social game Archives - Kill Screen

Before gets NSFW in its latest update (but it’s still beautiful as heck)

Before is a new spin on the survival game from Rust developer Facepunch Studios where, rather than controlling a single character, players must lead a whole tribe of cave people to survive in an intimidating post-Ice Age world. Up until now, we’ve had a few opportunities to gawk at the game’s naturalistic vistas and see early glimpses of how the player’s tribespeople interact with both the environment and each other. But thanks to a new update over on Before’s blog, we now have a better idea of the specifics on how they’ll live and fight in this still young society.…

Feature

A people’s history of PlayStation Home

Released at the end of last year, Postcards from Home has the feel of a curio: a weighty tome assembled exclusively from images captured within Sony’s discontinued virtual world, Home (2008-2015). Its author, the Spanish photographer Roc Herms, has explored games before, whether making absurdist use of the Game Boy camera or documenting an enormous LAN party from the perspective of the hardware. But it only takes a few pages for the scope of Postcards from Home to reveal itself as something much more empathetic, even human, full of penetrating longform interviews that explores the digital architecture of Home as…

Announcement

Announcing Play/Off, NYC’s first league of digital play

EDIT: Keep an eye out for Play/Off in 2016. We have decided to postpone it until then in order to do the best job possible on this event series. Games have been inherently social for most of our history, from basketball to chess. Why should videogames be any different? In our new event series, brought to you by Grind coworking spaces and arts and culture publication Kill Screen, we want to bring people together to play face-to-face in New York City’s first league of digital play. Over the course of six events, teams will face off in games plucked from…

News

New episode of Let’s Play takes games beyond the screen

The first three installments of Laurent Checola and Thomas Kimmerlin’s micro-documentary web series Let’s Play invited viewers to examine the new frontiers for game designers, how they are participating in controversial conversations, and how they can challenge conventional notions of play and success. Now, the fourth episode discusses how designers are moving play from the screen to create a more physical, social experience.