The Killscreen Podcast

The Level Designer Who Went Underwater

Jakob Kudsk Steensen [https://www.jakobsteensen.com/] 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 [https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/573604122b8ddea9122c6ee9/208cbda8-65b5-433a-a4dc-aa8aeef9f484/Screenshot+2025-10-18+at+09.17.04.png?format=2500w]—his most narrative work yet, and his return to something that looks more deliberately like a game. The full Otherworlds [https://phi.ca/en/events/jakob-kudsk-steensen-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 [https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en]. Subscribe to Killscreen [https://www.killscreen.com/membership/] 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 ★ [https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/support]

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

I sat down with Lou Faroux [https://www.instagram.com/loufauroux/]—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 [http://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 [https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en]. 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 ★ [https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/support]

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 [https://www.killscreen.com/tag/kara-stone/] is a game designer based in Calgary who runs Solar Server [https://www.solarserver.games/], a solar-powered web server hosting low-carbon games from her apartment balcony. Her latest game, Known Mysteries [https://www.solarserver.games/onnow.html#], is set in a near-future Alberta where oil and tech have fused into something indistinguishable. Joshua Ashish Dawson [https://joshua-dawson.com/openin] 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 [https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en]. 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 ★ [https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/support]

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 [http://www.killscreen.com/asses-masses-blenkarn-lim-collective-play/] 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 [https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en]. 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 ★ [https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/support]

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 ★ [https://www.killscreen.com/#/portal/support] * (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 [https://www.instagram.com/nicksylvester/?hl=en]. 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