The Backrooms Were Always About Games

Something a little different! We're focusing on the newsletter now and in a conversational way!This week, I sat down with Danny Snelson, a writer and professor at UCLA who spends his days thinking about the eerie. We start with a strange admission from this year's Venice Biennale, where the Chinese pavilion exhibited a video game you weren't allowed to play, and use it to chase a bigger idea: that games have quietly become a shared grammar, and once you notice it, you can't stop seeing where it has leaked. Into a sculptor's hooded figures pulled from DOOM and recast as the accused at the Salem witch trials. Into a painter who walks you inside his own canvases. Into a flesh-pink office shooter, and into the Backrooms, that empty image of damp carpet and fluorescent hum that turns out to be one of the clearest things our culture has made about infinity after the exhaustion of grandeur. We get into all of it, plus an auto-rickshaw in Goa in 1992, and whether a game is allowed to refuse to be fun. ReferencesMitchell Chan's talk at DEMOPeter Nichols' Crude OilMy interview with Leo Castañeda / Talk at DEMOCamofluxAdrian MM AbelaFalse.Work Maltese PavillionChinese Pavillion's Black Myth: WukongDamjan Jovanovic's essay on The BackroomsMy feature on CatmilkCatmilkGossamer MatrixKalp Studio's Rahi Daniel Scott Snelson is a writer, editor, and archivist working as an Associate Professor in the Departments of English and Design Media Arts at UCLA. His online editorial work can be found at PennSound, Eclipse, UbuWeb, Jacket2, and the EPC. Published books include Elden Poem (Hysterically Real, 2022), Apocalypse Reliquary: 1984-2000 (Monoskop, 2018), and Inventory Arousal with James Hoff (Bedford Press/Architectural Association, 2011). His most recently published book, The Little Database: A Poetics of Media Formats (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), examines the networked afterlives of media-reflexive works of art and letters in search of contingent methods for reading ordinary digital collections. He's just wrapped teaching "That Time I Got Reincarnated as a UCLA Creative Writing Seminar: Isekai x Experiment" this spring at UCLA. Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester.Subscribe to Killscreen for unlimited access to Jamin's writing and the archive at killscreen.com, member-exclusive newsletters and events. I love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] Please consider supporting independent media! ★ Support this podcast ★