The Killscreen Podcast

Jamin Warren
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Join host Jamin Warren on conversations with someone of the most unique and experimental artists, designers, and thinkers in the worlds of games, play and culture Jamin Warren founded Killscreen and has produced events such as the Versions conference for VR arts and creativity, in partnership with NEW INC. Warren also programmed the first Tribeca Games Festival, the groundbreaking Arcade at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Kill Screen Festival, which Mashable called "the TED of videogames." Additionally, he has served as an advisor for the Museum of Modern Art's design department, acted as cluster chair for the Gaming category for the Webbys, and hosted Game/Show for PBS Digital Studios.

  1. 3D AGO

    The Level Designer Who Went Underwater

    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 ★

    21 min

  2. MAY 13

    Lou Faroux: Internet Collapse, the Sewing Circle, and Building Digital Worlds from Queer Hollywood History

    I sat down with Lou Faroux—French artist and filmmaker—to talk about growing up on The Sims, why she spent years making films before she ever touched a game engine, and what it means to treat internet collapse as an art subject rather than a catastrophe. Lou's practice is hard to categorize, which is exactly why I find it so interesting. She uses game engines, deepfakes, found footage, and AI avatars to ask something most of us feel but struggle to name: what did the internet do to us? Not what it gave us — what it did to us. To our habits, our bodies, our sense of time. In this conversation, we get into her origin story as a gamer who hacked The Sims with her sister, why Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Kardashian keep showing up in her work as near-religious figures, how she builds with gaming assets the way a painter builds with color, and what she means when she talks about internet collapse as a subject for anthropology rather than science fiction. This is the public version of a longer members-only conversation. Paid members get the full hour, including a deep dive into her current project —Diamonds and Dust—a virtual world built around queer Hollywood history from the 1930s. If this conversation makes you want more, the best next step is signing up for the Killscreen newsletter at www.killscreen.com. It's free to start, and it's where I do my most serious writing on games as cultural objects. (00:00) - Welcome and Setup (01:36) - Games and Early Play (03:09) - Hacking The Sims (05:20) - From Games to Film (12:25) - Internet Collapse Themes (18:55) - Zuckerberg and Kardashians (25:54) - Gaming Language and Wrap Up 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 ★

    28 min

  3. MAY 5

    Can Art Fight Climate Change? Kara Stone & Joshua Dawson on Solar Servers, Degrowth, and Making Work in a Crisis

    What does it cost—materially, ethically, psychologically—to make digital art about the climate crisis? I brought together two artists who are building things inside the very systems they're critiquing. Kara Stone is a game designer based in Calgary who runs Solar Server, a solar-powered web server hosting low-carbon games from her apartment balcony. Her latest game, Known Mysteries, is set in a near-future Alberta where oil and tech have fused into something indistinguishable. Joshua Ashish Dawson is a speculative designer and filmmaker who builds fictional climate futures from CGI and live action — ghost towns in the Atacama Desert, deregulated water systems, server farms built from the copper that destroyed the communities they replaced. In this conversation, we get into what geography gives you that abstraction doesn't, whether the medium is complicit in what it critiques, and how both of them stay sane while making work about catastrophe. (00:00) - Welcome and Format (00:51) - Tech Supply Chains and Climate (02:29) - Meet Kara and Her Path (05:08) - Solar Server Explained (09:15) - Designing Known Mysteries (15:59) - Aesthetics and Constraints (18:42) - Meet Joshua and Next Steps 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 ★

    21 min

  4. APR 28

    100 Strangers, One Controller: Making asses.masses with Patrick Blenkarn & Milton Lim

    Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim are the Canadian theater-makers behind asses.masses — an eight-hour live RPG where an audience shares a single controller to guide a group of unemployed donkeys fighting to reclaim their labor from machines. It's toured from Helsinki to Los Angeles, and after 55 performances, no two shows have ever gone the same way. In this conversation, we talk about how they built the game from YouTube tutorials in a 300-seat theater with no budget, why donkeys became their central symbol (the answer involves a 15th-century woodcut, the global skin trade, and four years of development), and how they designed a game that assumes no single person holds all of the answers — on purpose. We also get into the political stakes of a work that keeps touring as the conversation around AI and labor keeps sharpening around it. Read my full piece on asses.masses at killscreen.com, and subscribe to the Killscreen newsletter for new writing on games and culture every Tuesday and Thursday. 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 ★

    38 min

  5. APR 21

    Vadim Nickel Is Waiting for Games to Hear Themselves

    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 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

    13 min

  6. APR 19

    The Body Is the Controller: Symoné on Circus, Memory, and Live Play

    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 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

    22 min

  7. APR 14

    Dance Moms Trained a Generation to Perform for Algorithms

    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 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 ★

    7 min

  8. FEB 19

    What If A Love Eternal's Story Doesn't Explain Itself?

    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 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 ★

    42 min
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About

Join host Jamin Warren on conversations with someone of the most unique and experimental artists, designers, and thinkers in the worlds of games, play and culture Jamin Warren founded Killscreen and has produced events such as the Versions conference for VR arts and creativity, in partnership with NEW INC. Warren also programmed the first Tribeca Games Festival, the groundbreaking Arcade at the Museum of Modern Art, and the Kill Screen Festival, which Mashable called "the TED of videogames." Additionally, he has served as an advisor for the Museum of Modern Art's design department, acted as cluster chair for the Gaming category for the Webbys, and hosted Game/Show for PBS Digital Studios.

Information

  • Creator
    Jamin Warren
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    28
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025 The Killscreen Podcast
  • Show Website
    The Killscreen Podcast

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