Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 121

Knuckle Sandwich shows us how to fight boxing bees and giant noses

As most of your teenage or 20-something friends can probably tell you, working in food service isn’t exactly the most rewarding way to spend your time. Customers will yell at you for mistakes you didn’t make, your manager will ask you to work overtime just as you’re heading out the door, your coworkers will come in having skipped one too many showers, and you’ll have to clean up more than your fair share of mystery slimes throughout your illustrious career. But hey, when you get home, you can always relax with a nice videogame, right? Just turn it on, pick up your sword, and… kill more slimes.

Enter Knuckle Sandwich, an upcoming RPG that blurs the line between adventure and menial labor. You play as a typical diner worker adjusting to his new life in Bright City, an Earthbound-style wonderland where being attacked by a horde of giant “apple bats” on your way to work is taken for granted as just a normal part of the daily grind. Details on just how exactly the game expects you to defend yourself against these inexplicable threats have been sparse until now, but thanks to a new video walking through some of the game’s battle system, we now have a clearer understanding of the types of life-or-death struggles you’re expected to endure in this city just to get to and from your shitty job.

The video opens on what appears to be a mugger threatening to introduce you to “the other side of town,” before he is quickly dispatched by a friendly vampire. “Bright City is a nice place to live,” claims the vampire. “But some parts of it are pretty scary.” He offers to teach you to defend yourself, and throughout the process, gives us a better look at some of the game’s weirder enemies. There’s a group of trashbag-wearing “fibre ghosts,” a trio of giant, angry bees with boxing gloves, a team of handsome men and, of course, don’t forget the slimes. Welcome to orientation, new fish. Have you met the giant walking nose?

snaking your fist through a series of mazes

You’re not without your own arsenal of quirk, however, as you also have access to powerful skills such as “curl up” (in a fetal position), as well as impressive special attacks like “complicated punch.” It’s the type of understated humor that’ll be familiar to fans of the recent anime One Punch Man, right down to the expressionless “this shit again?” look on your protagonist’s face, but that’s not to say the battles aren’t lively. To pull off these specials, you’ll have to play a different Mario Party or WarioWare style mini-game for each one, like snaking your fist through a series of mazes or playing pinball with your coworker’s head.

The routine nature to the fights in Knuckle Sandwich isn’t for lack of a larger quest, however. Since you’ve arrived, townsfolk have started going missing, and a mysterious series of cults have begun sprouting up asking questions. But if Mr. Vampire is to be believed, this fantasy adventure is only one part of living in Bright City, and doesn’t seem all that out of character for the town to begin with. Whereas games like Final Fantasy might seek to downplay the tedium of their random battles with grandiose effects and flashy character designs, Knuckle Sandwich instead leans into it by essentially making them just another part of the job. Rather than great heroes, you are ordinary people leading lives that are anything but epic, and fighting the bad guys is the equivalent of carrying an umbrella on a rainy day.

Knuckle Sandwich’s release date hasn’t been made public as of yet, but they video explains that those interested can find out by signing up for the game’s email list over on its official website.

How Doom inspired two generations of hackers and modders

This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel.

A premier first-person shooter, Doom (1993) still inspires programmers, modders and digital artists to adapt the game in unexpected ways. Excitement over the release of Doom 2016 is proof the beloved 24-year-old game series is a pop-culture mainstay. Doom is much more than a big-name franchise about blasting demons in their ugly faces. It’s a rare phenomenon that inspired the DIY gaming movement and continues to spark unbridled creativity among its biggest fans.

Since id Software unleashed Doom on PCs in 1993, it has ushered in two entire generations of modders, makers, and artistic communities. These fans have endless reasons to love Doom, according to David Kushner, author of Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture (2003). While researching his book, he learned why Doom continues to be way ahead of its time. “I was amazed by all the innovations Doom exemplified,” he explained, “Fast action FPS [first-person shooter], co-op play, shareware, mods, deathmatching, violence, the list goes on.”

Doom continues to be way ahead of its time

Beyond its legacy as an FPS, Doom is pegged for sparking a revolution in digital creation. “The most compelling thing about Doom today is the very fact that people are still playing it and making things for it,” said Andrew Stine, the co-founder of Doomworld, a popular internet hangout where “modders, map authors, musician, and coders” have been coming together to share Doom-related content since 1998. “People enjoy the idea of carrying on a tradition that [goes back] over two decades, which is a rare thing in gaming–a hobby that is usually always looking ahead to the next big thing,” he said.

Doom and the DIY Gaming Movement

The creative juices of Doom fans tend to spring from the unlikeliest of places. Case in point: among makers and coding communities, there is something of a hackers’ dare to see who can get Doom running on the most underpowered hardware. In recent years, the game has been played on everything from a Canon printer to an Intel Edison, a small micro-controller with built-in wireless that’s typically used in wearable prototypes and Internet of Things devices.

The process of adapting a game’s code to run on a system other than what was intended is known as porting, and Doom has been ported like no other game. “The reason why Doom has been ported so much is because it was designed with portability in mind,” stated Google software engineer and technical writer Fabien Sanglard.

This has everything to do with Doom’s rather unconventional evolution. Before creator John Carmack sat down to program Doom, he went out and purchased a NeXT workstation—the ill-fated computer system Steve Jobs built after being booted from Apple. That NeXT may have sealed the fate for Doom. “This way of programming was unusual at the time: Most games of the era were built on a PC,” said Sanglard. The result was that Doom played nicely with other systems, unlike its other PC-born contemporaries.

When id Software eventually released Doom’s source code to the public in 1997, DIY programmers latched on. Hackers were at liberty to bring the game to every platform, even unthinkable ones like Apple Watch. Impressively, members of the Omnimaga Texas Instruments programming group even got Doom to play on graphing calculators. “I’m not saying it was easy, but I didn’t run into difficult issues,” said Xavier Andréani, who ported Doom from a black-and-white calculator to a color calculator in 2012. “The game runs smoothly on all TI-Nspire calculators. There’s no need to overclock [or hack the calculator to run faster].” The desire to play Doom on everything reached fever pitch when one Inception (2010)-minded YouTuber named TheZombieKiller found a way to play Doom inside Doom.

Doom’s Design Legacy

Not only did Doom introduce a renaissance of DIY hardware hacking, but the game also gave many aspiring game designers a stage to shine on. “Doom, more than any other game, inspired a generation of developers to join the industry,” Kushner said, referring to, among many things, Doom’s innovative WAD “Where’s All the Data” file system.

John Carmack was very forward thinking when he structured the game’s files. Doom’s .wad or WAD, allows players to easily modify the content of a game. Carmack wanted players to be able to design their own levels, fill them with their own artwork and music, and then share their finished creations with other fans over the internet, which was just coming into its own in the mid ‘90s.

the number of games made from Doom‘s ingredients remains unprecedented

And share they did. Even today, the number of games made from Doom’s ingredients remains unprecedented. No one knows for sure how many Doom mods exist, but honest estimates sit at around fifty thousand unique pieces of user-created content. According to Chris Hecker, a key programmer on Will Wright’s Spore (2008), Doom was also important for designers who didn’t have art or programming chops. He said the game marked the first time these professionals could create and show a demo of their work during a job interview.

Today, the kinds of games people create with Doom run the gamut. There are brief, kitschy affairs, like Pirate Doom. Or elaborate, full-scale productions that spent years in development, like Beautiful Doom, which made the original Doom an altogether more pleasant experience.

Over at Doomworld, Stine links to something in the neighborhood of 18,000 custom-built Doom games. Annually, the community gives out awards for the best WADs of the year, and there are more than enough honorable mentions. There is also the Espi, the lifetime achievement award for an outstanding body of Doom user-creation, as it is entirely possible for someone to have spent a lifetime authoring Doom content.

“I think that Doom’s continued success as a creative outlet can be boiled down to the structure of the game itself,” Stine said. “Doom is incredibly simplistic compared to most modern games. There’s no inventory, no skill tree, no forced stealth segments. So the game itself affords a lot of experimentation and variation because the key elements are so basic.”

With no sign of fans running out of fresh ideas to build on these basics, it looks like Doom will continue to inspire the next generation of creatives who aren’t limited by technology but by the depths of their imaginations.

Old computers are made cool again in this photography project

The idea of innovation is often much cooler than innovation itself. Jetpacks, for instance, still capture the imagination in ways that a Boeing 737 does not. The former still looks like the future, even if that is a qualification it only holds because such a future has always failed to materialize. The latter—a future that has become our present—is the minivan of the skies: decidedly unsexy but nonetheless important. The jetpack in this context is an unrequited high school crush, the sort of idea best left in the past that still has an emotional hold on you.

Ideas fester, and they sometimes fester long enough that we find new uses for them. Photographer Docubyte’s series on early computers, produced for Britain’s National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park and subsequently remastered by the production studio Ink, is an example of this. It recontextualizes these devices as abstract representations of innovation as opposed to tangibly useful objects.

Meda 42A

This is both somewhat unfair and wholly justified. The Meda 42A, for example, is no longer really useful, but one dares not say such things. It’s like fighting over the bill at dinner with an elderly relative. The photography series therefore has to work out a careful balance by nodding to these devices’ noble histories while also acknowledging that they are, well, history.

They are big and sexy and impractical

Ink and Docubyte able strike this balance. As seen through their lens against a colorized backdrop, the Meda 42A, with its wires and buttons everywhere, does not so much look like a relic as it does a piece of kit from a CHVRCHES show. It is of the past, but not dustily so.

In this artistic interpretation, then, old computers return to being representations of the idea of innovation instead of innovation themselves. They are cool once again, even if you couldn’t do much with them. They point, once more, to a promising future. They are big and sexy and impractical and everything that the desktop in most cubicles cannot offer, other than computing power.

See more photos from the series over at Creative Review.

High-Rise; a very British psychopathology

The first time I saw the Barbican Estate in London I was entranced. The layered terraces of pitted concrete, the crisscrossing walkways, those monolithic towers that seemed—as with Petra or Al-Hijr—like they might have been carved out of natural stone. It is rare, especially in a city like London, as layered and complex as a geological event, to walk into such a large space that feels so designed, so ordained. Yet, setting foot in those 20 acres of roughened concrete, I somehow felt that I was stepping into an idea, or an ideal, and out of reality entirely. Even now, after having worked there for a spell, passed through and visited countless times, the Barbican Estate and its brutalist volumes of concrete hold a certain weight over me, a sense of both the unreal and yet totalizing impact of designed space.

It’s hard not to think of the forms of the Barbican Estate when watching High-Rise. Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G Ballard’s transgressive, psychosis-riddled novel clearly takes inspiration from the scooped balconies and roughened pillars of the Shakespeare, Cromwell, and Lauderdale towers as well as the Trellick and Balfron towers, whose construction in the early 70s directly inspired Ballard’s work. Wheatley’s adaptation pulls the textures and volumes from this precise era of utopian brutalist projects and their material commitment to a concrete future. In their explorations of Ballard’s inspirations and this powerful aesthetic, Wheatley and his production designer Mark Tildesley crowd their sets with pillars and buttresses of textured concrete, breaking up the carefully composed shots into discrete volumes of highly-charged space. Slit-like windows suggest pillboxes or machine gun nests, or perhaps that obsession of Ballard’s; observation posts for nuclear weapon tests.

40 stories of violence, oppression, and isolation

High-Rise is a loyal adaptation, then, from its 1970s setting to its commitment to the structured and surreal texture of Ballard’s prose. The novel’s plot, which charts the collapse of the titular high-rise into a state of violent decay as witnessed by the precise and unnervingly calm eyes of Dr. Laing, is replicated in fractured movements; short scenes that have an accumulative effect of growing unease. Arranged in mirrored patterns, these vignettes connect through elegant repetitions of imagery and choreography, perhaps the most memorable being a Luis Buñel-evoking arrangement of a slowly cracking apartment door cutting to the face of a cadaver being rolled back from its skull. This image suggests the connection that animates both the book and the film: the association of internal, psychological space and the architectural spaces of society.

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In 1972, Oscar Newman published the book Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design. Putting forward what would become a hugely influential and long-lasting theory of architectural design, Newman combined case studies of high-rise housing estates with a theoretical study of the impact of space on the human mind. Newman’s position, sketched out with now questionable associations between building heights and crime figures, public spaces and degradation, presented the behavior of individuals as stemming from the design of their environments. Outlining how increased public areas, shared space, and open undivided areas led to a lack of collective responsibility in residents, Newman proposed that safe space must be “defensible”—owned, divided, surveillanced, and secured. It’s no surprise that Ballard was attracted to such a work. Already Ballard’s work had connected space and psychopathology, perhaps most powerfully in the short story The Terminal Beach (1964), where Traven, a character who would later reappear in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), wanders a retired nuclear testing site, his memories and movements choreographed by the blocks and bunkers that make a labyrinth of the atoll. In Newman’s defensible space, Ballard found a sketch of the future he would create in High-Rise (1975), one where possession and privatization would dictate space, and the individual—not the state—would be championed as the arbiter of the new order.

Panoramic view of the Barbican (February 1982), via The Guardian

Ballard wasn’t the only one to latch onto Newman’s “defensible space.” Taken up by planners and politicians alike, it began to dictate the ornate fortifications of the decade’s grand housing projects. Margaret Thatcher, the would-be modernizer of the British state, drew a particular strength from these ideas. Her world view—where “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families”—sought to place the impetus on the individual, to blame them for their shortcomings and champion them for their successes. Collectivity was a myth, a liberal fantasy. Fueled by Alice Coleman’s Utopia on Trial (1985), a politically motivated retread of Newman’s idea that explicitly blamed architects for the living conditions of the poorest estates, Thatcher would attempt a complete restructuring of many of the most deprived estates in England, imposing a top down reorganization designed to manipulate people out of poverty and misery.

The failings of this perspective is now evident. Both Newman, and in a even more totalizing way, Thatcher, robbed the individual of agency, subsuming them into a set of behaviors dictated by space. Inequality grew, unemployment spiked, and industry declined during Thatcher’s leadership, leading to worse conditions in the so-called “sink” estates she had hoped to renovate. The division of space into private parcels, as well as a drive towards private ownership led to fractured, isolated communities. Newman’s ideas meanwhile, were heavily criticized by academics for their architectural determinism and imprecise methods, yet still proved attractive to city planners. Blaming social problems of architectural utopianism allowed leaders to overlook deeper, more difficult problems in society, and instead turn to technology, innovation, and design as bright modern antidotes to the drudgery of poverty.

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Thatcher, and the experiences of that generation hang over Wheatley’s High-Rise like a dark shadow: As is true of Ballard’s book, the residents of the tower are not deprived or working class, they are instead Thatcher’s ideal citizens, the new “professional” class. The tower’s architect Royal, speaks of the the building as a “crucible for change,” and Wheatley, in what is perhaps too much of a straight shot, even includes a quote from the iron lady herself. Its an adaptation that brings the political and class commentary contained within Ballard’s book to the fore, and using the stratified structure of a tower block as a metaphor for the trickle-down structure of British society as it was isn’t quite as blunt as it sounds. Wheatley, in his choice of period setting and political motifs seems eager to look back at what was a formative time for British society and how the previous generation’s struggles have impacted in his own (Wheatley was born in 1972, the same year Defensible Space was published). His transformation of the book’s rooftop sculpture park into a Tudor garden doubles down on the importance of Royal’s signpost of a name, and from the occasional aerial shot, we suddenly realize that from the top-down this monstrous construction becomes subterranean: 40 stories of violence, oppression, and isolation all covered up beneath a delicately arranged lawn. If that isn’t an image of British history, I don’t know what is.

Ballard might have approved of such an image, but it’s difficult to know if he would have also approved of Wheatley’s more obvious politicking. Ballard was paradoxically both emblematic of and estranged from his context, and flicking back through old interviews it’s not hard to detect the glee with which he refused to adhere to party political dogma. For Ballard, political figures were always emblems, symbols and diagrams, not leaders, which is perhaps why there is a certain timelessness to his work, focused as it is on the darkness of the human condition. This darkness is still very much present in this adaptation: High-Rise, even with Wheatley’s clearer socialist leanings, still can’t be mistaken for a “message” film—it retains the kaleidoscopic violence, humor, and intense psychological focus of Ballard’s best work.

In some moments, then, High-Rise is the best Ballard adaptation we’ve seen. Wheatley’s ebbing and flowing structure remains irreducible, tracing geometric patterns of suffering and violence. His Dr. Laing, the idealized English intellectual, is Tom Hiddleston in a moment of perfect casting. It’s possible to imagine him as any one of Ballard’s precise protagonists, the distant Kerans of Drowned World (1962), the spiralling James Ballard of Crash (1973). Here, he makes for an exceptionally lost and heartless heart of the film, pursuing his own melding with the architecture, his shrugging off of his self. He is the super sane one in all this madness, the best prepared individual to survive in this “defensible space.” He is the Barbican’s ideal tenant, and perhaps, Ballard’s attempt at sketching our most direct ancestor. Because if there is one thing that High-Rise makes clear, it’s that we are all living through a future that has already happened.

The insightful history of one of the first modern board games

Though many people might think that board games are a relatively modern phenomenon, the likes of Trouble (1965) and The Game of Life (1960) were actually preceded by years and years of table-based entertainment, flung as far and wide as Egypt, India, and ancient China. A brief glimpse into this long and storied history is provided by the Grolier Club in New York and their exhibition The Royal Game of the Goose: Four Hundred Years of Printed Board Games. Curated by Adrian Seville, this exhibit interrogates the many different forms of “The Game of the Goose”—one of the first modern-style board games—between the 17th century and the present day.

In predynastic tombs in Egypt that date back to 5,500 years ago, a game called senet was found, making it the oldest known board game ever. Successful senet players were thought to be protected by the gods, and the game was placed in their burial chambers for luck. A thousand years later, the royal game of Ur was played, and then discovered in tombs in Iraq by British archaeologists with tablets containing such detailed rules that the game can be replayed today. The game “Go” was mentioned in Chinese writings as early as the 4th century BC, and Pachisi—now Americanized and commercially sold as Parcheesi—may be a variant of Ashtāpada, a game that the Buddha famously refused to play in the 5th or 6th century BC. The viking game Hnefatafl was mentioned by medieval sagas as early as 400 CE, and played until the 1200s. Chess was modified to its modern version in Iberia by the 15th century. As early as we had civilization, we had games.

The Royal Game of Ur, via the British Museum

The Game of the Goose, the focus of Seville’s exhibit, was first recorded when Francesco dei Medici sent a copy to King Philip II of Spain in the late 1500s to wide praise. Since then, it has flourished in one form or another, and Seville’s collection includes copies that span from Germany to England to Canada. The appeal of the exhibit, however, is not just for history buffs. The main draw of the exhibit is the vast collection of boards, all presenting visually striking takes on the same basic concept. While certain game boards do present the eponymous goose, others wind their spaces around a snake, or fill them in with pictures of architecture or other amusements. They resemble illuminated manuscripts from the medieval era, or old illustrated children’s books; it’s hard to recognize that they’re all for the same game. Like senet’s tie to the afterlife or the way Go dealt with war, Goose said a lot about the society it was created in: the goose represented purity and luck, while the number of spaces (63) was meant to indicate tranquility and wisdom at the end of a life.

the Game of the Goose says a lot about the society it was created in

This continuity is even more apparent with a brief look at the rules of Goose: there’s one track with a varied number of steps, and the players each roll a die in an attempt to reach the end first. Sound familiar? It’s been a template for board games up until the modern day. Perhaps you remember the bright colors of Candy Land (1949) or the devious pathways of Chutes and Ladders (1943) from your childhood, or maybe you’ve gotten heated over a game of Sorry! (1929) one too many times. These modern amusements deviate in name and detail, but the boards are as winding and elaborate as those of Goose in 1640—and 1784, or 1820, or 1900.

In 1934 the game became a promotional maneuver for Coca-Cola, and in 1953 it warned of the ridiculous nature of Italian elections. By investigating the inspirations behind these games and their rules, we can learn a lot about the social climate of where and when they originated. Could the same not be said for us now? In 200 years a historian could discover the Target™ edition of Monopoly (1935) and display it proudly. Sure, it won’t protect us after we die, but it might tell that guy something about what we valued.

See “ The Royal Game of the Goose: Four Hundred Years of Printed Board Games ” at the Grolier Club in New York until May 14.

Header and additional photos by Claire Voon .

H/t Hyperallergic’s coverage of the exhibit .

Virtual reality photography will change how you take screenshots

First, there was the talkie. Then, the amazing technicolor. Soon, cineplexes started handing out paper red-and-blue glasses to show their movies IN THREE-DEEEE! Once revolutionary in their time, all of these features now come standard on even the cheapest of smartphones (well, so long as you still have a pair of red-and-blue 3D glasses kicking around a junk drawer somewhere). On the creator’s side, producing films with all of these advancements is practically no-budget at this point, and cheap consumer options allow even amateurs to get in on experimenting with stereoscopic 3D and resolutions as high as 4K at a relatively small cost. It should come as no surprise, then, that virtual reality would eventually make the same transition.

A screenshot taken using Ansel. To view the image in full 360 degrees, visit Ansel’s image gallery.

Named after American landscape photographer Ansel Adams, Nvidia’s Ansel is a virtual reality videogame screenshot platform for the Instagram age. It’s for the type of player who might like to take a selfie after beating a boss in Hyper Light Drifter, or who wants to show their friends how #lit they are whenever they reach a new bonfire in Dark Souls. Prior to this platform, these players were stuck taking screenshots from their character’s in-game perspective, which while great for play, tends to be lacking when it comes to the composition department. With Ansel, the goal is to divorce the camera from the player character’s perspective entirely, giving it the free-form ability to shoot from any angle and distance, similar to how a real-world photographer might use a drone.

Most impressively, Ansel will allow players to take full 360 degree screenshots with the click of a button, allowing even amateur photographers with little equipment to get in on creating VR photos, even if they’re currently—if fittingly—limited to virtual worlds. This is all part of the Nvidia graphics card arms race, of course, so photo resolutions do tend towards the massive, with one screenshot from the announcement demonstration clocking in at 61,440 pixels wide. I don’t even want to think about how long it would take me to download that.

Ansel will allow players to take full 360 degree screenshots with the click of a button

For those worried they’ll have to drop $500 or $600 on a new virtual reality headset just to have a chance to give these photos a “like,” Nvidia will be making them available to anyone with Google Cardboard, a red-and-blue glasses budget version of virtual reality that can be achieved using a smartphone and, well, cardboard. Alternately, users can download an app that will allow them to view these VR photos in 2D, but with full motion tracking and 360 degree support.

Supported games at the moment include The Witness, The Division, The Witcher 3 (2015), Paragon, No Man’s Sky, and more, but I really am rooting for them to add Dark Souls (2011) to the list at some point. My first time making my way through Lordran, I had two best friends: my shield, and my screenshot button. I became something like a very murdery photojournalist as I posted my progress through the game for all my friends to see, and as veteran players cheered me on—my journey actually convinced another one of my friends who had skipped the game to pick it up.

Since then, I’ve been looking for another game to photodocument and turn into annoying vacation slides for bothering my timeline with. With Ansel, maybe my No Man’s Sky flights will be worth a travelogue or two.

A screenshot taken using Ansel. To view the image in full 360 degrees, visit Ansel’s image gallery.

You can learn more by visiting Ansel’s website.

h/t Engadget

Artists explore how we express feelings through technology

The mindfulness group meets every Wednesday in a room with obscenely grimy chairs and an even more obscenely good view. This week’s subject was emotions. There they were, laid out in a circle: six basic emotions—anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise—each sprouting a few sub-emotions, which in turn each birthed two more specific variants. Here’s the rub: There are more positive than negative emotions.

Midway through the proceedings, the eldest participant asked about an emotion she’d been feeling—why wasn’t it on the chart? Well, which one most closely resembles your emotion, the discussion leader asked? It was one of the basic six, but like a sub-prime mortgage, none of the tranches really worked. On and on the discussion went, ending only when time ran out with the unsatisfying conclusion that we need more terms for describing emotions.

It demands your attention and you give it

Maybe we do. The Institute for New Feeling definitely thinks so. Based in Los Angeles, it self-identifies as a “research clinic committed to the development of new ways of feeling, and ways of feeling new.” One might identify that as an artsy joke, but the jury’s still out.

Anyhow, the Institute, as reflected in its newly-released FELT Book, is interested in the intersection between feelings and technology. In total, 125 artists contributed to the undertaking. “The instructional form of the FELT BOOK is inspired by Fluxus,” co-founder Nina Sarnelle told The Creators Project, “as well as the many styles of instructions we encounter today, like YouTube tutorials, eHow articles, DIY publications, technical diagrams, home remedies.”

Casey Kauffmann, Reflexive Validation Therapy

So it does. Casey Kauffmann’s Reflexive Validation Therapy, for instance, is a collage of famous crying faces (here’s looking at you, Kim Kardashian and Lauren Conrad), computer mice, Facebook like symbols, and pink word art reading “give me attention.” This is not a caption with which one argues. It demands your attention and you give it. That may very well be the point.

Once you’re paying attention, though, the question of what exactly is new about these feelings is hard to escape. The need for attention, condescending tropes about social media notwithstanding, is not really novel. The form through which it is expressed, however, has changed. This may only be surface (an irony sometimes lost when deploying the Kim Kardashian meme) but it is significant nonetheless.

So, here we are, back where we started: Many feelings and a question of how to describe and express them. Some might say it’s ageless.

You can find out more about the Institute For New Feeling on its website. 

Via The Creator’s Project

Theo Triantafyllidis, FOMO fbX

Adam Ferriss, Dead Pixel Burial Kit

Eva Papamargariti, Three Domestic Events Against Boredom

Grimes is turning her luscious pop music into an interactive installation

Experimental pop musician Claire “Grimes” Boucher is a one-lady machine. Not only does the pop songstress compose and write all her own music, she also directs her own music videos and has a steady hand in producing. The fully-realized vision of Grimes is wholly Boucher’s own. Grimes is Grimes, because of Grimes. It only makes sense that the next logical step for her is a step beyond the musical sphere—an interactive art installation.

Perhaps Grimes is diving back into her experimental roots

Grimes will be headlining the North Carolina music, art, and technology festival Moogfest, which will be held May 19-22. There, Grimes, a proprietor for all things innovative and strange in her music and visual aesthetic, will have her interactive installation “REALiTi: Inside the Music of Grimes” on display for all the lucky festival attendees. The Microsoft Kinect-powered installation will allow visitors to “manipulate the music as they physically interact with the environment,” according to a press release.

Grimes has been involved with the experimental electronic scene since 2009. While a cult-favorite in the scene, she later rose to prominence with her 2012 album Visions, a record that was met with widespread critical acclaim for its unique blend of experimental sounds and pop. After a few throwaway singles (including one originally written for the illustrious Rihanna) and an alleged entire scrapped album, Grimes finally released her Visions follow-up in late 2015, entitled Art Angels. Art Angels is a polarizing record for longterm fans, as Grimes fully embraced her pop-sensibilities and nearly left her experimental past behind. Yet, with this new interactive experiment, perhaps Grimes is diving back into her experimental roots.

Tangible details for the interactive journey through Grimes’ single “REALiTi” remain scarce. As shown in a brief video preview for the installation, visitors gently touch mesh-like walls, inhibiting neon colors and sounds in the enclosed environment. But knowing Grimes, it’ll be something wonderfully weird.

Via Pitchfork

Twilight Princess and the little imp girl that upset Hyrule

In the Legend of Zelda series, the roles of hero and villain are fairly consistent. Link, using the resolve of courage, overcomes Ganon, whose lust for power represents the ultimate in evil. This is the reliable dichotomy that surges throughout each game. However, the 2006 Wii title (and now re-released in HD for the Wii U) The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess complicates this previously steadfast ideological balance. The game introduces Midna, a dark, impish character that raises the question of where a “good” hero who uses “dark” powers would align in Hyrule. We are confronted with the possibility that Midna is either heroic, like Link, or something more akin to an anti-hero.

The idea of such a character—an anti-hero—is  commonly found in western pop culture. Look no further than Breaking Bad‘s (2008-2013) Walter White or the titular character in the Jessica Jones (2015-present) TV series for someone that fits the moniker. These are characters that use morally gray—or, at times, outright evil—means to what most people would say are “good” ends. Walter White starts out in Breaking Bad as a traditional family man, only to be slowly drawn into the criminal underworld where he grows a meth empire. It’s gripping drama because we know the man he once was (and pretends to be, at times), and so as his descent continues, we still hope for him to succeed and survive, even as he kills and commits crime after crime.

Midna raises the question of where a “good” hero who uses “dark” powers would align

Similar could be said for Jessica Jones. Unlike a more traditional superhero, Jones’s approach to dealing with both her detective agency’s clients and her antagonist, Killgrave, include tactics that would likely give other heroes the chills. We wouldn’t expect to see Link dangling a townsperson from a railroad track just to get information, for example. It’s this type of behavior that draws us to anti-heroes. Their story arcs often prove more interesting given that the audience can’t predict how they will act. We become fascinated as they struggle with their own internal sense of morality—it’s never a case of simply doing the right thing every step of the way.

Unlike traditional heroes, then, the anti-hero exists to smear the lines that are used to guide and judge the behavior of an individual and the society they belong to. They provoke and challenge the morals we uphold and live by, twisting them in new ways, asking us where we might make exceptions to our rules. A “good” hero is typically held to unrealistic—and potentially unhuman—standards, acting as an almost perfect representation of humanity. They are us, without so many of the flaws. While a villain is the polar opposite, a physical manifestation of an abhorrent part of the human psyche. Anti-heroes, on the other hand, have the potential to be much more human and relatable characters, given that they tend to be broken, make mistakes, and don’t always act in line with a specific code or creed of heroism. They aren’t those distant paragons sitting at the fringes of the good-evil alignment, they fit somewhere in the middle, right alongside us.

Going back to The Legend of Zelda, Link is the series’ poster child for the perfect ideal of heroism: he fits the iconography almost too well, riding in to save the day on the back of a horse, and always unwavering in working against evil. With Link on one side of morality and Ganon on the opposing side, we have the two poles of the good-evil scale. For a long time, the  gray area between hero and villain wasn’t acknowledged by the series. Then Midna came along. She’s the ruling princess of the Twilight Realm, which is inhabited by a group of sorcerers who were locked away eons ago for using dark magic that was forbidden by the goddesses; the creators of Hyrule.

However, Zant—a usurper who Midna will not kowtow to—has taken control of the Twilight Realm, turned all of its inhabitants into cursed creatures, and is using the realm to try to break into the world of light. Midna isn’t having any of it and plans to stop Zant. But this doesn’t necessarily shift her to the side of good, as she makes that crystal clear when outlining her motivations to Link early on in the game: “Don’t you think for a second that I care about the world of light, I don’t, I’m helping you because I have to.” Midna sees no other way to save her own world, even though she still holds the light world in contempt for punishing the sins of her ancestors. And so we see here that Midna is more dynamic than Link, who is often single-minded and one-dimensional in his heroic abilities and righteousness.

While, at first, Midna’s purpose seems to solely be to throw off the morality spectrum of Hyrule (and entertain along the way), it proves to be more complicated than that. In the essay “Slave Morality and Master Sword”, from The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy: I Link Therefore I Am (2008), Kristina Drzaic and Peter Rauch speak of how Hyrule’s morality is defined by when Link is working against Ganon—Link never acts on his own, but instead is a reactionary force against “the machinations of Ganon.” This is an important idea, because it sets up how reflexive Link is as a protagonist and as a character. Link—in Twilight Princess—is pulled into this world-scale conflict not of his own accord, but by the actions of the “evil” in the world. It also shows us the necessity of both characters—Link and Ganon—to any discussions of good and evil in Hyrule. This is the standard for what being a “hero” in Hyrule means. With Link as an ideal hero, we must take a hypothetical look at what being an anti-hero in Hyrule would require to see if Midna fits the bill.

Link is the series’ poster child for the perfect ideal of heroism

For that, we can turn to the essay, “Anti-Heroism in the Continuum of Good and Evil,” from The Psychology of Superheroes: An Unauthorized Exploration (2008). In it, Michael Spivey and Steven Knowlton examine the space between good and evil where anti-heroes reside, through characters such as The Crow, Batman, Judge Dredd, and the Punisher. Spivey and Knowlton point out that one act often committed by anti-heroes that introduces a sledgehammer of moral ambiguity to a fiction is mass murder. Midna fits in with moral ambiguity this through her willingness to use the Fused Shadows—the very power her tribe was locked away for—as a means to try to save her people from Zant. Interestingly, after already trying to use the Fused Shadows on Zant, Midna spins on a dime and once again shows concern for the abuse of the magic. “My King? You who do nothing but abuse the magic of your tribe? You must be joking,” she says to Zant. Her defiance at this moment can be interpreted as one of moral clarity and it shows her belief that there are correct and incorrect ways to use this banished power. Midna sees no problem in using it if it means saving her subjects from Zant.

However, it turns out that Zant is not being powered by this old magic, but by Ganon, the ultimate evil on our scale of morality for Hyrule. Midna’s opposition to Zant would—at least ideologically—place her on the heroic side of Hyrule’s morality. After this encounter with Zant, Midna is left mortally wounded, but she still decides to act for the light world. It’s a key moment, and a significant moment in her shift away from her anti-heroic role towards the “good” side of the hero continuum.

Going back to the ideas presented earlier, it’s also worth noting that Midna, even with her dark origins, is a reactive character. In this light, she might be seens as more akin to Link: she is simply acting out of the will to save her own people from the new “machinations” of Ganon, through Zant. By this morality, she’s aligned squarely with the same “good” that Link comprises. Therefore, even by using the dark powers forbade by the goddesses, Midna is still, in some regard, acting in the same way that Link would, given the circumstances.

After defeating Blizzeta, a boss monster that resulted from evil possessing an innocent character, Midna starts to show remorse, but also a care for not just her world, the Twilight Realm, but also for Link’s world, the world of light:

“Still… I feel bad about the way we treated that girl. To think the Mirror of Twilight has the power to change people like that…This world…ALL worlds…can be cruel…Let’s hurry and collect the rest of those pieces, Link! We have to, before more innocent creatures have to endure the suffering this poor girl did…”

This is a drastic change from the character that, at the start of the game, was in it only to save her own world. Her change of heart is further illumined, and fully realized, in another scene:

“I didn’t care what happened to the world of light, not at all. But after witnessing the selfless lengths that Princess Zelda and you have gone to… Your sacrifices…I now know, in the bottom of my heart, that I must save this world, too.”

Here, Midna has fully transformed, her anti-heroic qualities that she started the game with having disintegrated by interacting with Link and Zelda. As it turns out, Midna does decide to use the power of the Fused Shadows at the end of the game—but hesitates, and is unable to use them at the risk of hurting Princess Zelda. Only after Link defeats the Puppet Zelda does Midna use her powers to cleanse the Ganon-possessed Zelda, afterwards unleashing them to try to ultimately suppress Ganon and save, not just her own life, but Link and Zelda’s too. She proves to be unwilling to risk the world of light, and its citizens, at this point, which is something that she would have done without issue at the start of the game.

This is a journey that Link could never take

Twilight Princess, then, depicts Midna’s journey as she shifts closer to Link and that side of heroism, and away from the dark side she was born into. It’s a character arc that only she’s able to traverse in The Legend of Zelda and it’s one that serves this specific entry in the series on multiple levels. As Ganon says right before the final battle, “Shadow has been moved by light”—the “shadow,” of course, being Midna. This is a journey that Link could never take, one that demanded the designers at Nintendo to create a whole new character for, to embody something more fluid than the rest of the series’ personalities. Midna is the representation of an evolving struggle between darkness and light, and illuminates how this struggle may look within the scope of Hyrule.

The complications that Midna throws into the ingrained set-up of Hyrule may be why Twilight Princess remains compelling 10 years on. It’s especially prescient this year, which will see more superhero movies than ever turn towards their darker side. However, while western ideas identify Midna as an anti-hero, which specifically aligns her with ideas of morality, her Japanese origins consider her differently. In a 2007 Game Informer interview, The Legend of Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma touched on some of the development of Midna’s personality and her Japanese-anime roots. “In Japanese, there’s a phrase called ‘tsundere,’ which means in the beginning you’re kind of snobby and cruel, but towards the end your shell kind of breaks off and you become sort of sappy,” Aonuma said. “Women with that kind of personality, I think guys are really attracted to. Both Miyamoto-san and myself are quite fond of characters like that.”

The tsundere character has appeared throughout Japanese manga since at least the 1970s. But the term itself wasn’t popularized until around 2005 (the year before Twilight Princess came out) as it became more prevalent and recognizable in Japanese media—some speculate this is due to the recent rise of individualism in Japan, which may led to more self-assured and independent women becoming more desirable. It’s fair to say that Aonuma and Miyamoto-san are far from the only ones who find female characters with that personality type interesting. There has been some research into why the tsundere is appealing, and it showed that due to the gain-loss effect, having a character treat someone coldly, then slowly warm up, actually makes people feel, psychologically, that they have advanced the relationship. There’s a rewarding sense of progression.

The same goes for the relationship between Midna, Link, and even the player. Midna is, at first, cold, and very much seems to fit the idea of an anti-hero as popularized in the modern era through American comic books. But over the course of the game she starts to warp that western label and, by the end, seems to escape the archetype completely. And so while a valid reading is to see Midna serving as an anti-hero—as western eyes are trained to—that acts to upset the moral balance of the series, she is instead informed by a character type deeply ingrained in Japanese, not American, culture.

The art of pinball

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INKS (iOS)

BY STATE OF PLAY GAMES

Pinball is something of a lost art. With the glory days of arcades and The Who’s rock opera Tommy (1969) behind us, the Pinball Wizard may appear to have lost his luster. But State of Play’s INKS is breathing new life into this arcane mode of play, by making the pinball machine double up as a blank canvas for painters. From the creators of Lumino City (2014), the game brings a similarly tactile approach to design. Instead of flashing colors, your ball hits objects only to create bursts of watercolor behind it. The path your ball takes across the board leaves a trail of paint, too, turning play into a form of self-expression. With tables inspired by the styles of Miro, Matisse, Pollock and Riley, INKS is for the pinball player who wants something beautiful to look at while they rack up high scores.

Perfect for: Pinball wizards, artists, Lumino City fans

Playtime: short