Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Jamin Warren
Peter Nichols Built a Colony Sim for the Last Honey Bees
Peter Nichols, the Los Angeles artist and developer behind Elfsend, released Buzzkeeper on November 7, a free browser game about keeping the last honey bee hive on Earth alive. Grim! The release announcement calls it "an emotional colony sim based on real behavioral research and climate prediction" and Nicholas has m tightened this last ditch effort to forty minutes to cover a single queen's reign.
Where do artists who make games "fit"?
Where do artists who make games "fit"? It's a question I hear quite often—Tomo Kihara told me that "I will not sit comfortably in one chair," a sentiment shared by many interdisciplinary creators. Early this year, I had the pleasure of hearing artist (and Killscreen member) Mitchell Chan work through this idea in a talk as part of NEW INC's DEMO Day. Chan has consolidated the work in the newly published "Categories of the Art Game," an essay on Rhizome's blog.
Janne Schimmel and Vinzenz Build Remote-Work Console Game
Those shiny objects we hold in our hands and stuff beneath under media consoles are deceptively smooth. So smooth, there's a cottage industry of case covers to keep clumsy cats like me from breaking their phones when they're juggling too many things in the kitchen. Artist Janne Schimmel and game maker Vinzenz see the deception of those shiny surfaces and have responded with Friendly Secrecy System, a game and sculpture built as a fictional remote-work console.
Reactionary Replicas reviews 30 years of museum shooters
Event details When Sat., Nov. 21, in Session 2, 1:35 to 2:50 p.m. CET. FROG runs Fri., Nov. 20 to Sun., Nov. 22. Where Belvedere 21, Vienna, Austria Cost Free, registration required "Reactionary Replicas: 30+ Years of the First Museum Shooter" is a special talk by Elliott Burns, lead author for the publication Side Quest, and he takes on games that model real galleries and museums. It'll be part of a session at Museums Inside and Outside Play in Vienna.
Name of the Will's daylight cult reaches a playable demo
News — 2 min read Key art for NAME OF THE WILL. Image: Zeitgeist Studio / HYPER REAL Of all the ominous names for a cult, HOPE is truly diabolical. It is a place of intense microobservation where every thought and smile is tallied. NAME OF THE WILL (集體後遺症) pins you to its walls: each day finds you at work on the quotidian, diligently doing your tasks. But at night you are free to explore the 34 floors to hack terminals and figure out exactly what the Benevolent Father is up to.
Six artists tackle pauses and glances as data in Soft Signals
Event details When Opening Thurs., Nov. 12, 6:30 p.m. On view Nov. 13 to 22: Fri., Nov. 13, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sat., Nov. 14, 6 to 10 p.m.; Sun., Nov. 15, 6 to 8 p.m.; Mon., Nov. 16 to Fri., Nov. 20, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Sat., Nov. 21 and Sun., Nov. 22, 2 to 8 p.m. Where Institut français, Cluj-Napoca, Romania Soft Signals is a digital arts exhibition about the gestures and messages that transcend language: changes in tone, pregnant pauses, forlorn glances and of course, those messages left unread.
“It’s About Skinning Faces, and That’s All You Need to Know”
Currently Making is a series featuring artists and game-makers with work in progress. Adam Pype downloaded GameMaker one night as a teenager in Belgium, ran through the built-in tutorial, and never really stopped. He went on to major in independent game production, spent a year at Nitrome working on Shovel Knight Dig, and for 32 straight months released a new game every month. One of those monthly games, a Halloween horror experiment, did well enough that he kept going in that direction.
Adam Pype Hands You the Knife [Podcast]
Podcast — 1 min read SKINFACE (Adam Pype and Ties Groen) I ask Adam Pype, the Belgian developer behind No Players Online, why a game where you peel the faces off strangers turns out to be easier on the squeamish than one where it happens to you. SKINFACE started at an in-person game jam in Belgium on the theme “mask.” Adam pitched it to the room, heard that it was messed up and that he should go for it, and built it with the artist Ties Groen.
The Whistle and the Sink: What to Play, October 30
Playlist — 8 min read The Killscreen Horror Collection closes this weekend: fifteen independent horror games, each with a deal from the people who made it, free to browse through Oct. 31. This post is for subscribers on the Helping Hand and Trustee tiers only
Brainfruit's Sheeps turns a sleep trick into a roguelite
Brainfruit Studio, the North Carolina studio run by Rob Dubbin and Garrett Miller, has announced Sheeps, a roguelite built on a single action: counting. Sheep pour out of a rift and across a field, and the player enters how many crossed. Accurate counts earn upgrades. Bad ones let crows eat the player's peanuts, which serve as health. The game is planned for PC, Mac, and SteamOS in 2027, and the store page is open for wishlists. Seems simple enough and yet....
A Metal Oil Rig Is Screaming: Oct. 28, 2026
GAMES THIS WEEK — 6 min read Resident Evil (Zach Cregger, 2026) We're almost done with spooky season! I know nearly half of you are coming from abroad, so Halloween doesn't mean much (and I'd happily trade for a proper Carnival), but I went as Tony Soprano this year. One bathrobe, slippers, and rolled up Newark Star-Ledger, and I was good to go. Feedback alert! So Friday's Playlist is a mix of new games and older work, let me know if you prefer one or the other?
Scoring Fear: Ryan Holladay and Jason Graves on the Sound of Dread
"No one noticed that there's music, but they love the scene." Ryan Holladay Tension is something that's built before the scare. Cross-Conversations: Horror, presented with MUBI, puts people who make horror films and horror games in the same room, and the first conversation brought together two composers who build it for a living. Ryan Holladay is a composer and sound artist based in Los Angeles.
The Dread Built Into Ordinary Rooms [Podcast]
I talked with three people who build dread out of ordinary rooms. Sophie Winqvist Loggins shot Aniara, Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja's adaptation of Harry Martinson's poem about a passenger ship knocked off course on its way to Mars. Max Friberg is creative director at Housefire, the studio behind the surrealist horror game Eclipsium. Johanna Kasurinen co-founded Wrong Organ and leads art and narrative on Mouthwashing, its game about a freighter crew stranded after a crash.
Choose Where You Fall: What to Play, October 23
Sorry about the earlier send today! I publish on Ghost, and the default is email. I often publish directly to the site and save email for big sends. Thanks for understanding! Ok, on to this week's pick. New on the podcast: The Dating Sim That Won't Tell You Why. Danny Snelson and I talk through Sagan Yee's mermaid hookup sim, Oleomingus's paradise, You+Pea's building plans and a Steel Battalion cockpit in a box. This post is for subscribers on the Helping Hand and Trustee tiers only
The Dating Sim That Won't Tell You Why [Podcast]
I open with Sagan Yee's Last Call for the Redding District, a 3D narrative game that asks what would happen if mermaids had the life cycle of Pacific salmon. You swim home to a town modeled on Saskatoon, catch up with everyone you went to school with, decide who to spawn with, and then everyone dies. Danny Snelson, who advised Sagan's MFA thesis at UCLA, joins me to talk through clips from my interview with Sagan.
“When You Go Into Space, You Go Into Your Own Dark”
Mouthwashing — 7 min read In 1956, Harry Martinson published Aniara, an epic poem about a passenger ship knocked off course on its way to Mars.
What Does Grand Theft Auto Do When No One Is Watching?
Playlist — 9 min read Playlist 293 You Are Currently in a Session on Your Own (2026) Kent Sheely I feel like I have nothing really interesting to say about Grand Theft Auto, since I've been living with the franchise my whole life. Each new entry boasts a grand (har har) new city with roughly the same style of play: driving and shooting. I'd argue most of us know what to expect. In perilous times, repetition offers some comfort, even if we only see a new title every decade or so.
[Event] Space and the Body: Aniara, Eclipsium and Mouthwashing
Event details When Oct. 20, 2026, 10 to 11 a.m. PT Where Online Cost Free Horror keeps finding new ways to trap a body. For Cross-Conversations: Horror, Killscreen puts someone from horror film in conversation with people from horror games, and this session is about space and the body. Sophie Winqvist shot Aniara, the Swedish film about a passenger ship knocked off course on its way to Mars.
The Sound of Dread, From Weapons to Dead Space [Podcast]
I sit down with two composers who make audiences flinch for a living. Ryan Holladay scored Zach Cregger's Weapons and this year's Resident Evil with his brother Hays. Jason Graves wrote the music for the original Dead Space trilogy, Until Dawn and Still Wakes the Deep. This is the first of Killscreen's Cross-Conversations: Horror, three free talks presented with MUBI that put people who make horror films and horror games in the same room.
Experimental Game Culture This Week: Oct. 14, 2026
GAMES THIS WEEK — 7 min read Last Call for the Redding District (courtesy Sagan Yee) October at Killscreen has turned out to be mostly about fear: the Horror Collection, the Scoring Fear talk, and now an issue that opens on a fish who has to swim home to die. I promise it's sweeter than it sounds. One other thing I've been working on is a new Events page.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley Releases The Eyes Under the Sky
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley has released The Eyes Under the Sky, a free browser horror game about gender enforcement in public toilets. It accompanies a comics series of the same name and is playable at theeyesunderthesky.com. Brathwaite-Shirley built it to run on phones, including inside Instagram's in-app browser. 0:00 /0:24 Brathwaite-Shirley's preview of The Eyes Under the Sky, from the announcement.
Miles Buckle invents a Paul McCartney idle game from 1998
Twenty-eight years ago this week, Paul McCartney did not release a CD-ROM. That has not stopped London 3D artist Miles Buckle from celebrating the anniversary: the latest video commemorates Temporary Secretary, a 1998 desktop game in which you play Paul's temp, leave the thing idling for days and check back to see whether Paul has any assignments for you. 0:00 /0:43 Temporary Secretary (1998), the CD-ROM that never was. Video: Miles Buckle.
Dave Shuff's Big Steel Battalion Box Wins Editor's Choice
News — 3 min read The Big Steel Battalion Box at Maker Faire Bay Area 2026. Photo courtesy Dave Shuff. In 2014, Killscreen's Michael Pedersen climbed into a refrigerator box in Dave Shuff's Brooklyn home and piloted a mech. The box was the Big Steel Battalion Box, a homemade cockpit for Steel Battalion, Capcom's 2002 Xbox game that shipped with a $200, 40-button controller. The house rule that night: skill was discouraged.
Fish Make O-Faces, and Other Lessons From the Redding District
Thomas Wolfe's posthumous novel told readers You Can't Go Home Again, and generations of writers have mostly taken him at his word. Sagan Yee's answer is stranger and more biological: you can go home, you have to, and it will be the last thing you do. Last Call for the Redding District, the game Yee built for his MFA in UCLA's Design Media Arts program, asks what would happen if mermaids had the life cycle of Pacific salmon.
The audience writes the bars Degular raps
Event details When Oct. 18, 2026, 3:30 p.m. Where Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, London Cost £25; £20 concessions Degular labels data for a living. By night it raps. dmstfctn's character, trained to describe the world in objective, manageable language, keeps hitting the wall every data worker knows: some things refuse the label.
A rhinestone is the only controller in Moled to Gold
Event details When Through Oct. 11, 2026 (Wednesday to Sunday, noon to 6 p.m.) Where Art/Space 114, 114 W. 4th St., Los Angeles You open a shrine-like door and a mirror looks back. Then comes the one move the piece gives you: stick a rhinestone somewhere on your own face. A camera reads the placement, and a language model trained on the meanings of Chinese mole reading, the centuries-old practice of 痣相, writes you a fortune on the spot.
Walk, Sit, Listen: What to Play, October 9
Playlist — 6 min read This post is for subscribers on the Helping Hand and Trustee tiers only
Inside Keiken’s giant mask, you wait to be reborn
Every roleplaying game starts in the same room: the one where you pick a body. Keiken built that room at architectural scale. The Divine Puppeteer, now installed at BALTIC in Gateshead, is a monumental fiberglass mask you step up to and wear; for 11 minutes, a binaural sound journey puts you in the head of a deity sitting in a waiting room, flicking through a catalogue of possible bodies and preparing to be reborn. A Morphogenic Angel? Something more like a snail?
Brass, Flesh and a Genius Grant [Podcast]
I open with a fan who has rebuilt P.T. from its own PS4 code, which raises the question under the whole hour: when a game can disappear, who is responsible for keeping it? Danny Snelson calls in from New York with a ZipDeck in tow, and we take a detour through Zach Cregger's Resident Evil, which Danny calls a faithful betrayal.
The Buttons Are Under Your Skin [Podcast]
Podcast — 2 min read I ask Murlo, the Manchester producer and illustrator Chris Pell, what changes when the crowd is gone and the work is a game someone plays alone in a room. Something Beautiful is the music-driven point-and-click he is building by himself in Unreal Engine, set on a broken industrial estate much like the one beside Shepshed, the East Midlands market town where he grew up drawing in his bedroom and copying Boris Vallejo to learn anatomy.
Scoring Fear: The Composers Behind Weapons and Dead Space
Event details When Oct. 13, 2026, 10 to 11 a.m. PT Where Online Cost Free Horror lives in what you hear before what you see. For Cross-Conversations: Horror, Killscreen puts someone from horror film in conversation with someone from horror games, and this session starts with sound. Ryan Holladay co-scored Weapons and this year's Resident Evil film. Jason Graves scored Dead Space, Until Dawn and Still Wakes the Deep, where he built his own metal instrument to make the score.
The Killscreen Horror Collection
October 2026 · Free through 31 October Fourteen independent horror games we think you should play this month, each with a deal from the people who made it. Sign up once and every offer lands in your inbox in a single email. In celebration of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, streaming 2 October on MUBI. Get 30 days of MUBI, free, and watch Jane Schoenbrun's new film alongside the games.
Not With a Scream, But With a Bloop: What to Play, October 2
Playlist — 8 min read Many thanks to the folks at MUBI for making October’s Playlists available to everyone. Get 30 days free. Playlist 291 Crude Oil (2026) Peter Nichols “The Oil Encounter ... has produced scarcely a single work of note.” -Amitav Ghosh, 1992 In sci-fi writer Fritz Leiber’s 1964 cosmic horror short story, “The Black Gondolier,” the unnamed narrator found himself with an odd, learned friend named Daloway, who was stricken with a particularly unfortunate obsession.
Murlo Builds a World You Can Play
William Blake trusted almost no one to make his books. He wrote the poems, etched the plates, printed the pages, and colored them by hand (with his wife, Catherine, of course), so that word and image arrived together as one private cosmology. Murlo, the Manchester producer and illustrator born Chris Pell, works in a similar spirit.
Come and See: What to Play, September 25
Playlist — 6 min read This week: a photography game where the camera is the only thing you can do, set inside a war you cannot stop. Playlist is for Killscreen members. Membership starts at five dollars a month, and the first month is free. Playlist 290 Umurangi Generation (2020) Origame Digital Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge.
Peter Burr's DVD-era animation network turned 20 at Roulette
News — 2 min read Photo by Ostrava Kamera Oko In 2006, when YouTube was a baby and Netflix still mailed discs, Peter Burr pressed the first Cartune Xprez DVD and started driving experimental animation into basements and cinemas across twenty countries.
Cameron Granger builds a dance floor you can only cross once
Apocalypse — 6 min read This post is for paying subscribers only
Bub is a paper-cut memoir of a thousand cut pieces
News — 2 min read Bub is built from paper—thousands of cut pieces, "slashes of ink and paint," collages photographed into a stop-motion world by hand. This week the paper traveled. Case Jernigan and Todd Anderson, the two-person studio Paperfrog, brought the game to Amsterdam for a playtest and presentation at the Rijksakademie, followed by a showing at [untitled games event] #8 on Sept. 18—opening night of the series' first three-day weekender, which runs through Sept. 20.
Watch "A Field Guide of Orbital Melancholy"[Playlist 289]
Hey, we're doing something a little bit differently again. Cezar Mocan, who I covered earlier this week and spoke about on our podcast yesterday, has graciously agreed to let members watch his real-time simulation, A Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy. You can read more about the work here. A quick note about real-time simulations for those who don't know.
The Lake Was Gone and the Satellite Kept Talking [Podcast]
Unreal Engine — 2 min read I open with Cezar Mocan's satellite, which finds a lake missing from the place its own records insist it should be, and would rather produce testimony than admit it does not know. The question I put to Danny Snelson runs through the rest of the hour: what happens when unreliability is the design decision instead of the defect? The through line for this cycle is what a machine does at the edge of what it can account for.
Gaming Club: Pocket Boss with Mario von Rickenbach
Gaming Club — 2 min read This post is for subscribers only
Falling stars replace the map in Gabe Askew's Abelina
When we think about the afterlife, we're haunted by images of the River Styx or the arrow-throwing monkeys of Mictlan. But what if it's something else entirely, a place where you can die many times over in search of the things you've lost. Animator Gabe Askew has been posting more development updates from his solo effort Abelina, including a well-shared clip of its character pausing on a ledge while the camera tilts up: no minimap, no compass rose, no objective marker.
Cezar Mocan's AI satellite cannot get its story straight
satellite — 6 min read End of Signal at SOLO Contemporary, Madrid, June 2026. Courtesy the artist. On a strange night in Cezar Mocan's A Field Guide to Orbital Melancholy, a lake goes missing. Seventy-two satellites, operating as a single artificial mind, report a toxic lake gone from a place where it has always been. But by morning, strangely, it is back. Perhaps it was truly a hallucination, but the problem is no one is around to see which version is actually true. And the only witness?
Trains Don't Stop: What to Play, September 11
Playlist — 6 min read This post is for subscribers on the Helping Hand and Trustee tiers only
Riding a Bike Through San Andreas [Podcast]
Playlist — 2 min read I ask Bruno Abib why a short film about police violence in the suburbs of Lisbon needed Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to finish its story. Death in August (Morte em Agosto, 2023) follows a group of friends after one of them drowns in a lagoon. Some of them take on the police. Pedro stays in his bedroom and plays San Andreas.
Games This Week: Sep. 9, 2026
Today would've been my grandfather's 94th birthday. He wasn't a big games person, but apparently, he loved to play the dice game bunco with my grandmother. Rest easy, Popo! Ok! So every so often, a week arranges itself. This one is about apparatus: a magnifying glass that opens the past instead of enlarging it, a controller built to be unpleasant to hold, a nightclub rebuilt inside a headset because the body that used to go out cannot do it anymore.
Carol Ann Has Dysentery
The tale of The Oregon Trail is a bundle of odd circumstances and lucky breaks. Developed in 1971 by three college students for the Minnesota public school system, the game became one of the most influential pieces of pop culture in the last half-century. The Oregon Trail was partly responsible for Apple’s dominance in the ’80s in the education space, but the game’s creators never made a dime. Even its creation was nearly thwarted.
When you can no longer close the club, you build one
If you’ve had the misfortune of not quite having enough cable, you may have been tempted to cross one power strip over another. Any DIY arcade maker knows this well, and you hope the entire arrangement doesn’t become a fire hazard. But artist Ambrose Trataris pointed me to a different understanding while making their new work, which premiered at Gray Area in San Francisco on Aug. 29. “In the queer community, resources are daisy-chained,” they say.
One Pigeon Instead of Every Clock [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.
Gradually, Then Suddenly: What to Play, September 4
I've been putting together the best and brightest of what independent, experimental, and artist-driven games and culture have to offer in Radar. Add it to your emails in settings. This post is for subscribers on the Helping Hand tier only
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Jamin
Contact Jamin, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack