This story is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2025 issue of AnOther Magazine:
“I only discovered The CRPG Book: A Guide to Computer Role-Playing Games three years ago, while looking at old 1990s PC games. I’d grown up fascinated by my dad’s big DOS game boxes and this book encapsulates that memory. I ended up getting really into the history of RPGs, going back to 1979. This book helped me explore that history – how those games were made and what design decisions were shaped by the limitations of each system. As someone who sees game engines like paintbrushes, I pick a palette from a certain era and think, what can I make with it? These old games didn’t really choose aesthetics – they were doing the best they could with what they had. That’s freeing. When you’re working within constraints, you’re not chasing perfection – you’re focused on getting the expression right. Technology moved so fast that some of these aesthetics were only tried once and never returned to. That makes them worth revisiting. I’m not trying to recreate nostalgia, I just want to kick up enough internal dust to stir something in you, so that when you’re asked to respond, something’s already there.”
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is a British artist based between London and Berlin who creates video games, animation and performance that centres on black trans lives. The interactive work that results from this draws on the radical possibilities of role-playing games, inviting viewers to explore power, bias and belonging in glitchy dreamscapes. Brathwaite-Shirley mines the rich visual history of the RPG genre – flickering menus, fractured timelines, complex moral choices – to imagine new ways of living and resisting. On 30 September Brathwaite-Shirley’s new project, The Delusion, opened at Serpentine North. The exhibition functions as a live game playtest and living archive where the audience will determine how the story continues, examining the civic potential and power of video-game technologies in the process.
This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2025 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale now. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: The Delusion is open at Serpentine North Gallery until 18 January 2026.
