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.

Want the full conversation? Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★

• (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

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

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

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

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 ★

Toby Alden is a game designer and DJ based in Los Angeles. Their platformer Love Eternal — released today — is an eight-year collaboration with their brother Sam that grew from an earlier, near-unbeatable freeware game called Love. In this conversation, Toby talks about making music and games in parallel, the surprising amount of work a single animation frame can do, why they let the story operate on dream logic, and what it feels like to hand a creative problem to someone you trust completely.

• (00:00) - Does the Story Have to Connect to the Mechanics?
• (01:55) - Cave Story, Solo Dev, and the Free-to-Play Asterisk
• (05:54) - DJing, Ambient Music, and Scoring Love Eternal with Emily Glass
• (15:17) - From Brutal Freeware to Family Drama: Building Love Eternal
• (22:58) - Making a Game With Your Brother for Eight Years
• (24:16) - Division of Labor and Improvising Scenes Together
• (25:21) - Why the Jump Feels Right: Animation, Physics, and Dream Logic
• (36:21) - Level Design by Instinct, Portland to LA, and Closing

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 ★

In 1922, Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific changed anthropology forever, introducing the world to "thick description" and the rigors of deep fieldwork. A century later, researcher Michael Hoffman is bringing that text into the future.

In this episode, Jamin Warren sits down with Hoffman—a computer scientist and anthropologist at one of Germany’s premier supercomputing centers—to discuss his creation of the "Anthrogame." By feeding classic ethnographic texts into Large Language Models, Hoffman has built a playable Dungeon Master version of Trobriand society, where players navigate the complex social and economic rituals of the South Pacific.

We explore the intersection of worldbuilding and fieldwork, the frustration of academic reach, and whether AI can turn dense monographs into "appetizers" that make us more curious about the real world. Is anthropology the original worldbuilding discipline? And why haven't game designers tapped into the "thick description" of real cultures?

Host: Jamin Warren
Guest: Michael Hoffman (Leibniz-Rechenzentrum)

• (00:00) - Introduction: The Decline of Reading
• (00:27) - Anthropology and AI: A New Frontier
• (01:27) - Michael Hoffman's Journey
• (02:40) - The Intersection of Anthropology and Game Design
• (28:57) - Cultural Representation in Pedagogy
• (29:33) - Malinowski and the Argonauts of the Western Pacific
• (34:47) - Developing an AI-Powered Text Adventure Game
• (46:22) - Challenges and Future of AI in Anthropology

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 ★

Swedish studio Simogo spent their first five years making seven games—Year Walk, Device 6, Sailor's Dream—then two games over the next decade. Their new Legacy Collection preserves that early mobile work by recreating the iPhone itself inside modern platforms, complete with virtual gestures and motion controls. Simon Flesser talks about the decade-long conversation that led to preservation, the difference between remasters and ports, why doors that don't open are more interesting than the rooms behind them, and the specific Northern European melancholy that Americans mistake for horror. We discuss production constraints as creative fuel, the challenge of staying relevant across decades of game-making, and why no one would start a five-year project if they knew it would take five years.

• (00:00) - Introduction to Digital Preservation
• (00:33) - Samo's Legacy Collection and Preservation Challenges
• (05:25) - The Philosophy Behind Remasters and Ports
• (14:52) - Reflections on Time and Creative Evolution
• (28:09) - Production-Driven Game Development
• (29:16) - Architectural Influence in Game Design
• (35:08) - Intertextuality and Media Inspiration
• (44:23) - Creative Community and Future Plans

There's already a game about the Haitian Revolution. It's part of Assassin's Creed. You sneak around, you stab people, you "free the slaves"—and the game gives you an achievement notification.

Dom Rabrun thinks that's bullshit.

The Haitian-American painter and game designer is building Vèvè-Punk: Mind Singer, a game about the Haitian Revolution that refuses to let you pick up a weapon. Instead, you navigate Saint-Domingue's 16 racial classifications through dialogue trees, where saying the wrong thing to the wrong person can get you killed. Your protagonist isn't a soldier—she's a telepath and a singer. A free woman of color with zero strength, zero dexterity, and everything on the line.

Dom's work sits at the intersection of Haitian Vodou symbolism, Basquiat's visual language, and the kind of thoughtful, conversation-driven game design you'd find in Disco Elysium. He's part of a generation of artists who grew up with games, studied painting, then realized that interactivity might be the best way to tell certain stories.

But there's no lineage for what he's doing. Black filmmakers have Oscar Micheaux, Charles Burnett, Ava DuVernay. Black game designers? They're writing that history right now.

In this conversation, we discuss why physical violence is the laziest choice in games, what it means to hold a controller and "control" someone, and how Basquiat's painting Glenn taught him to think about right-clicking on reality. We also tackle the deeper question: when you're making a game about historical trauma, about enslavement, about revolution—how do you do that without replicating the very dehumanization you're trying to critique?

About Dom Rabrun: Dom's work merges technology, storytelling, and music into a cohesive creative system. Guided by his first-generation Haitian-American heritage, conservative Christian upbringing, and 15 years of experience in IT, he's developed a philosophy called "Vèvè-Punk," blending Haitian Vodou symbolism with futuristic Afro-Caribbean themes. In 2020, his video piece Dr. LaSalle, The Spider Queen, and Me earned first prize in a juried exhibition at the Phillips Collection. He was a 2022 fellow with Black Public Media, which is now executive producing his forthcoming video game. He lives and works in Hyattsville, Maryland.

Killscreen treats games and interactive media as cultural artifacts worthy of the same analytical rigor as film, literature, and art. Subscribe wherever you get podcasts.

Links: Dom Rabrun site and YouTube
Read the full article.

If you like what you're listening to, please consider becoming a member.

Big Buck Hunter made a quarter billion dollars by perfecting one thing: the tactile pleasure of pulling a trigger. This arcade shooter stripped hunting down to its essential tension—the moment before you fire, when your heart jumps and your hand trembles—then packaged it for drunk people in Brooklyn bars.

We read Jason Fagone's 2010 profile of the game's creator George Petro, who understood that the gun itself had to be an object of desire, calibrated like an iPhone for immediate satisfaction. The piece examines how Buck Hunter became morally complex without trying to be: a game that presents animals as innocent, majestic creatures, then asks you to shoot them anyway while chatting with friends over beer. It's the gap between the act and the environment that creates its under-the-skin power.

Fagone traces how an arcade game designed by non-hunters became the most lucrative shooter ever made, not through narrative sophistication but through understanding something older and weirder about human psychology. The sensation of shooting in Buck Hunter feels less like a video game and more like telling someone you love a lie—a tiny thrill followed by mostly subconscious regret, justified and moved past.

Originally published in Kill Screen Issue #1, Spring 2010. Get a physical copy if you are so inspired!

Music by Shiden Beats Music from Pixabay

Sound Effect by Universfield from Pixabay
Sound Effect by freesound_community from Pixabay
Sound Effect by freesound_community from Pixabay