Polygon
The Great Game: The Making of Spycraft
In 2021, my colleague and I started work on a feature length documentary about former CIA Director William Colby and KGB Major General Oleg Kalugin playing themselves in a 1996 video game. The documentary looks at the oddly parallel biographies these Cold War legends had before staring in Spycraft, as well as the 90s video game industry, espionage in pop culture, the geopolitics of post-Cold War Russia, and the way video games have evolved since the game was released.
Winner of the 2025 Knickerbocker Award for Best Games Journalism, New York Game Critics Circle
Video games explain the supply chain crisis
Games like Satisfactory, Factorio, Infinifactory... they’re all about creating supply chains, gathering resources and moving them from step to step in a massive system, resulting in the creation of capital, or simply the creation of a bigger system. Inspired by the unwinding of our supply chains during COVID-19, I explored how our supply chain became more like this videos games, and why that’s a bad thing.
Finalist, 2024 National Magazine Awards
How Red Dead Redemption 2’s landscapes are connected to 19th century art
Rockstar says Red Dead Redemption 2 wasn’t specifically inspired by the art of the Hudson River School of Art (or anything else for that matter), and yet… they look a lot a like. Why is that? I speak to Wendy Ikemoto, Associate Curator of American Art at the New York Historical Society to learn more about the Hudson River School of Art and its connections to American history.
Unboxing the hidden politics of SimCity
City simulators like SimCity are serious games — the kind that gets coverage well beyond the video game press. The kind of game that appears in school curriculums. The kind of game your non-gaming uncle has probably spent hundreds of hours in. On the surface, they appear to be exactly what they say: a simulation of a city. But any simulation is only as good as the model it’s built on, and the model underpinning SimCity has quite the history. In this video, I unboxed the secret ideology hiding in the formula that built SimCity, and how that’s reflected in one of the most popular gaming series of all time.
Vocativ
Here is a selection of the documentaries I created graphics, edited or co-edited.
Purch
Kronos Quartet at the Edison Museum
In the fall of 2013, I assisted on a shoot at the Edison Museum in West Orange, NJ where the Kronos Quartet was captured on four different recording devices, including one of Thomas Edison’s wax cylinder records. I later edited these fives pieces.
Fiber City
In early 2013 I proposed, directed and edited a four part documentary about Google Fiber and the impact it was already having on Kansas City, the very first “Google Fiber City” and the hopes the community had for its potential to change the city for the better.
Personal Documentaries
At the University of Kansas I created two documentaries. We Help Them Up was my senior project. The untitled documentary was my part of a larger documentary on LGBTQ issues in Kansas that was later included in a class-wide project.
Clayton Ashley's Portfolio 