What does it mean to really listen to a game? Vadim Nickel is a researcher and game developer at Concordia University who studies exactly that question. His recent survey of sound-first games—titles where music and sound drive the action rather than just accompany it—turns up only 43 examples across nearly four decades of game history. That scarcity is itself the story. We talk about why the tools to make these games have only recently caught up to the ambition, what film sound theory can teach us about how players hear, and why the most interesting territory in game audio might not come from games at all—but from soundwalks, acoustic ecology, and the experimental music practices of R. Murray Schafer and Pauline Oliveros.

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• (00:00) - Listening to Games
• (00:54) - Vadim’s Origin Story
• (04:53) - Surveying Sound First Games
• (07:28) - Tech Barriers and Audio Tools
• (10:33) - Peripherals and Movement

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Symoné is a British-American interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of circus, dance, and game technologies. Her piece Nullspace Motel is a one-hour live performance where audience members are pulled from their seats to play a custom video game — and what they do shapes the story unfolding on stage in real time.

In this conversation, we talk about how a childhood encounter with Katamari Damacy cracked open her sense of what games could be, why she designs explicitly for people who think games aren't for them, and what it means to put a spotlight on a single player in front of seventy strangers. We also get into the origins of Nullspace — a 60-page Google Doc called "Performance and Video Games" — and why she believes the most meaningful thing a game can do has nothing to do with winning.

If you want the full conversation — including a deep dive into game time, duration, the politics of accessibility, and what Beau Ruberg's Video Games / Avant-Garde meant for this work — that's available for Killscreen members. Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★

• (00:00) - Meet Symoné and Nullspace Motel
• (01:24) - From Anthropology to Circus
• (06:24) - First Big Stage Rush
• (09:12) - Games That Changed Everything
• (16:28) - Designing Audience Play

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Competition dance trained young girls to hold their bodies in anticipation of judgment—to perform flawlessly, make difficulty look effortless, and measure themselves in real time against a crowd.

TikTok rewarded all of that. This was not a coincidence.

In this episode, I'm writing about Maya Man's StarQuest, a lecture-performance I saw at LA Dance Project—a work built from 111 AI-generated eight-second clips, each manually restaged from screenshots of Dance Moms episodes, generated using Google's Veo model, and shuffled endlessly by a custom app that never plays them in the same order twice.

The piece traces a throughline from competition dance to the algorithmic logic of social media—and then turns the camera on the artist herself. When Man tried to generate a mixed-race dancer to represent her own body, the model couldn't do it. Through that failure, she found her real role in the work: not dancer, but coach. The same relationship she'd been examining in Abby Lee Miller. The same one running the internet.

I also get into Ted Chiang's argument about AI consciousness and suffering, what it means to command something that performs on your behalf, and whether the act of prompting an AI model is, in some small way, a rehearsal of the same demanding absolutism the work sets out to critique. Also, exploding video game avatars.

If this kind of cultural criticism is your thing, I write about it every week at Killscreen—experimental games, interactive art, and the questions interactive media is quietly raising about how we live.

• (00:00) - AI Consciousness Doubts
• (00:36) - Suffering and Moral Agency
• (01:22) - Seeing Star Quest Live
• (02:48) - Dance Moms to Data Bodies
• (03:54) - Building the AI Clip Machine
• (04:54) - Coaching the Uncanny Performers
• (06:18) - What We Owe Our Creations

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 ★