A Sea Made of Plastic [Podcast]

We go in on a police station built wrong on purpose, films rebuilt as late-'90s games nobody can play, and why Mario 64's water still felt like water.

The Little Database expands into a desktop directory

A year after the University of Minnesota Press book, UCLA's Danny Snelson rebuilds its resources as a clickable fake OS—podcasts, reviews, and dozens of small archives included.

The health packs in POLYMORPH have to die first

Intron Interactive's biological roguelike casts you as a cancerous pathogen; the comments immediately turned healing into a moral problem.

Helsinki names Ville Kallio an Artist of the Year

The Cruelty Squad creator shares the city's annual 5,000-euro award with soul singer Emilia Sisco and knitwear designer Juha Vehmaanperä.

Murlo's Luddite rhythm games wrapped a run at Aviva Studios

Five minigames from the unreleased Something Beautiful played on Factory International's Media Wall, on a controller covered in the artist's 3D-printed sculptures.

The mouse in this AI war game is a demonic latex hand

freeculture.api built an idle game about autonomous weapons into a field-deployable hardshell case—and the critique is in the hardware.

Miles Buckle Makes Games You Can't Play

Miles Buckle rebuilds Rear Window, Amarcord and Hitchcock's Rope as late-'90s games nobody will ever play, and the impossibility is exactly the point.

A whole triennial is named for a platformer's grace period

Alice Bucknell's Coyote Time—an eco sci-fi text adventure premiering at St. Louis's City Museum this fall—gave Counterpublic 2026 its title.

Four decades of consoles move into the museum

Larry Achiampong's The Gaming Room furnishes Pixel Pioneers at the Boijmans with a playable living room—games as memory, kinship and diaspora.

Sahej Rahal's Azalabad salvages a drowned village

The open-world civilization built for ifa's ARE YOU FOR REAL is still playable on New Art City—the browser as exhibition hall.

Mitch Anzuoni is building a money laundering simulator

Offshore, made with Pete Christian, treats the criminal network as a sign system where signification is the gameplay.

A sculptural camera turns a game engine into cinema

Kevin Peter He and Dan Gorelick staged PASSAGE at an off-SIGGRAPH night in LA—visuals and score as two instruments answering each other live.