The Archive

Stray From the Path

Stray From the Path

The Path capitalizes on the horror of imagined terrors in a no-win journey; contemporary art like Jeremy Blake's Winchester Trilogy and Hein's Invisible Labyrinth have similarly terrifying and labyrinthine aspects. 

Jun 14 Columns Visual Games
What's Happening?

What's Happening?

Installation artists like Yayoi Kusama and Allan Kaprow built interactive worlds decades before Zelda. What can videogames still learn from contemporary technology-based art?

Apr 30 Columns Visual Games
Yoshi's Fauvist Island

Yoshi's Fauvist Island

Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island is a legend among 2-D platformers—but its art design was something to behold as well. It's intense, vivid and contrasting use of color recalls Fauvism, the 20th century art movement. Just as Fauvism took Impressionism's abstraction to a wilder, weirder level, so does Yoshi's Island embrace artistic passion and messiness. Kyle Chayka explains why Yoshi's Island is full of more "wild beasts" than we realize. 

Jul 7 Columns Visual Games
Photorealism in Crisis

Photorealism in Crisis

In the latest of our monthly column, Kyle Chayka explores the search for photorealism in videogames. Once we can perfectly recreate grass in code, where does photorealism have left to go? Where does the search for photorealism fall apart, how does it relate to the struggle between photography and painting, and what would an abstract-expressionist game look like? 

May 17 Columns Visual Games
Over the River and Through the Woods

Over the River and Through the Woods

In the third installment of this monthly column, Kyle Chayka explores the relationship between landscape painting and Minecraft. How does one blocky indie game have the ability to create transcendental experiences just as the greats of landscape painting were able to do? And how does Minecraft allow players to accomplish this in a different way?  

Apr 5 Columns Visual Games
White Square on Black Ground

White Square on Black Ground

Pong, created in 1972 and one of the first arcade videogames, displays two white rectangles and one white square on a black background. These simple geometric structures represent a game of endless complexity, one that is also an ever-changing abstract image whose composition depends on where the ball goes and where the players move their paddles. It's an elegant abstraction that visual artists can appreciate. Pong solves many of the conceptual problems faced by abstract artists in the 1920s and '30s, using many of the same approaches, but for a very different end.

Feb 25 Columns Visual Games
Another Legend of Zelda

Another Legend of Zelda

When Shigeru Miyamoto debuted the latest installment in Nintendo's Legend of Zelda series at E3 2010, he also made an explicit connection between videogames and fine art. The graphics of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, as it turns out, are inspired by the French painter Paul Cézanne and Impressionist art. The artistic influence was unmistakable in the game's first leaked screenshots, where warm light filters through hazy trees that become masses of solid color in the distance. Yet some fans decried the new style for not being "realistic" enough, following on the heels of the gritty Twilight Princess of 2006. 

Jan 31 Columns Visual Games

Categories

Tags

Writers

Latest Issue

#5: Sound

Issue 5 brings together our two most personal obsessions: the games we play, and the sounds that make them whole.

Free PDF sample! 1 Issue for $12 4 Issues for $40
Issue #5

Kill Screen by Email

Get sneak peeks of new issues, special offers, and lovingly crafted late night musings.