game design
Rui Hu: The infinite futures of games
Artist Rui Hu blends game engines, installation art, and memory to examine how virtual spaces infiltrate our physical world.
anxiety
experimental
Milan & Neilson Koerner-Safrata: The myth and poetry of game engines
In discussing their influences, SCRNPRNT's Milan and Neilson Koerner-Safrata bridge the worlds of experimental games and contemporary art, exploring how anxiety, flow states, and institutional critique can manifest through interactive experiences.
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Rainy Day is a powerful and sobering look at anxiety
Rainy Day, a recent interactive narrative by Thais Weiller, is a quick and impactful glimpse of the paralyzing power of anxiety. It was born out of creative frustration when she moved from a design role to production, where she often stayed quiet about her own creative ideas so as not to disrupt the
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Smart devices still struggle to cope with mental health crises
Content warning: This article discusses suicide and depression. /// Most days can be good days, even when you’re diagnosed with depression and anxiety. Or at least they can be made to look as such. You learn to put on a good face, to make it through the day. All of this means that when you spiral—an
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The Year in Anxiety
There’s nothing to be worried about, it’s just a quiet walk through the woods. The sun is shining through the leaves. Strings swell in the background as you amble about. Everything is okay. Only it isn’t. Sure, Alessandro Salvati’s Anxiety Attacks starts out pleasantly enough. You are in the woods a
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A videogame meant to raise awareness of anxiety attacks
Anxiety Attacks doesn’t need to wander far from its inspiration to earn its status as a horror experience; there are no jumpscares or monsters—just the knowledge that you might not be in control of what you see and feel, that something as simple as moving and breathing can become a chore to juggle.
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Your brain on anxiety: an interactive explanation with Nicky Case
Last year, Nicky Case and Vi Hart released Parables of Polygons, an experiment inspired by Bret Victor’s work on Explorable Explanations. Their aim: to bring the best parts of interactivity to a blogpost that might help explain how systemic biases and prejudices can take shape. After being a finalis
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Face the panic-stricken options of a single mother as she loses her daughter
You wake up to a series of missed messages on your phone. Shit, today’s going to be horrible. Today is taking place in Open the Door and Smile, an entry in the 33rd Ludum Dare game jam, and it does indeed look like it’s shaping up to be horrible. There are messages on the phone from your partner, s
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In Excuse Me! the real obstacle course is social decorum
Humanity’s most common phobia, according to a plurality of strange websites that specialize in this topic, is arachnophobia. Fair enough. Creepy crawly spiders are hardly pleasant. But fear is contextual: Your biggest fear when home alone is rarely your biggest fear when at a public event. For resea
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Piece your life together by piecing together broken pottery
I have but one question to ask about puzzles: if at some point a creator had a complete picture, why on earth would they smash it into pieces just so we would have to do more work before enjoying it? Kintsukuroi, an Android “experiment” by Chelsea Saunders, attempts to answer this question. It takes
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If you get anxious about karaoke just wait until you play Stage Presence
Stage Presence is karaoke with less musicality and more social anxiety, and really, what’s not to like about that? You play as the frontman of a band. You’re on stage at a large festival—think Glastonbury, but without the ambient fug—when something goes wrong. Who knows what went wrong. This is the
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This game reimagines the glitch aesthetic as an emotional breakdown
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. WHAT NOW? (Browser) BY ARIELLE GRIMES Arielle Grimes has developed tremendously as an author of videogames over the past year. She has expressed grief, sorrow, kindness, and love through her