GAMETHING is an audio book-club about videogames. Each episode, experimental game designer Pippin Barr and oral historian David Wolinsky choose a game to play separately and exchange answering machine messages about it until the tape runs out. The result is a conversation about anything and everything (mostly everything) they find interesting about videogames.
In Season 5, GAMETHING executes all the commands in games that put coding and computational thinking centerstage. Building circuits in SHENZHEN I/O, pulling cyber-heists in Quadrilateral Cowboy, and making robots dance in Carnage Heart... we're going in(side the computer's brain).
Seasons 1 and 2, produced in 2018, are considered "lost." They were pretty experimental and Season 3 came about when we asked ourselves "what if we actually talked about games?" But wait! If you want to hear the first two seasons, they're available if you support us on Patreon. Act now!)
Pippin Barr is an Associate Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal who makes experimental games about anything from performance art to chess to classic films. He's a regular jury-member for the Nuovo Award (the preeminent international experimental games prize) at the Independent Games Festival and judges for IndieCade.
Pippin's latest book, The Stuff Games Are Made Of, explores videogame design through the lens of its materials, from computation, to interfaces, to time.
David Wolinsky is an author, recovering critic, and creator/curator of Don't Die (2014-present), a Stanford-preserved and award-winning interview series exploring alternate histories of the internet, videogames, and the re-negotiation of power made possible and inevitable by our new systems for socializing, working, and interacting. He's also a former Onion and NBC editor. If you see him, say "hi."
David is the 1995 Blockbuster store champion at Donkey Kong Country and author of the forthcoming oral history All The Rage: Conversations Processing Gamergate.
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