Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 153

New writing app deletes your work if you don’t concentrate

I’ve never been a writing-within-hours-of-the-deadline type of person. In college, I was probably an anomaly of a student. I’d write my papers in advance, then pop into my professors’ office hours for feedback before turning in a final draft. Some peers called me an overachiever. Others had no idea how I could ever not write a paper the night before it was due, fueled by Five Hour Energy Shots and Totino’s Pizza Rolls. The answer was always simple: I set myself early personal deadlines because I’m easily distracted, and needed the extra time to slowly gnaw away at a project. That’s why designer, developer, and neuroscientist Manuel Ebert’s pressure-driven The Most Dangerous Writing App is practically tailor-made for me, and even for that matter, my peers who incidentally put things off until the very last minute.

An arcade-like exercise in how well an individual can work under pressure

Ebert’s app seeks to change the wandering mindset that comes with being sat at a computer with intense, pointed pressure. You set a goal for yourself, say, your objective is half an hour, and get typing—except there’s a catch. The catch is that if you stop writing for more than five seconds, all your progress is lost. Pretty high stakes for a measly writing management application. No more listening to a podcast or deciding to window-browse Amazon while you’re writing, otherwise you’ll be punished.

Its design in this sense is similar to recent roguelike survival games Downwell and Nuclear Throne: strive to reach the goal, most likely fail in the process, only to start from the beginning once more, like your soul wasn’t just crushed moments prior. The Most Dangerous Writing App is an arcade-like exercise in how well an individual can work under pressure. The app exists as a potential solution to the ever-growing problem of waning productivity in the age of the net.

Described by Ebert in the description as, “designed to shut down your inner editor and get you into a state of flow,” the app might not be the best route into creating that rare perfect first draft. Instead, it’s better served to get your creativity flowing in a natural state. So, journalists, students, and other writers from all around: turn on your favorite background music and take The Most Dangerous Writing App for a spin. Write until your fingers cramp up and your brain stops functioning, because if you don’t, it’s game over.

Got writer’s block? T est The Most Dangerous Writing App for yourself here.  (That is, if you dare.)

Internet-connected toys spark a new era of play

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

From building blocks to Cabbage Patch Kids, children’s toys have often relied on the player’s active imagination. A new era of touchscreen cubes, rolling robots and other Internet-connected toys engage kids, teaching them about the world. Overall, the market for toys is on the rise, with marketing research firm NPD Group estimating a 7 percent sales growth across 11 major global markets. Meanwhile, licensing industry publication License! Global predicts connected toys will be a significant trend in 2016.

Take, for example, the plastic kitchen set of old, which did little more than provide a countertop for Play-Doh spaghetti. Robo Mama’s Kitchen Set, created at the Internet of Things Hackday in Minneapolis, makes future chefs feel as if they’re really cooking with fire. The set features a digital faucet and frying pans with conductive pads that can detect different vegetables and heat settings. Through LED lights that provide immediate feedback, kids can learn different recipes and cooking methods. It’s all the fun of a beginners cooking class without the fire hazards.

It’s not just kiddie kitchenware, either. Even the stiff and immovable plastic action figure is taking a leap into modernity with Sphero’s app-enabled BB-8. Far from a generic token of the Star Wars universe, unboxing Sphero’s droid feels more like mistakenly receiving a package meant for delivery on Tatooine. “We wanted to create a product that was as authentic to BB-8 in the film as possible,” said Ian Bernstein, co-founder of Sphero. “Things like the decorations had to be perfect. Applying high-quality artwork around a sphere and having it all match up correctly is not easy.” Everything from BB-8’s packaging to its ability to store and play holographic messages makes that galaxy far, far away feel much closer to home. What would have been impossible in 1977 has become a reality thanks to widespread access to powerful handheld computers. In a manner of speaking, Bluetooth is the new Force.

The craftsmanship of the replica, coupled with its responsiveness and personality, transports players to the tactile world that lies at the heart of Star Wars’ magic. Reactive to touch and voice, BB-8 invites a uniquely personal experience that is unlike most other manufactured toys.

But perhaps droids and light sabers seem too alien. Sphero also houses the SPRK (Schools, Parents, Robots, & Kids) program, which brings these connected toys into the classrooms and challenges students to invent their own uses for the app-controlled sphere. “Hundreds of thousands of kids in over 5,000 schools have used Sphero to learn programming, math, astronomy, social skills, engineering and many other topics,” Bernstein said. The desire to create new and more engaging ways to play isn’t new, though. Widespread Internet usage, along with the ever-growing pervasiveness of powerful technology, opens doors that fundamentally change the nature of toy making.

In 2011, designers Bernie Lin and Dave Merrill updated the traditional wooden building block with LCD touchscreens and location-based sensors. Sifteo Cubes replaced banal wooden blocks with sleek miniature computers that display a variety of videogames. The presence of smaller, more elastic tech allowed Lin and Merrill to change what kids could expect from even their basic building blocks. Sifteo’s design was a hybrid of physical play and virtual gaming, a trend that caught on quickly thereafter.

connected toys invite a kind participation that was impossible just a few years ago

That same year, Activision and Toys for Bob took it a step further with Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure. The game revolved around a series of figurines that corresponded to the game’s digital characters. When placed on a “portal,” kids could play with their beloved avatars in a dynamic virtual world. The “Toys-to-Life” category exploded with entries from Disney, Nintendo and Lego following suit. LEGO Dimensions makes every 80s kid’s dream a reality by bringing its yellow brick creations to life. Though similar to Skylanders in many ways, Dimensions adds an important element of participation. Whereas Skylanders are prefabricated collectable figurines, LEGO lets kids build their own toys, with different constructions serving different purposes in the virtual world.

Another old favorite seeing a 21st century remodel is Anki Overdrive, a modern take on the slot-car racers popularized in the 1960s. Where before kids could only control the speed of their model on a plastic track, each Anki Overdrive car can be tinkered with and customized through a smartphone app. Coming in many different shapes, sizes and forms, connected toys invite a kind participation that was impossible just a few years ago.

Place an action figure on a portal, and watch it spring to life. Drop a plastic egg in a pretend frying pan, and listen to it sizzle. While a kid in the ‘80s rolled R2-D2 around by hand, that kid’s daughter now presses a button on an iPhone to send her BB-8 across the room to deliver a personal message. This responsiveness changes the playing field, giving kids the opportunity to make choices and see their impact. These Internet of Play-Things help children become familiar with the technology that will shape their futures. As more things connect to the Internet and are controlled via devices and software, these toys are kids’ first foray into a digital future.

Jess Joho contributed to this story.

Fighting game will pit Darwin against Tesla in brutal fisticuffs

Science Combat, an upcoming “newsgame” from Brazil’s Superinteressante science and culture magazine, aims to teach players about some of history’s greatest minds not by handing them a dry quiz, but by having a select group of notable scientists beat the crap out of each other in one-on-one fights. It’s education by way of the WWE, hearkening to playground debates of who-would-win versus battles more than classroom lectures, and the result is a game that aims to be both educational and yet also features Albert Einstein shooting people with lasers.

In the style of games like Street Fighter, each character in Science Combat has several basic punches and kicks, yes, but also a specific set of over-the-top special moves, which is where Science Combat gets creative. “The idea of the game is to make a link between the ‘powers’ of each character and his or her discoveries and inventions,” writes the game’s animator and lead designer, São Paulo-based Diego Sanches, over on his website. This means that beyond fisticuffs, Isaac Newton will be dropping apples on people’s heads, Pythagoras will deliver flying kicks in the shape of a right triangle, and Stephen Hawking will be summoning black holes. The hope is that the more players use these moves, the more familiar they will get with what each of the scientists featured in the game is known for, in the same way that most people with even a passing familiarity with videogames know what Street Fighter’s fireball-like hadouken is.

It’s a neat way to leave players with a basic understanding of scientific discovery throughout human history, but if there’s any concern to be had with Science Combat as of yet, it’s in the somewhat limited scope of who it’s chosen to honor. So far, seven of the game’s eight total player characters have already been announced, six of whom are male and all of whom are white. This leaves out contributions from notable scientists of color, such as 11th century Chinese scientist Shen Kuo, who was the first person to describe the magnetic compass as well as the first to discover the concept of true North. It also underrepresents the achievements of women, meaning that innovators like Ada Lovelace, widely considered to be the world’s first computer programmer, go unrecognized. The result is an unfortunate implication that scientific progress has been largely limited to Western men, which perhaps runs counter to the game’s educational goals.

That said, the more action-based approach to education seen here looks like a blast, capturing the imaginative power of games in a way that titles like the more trivia-heavy Mario is Missing never could.

You can learn more about Science Combat over on Sanchez’s website.

Street Fighter V is for lovers

“ANOTHER FIGHT IS COMING YOUR WAY!”

This is the siren sound of a Street Fighter match: two people getting ready to know each other without ever meeting. No matter how you dress it, Street Fighter V is an intimate experience dispersed globally. This Street Fighter has the distinction of a purely at-home experience: no more arcade machines produced, no more gangly crowds growing around the electric glow of a single screen in the dark and suspiciously meaty atmosphere of the local arcade. There’s no limit to the kvetching about a dearth of release features, either in reviews, at forums, or on Twitter, but the Street Fighter V experience at the moment isn’t so much low-featured as it is pure: a conduit in which you and one other person meet and do battle. Instead of putting a quarter up there on the machine, you’re setting your match experience up like a personal ad and then plinking away at an unsatisfying computer-controlled partner while you wait, practicing your combos, your specials, your opening line.

Street Fighter V has traded a physical space for the intimacy of a digital one: an internet meeting with a mysterious stranger. When a match announces itself, loudly, it’s impossible to not get excited. And suddenly, you’re fighting: you, some anonymous other, and the small, limited locale in which you’ve agreed to meet. To begin, your characters shout, insult, and taunt in giddy eagerness, and then suddenly a silence among punches, kicks, and desperate concentration.

one’s sheer force of will eventually wins out

Street Fighter V rounds rarely take the full 99 seconds they’re allotted. It feels like an eternity. Even here, in a game that feels slower than its forefather, rounds tend to go only 20 to 30 seconds before somebody is exhausted, face-down in the glorious mud. Though the length varies, it always begins the same: a flurry of tests on the part of each entrant, trying to see what a stranger is all about. In the first five seconds, you learn how they like to open a conversation. You learn how they respond in the pressure cooker of a blind date. Most matches open with a salvo of fireballs, or plasmaballs, or whatever—the life-energy of two individuals meeting between them, fusing into one, and then dissipating into nothingness.

As in staring contests, or a mind battle in Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981), one’s sheer force of will eventually wins out. Their fingers flow smoother over the buttons and the fireballs meet closer, and closer, and closer, until the round opens up into a series of pokes, specials, combos, and blocks. It’s here that you get to know each other: you poke at their hard, antisocial exterior with punches and kicks of varying strengths and lengths, meeting either the resistance of a block or the soft interior of an opening. If it’s the latter, you press on, trying to lay as much damage on them before they’re able to recover.

They always do. Unsuccessful combos are plentiful, the results of a brand new language that new and old players alike are desperately trying to learn. The game is once again loose on instruction: this is trial by fire, learning by immersion. My surprise at the inclusion of a basic introductory tutorial fell away when I reached the main screen, where the only training is a computer dummy best served by those who already know what to do with it. The in-depth tutorials are already on YouTube, only this time they’re uploaded and promoted by Capcom itself. In the actual game, you’ve got a move list and a brief overview of the new features. Handy reverse attacks and character specific two-button moves that are gleefully different as they are easy to perform are among them. They hint at a future where complex directional combos might give way to the relatively simple action of pressing two buttons at the same time.

But even as the series steadfastly refuses to give priority to introductory features, Street Fighter V can feel as light as a lungful of fresh air. This latest iteration is delivered with a reduction of characters from a bloated 44 to a base 16 (which will, of course, only increase overtime). And laxer timing requirements for sequential button presses means there’s less to worry about initially, owing to more space to think, ponder, and respond. What unfolds is a delicate ballet: if one of you fails and gives an unevenly bad performance, it’ll be over too soon. You might never meet again. After waiting, a quick defeat or victory is just as deflating on either side.

once more alone and attempting to console your broken ego by beating up a training dummy

But the matches that do last feel as though they could go on forever. These are the matches that take up the full time limit, and almost always go to the third tie-breaking round. These are the even matches, where the game has succeeded in introducing you to your fighting game soul mate, so that you might learn each other’s habits and fears and aspirations over the course of three 99-second dances. Your digital bodies float around each other, pushing the limits of contact. By the third round, you know each other well, and what follows is a perfect minute and a half where you both feel like superstars on the grand stage at a big tournament, the unnamed masses cheering behind you.

And then it’s over. You forgot your words, got nervous, put in an uppercut when you should have blocked and got punished for it, just like you always do. A defeat screen pops up and then you’re back by yourself, across from a lifeless computer player, once more alone and attempting to console your broken ego by beating up a training dummy.

This time, you’ll remember not to uppercut immediately when you get up. You’ll play it cool; let them do all the talking before you pull out an appropriate response. You’ll block accordingly. You won’t let yourself get swept off your feet. You pick a new character and edit your profile:

Ken Masters. SWM. Just turned 51. Aquarius. Blonde (on my good days). Seeks opponent for drawn-out romance: candle-lit waltzes, tangos through sheep-pocked fields, and gentle cuddling beneath the mist of a waterfall.

Likes: family and pasta.

Looking for: Casual—no ranked. PC and PS4. Good connections only.

And soon:

“ANOTHER FIGHT IS COMING YOUR WAY!”

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BalanCity will challenge you to build an entire city on a seesaw

BalanCity, due out this summer, touches upon one of the major difficulties with constructing a city, one that videogames often miss out: fighting against uneven foundations. The concept of the game is deliriously absurd—mount a mass of buildings atop a seesaw—earning the creators the right to summarize it as “if SimCity and Jenga had a love-child.” You have offices, airports, train stations, power plants, monuments and more to pile on top of one another, all while ensuring that the total weight is evenly balanced.

It seems that at all times you’ll need to be aware of the physics at play here, especially as these buildings aren’t vacant blocks. This is a city builder after all, and each building you precariously place on the pile will still need to serve a function—it’s this that will push your efforts to tipping point. When establishing a neighborhood you’ll need to ensure the would-be residents of these homes have power, access to jobs and public transport, as well as nearby trees to free the air of smog. Not to mention that setting up an airport will mean a plane, with all its girth and weight, will regularly swoop in, adding further stress to your piling, wobbling tower.

there’s a truth that underlies BalanCity‘s extreme disaster-proofing

On top of this loose concept (which is essentially the “Free Building” mode), BalanCity will offer more specific, increased challenges such as recreating famous cities and their landmarks, with San Francisco being the first of these. Missions will also be available to pursue, requiring you to reach certain goals with your swelling mass of concrete and glass before going onto the next one.

As silly as the game might be, there’s a truth that underlies BalanCity‘s extreme disaster-proofing, one that all architects are extremely familiar with. Gravity is a helluva thing. The act of erecting a building is to constantly counteract this unrelenting force—it’s a battle that cannot be won, only sustained. And it’s one that is always facing new challenges, especially as cities become more populous and less spacious, meaning a demand for more houses is forcing architects to build ever more vertically. On the contrary, videogames that involve construction are often fantasies built within zero gravity spaces, at least in the case of the building blocks. The absence of gravity in these games speaks of its horrendous might. To simulate it is to ensure not only a clumsy building process but, ultimately, the eventual destruction of everything created in these virtual workshops.

Videogames, then, typically serve as a place where the unbuildable can be built: this is their enticing promise. BalanCity works against this. In fact, it accelerates the reality of architecture, demanding that it topple much faster due to the seesaw holding everything up and the gravity pushing it down. However, a city performing a balancing act isn’t as far-fetched as you might think, as we humans are hardly averse to building seemingly dangerous structures. Look to the WoZoCo apartments in Amsterdam, which sees 13 housing units cantilevered so that they are literally suspended in the air, hanging to the rest of the apartment block. Or Takasugi-an in Japan, a tea house that is balanced on top of two chestnut trees, high above the surrounding canopy. There’s also the Hanging Monastery in China, which has for 1400 years clung to a cliff, appearing to hover 75 meters above ground.

If anything, BalanCity‘s goofy premise only moves videogames closer to the wilder side of actual architectural efforts and considerations.

You can vote for BalanCity on Steam Greenlight and find out more about it on its website.

h/t Kotaku

Of carnage and cannibals: The lawless wilds of Rust

No arts; no letters; no society; and […] worst of all, continual fear, and the danger of violent death; the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”, so says Thomas Hobbes, describing his conception of the “State of Nature” in Leviathan (1651).

This quote is one of the first things that comes to my mind when playing Rust, which is perhaps one of the most fully realized visions of Hobbes’ greatest fear; a world of anarchy, free of any governance and thus plagued by an unforgiving dog-eat-dog state of affairs. Though we can never know for sure whether, as Hobbes suggests, the State of Nature existed before society, it is undoubtedly alive and well in Rust.

Hobbes was one of the leading social scientists and philosophical scholars of his day. He was born in the onset of the Spanish Armada and lived through the entire English Civil War, two experiences which seemed to directly shape his Realist worldview—he later exclaimed that “my mother gave birth to twins: fear and myself”. Leviathan is essentially Hobbes laying out his case for the necessity of an absolute sovereign power to rule over humankind. In the absence of such an authority to keep our primal nature in check, Hobbes suggests that any form of civil society is unable to exist. As such, before society as we know it was established, there was only the State of Nature, which is characterized by five key features.

Rust is in a world of anarchy, plagued by an unforgiving dog-eat-dog state of affairs

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“Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice”

You begin Rust as an adult human being, naked and alone in a rugged landscape, with only a multi-purpose boulder for companionship. There is no tutorial because, as you’ll quickly discover, there are no rules. You are free to do as you please, within the limits of your physical capacity as a hapless primate of course. This freedom, however, is as much as a curse as it is a blessing. You’re lucky to survive just one day in Rust before you encounter a fellow player who will either exploit, abuse, or outright murder you. As Hobbes predicted some 400 years ago, the natural man—without any laws to dictate his behaviour—is an animalistic savage. This might sound like a nihilistic nightmare, but there is a natural order of things behind this anarchic carnage.

“The first and fundamental law of Nature is to seek peace and follow it. The Second […] by all means we can, to defend ourselves.”

Hobbes wasn’t a completely glass half empty kind of guy. He did believe that humankind, first and foremost, sought peace. Unfortunately, according to Hobbes, perpetual peace in the State of Nature is impossible without any sovereign to facilitate or enforce it. Naturally, then, the next best thing you can hope to achieve in Rust is to merely survive. The game allows players to attain these goals through a number of means; progressing your character, collecting resources, building a home, even killing others for self-gain. It’s all in the name of being able to stay on top of things in this unforgiving climate.

“The condition of man… is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.”

Of course, it’s not just yourself who is looking to secure the advantage in Rust. It’s a Darwinist world where staying alive requires staying at the top of the food chain. As such, conflict reigns. Every chance encounter with another player is, at the very least, met with suspicion and tension, and either ends with the beginnings of a shaky alliance or, more likely, a bloody battle to the death. Conflict is the surest means to self-preservation, as the competition is thinned and the upper-hand is gained. Thus, as long as your moral compass can handle the incessant bloodshed, you should heed Hobbes’ warning and prepare yourself to kill or be killed in the wilderness of Rust.

“For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE”

Hobbes is famous for being to the first to articulate what is now known as social contract theory; the idea that, to transcend the State of Nature, the people of the land must come together and jointly consent to a legal agreement that sets the basis for a functioning government and society. Though this never comes to full fruition in Rust, you can see the echoes and semblances of such a social contract, as pacts are made and microcosmic communities are formed. Becoming a member to groups such as these may require the willing sacrifice of certain liberties, as you will no doubt have to follow their rules should you wish to enjoy the security that they provide. Even something as informal as a verbal agreement, between two strangers who decide to venture forth as a team, is indicative of a contract where both parties understand the mutual benefits of each other’s companionship. That said, plenty of alliances fall and crumble in the virtual world of Rust, wherein all hopes of some semblance of society are destroyed with the firing of a gun. This is contrary to Hobbes’ vision of a common-wealth, which he considers to be a permanent and absolute entity.

“I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”

Conflict is the surest means to self-preservation

This is where things get really nihilistic. The stories of exploitation and humiliation are abundant in the servers of Rust, with my particular favourite going to this cannibal prison, wherein unfortunate detainees were beaten to death and their remains thrown into the other prisoner’s cells for food. Don’t let the 17th century lingo fool you, Hobbes is saying that humans are douchebags, with a taste for maliciousness. Plenty of other games have touched on this topic too, but none have quite reached the same heights as Rust in revealing the dark side of human nature.

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Hobbes also once wrote in Leviathan: “Knowledge is power.” Well stated, Hobbes, but can we actually learn anything from these unmistakable parallels between this 17th century philosopher’s musings and the world of Rust? While Rust can never outright prove Hobbes’ theory of the State of Nature, for nothing ever could, it is still useful as an incidental experiment into the plausibility of his ideas. The game certainly showcases the idea that, in a world without rules, humankind is also liberated from any morals, free to pursue their natural tendencies to survive through the assertion of power. We shouldn’t take this as a reason to become existential nihilists by any means, but—by painting a vivid portrait of Hobbes’ expressed fears regarding human nature—Rust serves as a stark reminder that civil society is something we should not take for granted.

Where Cards Fall to be a wistful journey through adolescence

For Sam Rosenthal, the best part of building a house out of cards is the pile it leaves after it falls. “The cards remain intact amidst the disorder, waiting for an architect to make them stand again,” he tells The Verge. It’s in this that Rosenthal sees a metaphor, one that corresponds to his life at the time he was moving to a new city and job, out of his regular comforts—parts of him began to crumble and so he needed to rebuild them.

This perspective gave Rosenthal a new approach, perhaps a solution, to a videogame he had started piecing together while a student at University of Southern California. Inspired by Radiohead’s song “House of Cards,” Rosenthal crafted the beginnings of Where Cards Fall, a game that involves breaking down houses of cards that you can then reconstruct in different ways. The idea is for this process to tie in to a coming-of-age story “about the wistfulness of adolescence, and the way important, sometimes devastating events can impact your life,” according to The Verge. But Rosenthal had initially struggled to make the connection between the in-game interactions and the story until he more closely lived through the type of experience it was about.

“solving puzzles with skyscrapers”

Now those houses made of cards serve difference functions in the game: as homes for characters, as platforms to traverse, as places to visit, and more. You’ll need to rebuild the houses in order to balance the needs and ambitions of different characters as well as your own. This could involve “building dreams in a lake or solving puzzles with skyscrapers,” so says Rosenthal, who has used his years thinking on the project to discover different ways to make use of the game’s central conceit. Establishing this connection was also helped along by Rosenthal having worked at Giant Sparrow a studio that thinks a lot about merging storytelling with interactions as proven in the paint-splatting adventure The Unfinished Swan (2012), and the upcoming What Remains of Edith Finch—a surreal videogame comprising a collection of short stories about a cursed family.

But getting all this down has only been one step of many towards getting Where Cards Fall to the place it needs to be. Hence Rosenthal and his studio The Game Band teamed up with Ryan Cash and his studio Built By Snowman, who last year released the gorgeous snowboarding game Alto’s Adventure. The two studio leads met in 2013 and had, back then, shared the individual projects that they were each working on. Cash knew right away that he wanted to work on Where Cards Fall and so, with Alto’s Adventure finished, he and his team have been working on it full-time since last year.

Though conceptually different, the similarities between Where Cards Fall and Alto’s Adventure include a flat look that is used to emphasize beauty and a complementing soundscape. And so the two teams have been able to tweak this for maximum effect, aiming for it to “feel like a bittersweet memory of adolescence.” The other big parallel running across both games is the audience they’re trying to reach, it being one that appreciates approachability and a focus on compelling art and music. Built By Snowman has helped towards reducing the need for game literacy in Where Cards Fall and guiding players smoothly between ideas so that they don’t become overwhelmed. A process that, you might say, is akin to slowly stacking cards on top of another to form a solid structure that doesn’t suddenly topple.

You can look out for updates regarding Where Cards Fall on its website. No platforms or release date have been announced yet.

Jason Rohrer’s personal games get their own museum retrospective

The Davis Museum at Wellesley College is now exhibiting The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer until June 26th, 2016. It’s a retrospective of Rohrer’s unique videogames, exemplified by his earlier works such as the semi-autobiographical 2D sidescroller Gravitation (2008) which explores, in Rohrer’s own words, his own bursts of “mania, melancholia, and the creative process.”

Rohrer asserts that he is not a “gamer” per se, which has helped him to view videogames as a non-spatial medium that can be repurposed as another form of art. He says that he does not see the confines of videogames themselves and can better tap into their artistic potential. The result is an interactive and immersive experience that combines the sophistication of architecture, music, and movement, yet manages to retain a mechanic simplicity.

They can only perpetually experience

For example, one part of his exhibit, showcases Rohrer’s 2011 game Inside a Star-Filled Sky, which puts the player in a maze with a bit of a twist. To complete the level, the player must do the traditional fighting-bad-guys-and-gain-weapons dance that is common in most fantasy games. But calm, gentle music undulates in the background, and as the player ascends to the next level, they should be shocked to discover that the maze they just completed was actually a tiny part of a much, much bigger maze.

(Image credit: Thomas Willis, Exhibition Design Credit IKD, via The Creative Project)

The suggestion is that this larger maze is either hidden inside the player character, inside an enemy, or inside the physical confines of the maze itself. It’s impossible to tell exactly which one. The idea, then, is for the player throw up their hands in angry defeat or embrace the chaos. In any case, there is no real objective here and the player literally cannot win. They can only perpetually experience, forced to face and process their own frustrated emotions—a theme perhaps not so common in videogames.

Where there may be great satisfaction to be found in reaching objectives, Rohrer says his games seek to move players beyond that simple pleasure. They are also personal. He wants players to both revel in and shrink beneath the seeming infinite space of his art, and this exhibit reflects just how much fun plunging into an infinite abyss can be—so long as you know how to relax into it.

You can learn more about The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer exhibit here .

Header image credit: Benjamin Kou, Exhibition Design Credit IKD, via The Creator’s Project

h/t The Creative Project

Printable Firewatch maps add a new challenge to the game

With its 1989 setting and focus on exploring the wilderness of the American West, Firewatch recalls a time before cell phones and GPS were common tools among those looking for adventure. Before Siri, the best option most travelers had for finding out how to get somewhere was still the simple paper map, with no guiding voice or blinking “you are here” indicator to make reading it any easier. To make up for this, car passengers would often double as navigators, reading through maps to find directions and arguing with drivers about which route was best—the main thing that’s changed is that we now shout at a stern-voiced machine.

Now, Firewatch creators Campo Santo are looking to bring that experience to the couch with their printable Firewatch map, offering a new way for duos to explore the game’s rendition of Wyoming’s Shoshone National Forest.

the player will have to rely on their partner to tell them where to go

Free to download over on Camp Santo’s website, the printable Firewatch map depicts the entirety of the game’s playable area and comes in two varieties—one made to look worn and well-used, and another that is pristine and ready to be filled with the player’s own notes and instructions. “If you play games with someone next to you on the couch, print this out and hand it to them,” explains Campo Santo, “and your formerly disinterested couch-sharer is magically transformed into an officially engrossed Firewatch Navigator And Map Scribbler.” For an extra challenge, the team also suggests that those playing with a co-pilot turn off the game’s “you are here” map indicator, meaning that, in true ‘80s fashion, the player will have to rely on their partner to tell them where to go.

It’s a clever way to turn an otherwise single-player experience into a cooperative challenge, and it’s sure to set off a good deal of arguments about shortcuts and landmarks, or maybe even threats of turning this goddamn couch around. In contrast to games like Fable II (2008), which guides players from destination to destination with a magical glowing trail, Firewatch’s printable map is a reminder that, sometimes, not getting lost is a game in and of itself.

You can download the maps over on Campo Santo’s site.

The forgotten politics behind Contra’s name

Do a quick Google search of “contra.” Browsing the first few pages, you should see a saturation of links about the videogame—the now-primary version of the word—sprinkled with other definitions. Next in the deck is contra as preposition: “against, contrary, or opposed to,” suitingly enough. Then, a “contemporary New York cuisine” restaurant; contra-dancing, a folksy flirty form adaptable to many musical styles; the second album by Vampire Weekend; and eventually, peeking through before being closed out again, you’ll stumble upon the elephant in the room.

Contras are the name of the group of soldiers from Nicaragua that Ronald Reagan cultivated in the 1980s, during the Cold War. They were created specifically to fight the Sandinistas, a socialist political party, who had recently overthrown the right-wing and American puppet dictator, Somoza.

Contra commandas 1987 via Tiomono

Because the American taxpayers weren’t all that jazzed about their money going to foreign soldiers with dubious causes, fighting with doubtlessly corrupt methods—raping, torturing, and kidnapping civilians just a smidgen—the Boland Amendment was legislated between 1982 and 1984 in order to prevent Reagan from overreaching. Except, it didn’t work. The Iran-Contra affair, revealed by Lebanese newspapers, eventually proved that via loopholes in the amendment, a couple soldiers, under Reagan, were still sending funds, albeit “privately,” to the contras, paid for by selling illegal weapons to Iran.

The Iran-Contra affair put an even deeper black mark on Reagan’s record. The public knowledge of it and disapproval of him culminated in late 1986, which raises some questions about the videogame titled Contra, first released for the arcade a few months later in February 1987. Some serious questions.

It should be noted that Konami’s original Japanese title “kontora” was chosen solely to sound like the Western word “contra,” and not because of any particular meaning in its individual syllables, so we know that American translators didn’t take any creative liberties on the title. Europe, however, either used the names Gryzor for various computer ports, or Probotector for the NES one.

everything about the American Contra is more spicy

It was easy to avoid the nasty political implications of Contra. Actually, Probotector is a portmanteau of “robot” and “protector” changed to match the new eponymous sprites, now less violent and more robotic than humans. Under Germany’s restrictions for the Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young People (BPjM), certain media couldn’t be sold on the basis of being potentially, well, harmful to young people. Also, Gryzor is what Ocean Software (now Atari, inc.) named the first arcade version in PAL regions, likely because it thought Kontora’s literal translation didn’t make any sense; though dodging the awkwardness of witlessly commenting on political controversies at the time shouldn’t be ruled out.

On the surface, the contras in the game only share superficial commonalities with the ones in real life (i.e, they’re both soldiers). In Japan, the game takes place in New Zealand, the year 2633—a relatively innocuous time and location. In the American translation of Contra, however, where the political realities and controversy surely wouldn’t tackle the subject head-on, the opposite is true. It is set somewhere in the Amazon, in the present day, 1987. Those jungle trees and mountains in the background are just as much the geography of Nicaragua as New Zealand. Usually, localization and translation are meant to make a game more palatable, but everything about the American Contra is more spicy.

Extract from the American NES manual

Contra, in all its variations of story and aesthetic, tossed from creative hands in different regions and consoles, overwriting story and even art, is something of a homunculus. It’s difficult to talk about because it barely exists in any real pure form. That being said, the American translation, particularly the plot in the instruction booklet appears to interpret the content of the game into something new and subversive: a subtle satire of Reagan fooling around in Nicaragua, and American military expeditions in general.

The game’s plot, described in the American NES manual, as in the excerpt below, reads like a transparent send-up of America’s view of the events in Nicaragua, and more specifically, its black-and-white take on fighting communism in the Cold War.

“In 1957, a large object from outer space crashed into Earth’s Amazon basin, near the ruins of a lost Mayan civilization. Scientists worldwide heralded the incident as a trivial cosmic occurrence, and thus the collision was soon forgotten.”

The Mayan civilization, not only located in South America, roughly encapsulated the edges of Nicaragua. The “large object from outer space,” the enemy in the videogame, can be seen as the enemy to the contras in real life, the Sandinistan government. Sandinistas (in Spanish, Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, shortened FSLN) naturally opposed to the US, trumpeting anti-imperialism and Marxism. They formed in 1961, which was relatively trivial, until later when the ambitious goals of “seizure of political power” were met.

“Now thirty years later, rumors of an evil force have swept into the Pentagon’s front office and tales from frightened villagers of a hideous being with an army of alien henchman are sending chills down the spines of top military brass.”

Even the aesthetics of Contra represent America, borrowing from macho action films

The FSLN finally did carve a victory in 1979 over the US surrogate, Somoza; a revolution now known as one of the most significant events in Nicaraguan history. “Rumors of an evil force” also swept into the Pentagon’s office: once the Reagan administration got wind of the Nicaraguan leader supporting Cuban Socialism and leftist El Salvador, he was spurred to fund the opposition and to even directly send CIA soldiers to Nicaragua.

“Unwilling to upset current political stability, an all-out assault on the region has been overruled and instead, two of America’s most cunning, courageous and ruthless soldiers from the Special Forces elite commando squad have been selected to seek out and destroy these alien intruders.”

Ignoring the absurdity of “upsetting political stability” by waging war on an alien literally sent solely to kill humanity, this is almost exactly what Reagan did to contain the spread of socialism in Nicaragua, sending the CIA over to do the dirty work. Except he also hired the contras, the citizens of Nicaragua who didn’t particularly care for their new Sandinista government, due to a variety of reasons, whether that be displaced anti-Sandinistans, or peasants who didn’t get what they were promised. Even, curiously enough, the first two bridges that get destroyed in Contra, iconic to players of the game, have a striking real life parallel. In his book, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987, Bob Woodward found that the CIA destroyed two bridges in 1982, near the beginning of the expedition.

The next paragraph of the Contra booklet describes the goals of the antagonist alien, Red Falcon, not at all removed in either semantics (“red,” anyone?), chronology, or rhetoric, of the Cold War.

“You’re about to come face to face against Red Falcon, the cruelest life-form in the galaxy. He arrived on Earth thirty years ago (that is six months time in an alien’s life) to establish a foothold from which he will attempt to conquer our world and then use it as a stepping stone toward his ultimate fiendish goal: domination of the universe.”

The anti-communist scare and Cold War started roughly around 1950, around the same time Red Falcon arrived. Lots of the rhetoric used to describe communists in order to motivate America against the communists were based on unwarranted fears that they would take over the world, stepping on one little third-world country at a time. Just like Red Falcon, the fear was equal parts goofy and apocalyptic.

I don’t even know what to say about the last part:

“If you succeed. well…it doesn’t matter, because I doubt you will.”

Contra as a game raises a clear opinion about the real contra scandal

Even the aesthetics of Contra represent America, borrowing entirely from macho action films. Look at the original Japanese models for the characters Bill Rizer and Lance Bean. Do you see Nicaraguan soldiers? I see two grizzled, white Hollywood archetypes. In fact, Lance is Sylvester Stallone, drawn at times with quintessential sweatband as Rambo (First Blood, 1982), and Bill is Arnold Schwarzenegger, chewing a cigar, just like in the movie Commando (1985). Even Bob Wakelin, the artist for the NES box art in Europe, brutally observed that this game is a “rip-off” of an American action movie, namely “Alien/Predator.” Even the enemies in Contra are inseparable from Hollywood, inspired by H.R. Giger’s monsters, through Alien (1979).

The dissonance between the title and overtly American content of the game delivers the sharpest criticism: the contras fighting the war are proxies for gung-ho Americans fighting a different one. It lampoons Ronald Reagan’s self-image in the fight against communism during the Cold War. Or, it lampoons the lack of self-awareness one needs to fight an unjust war. Contra raises a clear opinion about the real contra scandal, more precisely on the irresponsibility of Cold War rhetoric in making serious decisions. Made more appropriate given Reagan’s background as an actor, extending the Reagan Doctrine to its logical extreme as an appropriately dumb fantasy movie is an artful way of skewering it.

The American manual could have been orchestrated by a clever translator who re-interpreted an innocent game, inspired by American popular cinema, into a personal joke about the sinful nature of said movies—perhaps cathartically releasing their frustration through an unpopular medium where nobody would raise an eyebrow. Or it could have been the product of the opposite: absolutely no self-awareness about how current events can be sneakily channeled or commented on through seemingly brainless media.

After the game is beaten, the credits roll with the ending theme, composed by Kazuki Muraoka. It sounds about how the ending to a war movie should sound. A little bit triumphant, but a lot stoic, like a toast to victory over one particularly hard mission in the line of millions. It is an epilogue in itself. It is also called Sandinista.

Do a quick Google search of the word “contra” again. Maybe it’s poetic that most people in America today signify the word with the game, rather than reality.