Motorbiking in Trials Evolution isn't about speed, flips, or flails. It's an exercise in meditation on landscapes.

In PopCap's tower defense game, lively plants defeat a zombie horde. We asked a horticulture expert how real plants grapple with nature in uncannily similar ways.

When in doubt, look to Italo Calvino's systematic writings about literature and the imagination. We use one of his essays to speculate on the creation of a gaming canon.

How different is writing about games from writing about food or music? We talk to New York food critic Adam Platt and former Pitchfork EIC Scott Plagenhoef about dealing with the internet and what it means to be a critic.

If the skills we learn in games don't matter, why are they so unforgiving? NYU professor Jesper Juul and Jamin Warren talk about why we can't hide from failure in games.

The critically championed Journey can be taken together or solo. Either way, it's arguably an interpersonal desert, due to creative decisions that leave little to the imagination. Here's why.

Do we need to rethink our priorities? How games secretly take our minds to the endless places that math and science cannot.

Jamin Warren on the myth of the dying music game. Two new games, Rhythm Heaven Fever and Beat Sneak Bandit, show that less is more—and that music games need not be about music at all.

We talk to Rogers Redding, the man responsible for balancing the rules of NCAA football. What can one of our most beloved—but complicated and particular—sports tell us about the pursuit of meaning through limitations, success and defeat?

Is the game industry a well-oiled, profoundly risk-averse machine with a stranglehold on creative talent, or is crowdfunding about to destroy publishing as we know it? Jamin Warren takes a look at the unprecedented success of Tim Schafer's Kickstarter project Double Fine Adventure and sees a potential sea change in the creative ecosystem of gaming.

Recent cash-in knockoffs of popular mobile games Tiny Tower and Triple Town have the gaming scene in a fury. But there's a problem with this scenario: It's nothing new, with plenty of precedent in other media. Game designers need to embrace their copycats. Here's why.

Kicking off our new project to document games from every country in the world, a Zambian game about the crying of goats.

The long-delayed shooter Duke Nukem Forever inspires disgust, conflict, and introspection in Jamin Warren. And totally breaks our review system for good.

The funnyman behind Double Fine Productions talks to us about fishing for a good nickname, the subconscious effect a bully named Bobby had on him, and how videogames kept him from ever feeling lonely. 

Creator of the Scott Pilgrim series, Bryan Lee O'Malley takes us through the evolution of his relationship with vidoegames, five years at a time. 

The creators of the über-nostalgic indie hit Super Meat Boy reflect on their own childhoods in the latest edition of our ongoing series. Team Meat members Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes talk to us about the worst trouble they got into, their biggest childhood secrets, Calvin and Hobbes, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and requesting wings for Christmas. 

As part of our ongoing series, we talk to EA Senior Creative Director Mark Turmell, who's best known for his work on popular arcade games NBA Jam and NFL Blitz. His 31 years in game design include collecting checks as a teenager, turning down Bill Gates, and a mild case of pyromania.

Carnegie Mellon professor Jesse Schell has become a major voice in the “gamification” debate that has raged in the game design community for the last year. His “Design Outside the Box” talk two years ago on the layering of games on every aspect of human existence became a big hit. We talk to Schell about how games are centers of pleasure, whether game designers need a moral code, and why FarmVille isn't like gambling.

Patrick Smith really likes the color blue. We get the painter-turned-game designer's perspective on games, art, color and what inspires him to create. 

More than five years ago, something strange happened in World of Warcraft. A spell gone awry known as “Corrupted Blood” ravaged the millions of players, leaving behind death, mayhem, and fear. That's where Rutgers epidemiologist Nina Fefferman stepped in, and that's where the story gets interesting.

Researcher Nicolas Nova thinks a lot about game controllers. Especially as design objects. What do videogame controllers tell us about technological evolution? What does the future holds for the modest controller?  And which controllers stand out as 'paragons' of design? In this interview, Nova addresses these questions, covering what it is about the videogame controller that makes it such a fascinating cultural artifact. 

As part of continuing series into the early lives of videogame designers, we talk to Manveer Heir, now a senior designer at BioWare working on Mass Effect 3. Heir, who's been outspoken on the subject of race, talks about his early childhood discrimination in a DC suburb, why he's captivated by the song "Apache" (and its subsequent performance on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air), and hiding Wolfenstein 3D from his parents.

Do videogames count as design objects? NYU sociologist Harvey Molotch certainly thinks so as we are prone to think of videogames as another form of entertainment. But much like videogames, design faces the same problems of anonymity, disrespect, and cultural bias.  However, design is now ascendant and sociologist Harvey Molotch knows why. He has more to say on what this means for videogames.

Pop artist Jeff Koons has drawn criticism and praise in equal doses over the life of his career, but a Florida art student has decided to express his opinion in a different way—by blowing Koons' work to pieces. Hunter Jonakin created "Jeff Koons Must Die!" for his MFA thesis show as a first-person shooter set in a fictional gallery housing Koons' work. We talked to Jonakin about his love/hate relationship and using videogame engines as a means of expression.

Lewis Carroll's protagonist's take on badges, prizes, points, and balderdash of that sort.

The "games as art" debate has fortunately waned a bit. Good riddance, I say. But a broader interest in videogames as a visual, interactive medium is certainly welcome. At least, that's how John Sharp, who teaches at the Savannah College of Art and Design, is approaching games. For the last year or so, Sharp has been appearing at conferences to give a crash course in art history for game designers. We were curious why.

For more than 20 years, Jayne Gackenbach has been doing research into the depths of our sleeping subconscious as a dream researcher. Over the past decade, the professor of psychology at Edmonton's Grant MacEwan University has become increasingly interested in the world of videogames after watching her son consume them with a passion as a child. We asked her about her the interconnections between those two worlds—dreams and games—and how nightmares and videogames are related. Gackenbach's recent work suggests that playing videogames may actually decrease the frequency of nightmares. We wondered why!

This is the first of a series we're calling the Pre-Game Interview. Profiles of game creators tend to focus on the products themselves and ignore who the people are as creative individuals. We think that looking at their early lives might be a revealing way to think about game developers' later output.

This article was originally delivered last week as a "microtalk" at the Game Developers Conference 2011. The format dictates that all speakers must also use 20 slides that auto-advance every 16 seconds! So if you dare, attempt to read the following in about five minutes.

We've been selected by Kickstarter to create a curated page so we can spotlight projects that we think fit in with the Kill Screen ethos. Without further ado, here are our first picks.