Synopsis
Our experience of videogames is often filtered through a spidersilk gauze of market research and high production values. Videogames, we’re told, are a pristine domain accessible only to small armies of trained professionals working overtime. Taking a longer view of the medium’s history, though, we see: absurd physics, nauseating graphical bugs, tedious repetition, maddening difficulty curves, and eyeroll-inducing voice acting. It seems that videogames also have the capacity to be abjectly, unequivocally, gloriously shitty! What better way, then, to approach this vibrant, diverse, and crucially contemporary form than to catalog its many failures? In doing so, many videogame designers are now reclaiming an ugly, broken mess as a call to action: make bad games!

Bio
Jake Elliott makes videogames and noise. He is half of indie game studio Cardboard Computer, and a different half of experimental internet radio station NUMBERS.FM.