Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 152

Japanese horror game has an air of Studio Ghibli about it

“At night every town…changes” the new trailer for Yomawari tells us. The idea in this upcoming PlayStation Vita-exclusive, from Japanese studio Nippon Ichi, is to take on the role of a young girl whose sister and dog have gone missing. Despite her fears, the girl is determined to find her loved ones, even if it means traversing her town while it’s warped into a different place by the cover of darkness. With the company of only a flashlight, the girl must overcome multiple obstacles; monsters and darkness are scattered throughout her journey.

The horror and stealth of the game are made immediate by the thick black vignette which envelopes the screen. However, there is also something more whimsical here, highlighted by the meandering crescendo of music in the trailer and the dancing light particles which float around the character’s thoughts. This combination of dark horror and eccentric fantasy perhaps brings to mind another piece of media that also had a young girl as its protagonist—Spirited Away (2001). 

Studio Ghibli is famous for its numerous young girl protagonists, from their earliest releases, like My Neighbor Totoro (1988), to their most recent (and potentially last) release, When Marnie Was There (2014). Studio Ghibli has also developed a robust following internationally for their work, likely due to their partnership over the years with Disney, who has released many high quality English dubs of their films. It is far from the norm in the west to see stories that focus on young girls as strong and complex characters, which has allowed Studio Ghibli to fill a sorely needed gap in the film market. Yomawari may serve a similar niche.

“Every adult was once a child…” says Yomawari’s trailer—highlighting how the divide between child and adult is often more contrived than we realize. Even though the young girl’s fear is openly mentioned, she pursues her quest regardless. This is similar to what we see and experience in Spirited Away where Chihiro/Sen expresses their fears throughout, and yet still find the will to overcome these fears. The association of “fear” and “child,” and particularly of “girl,” to “powerlessness” is undermined in this way. These depictions allow us to experience and understand that “girl” and “fear” in no way equate to weakness.

These depictions allow us to understand that “girl” and “fear” in no way equate to weakness

In this context, it is very exciting that Yomawari is being adapted for the Western market and gaining wider scope. In particular, the question the trailer leaves the audience with, “Do you remember your fear of the dark?” calls upon us to relate and empathize with the character’s experiences—to the fear, to the fantasy, and to the courage—and if that doesn’t appeal to you, the monsters look pretty cool too.

Be sure to visit Yomawari’s website for more information and to subscribe for updates.  Released in Japan October 2015, Yomawari will see its North American release late 2016.

 

New music video looks like a broken videogame

The new music video from Berlin-based duo Amnesia Scanner dropped recently and, boy, does it deliver. For the past few years, Amnesia Scanner has been producing some of the most exquisite sonic ruminations on our descent into digital assimilation. The track in question, “Chingy”, is no different as a digital voice bleeds over trance synths, drowning among the kicks and snare. It’s an abrasive, disorientating, and totally potent attack on our senses.

The accompanying video, created by digital artist Sam Rolfes, reinforces and furthers the aesthetic considerations of Amnesia Scanner, pushing it almost to the point of gravitational collapse. Rolfes twists a 3D environment to the contours of the music, shot through first-person videogame tropes. There are points where it resembles the most overloaded moments of 2016’s Devil Daggers, but the whole thing plays out like a disfigured, hellish version of EDM festival clusterfuck Tomorrowland.  

I had to check whether this was edited footage of an existing videogame but it turns out Rolfes created it “99% from scratch.” Rolfes constructed the video by building a “long corridor of increasingly abstracted and reactive venue elements inside the Unreal Engine.” He then “built an audience and dozens of writing sculptural pieces, and then scripted lights and refractions and the stage movement and numerous other things to change based on user input.”

a heartfelt tribute to the disembodied club experience

Rolfes told me that the piece was recorded in real time, to the music, using two players; an intricately choreographed performance. Player one controlled the “camera via [virtual reality headset] Oculus Rift” whilst directing “leg movement control and triggering certain animations by keyboard.” Player two took “control of the lights, stage movement, and refractions via a PlayStation 4 controller.” It’s an unholy alliance of player input, and the results gloriously reflect the Frankensteinian method of control.

The video is part of an internal process Rolfes has been undergoing of late; an attempt to reconcile his love of videogames with his digital art. Rolfes described to me his need to play videogames in the most cinematic way, “to frame the scene as artistically and dramatically as possible.” That compulsion is fully realized in the “Chingy” video, which takes him from playing within the videogame confines of others to creating, and working within virtual confines of his own making.

Rolfes admitted to binging on this year’s SUPERHOT having wrapped up production on the video, a game whose carefully constructed artifice and balletic choreography mirrors that found in the process and final video. But his “Chingy” video is not only an ode to, and a warning against, the monstrosity of contemporary performance, it’s also a heartfelt tribute to the disembodied club experience.

You can watch the “Chingy” music video right here.

Desert Golfing’s first unbeatable level has finally been discovered

Chris Adam played a lot of golf in 2012, and that’s putting it mildly. He must have been quite good, because one could not play as many holes as Adam did while triple-bogeying left, right, and center. But how many holes did he play that year, you ask? Well, according to the world record certified by Guinness World Record: 14,625.

That is a lot of golf for a lifetime, let alone one year. “809 full rounds of golf and seven 9-hole rounds,” as Golf Digest helpfully explains. All that golf adds up to 4,866 fewer holes than the point at which the shockingly compelling Desert Golfing is rumored to end. The game never really ends as its levels are procedurally generated (though the same for every player)—you can open it day after day—but hole 19,491 is the point where a Touch Arcade forum member, Jotch, found an unbeatable hole.

that promise hasn’t really been broken

“The game doesn’t allow you to drive the ball hard enough to make it up the hill and all the angles that make up the hill are too steep to allow the ball to sit still on them,” writes Touch Arcade’s Jared Nelson. “Another possible strategy that’s been discussed is trying to land the ball on the very point of the slanted wall right next to the tee, but Jotch has tried that tactic “endlessly” and could never get it to work either.”

(UPDATE: An intrepid Twitter user has reported that there is life on hole 26,950. It is not yet 100% clear that Jotch’s hole is indeed beatable or that no unbeatable exists in Desert Golfing, but the game’s outer limit is further out than it first appeared.)

Desert Golfing’s iTunes description promises “Hold infinity in the pocket of your shorts, And eternity in Desert Golfing,” and that promise hasn’t really been broken. Jotch can tilt at the windmill of hole 19,491 forever. That may well be the textbook definition of “eternity in Desert Golfing.” It is, however, a slightly different definition of eternity than the game heretofore hinted at. Desert Golfing has always been a slog, purposely and painfully slow, but it has never been truly Sisyphean. It just felt that way. Therein lies its charm. As Pete Brooksbank wrote in 2014, “You are playing for absolutely no reason at all, certainly not glory, but you keep going, your addiction fuelled by its unerring ability to immerse you in its 8-bit landscape and impart an eerie sense of overwhelming solitude.”

If this whole episode achieves anything, however, it will have been to demonstrate the vitality of infinite universe* games. To find Desert Golfing’s breaking point, Jotch had to play 19,491 holes. And, as it turns out, that wasn’t even the breaking point. Someone’s made it 7,000+ holes further. It’s an unthinkable slog, yet a person on the Internet did it. Similarly Chris Adam went around King Kamehameha Golf Club hundreds of time in one year—to no particular end. There is always someone who will press on towards some invisible and possibly nonexistent threshold. If nothing else, that is encouraging as No Man’s Sky looms closer.

You can purchase Desert Golfing over on the App Store.

Why videogames love Alice in Wonderland

The bed is on the ceiling. The faucet is dripping up. A fish floats above you, bleating sonorous pun-filled pronouncements: “The sweet scent of bile hangs like a condemned man.” In the center of the room is a tiny door; on the table, a potion. “I’m constantly observing my declining behavior as if through a looking glass,” the protagonist mutters to himself.

I think you might know what happens next.

Why do videogames love Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)? Again and again they return to it as a reference point, regardless of genre, regardless of style. What I just described is a scene in The Slaughter: Act One, a point-and-click adventure game released in the final days of January this year which mixes noir with Victorian London, much in the same way that Grim Fandango (1998) mixed it with Aztec mythology. You play as Sydney Emerson, a private eye who likes to mutter steel-cut ironies to himself between hitting the pub and pursuing…yeah, Jack the Ripper. The game arguably has more reason than most to toss out an Alice reference like it’s no big deal; it takes place, after all, in the historical setting that begat Alice in the first place. And yet, the dream sequence I’ve just described—also referred to as “Lynchian” by the creator, because the only thing games love as much as Alice in Wonderland is Twin Peaks—is less immersed in the history of Victorian literature than in the history of videogames themselves, which are rife with Alice moments just like it.

When things get druggy in Far Cry 3 (2012), the game brings in Alice as epigraph and intertitle; the action stops and lines from the book pile on each other in that blocky blue font, that font of carefully designed disarray. When things get almost unmanageably disorienting in the first-person exploration game NaissanceE (2014), a game almost as devoid of words as it is devoid of color, Alice shows up: “Deeper into madness,” it says, as you find yourself running into the same hallway over and over again, getting tinier and tinier as the camera is knocked askew. Alice is the very first world in Kingdom Hearts (2002), and the world that arguably sets the tone for all the illogical encounters after it—every Heartless derived from the Queen, every level subject to sudden and arbitrary reversals of the rules. In the Shin Megami Tensei series, Wonderland is sometimes a dungeon and Alice is sometimes a boss. In The Elder Scrolls series (especially 2007’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles), the books creep in via Sheogorath, the Daedric Prince of Madness, lord of his own wonderland where the laws of the mind take hold.

There are games that are based completely in Alice’s world: American McGee’s Alice (2000) and Alice: Madness Returns (2011)—sequels to the books that star a grimdark Hot Topic version of Alice herself—as well as direct adaptations of the story on many different gaming platforms, going all the way back to Commodore 64. And yet, so much more often, the books seem to show up in games that are not about them, and in much more managed ways—as interludes, interpolations, allusions, shoutouts. A lot of games have a tendency to invoke them at penultimate moments. “Down the Rabbit Hole” is the second-to-last mission in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (2011); “Deeper into madness” is the second-to-last major section of NaissanceE, a brutal kinetic gauntlet before the endless stasis of the desert. In The Slaughter, Sydney has his Alice dreams. But they’re premonitory, arriving before something horrible happens in reality.  

the books seem to show up in games that are not about them

The literary theorist Jonathan Culler once maintained that when poets begin with an apostrophe, “O whatever!” (e.g. “O wild West Wind”), they’re doing nothing so much as implicitly inserting themselves into the canon of every other big-name poet who begins poems with an apostrophe; they’re adding an aesthetic hashtag, a tacit marker of cultural seriousness. A lot of Alice references in games work in kind of the same way. Games like Madness Returns and Far Cry invoke Alice to reach for a marketable tone, casting themselves into a higher plane of mordant cynicism, as if to say: “we’re dark, man, like this famous children’s story about death and drugs.” Other games (like NaissanceE and The Slaughter) seem to invoke it at least in part because of its highbrow baggage—because to reappropriate Alice is to do something that avant-garde movements were doing all across the 20th century, from modernism and surrealism and Dada to ‘60s drug culture, psychedelic rock, and Jefferson Airplane (and to a lesser extent, 1999’s The Matrix). Beloved cultural touchstones are beloved cultural touchstones, of course, and if people tend to invoke them it’s probably because they’re beloved. At the same time, I think it’s a lot like how puzzle games that want to be taken seriously as aesthetic experiences and intellectual achievements—Fez (2012), this year’s The Witness, NaissanceE once again—have an extremely high chance of invoking the inscrutable black monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). It profits the creator of something new and strange to be in good intertextual company, to be among the heavy-hitters. At least until you make too many Moby-Dick (1851) references and it gets a little stupid.

But there’s a much better reason for games to invoke Alice, and I think it’s a reason that ultimately underwrites their abiding tendency to do so: because Alice is itself a game. Alice might very well be the original attempt to resolve the ‘ludology vs. narratology’ debate that game critics and designers have been trying to work through for the last 20 years—the original attempt to make storytelling gamelike and gameplay a form of narrative experience. The textual chessboard at the beginning of Through the Looking-Glass (1871) makes this crystal clear, establishing the whole book as a game—or maybe a metagame—that unfolds through the act of reading, each chapter corresponding to a ‘move’ by Alice’s profoundly overwhelmed pawn. But the original is also fundamentally gamelike, not only in the way it contains games (e.g. the wacky croquet match between Alice and the Queen) but in the way it invites the reader to play language games at every turn. Just as Alice is asked to solve riddles by seemingly every vulgar, indignant animal she encounters in that topsy-turvy world, Alice author Lewis Carroll implicitly asks the reader to puzzle through the linguistic inversions, looking not necessarily for meaning—as Alice says about the poem ‘Jabberwocky,’ “It fills my head with ideas—only I don’t know what they are!”—but for logical, or at least ludic, consistency.

PD-US

It’s hard to see Alice clearly through the Genius-like cloud of its annotators and 20th century interpreters, who often associate it with things that aren’t gamelike at all—dreams, trips, the formlessness and illogicality of altered states—or even turn it into a straight-up drug allegory. But there’s an alternate tradition of commentators who attach themselves to the hard precision of its weirdness, and the clearly defined rules of its textual engagement. Like fellow Victorian ‘nonsense poet’ Edward Lear, Carroll (also known as Charles Dodgson) was a professional logician, and the genesis of his project can be traced not only to a deep love of order—apparently he kept an exhaustive database of all his incoming and outgoing letters for 37 years, totaling 98,000 entries by the time he died—but also to his proclivity for making word games for children. As Elizabeth Sewell puts it in her classic 1951 study The Field of Nonsense, “Nonsense as practiced by Lear and Carroll does not, even on a slight acquaintance, give the impression of being something without laws and subject to chance, or something without limits tending towards infinity.” On the contrary, it’s “a carefully limited world, controlled and directed by reason, a construction subject to its own laws.” The challenge of the books is to see those laws in any kind of clarity, and it’s a challenge that yields apparent (if fleeting) win-states. When the Cheshire Cat says, “You see a dog growls when it’s angry, and wags its tail when it’s pleased. Now I growl when I’m pleased, and wag my tail when I’m angry. Therefore I’m mad,” it’s ridiculous. But it’s also a perfect inversion, as beautifully self-enclosed as a square on a sheet of graph paper. To be “mad” is to be at the other end of a “therefore,” a clockwork determination. To be sane is to see what madness is and simply do the opposite.  

What is nonsense, anyway? In the realm of language, the term designates a lack of meaning: words and phrases arranged into shapes and sequences that bear no definite (or at least obvious) semantic fruit. Yet that very definition puts emphasis on the “arrangement” part, which is what nonsense literature tends to have in paradoxical abundance: as Hugh Haughton observed in 1988, “Nonsense is more shapely, more brazenly formalized and patterned than other kinds of language—not the reverse.” Nonsense is language unshackled from semantic reference and hyper-arranged according to some other internal system—probably one more organized, since meaning is itself so messy and infinite and prone to change over time. The result is a piece of language that’s gamelike almost by default, since games, in Sewell’s view, have three distinct components:

1. A desire, on the part of the player, to play;

2. Objects for the player to manipulate: chess pieces, cards, croquet balls, Companion Cubes;

3.  A constrained field of possibility: a board, an arena, a battle, a level.

Nonsense invites sense-making; we feel a drive to crack the code. At the same time, it strips words of their usual meaning and context, making them manipulable, movable, in ways they weren’t before—hence all the puns in Alice, which allow words to move in a completely different direction (e.g. the “tale” of the mouse that Alice encounters early in Wonderland, both a piece of text and a piece of its body). And nonsense happens within its own frame, in a special field: a field of absurdity but also liberating possibility, enabled by conceptual constraint. Every page offers a new Zelda room full of blocks, levers, items, and switches, with no particular door to open. Reading becomes playing, no matter how fast you proceed.  

Nonsense invites sense-making

Perhaps Alice is still rooted in the stuff of the subconscious, dredged up from a dark and merciless place beyond the light of reason. Theorists of nonsense tend to maintain nonetheless that its “nonsense” is opposed to dream-logic rather than the same thing—a way of containing and managing the disorder of the mind rather than giving it total, all-encompassing freedom. Games particularize the world, breaking it into manageable chunks. Videogames do this with even greater intensity, ultimately bound as they are to the binary architecture of computers; the most realistic games are also the ones that most visibly abstract the real into manipulable units and blocks, like the wooden pallets in The Last of Us (2013). You can’t play a game unless it has objects you can control. The disorder of dreams, by contrast, in Sewell’s view, offers nothing less than the prospect of everything being unmanageable and all-consuming—the prospect of the self or the mind being the thing “played with,” in a game far beyond its control. It would be wrong to say that there’s nothing dream-like about Alice, since the story takes place explicitly in a dreamscape. But it has a way of managing that dreamscape that staves off the most destabilizing qualities of dreams themselves. It divides them so that we might conquer them, even in moments of profound disorientation. “The game of Nonsense may, then, consist in the mind’s employing its tendency towards order to engage its contrary tendency towards disorder,” Sewell writes, “keeping the latter perpetually in play and so in check.”

Games often invoke Alice as a way of introducing disorder, a way of subverting their own carefully designed world-logics at the nadir of the player’s journey, when things get darkest before the dawn. Before its Alice chapter, NaissanceE works like any other first-person exploration game; you know the height and length of your jump, the speed of your walk, the general direction of your journey—forward and down, forward and down—even as the game impedes your path with labyrinths. In the Alice chapter, all bets are off; basic truths like gravity and perspective stop working the way they’re supposed to. And yet, I can’t help feeling that the very invocation of Alice in moments of despair like this is inevitably a way of keeping them corralled, contained, bound within a limited field of possibility. Things get weird in NaissanceE, but without an Alice reference they would be almost unimaginably weirder: the reference provides an implicit intertextual instruction manual, a way of navigating and understanding the disarray. Things get weird in The Slaughter, but when Alice shows up, the weirdness becomes almost reassuring in its predictability, its containment. We find ourselves in a world already framed and divided by its ties to Wonderland. Its rules are strange — but there are rules. In this way, almost every game that invokes Alice as a reference point is true to the source material whether it wants to be or not, given that the source material is precisely about arranging disorder into manageable chunks, using play to contain the unbearable. Alice lives on in every game that uses Alice—or anything else—to make madness recognizable, to give it a face and a name.

VR is a realm of endless promises, and one of the things it promises is to give us a new breed of Alice game. The upcoming A.L.I.C.E. VR, yet another first-person game with explicit ties to the books, seems to follow NaissanceE by invoking them not only as a reference point but as a kind of template for the entire genre. You, like Alice, are wandering—this time on uncharted alien planets. Things are weird, and you can’t quite discern why from your limited, small perspective; the laws of reality are subject to sudden abrogation. I don’t doubt that it will be disorienting. Nor do I doubt that it will be a lot like Alice in Wonderland, even if it has nothing in particular to do with Alice in Wonderland: not only because it is a game, but because it needs to be one.

The future of playgrounds might be in virtual reality

The creative playground is under siege. Land scarcity, underfunded municipal governments, and rising costs are all impediments to constructing innovative public spaces. Moreover, parents’ concerns—some more reasonable than others—about their children’s safety increasingly shapes playground design. The confluence of these factors can produce interesting results, but the odds are against such outcomes.

virtual reality may be the way forward

If communities cannot build interesting and stimulating parks on city blocks, where can they be built? One possible option is virtual space. That, at least, is a possible reading of George Michael Brower’s Playthings: Musical VR Playground. The experience is a mad, neon playscape. Hot dogs float through the air, unmolested by gravity. (Their mustard, however, remains attached.) Drums take on the appearance of gummy bears that have moulded from jello shots. In point of fact: everything—even the hot dogs—can be used as a drum. You can bash away at these instruments using handheld controllers. And why shouldn’t you? It’s not like anyone else can hear the racket you’re cooking up.

The public playground’s enduring playground is in large part due to its role as a low-stakes environment to which each participant can attach their own significance. Low-stakes spaces do not need to be sanitized and tame, but that’s where the built environment often falls short; it confuses total safety with the lack of risk. If interesting, low-stakes playgrounds can’t be built in physical space, virtual reality may be the way forward. You can be as weird as you want in VR, bashing away at a neon foodscape for as long as you want. The eye rolls of onlookers cannot be seen while wearing a headset. A virtual playground may lack some of the sociability of its meatspace antecedent, but Playthings demonstrates that it can have advantages to spare.

Find out more about Playthings on its website.

Practice patience with painterly, puzzle-like swordplay

The format of a mobile game is pretty well-honed by now. From Super Hexagon (2012) to Crossy Road (2014), the games we play on our phones are (for the most part) broken up into short-and-sweet attempts to break high scores. When they were new, maybe we imagined spending more time in waiting rooms than we actually do, but now we seem to be able to find a lot of time for these bite-sized bursts of game.

However, a new game from Lee-Kuo Chen and Sunhead Games—creators of A Ride into the Mountains (2013)—called The Swords, doesn’t totally line up with this mobile design paradigm. While it is made up of collections of short puzzles, once you’ve started, you can’t go back or skip one; you progress through them one-by-one, picking up where you left off when you get back to the game. Then it puts fragments of story between each group of puzzles, casting you as a student learning the ways of the blade through a series of metaphor-driven fables. The Swords needs you to be patient both in and outside of its puzzles.

similar to having a coach direct your movement as a fencer

More than just the explicit reference in the framing device, something about playing The Swords reminds me of doing fencing drills. The first set of puzzles revolve around tracing brush strokes representing movement patterns, and they immediately demonstrate that you’re not just expected to pay attention to the shape (as a calligrapher might), but also the timing of these patterns. If you’re impatient or imprecise and with a puzzle, it doesn’t start over the exact same way it did the first time, it rotates and shifts a little to keep you from developing solutions based on reflex. It’s similar to having a coach direct your movement as a fencer—tap this target, this one, this one, at this timing, patience, try again. It’s a game about rote repetition, about feeling out timings, and about progressing—coming back until you get it right.

None of the different kinds of puzzles in The Swords are entirely novel, but the way they build on each other and demand restraint instead of reflex makes the game feel pleasantly different from a lot of the other collections of bite-sized puzzles out there.

You can purchase The Swords on the App Store for $2.99.

See through Ned Kelly’s eyes in this videogame

Ned Kelly is prime videogame material. A man who commanded a gang, set-up a hideout in the Australian bush, and donned iconic homemade steel armor in his final showdown with the police. The bushranger and his tale lends itself to being fastened to the hallmarks of any violent, open-world game. In fact, how the translation might occur has already been imagined, spurred on by Matt Sophos, director of Lost Planet 3 (2013), who showed an eagerness for the history, drama, and “gameplay opportunities” of Kelly and his gang.

Yet, Ned Kelly has remained strangely absent from videogame canon. There was one effort made for the game jam 7DFPS called Ned Kelly’s Last Stand but that has since vanished. And Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! (2014) featured a bandit wearing Kelly’s armor that was accompanied by an audio log about the decision to miss out leg protection on the suit (the flaw that got Kelly wounded and captured). But that seems to be about it.

(No Name On The Bullet, 1959, via )

Ian MacLarty has changed that with his newest game simply titled Ned Kelly. It’s made in his tool Vertex Meadow—with which he also made his parody of The Witness—which easily lets you turn any 2D image into 3D terrain that can be explored. By the looks of it, for Ned Kelly, MacLarty has focused on creating a rendition of the Australian bush as Kelly would have been familiar (although its desert colors seem closer in tone to the outback). Most striking, however, is that you view this virtual world through a narrow slit. The idea is that you are seeing through Kelly’s eyes as he wanders in his iconic steel armor, now perhaps the most famous asset of the man as it has come to symbolize that of a flawed hero.

staging them as natural expanses to be conquered by man

There’s something in this visual framing that evokes the frontier westerns that came out of Hollywood in the 1950s. At the time, CinemaScope was introducing widescreen ratios to the film studios, giving directors an expanded lexicon to communicate their stories. The widescreen format especially suited westerns as they often took place upon the large stretches of American desert-wilds. Being able to exaggerate these barren horizontal spaces, staging them as natural expanses to be conquered by man, became a recurring iconography. Not to mention that widescreen was also used to create extra tension in shootouts in westerns, it used to exaggerate the space between dualists who typically stood at horizontal extremes from each other. The use of widescreen to this effect in the western would be expanded upon in the 1960s with Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns—the unforgettable widescreen close-ups on squinted eyes in the heat of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly’s (1966) conclusive Mexican standoff, for instance.

(Ned Kelly’s armor, via State Library Victoria)

However, whereas Hollywood westerns used widescreen to imply a spaciousness, in MacLarty’s Ned Kelly it implies the opposite. We are enclosed in Kelly’s world, one in which he is being hunted down by the police, a large bounty on his head, having to rely on his lifelong knowledge of the bush’s geography to outpace and flank them. There aren’t any police or guns in the game, in fact, you can only walk and jump around, but it is enough to feel the imprisonment by simply seeing through Kelly’s eyes. We have to make a considerable gesture with the computer mouse to tilt his head and see the freedom of the blue sky above. Meanwhile, the tight view has you constantly creating horizons out of the landscape, looking into the distance for a new landmark that, for Kelly, could be an escape route or hiding place.

You can play Ned Kelly right in your browser. It’s also available on itch.io.

LARPing for Social Good: The Power of Live Action Role Play

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

Fantasy entertainment once considered only for children has evolved into a social tool for diversity. LARPing inspires empathy and understanding for gender identity and oppression issues.

When Anna Anthropy created Dys4ia (2012), an autobiographical game about her experience taking hormone replacements as a trans woman, she sought to give players insight into her unique perspective. Anthropy knew that shared experiences can raise people’s awareness and even inspire compassion for diversity. The power of empathizing with others could ultimately lead to kinder behavior and a better place for society as whole.

In today’s videogames and virtual reality adventures, players have fun while learning new things that can help them change the world for the better. Live action role playing (or LARPing) is proving to be one of the most visceral tools for inspiring social good acts.

A more analog approach than typical computer or console games, LARPing brings people together in the real world to act out characters by dressing up in costumes and improvising stories.

Though usually used in a fantasy context, social activists are using LARPs to foster empathy among adults, who act out scenarios of real world injustices in order to spotlight emotions and complexities inherent in social or culture clashes.

Here are a few examples of LARPs that put players on the front lines of the social issues like racial discrimination, gender identity, oppression and more.

Finding Oneself through Play

The Wayfinder Experience summer camp that empowers people with foam swords, capes and many other tokens of traditional fantasy role play. The summer camp has built a tight-knit community that reflects the real-world impact these LARPing experiences have on participants.

While most LARPs are actually played by adults, The Wayfinder Experience also aims to provide a safe space for adolescents interested in exploring their identity. These games are especially helpful for The Wayfinder Experience’s queer community, for whom self-discovery can be a painful, frightening process, according to Corinne McDonald, co-owner of The Wayfinder Experience.

ONE OF THE MOST VISCERAL TOOLS FOR INSPIRING SOCIAL GOOD ACTS

“LARPing allows you to play with ideas of masculinity and femininity in ways that aren’t necessarily traditional,” McDonald said.

She said someone who has questions about sexuality might find the vocabulary or courage to ask those questions out loud in a LARP. This is similar to how many trangender teens find solace through virtual role-playing games like World of Warcraft (2005). Instead of killing boars, this LARP empowers kids to learn through interactive storytelling.

McDonald hopes that The Wayfinder Experience is where a person’s identity can be determined from the inside out.

Role-Playing Prejudice

Described as a “performative empathy experience,” &maybetheywontkillyou is a LARP that deals with tough, real-word situations. Creator Akira Thompson describes it as putting players in the role of someone who “may be judged based on their appearance or income.”

Drawn in part from Thompson’s own experiences as an African American, &maybetheywontkillyou takes players on a simple walk between home and a local convenience store.

Leveraging his own experiences and storylines from the lives of friends and family, Thompson depicts the danger of doing even the most mundane task as a black person in America.

Conceived shortly after a grand jury failed to indict police officer Darren Wilson for shooting and killing Michael Brown in 2014, &maybetheywontkillyou’s most dramatic moments can sometimes be pulled directly from headlines.

Placing players in the shoes of an oppressed minority proved challenging for Thompson, but he believes that role-playing is a powerful way for people to understand what it’s like to experience racial discrimination.

Reading news articles or watching a documentary won’t illicit the same profound feelings, Thompson said. “I haven’t seen anything else that has really put people in [racially discriminatory] situations in the same way [as his LARP].”

A POWERFUL WAY FOR PEOPLE TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IT’S LIKE TO EXPERIENCE RACIAL DISCRIMINATION

Understanding Injustice Through Play

In writing the LARP called The Tribunal, Nordic writer J. Tuomas Harviainen sought to replace the ogre army of traditional role-playing games with a fiercer foe: totalitarianism. Drawing inspiration from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Harviainen created archetypal characters that players can easily identify with and embody.

“I wanted to make a game about totalitarianism without pointing any fingers directly,” said Harviainen. “That inspired me to do a game about people being collaborators in their own oppression. I wanted to make a game that makes people think [afterward about] how easy it is to make decisions based on fear, comfort and ambition.”

The premise is simple: Two soldiers, private Magpie and corporal Badger, have been accused of stealing bread, a serious crime in a military unit already on the razor’s edge of starving. If they’re found guilty, they’ll be shot. Everyone knows they’re probably innocent, but that doesn’t matter if most of the officers are either corrupt or afraid.

LARP image via Flickr.

It’s theoretically possible to save Magpie and Badger if enough people testify on their behalf. Doing so puts players at great risk, and many choose not to stand up for their fellow comrades.

Since its debut in 2010, the online LARPing community has flocked to The Tribunal, which is now translated into multiple languages and played around the world. Non-governmental organizations in Belarus—a country repressed for decades by an autocratic president—have used the game in their work with young people.

Harviainen’s work, like that of Thompson and The Wayfinder Experience, taps into the power of role-playing games to demonstrate systemic injustices on a human level. By getting players to embody prejudice, the makers of these LARPs aim to raise understanding and empathy through shared experiences.

Far from a fantasy game, LARPing encourages players to challenge the status quo and champion positive changes in the real world.

Header image via Flickr.

No Man’s Sky finally revealing its mysteries when it launches this June

It’s been a little over two years since ambitious space exploration game No Man’s Sky, with its “planet-sized planets” and “universe-sized universe,” was first announced back in December of 2013. Since then, the game’s trailers and various press showings have been great at capturing the imagination, but haven’t exactly shown us too much of just what this game is about. What’s there to do in this massive universe? What sort of creatures and people live in it? What’s this all leading up to? As with J.J. Abrams and his mystery box, part of the excitement of No Man’s Sky comes from the not knowing. Still, like Lost fans waiting for the next episode after a cliffhanger, all of our burning questions are starting to get to us a little. Thankfully, it seems we needn’t wait much longer, as Sony’s PlayStation Blog has finally revealed that No Man’s Sky will be landing on PC and PlayStation 4 on June 21st, 2016.

part of the excitement of No Man’s Sky comes from the not knowing

For a title that’s been so shrouded in mystery, knowing that it will soon be an actual thing that I could go buy with the physical cash sitting in my pocket feels a little bewildering, and it seems I’m not alone on that. “I can’t really imagine what it will feel like to walk into a shop and see our game on a shelf,” writes the game’s lead designer, Sean Murray, after announcing that it will also be coming to Blu-Ray. Likening it to seeing the successful LittleBigPlanet series on stage at E3 for the first time, he continues “I can’t believe we’re about to follow in their footsteps as an even smaller studio with their game in real, actual shops.”

At the end of its second season, Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty perfectly captured the simultaneous pain and elation that comes with being excited for something while not knowing when it’s going to come or what it’s going to entail. As Mr. Poopy Butthole writhes around on the floor, endlessly speculating about the next season, I can’t help but see a bit of how I’ve felt in the lead-up to No Man’s Sky. But now the question of when has been answered. All that remains is to hop in my spaceship and find out the ‘what’.

The Cave as Canvas: A Review of Far Cry Primal

Those who remember Banjo-Tooie (2000) with great fondness, as I do, may remember the ceaseless, bitter conflict between the Unga Bungas and the Oogle Boogles. The Unga Bungas are a warlike people, barely more than sentient beards with clubs; they get very mad when you try to sneak into their cave and routinely administer “big beatings.” The Oogle Boogles, by contrast, are meek and civilized, aspiring not to rule Terrydactyland but to “share” its primeval abundance. Banjo and Kazooie find the Oogle Boogles starving to death in a dark cave, blockaded by their tyrannical rivals. They are clearly the weaker tribe. But you give them dirty hamburgers from WitchyWorld and it becomes clear that they, not the Unga Bungas, will be the inheritors of the earth.

Far Cry Primal is basically everything I just described, without a whole lot of irony. Which is to say it often feels enormously, almost amazingly stupid. The game places you in the middle of a three-sided conflict between tribes of cave people circa 10,000 BCE. There’s the Unga Bunga-like Udam, a bunch of unregenerate cannibals who have barely mastered tool use and look suspiciously like Neanderthals. There’s the “fire-wielding” Izila, the blue team, somewhat enlightened—they sort of discovered agriculture—but held back by a crazy religion. And then there’s your tribe, the Wenja, who aspire only to make a comfortable home in the land of Oros without having to fend off threats both human and not. The lines are drawn pretty clearly, without much in the way of nuance or narrative variation. The Udam and Izila must be killed. The Wenja must be saved.

UNAPOLOGETICALLY AN EXERCISE IN PROJECTION

Like any Assassin’s Creed, the game is ostentatiously and impressively devoted to period detail: everyone speaks variants of an actual prehistoric language called “proto-indo-European”; outfits and environments look like they were ripped straight out of a diorama in a natural history museum; your arsenal is limited to a bow, a spear, and a club. In practice, almost all of these attempts at Mesolithic realism lead to an experience that feels, paradoxically, much more arcade-like and artificial than other Far Cry games. This is a lavishly detailed caveman simulator that wouldn’t feel out of place stationed inside a plastic Flintstones bone car between Primal Rage (1994) and Daytona USA (1993).

Sure, you’re stuck with those three primitive weapons. But then you get a grocery cart full of ridiculous toys: fire bombs, berserk bombs, bee bombs, a sniper longbow, AI animal helpers, meat that heals you as fast as a BioShock syringe, an owl that can tag enemies and kill one for you every 80 seconds. Sure, the language is anthropologically authentic. But it tends to sound like a more guttural Simlish, delivered by the voice actors with an almost absurd level of gravitas. Sure, on the level of narrative, the game proclaims itself to be about survival in an era of incomplete human dominance. But then it ends up being about clubbing and shooting things, over and over, sometimes with style and strategy, often with neither—it doesn’t help that, as you progress further into the game, enemies become spear/arrow/club-sponges that require a comical amount of effort to bring down. Don’t get me wrong: the game’s ooga-booga whack-whack rhythm can be really satisfying in short bursts. But over the long haul, the game’s sincere commitment to the idea of survival makes you wish for something more like Metal Gear Solid 3 (2004), which does a much better job simulating solitude in the forbidding wilderness even if it tends to place matters of bare necessity within abstract menus.

At the same time, there’s something weirdly captivating about the way Far Cry Primal brings us into its imaginary prehistory with such a brazen combination of complete seriousness and wacky, self-indulgent artifice. At no point does it pretend that the prehistory it depicts is “real”—i.e., an accurate representation of prehistory itself. Instead, it asks us to see at every turn, with every takedown, that its prehistory contains the essence of Far Cry. It’s unapologetically an exercise in projection that invents prehistory according to a contemporary template, filling in the corners of the primeval past with features from other Far Cry games, as well as the Far Cry worldview. It’s impressively recursive: the game is the 5th in the series, but in a canny way it presents itself as Far Cry Prime, the ur-Far Cry, retroactively justifying everything you do in the other games—all the predation, the nihilistic destruction, the animal genocide—by locating it at the beginning of things, in nature, at the origin point. And in that way, it’s also instructive, maybe despite itself. This is a game that shows us exactly what prehistory tends to be: a canvas of ideological convenience.

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Last year, I took one of my classes to the American Museum of Natural History. Like everybody else, we were there, primarily, to see dinosaurs. But we were also there to see the lingering traces of Victorians—the 19th and early 20th century figures who had built, funded, and designed the Museum as a reflection of their own worldview. We learned about Henry Fairfield Osborn, an early president of the Museum who put together maximally violent dinosaur exhibits in the hope that they might combat “effeminacy” in young boys. We saw remnants of the Museum’s previous life as a display case of colonial power. We saw remnants of the racism of its initial curatorial premises: the idea that there was one human culture, not many, and the Museum was a place where one could see previous, inferior versions of it through the plate glass of scientific detachment.

We also saw animals that were often, beneath their carefully taxidermied surfaces, a lot more human than they seemed. Our tour guide was an amazingly knowledgeable Upper West Side native who’d grown up around the block and seen the Museum change enormously, despite the epochal solidity of its columns. At one point he paused in front of a diorama of four Indian tigers—a mama, a papa, and two cubs. “As you can see here,” he said, in his thick Billy Crystal accent, “we have the nuclear family.”

“Memo,” he went on: “Tigers are solitary.”

A CANVAS OF IDEALOGICAL CONVENIENCE

Meanwhile, tigers are abundant in Far Cry Primal, along with cave lions, cave bears, woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, massive elk, and rare or “legendary” versions of all of the above. Playing the game is like putting your face up to a firehose of charismatic megafauna: roughly every 10 seconds, you hear the drumbeat of combat and a major zoo-grade predator runs out of the bushes and bites you in the face. But these animals are a lot like those sitcom-family heteronormative tigers, domesticated ideologically even as they appear savage and untamed. They present themselves—always present themselves—as recurring examples of a few basic truths that Far Cry wants to convey to the player, even if it does so with a little bit of a Ron Swanson wink. Predators are the only animals that matter. Masculinity means being able to kill them before they kill you. Being one with nature, being “natural,” means assuming the human’s rightful place at the head of a hierarchical kingdom.  

Again, a lot of this feels tongue-in-cheek. But the thing about Far Cry Primal is that it shapes and contours prehistory to fit even its own brand of irony. It shapes and contours prehistory to fit every aspect of itself—which makes it much more than a reskinned Far Cry 4 (2014), even if it often feels like one. The basic gameplay loop of the series somehow becomes the daily rhythm of Mesolithic life: early humans apparently spent a huge amount of time stalking enemy encampments by themselves, nailing sling headshots like King David, and sprinting around the wilderness until they could find a very specific clay needed to fully upgrade Dah’s hut. And the games’ overall sensibility—perhaps best described as Reservoir Dogs (1992) meets the TV series Vikings—somehow becomes the sensibility of that distant world. That sensibility is kind of ironic: the games are always prone to gleeful moments of nihilistic violence; they’re obsessed with presenting better and more colorful psychopaths. But it’s ironic only to a point.

Caveman image via Wikimedia.

In one cutscene, for example, we encounter the aforementioned Dah in his hut, freaking out because he has some sort of migraine-like condition he has dubbed “skull fire.” “Open Dah’s head to get rid of skull fire!” he commands, and you oblige: wielding your rock-knife like a chisel, you tap some bloody little holes into his head, each yielding one of the game’s many bone-crunch sound effects. Instead of passing out from the head trauma, Dah laughs gleefully and grabs you in a manly embrace: this, clearly, is a moment of brotherhood.

On the one hand, violence is funny. On the other hand, masculinity—expressed through ceaseless rituals of becoming-man—is deeply, powerfully important. On the other other hand, you wouldn’t be having this cheerful interaction in the first place if Dah, a former Udam chieftain, hadn’t conceded your dominance. Dominance is more important than anything. That combination of nihilism, masculinism, and pseudo-Darwinism is Far Cry in a nutshell, and Primal does a surprisingly effective and plausible job placing it at the bedrock of the everyday struggles of Mesolithic humans—and therefore, by extension, the human experience.

What’s interesting about this insertion of the present into the deep past is that it’s something we always do. It’s The Flintstones. It’s Terrydactyland. It’s Roland Emmerich’s 10,000 B.C (2008). Even on the level of more serious cultural artifacts, the history of prehistory is a history of interpretations, a history of appropriations—a history, especially, of visions of prehistoric life that tend to cast the caveman as the icon of a fundamental violence, selfishness, or impulsivity in the human breast, forging a connection between anthropological origin and psychological essence. Late 19th and early 20th century psychology and anthropology constantly used the caveman to put a (pre-) human face on the subconscious. In his Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Freud cast primitive man as another version of the child, the neurotic and the “savage,” that creature of impulse that stays with us, deep down in the psyche, even as we consider ourselves unimaginably distant from it. Heart of Darkness (1899), like a lot of other adventure novels before it—many of which anticipate Far Cry—makes the connection explicit: as Marlowe travels deeper into a place of “savagery,” he travels deeper into himself.

AN INSERTION OF THE PRESENT INTO THE DEEP PAST

Other writers have been more inclined to insist that the caveman embodies better, nobler essential qualities. As G.K. Chesterton put it in his 1925 polemic The Everlasting Man:

When the psychoanalyst writes to a patient, ‘The submerged instincts of the cave-man are doubtless prompting you to gratify a violent impulse,’ he does not refer to the impulse to paint in water-colors; or to make conscientious studies of how cattle swing their heads when they graze. Yet we do know for a fact that the cave-man did these mild and innocent things and we have not the most minute speck of evidence that he did any of the violent and ferocious things.

Chesterton anticipates Claude Lévi-Strauss, who insisted in the 1960s that the “savage” was, in fact, the greatest scientist, driven even more than modern scientists to categorize and organize the surrounding world. In a way, he also anticipates Werner Herzog, who spends most of Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011) curbing his usual nihilism in the face of the wonders of cave art. But Far Cry Primal is attached to a longer, more entrenched rhetorical tradition that tends to be much more interested in those “violent and ferocious things” that cavemen did, that we still do. Interested because they can explain us. Interested because they can absolve us.

At the beginning of The Last Dinosaur Book (1998), a history of the dinosaur as a cultural icon from the mid-Victorian period to the current day, the visual scholar W.J.T. Mitchell raises a weird and useful thought experiment: if aliens were to dig up remnants of our civilization 3,000 years from now, what would they make of our obsession with dinosaurs? Looking at the endless toys, the endless effigies, would they not be compelled to assume that it was an object of worship?

Dinomania ebbs and flows. It’s back again, sort of, thanks to Jurassic World (2015) and the recent unveiling of the Titanosaur. But it may subside again. What remains constant is our investment in the dinosaur as a figure—”the totem animal of modernity,” in Mitchell’s view—which we prop up always as a kind of dialectical foil for ourselves. They became extinct; we are still alive. They were ancient; we are modern. They were fearsome; we are cunning. And I think one thing Far Cry Primal makes colossally clear is that the caveman works in much the same way. It transforms  with the changing needs of a modernity searching endlessly, restlessly, for an origin point as well as an opposite—a thing we once were; a thing we cannot be; a thing we want to be anyway because it represents the “natural,” the essential (see, e.g., the paleo diet). The caveman always changes. But in its changes you can see what we need it to be, and that need is more powerful than any idea of ‘essence’ it represents.  

Header image via Flickr.

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