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Wiley Wiggins (he/him) is a researcher and artist engaged with a history of digital games and their allegorical potential. His multifaceted career includes roles as an actor, animator, interaction designer, and board member of the Juegos Rancheros arts nonprofit. During his time at Juegos Rancheros he produced the Fantastic Arcade international games festival in Austin, Texas.

The (New) Tower of Babel is the second in a series of essays about visionary architecture and future imaginaries, following “The Arcology Mode,” which was published in the UCLA Design | Media Arts journal, Flat. In this essay, The Tower is presented as an allegorical image connecting ancient myth to modern technological anxieties, through the biblical etiology, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and contemporary projects. 

Wiggins is an interdisciplinary humanities PhD student at Concordia University in Montreal, at their Technoculture, Art and Games center (TAG). His doctoral work focuses on the Dungeon as a mode of game world apprehension and allegorical image, consisting of both a book-length written work and a suite of tools for making dungeon-themed games. He holds both a BA and MFA from UCLA, and all of these projects have evolved from thesis work done at UCLA’s Game Lab.