Currently Making
The Pink Game About Corporate Violence
Catmilk wants you to go a little wild at work.
game design
climate change
What is the Environmental Weight of a Rendered Frame?
Kara Stone and Joshua Dawson are making work about a world in crisis. They're also reckoning with what it means to build inside the systems driving it.
graphical fidelity
How low-fidelity pixels expose games' emotionless arms race
A new film shot on a 2008 cell phone has me convinced games have been losing an arms race they shouldn't be running—pixels and feeling were never the same thing.
live performance
What Happens When 100 Strangers Share a Single Controller for Eight Hours?
Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim built a game that hands its labor back to the audience. asses.masses is eight hours of collective donkey revolution.
speculative fiction
Is Project Hail Mary secretly a game designer's novel?
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.
Andrei Tarkovsky
Tarkovsky's Stalker taught a geographer how to write about damaged landscapes
Geographer Caroline Tracey credits Tarkovsky's Stalker with teaching her to foreground damaged landscapes—a lesson game designers have been learning on their own.
sports theory
What Tottenham's Collapse Teaches Us About the Corruption of Play
What happens when capitalism corrupts play itself? Tottenham's historic collapse explores what game theory reveals about the soul of sport.
game cities
The Secret to a Believable Game City Isn't What You Think
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?
gravity
Why The Dream Logic of Love Eternal Doesn't Need to Explain Itself
Toby Alden traces a line from to ambient DJing to Love Eternal, a gravity-flipping platformer where dream logic and intuition guide every level.
digital preservation
What Happens When You Preserve Your Games While You're Still Making Them?
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.
war
What Happens When You Can Do Nothing in a War Zone?
Alan Kwan's new game, Scent, offers you a role not as a soldier, but as a lone dog wandering a desolate war zone. You are simply a witness without power.
World-Building
Keiken's Morphogenic Angels Imagines Post-Human Bodies 1,000 Years From Now
Keiken—Isabel Ramos, Hana Omori, and Tanya Cruz—merge performance, film, and game design to build optimistic post-human worlds 1,000 years in the future.