Lifestyle
Want to play games under the stars? The Music Center is turning into an outdoor arcade
The game started as an experiment. A way to look at emergent behavior — the coordinated and mesmerizing flight of a flock of birds, for instance.
For artist and researcher Hillary Leone, the concern was that the world was becoming more divisive. She wanted to create a new language, one that showed the power of cooperation. Teaming with a host of researchers, she wanted to study human communication, to probe how individual actions contributed to collective problem solving.
What, essentially, makes a successful group?
This is “Sync.Live,” and while you don’t need to know the science behind it to play it, doing so adds meaning to the experience of wearing a top hat affixed with blinking LED lights and making silly, exaggerated strides at strangers. The goal: to synchronize the lights on the hats. No talking or touching allowed. And the challenge? You can’t see the lights on your own hat, meaning you must rely on non-verbal cues from others.
“I really want people to feel the thrill of direct human connection,” Leone says.
A group of young adults playing “Sync.Live,” which will be showcased at this year’s IndieCade and focuses on non-verbal communication.
(Visions2030 / “Sync.Live”)
“Sync.Live” is part of IndieCade’s long-running free Night Games programming, back for the second year at downtown’s Music Center on Friday and Saturday evenings. IndieCade for more than 15 years has been dedicated to championing independent games, often with a focus on the experimental and the approachable. Think of an IndieCade happening as a showcase for what’s underground, what’s next and what’s important in interactive storytelling, a gathering that takes a wide-angle view to all things play.
For play at an IndieCade event is not just a medium but a language. “‘Sync.Live’ is a cooperative game,” says the Music Center’s Kamal Sinclair, who heads the firm’s Digital Innovation Initiative and brought Night Games to the space, adding that works like “Sync.Live” bridge the gap between games and theater. “It’s a simple game mechanism — people just trying to find patterns together — but the visuals of it, with things on your head and lights changing colors, it does it all. It creates a connection. It creates laughter. You can think about mathematics and patterns. This, to me, is improvisational choreography.”
Night Games will be home to academic experiments — “Sync.Live” — as well as games that ask us to converse and work together via a seesaw, such as the pirate-themed “Back Off Me Booty.” It also makes space for immersive theater — see the whimsical investigative adventure that is “The Apple Avenue Detective Agency” — and even games that turn barcode scanners into controllers, such as “Wizard’s Warehouse: The Magick of Retail.” The latter is group chaos, as we take on the role of shopkeepers in a fairy tale kingdom who are frantically trying to fulfill orders. There are screen-based offerings as well, but the emphasis is often on the communal, as evidenced by the anyone-can-be-an-artist zaniness that is “Sloppy Forgeries.”
Last year’s Night Games drew about 2,000 participants over its two days, says Sinclair. IndieCade makes sense for the theatrical-focused Music Center, Sinclair says, as games not only create a dialogue but turn players into active performers.
Guests at IndieCade in 2023 play the light-up puzzle game “Kroma.”
(Scott Chamberlin / IndieCade)
“Not to get too academic or philosophical, but in many cultures there’s a participatory relationship with performance,” Sinclair says. “It’s not just watching and sitting in a chair and looking at a stage. With a sense of play, everybody is participating in story and aesthetics and all those good things the arts do for creating meaningful experiences and creating community.”
IndieCade has shifted over the years. In its pre-pandemic incarnation, IndieCade was often a multi-day festival at locations in Santa Monica or Culver City, with game showcases and panel talks. The online nature of the world post-2020, coupled with the difficulty in raising sponsorship funds for a discovery-focused game event, has put most of IndieCade’s offerings, including its annual awards, on the web, but the party-focused celebration that is Night Games has endured.
IndieCade co-founder Stephanie Barish says Night Games typically had the broadest appeal of IndieCade’s in-person offerings. “You’re really able to just be with other people in a real way,” Barish says. “You can be so much more tolerant of people because you’re around people you wouldn’t normally even talk to, but you had a great experience playing with them. It’s just a way of connecting with people that transcends the normal way we connect. I do believe it’s transformative.”
IndieCade often features participatory, communal games, such as “Secret Shuffle” at last year’s event.
(Scott Chamberlin / IndieCade)
The event is arriving at a difficult time for the game industry. In 2023, at least 6,500 game workers worldwide were laid off, according to a Times analysis, including hundreds at California-based companies like Unity and Riot Games. The cuts have continued into 2024. The state of the industry is sure to be a topic at IndieCade’s developer focused two day Creator’s Retreat at downtown’s ASU California Center. IndieCade architects, however, are pitching the festivities as a sort of creative rejuvenation.
“When the big studios fall apart, the people that are still making games — if they want to keep making games — want to be a part of this community,” Barish says. “When the industry feels like it’s being shaken up, this is the heart — the creativity, the connection and the new ideas. These are the things that will most likely drive the industry forward. It’s going to be the innovations coming from unexpected places. That’s our mission. To bring people together to keep the creative spark going.”
Guests at last year’s Night Games at downtown’s Music Center experience an experimental game, “Wobble Sphere.”
(Scott Chamberlin / IndieCade)
And few places in gaming are as unpredictable as an IndieCade event. There’s nowhere else, for instance, one can sample a “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” game and take part in the live-action role-playing game “The Apple Avenue Detective Agency.” The latter, from husband and wife duo Mister & Mischief, takes its cues from works such as “Encyclopedia Brown” and “Nancy Drew,” casting adults in the role of kid detectives. It’s inspired by the real-life childhood games of co-creator Andy Crocker, who’s made it sort of a mission to have grown-ups reconnect with their younger selves.
“While the show is about childhood, it is truly not designed for kids,” writes Crocker via email. She designed the experience with her husband, Jeff. “The further away from childhood we get, the more support we need to access our imagination and wonder.”
Crocker adds that the power of being a kid detective comes not from where you are, but how you see the world: “A kid detective can notice details and cultivate curiosity anywhere — all you need are a few friends. And snacks. A notebook is helpful. Also a magnifying glass and some walkie talkies. But mostly friends.”
Likely, at IndieCade, friends you just met.
From left: Noah Wyle plays Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the senior attending physician, and Fiona Dourif plays Dr. Cassie McKay, a third-year resident, in a fictional Pittsburgh emergency department in the HBO Max series The Pitt.
Warrick Page/HBO Max
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Warrick Page/HBO Max
The first five minutes of the new season of The Pitt instantly capture the state of medicine in the mid-2020s: a hectic emergency department waiting room; a sign warning that aggressive behavior will not be tolerated; a memorial plaque for victims of a mass shooting; and a patient with large Ziploc bags filled to the brink with various supplements and homeopathic remedies.
Scenes from the new installment feel almost too recognizable to many doctors.
The return of the critically acclaimed medical drama streaming on HBO Max offers viewers a surprisingly realistic view of how doctors practice medicine in an age of political division, institutional mistrust and the corporatization of health care.
Each season covers one day in the kinetic, understaffed emergency department of a fictional Pittsburgh hospital, with each episode spanning a single hour of a 15-hour shift. That means there’s no time for romantic plots or far-fetched storylines that typically dominate medical dramas.
Instead, the fast-paced show takes viewers into the real world of the ER, complete with a firehose of medical jargon and the day-to-day struggles of those on the frontlines of the American health care system. It’s a microcosm of medicine — and of a fragmented United States.
Many doctors and health professionals praised season one of the series, and ER docs even invited the show’s star Noah Wyle to their annual conference in September.
So what do doctors think of the new season? As a medical student myself, I appreciated the dig at the “July effect” — the long-held belief that the quality of care decreases in July when newbie doctors start residency — rebranded “first week in July syndrome” by one of the characters.
That insider wink sets the tone for a season that Dr. Alok Patel, a pediatrician at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, says is on point. Patel, who co-hosts the show’s companion podcast, watched the first nine episodes of the new installment and spoke to NPR about his first impressions.
To me, as a medical student, the first few scenes of the new season are pretty striking, and they resemble what modern-day emergency medicine looks and sounds like. From your point of view, how accurate is it?
I’ll say off the bat, when it comes to capturing the full essence of practicing health care — the highs, the lows and the frustrations — The Pitt is by far the most medically accurate show that I think has ever been created. And I’m not the only one to share that opinion. I hear that a lot from my colleagues.
OK, but is every shift really that chaotic?
I mean, obviously, it’s television. And I know a lot of ER doctors who watch the show and are like, “Hey, it’s really good, but not every shift is that crazy.” I’m like, “Come on, relax. It’s TV. You’ve got to take a little bit of liberties.”
As in its last season, The Pitt sheds light on the real — sometimes boring — bureaucratic burdens doctors deal with that often get in the way of good medicine. How does that resonate with real doctors?
There are so many topics that affect patient care that are not glorified. And so The Pitt did this really artful job of inserting these topics with the right characters and the right relatable scenarios. I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s a pretty relatable issue in season two with medical bills.
Right. Insurance seems to take center stage at times this season — almost as a character itself — which seems apt for this moment when many Americans are facing a sharp rise in costs. But these mundane — yet heartbreaking — moments don’t usually make their way into medical dramas, right?
I guarantee when people see this, they’re going to nod their head because they know someone who has been affected by a huge hospital bill.
If you’re going to tell a story about an emergency department that is being led by these compassionate health care workers doing everything they can for patients, you’ve got to make sure you insert all of health care into it.
As the characters juggle multiple patients each hour, a familiar motif returns: medical providers grappling with some heavy burdens outside of work.
Yeah, the reality is that if you’re working a busy shift and you have things happening in your personal life, the line between personal life and professional life gets blurred and people have moments.
The Pitt highlights that and it shows that doctors are real people. Nurses are actual human beings. And sometimes things happen, and it spills out into the workplace. It’s time we take a step back and not only recognize it, but also appreciate what people are dealing with.
2025 was another tough year for doctors. Many had to continue to battle misinformation while simultaneously practicing medicine. How does medical misinformation fit into season two?
I wouldn’t say it’s just mistrust of medicine. I mean that theme definitely shows up in The Pitt, but people are also just confused. They don’t know where to get their information from. They don’t know who to trust. They don’t know what the right decision is.
There’s one specific scene in season two that, again, no spoilers here, but involves somebody getting their information from social media. And that again is a very real theme.
In recent years, physical and verbal abuse of healthcare workers has risen, fueling mental health struggles among providers. The Pitt was praised for diving into this reality. Does it return this season?
The new season of The Pitt still has some of that tension between patients and health care professionals — and sometimes it’s completely projected or misdirected. People are frustrated, they get pissed off when they can’t see a doctor in time and they may act out.
The characters who get physically attacked in The Pitt just brush it off. That whole concept of having to suppress this aggression and then the frustration that there’s not enough protection for health care workers, that’s a very real issue.
A new attending physician, Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi, joins the cast this season. Sepideh Moafi plays her, and she works closely with the veteran attending physician, Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, played by Noah Wyle. What are your — and Robby’s — first impressions of her?
Right off the bat in the first episode, people get to meet this brilliant firecracker. Dr. Al-Hashimi, versus Dr. Robby, almost represents two generations of attending physicians. They’re almost on two sides of this coin, and there’s a little bit of clashing.
Sepideh Moafi, fourth from left, as Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi, the new attending physician, huddles with her team around a patient in a fictional Pittsburgh teaching hospital in the HBO Max series The Pitt.
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Part of that clash is her clear-eyed take on artificial intelligence and its role in medicine. And she thinks AI can help doctors document what’s happening with patients — also called charting — right?
Yep, Dr. Al-Hashimi is an advocate for AI tools in the ER because, I swear to God, they make health care workers’ lives more efficient. They make things such as charting faster, which is a theme that shows up in season two.
But then Dr. Robby gives a very interesting rebuttal to the widespread use of AI. The worry is that if we put AI tools everywhere, then all of a sudden, the financial arm of health care would say, “Cool, now you can double how many patients you see. We will not give you any more resources, but with these AI tools, you can generate more money for the system.”
The new installment also continues to touch on the growing corporatization of medicine. In season one we saw how Dr. Robby and his staff were being pushed to see more patients.
Yes, it really helps the audience understand the kind of stressors that people are dealing with while they’re just trying to take care of patients.
In the first season, when Dr. Robby kind of had that back and forth with the hospital administrator, doctors were immediately won over because that is such a big point of frustration — such a massive barrier.
There are so many more themes explored this season. What else should viewers look forward to?
I’m really excited for viewers to dive into the character development. It’s so reflective of how it really goes in residency. So much happens between your first year and second year of residency — not only in terms of your medical skill, but also in terms of your development as a person.
I think what’s also really fascinating is that The Pitt has life lessons buried in every episode. Sometimes you catch it immediately, sometimes it’s at the end, sometimes you catch it when you watch it again.
But it represents so much of humanity because humanity doesn’t get put on hold when you get sick — you just go to the hospital with your full self. And so every episode — every patient scenario — there is a lesson to learn.
Michal Ruprecht is a Stanford Global Health Media Fellow and a fourth-year medical student.
Two fiction books about good friends coming from different circumstances. Two biographies of people whose influence on American culture is, arguably, still underrated. One Liza Minnelli memoir. These are just a handful of books coming out in the first few months of 2026 that we’ve got our eye on.
Fiction
Autobiography of Cotton, by Cristina Rivera Garza, Feb. 3
Garza, who won a Pulitzer in 2024 for memoir/autobiography, actually first published Autobiography of Cotton back in 2020, but it’s only now getting an English translation. The book blends fiction with the author’s own familial history to tell the story of cotton cultivation along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Crux, by Gabriel Tallent, Jan. 20
Tallent’s last novel, My Absolute Darling, was a harrowing coming of age story about a teenage girl surviving her abusive survivalist father. But it did find pockets of beauty in the outdoors. Tallent’s follow up looks to be similarly awestruck by nature. It’s about two young friends, separated by class and opportunity, but bound together by a love of rock climbing.
Half His Age, by Jennette McCurdy, Jan. 20
The former iCarly actress’ bracing and brutally honest memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, was a huge hit. It spent weeks on bestseller’s lists, and is being adapted into a series for Apple TV+. Now McCurdy’s set to come out with her fiction debut, about a teenage girl who falls for her high school creative writing teacher.
Kin, by Tayari Jones, Feb. 24
Similarly to Crux, Kin also follows two friends across the years as options and opportunities pull them apart. The friends at the center of this book are two women who grew up without moms. Jones’ last novel, 2018’s An American Marriage, was a huge hit with critics.
Seasons of Glass & Iron: Stories, by Amal El-Mohtar, March 24
El-Mohtar is an acclaimed science-fiction writer, and this book is a collection of previously published short stories and poetry. Many of the works here have been honored by the big science-fiction/fantasy awards, including the titular story, which is a feminist re-telling of two fairy tales.
Nonfiction
A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, by Gisèle Pelicot, Feb. 17
Pelicot’s story of rape and sexual assault – and her decision to wave anonymity in the trial – turned her into a galvanizing figure for women across the world. Her writing her own story of everything that happened is also a call to action for others to do the same.
Cosmic Music: The Life, Art, and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane, by Andy Beta, March 3
For decades, the life and work of Alice Coltrane has lived in the shadow of her husband, John Coltrane. This deeply researched biography hopes to properly contextualize her as one of the most visionary and influential musicians of her time.
Football, by Chuck Klosterman, Jan. 20
One of our great essaysists and (over?) thinkers turns his sights onto one of the last bits of monoculture we’ve got. But in one of the pieces in this collection, Klosterman wonders, how long until football is no longer the summation of American culture? But until that time comes, there’s plenty to dig into from gambling to debates over the true goat.
Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! by Liza Minnelli, with Michael Feinstein, March 20
Minnelli told People that previous attempts at telling her story “didn’t get it right,” so she’s doing it herself. This new memoir promises to get into her childhood, her marriages, and her struggles with substance abuse.
Tom Paine’s War: The Words that Rallied a Nation and the Founder of Our Time, by Jack Kelly, Jan. 6
If you haven’t heard, it’s a big birthday year for America. And it’s a birthday that might not have happened if not for the words of Thomas Paine. This new book from historian Jack Kelly makes the argument that Paine’s words are just as important and relevant to us today.
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