Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 134

New painting collection stands up for the value of digital art

We live in a time of artistic plenty. At any moment, anyone with an internet connection can simply type a few words into their browser and have immediate and free access to history’s most famous paintings, music, and theater. Even lesser-known works are often available to view as photographs on the personal websites of the artists who made them. This is easy to take for granted, but it is important to remember that seeing a work of art used to require either purchasing it for oneself, visiting it in person, or at the very least buying an art book. With its new group show Emulator, New York’s The Gallery 151 is seeking to question the effect this has on how we experience art, while at the same time defending the value of art made in the digital space.

“With the unlimited access to the virtual, the exclusive and intimate pleasure of experiencing art has been cheapened by the boundaries of our digital screens,” explains curator Anna Gritsevich to The Creator’s Project. “However, the notion that this lowers the value of creative works, is increasingly a hackneyed idea. I wanted to showcase ‘paintings’ that appear as though they are being viewed on a screen—without a device present.”

‘paintings’ that appear as though they are being viewed on a screen

Gritsevich has accomplished this by selecting works with “bold color schemes,” hoping to “shock and produce physical sensations similar to the aftereffects of looking at a bright, shimmering screen.” Additionally, the artists featured in the exhibit, who include Canyon Castator, Anne Vieux, and Jonathan Chapline, all make use of techniques meant to emulate digital styles. Castator, for instance, uses an iPad to create his works, later printing them onto a canvas. Vieux, meanwhile, uses scans of reflective papers to mimic photoshop effects. Finally, Chapline’s paintings are made with oils, to recreate shapes and colors that look almost digital in nature.

“None of the representations are necessarily those of imagination,” explains Gritsevich. “However, they are reimagined, much like when one is trying to search for a distant memory but only hazily remembers specifics.” Emulator comes in the wake of Zach Gage’s Glaciers, which similarly tries to blend the digital and the physical. In bringing digital styles into the physical space, both projects highlight that, regardless of the medium of expression, art is still art.

Emulator will be on view at Gallery 151 from April 15th to June 5th. You can learn more over on the gallery’s website.

h/t The Creator’s Project

The joys of taking a shower and sipping coffee in Indigo Prophecy

This article is part of PS2 Week, a full week celebrating the 2000 PlayStation 2 console. To see other articles, go here.

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In the men’s restroom of a New York diner, a dazed man stands over a corpse. He knows he killed the person but insists, to no one other than himself, that someone else was controlling him, that a moment of temporary possession had caused him to murder the restroom’s other occupant. Panicking, he struggles to hide the body in a stall, grabs a nearby mop to clean the red off the floor, washes the blood from the self-inflicted wounds on his wrists and forearms, stashes a crimson-stained knife, urinates—anything to calm his anxious mind. Meanwhile, a police officer eating at the counter stirs, eventually meandering to the bathroom. The killer, who according to his bill is named Lucas Kane, pays his tab and bolts out the door into a blizzard that threatens to swallow the city.

Looking back on Indigo Prophecy (2005), or Fahrenheit as it was known outside North America, I remember these opening moments distinctly. The inelegant controls, the designer David Cage’s insistence on calling it an “interactive film,” the feeling of being a director of the action more so than a player inhabiting the world; all of these concepts that seemed so alien over a decade ago now look like early unsure steps toward the creation of an oeuvre. While the merits of Cage’s obsession with the language of cinema are debatable, there is a curious side-effect of his insistence on putting the player in the director’s chair: despite the drama and tension of its beginning, Indigo Prophecy’s greatest accomplishment happens when the player begins to consider the mundane.

early unsure steps toward the creation of an oeuvre

The three protagonists of Indigo Prophecy split their time between solving the mystery behind the murder that sets the game’s events in motion, and keeping themselves from falling into despair. After the player directs Lucas to hide the body and exit the diner, she takes control of Claire Valenti and Tyler Miles, two NYPD officers in charge of investigating the case. They interview bystanders, look for clues—performing all the procedural tasks as well as or as poorly as the player chooses. The tension established in the game’s first moments slows with the rhythmic predictability of an episode of Law and Order. By the time Carla and Tyler leave, the player understands the ebb and flow of the game as a mix of area investigation and conversation, all of which is controlled by analog stick manipulation with minimal button input.

The next scene, however, applies the same careful consideration to a much simpler series of events. Lucas wakes up, answers the phone, takes a shower, washes his clothes, gets dressed, checks his email. The player directs him through his morning routine with the same patterns and controller inputs that she used to help him hide a body and erase its evidence. While the sequence unfolds in context with the nightmarish events of the night before, Lucas finds some solace in the routine of the everyday, replenishing his mental health in the midst of anxiety-ridden circumstances. The tension returns when a police officer shows up at his door, but, for a moment, directing Lucas through mundane activity offers respite amid the chaos around him.

Similar instances happen with the other player-directed characters as well. Carla chats with a friendly neighbor over a glass of wine. Tyler has a conversation with his girlfriend about their possible future. They open cabinets, fix drinks, wash their faces, all of which seems on even ground with the anxiety-wracked moments of the game’s opening.

None of these actions would be of any interest, however, if not for the game’s reliance on the PlayStation 2’s analog sticks. Somewhat novel at the time, the game asks you to push the sticks in directions to move between and match each contextual action (like using the sink or opening the refrigerator), as well as to choose dialogue responses. The game later complicates these gestures to include rotation and simultaneous contrary motions, each movement further exploring the game’s tactile preoccupation with everyday objects and interactions. At the same time Indigo Prophecy asks the player to accept a new perspective from the director’s chair, it removes the well-established button-based control model that had become second-nature to most players—an especially jarring move given the game’s release near the twilight of the PS2’s console generation. Thus, the banality of modern life depicted in the game crashes against the awkward novelty of an unexpected set of controls that condition the player to rethink the object in her hand, the controller she had grown accustomed to using in an established way.

Granted, most would attribute the analog stick control-scheme to the idiosyncrasies of the game’s designer, and they would be correct. Any game that begins with its designer’s digital avatar walking the player through the game’s novel controls tips its hat in self-satisfaction. But the way that the camera lingers so patiently over the domestic spaces and mundane activities of these characters makes the gestures tied to the analog sticks all the more poignant in Indigo Prophecy. There is a fascination with the unremarkable in Indigo Prophecy that, for the longest time, didn’t appear in videogames with quite the same dedication. That crime scene investigations and apartment life are treated with almost parallel importance provides the game’s most significant step toward a videogame aesthetic of the everyday.

The irony here is that much of Cage’s emphasis on the everyday seems incidental; the inclusion of the mundane is likely a byproduct of his attempts at attaining the cinematic eye of a director. Cage himself explains that the player’s emotional immersion was of utmost concern during the early stages of development. But from the director’s chair, I always found myself too far removed from the characters—and the characters themselves too archetypically drawn—to warrant any real investment in their stories. Rather, to be immersed in Indigo Prophecy is to be engaged with the characters as actors on a set. Hence, the quieter moments meant for building empathy, inadvertently become stages in which the player can direct them in a pantomime of the mundane—drinking coffee, washing their hands, fiddling with the radio, opening and closing kitchen cupboards. Everyday life transforms into spectacle that reveals how mechanical and predictable our habits are when viewed at a distance, the same fascination with the minutiae of modern life that energizes films like Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967).

to be immersed in Indigo Prophecy is to be engaged with the characters as actors on a set

Of course, Indigo Prophecy isn’t about the mundane things humans do. It’s a murder mystery wrapped up in apocalyptic supernatural forces. Moments of quotidian curiosity pop up for the purpose of juxtaposition, making scenes of high tension (such as the game’s opening) all the more troublesome due to the player using the same controls to explore the plain, domestic spaces of the characters’ apartments. Consequently, peering into the world that these characters inhabit and directing them through their daily lives offers a distinctly voyeuristic experience. Directing a handful of characters to walk around in their underwear or guiding them toward a sexual encounter, I can’t help but think of David Fincher’s conclusion that “people are perverts,” drawing their eyes to the intimate spaces where they are not meant to wander.

Cage realizes the fuller potential of this principle in Heavy Rain (2010), a game more explicitly concerned with the perverse pleasures of viewing. The central plot, a search for a serial killer obsessed with documenting the trials of his victims, constantly draws the camera to moments of intimate vulnerability, such as a character performing a striptease at gunpoint, or filming an act of self-mutilation. But Heavy Rain also indulges in those aspects of banality that appear in Indigo Prophecy, if only for dramatic juxtaposition. Opening with an unbearably saccharine depiction of the protagonist Ethan Mars’s home life with his wife and children, the game leads the player through a day of tedium and of nuclear family idealism only to strip it away later, after the death of his son Jason. The setting then changes from playful toy sword fights in a Better Homes and Gardens backyard to boxed dinners in Ethan’s cold dank apartment as he tries to connect with his surviving son, Shaun. Even more so than Indigo Prophecy, the everyday in Heavy Rain only matters inasmuch that it can be measured against the crushing weight of inevitable drama.

Consequently, Cage’s direction misses what makes these trivial moments accidentally significant. His over-reliance on, and misguided attempts at, overbearing emotional melodrama keep him from building an aesthetic out of the microdramas that pop up in the midst of extraordinary circumstances. Lucas Kane’s morning routine, removed from the suffocating tension of Indigo Prophecy’s intense opening moments, finds the slightest spark of what makes the rhythms of the everyday worth considering and asks the player to find pageantry in the mundane, bringing it to life with the tactile movements of analog sticks and choosing the right camera angle.

Neither Indigo Prophecy nor Heavy Rain ever become the sort of paean of the quotidian, one of those cinematic experiments of Tati or Vertov, and I don’t think Cage ever meant them to be.

Nevertheless, they both come close to revealing something profound from the distance of the director’s seat. From that perspective we cannot know characters as much more than creatures of habit, and the player assists them in the boring, unsexy moments that most game designers ignore. Cage invests in the spectacle of the everyday for just enough time to deliver an impression of importance, and I find myself wanting to keep Lucas, Carla, and Tyler in these quiet moments for just a bit longer; not for the sake of empathy, but for the simple pleasure of experiencing the unremarkable.

Lo-fi survival horror returns next week as Back in 1995 comes out

The year 1995 was a turning point for the videogame industry. It was the first year of E3—now the biggest videogame awards and announcement show, which still runs annually. It was the year of the release of Sony’s PlayStation in Europe and North America (it had been released the year prior in Japan), as well as the release of the now cult-regarded system Sega Saturn (also released in 1994 in Japan). While the systems’ most notable games didn’t see release until a year or so after, 1995 was the start of something new. The dawn of a new generation—and a delightfully weird, sometimes experimental one at that.

Tokyo-based game maker Takaaki Ichijo’s upcoming game Back in 1995, due for release on April 28th on Steam, pays homage to the eerie, low-poly games that came out of that time. “Here in 2015, some might think it’s still too early to label those games [as] ‘retro,’” said Ichijo in the description for Back in 1995, written sometime last year. “Yet many fans around [ages] 25 [to] 35 feel something [strangely nostalgic and appealing] about those stylistic graphics. I’m trying to replicate the unique feeling of those early games.”

Ichijo’s not the only game maker to feel a pang of nostalgia for the gloomy low-res games buried in PlayStation and Sega Saturn’s history. The recent arcade-like Steam hit Devil Daggers (2016) paid homage to first-person shooters of the 90s, with its gruesome, Doom-like imagery and unearthly sound design. Banned Memories: Yamanashi, which released a demo the summer of 2015, is Silent Hill-y (1999) down to its core, with its creepy lo-fi environments and fixed camera angles. The game’s full release has not yet been announced.

Back in 1995 is vaguely reminiscent of 90s survival horror, retaining the mystery of other like minded games, but lacking the ubiquitous zombies in another PlayStation-era classic (yet still, a monster of some sort pops up in its teaser). In the game, the player character is on a mission to find his lost daughter and further explore the barren city he has mysteriously returned to. The game employs an old-school menu system (complete with sparse inventory management), a stagnant third-person camera, and of course: “tank” controls (the perpetually groan-inducing, sloth-like movement that plagued early 3D games). Back in 1995 doesn’t just look “old,” but can literally be plopped besides its inspirations and mechanically feel no different.

“I’m trying to replicate the unique feeling of those early games”

The most striking aspect of Back in 1995 is its self-awareness. There’s ever-prominent stilted voice acting. There’s mystery amid the creepy environment absorbing the player. There’s unabashed low-res graphics and CRT-emulating trappings. Back in 1995—down to the year stated in its very name—is not afraid to point directly to the many games that influenced it. It transcends being just another homage to inspired games, and instead exists as a product of the era itself.

While not up for pre-order yet nor with a price listed, Back in 1995 mysteriously appeared on Steam and will be released on April 28th for PC .

Shadow of Destiny, the PS2 game ahead of (and behind) its time

This article is part of PS2 Week, a full week celebrating the 2000 PlayStation 2 console. To see other articles, go here. 

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Paracelsus first coined the term “homunculus”—the Latin portmanteau meaning “little man.” The 16th Century occultist used the word to describe a miniature, fully-formed human that he believed could be produced through the “putrefaction” of isolated human sperm within a horse’s womb (yes, you read that correctly). The unconscious desire implicit in this bizarre interspecies experiment—for a man to be able to create life without the aid of a woman—was apparently lost on Paracelsus. He presented the idea as a literal and serious possibility of alchemical science, a practice interested in all manners of manipulation beyond known natural laws, including the search for the fabled “Philosopher’s Stone,” which could purportedly turn lead into gold and grant eternal life.

Hundreds of years later, the homunculus was resurrected in modern parlance through the 19th century epic Faust (1808) by German playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In Part Two of the play, Faust and the devil Mephistopheles encounter an artificial human created by Faust’s former assistant Wagner. In direct contrast to Paracelsus, Goethe employs alchemy as a metaphor, in part to represent the dangers of post-Enlightenment science which he saw as fundamentally amoral. Goethe’s homunculus is a soul unshackled by the material plane, and is depicted as being on a journey that mirrors Faust’s: while the latter is a mortal soul trying to shed his body, the homunculus is a kind of pure spirit working to become human. In an eerie foreshadowing of contemporary concerns over the singularity, Mephistopheles suggests that a creature born of human science, being unbound from nature, may ultimately come to dominate us: “Upon the creatures we have made,/ We are, ourselves, at last dependent.”

the homunculus is a kind of pure spirit working to become human

In the 20th Century, the homunculus was adopted as a largely derisive term levied at Cartesian dualism, the notion of a separation between the material and immaterial, body and soul—the very distinction Goethe used the homunculus to illustrate. The absurdity of a “little man inside your head” became a central argument for mid-century cognitivists to dismiss the study of metaphysics en masse: if there is a homunculus within you, processing stimuli and guiding your actions, then who processes its stimuli and guides its actions? Another homunculus, and so on through infinity? The impossibility of this model was used to advocate a separation between the studies of philosophy and brain science, an ironic new dualism that persists today.

The next important appearance of the homunculus in popular culture, at least in my view, arrived in the PS2 cult classic Shadow of Destiny (2001). It is the name given to the churlish overseer who helps guide you through the game world’s complex web of time and space. Developer Konami uses the term with full awareness of its long and varied history, and taken as a whole the game stands as a multi-tiered experience that touches upon all three of the major manifestations of the homunculus outlined above: the literal, the metaphorical, and the critical. The game is an astonishing work that, despite its substantial camp and silliness, manages all at once to be a compelling yarn about time travel and alchemy, an informed take on Western metaphysics, and a presage of the postmodern turn in videogames.

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Shadow of Destiny begins with your murder. You are stabbed in the back on an empty street in a quaint European hamlet.

You wake up in purgatory, depicted as a room filled with oversized fallen statues, bookcases, and other historical detritus, all of it surrounded by an endless void. A strange voice waxes vaguely on the challenges of averting fate, suggesting that it can help you reclaim your life. The voice belongs to a creature you will later learn is named Homunculus, who in appearance looks like an androgynous young person with red eyes and all-black clothing. Initially, you reject the offer: “I get it,” you call out. “You’re the big S, the devil. ‘In exchange for your immortal soul’ and all that, am I right?” The voice replies with a casual impatience: “Your soul? Oh, please… in this day and age?” From this very first exchange the game encourages a comparison with Goethe’s Faust—the most famous deal-with-the-devil story in Western civilization—while simultaneously suggesting that the times have changed, and that metaphysical morality isn’t what it used to be.

“Your soul? Oh, please… in this day and age?”

Eventually you accept Homunculus’ help, and it provides you with a “Digipad,” which looks like a late-1990s electronic organizer but in fact is a magical device that allows you to travel through time. Since you were murdered on an empty street in the middle of the day, your first task after returning to the land of the living is to travel to 30 minutes before “the fated hour” to convince a crowd to gather in the town square, thus shielding yourself from a lonely death.

This, however, is only the beginning. You will be murdered many more times before the day is through, from smoke inhalation to having a vase dropped on your head to several more backstabs. Each instantiation drives you further into the town’s past and puts you in deeper contact with the generations of individuals who inhabit it. There’s the medieval squire whose wealthy descendants own the modern-day classical art museum. The populist local filmmaker whose ancestor was the acclaimed local painter. And then there’s the contemporary fortune-teller who lives in a building labeled on your map as the “Former Alchemist’s House.”

Alchemy is central to the plotline of Shadow of Destiny, from Homunculus to the quest for the Philosopher’s Stone. The earliest timeline you visit is, not coincidentally, the 16th Century, where you meet an alchemist, not coincidentally, named Wagner. As the literal elements of alchemical lore drive the story, the symbolic meaning behind unnatural manipulations of nature becomes an increasingly prevalent theme. Because, of course, you are not simply a time-traveling tourist, taking in some firsthand history before heading home; you are changing things to save your own skin. Much of the time what that amounts to is changing people: confusing them, misdirecting them, convincing them to do things that they weren’t intending to do before you magically appeared with a pointed suggestion.

This is a game of mad logic. A game that asks you to resolve the matter of your killer hiding behind a tree by going back to the 1500s and convincing the townsfolk to plant flowers instead of a mighty oak. A game in which you remedy food poisoning by travelling to the 1900s in order to convince a guy to build a library instead of an art museum, so that in the present day you can find a book about how to make an antidote, which in turn can only be procured in the 16th Century. The recklessness with which you regard the sanctity of the past and the wills of those who live there is unprecedented for the time travel genre, which typically obsesses over the importance of making as small an impact as possible. You often have the option to alter things for your own amusement, as well: arbitrarily suggesting subject matter to the 16th Century painter Franssen, for instance, only to zap back to the present day and see your ideas framed and fawned over at the local museum.

The first few times you play through Shadow of Destiny (at least six iterations are required to truly complete the game), the metaphysical commentary comes across as rather cynical. In order to justify your careless manipulation of the world, there is an uncomfortable presumption that your life must be so much more important than anyone else’s. Even more disturbing is how susceptible all the people around you are to manipulation. No one seems to have a solid sense of self, a drive to be someone or do something that can’t be knocked off course after a brief conversation with a guy in strange clothes holding an electronic organizer in his hand. If there is a soul, something immutable within us that exists independent of our decaying bodies, no one appears aware of it besides you. They’re all puppets on your string.

Then, on your fourth playthrough, something interesting starts to happen. You start to question the internal logic of this town and wonder if, in fact, you’re not the one being fucked with. The first three endings the game presents are either disappointing or gruesome, with many plot threads left dangling. If you’re truly the puppetmaster, why are so many questions still unanswered, and why do you feel like you’re following the same well-worn path on every outing? This is when you start to realize that you have been tricked by an entity born not of nature but of science. Homunculus is a liar, but even more, Shadow of Destiny is: you’ve been outsmarted by a videogame.

you have been tricked by an entity born not of nature but of science

Homunculus essentially stands as a proxy for the game designer, feeding you convenient hints for how to approach the improbable solutions to each of your deaths. “Why not try the library?” it suggests. “Oops! I guess it’s the art museum now…” Until now, you have been assuming that these hints are the only way to approach the problem, and that once addressed there is nothing else for you to see or do. In effect, you have given up your personal agency in the service of this digital creation. “Upon the creatures we have made,/ We are, ourselves, at last dependent.”

So you start to mess around a bit more. Even though the Digipad starts glowing—instructing you to return to your original time—you stay where you are and explore other parts of the town, talk to new people, or travel to an age that isn’t directly relevant to the task at hand. You soon discover that Homunculus is lurking in times and places that it doesn’t want you to know about. By defying the dictates of your guide and charting your own course, you begin to expose Homunculus’ deception. New sequences open up, obscurities are revealed, and more satisfying endings become available.

This is what makes Shadow of Destiny something truly special, a kind of proto-postmodern videogame anticipating titles like Portal (2007) or The Stanley Parable (2013) that challenge players to disobey in-game instructions. These more recent games speak to a turn in design philosophy that reflect global cultural shifts regarding distrust of authority and the status quo. But over a decade before anyone knows the name Edward Snowden, Shadow of Destiny equates blindly following the will of a game to the act of forfeiting your immortal soul. “Oh, please… in this day and age?” Homunculus chides you not because the soul is an irrelevant construct, but because it knows that you have already forsaken it, given over to false dualities of mind and brain, science and philosophy. That you erroneously trust the digital world to be simpler and easier to master than the corporeal one.

Seeing Shadow of Destiny through to its very end is like spiritual electroshock; a reminder that the self can no easier be grown in a horse’s womb or an alchemist’s lab than it can be found in adhering to the path of human-made fictions. In the guise of a campy time-travel mystery, Shadow of Destiny anticipates a desire for games to explore the philosophical implications of playing games; we are only recently seeing other developers beginning to catch up. It invites you to peel back the veil of digital manipulation and recall what it means to be human in the first place.

Weekend Reading: The Deafening Sound of Silence. And Pinball.

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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A Maddening Sound, Colin Dickey, The New Republic

Some think it’s a government conspiracy, some think it’s just weird and creepy, but for centuries various there have been people in various places attesting that they can hear a frequent dull noise, a phenomenon known by many as “the Hum.” Colin Dickey explores the history and studies of the weird sound, and why thinking of those who can hear it as outliers might be going about it the wrong way.

How ‘Empowerment’ Became Something for Women to Buy, Jia Tolentino, The New York Times

Feminism, as you may have noticed, has become one of the most key conversations of this digital generation, with absolutely no shortage of virtual naysayers. But there’s one constituency that has no issue with the progressive push, as long as it means you buy more Brawny towels: marketers. Jia Tolentino looks at empowerment—the brand—and the industries happy to be hypocrites.

Internet mapping turned a remote farm into a digital hell, Kashmir Hill, Fusion

It’s probably happened at one point or another: a computer glitch or a corrupted file has ruined your day. Most of us are familiar with technology being an imperfect and infuriating thing. For the Vogelman family, someone else’s hiccup has become their absolute nightmare. Their farm is a glitch in another company’s system, and the repercussions keep on coming.

Photograph: pinballhall.org

Wanted: pinball wizard to care for 1,000 machines and take over hall of fame, John M Glionna, The Guardian

Are you between the ages of 20 and 40 and always considered yourself destined to be an incredibly niche Harry Potter? Do you love mechanical parts and flashing lights above most everything else? Then Tim Arnold needs you, apprentice, to guide and train you to caretake 9,000-square-feet of loud, glorious pinball.

3Pac: To Live and Die on 4chan, Drew Millard, SPIN

There once was a white water polo player who considered himself a greater rapper than Tupac; an incendiary meme man whose whole awkward shtick seemed to be viral-tailored. Before the world got their punchline, or even got to learn if there was a punchline, 3Pac died. Drew Millard attempts to bring resolution to an unfinished story.

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Header image: Illustration by Javier Jaén. Cages: DSGpro, via iStock/Getty Images. Balloon: Zoomstudio, via iStock/Getty Images.

In the post-apocalypse, there will still be performance art

Back in 2013, Lady Gaga quit smoking by employing the “Abramovic Method” during a three-day retreat in New York. It led to this extraordinary (and NSFW) video, in which Gaga is seen chanting into an empty room, stood blindfolded in a river to feel the rain drops against her skin, and getting intimate with a big block of ice while completely naked. The video achieved what it was supposed to: encouraging everyone who watched it and the public-at-large to question what this peculiar Method she went through was.

The “Abramovic Method” is named after its creator, famed artist and self-proclaimed “grandmother of performance art” Marina Abramovic—if you’re not familiar, she’s the woman you can see sat on a wooden chair next to Gaga in the river. The Method is a series of slowly performed exercises meant to be increase your awareness of the moment, to drench you in the physical and mental experience of the present. The exercises vary, with a typical one being to drink a glass of water over a 15 minute period, pressing the cold of it against your lips, taking in only slight sips and concentrating on the liquid as it moves through your body.

In 2014, game maker Pippin Barr teamed up with Abramovic to turn her Method into a series of browser games. You can play them here. Included is typing complaints to a tree, counting rice and sesame, and looking at a block of color for an hour. They are each a form of long duration performance that increases mindfulness. They should lead to calm, oneness, and also help you to feel connected with science, nature, and the world through your physical body.

We walk and seem to find only devastation

Barr has now created a spiritual successor to his Abramovic Method games called Post-Apocalyptic Abramovic Method Game. Originally, the idea was to imagine what Method games he created before would be like if played in the post-apocalypse. He became stuck on trying to make this happen in 2D, but soon realized that he could move the idea into 3D, which he says “led to thinking about the game more as a ‘place’ than a post-apocalyptic recreation of the exercises/games themselves.”

What we end up with is an ashen-gray cross-section of dead world to explore. There’s not much here, but there are five distinct landmarks to visit, each of them representing one of the games that Barr had created before. But what has become of them in this ruination? The rice and sesame game is now an overturned table, the two cups that you sort the grains into spilled onto the ground, wrecked. The trees that you complain to don’t have leaves or branches, heck, they hardly have trunks, the only remnants of them a blackened dead stump. Upon arrival at each of these sights a sentence appears on the screen to make the connection between the game and its 3D representation. Once you have seen them all there is nothing else to do but wander forever inside this voidscape.

The poignant feature here is absence. There’s a sense that everything is lost: no people, no nature, no science, no future. We walk and seem to find only devastation. And we cannot engage with the surroundings as the exercises are not available any longer; they are in disrepair. However, without them it is still possible to find resolve—you do not need these specific exercises to enact the Abramovic Method. You can walk around this walled-off virtual space for a length of time and achieve that feeling of presence in the moment through that idleness (in fact, for this purpose I think the walking speed could afford to be a lot slower). You can point the first-person perspective at the ground to look eternally at the gray to achieve the same effect.

This 3D space where the world has been destroyed perhaps serves to teach us that no tool other than patience and concentration is needed to find peace. It may also encourage in you an appreciation of the world in its current state, and a desire to help preserve its flourishes of beauty while they’re still here. Find peace in the everyday.

You can play Post-Apocalyptic Abramovic Method Game in right here.

Mosh pit simulator for VR goes wrong, turns into nightmarish comedy

Having recently earned front page status on Reddit, I Have No Idea What I’m Doing: The Game is a virtual reality mosh pit simulator gone wrong, or so its creator Sos Sosowski claims. In it, hordes of creepy, slightly gelatinous men with no respect for personal space try to swarm you, leaving you awkwardly flailing your arms at them as you try to push them away. So, another day on Tinder, then?

I wanted to make a mosh pit simulator but it turned out really creepy! pic.twitter.com/CiTL8mZ6y0

— Sos Sosowski (@Sosowski) April 13, 2016

As you can probably see from watching the gifs, Sosowski tells me that “there was no mosh pit game in the first place.” Rather, I Have No Idea What I’m Doing was born out of his recent experience visiting GDC, where he was inspired to start working with virtual reality after seeing what other game makers were doing with the platform. “I didn’t really want to work on VR,” he told me. “But when I went to GDC and saw all the hype and great ideas, I got really excited and wanted to try something too!” So he got his hands on an HTC Vive developer’s kit, rigged it up to control an old human model he had previously made for a zombie parody game, and started making it dance around like “a weird inverse kinematic human abomination.”

“should I have dinosaurs in my game?”

Dancing by oneself in VR can get lonely, though, so he added some more abominations to the game and set them to slowly wiggle towards him. After that, he then gave himself super strength to push away the encroaching horde of groovers, giving us the game as we can see it now. “It looked really nice, so I recorded a short gif and uploaded it to Twitter and Reddit,” he explains. “The entire process took no more than two hours, but the internet did not care about the process, and the internet exploded!”

You can now shoot chicken from your hands! pic.twitter.com/Vcgjr66Kzd

— Sos Sosowski (@Sosowski) April 14, 2016

With the project’s newfound popularity, he’s since given it its own website, and has been hard at work recording more footage of it while also toying around with potential new features. “I have a million things in mind,” he tells me. “Like, should I have dinosaurs in my game? Should the enemies ride horses? I really, really have no idea what I’m doing.” The latest update to the game sees you shooting whole roast chickens from your hands. 

The project isn’t Sosowski’s first time developing for virtual reality, as he had previously ported one of his older games—a parody of Proteus—to the Oculus Rift, but it is his first time developing a game specifically meant to be played in VR. As he explains, “I didn’t think ‘what kind of game can I force to work in VR,’” but rather, “what cool thing can I do in this virtual space with my head and my hands?” The result “immediately looked good,” he said, “as in VR is a ‘make it look good’ button that always works.”

I have no idea what I'm doing. pic.twitter.com/lPZIbKf4db

— Sos Sosowski (@Sosowski) April 14, 2016

Even though the game wasn’t technically built with mosh pits in mind, Sos tells me that he loves mosh pits all the same, so much so that he even has a book of mosh pit paintings from artist Dan Witz. “My greatest achievement is surviving a mosh pit for the entire duration of a Vader concert during a 500,000 people music festival while wearing just a swimsuit,” he shared. “I was just one big bruise after bumping into all the leather-and-iron-clad hairy dudes :P” Unfortunately, since he’s currently recovering from a broken shoulder, he won’t be able to mosh for what he says will probably be another year. “But hey!” he laughed. “I still have the VR for that!”

Sos “truly hopes” that I Have No Idea What I’m Doing will be “the worst game ever.” You can keep up with it over on its website, and follow Sos’ work as a whole over on his Twitter, his YouTube Channel, and his personal website.

Racing Apex, the car combat game made to honor your memories of the ’90s

Trevor Ley is looking to the past. Those times, as a kid, when he played arcade racers. Virtua Racing (1992) was a big one for him. He laments that this style of racing game has gone out of fashion. He sees most racers these days emphasizing simulation and realism. That, or they’re trying to be edgy and grimy, imploring us to engage with criminality and spray paint stylized decals across bonnets.

Ley is the founder of Lucky Mountain Games and is currently making his own arcade racer called Racing Apex, which is up on Kickstarter. As with a couple of other studios, the team is taking their inspiration from the ’90s. Watching Racing Apex in motion, I’m instantly reminded of games like Daytona USA (1993)—though, as Ley clarifies, the blocky characters and car combat is specifically taken from the PC game Interstate 76 (1997).

that certainly wouldn’t have worked on dial-up internet

Everything is bright and colorful. But now, with modern hardware and improved screens, the ’90s-style arcade racer can look smoother and sharper. Without going back to look at those older games directly, Racing Apex is what they have come to look like in my mind; preserved in that nostalgic part of your brain where everything looks better. Racing Apex isn’t recreating what those games looked like, it’s what you remember them looking like.

There is a little embellishment, too, of course. Other than the car combat, Racing Apex will also have day and night cycles, car damage, and online multiplayer—that certainly wouldn’t have worked on dial-up internet a couple of decades ago. “It’s not easy to implement, but these elements are a lot of fun and worth doing. I wanted to create a racing game that people would return to,” Ley said. His hope is that players will be encouraged to bring their friends along for the ride, engaging in competition with the car-mounted guns as well as the leaderboards.

Racing Apex has been a labor of love so far for the team at Lucky Mountain Games but their wish is to focus on developing it full-time. That’s why they’ve decided to bring the game to Kickstarter. The hope is that the crowdfunding effort will also enable them to get “racers involved in closed alpha and beta testing, hopefully leading to Early Access.”

If the Kickstarter is successful enough then the team would look into bringing Racing Apex to consoles as well as PC. Ley’s infectious excitement reached its peak at this prospect, of bringing Racing Apex to more people: “Like a classic car at the back of a garage, we want to roll Racing Apex out of the workshop, into the light, and start her up!”

Racing Apex is coming to PC, Mac and Linux next year. You can support Racing Apex on Kickstarter and you can also check it out on Steam Greenlight.

Scanner Sombre finds the mystery in laser-based surveying technology

After working on one thing for an extended period of time, sometimes the best thing to do is to step away from that particular project and work on something else for a while, if only to get the creative juices flowing again. This is what happened to Introversion, the studio behind Prison Architect (2015), a game in which players act as both the warden and the titular architect, as they manage and expand their very own prison.

Last year, the team decided to take a month off from Prison Architect and create two prototype games. They became Scanner Sombre and Wrong Wire. Introversion’s lead designer Chris Delay explained that he “just wanted to work on something completely different to Prison Architect, or any of our previous games for that matter.”

Wrong Wire, a game about reverse engineering a bomb and defusing it, will inevitably draw some comparisons to Steel Crate Games’ Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes (2015). Scanner Sombre on the other hand, will have a relatively harder time being compared to other games (though it bears some visual similarity to A Light In Chorus). The main concept is based on LIDAR, a type of surveying technology that measures distance and illuminates nearby objects using lasers, and it’s an idea Delay’s had kicking around for a while. He cites the 2008 music video for Radiohead’s “House of Cards” as another point of inspiration for the game.

“There’s something deeply haunting and beautiful about this kind of imagery,” he says. “It’s recognizable but also inhuman and abstract. I thought I could create a wonderfully unsettling atmosphere for a videogame if all you could see was the LIDAR point cloud, without any natural light to help.”

“drawn in by the mystery”

Scanner Sombre is set inside a cave where players are given no portable light source. The only source of light they have is a small fire, and nearby is a scanner gun players need to pick up before heading deeper into the cave. All told, it’s not an incredibly long game, but it was never meant to be. It was made to be a complete experience that would take around 15 minutes to play; and for a game that was being shown among many others at London-based videogame event Rezzed last weekend, that short playtime is perfect.

During the month in which Introversion worked on their two prototypes, Delay believed getting both games to a playable state would be the best way to show off the ideas driving both of them. By the end of Rezzed, both games had received incredibly positive responses. According to Delay, many were “drawn in by the mystery” presented by Scanner Sombre, and watching others play prompted him to take down dozens of notes.

Now that Rezzed is behind Introversion, though, it’s back to work on Prison Architect, with the futures of Scanner Sombre and Wrong Wire currently undecided. That includes any plans to release either game on PC or consoles. “I’m really not sure what we will be doing yet,” answered Delay when asked about a public release. “Both [games] had their fair share of fans, and we are still committed to working on Prison Architect.”

///

Images via Rock, Paper, Shotgun and TheSixthAxis

Morning Makeup Madness gives you 10 seconds to become as glam as can be

Jenny Jiao Hsia just released a new game, a little vignette called Morning Makeup Madness. The game has you put on your makeup in 10 seconds with predictably awful (or remarkable) results.

Inspired in part by the YouTube 3 Minute Makeup Challenges done by some of the platforms most well known faces (Hsia cites Bubzbeauty as a notable example), Morning Makeup Madness puts you in control of the brushes and other implements of beauty warfare to help complete a common ritual. The timing here is what elevates this task to the heights of ridiculousness.

the imprecise nature of the scoring is part of what makes the experience so very silly

YouTube’s 3 Minute Makeup Challenge is all about humanizing the beautiful women who dominate the airwaves. Their effortless beautiful routines, with sponsored product in palm, are often for obtaining the glamorous looks that no one else could even touch with a badger-haired brush. Make them do the same process in three minutes, however, and you see a bit more of the startled girl that some of us are at 7:30AM when we’re on the verge of being late for work and just can’t find the right lipstick.

“The YouTuber would perform her makeup routine in under three minutes and it usually resulted in a really entertaining (and sometimes, impressive) outcome,” Hsia says. But what YouTuber’s can do in three minutes, Morning Makeup Madness demands in seconds. The scoring system, Hsia says, is rudimentary: “if you’re applying makeup within the vicinity, you automatically get a portion of the score.” But the imprecise nature of the scoring is part of what makes the experience so very silly—smudged lipstick from nose to chin, eyeliner that streaks across the nose, and blush pancaked onto hair. No YouTuber would be so careless.

As for whether she would rush her own beauty regime, Hsia says, “I think I’d rather show up late than rush my makeup.”

You can play Morning Makeup Madness on itch.io.