The Killscreen Podcast

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 [email protected] Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★

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.LinksEd Smith, "The horror of Resident Evil 2’s police station"Miles Buckle Makes Games You Can’t PlayThe Little Database expands into a desktop directoryKill Screen on the Resident Evil film’s save pointsKill Screen on Defence Contractor Fantasy WorldDanny Snelson, The Little Database: A Poetics of Media FormatsThe Little Database desktop directoryScott Richmond, Cinema’s Bodily IllusionsPippin Barr, v r 3Miles Buckle on InstagramPaul Sharits, Dots 1 and 2 on UbuWebFiasco, from Bully Pulpit GamesCorrectionsDanny 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 [email protected] Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★

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.LinksBrendan 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 [email protected] Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★

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 [email protected] Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★

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 [email protected] Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★