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  • Nobody Knows What Happens Next

    Nobody Knows What Happens Next
    2026/09/04
    I open with Tomo Kihara, a Tokyo designer who has built an arcade cabinet that nobody scripted, and put a question to Danny Snelson that runs through the whole hour: what happens to authorship when the designer does not know the outcome either? The through line for this cycle is work built to outlast the thing it was made on.Kihara's What Plays You? Game of Possible Lives is a cabinet running a language model locally, generating a statistically plausible Japanese life out of census data. You steer that person through their decisions and you get exactly one rewind. Danny puts the authorship problem in a much longer line, back through Dada and the constraint-based writing of the 1960s, where the artist produces a set of rules that might themselves be the work. The only new thing here is that one of the players is a large language model. What moves me is the venue: the cabinet has travelled from the museum to a hotel lobby, so the people playing it are the ones passing through hotels, airports and train stations rather than the ones who chose to visit a museum. Danny lands on Marc Augé's non-places, and on the fact that a census is a state instrument, which puts a game about ordinary lives in exactly the spaces where ordinary life is watched most closely.Then Christian Marclay's The Clock, which I went to see in Los Angeles. Twenty-four hours, every minute cut from a different film, synchronized to the time on your own watch. It is ludic without containing a single game mechanic. You watch it hunting, and Danny calls it the ultimate collectathon on both sides at once: whoever had to find a usable clip for all 1,440 minutes, and the viewer collecting them back one at a time. It also could not be made this way now. The labor is the work, and a model asked to find every clock would dissolve it.To close, Wristwork's Pigeon: A Love Story, where you are a pigeon crossing London, New York, Tokyo, Paris and Amsterdam looking for one specific other bird. The commercial map service it ran on was switched off, so they rebuilt it on open map data, which is the same durability question in a different key. Danny reads it as the inverse of The Clock: one pigeon instead of every clock. Then Paris, where the events company Diversion marked ten years with an exhibition and the collective at distraction.fun filled it with games. That sends us into what makes a game legible as coming from a place at all, and Danny's counterexample is Stray, a deeply French game whose every visible marker points at Hong Kong.LinksTomo Kihara's Game of Possible LivesWristwork rebuilt its dead pigeon romance on open mapsA game tower crowned Diversion's tenth anniversary in ParisRoppongi Crossing 2025 at the Mori Art MuseumTomo KiharaChristian Marclay, The ClockWristwork, Pigeon: A Love StoryDistractionJonathan Coryn, Player Non PlayerNicolai Troshinsky, Loop RaccordMiguel Sicart, Playing SoftwareDanny SnelsonCorrectionsI name Tomo Kihara's studio as Gift Ten Industries. His studio is Other Rules. Gift Ten Industry is a separate Tokyo game company.Danny attributes Death 24x a Second to Leslie Thornton. The book is by Laura Mulvey. Leslie Thornton is a different filmmaker.I refer to a game called Loop Record by Nikolai Trishinsky. It is Loop Raccord, by Nicolai Troshinsky.I describe Robert Redford in The Natural hitting a home run into the clock at Wrigley Field and exploding it. Those are two different shots. He shatters the scoreboard clock at Wrigley earlier in the film, and the famous exploding home run at the end hits the stadium light towers.The birthday problem needs 23 people for a better than even chance of a shared birthday, not 25.Hosted by Jamin Warren with Danny Snelson. Music by Nick Sylvester.Subscribe to Killscreen for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to info@killscreen.com Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★
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    43 分
  • Does Water Have to Look Like Water?

    Does Water Have to Look Like Water?
    2026/08/21

    I open with a 2015 Kill Screen essay about a police station built wrong on purpose, and end up asking Danny Snelson, a writer and professor of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA, a question that runs through the whole hour: what does a work become when you move it into the wrong container?


    Ed Smith's piece on Resident Evil 2 called horror architecture "anatomically correct but tonally wrong." Danny maps that onto Freud, onto the impossible geometry of the Overlook Hotel, and onto Zach Cregger's Resident Evil film, where a typewriter on a desk is asked to carry 30 years of player fluency.


    Then I turn to Miles Buckle, a London artist who rebuilds Rear Window, Amarcord and Hitchcock's Rope as late-'90s games nobody will ever play. Danny traces the impulse back to Lego and forward to Roblox, and lands on why a JPEG face stretched over a low-polygon head is more unsettling now than it was in 1998.


    The last stretch is Danny's own book, The Little Database, free and open access from the University of Minnesota Press, and the desktop directory of 44 small archives it has grown into. His best example is Paul Sharits's flicker film Dots, which on celluloid at Anthology Film Archives is close to hallucination and on YouTube is a blotchy field of squares. The compression is not the failure. It is what lets you see YouTube at all. Quick hits to close: Mitch Anzuoni's money laundering simulator, Joshua Mattson's Defence Contractor Fantasy World and its latex hand, and a new alt-control cabinet at Wonderville in Brooklyn.


    Links

    Ed Smith, "The horror of Resident Evil 2’s police station"

    Miles Buckle Makes Games You Can’t Play

    The Little Database expands into a desktop directory

    Kill Screen on the Resident Evil film’s save points

    Kill Screen on Defence Contractor Fantasy World

    Danny Snelson, The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats

    The Little Database desktop directory

    Scott Richmond, Cinema’s Bodily Illusions

    Pippin Barr, v r 3

    Miles Buckle on Instagram

    Paul Sharits, Dots 1 and 2 on UbuWeb

    Fiasco, from Bully Pulpit Games


    Corrections

    Danny refers to "The Curse of the Golden Idol." The game is The Case of the Golden Idol.

    Joshua Mattson is based in Linz, Austria, not Germany.

    The Grand Theft Auto VI story concerned a single Army unit offering a four-day pass as a reenlistment incentive, not the US military broadly.


    Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester.

    Subscribe to Killscreen for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to info@killscreen.com

    Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★


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    1 時間 1 分
  • Do Good Games Taste Like Gasoline?

    Do Good Games Taste Like Gasoline?
    2026/08/06

    When Bennett Foddy was a fellow at Oxford, the college sold off its wine cellar and let the fellows judge the bottles. After twenty-four samples, the one that stopped him tasted like gasoline. That is now roughly how he picks games, and it turns out to be a useful way to think about difficulty, taste and what a player is actually looking for.


    Danny Snelson of UCLA joins for a new format: one piece from the Kill Screen archive, one long interview, and the news worth knowing from the past two weeks. From the archive, Brendan Keogh's "Game Type: Capture the School," the lead article in issue two, in which Keogh and his friends lose power mid-Halo and rebuild capture the flag across their school grounds, ceramic Jesus statue included. Written rules, invisible rules, and what happens to a space when someone finally says them out loud.


    Then Bennett Foddy on Baby Steps, made with Gabe Cuzzillo and Maxi Boch. Why the mechanics came first and the story grew out of them, why Nate cannot use his hands, why there are no checkpoints, and what game designers mean when they talk about being in good hands. Danny reads the whole thing as Beckett, which is hard to argue with once you have watched the character crawl out of a pond.


    In the news: Gareth Damian Martin reveals Signet City, a first-person fungalpunk RPG set in a monochrome Britain of 1978. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley releases I Didn't Realise You Thought Like That as a free browser game out of her Serpentine show. And Aidan Strong's TEXTURETOWN runs Toontown Online's source code with the assets of three other dead MMOs, which is preservation as collage rather than restoration.


    Links


    Brendan Keogh, "Game Type: Capture the School"


    Bennett Foddy on the body, jadedness, and Baby Steps


    Nikima Jagudajev's Like is a game about who we were


    Gareth Damian Martin reveals Signet City


    Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley's Serpentine game hits the browser


    The dead MMOs of your childhood, stitched into one game


    Danny Snelson, The Little Database

    Hosted by Jamin Warren with Danny Snelson. Music by Nick Sylvester.

    Subscribe to Killscreen for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to info@killscreen.com

    Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★


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    54 分
  • The Backrooms Were Always About Games

    The Backrooms Were Always About Games
    2026/06/13
    Something a little different! We're focusing on the newsletter now and in a conversational way!This week, I sat down with Danny Snelson, a writer and professor at UCLA who spends his days thinking about the eerie. We start with a strange admission from this year's Venice Biennale, where the Chinese pavilion exhibited a video game you weren't allowed to play, and use it to chase a bigger idea: that games have quietly become a shared grammar, and once you notice it, you can't stop seeing where it has leaked. Into a sculptor's hooded figures pulled from DOOM and recast as the accused at the Salem witch trials. Into a painter who walks you inside his own canvases. Into a flesh-pink office shooter, and into the Backrooms, that empty image of damp carpet and fluorescent hum that turns out to be one of the clearest things our culture has made about infinity after the exhaustion of grandeur. We get into all of it, plus an auto-rickshaw in Goa in 1992, and whether a game is allowed to refuse to be fun. ReferencesMitchell Chan's talk at DEMOPeter Nichols' Crude OilMy interview with Leo Castañeda / Talk at DEMOCamofluxAdrian MM AbelaFalse.Work Maltese PavillionChinese Pavillion's Black Myth: WukongDamjan Jovanovic's essay on The BackroomsMy feature on CatmilkCatmilkGossamer MatrixKalp Studio's Rahi Daniel Scott Snelson is a writer, editor, and archivist working as an Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA. His online editorial work can be found at PennSound, Eclipse, UbuWeb, Jacket2, and the EPC. Published books include Elden Poem (Hysterically Real, 2022), Apocalypse Reliquary: 1984-2000 (Monoskop, 2018), and Inventory Arousal with James Hoff (Bedford Press/Architectural Association, 2011). His most recently published book, The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), examines the networked afterlives of media-reflexive works of art and letters in search of contingent methods for reading ordinary digital collections. He's just wrapped teaching "That Time I Got Reincarnated as a UCLA Creative Writing Seminar: Isekai x Experiment" this spring at UCLA. Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester.Subscribe to Killscreen for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to info@killscreen.com Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★
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    1 時間 12 分
  • The Pink Game About Corporate Violence

    The Pink Game About Corporate Violence
    2026/06/09

    Catmilk is a digital artist and solo developer who has been building a game called Gossamer Matrix for about four years. It's a first-person shooter set inside a corporate tower in a climate-flooded future, where cities have condensed vertically, and private militaries defend shareholder value floor by floor. The premise is deliberately hyperviolent. The color palette is, improbably, pink.

    What caught my attention was the texture. The game looks stitched. Woven. Like something pulled together one color at a time. Catmilk cites the Impressionists and Zdzisław Beksiński, the Polish painter behind a generation of heavy metal album covers, as visual touchstones. You can feel both.


    We talked about designing for something other than fun, about how working an IT job in a university basement quietly shaped the game's level design, and about what it means to make something you're calling a "digital object" that exists as itself, optimized for nothing.


    • (00:00) - Pink Corporate Violence
    • (01:35) - Beach Town Origins
    • (04:38) - From Painter to Games
    • (08:15) - Impressionists and Metal Dreams
    • (10:42) - Playtest Push and Unfun Design
    • (17:04) - Building the Corporate Tower World
    • (26:41) - Office Job Level Design

    Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester.

    Subscribe to Killscreen for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to info@killscreen.com

    Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★


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    31 分
  • Your Body Is Being Compressed—Lisa Jamhoury on Lossy, Grief, and the Digital Body

    Your Body Is Being Compressed—Lisa Jamhoury on Lossy, Grief, and the Digital Body
    2026/06/02

    Lisa Jamhoury is an artist and performer working at the intersection of the physical body and computation. Her Capture Series—five years in the making—investigates what it means to live through digital representations of ourselves. Lossy, the newest piece in the series, had its world premiere at South by Southwest 2025.

    In this episode, I talk with Lisa about how a traumatic car accident sent her from circus performance into software design, a 1940s sculpture called Norma that explains everything wrong with how we build technology today, what it actually feels like to walk through Lossy, and why she reached for Kurt Vonnegut to write through grief.


    This is the main feed cut. Gaming Club members get the extended version—including Lisa's full breakdown of the Norma sculpture, her reflections on motion capture as an ethical practice, and more of our conversation about digital death and the right to be forgotten.


    Join the Gaming Club at killscreen.com—$6/month gets you extended episodes, monthly game selections, creator interviews, and the editorial layer that makes it all make sense.


    Read more at killscreen.com.


    • (00:00) - What Lossy Means
    • (00:20) - Meet Lisa Giammori
    • (03:02) - Trauma To Tech Critique
    • (10:26) - Naming The Capture Series
    • (14:20) - Norma And The Perfect Body Myth
    • (15:59) - Wrap Up and Where Next

    Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester.

    Subscribe to Killscreen for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to info@killscreen.com

    Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★


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    16 分
  • Telling the Bees: Kyriaki Goni on Building a Game from a Stranger's Gift

    Telling the Bees: Kyriaki Goni on Building a Game from a Stranger's Gift
    2026/05/26

    In this episode, I talk with Greek artist Kyriaki Goni about Telling the Bees —her in-development game about a character called the Bee-Seeker, searching for the last surviving bees in a near-future Aegean archipelago on the edge of ecological collapse.

    We get into the ritual that gives the game its name, the anthropological research behind every design decision, and why she wants players to physically perform the waggle dance to unlock parts of the game.

    This is exactly the kind of work I cover at Killscreen: art that uses interactivity to reveal something true about the world that couldn't be said any other way.


    If you want more of this—interviews, essays, and cultural criticism on experimental games and interactive art—the newsletter goes out every Tuesday and Thursday, free, at killscreen.com.


    And if you want to go deeper, membership gives you extended cuts of every episode, full transcripts, creator interviews, and a curated monthly game experience. Join at killscreen.com.


    • (00:00) - Ritual of Telling Bees
    • (00:34) - Meet Kyriaki Goni
    • (01:30) - Naming and Family Traditions
    • (03:33) - The Basket Origin Story
    • (07:20) - Researching Ancient Beekeeping
    • (10:23) - Designing the Bee Seeker
    • (12:41) - Wrap Up and Where Next

    Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester.

    Subscribe to Killscreen for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to info@killscreen.com

    Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★


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    13 分
  • The Level Designer Who Went Underwater

    The Level Designer Who Went Underwater
    2026/05/18

    Jakob Kudsk Steensen has spent fifteen years building a practice that doesn't fit neatly into any single category. He's not a game designer in the commercial sense. He's not exactly a filmmaker or a sculptor. He's someone using the tools of game engines to document ecologies that are disappearing.

    In this conversation, we talk about how he started modifying Unreal Tournament at 12 and never really stopped. We talk about why Fortnite's commercial success is directly responsible for the expressive tools artists like Jacob now use for free. We talk about the Far Cry 2 modification he made seventeen years ago—a swimmer, an island, a slope too steep to climb—that was the first time he thought of himself as an artist.


    We talk about the Berola glacier, which he digitized in 2022 and which collapsed the following year. We talk about what it actually feels like to dive into a volcanic vent. And we talk about Song Trapper—his most narrative work yet, and his return to something that looks more deliberately like a game.


    The full Otherworlds exhibition is on view at Phi Centre in Montreal through the summer.


    • (00:00) - Meet Jakob Kudsk Steensen
    • (01:27) - Origins Nature and Mods
    • (04:42) - Why Unreal Works
    • (09:16) - Other Worlds and Mourning

    Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester.

    Subscribe to Killscreen for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to info@killscreen.com

    Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★


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    21 分