I recently sat in the freshly refinished theater space at the Visual Studies Workshop’s new location tucked away in an unassuming residential neighborhood of Rochester, New York. A live stream of artist Nathalie Lawhead projected onto the large screen. Nilson Carroll, the curator of SEQUENCEBREAK//, managed a complex OBS setup of audio inputs and outputs from a projection booth in the rear. He was live mixing his computer screen, his own webcam, and Lawhead’s video feed, simultaneously projecting the results onto the theater’s screen and streaming via Twitch. Many pieces of hardware and software made it all work. Waiting for Carroll to tweak his setup, a series of questions ran through my head: What’s this going to be like? Why do a hybrid, live playthrough of a game? What does a theater or a gallery add to our experience of video games?

After brief introductions, Carroll began playing Lawhead’s game, Individualism in the Dead-Internet Age (2024). Lawhead described the game as a talk that turns into an interactive slideshow, a “manifesto—a fancy rant” about the promises and pitfalls of internet culture. The complicated livestream had some hiccups. At points, a toddler in the audience climbed onto the stage, hamming for attention. Sometimes the audio was inaudible or cut out completely. But it all seemed appropriate. Friction with the technology made this an enlivened event rather than a banal stream. We relished the opportunity for interruptions—for glitch. As artist and scholar Michael Betancourt observes, when experiencing a glitch, “familiar concepts such as ‘intentionality’ and ‘signification’ become contingent,” rather than a stable ground, avenues toward opportunity rather than foreclosure.

Carroll and Lawhead’s livestream was one of a series of events programmed as part of the Visual Studies Workshop’s recent exhibition, SEQUENCEBREAK// Experimental Arcade. The project takes its name from a glitch: a technique used by speedrunners to complete games more quickly. Carroll, the exhibition’s curator, defines a “sequence break” as “the act of going outside of the intended linear sequence featured in a video game, breaking the game’s designed boundaries toward a new form of play or pathfinding.” He pointed out that Lawhead’s live playthrough was the “opposite of a speedrun,” however. After all, sequence breaking merely means going out of the intended order—there’s no reason it can’t delay instead of accelerate.

Nathalie Lawhead, *BlueSuburbia*, 2024. Installation view in *SEQUENCEBREAK//,* Visual Studies Workshop.
Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Nilson Carroll.

After Lawhead’s fancy rant concluded, Lawhead and Carroll discussed the state of contemporary artists’ games and “outsider” software development. DIY, free, or very cheap tools of creation were central to this conversation. For the independent game creator, these offer the equivalent of buying a cheap guitar and amp and playing around with the feedback—or taking your parents’ camcorder out of the closet to make a short film. However, the seamlessness of current software ecosystems, such as Apple’s app store or Chromebooks, means alternatives rarely penetrate search and social algorithms.

Anyone who has curated video games understands the challenges involved. Of primary concern is how to prevent the gallery from looking like a room of computer-filled cubicles. (Unless that’s what you’re going for.) To put these pieces in an art gallery also immediately creates practical, logistical problems. They require computers, screens, and ongoing IT troubleshooting. Though interactive media often create architectural and sculptural spaces, their virtuality binds them to the flatness of a screen and their interactivity requires a means of interaction (controller, keyboard, mouse, or something else altogether). Thus, the very nature of these pieces demands specific consideration of how to house them, to turn them on and off each day, to troubleshoot hardware and software when something (inevitably) stops working. They’re difficult to work with—a reminder that the “ease” promised by computer technologies rarely exists outside of narrow lanes of use.

But each of these pieces and the exhibition itself embrace these complications. The practical difficulty of curating an experimental arcade is analogous to that of navigating the pervasive, unescapable sea of computers through which we constantly wade. Here, in SEQUENCEBREAK//, to wade through is the objective. The gallery offers a moment to sit in the act of mediation, to listen to the signal and the noise rather than just the message. This isn’t freeing, but it can be a relief. Normally, we feel technology’s friction in moments that cannot warrant contemplation: an email doesn’t send, a transaction is incomplete, a movie won’t stream. The inevitable glitchy ripples that occur in these interactions cannot long withstand life’s necessity. In these moments, we push through the glitches to the inevitable ends—the email is sent, the transaction complete, the movie streams—and the glitch itself is not internalized as an experience. The gallery space allows us to sit with these contingencies.

*(left to right)* Heart Street, *Out for Delivery,* 2020. Nathalie Lawhead, *BlueSuburbia*, 2024.
Installation view in *SEQUENCEBREAK//*, 2025, Visual Studies Workshop.
Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Nilson Carroll

SEQUENCEBREAK//, as a self-consciously experimental arcade, had certain rules differentiating it from its mainstream counterparts. First, you cannot “die” or “lose” in any of the games. They are about moving, exploring, and seeking. Second, these are not skill-based games; controls are simple, immediately graspable, and the stakes are low. There are no wrong buttons, and there is no bad timing. Finally, their goal is not entertainment—even if they are entertaining. As artists’ games, their intention is to push us “into the margins, to gain a different perspective, to reject rigidness, and to engage in possibility”—though they achieve this with diverse methods.

Upon first entering the gallery, a large projection of Cassie McQuater’s Black Room (2017) fills the visitor’s field of vision. Depending on who played beforehand, any number of images could be dancing on the screen. This “browser-based feminist dungeon crawler” offers various hallucinatory dreamscapes populated by ready-made video game sprites. Though reminiscent of late-90s/early-aughts clip art and low-res gifs, Black Room rips its loops of animation from an earlier moment in the history of video games: early arcade games, Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis. Just as the game’s visuals shift from maximalist dreamy rooms to the stark coldness of a dark, empty bedroom, so, too, shifts its means of interaction. The tableaux of blinking animation loops invite a more passive passage—often only allowing movement in one or two directions. Helping our unseen, insomniac protagonist escape the black room into dreams and sleep involves solving puzzles by resizing your browser window. Contorting the window into unusual shapes and sizes reveals hidden, glowing, pink-purple objects: a shoebox, a USB cable, a vase. Other objects playfully open tabs to other sites: a Google search for “paradise,” short Vimeo videos of landscapes. Hovering over a candle causes half the room to turn white. “How can I place things if I can’t see them? Where does my body belong in this room?” These haunting lines of text call into question embodiment within sleep, in struggling to sleep, and in playing a game in a virtual space.

Cassie McQuater, *Black Room*, 2017, video game. Installation view in *SEQUENCEBREAK_*, 2025, Visual Studies Workshop.
Courtesy of Visual Studies Workshop. Photo Hernease Davis.

Stephen Gillmurphy’s (aka thecatamites) collection of games, Anthology of the Killer (2024), sits next to Dark Room. It is displayed on a large TV that is nevertheless comparatively small, a contrast that calls attention to both pieces simultaneously. Two counter-height chairs sit in front of a controller and the screen. They invite you to play with a friend. The anthology contains a series of nine games that Gillmurphy released between 2020 and 2024. Each features a short story about BB, a college student and zine-maker, who repeatedly stumbles into strange, murderous cults. Characteristically, Gillmurphy combines hand-drawn doodle-esque art with simplistic 3D spaces to create bizarre, yet humorous, experiences. Characters’ outlines wiggle and dance as violent, irreverent humor plays out. Inevitably, each of BB’s adventures devolves into a disorienting maze of half-complete yet densely populated rooms and corridors. Exiting and entering doors creates a jarring rhythm—a video-game equivalent of a jump cut—that signifies leaps in time and place with no obvious connection between the two.

The next piece sits askew in a corner, atop a small desk with a 27-inch computer monitor, controller, and over-the-ear headphones. xThe installation encourages playing alone, putting on the headphones and immersing oneself in its world of 1940s Chicago. Philip Mallory Jones’s Time Machine Bronzeville (TMB, 2024) is a unique integration of archival documentation, historical reenactment, and (virtual) dioramic mock-ups that tell the history of the Bronzeville neighborhood, dubbed the “Black Metropolis” at its height in the early twentieth century. The game begins in a room lined with photographs and documents and with a large diorama of the neighborhood at center. Players can examine objects and even enter some buildings while actors perform oral histories. If the nonlinear and open-ended TMB does not fully cohere, this is only in keeping with our inability to fully grasp any historical topic. What is immediately striking about the piece is the extensive archival research that it showcases. TMB is not only a game that relies on the archive; it also mediates archival materials in an interactive, virtual context. In other words, to play this game is also to dig through the archive and see what you find. It is, itself, a creative act of curation, with educational and historical significance for preserving this history of the African American experience.

Yuxin Gao, Lillyan Ling, Gus Boehling, and John Bruneau, still from Out for Delivery, 2020, video game. Courtesy of the artists.

On the opposite wall is a second large projection. If the exhibition’s other large projection, Cassie McQuater’s 2017 game, Black Room, is a confrontation, then Out for Delivery (OFD,2020), by the collective Heart Street (Yuxin Gao, Lillyan Ling, Gus Boehling, and John Bruneau), is more like a hug. You would be forgiven for mistaking OFD, a “42-minute interactive documentary shot with a 360-degree camera,” for a video installation. It can play on its own, but user input is necessary to reveal the game’s more interesting content. In early 2020, the collective was working on a documentary about a food delivery courier just as COVID-19 escalated into a pandemic. The game’s 42 minutes provide an un-editorialized “slice-of-life experience” of a food courier making deliveries in Beijing on January 23, 2020—the day that Wuhan went into lockdown. As the camera follows our nameless protagonist, we witness conversations between them and various passersby. The dialogue, translated from Mandarin, floats above speakers’ heads in cute purple text boxes. The camera follows the courier automatically, freeing the player to focus solely on what they can see in all directions, becoming a passive observer of the banalities of life on a historical day.

Lawhead’s BlueSuburbia (2024) sits inconspicuously in the gallery between Out for Delivery and Time Machine Bronzeville. The most powerful and vulnerable piece in the exhibition, the game is a strange artifact of culture and memory. First launched in 1999, BlueSuburbia was a series of Flash-based web games that Lawhead continued to update and expand through 2005. With the death of Flash, this original version is no longer easily accessible. SEQUENCEBREAK// hosted a version that Lawhead updated for contemporary computers and with heavily revised content. BlueSuburbia confronts the player with difficult questions about surviving trauma and persevering through it. It continues to shift modes of play and game genres; for example, portions include a polished 3D first-person game, a text-based adventure game, and an 8-bit action game. With its continuously shifting controls, art styles, and points of identification, the game disorients as much as it dazzles, ruptures as much as it coalesces, disturbs as much as it calms.

These games are theoretically playable on your own computer—would you ever play them, though? Would you even think to? SEQUENCEBREAK// exposed people to these games who would otherwise not play them. This, itself, is a notable and worthwhile endeavor, but it did more than that. In the exhibition catalogue, Carroll argues for the term “artists’ games” as opposed to “art games” or “experimental games.” He states two reasons: “One, all video games are artworks, which confuses the issue. Two, my focus is on the intentionality and methodology of each artist instead of the games themselves as (digital) art objects.” Returning to the questions that opened this review: Why put video games in an art gallery? I mean this seriously, not dismissively. The answer that I, and I think Carroll and the exhibition, would offer is that arranging artists’ games in a gallery space invites aesthetic contemplation of those games in ways that conventional video gameplay does not easily accommodate. SEQUENCEBREAK// used its namesake as an analogy for disrupting normalized play states. Like any form of curation, SEQUENCEBREAK// offered an invitation more than an imposition, but then again, gameplay itself is always only an invitation as well.

OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) facilitates live streaming and integrates into video streaming platforms, acting as a virtual video mixing board.
Michael Betancourt, Glitch Theory: Art and Semiotics (I’m Press’d, 2023), 1.
This livestream can be re-watched at the VSW’s Twitch page: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2458642068.
Speedrunning is the practice of completing a game in the shortest time possible. There are many variations and rules around the practice, including formal competitions and the successful semiannual charity event, Games Done Quick.
Nilson Carroll, foreword to SEQUENCEBREAK// experimental arcade (Visual Studies Workshop, 2025), 3.
Carroll, foreword to SEQUENCEBREAK//, 4.
Animation scholar Dan Torre calls these “boiling lines,” and they were used in early aughts animation series like Home Movies (1999–2004).
SEQUENCEBREAK//, 16. https://out-for-delivery.com/
Carroll, foreword to SEQUENCEBREAK//, 3.

SEQUENCEBREAK// experimental arcade exhibition review

“These games are theoretically playable on your own computer—would you ever play them, though?”

SEQUENCEBREAK// experimental arcade exhibition review

“These games are theoretically playable on your own computer—would you ever play them, though?”

Boreal Bonds