Games, play, and culture with Jamin Warren

Kara Güt staged a two-person play inside Red Dead Online at a Dutch film festival

Two performers at a desk with controllers, walking their characters toward each other across a server whose weather and respawns nobody in the room controlled.

SFMOMA and ZKM jointly acquire Eden.Garden 1.0, 25 years after its debut

The 2001 net artwork grows a 3D Garden of Eden out of any website's HTML—and it took a restoration at ZKM to make it collectible at all.

Amanita Design built a dystopian city out of real cardboard, then digitized it

Every set in the anti-authoritarian adventure was cut and glued in paper first—a handcrafted city where the Leader rules through loudspeakers.

Playfool built a working bot farm that hands you the controls

Type an opinion into [OP]erator, and100 X accounts post LLM-varied versions of it back

Bonheur Suprême shot Homunculus, a documentary short, entirely inside Skyrim

Seventeen minutes of machinima about cruising as an "Arab" on gay dating apps—premiered at Visions du Réel, built from the mod community's tools.

The Long Way Around

Kalp Studio built Raahi around the thing most games treat as dead time—the ride between two places—and set it in a 1990s Goan town that never existed.

Who Do You Let In: What to Play, August 7

Careful what you let through the door.

Do Good Games Taste Like Gasoline? [Podcast]

Danny Snelson on Bennett Foddy’s gasoline problem, a school rebuilt as a Halo map, and three games worth knowing this week.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley releases I DIDNT REALISE YOU THOUGHT LIKE THAT as a free browser game

The next chapter of Serpentine's THE DELUSION imagines every hostile online comment made physically real, and asks who you would open the door for.

Aidan Strong's TEXTURETOWN runs Toontown's source code with the assets of three other dead MMOs

Text from Club Penguin, sound from Pirates of the Caribbean Online, textures from FusionFall: digital preservation practiced as collage.

Messhof's Blood Dungeon, a platforming autoshooter, arrives Aug. 25

Mark Essen drew it himself again: a weekend Game Maker sketch, animated on a $50 tablet in parked cars, grown over years into a bullet heaven you parkour through.

Gareth Martin reveals Signet City, a first-person fungalpunk RPG

The Citizen Sleeper creator casts you as a parasite in a monochrome 1980s British industrial city, with dice checks swayed by your host's emotions.