The Game Plays You

Medium: Two-screen installation, Unity Game Engine

Exhibited:  Catalyst Arts, Belfast, February 2026

Created in response to Catalyst Arts’ annual Members’ Show open call exploring the relationship between technology and society, The Game Plays You, examines what we gain and what we lose,as digital systems become seamlessly embedded in everyday life.

The installation is shown across two screens: On the first, a machinima, a film made within a game engine, guides the viewer through a hyperreal digital forest. The environment appears natural and immersive, yet subtle glitches interrupt the illusion. The forest reveals itself not as nature, but as code: a constructed system simulating the organic.

On the second screen, the viewer encounters themselves inside this landscape, framed through the interface of a lost phone. The device becomes both portal and surveillance tool. You are no longer just navigating the environment, you are inside it, visible within it.

The work plays with inversion of agency. We assume we control the game, that we can step into digital environments and remain autonomous. But increasingly, systems observe, frame, and shape us in return. They have control of it.

They can go to the arcade and play the game — and the game won’t play them. But what if that is no longer true?