Explore a free exhibition dedicated to showcasing games created by digital artists and independent video game developers.
Open Wed–Sun, 11:00–18:00
From 5 September 2024 - 27 April 2025, we’re transforming our first-floor gallery into a space for games created by digital artists and independent video game developers.
Fun, playful and suitable for gamers and non-gamers of all ages, Art Plays Games looks at how artists are increasingly using games as a way to challenge conventional forms of storytelling and offer us new ways to make sense of the world today. Over the exhibition’s run, the artworks and games on display will rotate, introducing something different to discover each time you visit!
Exhibition Schedule
5 September - 20 October 2024: Rachel MacLean, Youngju Kim, Angela Washko, Sahej Rahal.
29 October 2024 - 5 January 2025: Tomo Kihara and Playfool, Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Laura Palavecino, and Ayoung Kim.
14 January - 2 March 2025: Ada Eden, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, David OReilly, and Jiabao Li.
12 March - 27 April 2025: Alice Bucknell, Theo Triantafyllidis, Matt Allen, Livi Wilmore, James McColl, and Gavin Gayagoy.
The gallery is closed in between rotations.
Each collection of games invites you to play with some of the most pressing questions we face today: how might game worlds offer us new ways of thinking about whose stories are told and how they are represented? Can we see the world through non-human perspectives or think about the issues of climate change and ecology differently? How will our understanding of being human change as artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies become more dominant?
We’ll also host a number of free and affordable events within the space, such as talks, workshops, and tournaments that explore questions around worldbuilding, gamification, and screen culture.
Alice Bucknell
The Alluvials (2024)
Alice Bucknell's The Alluvials is a multi-level video game and film that examines the impact of drought and water scarcity in a near-future LA. Told through a variety of non-human and elemental perspectives, including the LA River, a field of Joshua Trees, a pack of wolves that roam the city and a raging wildfire, The Alluvials is a multi-species exploration into the effects of a heating planet and the subsequent climate crisis.
Theo Triantafyllidis
Feral Metaverse, Y-Frame Edition (2025)
Feral Metaverse is a chaotic, exploratory multi-player game. Taking inspiration from massive online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft, Theo’s work provides an artistic response and counterbalance to Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse; a highly monitored and productive virtual environment. Instead, Feral Metaverse is a place free from capitalist conditions, where players are encouraged to explore their most primitive and instinctual behaviours.
Matt Allen
It’s Not You, It’s M.E (2025)
It's Not You, It's M.E. is an interactive point-and-click game based on the artist’s experiences of living with Long COVID and M.E. It is a game you can't win, full of mini-games that often are impossible to complete. Players experience a fictionalised version of the artist's life in an energy simulator game world. Experiences of living with a disability vary greatly, but It's Not You, It's M.E. makes explicit some of the daily challenges that having an energy-limiting condition can bring.
Livi Wilmore
Hiraeth-x (2025)
Recalling the innocence and promise of the early days of the internet, Hiraeth-x is a first-person game that explores the reasons behind our nostalgia. Through the unmistakable aesthetics of the online spaces that Livi (and many of us) frequented during childhood, her work reflects on how things have changed as we enter the era of information overload.
James McColl
Feel My Desire (2025)
Feel My Desire is a text-based game centred on the power of words and the personal mythology of the professional wrestling world. James encourages players to embrace this concept of personal myth-making by offering them the chance to create their own character. Focusing less on the physical requirements, and more on actualising personal desires, the work provides a nuanced look at the elaborate character creation necessary for professional wrestlers, one that goes beyond the hyper-masculine facade.
Gavin Gayagoy
Doomscroll_1 (2025)
Doomscroll_1 takes players through digital realities, meandering from the mystical to the mundane and every possibility in between - a rollercoaster to infinity. Gavin’s work centres on our relationship to smartphones, specifically the sensation of ‘doom scrolling’. This is the act of compulsively consuming content on your phone, often to the detriment of your mental health. When doom scrolling, people often feel as though they are stuck in an endless loop, mindlessly switching between apps and unaware of how much time is passing.
Header image: Photography by Kieran Irvine
The Alluvials (2024)
The Alluvials is a multi-level video game and film that examines the impact of drought and water scarcity in a near-future LA. Told through a variety of non-human and elemental perspectives, The Alluvials is a multi-species exploration into the effects of a heating planet and the subsequent climate crisis.
Feral Metaverse, Y-Frame Edition (2025)
Feral Metaverse is a chaotic, exploratory multi-player game. Taking inspiration from massive online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft, Theo’s work provides an artistic response and counterbalance to Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse; a highly monitored and productive virtual environment.
It’s Not You, It’s M.E (2025)
It's Not You, It's M.E. is an interactive point-and-click game based on the artist’s experiences of living with Long COVID and M.E.
by Matt Allen
Hiraeth-x (2025)
Recalling the innocence of the early days of the internet, Hiraeth-x is a first-person game. It explores the nostalgia we have for this time through the unmistakable aesthetics of the online spaces that Livi frequented during her childhood.
by Livi Wilmore
Feel My Desire (2025)
Feel My Desire is a text-based game centred on the power of words and the personal mythology of the professional wrestling world.
by James McColl
Doomscroll_1 (2025)
Doomscroll_1 takes players through digital realities, meandering from the mystical to the mundane and every possibility in between - a rollercoaster to infinity.
Nocturnal Fugue (2024) and EchoVision (2024)
Nocturnal Fugue and EchoVision explore how non-human species experience the world.
I CAN’T FOLLOW YOU ANYMORE (2024)
I CAN’T FOLLOW YOU ANYMORE is a browser-based game that incorporates the glitchy aesthetics of video games from the early 2000s with vampire mythology and an interrogation of authority.
1001 Nights (2024)
Inspired by Persian folklore, Ada Eden’s game 1001 Nights reinvents the ancient tales of One Thousand and One Nights using AI and audience interaction.
by Ada Eden
outdraw.AI (2022 - 2024)
outdraw.AI is a game that explores new forms of creativity that resist the technological gaze of artificial intelligence.
almanac of girlswampwar territory (2018)
Created in Bitsy, a web-based game-making tool, almanac of girlswampwar territory (2018) features lo-fi graphics that seek to recreate the feeling that Porpentine experienced when playing video games as a child.
Enchanted Sea (2018-2024)
Enchanted Sea combines music, nature and poetic narrative in this meditative gameplay that encourages us to remember and embrace our fundamental connection to the natural world.
Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022) + Delivery Dancer Simulation (2022)
Delivery Dancer’s Sphere and its accompanying game Delivery Dancer Simulation, explore alienation and the gamification of work through the gig economy and platform labour, both of which became accentuated during the pandemic in South Korea.
by Ayoung Kim
DUCK (2023)
Rachel Maclean's deepfake short film takes inspiration from video games, sci-fi, classic Hollywood, and film noir to raise compelling questions around truth and power.
Distributed Mind Test (2023)
Sahej Rahal's video game artwork drops you into a sprawling post-apocalyptic landscape where all traces of humanity have been wiped.
by Sahej Rahal
Mother, Player (2023)
Angela Washko's experimental hand-drawn video game features pregnancy and early parenthood stories from artists during the global pandemic.
Layers of Reality: The Cat (2018-2024)
Loopntale's detective puzzle game uncovers how human and non-human life coexist within urban spaces.
by Loopntale
Special Event
Game On
FACT
Ready, set, play! Join us for a family-friendly games tournament to challenge yourself and others with classic, indie and artist-made games.
Conference
Choose Your Own Adventure
FACT
FACT invites you to Choose Your Own Adventure, a day-long symposium that delves into how games offer unique approaches to world-building, agency and collective experience. With contributions from Babeworld, Babak Ahteshamipour, David Blandy, Jeremy Chen, Aleena Chia, Marijam Didžgalvytė, Anne Duffau, Jon Edgley, Zein Majali and Jazmin Morris.
Artists
Be inspired
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