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  • Can a Dating Sim Say No?

    Can a Dating Sim Say No?
    2026/10/23

    I open with Sagan Yee's Last Call for the Redding District, a 3D narrative game that asks what would happen if mermaids had the life cycle of Pacific salmon. You swim home to a town modeled on Saskatoon, catch up with everyone you went to school with, decide who to spawn with, and then everyone dies. Danny Snelson, who advised Sagan's MFA thesis at UCLA, joins me to talk through clips from my interview with Sagan.


    We get into the dating sim as a power fantasy, a game that won't show you the meter behind someone's affection, and a surface meter that works like an oxygen gauge for desire. Along the way, Angela Washko's The Game: The Game, Jessica Hopper's "Emo: Where the Girls Aren't" and Ted Chiang's lesson from Clarion West that world-building is one premise followed all the way to its end.


    Then three pieces from the site: Studio Oleomingus's new work for the 8th Anyang Public Art Project, Is it any wonder that I hesitate even at the gates of paradise?; You+Pea's book Videogame Architecture: Building Virtual Spaces, which draws Doom and Elden Ring as building plans; and Palestine Skating Game, where the soldiers can now surround you and you can fight back.


    We close on Dann Beeson's sticky-note storyboards for Messhof's Blood Dungeon and Dave Shuff's Big Steel Battalion Box, the refrigerator-box cockpit we first climbed into in 2014, now in the permanent collection of The MADE. Plus the new Killscreen events page.


    Links

    Fish Make O-Faces, and Other Lessons From the Redding District

    Studio Oleomingus Shows a Game About Mapping Paradise

    You+Pea Redraw Doom and Disco Elysium as Building Plans

    In Palestine Skating Game, the Soldiers Can Surround You

    Sticky Notes Storyboarded Blood Dungeon's Animated Intro

    Dave Shuff's Big Steel Battalion Box Wins Editor's Choice

    Here's What It's Like to Play Steel Battalion in a Tricked-Out Refrigerator Box (2014)

    Killscreen Events


    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
  • What Does Fear Sound Like?

    What Does Fear Sound Like?
    2026/10/15

    I sit down with two composers who make audiences flinch for a living. Ryan Holladay scored Zach Cregger's Weapons and this year's Resident Evil with his brother Hays. Jason Graves wrote the music for the original Dead Space trilogy, Until Dawn and Still Wakes the Deep. This is the first of Killscreen's Cross-Conversations: Horror, three free talks presented with MUBI that put people who make horror films and horror games in the same room.


    We start with Bluebrain, the location-aware album Ryan and Hays made for the National Mall in 2011, which grew out of the way sound changes as you walk through Myst. Jason explains how a drummer's background carried him through his first audition for EA and into Dead Space, and both of them trace the vocabulary horror still borrows from Penderecki, Psycho, Jaws and John Carpenter.


    Then the difference between scoring a film and scoring a game: Wwise and FMOD, and stingers that have to wait for the player. Jason walks through The Rig, the metal sculpture Matt McConnell built for Still Wakes the Deep, and Ryan talks about Abelina, the game he is scoring now. We close on audience questions and the tools they actually use, from handheld recorders to iZotope RX and Ableton.


    Links

    Scoring Fear: The Composers Behind Weapons and Dead Space

    The Killscreen Horror Collection

    Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma on MUBI, 30 days free


    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
  • Can a Game Be the Work of One Genius?

    Can a Game Be the Work of One Genius?
    2026/10/08
    I open with a fan who has rebuilt P.T. from its own PS4 code, which raises the question under the whole hour: when a game can disappear, who is responsible for keeping it? Danny Snelson calls in from New York with a ZipDeck in tow, and we take a detour through Zach Cregger's Resident Evil, which Danny calls a faithful betrayal.The A story is my interview with Murlo, the Manchester producer Chris Pell, who left a decade of DJing to build Something Beautiful alone, a point-and-click rhythm game with an album inside it and jukeboxes made of flesh. I play three clips from our conversation: why he left performance, what a good interaction feels like, and the lineage he claims, from William Blake and Goya to the Luddites. Danny reads Blake as a printmaker who controlled every stage of production and finds a model there for the solo developer. Then two quick ones that rhyme with Murlo's sense of touch: Sahej Rahal's Atithi, which you play by dragging your hands across brass, and Berrysoft's CORPSE FARM, where the crop is flesh.In the news, Zhou Yichen is pressing GRANDMA onto 5,000 metal Game Boy cartridges because a story this permanent should not live in plastic, and Danny checks whether metal actually outlasts plastic. It does not. Walaber's Reason and Rhyme is built for exactly two players, and Unrelated Studio's Lofsöng turns the problem of marking a nuclear waste site into level design.Then Joseph DeLappe and Biome Collective's game about Guantánamo, made with Mansoor Adayfi, who was held there for 14 years without charge. We close on Christine Sun Kim's MacArthur, whose citation names a work you play. I have been waiting for that since 2014. Danny asks what the word genius does to work made by many hands.LinksMurlo Builds a World You Can Play, my interview with Chris PellP.T. is being rebuilt for PC from its own PS4 codeScoring Fear: The Composers Behind Weapons and Dead SpaceVadim Nickel on sound designBennett Foddy's Games Taste Like GasolineSahej Rahal's Atithi interrupts our sense of touchThe crop is flesh in Berrysoft's CORPSE FARMZhou Yichen's GRANDMA is coming to a metal cartridgeGRANDMA on KickstarterWalaber's Reason and Rhyme is co-op for exactly twoReason and Rhyme on SteamLofsöng hides a nuclear warningLofsöng on SteamA game about Guantánamo is being built with its survivorChristine Sun Kim's MacArthur brings games one step closerChristine Sun Kim, MacArthur FellowChristine Sun Kim, Up and Away, Hyundai ArtlabKill Screen in 2014: Will a game designer ever win a MacArthur "genius" grant?The Killscreen Horror CollectionDanny SnelsonHosted 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 ★ CorrectionsI give the MacArthur fellowship as $500,000. It is $800,000.No Fun was Issue 1 of Kill Screen, published in Summer 2010, not 2011. The MacArthur piece I mention ran in 2014, twelve years ago rather than ten.Brian Gibson, who made Thumper, is Lightning Bolt's bassist, not its guitarist.Atithi showed at Basel Social Club during Art Basel week, not at Art Basel itself. Aviva Studios is Factory International's home in Manchester, not part of FACT Liverpool.
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    58 分
  • The Satellite Has Too Many Explanations

    The Satellite Has Too Many Explanations
    2026/09/18
    I open with Cezar Mocan's satellite, which finds a lake missing from the place its own records insist it should be, and would rather produce testimony than admit it does not know. The question I put to Danny Snelson runs through the rest of the hour: what happens when unreliability is the design decision instead of the defect? The through line for this cycle is what a machine does at the edge of what it can account for.Mocan's End of Signal, which won the SOLO AI Award '25 and which I wrote about last week, imagines a constellation of 73 satellites called Argus. One of them registers the absence of a lake and, in the minutes before it is unplugged, generates testimonies about what might have happened. Mocan's own term for this is "technological undetermination," a condition in which the unknown comes from a surplus of plausible explanations rooted in existing ground truths rather than from a scarcity of information. Then thatgamecompany started a label. Fifteen years ago, I wrote a Wall Street Journal piece arguing that small studios were the New Hollywood, and the part that did not hold is that almost nobody got wealthy. Danny reframes the whole question by going back to what the word means. A publisher makes things public, which is the labor of getting work into someone's hands, and in a field where the tools keep getting more open, the scarce thing is whoever can be trusted to cut through the noise. He reaches for Annapurna and for Something Else Press in the 1960s, where an imprint was a coterie rather than a funding source. My own answer is smaller: own the audience, and make the games smaller.The back half is the archive and the news. Adam Yates published Holyvoid, 168 pages of artifact for a game that does not exist, in the lineage of Vermis, and Danny argues the hallucination the book produces may beat the game it implies. Joshua Calixto's 2015 piece on the Rosa Var Attre encounter in The Witcher 3 gives us sideshadowing, , and Danny traces it forward through Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring and Disco Elysium. My interview with Don Rawitsch turns into the thing I would now write differently about westward expansion, and Danny lands the episode's best reversal: The Oregon Trail did not teach a generation history, it taught them how games work. We close fast on Mexico joining IberVideojuegos through the Centro de Cultura Digital, on VHOLUME and whether brutalism actually suits parkour, on Inkblood interrogating time itself, and on why marketers keep telling people not to make puzzle games.I started the video with my other microphone (doh!) and we fixed it about 15 minutes in.LinksCezar Mocan's AI satellite cannot get its story straightJoshua Calixto, "Dickens and the Impossible Romances of Video Games"Carol Ann Has DysenteryAn .exe in the caption turned an art book into a rumorMexico joins a seven country games policy programVHOLUME is out, parkour under a brutalist ministryInkblood, a magnifying glass and a time machineKill Screen in 2012: thatgamecompany will self-publish their next gameCezar MocanNouvelle BugHito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV FileJon Bois, 17776Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, "Art histories from nowhere"sunset visitor, 1000xRESISTthatgamecompany launches thatgamepublisherSomething Else PressAdam Yates, HolyvoidPlastiboo, Vermis IGary Saul Morson, Narrative and FreedomVHOLUME on SteamInkblood on SteamIberVideojuegosCentro de Cultura DigitalTUMO Center for Creative TechnologiesAmbrose Trataris, Daisy-Chain Star-Connection at Gray AreaDanny SnelsonHosted 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 ★ CorrectionsThe Witcher 3 character as Rosa von Attre. She is Rosa Var Attre.VHOLUME is credited to Léonard Lemaitre with Niels Tiercelin and Nathan Grange rather than to both brothers.Danny gives Hito Steyerl's film as How Not to Be Seen, a Fucking Didactic .MOV File. The full title is
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    1 時間 1 分
  • 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