We're documenting how interactivity is reshaping culture beyond gaming. From VR art installations to architectural play spaces, we explore where interactivity meets creativity. (Like Sahej Rahal's DMT!) Reply "NOTES" below for our curated insights + newsletter.

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"Black holes are fundamentally about the wavelength of desire" might be the best description of quantum entanglement I've ever heard. Alice Bucknell made a game about it where you navigate by controller vibrations to find your antimatter half. It's physics as romance!

In Alice Bucknell's Nightcrawlers, the flower player moves as electromagnetic pulses through root networks. This is based on real plant biology—how plants communicate through their roots. The game that takes multi-species cooperation as seriously as a biology textbook.

The reason people get "controller anxiety" in galleries and museums—but not arcades—has nothing to do with skill level. It's because cultural institutions position games as precious objects to be observed, not systems to be broken. It's why love artists messing w multiplayer.

Full interview with Alice Bucknell on Killscreen. We talk about: why plants make good dance partners, how black holes are about desire, and what bats can teach us about echolocation as love language. https://t.co/Eyb2kwwN50

Games have predicted the future of joy for 30 years: social networks, VR, button design, interactive TV. Maybe they're about to predict the future of how we think about partnership, cooperation, and what it means to navigate the dark together.

"I was thinking a lot about love," Bucknell said about making both games. They're both fundamentally about how two parts of a whole relate to each other across time and space. Whether you're pollinating or annihilating—you need the other person.

Something interesting is happening with gallery games right now. Artists like Bucknell, Theo Triantafyllidis, Sahej Rahal—they're all experimenting with multiplayer mechanics that "fuck with agency." When you give people two controllers, nobody's fully in charge.

You might think: "But what about challenge? What about skill?" That's the point. Challenge has been THE dominant aesthetic in games forever. It's overshadowed everything else. These games privilege sensation, cooperation, attachment instead.

You navigate by haptic feedback. Your controller pulses. The closer you get to the other player, the more intense the vibrations. No language. No vision. Just feels.

The second game, Small Void, came from a CERN residency. You and another player are matter and antimatter split at the edge of a black hole. One falls in. One shoots into space. The question: will you ever find each other again?

Here's the brilliant part: whoever collects the notes first SETS the musical score the other person has to follow. The hierarchy keeps shifting. The pollinator isn't always in charge. Sometimes the plant initiates everything. It's biology as democracy.

When you play as the flower, you don't move the plant itself. You move as electromagnetic pulses through the root network. You catapult through the soil like whack-a-mole, popping up in different locations. The architecture of the Grand Palais is flipped upside-down beneath.

Nightcrawlers premiered at the Grand Palais in Paris during Centre Pompidou's closing exhibition. Two-player co-op. One person plays a bat. One plays a flower. You have to pollinate each other to trigger a musical mini-game. Except the flower isn't passive.

Everyone's been making games about competition for 50 years. Alice Bucknell made two games about love instead. One where you're a flower seducing a bat. One where you're antimatter searching for your other half in a black hole. Here's what happened: 🧵

Severance isn't trying to be solved. It's trying to be played. The severance procedure is an information system. Perfect information = Chess. Imperfect information = Poker. Severance is Poker for consciousness. Every character has cards they can't see. & we're playing too.

What other shows are secretly using game design?

https://t.co/6fICF2TOpz

Every Severance character hides information from themselves. Innies don't know their outies. Outies don't know their innies. The show's entire architecture is built on information asymmetry. That's not mystery—that's game design.

https://t.co/6fICF2TOpz