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. 4D AGO

    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

  2. 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

  3. 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

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. FEB 13

    He Fed a Classic Anthropology Text To Make An AI Game. Here's What Happened.

    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 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 ★

    58 min

  8. FEB 5

    Doors That Don't Open: Simon Flesser on Constraint, Preservation, and Northern European Melancholy

    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 ★ Support this podcast ★

    53 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
    26
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025 The Killscreen Podcast
  • Show Website
    The Killscreen Podcast

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