We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all persons are endowed with the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness at LIKELIKE this Fourth of July. That such pursuit may, at times, lead them unto strange and unruly diversions: namely, experimental video games, which do challenge the mind, afflict the senses, and occasionally harass the player.
But when a long train of ludic provocations and indignities evinces a design not to amuse but to render them miserable, it is their right, it is their duty, to refuse to play.

Works by Holy Wow /// The Plug-In Studio /// Tuxedo Labs & their modding community /// Mike Lacher, Brian Moore and Chris Baker /// Chequered Ink

Friday July 4th
7-11PM
During the Unblurred gallery crawl
205 North Evaline St

Tide Breakers by Brainfruit studio is a city council simulation game for six players and a crowd of spectators. With the multi-species city of Buabu under threat from rising seas, players must decide whether to consolidate power within their own factions or pursue more collective outcomes. Will you earn a bitter victory over your rivals, at the cost of the city’s survival? Or can you work together to save Buabu?

Don’t miss this one-night-only event! Tide Breakers co-creator Rob Dubbin (writer for The Colbert Report and The Late Show With Stephen Colbert) will be present.

Friday June 6th
6-11PM
During the Unblurred gallery crawl
205 North Evaline St

Pictures

Let’s celebrate International Workers’ Day with a show featuring games about labor conflicts! We have something for all tastes and every degree of class consciousness: follow a Beijing food-delivery courier at the onset of the pandemic! Plan a puzzly picket line! Vent your repressed white-collar frustrations! Explore labor issues in the game industry within the glitched ruins of Assassin’s Creed! Can you rage-quit capitalism?

Works by: Cat Bluemke /// Yuxin Gao, Lillyan Ling, Gus Boehling, John Bruneau /// Morgan Quirk /// Laurent Gehin, Evaline Høyrup Jørgensen, Nikolaj de Haan /// Studio Fizbin

May 2nd
7-11PM
During the Unblurred gallery crawl
205 North Evaline St

Pictures

LIKELIKE kicks off the 2025 season with Nick Crockett’s video installation Fire Underground.

Fire Underground is an animation which presents a fantasy loosely based on the events of the West Virginia Mine Wars, the Homestead Steel Strike, and other labor conflicts in US history. While a labor conflict escalates into a war, the dead and dying find themselves in a prehistoric carboniferous swamp deep below ground, where strange creatures are stirring in the dark. The story is framed by scenes from a surreal “museum at the end of history” where heroes from America’s past are immortalized forever as animatronic statues and looping dioramas, alongside prehistoric creatures, war machines, and other historical artifacts.

The piece was made with the game engine Unity. Most of the props and characters were made out of physical materials like clay and tinfoil, and captured with photogrammetry.

Friday April 4
7-11PM
During the Unblurred gallery crawl

205 North Evaline St
Pittsburgh, PA

Pictures

Continue reading “Fire Underground”

Prepare to embark on a delicious journey through the world of video games where food and cooking take center stage. Playing with food is a buffet of works that transforms the kitchen into a digital playground. From autobiographical cooking games to time traveling virtual recipes, this exhibition is your invitation to taste a still underexplored aspect of interactive entertainment.

Works by: Terrifying Jellyfish /// Schell Games /// Charlotte Broccard /// Toco Games

Friday August 2
Friday September 6
7-11PM
During the Unblurred gallery crawl

205 North Evaline St
Pittsburgh, PA

Pictures

*cover model by Harry Charalambous

What if games could be sampled and remixed like music?
This show is an introduction to the obscure and fascinating world of plunderludics (games made out of other games) and plundercore (games entirely made of other games’ assets).
You can leave your game nostalgia at home! These experimental works may not play nice with your favorite intellectual properties.

Works by: mut/moochi /// Alistair Aitcheson /// GURN GROUP /// Big Bag /// Jonny Hopkins

Friday June 7
Friday July 5
7-11PM
During the Unblurred gallery crawl

205 North Evaline St
Pittsburgh, PA

Pictures

KLUB WRKR is a traveling exhibition composed of interactive media and custom-made furniture inspired by Alexander Rodchenko’s Workers’ Club. The space for self-education and leisure of the soviet proletariat has been reimagined as a nomadic performance-architecture raising questions about identity, emancipation, and labor today. KLUB WRKR points to the oppositional forces of struggle and exploitation that form subjectivity, and centers the politics and economy of friendship as a method for revolutionary action.

The exhibition’s components include a dialectical karaoke machine, a 24-hour comrade hotline, a 2-channel 2-player video game and arcade apparatus titled lupa rossi, a suite of plans, and a two-channel video of earth’s zenith/nadir from NY-LA.

KLUB WRKR is made collaboratively and features the work of Kyle Bellucci Johanson, Will Lee, Jen Vanselow, and Real Friends LLC.

Friday May 3
7-11PM
During the Unblurred gallery crawl

205 North Evaline St
Pittsburgh, PA

An exhibition of works by Pittsburgh-based artists exploring impossible, fluid, ominous, and utopian architectures in virtual spaces. Navigate a hui-style labyrinth through your brainwaves! Discover a Lovecraftian rave in the depths of Millvale! Experience The Shining in first person through the magic of photogrammetry! And much more!

Works by: Lilith Zone /// Heidi He and Lu Lyu /// Colofiction /// Emily Amspoker /// Claire Hentschker

Friday March 1
Friday April 5
7-11PM
During the Unblurred gallery crawl

205 North Evaline St
Pittsburgh, PA

Pictures

While mainstream video games engage in a wasteful race for technological superiority and boring photorealism, here at LIKELIKE we celebrate handmade games with a personal touch. The five works in the show complicate the cold computational matter of digital media with hand-drawn graphics and intimate themes. Immerse yourself in the existential dread of silent crowds! Interact with a dazzling flow of consciousness! Experience parenthood during pandemic times with Angela Washko’s forthcoming project “Mother, Player”!

Works by: Jenny Jiao Hsia /// Angela Washko /// Michael Frei and Mario von Rickenbach /// Caroline Robert /// Petri Purho

Friday September 1st, 2023
7-11PM
During the Unblurred gallery crawl

205 North Evaline St
Pittsburgh, PA

Cover image made with Weave Maze Generator by Doug van Hoffen

An evening of X-rated games dealing with sex work, pornography, internet censorship, gay hookup culture and much more.
All the projects in the exhibition, while not pornographic, challenge the notion of games as children’s entertainment, and push at the boundaries of what is thematically accepted in a playable form. Viewer discretion is advised.

Works by: Robert Yang /// Fellatia G /// Lena Chen, Goofy Toof, Maggie Oates, Avatar Lilith /// Pierre Corbinais /// Seemingly Pointless /// Heather Kelley

Friday August 4th, 2023
7-11PM
During the Unblurred gallery crawl

205 North Evaline St
Pittsburgh, PA

Do you have strange dreams?? Do you find yourself moving down a corridor, blindly. In the center of the room there is a fountain, in each corner, a large statue of a mouse. Sweating, you try to press the button. Great! You may have already played a videogame.

Join us for a retrospective of games by underground entity thecatamites.
A Smörgåsbord of bewildering, gory, verbose, handmade delights.

Friday June 2nd + Friday July 7th, 2023
7-11PM
During the Unblurred gallery crawl

205 North Evaline St
Pittsburgh, PA

What are we talking about when we talk about “Chinese Games”?

A nobody ran into fairy mountains by mistake, gathered five elements, and then ruled the martial art world? A secretly hidden agency rises from a cyberpunk underground and resists the system? A nuanced and metaphorical modern love story between emotionally reserved characters? These stereotypes could be half wrong half right — they were dissolved in a value and aesthetic liquid and have been permeating works in the cultural vessel that is so-called “Chinese.”

By presenting six selected games that were developed by Chinese designers, YouXi Dimsum destructs the stereotypical formulas and shows checkpoints scattered in a culture complex, rendering a more complete interpretation of Chinese Games from perspectives of mythology, spatial cognition, pictographic and symbolic narratives, and rhetoric, etc. At the same time, we acknowledge that this is not an exhibition representing Chinese games as a category or regional circle. Rather we want to highlight that they come together as a dim sum banquet and a collage that provides a rich yet non-exhaustive vertical slice of the fussy virtual cake known as “Chinese Games.”

Curated by Ruixuan Li and Allison Yang Jing

Works by: Qiang Jiadong /// Yi Xie /// BitCA /// Rachel Li /// Optillusion Games /// Team 9

Friday May 5th, 2023
7-11PM
During the Unblurred gallery crawl

205 North Evaline St
Pittsburgh, PA

It’s hard to maintain a sense of hope about climate change in light of the alarming reports from the IPCC. Against all odds, the videogames in this exhibition aim to shake off apathy and envision systemic change. These recent works tackle climate change from a variety of approaches: an arcade game about the destruction of habitats, an interactive documentary flowing down a river in Argentina, a reverse city-builder about ecosystem restoration, and two card games tracing paths to decarbonization on a national and global scale.

This show is also the release party for The Green New Deal Simulator by LIKELIKE’s sibling project Molleindustria.

Works by Free Lives, Matajuegos, Broken Rules, Francis Tseng and Son La Pham, Molleindustria.

Friday April 7th, 2023
7-11PM
During the Unblurred gallery crawl

205 North Evaline St
Pittsburgh, PA