The Terminal Art Form: Artists on the Subtleties of Video Game Design
Artists and game designers Bennett Foddy and Nathalie Lawhead give us an insider’s perspective on their approaches to making (and subverting) video games.
Bennett Foddy, Nathalie Lawhead
Jan 23, 2023
Whether you are fighting extraterrestrial invaders, hungrily devouring pellets while avoiding ghosts, creating a new city from scratch, or taking on the Sisyphean task of climbing a mountain of rocks and garbage while stuck in a cauldron, video games offer you a unique opportunity to directly interact with a world designed by someone else, unencumbered by pesky complications like, say, physics or mortality. Yet despite (or, perhaps, because of) the staggering complexity of putting these worlds together, many of us never think about the wild variety of decisions and disruptions that can go into even the simplest video game, from “Which button means ‘jump’?” to “What if there’s no way to win?”
On the occasion of our exhibition Never Alone: Video Games and Other Interactive Design (and in anticipation of our January 26 Member Roundtable on “Video Games and Design”), we asked Bennett Foddy and Nathalie Lawhead, game designers who have both taken the medium well beyond “shoot that alien,” to consider the following question:
