and I were sitting in the drive-through at Sonic when I told her. “I’m thinking about opening up my _WoW_ account again,” I said. “Oh yeah?” she asked. I don’t remember exactly what she did—I was driving, or looking at the menu, maybe trying not to watch her reaction—but I imagine all her muscles tensed and her spine went rigid, like I had drawn a knife. “Yeah. Dave and Zarq are playing again, and we all have Tuesdays off, so I figured we’d all start new characters and play together.” “Once a week, huh?” “Yeah, not like before.” ### This post is for subscribers only Become a member to get access to all content Subscribe now

A Love Story

Why The Dream Logic of Love Eternal Doesn't Need to Explain Itself _In 2017, professor Ian Bogost_ _proudly declared in_ The Atlantic _that games don't need stories. "That’s a problem to be ignored rather than solved. Games’ obsession with story obscures more ambitious goals anyway," he wrote. Bogost's general point was that stories are what you build on top of a medium's true material foundations, and games are actually best at disassembling ordinary objects and systems and reassembling them in surprising new ways._ _"There was a really big trend in the 2000s to have your story expressed explicitly through the mechanics," LA-based game designer Toby Alden says. 'The joke I always make is a platformer where it’s like, “I’m_ grappling _with the loss of my wife."_ _Right around the same time Bogost penned his broadside, brothers Toby and Ben Alden began updating a pet project called_ Love _, a hyper-difficult "masocore" game that almost no one finished and, to Bogost's point, was devoid of any narrative. But even for a physics-minded designer like Alden, the allure of telling some kind of story, even if the game itself doesn't demand it, was simply too great. But rather than deliver the story through the player's actions themselves,_Love Eternal, _the newly-released game simply leans into the abstraction._ _You are a Maya, a girl who's family has disappeared during dinner, and you're dropped into a perlious world in clear disrepair. You father has become some kind of wraith and a childhood friend has become something else entirely. It's all eerie but also deliberately indecipherable. In this conversation, Toby and I talk about the influence of ambient music like Aphex Twin, the perils of working with your brother, and how to make games that feel like playing music._ ## How Do You Design a Level That Feels Like Playing a Theremin? **JAMIN WARREN:**_I first found out about your work from Jenna Caravello, who recommended we connect. I’d reached out to her because I was interested in what was happening with animators in Los Angeles given their relationship to games. How did you make your way into game-making?_ **TOBY:** Almost as long as I can remember, it’s been something I’ve wanted to do. Around high school, I played _Cave Story_ for the first time and became aware that making a game was something one person could do. As soon as that was on my radar, I began taking stabs at it—making mods for _Cave Story_ , trying to make Flash games. I started a lot of projects and didn’t finish any until a little after college. But the desire was there from a young age. **WARREN:**_You’ve mentioned making music and wanting sound to fill the room. Tell me about the relationship between your music practice and your games._ **TOBY:** I’ve made music for a long time—it developed parallel to game making, with a similar trajectory of false starts until around college. A little after that, I started DJing, which I’ve done for almost a decade. Those three form the brunt of my artistic output: DJing, making music, making games. Music and games are very complementary—obviously because games contain music. But there’s almost a parallel between playing a game and playing an instrument, where it produces sound that fills a room. I think a lot about what one of my games would be like if you were in the room but weren’t the one playing—you just heard it. Would it be abrasive? Or would it be more soothing, ambient background noise? Which is what I usually lean towards. **WARREN:**_What kind of music were you DJing? Were there particular artists that pulled you into music early on?_ **TOBY:** A lot of what I was inspired by early on was sample-based music—DJ Shadow, Burial, IDM like Aphex Twin, and Kettel. A lot of rap production, like _36 Chambers_. Sample-based stuff especially had a big influence because it fit the way I thought about sounds—through experimenting, sampling, and re-sampling. And ambient music. I’ve always listened to a lot of it, and that’s a big part of what I DJ now—stuff that leans toward ambient, dub, ambient techno, down-tempo. **WARREN:**_You didn’t do the music for Love Eternal yourself (Emily Glass did.) Even if you’re not the person making the music, the decision to contract somebody who fits a particular vision speaks to taste. How did you connect with Emily? Did you start with a score in mind?_ **TOBY:** She was my first choice because she was the most talented person I knew who made music, and she had the emotional depth and richness of sound I thought would fit really well. Being in the position of directing a project requires this balance of egotism and humility—the things you know you can do well, you want to be confident in. But you really need to know what you’re not good at and then trust the people you assign those roles to. There wasn’t a lot of back and forth—small adjustments to fit technical specifications, but for the most part, I could let them do what I knew they were good at. I wanted the music to be ambient in the classical Brian Eno sense—where if you pay attention, a lot of nuance comes out, but if you don’t, it recedes into the background. I said something along those lines in my original pitch to Emily, and the first thing I got back I was like, “Yep. That’s exactly it.” ## Do Games Need to Explain Their Own Mechanics? **WARREN:**_For the story—you’ve said it wasn’t planned in a particular way. I typically don’t think of platformers as games where story isn’t really important anyway. Were there moments where what the game required mechanically was at odds with what you wanted to express narratively?_ **TOBY:** No, there wasn’t. There was a really big trend in the 2000s where it was very chic to have your story expressed explicitly through the mechanics—or have the mechanics cleverly comment on your story. The joke I always make is a platformer where it’s like, “I’m grappling with the loss of my wife.” But I think one of the strengths of video games is that people are willing to accept a level of abstraction. They don’t actually find it jarring to do a bunch of arbitrary platforming and then have a story beat. The gravity mechanic—where you can flip gravity—it’s never explained. There’s no in-game reason why you can do that. But I’ve never had anyone ask me why she can do that. I think video games are allowed to operate with this dream-like logic, and you give up some storytelling power if you ignore that. It was very freeing to write the story in a more abstract way that didn’t explain everything. There’s no moment in the game where Maya looks to the camera and says, “What’s going on? Why am I in this castle?” **WARREN:**_The way the game functions is at this subconscious state of working through individual levels. When I would think about things too much, it made it difficult. It felt more like playing a theremin than playing a piano—like playing a fretless bass rather than a harp. Can you tell me about what the feel of the levels should be like?_ **TOBY:** A lot of it comes down to intuition and experimentation. There’s a lot of just opening the level editor, smearing some spikes and geometry around, hopping into the game, seeing what it feels like. And then maybe you have one particular moment where it’s like, “Oh, that was really satisfying.” Maybe I can do that a second time in a slightly different way, or structure the whole level around it. That happens more often than sitting down with a fully formed idea. Despite what YouTube essays would have you believe, there aren’t really rules I follow to produce a brilliant level. It’s a lot more experimenting, playing, and seeing what feels fun or interesting.

Toby Alden traces a line from to ambient DJing to Love Eternal, a gravity-flipping platformer where dream logic and intuition guide every level.

Can AI-Powered Games Actually Teach Anthropology? _My wife teaches high school history and, like many educators, is deeply worried about AI's impact on her students' academic lives. It’s a source of constant conversation—I’m no AI-optimist, but I’m far more rosy about the possibilities of the technology than she is. She laments that teachers weren’t brought into the 2022 release of ChatGPT, and that it was foisted upon educators without warning or care. And now administrations everywhere are pushing AI as the future of her field, again with very little input from actual practitioners._ _I assure her, “Just wait until academics figure out the best way to use LLMs.” She justifiably rolls her eyes. I’m not moving the goalposts, of course, I’m just waiting. So, finding the work of Michael Peter Hoffman, hopefully, will tip the rhetorical balance in my favor._ _Hoffman is a researcher who occupies an unusual position at the intersection of two disciplines that rarely speak to each other. By day, he builds and evaluates AI models at the Leibniz-Rechenzentrum, one of Germany's premier supercomputing centers in Munich. By training, he is an anthropologist who spent three to four years doing fieldwork in Nepal and India—studying debt-bonded laborers in the lowlands of Western Nepal, visiting brick kilns and construction sites, and descending into a sand mine where hundreds of families dug and sold sand while a whole economy churned invisibly around them. It was in that sand mine, he says, that the idea first struck him: the stories he was gathering were extraordinary, but the academic monographs that would contain them would reach almost no one._ _His solution is what he calls an "Anthrogame"—a game that conveys anthropological knowledge with ethnographic thickness. In a series of papers beginning in 2024, Hoffman and his collaborators at Freie Universität Berlin fed Bronislaw Malinowski's_ Argonauts of the Western Pacific, _a standard Anthro 101 text,_ _into a Large Language Model and produced an “AI-native” text adventure where players step into the role of a fieldworker arriving on the islands, Malinowski’s academic advisor, or Malinowski himself._ _The results were promising and imperfect: the AI struggled with biographical depth, tended toward monotonic responses over extended play, and was susceptible to hallucination. But it also generated genuine curiosity. Many who playtested the game were surprised to find themselves drawn into a world they'd never encountered. Anthropologists, predictably the harshest critics, still wanted to try it in their classrooms._ _What follows is a conversation about why anthropology may be the original worldbuilding discipline, why game makers have been reluctant to set their work in real cultures rather than fictional ones, and what it means to translate a text—already a translation of a life world—into something you can play._ [Listen to the longer podcast with Michael] * * * **_JAMIN WARREN: How did you make your way to artificial intelligence as an anthropologist? Was your background as an anthropologist first, or were you already interested in the technology?_** MICHAEL HOFFMAN: AI is something I started very early. When I was 16, 17, I started programming and worked on little games—board games, actually. I started out as a computer scientist in Munich, and from there went into anthropology to study something different. **_JW: When you're explaining what an anthropologist does to someone who's not familiar with the field, what's the dinner party definition?_** MH: An anthropologist goes to another setting—usually further away—and you dive into a culture for at least 12 months, to get a whole yearly cycle. In my case, I went to Western Nepal, to a town called Tikapur. I studied the lives, politics, and economics of former debt-bonded laborers. You describe these systems, and it's a translation process. _JW: I can understand the appeal of games as a medium for this—many of them put you in a different place, in a different time, and expect you to make your way there. As you noted in your papers, there is a history of in-game anthropologies, applying anthropological tools as virtual worlds come to resemble human societies. For a skeptic, what is the value of doing that?_ MH: My take is that anthropologists should make video games. There are hardly any who have done it, because game-making is really hard. But not everyone has the fortune to dive into another culture. Games could be a way to give people a chance to experience such settings. AI-generated scene from the game ’Malinowski’s Lens’ , Bronislaw Malinowski with natives on Trobriand Islands; between October 1917 and October 1918 _JW: How are you defining the term "Anthrogame"?_ MH: An Anthrogame conveys cultural knowledge and anthropological insights to an audience who wants to play it. The key characteristic is that it's "ethnographically thick"—a term anthropologists use. You want to describe a culture not superficially but in depth. If you can convey that thick writing into a game, it becomes an Anthrogame. _JW: Game genres are usually focused on mechanics—is it a first-person shooter, is it a platformer, etc. As a result, you end up with less experimentation on the setting. Games have a history of doing history, at least, partly from the legacy of tabletop roleplaying and wargaming. But stepping into a real culture and experiencing it—that's not a place games have spent much time. Why do you think game makers have stayed away from that?_ MH: If you want to do this seriously, you have to dive into a culture first, and _that takes a long time._ Fictional games give you more freedom—you're not constrained by reality. With an anthropological game, you should ground it in the reality of the society and be respectful towards the community you're representing. It's also a double translation—anthropological books are already one anthropologist's subjective view, and then you translate that again into a game. _JW: What compelled you to create AI-driven games for a teaching context?_ MH: It started out of a frustration. I spent three to four years doing fieldwork in Nepal and India, and when you write your work up, you write it for a limited academic audience. Reading is in decline, let's be honest. I'm not saying this should replace reading—I'm a big fan of books—but this could be an appetizer. You play it for a bit, you get interested, and then you start to read the book. _JW: Walk me through developing the game. You chose interactive fiction as the format—how do you go from the text to something playable?_ MH: When there was the ChatGPT, I thought something like _The Oregon Trail_ would be a good start in a very easy way. If you want to turn Malinowski's book into a 3D game, you have to produce assets that look like the Trobriands, and you won't find that on the Unity Store. So stay without graphics first, then go toward the hard parts. My day job is at a Supercomputing Center in Germany building AI models, so it's an interesting way to apply that off-hours. Sample prompt generated the game world _JW: "AI-powered game" has become this term that gets thrown around. When you say "AI-native game," what does that mean functionally in terms of how the game expresses itself?_ The text gets fed into a Large Language Model through a Retrieval Augmented Generation technique. That means you force the LLM to really **just** read from the book. The output is a short description of a scene, and then you have different scene choices, and you can pick them. It's like a _Dungeons & Dragons_ setting where the LLM is the dungeon master and creates the scenes, and then you are stepping into the role of the anthropologist. You also have an open input field—instead of these three options, you could say whatever. Like _, go to the center of the island or try to go to a canoe and go to the next island._ The advantage is that every game is different. Once you build such a structure, you could theoretically do it with a whole different range of anthropological books or historical books. _JW: With students playing the game, was there a particular interaction that stood out—something the game revealed in the play structure that was a sign you were moving in the right direction?_ MH: Students tried very quickly to find a shortcut to solve the four quests. That was surprising for me, and also refreshing—they took a gamer's approach and tried to hack it. _JW: Yeah, that happens._

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

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, researcher Michael Hoffman is bringing that text into the future. In this episode, Jamin Warren sits down with Hoffman—a computer scientist and anthropologist at one of Germany’s premier supercomputing centers—to discuss his creation of the "Anthrogame." By feeding classic ethnographic texts into Large Language Models, Hoffman has built a playable Dungeon Master version of Trobriand society, where players navigate the complex social and economic rituals of the South Pacific. We explore the intersection of worldbuilding and fieldwork, the frustration of academic reach, and whether AI can turn dense monographs into "appetizers" that make us more curious about the real world. Is anthropology the original worldbuilding discipline? And why haven't game designers tapped into the "thick description" of real cultures? **Host:** Jamin Warren **Guest:** Michael Hoffman (Leibniz-Rechenzentrum) * (00:00) - Introduction: The Decline of Reading * (00:27) - Anthropology and AI: A New Frontier * (01:27) - Michael Hoffman's Journey * (02:40) - The Intersection of Anthropology and Game Design * (28:57) - Cultural Representation in Pedagogy * (29:33) - Malinowski and the Argonauts of the Western Pacific * (34:47) - Developing an AI-Powered Text Adventure Game * (46:22) - Challenges and Future of AI in Anthropology Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester. Subscribe to Killscreen for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to info@killscreen.com Please consider supporting independent media! **★ Support this podcast ★** #### What is The Killscreen Podcast? Jamin Warren founded Killscreen as well as Gameplayarts, an organization dedicated to the education and practice of game-based arts and culture. He has produced events such as the Versions conference for VR arts and creativity, in partnership with NEW INC. Warren also programmed the first Tribeca Games Festival, the groundbreaking Arcade at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Kill Screen Festival, which Mashable called "the TED of videogames." Additionally, he has served as an advisor for the Museum of Modern Art's design department, acted as cluster chair for the Gaming category for the Webbys, and hosted Game/Show for PBS Digital Studios.

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, researcher Michael Hoffman is bringing that text into the future.

In this episode, Jamin Warren […]

What Happens When You Preserve Your Games While You're Still Making Them? <h2 id="simon-flesser-sits-in-his-malm%C3%B6-studio-surrounded-by-15-years-of-digital-ghosts">Simon Flesser sits in his Malmö studio, surrounded by 15 years of digital ghosts. </h2><p>Behind him, I spy the unmistakable presence of a hulking phonograph, the iPhone of the 19th century. It's a curious choice, and for someone who has spent the entirety of their professional career making games in digital environments, the reminder of a once-passed technology sums up their current focus: preserving their own past. </p><p>Late last year, Simogo–a creative partnership between Flesser and Gordon Gardebäck—released its <a href="https://simogo.com/work/simogolegacycollection/" rel="noreferrer">Legacy Collection</a>, porting seven iOS games to modern platforms. It may seem quaint, but if you bought an iPhone and were around to launch the App Store in its earliest incarnations, there was an amazingly rich period of game-making in those late aughts. It's understandable that you would want to bring some of that work into a modern context. But this isn't a typical remaster.</p><p>I've been thinking about preservation lately, working on a project with the Getty Research Institute. <a href="https://gehry.getty.edu/" rel="noreferrer">They did something for the 20th anniversary of Disney Concert Hall</a>—Frank Gehry's archive is remarkable, all these scale models and photographs documenting the building's evolution. It made me wonder: is there something about games that doesn't lend itself to that kind of personal archiving the way architecture or graphic design does?</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/2026/02/image.png" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="1600" height="1200" srcset="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w600/2026/02/image.png 600w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w1000/2026/02/image.png 1000w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/2026/02/image.png 1600w" /><figcaption><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">Still from interview with Frank Gehry for </span><a href="https://gehry.getty.edu/"><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">Sculpting Harmony</span></a><span style="white-space:pre-wrap"> archival project for the Getty.</span></figcaption></figure><h2 id="why-digital-games-are-harder-to-preserve-than-physical-art">Why Digital Games Are Harder to Preserve Than Physical Art</h2><p>Flesser acknowledges the paradox. Digital files <em>should</em> be easier to preserve than physical artifacts, yet shifting platforms and proprietary ecosystems make games more ephemeral than sketches or models. Unlike architects who archive scale models, fashion designers who maintain pattern libraries, or musicians' collections of demos, game makers rarely build preservation into their practice. There's less detritus, fewer drawers to store work in. The archive must be actively maintained, or it simply disappears.</p><p>What Simogo built addresses their past differently. Flesser and his collaborators created a virtual phone interface for Switch and PC, complete with simulated motion controls and dual-cursor touch mechanics. There's something really poignant about this virtual phone—I played it on the Switch—because I'm "holding" a device that I spent thousands of hours pouring over that no longer exists. You can stretch, pull, pinch, and zoom just as you once did. The Legacy collection preserves the relationship between your hand and the screen of yesteryear, and novelty rushes back in a flood. "For us, how do we make a system where we could show the pixels exactly as they were?" he explains. </p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-width-full kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/2026/02/Simogo-Quote-Card.png" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="2000" height="1000" srcset="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w600/2026/02/Simogo-Quote-Card.png 600w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w1000/2026/02/Simogo-Quote-Card.png 1000w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w1600/2026/02/Simogo-Quote-Card.png 1600w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/2026/02/Simogo-Quote-Card.png 2160w" /><figcaption><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">Still from </span><i><em class="italic" style="white-space:pre-wrap">The</em></i> <i><em class="italic" style="white-space:pre-wrap">Sailor's Dream </em></i><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">(2014)</span></figcaption></figure><p>The approach stands in deliberate opposition to how most games handle their history. Franchises like <em>Resident Evil</em> and <em>Halo</em> rebuild from the ground up—polishing graphics, modernizing controls—to chase what players remember. The purpose is to evoke an affective response in players–the feeling of what it would have been to boot up a PlayStation or Xbox. Simogo is committed to a different project entirely: preservation as fidelity. "We would always have to say, 'No, actually this needs to be exactly as they were when they released.'" The distinction matters. Remasters capture games as you remember them. Preservation captures them as they are.</p><h3 id="what-does-it-mean-to-author-a-game">What Does It Mean to "Author" a Game?</h3><p></p><p>As a result, you get a unique view into what sustained authorship looks like in games. That continuity matters to me because games struggle with authorship in ways other media don't. Big-budget releases involve hundreds of people coming and going; there's rarely a singular voice. Moreover, games in recent decades have grown to an enormous scale, and unlike film, which has a long history of individual contributions (which is why the Oscars have so many categories), games pass through the hands of hundreds across corporate landscapes that can span years. The history of games is rife with game designers who ship a signature title but fail to build a long career, let alone one that you could identify as distinctly their own. </p><figure class="kg-card kg-gallery-card kg-width-wide"><div class="kg-gallery-container"><div class="kg-gallery-row"><div class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-7.jpg" width="2000" height="1125" loading="lazy" alt="" srcset="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w600/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-7.jpg 600w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w1000/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-7.jpg 1000w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w1600/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-7.jpg 1600w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w2400/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-7.jpg 2400w" /></div><div class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-2.jpg" width="2000" height="1125" loading="lazy" alt="" srcset="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w600/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-2.jpg 600w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w1000/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-2.jpg 1000w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w1600/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-2.jpg 1600w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w2400/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-2.jpg 2400w" /></div><div class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-1.jpg" width="2000" height="1125" loading="lazy" alt="" srcset="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w600/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-1.jpg 600w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w1000/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-1.jpg 1000w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w1600/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-1.jpg 1600w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w2400/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-1.jpg 2400w" /></div></div></div></figure><p>By contrast, Simogo's output has actually slowed as they've matured—seven titles in five years, then two games over the following decade—a dramatic deceleration that reveals a unique DNA that's invisible if you play each game in isolation. Simogo's stable partnership—Flesser and Gordon Gardebäck at the core, with longtime collaborators like composer Daniel Olsén—builds an oeuvre the way bands or filmmakers do. It's a distinct body of work from a team that operates without rigid roles. This flexibility matters as timelines expand and creative stakes shift."Even if you look at the story of <em>Bumpy Road</em>, you sort of see the early themes of death and memories as a recurring thing," Flesser says. "Life, love, and loss basically." The progression from <em>Bumpy Road</em>'s pixel-art whimsy to <em>Device 6</em>'s typographic architecture to <em>Sailor's Dream</em>'s fragmentary atmosphere is the mark of artists stumbling around saying the same thing in different ways.</p><h3 id="can-you-preserve-your-work-while-youre-still-creating">Can You Preserve Your Work While You're Still Creating?</h3><p></p><p>It's interesting doing this preservation work while you're still in the middle of your creative career as an artist. Many fields have preservationists who handle archival work separately from active production, although that work can still be preserved posthumously. But games don't afford that luxury. Flesser can't just put things in drawers; he has to actively port, rebuild, and maintain. "It's also not entirely preservation because it's just moving it from one digital platform to another," he notes darkly. "But on the other hand, the minute or the hour that it's on PC, it will get pirated, and so it becomes available forever."</p><p>Of course, a living archive released at the midpoint of your career gets me feeling some kind of way about <em>my own</em> mortality. I've been looking at games professionally for almost two decades, so looking back in my recent past is welcome but complicated. I remember jumping into Simogo's work almost immediately as a twentysomething, looking to fill my New York City subway rides, desperately listening for the drumbeats in <em>Beat Sneak Bandit</em>, closing my eyes in terror of <em>Year Walk</em>, scrambling to find someone to lend me an iPad to contort the screen in <em>Device 6</em>. </p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-width-wide kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-5-1.jpg" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="2000" height="1125" srcset="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w600/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-5-1.jpg 600w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w1000/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-5-1.jpg 1000w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w1600/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-5-1.jpg 1600w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w2400/2026/02/Simogo-Legacy-Collection-5-1.jpg 2400w" /><figcaption><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">The Saul Bass scenography of </span><i><em class="italic" style="white-space:pre-wrap">Beat Sneak Bandit</em></i><span style="white-space:pre-wrap"> (2012)</span></figcaption></figure><p>The Legacy Collection arrives at a moment when Flesser's relationship to his younger work has crystallized into simultaneous proximity and distance. "You are sort of embarrassed because they're maybe trying to do more than they could," he says of the early games. "That's laudable because we weren't holding back." </p><p>As any type of creative person, your sense of what's good becomes both limited and honed by age—you know what's been done before, so you know what's actually novel. But there's something about being able to make work for your peers. "Games, in many ways, are still toys. They don't have to be, but they can be," Flesser says. "That's not necessarily a bad thing." But when you're 60, trying to make games for someone who's 15, that's going to be much harder. I remember playing <em>Sailor's Dream</em> when it first came out a decade ago. My approach to it is different now, with some life behind me—I have a daughter, my parents are getting older, and a game about losing someone is no longer abstract. Some themes in games are hard to really feel until you've got some life under your belt. The hope as a game maker is that you can continue exploring different expressions of humanity as you experience more of life.</p><p>"I've always been slightly obsessed with houses that you can't enter or doors that don't open," Flesser says. "There's so much stuff you can imagine." There's always a mystery with the things we can't quite unlock, the corners of our lives that we can't quite peek around, books unopened, and lives not lived. "The doors are sort of always closed for us when we finish a project," Flesser says. "It's more like, 'Ah, okay, now we don't have to think about this anymore.'" </p><p>But it's ok, because someone else will.</p>

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.

Why This Game About the Haitian Revolution Has No Bullets <iframe width="100%" height="180" frameborder="no" src="https://share.transistor.fm/e/bacf067e"></iframe> <p><a href="https://www.killscreen.com/dom-rabrun-veve-punk-haitian-revolution-videogame/">Read the full article.</a><br /><br />There's already a game about the Haitian Revolution. It's part of Assassin's Creed. You sneak around, you stab people, you "free the slaves"—and the game gives you an achievement notification.<br /><br />Dom Rabrun thinks that's bullshit.<br /><br />The Haitian-American painter and game designer is building Vèvè-Punk: Mind Singer, a game about the Haitian Revolution that refuses to let you pick up a weapon. Instead, you navigate Saint-Domingue's 16 racial classifications through dialogue trees, where saying the wrong thing to the wrong person can get you killed. Your protagonist isn't a soldier—she's a telepath and a singer. A free woman of color with zero strength, zero dexterity, and everything on the line.<br /><br />Dom's work sits at the intersection of Haitian Vodou symbolism, Basquiat's visual language, and the kind of thoughtful, conversation-driven game design you'd find in <em>Disco Elysium</em>. He's part of a generation of artists who grew up with games, studied painting, then realized that interactivity might be the best way to tell certain stories.<br /><br />But there's no lineage for what he's doing. Black filmmakers have Oscar Micheaux, Charles Burnett, Ava DuVernay. Black game designers? They're writing that history right now.<br /><br />In this conversation, we discuss why physical violence is the laziest choice in games, what it means to hold a controller and "control" someone, and how </p><p>Basquiat's painting <em>Glenn</em> taught him to think about right-clicking on reality. We also tackle the deeper question: when you're making a game about historical trauma, about enslavement, about revolution—how do you do that without replicating the very dehumanization you're trying to critique?</p><p><br /><a href="https://www.domrabrun.com/" rel="noreferrer"><strong>About Dom Rabrun</strong></a><strong>:</strong> Dom's work merges technology, storytelling, and music into a cohesive creative system. Guided by his first-generation Haitian-American heritage, conservative Christian upbringing, and 15 years of experience in IT, he's developed a philosophy called "Vèvè-Punk," blending Haitian Vodou symbolism with futuristic Afro-Caribbean themes. In 2020, his video piece <em>Dr. LaSalle, The Spider Queen, and Me</em> earned first prize in a juried exhibition at the Phillips Collection. He was a 2022 fellow with Black Public Media, which is now executive producing his forthcoming video game. He lives and works in Hyattsville, Maryland.<br /><br />If you like what you're listening to, <a href="https://www.killscreen.com/signup/">please consider becoming a member.</a></p>

There's already a game about the Haitian Revolution. It's part of Assassin's Creed. You sneak around, you stab people, you "free the slaves"—and the game gives you an achievement notification.

Dom Rabrun thinks that's bullshit.

No Shots Will Be Fired In Dom Rabrun’s Haitian Revolution <p>Artist Dom Rabrun sarcastically remembers the first game about the Haitian Revolution. "It's an Assassin's Creed offshoot made by mostly white folks," he says, his voice picking up speed, volume, and intensity as he teases out the story. "<em>'Shh! Shh! Wa! Shh! Shh! I'm gonna free slaves! Oh my God. Psh!' You freed the slaves! Bah-bah-bah-bah-bah!</em>,” he gesticulates from his apartment outside Washington, D.C., and describes a game that’s more like <em>Call of Duty</em> than <em>12 Years a Slave.</em> He pauses. "<em>That's</em> what we're doing?" Rambrum snorts.</p><p>The Hyattsville, Maryland-based painter and game designer isn't interested in making <em>that</em> game. His project, <a href="https://www.domrabrun.com/mindsinger" rel="noreferrer"><em>Vèvè-Punk: Mind Singer</em></a>, approaches his heritage and the Haitian Revolution through dialogue and choice rather than combat. The protagonist, Fabienne, is a free woman of color, a telepath and singer with zero strength and dexterity, who returns to the village to stop a super-soldier attempting to sabotage the Haitian Revolution. "Physical violence is so easy in games," Rabrun says. "I'm really interested in the conflicts that happen when a formerly enslaved person is talking to someone of a different social status and has to pretend like he doesn't know something.” </p><p>This “double consciousness” is precisely what has kept the diaspora alive throughout the former enslaved labor colonies, and capturing that tactical linguistic specificity is an interesting design challenge. “What does that dialogue tree look like for someone who's like, 'All right, if I don't say the right thing, this dude is gonna murder me.'"</p><figure class="kg-card kg-embed-card"><iframe width="200" height="113" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8UfFIHoMkoY?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen title="Why This Haitian Revolution Game Has No Combat | Dom Rabrun Interview | Killscreen #17"></iframe></figure><p>Part of the new crop of visual artists who grew up on games and now are approaching the medium with their brush in hand, Rabrun's path to game development wasn't direct. He lived in a rent-controlled building in Brooklyn, raised by his mother, who bought him and his brother a Mac in 1994, when she was dying of HIV-related illnesses, and most Americans didn't own computers, especially BIPOC Americans. He remembers specific games with unusual clarity: <em>Flying Colors</em>, a proto-Photoshop program that let you create strange animated tableaux. <em>Super Mario World</em> on a neighbor's Super Nintendo, the sound still vivid decades later. “It’s been this dance of me being so in love with games as a medium and for portions of my life trying to downplay just how important they are to me.”</p><p>Aside from the cultural penalty the arts-minded can endure when taking games seriously, Rabrun’s religious community complicated his affection for it, while also enhancing its allure and adding a touch of the forbidden. Raised as a Jehovah's Witness, drawing comics—his first love—meant drawing violence, which wasn't allowed. Art itself wasn't exactly encouraged. "I come from a very conservative Christian, super working-class family," he says. "Drawing for me was always my thing, and I was rarely, if ever, praised for it or even barely acknowledged. It was like, 'Oh yeah, that's a thing you do.'"</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-width-full kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/2026/01/Dom-01-Cropped-Small.webp" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="200" height="118" /><figcaption><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">Rabrun's </span><i><em class="italic" style="white-space:pre-wrap">We See You</em></i><span style="white-space:pre-wrap"> mural (2024) in honor of America's first Black broadcast news anchor</span></figcaption></figure><p>He discovered comic artist James Jean around the same time he connected with Basquiat, and his practice has attempted to blend his two loves by drawing heavily on Haitian and Caribbean tradition. He spent two childhood summers with an aunt succumbing to the distraction with his nose pressed firmly in a GameBoy Color with <em>Pokémon Yellow</em>. The trip left impressions on him, if only that it was one of the few times his homeland was treated as a vibrant place, not an empty threat to send him away.</p><p>Basquiat was both an obvious entry point, a comparison that he bristles at as a lazy touchstone for any Haitian artist, but his encounter with <em>Glenn</em> (1985) at the Museum of Modern Art conceptually opened doors for his future game practice. In the seven-foot canvas, an enormous head speaks–no, screams—into a white background, an attempt to puncture invisibility with the power of sound. To Rabrun, the painting was an invitation to step into the work through the language of computers. “If you could imagine right-clicking on an element of a Basquiat painting, what does that menu look like? Pretty much any element you click is gonna give you sound, video, weird shit.”</p><figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/2026/01/image.png" class="kg-image" alt="" loading="lazy" width="1565" height="1350" srcset="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w600/2026/01/image.png 600w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w1000/2026/01/image.png 1000w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/2026/01/image.png 1565w" /><figcaption><span style="white-space:pre-wrap">Jean-Michel Basqiat's 1985 "Glenn"</span></figcaption></figure><p>In Rabrun’s paintings, flat perspectives force foreground and background to hold equal weight, where a goat and a hurricane share the same visual importance. "It's ancient wisdom," he says. "Our ancestors knew a thousand years ago that the earth is important. You should be able to hold a leaf and be like, '<em>The leaf is me too</em>.'" That compositional approach, he notes, flies in the face of games' typical hierarchy of player over non-player: "I click this thing, and my character moves here. What does it mean to even hold this controller and control someone?"</p><p>His painting practice eventually led him back to games through <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4CvmiLDOUXRDoOW4ys9hYkLcWFRLZz49" rel="noreferrer"><em>Hip Hop RPG</em>,</a> a six-episode animated series about an SNES-style RPG starring Kendrick Lamar, Drake, and Tyler, the Creator in a post-apocalyptic world. The work is a bit of a time capsule, given how complicated his protagonists have become over the last few years (Kanye, let's say, hasn't aged well.). In the first episode, Drake heals Kendrick—a detail that feels stranger now,w given their current relationship. The series never finished. "I was a baby writer," Rabrun admits. "I hadn't scoped out the whole story."</p><p>But <em>Hip Hop RPG</em> taught him what he wanted to make. It also foregrounds Black art and establishes his voice as someone looking to translate what animated Rabrun about our culture. When Black Public Media executive producer Lisa Osborne saw his pitch for a character-select screen showing the racial and class stratifications of 1790 Saint-Domingue, she told him to turn it into a real game. "I was like, 'Oh my God,'" he recalls. "And she was right."</p><p>The challenge goes beyond game design. "Being Black sometimes, when you're just trying to make stuff that’s historically accurate, you feel like this...ugh," he says, searching for words. "Like you think of something like <em>Amistad</em> or <em>Roots</em>. And I ask myself this all the time: Does this work in games?” It’s a tension I feel personally–I want to foreground Black joy, but it can be hard to find that wonder when the past, present, and future can seem so burdened.  “On the flip side, I'm like, o<em>kay, well, how many games have I played about a samurai? Or a fiefdom in ancient Europe somewhere.</em> And I'm like, okay, well then why is <em>this</em> one uncomfortable?"</p><figure class="kg-card kg-gallery-card kg-width-wide"><div class="kg-gallery-container"><div class="kg-gallery-row"><div class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/2026/01/Fabienne-Neutral-Portrait.webp" width="565" height="540" loading="lazy" alt="" /></div><div class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/2026/01/Mind-Singer-Map-Small.webp" width="900" height="506" loading="lazy" alt="" srcset="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w600/2026/01/Mind-Singer-Map-Small.webp 600w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/2026/01/Mind-Singer-Map-Small.webp 900w" /></div></div><div class="kg-gallery-row"><div class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/2026/01/Mind-Singer-Theater-BG.webp" width="1920" height="1080" loading="lazy" alt="" srcset="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w600/2026/01/Mind-Singer-Theater-BG.webp 600w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w1000/2026/01/Mind-Singer-Theater-BG.webp 1000w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w1600/2026/01/Mind-Singer-Theater-BG.webp 1600w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/2026/01/Mind-Singer-Theater-BG.webp 1920w" /></div><div class="kg-gallery-image"><img src="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/2026/01/Montrevel-Portrait.webp" width="1500" height="2066" loading="lazy" alt="" srcset="https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w600/2026/01/Montrevel-Portrait.webp 600w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/size/w1000/2026/01/Montrevel-Portrait.webp 1000w, https://www.killscreen.com/content/images/2026/01/Montrevel-Portrait.webp 1500w" /></div></div></div></figure><p><em>Mind Singer</em> is now 70% complete in its vertical slice phase. The game is playable, though Rabrun knows it needs more narrative tension, more of what makes stories work. “What are Toussaint Louverture’s stats?” he wonders. He's aiming for something between Donald Glover and David Lynch, citing <em>Disco Elysium</em> as a touchstone. "I want games where you sit and think about stuff and talk," he says.</p><p>These quiet acts of resistance, rebellion, and occasional violence are more in line with contemporary understandings of enslaved rebellions. “Because slaveholders wrote the first draft of history,” historian Vincent Brown <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/27/the-long-war-against-slavery"><u>lamented in <em>The New Yorker</em></u></a>, “subsequent historiography has strained to escape from their point of view.” Brown argues that it’s better to think of each uprising as part of a larger struggle for freedom, rather than isolated acts of bravery, a sentiment Rabrun echoes: “I'm walking on ice. I know that. It's like you have to make these deliberate choices for how the audience will see it."</p><p>There's no lineage for what he's attempting. Unlike film, where decades of diasporic filmmakers from Oscar Micheaux to Charles Burnett to Ava DuVernay built a tradition, games offer a sparse foundation in need of deeper historical scholarship. There are wonderful new communities like Game Devs of Color, but the future history of Black game design is really starting <em>today</em>. "I got a little terrified just now," Rabrun says when this comes up. "It is kind of me in this place. <em>I'm like, okay. And I have this awesome team</em>, and we're like, <em>okay, we're gonna do this thing</em>."</p><p>In some ways, Ubisoft did him a favor. They took the low-hanging fruit—the combat, the stealth kills, the "freed the slaves" achievement notifications. Now Rabrun is free to make something else entirely. </p><p>"I'm not interested in showing the murder," he says. "I'm interested in what that dialogue tree looks like." Saint-Domingue had 16 racial classifications. Navigating that social structure without a weapon—only words, only choices, only the consequences of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person—that's the revolution Rabrun wants to put in your hands.</p>

Artist Dom Rabrun rejects combat for "tactical linguistics" in Vèvè-Punk: Mind Singer, a game exploring the Haitian Revolution through dialogue and Black artistry.