This is the transcript of an artist talk I gave about the end-of-life of Adobe Flash, and digital art preservation in general. It was part of “Gone in a Flash”, a series of events organized by the MacKenzie Art Gallery and Neutral Ground Artist Run Centre. You can also watch the video here or check …
Category Archives: talks
Games Without Players
This is the transcript of a talk I gave at the 2020 Play Festival. The festival normally takes place in Hamburg but was moved online due to COVID. It’s a sequel to my previous Indiepocalypse talk. The Google Slides can be found here , a pixelated video recording is here.
Two Hundred Fifty Things a Game Designer Should Know
In 2018, architecture critic Michael Sorkin wrote “Two Hundred Fifty Things an Architect Should Know”. The items on the listicle are poetic, thought provoking, introspective, practical, and sometimes even canonical. They all connect architecture with broader social issues. In July 2020, four months after Sorkin’s death due to COVID-19, I challenged my Twitter friends and aquaintances …
Continue reading “Two Hundred Fifty Things a Game Designer Should Know”
Indiepocalypse Now. Indiecade Europe 2017 Keynote
This is the transcript+slides of a keynote I gave at the 2017 Indiecade Europe festival in Paris. Attention economy, indie market saturation, and how, why, and for whom we make games. Read it here: http://molleindustria.org/indiepocalypse/index.html
Stranger Playthings: Remaking a VR counterculture
The second coming of Virtual Reality is a convergence of different technological traditions with different aesthetics, goals, and strategies. In this talk given at the A MAZE and Game Happens festivals in 2017 I tried to question the current narratives supporting the idea of VR as a mass-consumer product, and recuperate some of the visionary …
Continue reading “Stranger Playthings: Remaking a VR counterculture”
SimCities & SimCrises
I had the honor to be one of the keynote speakers for the first International City Gaming Conference in Rotterdam last month. The conference, mainly attended by city planners and architects, looked at how games can facilitate more effective and inclusive city-making. Here’s the transcript of my talk (a similar version was presented a year ago at …
The Great Art Upgrade – DiGRA 2013
This talk was delivered as keynote for the Art History of Games conference, that took place during DiGRA 2013. While the infamous Can Games Be Art? question is now being carefully avoided like an inappropriate text you sent while drunk, some references and questions may still be valuable to the world beyond the small group …
Making Games in a Fucked Up World – G4C 2014
These are the slides and the edited notes from a talk I gave at the Games for Change Festival in New York. The talk was targeted to that specific audience (bureaucrats from the nonprofit industrial complex, TED-style technopositivists, game advocates…). Certain parts such as my take on metrics and social change, which may seem obvious …
Continue reading “Making Games in a Fucked Up World – G4C 2014”
Invisible Walls, Puffy Clouds, and the Unheavenly World Behind Them
This is the transcript of a minitalk I gave at Lost Levels 2014, an “unconference” happening during the Game Developers Conference (maybe a bit too square and academic for that casual environment). It’s a topic I’ve addressed in every single talk in the last 10 years or so, but I thought it could benefit from …
Continue reading “Invisible Walls, Puffy Clouds, and the Unheavenly World Behind Them”
Videogames and the Spirit of Capitalism
This is a talk I gave at Indiecade East 2014 (remotely due to snow-related flight cancellation). It’s based on an text I wrote for the catalog of Time & Motion: Redefining Working Life, an exhibition at FACT gallery in Liverpool. It’s also meant to be a companion piece for the game To Build a Better …
Toward Independence – Indiecade 2012
This is a slightly edited transcript of a short talk I gave at Indiecade 2012. It was part of the panel “Let’s Play With the World: Games, Art, Activism and Other Subversions” organized by Johannes Grenzfurthner. I added a few minor passages that got cut due to time constraints.
Fucking polygons, fucking pixels: On procedural representations of sex
Arse Elekronika (not to be confused with the similarly sounding, slightly more established new media art festival in Linz) is the most important conference investigating the intersection of sex and technology. The past six editions revolved around themes like porn as innovation driver, sexuality in science fiction or body enhancements. This year the emphasis was …
Continue reading “Fucking polygons, fucking pixels: On procedural representations of sex”