Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 124

In Defense of the 3D Platformer

Let me say it up front: the new Ratchet and Clank remake is magnificent. It also feels extremely strange, as though it hails from a parallel universe that isn’t quite our own. In this universe, the 3D platformer is ascendant. Good games are defined by everything it has in abundance: by the quality of their move upgrades; the length of their long jumps; the theming of their worlds; the cackling of their villains. Every game is legally required to have a fire level. Every game conveys the same set of values—duty, honor, the heroism of the ordinary, the sacrifice of the sidekick—beneath a surface of fart jokes and cartoon violence. Anthropomorphic mascots dominate the gaming industry and continue to exert outsize cultural influence, appearing in campaign ads and grocery store circulars; instead of a Carrie, a Miranda, a George, or a Kramer, people identify as “a Mario,” a Sonic, a Spyro, maybe a Jak. Banjo-Eightie has received universal acclaim. Super Mario Universe has broken new ground as the first MMO populated exclusively by Marios, scrambling around 3D levels of immeasurable texture and scale, many of which are shaped like Mario himself. We live in an age of unabashed totemism, and we receive a new Ratchet and Clank—bombastically orchestrated, aesthetically indulgent, functionally the same—with gratitude but no small measure of expectation. It is exactly what we wanted. It is the way of things.

I’m describing the universe I desperately wanted to live in and thought I would live in when I was a Nintendo 64-obsessed kid, polishing off Cloud Cuckooland—the last level of Banjo-Tooie—and dreaming of how videogames would evolve, having seen how they’d evolved already. Super Mario 128 was right around the corner, as I learned from rumors spread on the GameFAQs forums. I had no idea what it would be like. But with a distinctly childlike smugness I was confident that it would be more. It would have double the hats. Double the levels. At least double the graphics. And then Super Mario 256 would come along, doubling everything again.

We don’t live in that universe. It’s 2016, and the 3D platformer is no longer the pinnacle of game design I thought it was when I was 10 ; instead, the genre has been dead for over a decade. I’m not talking about 3D platforming as a basic mechanic, which lives on (in limited ways) all over the place. I’m talking about the 3D platformer as a discrete genre, with its hub worlds and iconic mascots and backflip upgrades and companion duos. The years between roughly 2002 and now are littered with evidence of its demise, and you can almost imagine a Wreck-It Ralph-like support group full of former mascots who have tried other careers since the bursting of an early 2000s bubble. Crash Bandicoot hasn’t been heard from since 2001; Jak and Daxter didn’t make it to PS3, bowing out in favor of Naughty Dog’s other—and decidedly more generic—creation, Uncharted. Spyro joined Skylanders, which is a bit like a C-suite executive becoming a door-to-door knife salesman. Sonic has descended into a pitiful spiral of narcissistic self-reinvention, like a less lovable Jenna Maroney. Banjo-Kazooie returned only in Nuts and Bolts, which might be the most depressing (and depressed) game of all time; I’ve never seen a genre hybrid more bitterly aware of the market need for it to be a genre hybrid.

The years between 2002 and now are littered with evidence of the 3D platformer’s demise

Mario continues his lone crusade, of course, kept alive by Nintendo’s panache and the sheer fact of being Mario, but a game like Super Mario 3D World (2013) is very different from a game like Super Mario 64 (1996): it’s the essence of a 2D platformer translated into 3D space, with none of the emphasis on exploration, topological intricacy, or collection for collection’s sake. Even Super Mario Galaxy (2007) was a step toward that model, and the new Ratchet and Clank is similar. Levels appear vast, complicated, and open in all directions, but within them you’re almost always funneled along linear paths, shooting endless enemies that come in shooter-like waves. Unlike other platformer series, Ratchet and Clank stayed alive throughout the 2000s and 2010s, continuing to iterate, greeting the future (hence Ratchet and Clank Future) with open arms. What kept it alive, however, is a canny instinct for adaptation, and a willingness—even in the first game—to diverge from the design philosophy that inspired it in the first place. You will jump a lot in this new Ratchet and Clank, as you did in the original Ratchet and Clank. But it’s still fundamentally a 3rd person shooter with “platformer elements.”

The sum of these stories is a larger story that feels pretty unique, all things considered. Videogames are an aggressively nostalgic medium, always looking backward before they look forward, yet something about the 3D platformer defies the cycle of reappropriation that makes old things new again. Other defunct genres are lovingly exhumed all the time, their mechanics—even if austere, even if unforgiving—mined for expressive potential we might not have recognized at the time: the isometric RPG in Pillars of Eternity; the roguelike in The Binding of Isaac; the FMV CD-ROM game in Her Story; the point-and-click adventure in countless indie reimaginings. In its old age, the 2D platformer has gone through an astonishing creative renaissance, its central mechanic—one of the oldest and purest things you can do in a game—becoming a vessel of pathos and philosophical rumination. Like novels, there are games of ideas. Many of those games are 2D platformers. Almost none are 3D.

Concept art by Insomniac Games

To be sure, there are upcoming games, mostly Kickstarted, that advertise themselves as returns to the form: Yooka-Laylee and A Hat in Time, both spiritual successors to Banjo, as well as the notional Psychonauts 2. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling a rabid desire for everything they vow to bring back: vast worlds stuffed with a “plethora of delicious collectibles,” many of which possess googly eyes; bosses who “communicate via a collage of burp and fart noises”; a new generation of sublimely simple melodies by Grant Kirkhope (Banjo-Kazooie) and David Wise (Donkey Kong Country). But all of these are attempts at re-creation, driven to make again rather than make anew. In this way they are unlike the Ratchet remake in their attitude toward the source material; they want to preserve the genre in its sanctity rather than throw out the shit that feels dated. But they’re not dissimilar from the Ratchet remake in their overall orientation toward the genre’s pastness. Their explicit preservationism only underscores the idea that the genre is a relic of the past with no place in the present. It’s either an endangered species or something long since extinct—a dinosaur to be resurrected through careful DNA analysis.  

If, as Darwin maintained, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, it’s hard not to see the 3D platformer through the lens of both—as an evolutionary predecessor and a form of infancy. On the one hand, it’s the ur-species behind every successive species of 3D action game. You can see its traces in everything: in the architectural intricacy and spoke-to-wheel level design of Dark Souls; in the endless collectables scattered across the map in Assassin’s Creed and other open-world games; in the basic grammar of moving the camera around with a second stick. Imagining Yooka-Laylee sharing digital shelf space with Uncharted 4, Dark Souls III, and Assassin’s Creed Whatever is sort of like imagining a primordial amphibian waddling into an ecosystem full of its descendants, all brandishing teeth and claws and complex eyes. On the other hand, the genre is attached to childhood, both aesthetically and conceptually. It’s the closest thing we’ve ever gotten to a playable cartoon, as the new Ratchet—a game based on a new movie based on the original game—makes abundantly clear. But it’s also about exploration and adventure within a distinctly constrained field of possibility: as confined yet limitless, as limitless in its confinement, as a LEGO set, a childhood bedroom, a theme park, a toy box.

In other words, it’s hard to take the 3D platformer seriously as a genre unto itself because it’s hard to see it as anything but a stepping-stone to other things. Its identity is enmeshed with a sense of becoming: games becoming bigger and better; children becoming adults; games maturing into genre specificity; humans maturing into the uncertainty of adulthood, where there is no abiding sense of finitude, no world-logic as neat and trim as the contours of Cloud Cuckooland, a place of insanity organized neatly—like so many platformer levels—around a central mountain hub. The 3D platformer is defined at every level by the possibility of completion. Adulthood is about incompleteness, as are many contemporary games: the endless grind of Destiny; the 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 planets of No Man’s Sky; the irresolvability of Her Story; the emotional paths of Firewatch, branching and intertwining. Childhood is about collection.

Its identity is enmeshed with a sense of becoming

I found myself collecting everything in the new Ratchet and Clank. Every gold bolt, every card, every weapon, every upgrade. I found myself in the familiar thrall of menu screens with precise, whole-number fractions: 1/3, 3/5, 28/28, 62%. I found myself returning to every planet systematically, “Map-O-Matic” in hand, to find nooks and crannies with crystals I had missed. Memories of Banjo-Kazooie came rushing back, memories of Kazooie squawking like a rusty see-saw as I ran him up treacherous slopes. In a return of one of my oldest habits, I staved off the final boss until I was satisfied I’d done everything else you could do. Beating him was like setting a capstone, ticking off a final checkbox. I returned to a way of approaching videogames in general that I’ve long since abandoned, as games themselves have increasingly traded the pleasures of delimitation for illusions of infinitude. I also ended up wondering if a return to collection is necessarily a return to childhood—whether it could be a form of escape that isn’t regression, a form of play that isn’t denial.

There are many circles in Ratchet and Clank. Levels are almost always circular in some way, their paths ending close to where you parked your ship. The game’s aesthetic is a chaotic retro-futurist assemblage of rounded spires, glass domes, and elevator tubes; every planet sort of looks like a cross between Tomorrowland and the Taj Mahal. The power of the PS4 is evident above all in the high-poly contours of things, now fully round where they were once jaggy. Things that aren’t circular are hexagonal—bolts, UI elements, segments on the weapon upgrade chart. Things that aren’t hexagonal are inevitably, somehow, circular. In a way, the whole game is circular in its return to the first Ratchet and Clank, even if it retains elements from later entries. And the genre to which it returns is infinitely circular, too: Spiral Mountain, Grunty’s Lair, Whomp’s Fortress, Tall Tall Mountain—all wheels within wheels, as though the ethos of the 3D platformer as a whole were a kind of circular self-containment.

image via the Blanton Museum

That circularity makes me think of the mandala as described by Carl Jung in Mandala Symbolism (1972)—the circles within circles drawn in sand by Tibetan monks; the circles one draws to stave off the chaos of reality, to feel a sense of centeredness, completion, totality. Mandala simply means “circle” in Sanskrit, but Jung sees it as an archetype of wholeness, a symbol of the self fully centered, appearing in the ancient texts of countless world cultures. Children are born with a seemingly innate desire to look at circles. But adults also, according to Jung, find an important kind of peace and pleasure in their shape–the “premonition of a centre of personality,” a vision of the self organized into a whole. He describes how drawing mandalas over and over again, tracing them, constitutes a therapeutic practice:

The severe pattern imposed by a circular image of this kind compensates the disorder and confusion of the psychic state—namely, through the construction of a central point to which everything is related, or by a concentric arrangement of the disordered multiplicity and of contradictory and irreconcilable elements. This is evidently an attempt at self healing on the part of Nature, which does not spring from conscious reflection but from an instinctive impulse.

An old teacher of mine once warned against the temptation to turn everything into “Jungian soup”; one of the things that makes archetypes archetypes is that it’s easy to see them everywhere. Nonetheless, I think it’s possible to see something mandala-like in the 3D platformer’s basic design, ethos, and rhythm: in the way it’s about nothing more than recursivity and completion; in the way it’s about tracing paths, filling in nooks and crannies, finding resolution at the top of the mountain. Playing a 2D platformer is inevitably about reaching an endpoint, even if—as in Metroid—you can move left, up, and down. Playing a 3D platformer is inevitably about reaching the center, even if—as in Ratchet and Clank—the emphasis is on shooting rather than platforming itself. With every collectable, you fill in a part of a predetermined tapestry; with every repeat traversal of the same concentric place, you add a grain of sand to something designed, something total.

Weekend Reading: Tears of War – Ultimate Edition

While we at Kill Screen love to bring you our own crop of game critique and perspective, there are many articles on games, technology, and art around the web that are worth reading and sharing. So that is why this weekly reading list exists, bringing light to some of the articles that have captured our attention, and should also capture yours.



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Restoring a Lost Psychedelic Anime Classic: An Interview with the Team Reintroducing Belladonna of Sadness, Katie Skelly, The Comics Journal

Belladonna of Sadness is an erotic, Japanese animated feature from 1973, one mostly forgotten until more recently when the world wide web, as it often does, picked up on some of the visual splendors of this obscure film. Now being restored and redistributed for new audiences, writer/cartoonist Katie Skelly interviews the people responsible for reviving such a visually delicious and mysterious work of cinema.

No Bullshit: The Culture & Creativity Of Cliff Bleszinski’s Boss Key Productions, Rob Zacny, Rock Paper Shotgun

Saying that you want to revolutionize games has become as ubiquitous a notion as “part of a balanced breakfast,” but development icon Cliff Bleszinski seems to want to see that through, somehow, with his new project Lawbreakers. Rob Zacny makes an entertaining stop to Boss Key’s studio to see all the good, bad, and goofy of how Bleszinksi is running his new outfit.

The Male Sentimental, Liz Kinnamon, mixed feelings

Gaspar Noé has been addressed and dismissed as a shock rocker of arthouse cinema, including and especially his most recent feature, Love, a 3D film overflowing with sex scenes. Liz Kinnamon goes much deeper, though, deconstructing not only the film but pop culture’s modern state of men and their emotions.

When Everything Is Bullying, Nothing Is Bullying, Jia Tolentino, Jezebel

The interpretations and subsequent cross-platform hunting parties after the release of Beyoncé’s Lemonade was one of the many turbulences on this plane called life, but it was also another illustration of the kind of emotional warpaths capable online. The shadow of bullying and abuse online has only grown, and not to lose sight of the underlying problems Jia Tolentino eloquently examines anger and persecution in this day and age.

Kill Screen Fest’s scholars program to bring more women into gaming

Apply for the Kill Screen Festival Scholars Program here. 

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The internet makes it easier than ever for people at all skill levels to promote and distribute their art. This culture of creation has enabled a diverse community of game creators and studios to flourish, and for stories that are sorely neglected in mainstream games from larger studios to succeed. The next step for this wave of diversity is for the stories of women, people of color, and LBGTQ communities to be integrated into mainstream gaming. The only way to guarantee representation for these groups in these games is to ensure that they are represented at all levels of game development. That’s where initiatives like Code Liberation, Girls Who Code, and our scholars program come in.

On June 4th, Kill Screen will host its fourth annual conference in Brooklyn, New York. We will also be revisiting our scholars program, presented by Intel, in a new and exciting way. While our scholars program in 2015 took place over one weekend, we wanted to expand this program into a longer-term opportunity for women interested in creating games. The new Kill Screen Festival Scholars Program is a four-month-long mentorship program created to give a select few driven women the tools and support they need to enter the games industry.

We will handpick 10-15 scholars from a pool of female-identifying applicants for the program. The first major event for the new KS Fest Scholars will be the weekend of the Kill Screen Festival, where they will attend a private dinner, meet their mentors and the speakers contributing to the fest, and of course get to attend the conference for free. After being inspired by the conference, the scholars education continues for four months, during which they will meet regularly with mentors and established female voices in the industry and work to create a game of their own. This game will be shown at the end of four months at a showcase of all scholars’ work.

Commitment to diversity is rooted in action for both Kill Screen and Intel, who have both recognized how important it is to create opportunities in the games industry for marginalized voices. “The world is diverse, and Intel is trying to build products that are going to thrill and delight everyone, no matter where they are,” says Lee Machen, Director of Developer Relations at Intel. “We believe diversity in our workforce and in our industry is critical to being able to do that.” We at Kill Screen share this belief and are thrilled to be able to take part in this action-based quest for diversity in tech and games.

If you or someone you know identifies as a woman and is interested in bringing new voices into the games industry, please send them this article and application. We encourage women of all ages to apply now and get ready to make their mark on games.

Apply for the Kill Screen Festival Scholars Program here. 

New videogame thriller takes its cues from The Twilight Zone

“You had a good life. But things changed,” explains the narrator of Asemblance as you begin your descent into a world of reconstructed memories. The machine asks how much of your past life you remember, then: “Are you sure you want to remember?”

Last year, Niles Sankey founded Nilo Studios out of a desire to tell new kinds of stories within videogames. An ex-Bungie employee who lent his creative vision to Halo: Reach (2010) and conceptualized the E3 2013 Destiny reveal, Sankey saw untapped potential in the anthology format of storytelling. Asemblance is the first episode in a new, ongoing series of experiences that takes its cues from television shows like Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone (1959-64), The X-Files (1993-present), and Black Mirror (2011-present). It’s slated for release later this month on PlayStation 4 and Steam.

“we hope to do exactly what Rod Serling did with The Twilight Zone“

“The overarching themes and tone for each game will be the same, but the plot, locations, and characters will be different,” Sankey told me. “I think it’s important that each ‘episode’ is a self-contained plot with a new premise.” But the game isn’t just a single narrative being doled out piecemeal. “That’s not what we’re making,” Sankey said. “Asemblance will have different stories in each episode, but each episode will be a self-contained experience.”

The team also hopes to follow in the footsteps of television by bringing in a wide range of writers from outside the studio. “But we are a small team with a very small budget,” Sankey admits. “For now, we have a good chemistry among the three of us, and we’re all inspired by the same types of stories and writing. We already know what the next episode will be and have more ideas for others, but we are excited to work with other writers. Our writing lead comes from the science-fiction and fantasy literary world, so if all goes well, we hope to do exactly what Rod Serling did with The Twilight Zone and bring in a handful of great writers to offer their own takes on the Asemblance concept.”

When I asked him about diverging ideas about the use of narrative in games, citing Halo: Reach and Destiny as two very different approaches to story, Sankey said it wasn’t a matter of shifting design philosophies across videogame creators but rather the needs of the project at hand. “I don’t think we’re necessarily at a fork in the road. There have always been games that prioritize and focus on different aspects of the experience—it really just depends on what the development team values,” adding, “Our focus with Asemblance definitely prioritizes narrative, but we also didn’t want the experience to be completely linear. Story traditionally relies on character, so we wanted to challenge you as the player character to internalize the world around you as you progress. It’s hard to say too much without spoiling the game.”

Sankey now spends his days working from home, with his girlfriend’s dog to keep him company, and gets to make the kind of game he’s always wanted to play. But does he miss his time at Bungie? “Definitely. I miss my friends and coworkers,” he says. “That studio is full of some of the smartest people I’ve ever met. I almost feel like it’s cursed in that regard. So many smart and capable people, all limited to one game. One game is not enough to express the potential of the people at Bungie. That’s one of the reasons I left. I made my contributions to a big franchise and now I’m ready to push in new directions.”

Asemblance lands on PS4 and Steam later this month. Check out the trailer on YouTube.

The creator of Persona on life, Japanese culture, and the unconscious

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

In the crowded world of Japanese role-playing games (JRPGs), the critically acclaimed Persona series has stood out for a decade and counting. Defying conventions established by other popular franchises like Final Fantasy, the series forgoes the usual swords and sorcery for something closer to home. Using subtle surrealism instead, Persona layers its more fantastical elements with social commentary. Players venture into a strange, shadowy world hidden behind their television screens, where enemies are a unique blend of the psychological and supernatural.

“The Persona series addresses problems that people hold deep in their hearts,” said Katsura Hashino, the series’ director since Persona 3 (2006). “They’re not just playing the game as a form of escapism.” Hashino calls his games meditations on the “true self,” and the repercussions that come with suppressing it. Psychology pioneer Carl Jung considered the “persona” to be a mask of character traits worn to conform to societal rules, with one’s true self-being the wearer of that mask. By combining pop culture with academic theories like Jung’s collective unconscious, Hashino’s games ask players to face their most ancient fears and desires in a modern context.

“The core of the series is the ‘back’ side, the alternate world, the shadow of human society,” said Hashino. “The protagonists live a normal life in the real world, or the ‘front’ side, and enter an alternate world for a supernatural experience. This alternate world, however, is not a ‘world separate from the normal world’ that you find in other fantasy RPG titles.” According to Hashino, these alternate worlds serve as “an imaginative tool to express the problems that lurk within our society—weaknesses that people unconsciously possess that inhibit their individuation.” Their “honest selves,” which the game calls “Shadows,” can only be found in the alternate worlds and ignoring them can have real and dangerous consequences.

In Persona 4 (2008), a mysterious force on the elusive Midnight Channel murders people. At first, no one understands why, but according to Hashino, the Midnight Channel “reflects the human tendency to believe what one wants to believe, be it [in] themselves or someone else.” Meanwhile, “The Dark Hour in Persona 3 is a phenomenon caused by people forgetting to face and accept the eventual inevitability of death.” The Dark Hour and the Midnight Channel allow these repressed feelings to manifest as literal beasts. Defeating them often involves coming to terms with what they represent and affords each character newfound powers.

the mundane and supernatural worlds run parallel to one another

JRPGs that address real-world experiences like this are few and far between, with titles like Earthbound (1994) and The World Ends With You (2007) as rare exceptions. But under Hashino’s direction, the Persona series became more connected to everyday life, often grounding the surrealism in a typical Japanese school setting.

“For both good and bad reasons, I think that the school-life experience deeply affects many Japanese people in their daily lives,” Hashino said, speaking to the power of a shared cultural phenomenon. “Since everyone has experienced this, they [also experienced needing] to compare themselves with others,” said Hashino, “and, at times, had to suppress their own identity, learning to take hints so they don’t stand out or [get] ostracized from the crowd.” In Hashino’s games, the mundane and supernatural worlds run parallel to one another. The brightly colored scenes in the school contrast the scenes in the shadow world, mimicking the “front” and “back” side of human psychology. “The vibrant, everyday life becomes the Persona series’ persona, beckoning players to escape into a fun-filled experience of adolescence. But sooner or later, they’ll experience the dark shadow aspect of the game hiding beneath that persona, which they’ll feel a strange connection to.”

Every new Persona game hopes to “address a problem that we see in society at that time, especially in Japan where the games take place,” said Hashino. “We simply can’t ignore the current social issues when depicting our characters’ dark, hidden sides, their internal struggles, and the enemies they oppose.”

In the highly anticipated Persona 5, the lines between the real and alternate worlds appear to blur together even more, as reality itself becomes a surrealistic routine. In the upcoming game, a group of five students escape the monotony of everyday life by creating alter egos called the “Phantom Thieves of Hearts.” These masked bandits repeatedly raid a palace built by society’s hopes and dreams, but which has been exploited by shadowy figures of authority. “It’s built upon a distinct mood,” Hashino teased, “the stagnant feeling that can be felt in Japan right now, but our unorthodox heroes will go all out to challenge the status quo. I hope everyone will look forward to and enjoy the experience that only the Persona series can bring you.”

Using videogames to fight against the world’s nastiest diseases

Viruses and diseases in videogames are usually the kind that turn you or others into a zombie. the Resident Evil franchise has over a dozen different viruses that all turn you into a dangerous mutant. The Last of Us (2013) had a virus that destroyed the world and caused some people to become mushroom-faced monsters. Few games focus on real world viruses. And even fewer games allow you to help fight those real world diseases. MalariaSpot Bubbles does both.

MalariaSpot Bubbles is a game created by a research group at the Technical University of Madrid. The game is part of a larger project that the group is doing called Spotlab. “We specialize in designing videogames to study how to apply crowdsourcing to medical images analysis to find new low-cost tools for telediagnosis.” Sara Gil, who is part of the project, explained.

MalariaSpot Bubbles is their latest release. Miguel Luengo-Oroz, founder of Spotlab, was inspired by similar crowdsourcing projects like Planet Hunters. These crowdsourcing projects allow millions of people around the world to solve problems that would take months or even years if done through normal means. Using crowdsourcing is cheaper too.

In MalariaSpot Bubbles, the player is tasked with identifying different types of malaria strains. But players aren’t just looking at images of diseases, instead they play a bubble-popping game. After hitting certain bubbles they are required to correctly identify a strain of malaria. “We want to test if medical images can be collectively analyzed.” Gil says that as people play the game their answers are stored and analyzed. That data is being used to find the best and most reliable way to get accurate results from multiple players.

it could save millions of lives

So far, Gil and Spotlab have had a lot of success with the different games they’ve released. And if some players incorrectly identify the malaria strain, Spotlab is able to make sure these wrong answers don’t throw off the results. “The idea is that you merge results from several people that analyze the same image.” Gil explained, “That way the mistakes are not significant, because we have scientifically proved that in the case of MalariaSpot, 22 players tagging something as a parasite is a result 99.9 percent reliable.”

This process of using multiple players’ results to help identify diseases is being applied to other diseases, such as tuberculosis. “We have another game for tuberculosis (TuberSpot) and we have plans for other diseases, such as leukemia.” Gil and Spotlab believe that these types of “spotting” games can work for potentially any disease that can be diagnosed via images.  If Spotlab can perfect this crowdsourced diagnosing method it could save millions of lives.

Gil says the response from players has been very positive and enthusiastic. “Last year TuberSpot was reviewed in one the main Spanish videogames magazines and we had a great response from gamers.” And even though MalariaSpot Bubbles and the other games created by Spotlab are serving a greater purpose than fun, Spotlab still wants to make sure that their games are enjoyable to play. Striking this balance between fun and functional isn’t easy. “It’s hard to find that balance, but we think we are getting better at it.”

MalariaSpot Bubbles is available on the iTunes App Store, Google Play Store and you can even play it right now in your web browser. You can check out more games by Spotlab on their official website.

 

Play a dating sim about hooking up with erotic architecture

It’s very likely that I fucked a building last night. Now, hold up, I don’t know if I did. We hooked up and then I’m not sure what happened. Unfortunately, the erotic architecture dating sim Tectr doesn’t go beyond depicting your conversation with hot local masonry on a Tinder-style app, and into the awkward realm of human-building coitus. That is an idea for a sequel, though…

What this means is I told a horny panopticon that I would push my naked body against a dirty suburb window so it could watch, it then accepted, and I opened “Maps” to find the location at which this would go down. That’s where the game ends—signing off with the cheeky message “Have fun.” You’re not always this lucky. There are a range of potential suitors on Tectr, each with their own personality: one will send you unsolicited pictures of its grimy basement, another will tell you to touch yourself, and the skyscraper known as “Erector” won’t respond at all when you say its rock-hard foundation makes you wet. There is a lot of dating app humor to be found here.

All this might seem pretty wild, but as far as dating sims go, Tectr is actually one of the less shocking. There is a horse dating sim, a pigeon dating sim, a skeleton dating sim, and in each of these you play as a human. Yup. Japan is ruler of the dating sim, though, as proven by its many entries, which include an Egyptian god dating sim, one about dating buff grannies, and another that has you dating a Japanese zoo’s particularly beefy gorilla.

to find architectural orgasm

But, unlike a lot of dating sims made recently, Tectr isn’t competing in the race to be the most bizarre of them all. It is instead rooted in its creators’ passion for architecture. I know that at least one of the four of them, Clarris Cyarron, studied architecture and has admitted that she has “weird ideas” about it. Hence my suspicion that the idea for Tectr was born in her. Whether these “weird ideas” of hers go so far as to include what the internet proudly deems “architecture porn” I have no idea. But it’s likely.

Architecture porn has existed mostly in two forms. First, there’s the “building which appears to look like a couple having sex” variety. That’s the more obvious and juvenile one; the architect’s blown-up version of the world’s ubiquitous dick-and-balls graffiti. Although, hold back your judgment before you smite it from your perch: the creators of “Domestikator,” as it’s called, claim that their doggy-style hotel was made to demonstrate “the power of humanity over the natural world.” Sure, sure, let’s politely laugh and move on.

The other, and more common, type of architecture porn is a little more muted. It’s an activity that involves seeking out images of buildings and seeing which ones make you groan. There are subreddits and Tumblrs dedicated to this—the former of which identifies its purpose as sharing “the beautiful impossibilities that we want to live in.” There is desire here. There is want. The people who frequent these forums and seek out these images are out to find architectural orgasm. All Tectr does is return that lust, stating that its buildings “want you inside them.” So go ahead, slip cement into their crevices, varnish those angular forms, you dirty beast.

You can download Tectr over on itch.io.

Limp Body Beat makes a musical instrument out of weird fleshy men

Playing artists Sam Rolfe’s and Lars Berg’s “fleshy music game” Limp Body Beat will probably be the closest I’ll ever get to attending one of those Body World exhibits. I hate the physical look of muscles. I cringe at the sight of gore that includes flesh-slicing. I’m not into it. Flesh and anything flesh-related is not my thing. Yet, Rolfe and Berg’s browser-based rhythmic experiment for Adult Swim Games, featuring the horrifying sight of ungodly corpuscular beings, is somehow entrancing.

absurd head sizes and lumpish body shapes

While the ever-travelling Body Worlds exhibition is an anatomical exploration of preserved bodies, Limp Body Beat isn’t educational in the slightest. In fact, its fleshy creatures are explicitly grotesque—right down to their absurd head sizes and lumpish body shapes. The physics of the nightmarish figures is pure ragdoll, like a flailing body after a well-choreographed crash in Trials Fusion (2014).

As said, Limp Body Beat doesn’t operate to educate you, but it will enrich you with music. Rolfe and Berg describe the gameplay as a “3D drum sequencer played by flinging limp flesh people into sample cubes.” You can create new melodies by realigning notes on the translucent cubular grid behind your fleshy beast, or even swing the creature in any which way you please to a new coordinate a new tune. The possibilities are endless in Limp Body Beat. And who knows, you might even accidentally make a hot new track to swing your limp limbs to at the club.

Rolfe and Berg don’t restrain themselves to simply art and host a litany of other varied projects individually. Rolfe is an artist, designer, and experimental sound designer (hence, the customizable drum-like music in Limp Body Beat). Berg, on the other hand, resigns himself to being a game maker and an artist. The two combined created the sick world of Limp Body Beat. The duo’s outrageously protoplasmic environment and beings akin to the disturbing transformation at the climax of Katsuhiro Otomo’s cult classic anime Akira (1988).

Compose your own fleshy melodies with Limp Body Beat on Adult Swim’s website .

In-app purchases are coming for your car

Who among us hasn’t looked at a car and thought, “What if this complicated mechanical device operated a little bit more like the bestselling game, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (2014)?” A version of this thought may have passed through the minds of Elon Musk and the people of Tesla, who announced on Thursday that their Model S would be able to unlock five additional kilowatt-hours from its standard battery pack for $3,000. It’s like in-game purchases, but the game is your car.

This is not really a story about videogames getting there first. As with Ray J songs, that sort of parochialism is rarely helpful. Yet the history of in-game economies, where this model has been used for years, is still instructive; while many economic sectors are just starting to dabble in in-app purchases, this has been the dominant experience in gaming—and, more broadly, mobile devices—for years.

Tolerance for in-app purchases is highly variable. “Many developers,” The Wall Street Journal reported in 2013, “said they have found different price sensitivities for purchasers on the different app stores which has influenced how they price the apps for particular outlets.” Indeed, the ability to segment ad infitum is part of the appeal of in-app economies; the opening price is just a basic threshold. Moreover, while there are options for those seeking to avoid in-app purchases (low-end Androids, historically), the relative lack of competition for devices makes this a hard economy to opt-out of.

these economic shifts represent a transition away from ownership towards licensing

The key point of in-app economies is that you only own the minimum viable product and a right to unlock further potentialities. The full physical product is never really yours. Generously, this is the law of unintended consequences at work: reasonable intellectual property ideas come to lock you into a contract with a cellphone carrier or prevent you from repairing your car. Such generosity, however, may not be fully deserved. Culturally, these economic shifts represent a transition away from ownership towards licensing.

Ownership is, among other things, a form of protection. When you don’t own your car, for instance, creditors can install kill switches to ensure you pay up. Each of these devices allows a creditor to jump to the front of a line by locking you out. (Indeed, kill switches are quite effective in this regard.) Even if you’re fine with this specific use of technology, it opens the door to other forms of control. As Sarah Jeong notes in her excellent Atlantic series on the intersection of technology, security, and finance: “technologies encode control directly alongside surveillance: a creditor can control their property even without controlling the debtor’s behavior.” This may not sound a lot like Tesla batteries or in-app purchases, but a simple shift in economic models can have dramatic and under-analyzed effects. (As ever, there are many problems with capitalism but the answer is rarely more rapacious capitalism.)

If all of this sounds a little familiar, it’s because it’s also the basic story James Pinkstone told on Wednesday of Apple Music deleting all the audio files off his device. In the blog post, he noted that the experience had confirmed all of his worst fears:

“Information will be a utility rather than a possession. Even information that you yourself have created will require unending, recurring payments just to access.”

When giving the above warning, however, even in my most Orwellian paranoia I never could have dreamed that the content holders, like Apple, would also reach into your computer and take away what you already owned. If Taxi Driver is on Netflix, Netflix doesn’t come to your house and steal your Taxi Driver DVD. But that’s where we’re headed. When it comes to music, Apple is already there

Small devices got there first, but cars may well be next. On the bright side, driving and cheap iPhone racing games have never been more alike!

Fall of Magic turns everyone into a gifted author

Fall of Magic is the kind of free form storytelling you could do with your friends on the floor just about anywhere. Play some Howard Shore soundtracks in the background, light a few candles, and unroll the scroll. As an engine for creating stories it’s deceptively slight. From the rulebook: “Someone may ask, ‘Is a Raven like the bird?’ or ‘What is a Crab Singer?’ To this we reply: ‘It means what you want it to mean.’”

This open-handed approach extends to the rules. A six-sided dice is included but rarely used, and the rest of the game world’s description is confined to brief prompts on the scroll’s scratchy parchment. Certain areas prompt conflict, or drastic character change, but the method and execution is always in the hands of the players. The hazy illustrations and brief prompts function much like stage suggestions in improv; this is a world and a story you are building with your fellow players, and it can be anything you want it to be.

we were creating something different, something intentional and personal

In a sense, Fall of Magic is fundamentally lacking in authorship, which allows the group of players to build (or mercilessly rip off) any kind of fantasy setting or character. When I played with my sister, I shamelessly role-played a reluctantly noble assistant pig keeper from Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles. Another play session was filled with Lord of the Rings references, down to an Edoras-esque deposition of a possessed monarch. However, even as we blatantly stole from better storytellers, we were creating something different, something intentional and personal. In college, my improv troupe attended a workshop by maverick improviser Jet Eveleth (now at ioWest) who coached us to “follow the joy” of each scene and character: “Keep discovering what’s fun about the scene. Otherwise, stop.”

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Back in college, my friend Trae came over for what he called “Interactive Fiction.” We drew a map with India ink and textured paper and filled it with Tolkien-esque clichés: a massive wasteland called the “Fields of Hramnor,” shrouded mountains, a place named “The Lighthouse of Amé.” After some preliminary descriptions of the world and culture, Trae sat down with a six-sided die, asked my name and gender, and told me to tell him about my character.

“I’m smart,” I said. Trae rolled the die. A solid three.

“Not really,” he said. “But not all that dumb, either.”

“But I want to be good looking,” I told him. Trae rolled again. One.

“You’re deformed. Like, debilitatingly ugly,” he said.

I threw my pen at him. Several hours later, I’d become embroiled in a quest to impress the local milkmaid in my hometown by killing a dragon on some faraway mountain, even though it was obvious said milkmaid would never love me. My hero ended up heavily scarred but successful, only to return to find his affections spurned again by the maid. After we’d finished for the night, I asked him how he could narrate it in a way that made me feel so deeply for my ugly hero.

“Figure out what the character really wants, and don’t give it to them.”

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Fall of Magic’s designer, Ross Cowman, builds games around specific ideas. 2013’s Life on Mars explores the emotional and cultural impact of exploring an alien planet on a ship of interplanetary explorers. Serpent’s Tooth (2012) puts players in a court setting to squabble for power in the wake of a doomed noble’s passing. Fall of Magic, like Cowman’s previous offerings, contains similarly laconic scene prompts and branching story paths, but is very clearly about savoring the journey, taking in each moment, and ultimately about exploring the culture and flavor of another world. It’s a labor of love.

Everything in Fall of Magic revolves around the scroll, and the tactile experience of unfurling the world, thumbing the components. Player avatars are represented by thick metal coins stowed in a small burlap bag, the sides pressed into enigmatic symbols. The edges of the parchment scroll are roughly sewn. Minor but intentional choices like choosing a character’s coin feel significant: Is Ellamura of Ravenhall better represented by a winding river? Or a brimming ocean? Should the Magus’s token be a lit candle, or a burnt wick?

Of course, none of these decisions might be significant. A game of Fall of Magic requires a very specific kind of curiosity and thoughtfulness to build its intended experience. Where a “traditional” RPG like Dungeons & Dragons builds a sense of immersion from rigid mechanics and volumes of detail, Fall of Magic is an RPG for dreamers. The game doesn’t have enough hard edges to entertain the mathematical combat that excites “hardcore” players. Put another way: Dungeons & Dragons is a dungeon-crawl, and Fall of Magic is a stroll in a wild garden.

Fall of Magic is an RPG for dreamers

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“If you want to become powerful, I will need something from you,” I intoned, sage-like. It was after college and I was narrating an interactive fiction for my little brother.

“Anything,” he said.

“You will lose your man-shape.”

My brother’s face fell. He had curated his clever, handsome magic student up until now. I’d identified his vanity early in the game and was now using it expertly against him.

“I can get it back, right?”

“Get what back?”

“My, my man-shape.”

“Perhaps,” I nodded.

He huffed and conceded, eventually. I went to our parents’ cupboard and drew out every cooking implement, spice, flavor, and oil I could and dumped them into a single vitriolic brew: whole milk, cumin, pepper, olive oil, sugar, cinnamon, mustard. The smell of it made me sick.

“Drink this,” I suppressed a wicked giggle. “Tis a horrid brew.”

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A good session of Fall of Magic unfolds like a shared dream, with everyone in the group contributing piecemeal to the culture, relationship, and plot. If everyone in your group loves Terry Pratchett, the world you build might resemble Discworld; if the party is obsessed with steampunk, the journey could play out like Miyazaki’s Castle in the Sky (1989).  At every turn, the game encourages imagination, rumination, and the careful (but not critical) thought: follow the joy.

The motivation stands in stark contrast to how I learned to role-play in college. A good game of Fall of Magic entails players getting exactly what they want, and deciding as a group what makes a good story. The game engine enables players who aren’t “storytellers” to tell a good story. When adversity creeps in, it creeps in on our own terms—like when our party’s Crab Singer lost his voice eating a poisoned mushroom in an underground forest, or when we heard a witch-queen had taken control of Castle Stormguard. We introduced these problems with no clear sense of how they would resolve, and were forced to solve them on our own.

Fall of Magic is a strange beast: it lacks mechanical structure, yet is confined to its own rigid narrative. Our group took to flipping tokens to see if certain situations would turn in our favor: full tree means good, bare tree, bad. The parchment map, while beautiful and authentic, constricts every story to the overdone “fantasy quest narrative.” Unless players choose to start in the middle of the journey, the game will always begin in safe tranquil waters, move gently toward conflict, then ebb toward quiet denouement. This binding structure is Fall of Magic’s most pronounced weakness. The game’s rich and slightly tamed garden will be enough for some; for others, Fall of Magic will only spring to life when a group risks the narrative wilds past the edges of the parchment scroll.