Killscreen

Nobody asks if a novel is fun.

Games inherited a rule that literature never had: be enjoyable, or you've failed. UCLA professor Danny Snelson says that burden was never warranted.

There's a moment when you look in the mirror and see your parents' face staring back. It happens to all of us eventually.

Artist Carrie Chen took that feeling and made it into something I love. She generated 24 versions of herself at different life stages using AI, projected them life-size onto a gallery wall, and layered them with archival photographs of her mother and great-grandmothers.

She says she didn't expect the physical reaction she had when she saw them breathe and blink back at her.

I talked to Chen about what it means to build a digital version of yourself, why she's treating her AI avatars like kin, and how Renaissance painting and The Sims ended up in the same body of work.

The full interview is free in the newsletter at killscreen.com.

Most artists can name the exact moment they realized someone like them could actually do this.

For Toby Alden it was Cave Story, a Metroidvania built by a single developer over five or six years, ambitious and polished and free. As soon as they saw it was possible, they started trying.

No proof or plan needed!

Full conversation at killscreen.com.

Working with family is supposed to be a disaster. It usually is.

Toby Alden made Love Eternal with their brother for over eight years. No screaming matches. They consider it one of the things he's most grateful for, not just in making the game but in his life.

Full conversation at the link in bio.

Toby Alden had one rule going in: the first two minutes of Love Eternal had to be strange, compelling, and then immediately let you start playing.

What happened after that was less planned. The early sections were careful and expository. But the back two-thirds became him and their brother just chasing whatever felt most outlandish or funny or out there. That's when it started to find
its character.

Most things do. Full conversation at killscreen.com.

There was a trend in the 2000s where games had to justify their stories through their mechanics. The platformer had to feel like grief. The puzzle had to enact loneliness.

Toby Alden thinks players are more willing to accept abstraction than designers give them credit for. You can do arbitrary platforming and then get a story beat and it doesn't break the spell. It feels like a dream.

That dream logic is one of the things games do that nothing else can. I talked with Toby about how they built Love Eternal around that idea. Full conversation at killscreen.com.

Red flag or foundation?

Toby Alden's first game, Love, was ridiculously hard. Deliberately. They designed it for his own enjoyment, and that self-indulgent energy became the bedrock of their practice as an artist.

I talked with Toby about Love Eternal, ambient music, and what it means to trust your own taste before anyone else does. Full conversation at killscreen.com.