Obduction, despite how cosmic the word sounds, does not refer to flying saucers. More terrestrial than extraterrestrial, obduction means when one oceanic tectonic plate heaves up and laps over a continental plate. One world eclipsing another. Imagine the confusion you’d feel if you one day woke up u
This article is part of our lead-up to Kill Screen Festival where Robyn and Rand Miller, creators of Myst, are keynote speakers. /// Your job in Myst (1993) is to assemble books. Set aside for a moment the impossible grandeur, hermetic mythos, and resonant cultural legacy of the game and this is wha
Join us June 4th, 2016 for our fourth annual festival. The Kill Screen Festival, formerly Two5six, is a weekend dedicated to celebrating creative collaboration between games and other great art. We bring together two speakers, one from within games and one from without, to discuss a topic pertinent
Art has always been useful for drawing our attention to the controversially sad. Take something like Zoe Quinn’s text adventure Depression Quest; depression is, by its nature, a miserable affliction, but it is also a diagnostic category burdened by stigma, shame, and skepticism. Some people insist t
In January 1957, J.G. Ballard first published his story “The Concentration City” (then under a different title) in a magazine called New Worlds. It takes place in a city that spans the entire universe, where streets stretch out both horizontally and vertically, with lifts and levels expanding the ci
What the hell have I gotten myself into for you people? Is there a virus on my computer? I feel like there should be a virus on my computer. All I wanted to do was write a story about videogames when I found myself on the Tumblr for a game called Broken Reality. Of course, aside from “game” being in
Not a lot is known about the haunting, mysterious, and handsomely titled For Each Our Roads of Winter, but we’ve seen enough for our jaws to hang open and a little spittle to form in the pockets of our lips. It is without question a gorgeous and vividly photographic first-person adventure game. That
The Witness has remained shrouded in mystery since Jonathan Blow disdainfully revealed it a Sony conference last year. We’ve heard peeps here and there: Blow has been referring to the gameplay as pattern recognition; writer Tom Bissell was brought on and soon left the project; they hired a professio
