The Dog, The War, & The Souls You Can't Save

War games let you be a hero. Alan Kwan's games make you helpless.

In this conversation, we explore Scent—a 20-minute experience where you play a dog witnessing an unnamed war. No shooting. No saving. Just survival, souls, and the anxiety of watching violence you can't stop.

Kwan spent seven years developing Scent with no budget, transforming it from a sci-fi project about his father losing vision into a meditation on human brutality from an animal's perspective. The result premiered at Tribeca Festival 2025 and earned an Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica.

But Scent is just the latest in a practice that's been questioning gaming's assumptions for over a decade. His previous game The Hallway sits in Hong Kong's M+ Museum permanent collection. Forgetter won multiple awards at international game festivals. His work has been exhibited everywhere from Ars Electronica to the Nam June Paik Art Museum.

What we discuss:

• Growing up in Hong Kong game arcades without actually playing—just watching couples sit in racing games, viewing virtual Tokyo sunsets like they were on dates
• Why he moved from filmmaking to experimental games and what cinema taught him about interactive storytelling
• The design philosophy of "witness without power"—rejecting superhuman abilities and open worlds for fragile bodies and limited control
• How he creates psychological immersion through grass sounds and spatial audio instead of haptics and high-tech solutions
• Working on rails: why Scent is structured like a long cinematic take where you follow the dog's back through horror
• The philosophy of keeping violence off-screen—learning from Zone of Interest and the power of implied brutality
• Why he calls it an "interactive cinematic experience" more than a game, and what his Steam-native students think about that distinction
• Teaching international students at SAIC who come from different gaming cultures—China's lack of console culture versus Western expectations
• The strange ethics of trigger boxes: if you don't start the game, the war won't happen
• His interest in cloud streaming to remove Scent from Steam's expectations and make it browser-accessible
• Why short cinematic games should exist as a format—rejecting the assumption that meaningful experiences require 25+ hours

Alan Kwan is an artist working at the intersection of cinema and videogames. Originally from Hong Kong, he holds an MFA from MIT and currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His experimental games and VR installations have been exhibited internationally and collected by major institutions including M+ Museum. His latest work, Scent, premiered at Tribeca Festival 2025.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Scent (2025) - available at [link]
• Forgetter (2021) with Allison Yang
• The Hallway (M+ Museum collection)
• Bad Trip (2011-12) - his first lifelogging game project
• Zone of Interest (film)
• Prix Ars Electronica
• Tribeca Festival
• School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)

Links:

• Alan's work: https://www.kwanalan.com/
• Killscreen newsletter: killscreen.com