Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 156

How Stephen Curry is changing the game design of basketball

How do you solve a problem like basketball pro Stephen Curry—the guy breaking records for consistently scoring three-pointers? Note that the question here is not how to defend Curry. That’s a problem for other people, and we wish them the best of luck with that! But how do you write about a player with Curry’s peculiar skillset? Badly, for the most part. At some point over the last year, the phrase “it’s a cliché to call these video-game numbers” appeared on an NBC Sports page. Like primeval ooze, the phrase spread across NBC-affiliated sites, hidden in alt-text and metadata. Though you can’t read that precise phrase in a single article, it appears in thousands of results. Like Stephen Curry, the line of text has achieved a strangely mechanical form of sentience.

The videogame numbers meme is silly (we shall return to that shortly) but it is in the news again because NBA 2K gameplay director Mike Wang recently gave an interview to Forbes in which he said that the reigning MVP’s recent performances cannot be fitted in the game’s model of how basketball works. Curry has not really broken the game, as has been widely been reported. If you pick up a copy of NBA 2K this afternoon, it will still be fully functional. A functional game, however, cannot imagine three-point prowess as is currently being seen in the bay area. (At the time of writing, Curry had just set an NBA record by hitting a three point shot in the 128th consecutive game.) The game, in other words, is broken in the same way a crisp crossover is said to break a defender’s ankles.

None of this is particularly new. Wang concedes as much. Games have always struggled to achieve a reasonable balance between rewarding long- and short-range shots. All things being equal, a game in which three-point shots have a high success rate—higher than the NBA average, say—will see those shots come to dominate offensive strategies. There’s even a desultory term for this: cheesing. Humans react to incentives, and over time those incentives can push gameplay farther and farther away from the league it seeks to emulate. Rocket League (2015) notwithstanding, this is normally addressed through algorithmic course corrections until balance in the force is restored.

You can’t exactly blame 2K Sports for not having seen this one coming

The challenges of managing a sports game are not, however, particularly distinct from those of managing an actual sport. In behavioural terms, cheesing in NBA 2K16 is not meaningfully different from the probabilistic offensive strategy espoused by teams like the Houston Rockets. The strategies vary, but the underlying logic is the same. Rules are created to discourage and encourage certain behaviours, and players react accordingly. The three-point shot, as a recent episode of 99% Invisible expertly covered, was a design solution to the rise of dunking. The three-point arc rewarded smaller (and, if we’re being honest, whiter) players. There was now an incentive to shoot from 22 feet, though no meaningful reward for shooting from further away.

That’s where Stephen Curry enters the fray. As Five Thirty Eight’s Benjamin Morris noted in December:

For the most part, he is still shooting worse when he’s farther away. You can beat other humans, but you can’t beat science. (I think.) But relative to the league, as well as to his own recent history, his distance curve this season is incredibly flat: He’s shooting 43 percent on shots taken 26 to 28 feet from the basket and 42 percent on shots from 28 to 42 feet. (The 42 feet corresponds roughly to half-court, though most of his shots are much closer to the bottom of that range.) Not only is this not normal for Curry, it’s nowhere close to the norm for anyone, even other great 3-point shooters.

You can’t exactly blame 2K Sports (or the NBA, for that matter) for not having seen this one coming. If you were to model the game of basketball, distance would probably be a pretty big factor in determining which shots go in. Stephen Curry’s game is obviously hard to model because of his specific skills—all athletes are outliers, but he is an outlier on multiple levels—but that’s not the whole story. Widely held conceptions of how basketball works—not just 2K Sports’—have failed to account for Stephen Curry’s long-range prowess. That is not to say defenses will simply figure Curry out, but there is a clear imbalance at present.

And this is not just a Stephen Curry story. In December, an 11-year-old named Jaden Newman scored 59 points in a game. She took her shots from closer to the halfway line than the three-point line. One after the next, they kept going in, and each time opposing defenders did not come out to the halfway line. They, like NBA 2K16, could not compute:

11 year old Jaden Newman scores 59 points & all her attempts were near half court! pic.twitter.com/0wFlmBwWOp

— saycheesetv.com (@SayCheese_TV) December 9, 2015

In response to the rise of Curry and the distance shooter, San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Poppovich reiterated his opposition to the three-point shot: “I’ll never embrace it. I don’t think it’s basketball. I think it’s kind of like a circus sort of thing. Why don’t we have a 5-point shot? A 7-point shot? You know, where does it stop, that sort of thing.” As a design proposition, the five-point shot would provide a reward for shooting from, say, 30 feet. The catch, however, is that such a reward already exists—at least for Stephen Curry. Insofar as nobody seems to know what to do about Curry (and, again, can you blame them?) there is far less of a disincentive for him to shoot from well behind the arc.

a future in which his skills and approach to the game are increasingly normalized

Watching the video of Jaden Newman, however, one can already see a course correction in the works. It is not one where one of Curry’s big skills is devalued, but rather it is a future in which his skills and approach to the game are increasingly normalized. Kids who grow up on a steady diet of Curry highlights are likely to have radically different ideas of what is and is not possible in basketball. And just as audiences adapt to changes in basketball, so too do videogame models. Wang told Forbes that 2K is making tweaks to better replicate the Curry experience. That is not a broken game; that is the system at work.

The “videogame numbers” meme has always had tenuous relationship with logic and numbers. If an NBA player scores fifty points, he is an outlier in the context of any given season, if not basketball as a whole. Though sports media may give the impression of wall-to-wall action, there are relatively few NBA games to go around. A videogame avatar who scores fifty, on the other hand, is not a rarity in the same way. The most popular of sports titles simulate thousands of lifetimes of action per week. Like all-star games, they also emphasize certain skills at the expense of others. (Here’s looking at you, Kobe Bryant.) Of course these events occur more frequently in games. Calling a real-life achievement a videogame number, then, is just another way of branding it an outlier.

Stephen Curry is not putting up “videogame numbers”. The reason for this is not, however, that ESPN-commissioned simulations in NBA 2K fail to reproduce his scoring output. Rather, it is that the idea of a videogame number cannot include paradigmatic shifts. Strange, borderline-unbelievable things can happen in videogames with surprising frequency, but they are each one-offs. The Stephen Curry experience, as this long-suffering Cavaliers fan can attest, is repeated night after night after night. It is not a collection of oddities in the way one thinks of the “videogame number,” but a continuous performance. That’s where models break down. Game models, like NBA 2K’s are inherently reactive; they cannot be one step ahead of the sport and also promise to reproduce the product sold at stadiums and on TV most nights. Thus, to the extent that Stephen Curry can be said to have broken NBA 2K16, he must also be given credit for breaking the game design of NBA basketball.

Into explores the comfortable silence of conversation

Pausing during conversation can be terrifying. The ask is that you listen to your partner in speech, taking in everything they have to say, and then let you both wallow in a considered silence for a few seconds before your reply. It’s said that the person you’re speaking to will hardly notice that you’ve forced this gap into the conversation. It’s also said that the benefits of this pause is giving the conversation some weight; that you consider it a dialogue and are not simply waiting for your next turn to speak. But those few seconds can be unbearable, especially with a stranger—a lot of my conversations tend to be panicked, rushed responses delivered as if any silence begets instant murder.

Into is all about this pause. It’s the next game by Animal Phase, who seems drawn to the poetics of life, the quieter moments of contemplation. Morning Coffee stretched an intimate morning routine out to the scope of the universe while Lost Thing focused on a lonesome walk and the thoughts that formed in that moment. Into follows up on the line of thinking behind Lost Thing, of which creator Charle Elwonger said he was “constructing scenes where pauses between lines are natural, expected, part of the flow. So the writing and presentation offer frequent places for those pauses to feel natural.”

“explore that ‘dead space’ between spoken lines”

However, Lost Thing was a monologue, whereas Into is always a dialogue. There’s more weight to the pauses in Into due to this as your speaking partner is expecting a reply. However, each of the vignettes give framing for this pause to feel natural: either, you’re in an art class and speaking under the voice of a teacher; or you’re looking up at the woodchip paper on the ceiling, spotting shapes and patterns.

It is in within these scenes that you must search with your computer mouse for a way to move the conversation on, looking to the surroundings as if for inspiration. “Most of the interactions are designed around responding to subtle mouse gestures or elements in the background to explore that ‘dead space’ between spoken lines,” Elwonger says, “the times when characters are pausing or thinking about what to say.” This pursuit ends up tipping into the surreal, as you search a piece of paper on an easel for watery windows containing one of the character’s faces, or wait for a thought bubble to swell to the right size so that it displays a magnified view of the dots and bumps on the ceiling.

In Into, the “dead space” that Elwonger refers to, that silence, isn’t empty ellipsis, it is instead filled with the images we flick through in our mind as we piece together what to say. Searching for or waiting for these images to arrive provides pacing in the conversation, sometimes absurdly so, such as in the one moment you have to click on each single word in a sentence delivered in a dreamy tone by one of the characters. The significance here is that there’s an intimacy felt between the two people as they become more comfortable with each other. They start out delivering snappy small talk, then the next vignette sees them conversing in slower verse that has a syrupy texture to its delivery. Finally, the last vignette has no words at all, it being a drawn-out loving embrace in complete silence.

You can download Into on itch.io. There’s also a Deluxe Version available for $4.

Mario & Luigi Paper Jam Bros. folds in on itself

There’s something strange—maybe even broken—about fetishizing materiality in a digital world the way Mario & Luigi Paper Jam Bros does, though it’s not the first game to do this. I first noticed this in another Nintendo game from last year, Yoshi’s Wooly World, which trades on a contradiction. It’s a game about adorable dinosaurs in adorable environments made out of yarn and glue. Aesthetically, it’s “crafty,” which we value precisely because of its irreproducibility. Flaws aren’t flaws in this context; they’re signs of the hands that made it. And yet videogames are bits—0s and 1s—all the way down: data perfectly, inhumanly copied onto disks and shipped worldwide in order to connote this experience of the handmade in a medium that all but disallows it.

I think there’s a case to be made that Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam Bros. continues and complicates Nintendo’s meditation on materiality in the virtual.

As its title implies, Paper Jam is effectively a crossover episode for two once-independent Nintendo series: Mario & Luigi and Paper Mario. There’s an odd history of convergence and divergence hiding in this crossover. Mario & Luigi and Paper Mario, Nintendo’s Mario-universe role-playing games, inherited different aspects from their progenitor, the still-excellent Super Mario RPG (1996). They split up some elements of Super with the releases of Paper Mario (2000) and Mario & Luigi (2003), putting the the party-building system in one and the battle focus in the other. What was once whole, then divided, has now come back together.

In light of this, I feel obliged to include the deeply cynical reading of this reconvergence: Crossovers are a bit like shotgun weddings. They bring together two different groups of people in the hopes that they’ll have fun because (or in spite) of the circumstances that brought them together. But recourse to the market logic underpinning a work of art is both too easy and less interesting than almost any other reading. So, instead, let’s talk about Paper Jam and the question of “the real.”

Luigi’s only character trait—unrelenting, ill-founded terror—catalyzes the plot of Paper Jam. A book containing all of the stickers from the Paper Mario series falls on the floor, breaking a spell of one sort or another placed on it, and, whoosh: Demons unleashed upon the world.* But with the demons comes some good, too—namely, Paper Mario, Peach, et al. The main social conflict that you encounter as the worlds of Mario & Luigi and Paper Mario collide is not language or history, but dimensionality. After overcoming the strangeness of entering a world with an extra dimension, there exists this marker of difference that fundamentally changes how characters encounter and interact with the world. Consider the layers: there are the paper characters, who are physically 2D but have been thrust into a 3D world; there are the 3D characters in a 3D world destabilized by the exposure of the 2D world within it; and then there’s You, some n-dimensional being controlling the temporal fates of these characters (not to mention their perceived dimensionality, depending on how much you mess around with the 3DS’s 2D/3D slider). This dimensional confusion is doubled by the fact that all of the major characters have literal doubles: two Peaches, two Marios, two Bowsers, etc. Most importantly, this isn’t new; the thematic has been under exploration in these games since at least Super Paper Mario (2007), and perhaps most memorably in A Link Between Worlds (2013).

Crossovers are a bit like shotgun weddings

So. We could try to tease out these cross-dimensional Dostoevskian doublings, but I think that risks giving credit where credit isn’t due. The conflict between materialities is what Paper Jam really adds to the mix. Not only are there several matryoshka-nested dimensions, but these dimensions are actually made of different things: paper and the matter of the 3D (“real”) world. “Paper jam” is in many ways the perfect conceptual metaphor for this encounter and deformation—a paper jam happens when a (roughly) 2D object is mangled into 3D by that awful printer that you really, really need to replace. Changing dimensions, it ceases to function in the way we expect paper to.

There are cultures of difference that arise out of this conflict. 3D Toads deride 2D Toads, while 2D Toads do things the 3D ones could never do, and deride the 3D Toads in return. Bizarrely, this might be read as a first pass on Nintendo’s part at representing a mutually constitutive diversity rather than a conflict of cultures, an issue that the company has relegated to speciation (Animal Crossing) or player design within highly circumscribed bounds (Miiverse). Of course the dimensions wind up needing one another to survive, collaboration triumphs over dimensional difference, etc. The origami sections are perhaps the most literal invocation of this idea, with the 3D characters shaping the 2D ones in their image in a gesture that is both collaborative and colonizing.

Material and the diegetic real come into interesting conversations throughout Paper Jam, but that is the reach of the game’s ambition. As with many Nintendo games of the last few years, its gameplay elements are immaculately designed but risk nothing.

///

* Footnote: It’s worth noting here that this plot is structurally fundamental to tons of Nintendo series. The fact that the world changing instigates the quest betrays the pseudo-conservative impulse underwriting these games: scary ideas come flying out of books, become unchained from their deep chambers in the earth, or arrive from outer space, and it’s up to the Valiant Youth—the next generation—to suppress the Bad Thoughts and restore the world to The Way It Was Before. Hence the conspicuous absence of history across games that take place in series in a fundamentally unaltered world—they’re always starting from the same point in social history that was checked by the hero in whatever previous attempt at insurgency, revolution, etc. instigated the previous game. Granted, this is not to say that it would be better for “evil” to win (I imagine Ganondorf has a rather poor tax plan), but just to ask: Has there ever been a monarchy kept in power by suppressing all attempts to change its kingdom that we would also cast as politically was also politically neutral or even “good?”

For more about Kill Screen’s ratings system and review policy, click here.

Consume Me to be a cute, harrowing game about extreme dieting

Overzealous dieting is a rite of passage for people of all ages and genders. You stare in the mirror and wish you didn’t have that extra flab of fat. Later turning to the realms of Internet-aided food over-management and hellish exercise routines to (hopefully) fix yourself up and return to the slenderness of your metabolism-enabled childhood. Diet balancing can either be a positive force of getting your health back on track, or, in most cases, an obsessive, terrifying one that risks becoming an eating disorder. Striking a balance between eating healthy and being happy with your body is extremely difficult, but incredibly important. Now, student game developer Jenny Jiao Hsia is creating a game about just that complicated process.

a game about trying to follow the impossibility of your own rules

Aptly named, Consume Me is, in essence, a game about balancing your diet. Not of the fickle “eh, I probably shouldn’t eat so much junk food” variety, but more the “No gluten, no dairy, and absolutely no second helpings” breed. The kind of intense diet balancing that might attract the worry of friends, or be a negatively-enabled mutual bonding experience (the GTL lifestyle in the yesteryears of reality tv’s Jersey Shore comes to mind). In Hsia’s initial game pitch, she writes, “During the most intense part of this experience [of dieting in high school], I wrote down a bunch of very rigorous rules for myself to follow,” wrote Hsia. “By creating a simulation game out of these rules I want to explore this dissonance between knowing what you need to do in your mind—with rules clearly laid out before you–and your actual ability to follow these rules.” Hsia’s Consume Me is a game about trying to follow the impossibility of your own rules, and failing at them.

Consume Me began as a low-poly, saccharine game, but over the course of its short development has since evolved into a flat-styled world—all while retaining the original inception’s honeyed charm. The recent prototypes of Consume Me swap the original’s soft-pastel color palette for a more subtle, beige-hue. A puzzle game addition wherein the player builds their meals through Tetrominoes, and shapes them into a cube according to the meal’s given rules (such as “must have fewer than 400 calories”) has been implemented, according to its prototype videos. Consume Me’s development process is already ripe with changes, both aesthetically and in content, which adds to the excitement to see the end result of Hsia’s highly personal, vulnerable project.

Though young, Hsia’s already a prolific game developer. Her past work includes everything from low-poly bouts as a banana killer, to Sunday Session Power Yoga, a neon-tinged autobiographical game about her experience with yoga (complete with silly names for all the bends and twists, like “salted corpse pose”). Alongside development of Consume Me, Hsia is also currently working on Beglitched, a gleeful hacking game wherein you play an apprentice to the appropriately named Glitch Witch. Abstaining from the silliness of killer bananas and glitch witches though, Hsia’s Consume Me is shaping up to be the brave, personal game about a teen girl’s relationship with food and low self-esteem that we never knew we needed.

There is currently no release window for Consume Me, but you can follow its ongoing development here and play its basic Twine version to get a feel for its gameloop here .

Are You Well-Played?

It all started with that one spreadsheet: a trifle to amuse myself between bouts of frenzied editing and marathon writing sessions. It was called “the Database”—an inside joke shared by me and no one else—and it was my attempt at listing every videogame I had ever played in my life.

At first, I thought it insurmountable; the kind of self-ordained project that I would sink a few careless hours into before cosigning to the same dustbin shared by my teenage projects. After all, I had spent most of my life playing videogames, or at least what felt like it. How could I possibly account for all those hours, days, months that now congeal in my memory like raindrops on glass?

But it wasn’t insurmountable. I would hesitate to even call it difficult. It took a few nights of sifting through wikis, databases, and old cardboard boxes, but soon enough I came to something resembling to a final approximation. And it was just a small fraction of the estimate that had rattled in my head since I first started delving. Frantically, I searched, and scrounged, and scavenged. And though the count nudged northward ever so slightly, my disposition remained the same. All those worlds conquered, castles plundered, tales eternally retold—when tallied up into one small sum, they no longer seem larger than life. Rather, our lives seem smaller than them.

Game Boy Cartridges via mhigeura

Some may find this sort of ludic anxiety odd, even inexplicable. People engage with games for many different reasons, but for most of us, the titles that line our shelves are there chiefly to amuse us; surely wondering “am I playing the right games?” constitutes a contradiction of the first order. Despite this, such thoughts seem to strike many players with alarming regularity—that is, if message boards, chatrooms, and other such net ephemera are to be trusted. Even the salaried critics, arguably the group best-situated to fully burrow into gaming’s ample trove, lament the wealth of titles left unplayed at every turn. The phenomena, it seems, is endemic. Worse still, this question can beget other, more latent anxieties. If one had just found more time to play, would the dreaded backlog stack quite so high? And then there’s the matter of the games one did get around to—were they explored as fully as one could muster, or is there some deep dungeon worth the hours it would take to plumb its final depths?

These are unfair questions, of course; as useless to the asker as they are unanswerable. However, like most unfair questions, they sometimes have the power to reveal something about the people they vex so utterly. Here, the three entwine to form a familiar inquiry—one that lurks in the minds of both enthusiasts and newcomers alike, and that those in the community cannot begin to pry themselves from—“am I playing wrong?”

“am I playing wrong?”

Despite its prevalence, this brand of negative thinking is hardly specific to gaming. The choice-focused aesthetics of some interactive media certainly exacerbate it, but the phenomena has its roots not in any sort of media discipline, but in the “soft” science of behavioral economics, a psychology-heavy sub-field focusing on how people make decisions in a controlled environment rather than the chaos of the open market. In 1979, Daniel Kahneman, one of the field’s pioneering minds, authored a paper that first identified the concept that would later be called the “sunk cost fallacy.” Eschewing the traditional model, which posits absolute rationality as the lynchpin of economic decisions, Kahneman’s work suggests that the average person is far more sensitive to a loss of one dollar than they are to a gain of the same amount. Or, put forth more broadly: people have a tendency to be far more concerned with perceived loss than their actual gain. Perhaps that’s why some of us struggle for the laundry list of titles we touched in the past year while never ever forgetting that one gem we missed—in my case, The Witcher 3 (2015).

While bouts of this sort of self-flagellation crowd comments sections and forums the internet over, perhaps the most visible examples of it occur at the end of the year, when small-time blogs and big sites alike convene their award jamborees, dedicated to honoring their perceived best games of the year. And though these events can produce some surprising results, more often than not editors will find themselves settling on the heavy favorite simply because it’s the only one everyone actually got around to. That’s not to say that they should be expected to play every “notable” game that comes out—such a demand would be unreasonable—but when a system so clearly privileges the sort of big-budget megagame that dominates the press cycle to the detriment of smaller, perhaps more deserving games, it’s probably time to consider what exactly we intend for it to do.

E3 2006 vintage handheld games via The Conmunity – Pop Culture Geek

What’s so beguiling about the continued tradition of the institutional top 10 list is that it feeds and continues the same cycle of anxiety and doubt that many players find themselves falling into. With few exceptions, these lists compound upon each other to present the whole of gamedom as a set of tiers delineated by opaque criteria—an elite one you must play, an abysmal one you must laugh at, and nothing but forgettable slush in-between. Yet, despite the recent explosion of disparate and challenging independent games onto the scene, that “elite tier” is still populated with the same crop of blockbusters that strive so hard to say nothing at the loudest possible volume. This annual tradition apparently constructed to showcase the vibrancy of the medium now seems a testament to Kahneman’s sunk cost—an army of editors shrugging at the masses of games overlooked.

Perhaps this is too harsh; even in this time of transition, it’s easy to feel as if the changes that one would like to see aren’t happening nearly quickly enough. And it’s not the list-making impulse in itself we should find fault with, as it has existed for far longer than any of us. The idea of such a “canon” dates back to at least Aristotle. The concept seems sound enough. But while such lists can sometimes serve as useful guides to the uninitiated, their construction is often rife with the worst trends in media, such as elitism and unapologetic bigotry of all stripes. Such rampant gatekeeping has produced a backlash against the concept, with some labelling it the domain of the “deadest whitest men.”

editors shrugging at the masses of games overlooked

Still, even firm advocates of this canonizing impulse can recognize the limitations of the current approach. By definition, these lists bind themselves to the cultural now, allowing one-time classics like Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (1999) and Klonoa 2 (2001) to slip into the cultural void. The more comprehensive catalogs rarely do much better, reproducing the same biases and blindspots of the top 10 lists they so rely upon. No matter the crop of games, some always wield hyperbole like a weapon, taking care to only strike the title with the most cultural currency. And, worst of all, this focus on the present over all allows us to turn a blind eye to the same systemic faults that rear their ugly heads year after year.

For now, this is what it means to be well-played—to doggedly cling to a list of mass-approved titles included more for their historical value than their actual quality; to accept the latent mechanical hegemony assumed by the critics of yesteryear; to allow oneself to be swept up in the anxiety and secondhand hype for the sake of someone else’s curricula. No one guided us to this definition. No, we were driven to it, by the same creeping insecurity that shook me as I desperately tried to quantify my own sunk cost.

Regardless of whether or not we admit it, there is no denying that the world of videogames has left these archaic constructs behind. What was once niche now tops the Steam sales charts, and what was once sub-niche can still draw enough to support a modest Patreon. Game makers like Increpare and Christine Love continue to push the boundaries of the medium, sparking the sorts of messy conversations that help both creators and critics alike come to terms with their own aesthetics. The standardized measuring stick that critics once used to measure every game against another has shattered, taking a wealth of old assumptions with it. And while it’s easy to nod our heads in acknowledgement of it, altering the course of this rudderless ship has proved to be a task more laborious than any would have thought. We call this a time of opportunity, but few seem keen on leading it. So, if there’s nothing keeping you here, jump out and swim toward your own destination. Where you’re going, you don’t need a map.

Lead image: Rest of the PC games and other platforms via Tomer Gabel

Virtual reality doors tease you to enter new dimensions

I’ll tell you this much about Paris’ Institut du Monde Arabe: its windows are impressively clean. I can tell you that much because many moons ago I walked into one of the buildings glass walls while on a guided tour. In my defense, the glass really was quite clean—transparent even—and is the measure of a good window not whether someone oblivious dope walks into it?

Is that the standard by which we should judge DOORS, an interactive installation by French creation studio THEORIZ? DOORS does what it says on the tin; it is a virtual reality installation in which you look through a door towards alternate worlds. Try as you might, you cannot actually cross the threshold into these realms.

you don’t actually need to be able to access an alternate realm to experience virtual reality

The doors are generated using a mixture of software, projection mapping, and spatialized sound. Effectively, the system recognizes the perspective of the viewer and is tailored to their perspective. Put otherwise, it works a bit like this gadget from Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol (2011):

DOORS, as its name implies, is not something that you can wear, but it is still a work of virtual reality. It simply adapts to its viewer instead of moving with them. Moreover, you don’t actually need to be able to access an alternate realm to experience virtual reality. Teasing counts too, and sometimes it’s more effective.

And make no mistake DOORS is a tease. The closest you can get to alternate worlds is walking into the screen that fills the doorframe, and that’s where reality ceases to be virtual. But the urge to go through doors is nevertheless understandable, even if the unknown lurks on the other side. That’s why doors are so popular in games. They symbolize choice and reckoning with the unknown. So which door do you go through? You can’t traverse DOORS, but one couldn’t blame you for trying.

Find out more about DOORS on its website.

Threes! creator unveils mysterious new project

Guildlings is a new mobile fantasy adventure game from Sirvo Studios, the team behind 2014’s mobile puzzler Threes!, that might explore some of the lesser-seen sides of fantasy. Game designer Asher Vollmer and the Sirvo team have released sparing details for this new project set to be out in 2017, which we’re happy to wait for as Threes! was one of our favorite games of 2014.

Though deceptively simple, the amount of meticulous design behind Threes! is staggering, both in terms of the actual puzzle design and the seamless user experience. But even with the success of Threes!, Vollmer wasn’t satisfied to continue making puzzle games. “People expect me to keep making tiny little puzzle games,” he told the Los Angeles Times, “But meanwhile, I am an actual person who is interested in game design and pushing it in different ways. I’m interested in different dimensions of it.”

concept art of sneaker-and-spike-clad teens

So he explored those different dimensions in two follow-up games, Close Castles, a fast-paced player-versus-player battle and Royals, an inscrutable, lo-fi peasant simulator. Now he’s putting those ideas to work at a much larger scope with Guildlings.

Where Threes! and Vollmer’s other small games were heavy on logic and lighter on story, Guildlings looks to be guided by a much more complex narrative:

“We know a place where mages run raves,

harpies haunt the suburbs,

and a road trip can save the world.

Follow us.”

Though exactly what that narrative will be is all up to speculation until Sirvo drops more details, the concept art of sneaker-and-spike-clad teens on a possibly world-saving roadtrip evokes a certain sense of wonder and mystery. And does the magical tome-like smartphone hint that magic and technology won’t just co-exist in this fantasy world, but be linked? They’ve promised more details on the Guildings website later this year.

Shove your face into the hyper-eclectic web art of Anne Horel

When the internet was born the French artist Anne Horel was watching. In fact, I think it swallowed her. She exists now mostly as images stuck in looped emoji dances that are scattered around the web. Where she goes, rainbow fonts and pizza slices follow, spiraling off the screen in a ditz as they merge with the face of Miley Cyrus or a scene from a Disney movie. This is the labored work of a datamosh queen.

Horel is a force of mass creation. If the rapid speed of the internet encourages us all to consume at a high rate, then Horel is right at the center of it, gobbling up every meme as they emerge. She chews vigorously on the internet’s ever-changing icons like a fresh-tasting piece of gum, pulling them all together in animation, and spitting out the resulting bricolage back into the online mass. She’s a skilled agent in reusing and repurposing any media that is flung at her. This, she says, comes natural.

(Source)

Growing up on a variety of screens—watching television, playing videogames, using the internet—has caused Horel to impregnate her art with a type of hyper-eclecticism. “That eclecticism is what I think is symptomatic of my generation,” Horel says. “But also the principle of serendipity, trans-border and mutant imagery. The culture of moving images. Popular culture. Transcultured images. ” The screen serves as a single window yet it provides many views. Horel remembers watching Japanese, French, and English television shows as a child, which opened her up to embracing the variety she has espoused. The internet only wedged a crowbar into that growing interest and burst it wide open.

Horel seems to grind up against an inexorable urgency

Her process is fast and fizzes with energy, hence she is best suited to the immediacy of distribution that social media allows: you’ll find her art on Vine, on Facebook, on Tumblr, on Twitter, on Instagram, on YouTube. Every social media outlet is a “self-curated art gallery” to Horel, and one that allows her to connect with an audience and other artists without barrier, while also suiting the format of her digital collages. Out of them all, Vine is Horel’s favorite, mostly due to it encouraging users to match images with music, and to do it all in six seconds or less. Appeasing this strict time-demand is how Horel practices her art fusions every day. That frequency also probably explains her varied and commonplace inspirations for her Vines: “an outfit, a place, the collision between images, a song, a show I’m watching, a mood, an urge for pizza…” There is a lot of pizza.

Horel seems to grind up against an inexorable urgency. She doesn’t let an idea stew before considering it ready to work on—she’ll blast it all out in minutes and move swiftly on to the next micro-project. She has no time and must see everything as a canvas to be turned gaudy and modern. She once made the naked woman in Titian’s 1538 oil painting “Venus of Urbino” wink and stick out a pink tongue, while the No One Under Eighteen symbol emoji spins between her legs. This is a recurring motion; to bring classical art alive with a childish vision borne by the low art of computer culture.

Telling of Horel’s scrambled approach is that she says she sees art as “movement” rather than something to be pinned down and categorized. I ask if she considers her style to fit in with the ethos of vaporwave, in which the icons and images of hyper-capitalism are often mixed with nostalgia for the internet of the ’90s, sometimes also embracing a chaotic, warped, and brightly colored glitch aesthetic. She agrees there are similiarities and that she enjoys vaporwave for its comforting throwbacks to previous decades. But she has her own, separate ideas: “I consider myself a ‘plurimaniac,’ so references are more tools to me, a sort of palette. I like to be free from any label. I don’t belong to any art movement.”

You can see Horel’s work on her website where you’ll also find links to her more recent art on Vine and Tumblr.

(Source)

Header image: Not ur princess by Anne Horel

FutureGrind’s joyous bloodsport is worth the death toll

Following in the footsteps of last year’s rocket-car soccer game Rocket League, FutureGrind is set to be the next entry in over-the-top sports games that are built around being as dope as possible. With its bright neon colors, rad beats, and sick flips, FutureGrind imagines a future where the trappings of the EDM club have merged with motocross to become a national pastime. It’s a time and place where riders perform dangerous and sometimes lethal stunts to the bewilderment of thousands watching at home.

Sure, FutureGrind may be about a game of death, but it’s about a game of death with some pep to it, which stands in stark contrast to the bleak futures speculated upon by films like Hunger Games and The Running Man (1987). If Hunger Games is a cautionary tale, then FutureGrind presents a future in which I would want to live.

You could conceive FutureGrind as a sort of evolution of the stunt-biking series Trials, in which players have to navigate off-the-wall motocross courses while trying to pull off as many tricks as possible. In FutureGrind, you use a specially-designed “motorcycle” to ride along massive and increasingly ridiculous grind rails that are sort of like what might happen if Six Flags met your local skate park. The rails themselves come in both blue and purple, as do the bike’s wheels (all neon, of course), and players are tasked with pulling off a series of wheelies. The catch, of course, is that the bike’s wheels are only allowed to touch rails matching their own color, or else it’ll explode and the rider will face a nasty splat on the ground below. The result is a series of flips, spins, and jumps from rail to rail, it somewhat being reminiscent of the scene in Minority Report (2002) where Tom Cruise jumps from automated car to automated car along almost impossible geometry.

if Six Flags met your local skate park

Over on the game’s devlog, the creators have gone into a bit more detail about how this all came to be, walking viewers through their creative process and explaining the code and tools they used to make the game. It’s all very technical, but it gives us a bit of a peek into the hilarity that sometimes occurs behind-the-scenes while developing a game.

Particularly amusing is a Vine of the creators testing the physics of their rider character, making them dance to Cœur de pirate’s pop song “Carry On.” And then there’s one where the rider falls out of their seat and begins spinning around the handlebars like a pinwheel. Not to mention the one where the rider spontaneously develops Mr. Fantastic powers and starts stretching their limbs everywhere. But my favorite may be the one with the planking.

By all accounts, FutureGrind seems to have a good sense of humor about it that makes for a surprisingly strong combination with its bloodsport setting. It’s got the clean-cut and color-coded world of Mirror’s Edge (2008), the rave culture flair of Daft Punk, and the setup of Hunger Games, but it seems to have combined all of these disparate elements to form a cohesive whole entirely its own, the focus of which is maximum cool. So the riders die sometimes. They knew the risks going in. It’s all worth it in the name of a spectacle this rad.

FutureGrind is currently set to launch on PC and Playstation 4 in mid-2016. Follow the game’s progress over on its devlog.

SUPERHOT turns the shooter into a power ballad

Nothing happens without the player’s say-so in SUPERHOT. Their avatar—represented only by a pair of black, jagged-polygonal hands and a gun—is in complete control of the world. Enemies depicted by shimmering red silhouettes run into gauzy, white-washed rooms, ready to fight. Their figures and the black of bullets and nearby weapons stick out like exclamation marks. But nothing moves. Despite the action of every level’s opening, the impending violence hangs suspended in the air until the player is ready for it to begin. The enemies form a tableau that moves as slowly as cold molasses, only speeding up when the player takes a step forward or fires their gun.

SUPERHOT gives the impression that everything that’s about to happen is entirely at the player’s behest. It wants to seem as if it’s a game that exists only in reaction to its audience’s input.

Shooters are often meant to make the player feel like an invincible warrior. A bullet to the torso is afforded only a few seconds of health-regenerating inconvenience. An explosion may kill the player outright, but even death isn’t much of an obstacle. It means only a return to a conveniently placed checkpoint and a little bit of effort to regain lost progress.  

It wants to seem as if it’s a game that exists only in reaction to its audience’s input

SUPERHOT takes this style of empowerment to its logical extreme by repurposing the “bullet time” slow-down effects introduced in games like Remedy Entertainment’s Max Payne (2001) and Monolith Productions’ F.E.A.R. (2005). Meant to translate the impossibly acrobatic firefights of John Woo action movies for an interactive medium, a single button tap allows the player to emulate the superhuman reaction time of Chow Yun-fat, weaving through in-flight bullets and dispatching enemies with impeccably placed trick shots.

Making this effect an intrinsic part of the game’s design positions SUPERHOT as the zenith of this style of shooter. Rather than simply imply that the player is an iron-skinned killing machine through inconsequential deaths, regenerating health, and “bullet time” toggles, the game performs the ultimate act of subservience: its enemies only react when the player wants them to.

The result is as satisfying as that suggests. Positioned as a god, SUPERHOT’s player can take the time to survey their surroundings, noting enemy positions, stepping out of the way of bullets, and chaining gunshots together with thrown ashtrays and knockout punches. There’s some level of challenge to this—taking a single shot kills the player character and enemies swarm in from all angles—but any sense of weakness is obviated by the constant understanding that the game is a program that only functions in response to its user’s manipulation.

Watching SUPERHOT’s end-of-level replays, in which the player’s staccato movements are rendered in full, uninterrupted speed, shows a character with complete mastery of their situation. Though each step toward the replay is earned in forethought and skill, the fluidity of the playback demonstrates shooter thinking on steroids, the unholy reaction speed of speed-runners and superstars made attainable to the average player. It’s an endlessly thrilling process that combines the intellectual flattery of solving a puzzle with the chest-thumping bravado of skillfully navigating a hectic, deadly action scene.

The ultimate act of subservience: its enemies only react when the player wants them to

In between levels, the gunfights are revealed to be software running on an in-game computer. While moving through an MS-DOS style menu, chat messages pop up from one of the unseen protagonist’s friends. As in Kyle Seeley’s Emily Is Away (2015), the player types nonsense on their keyboard, which automatically translates into prosaic responses. These sequences foreshadow later levels, when launching the superhot.exe program forces the player into a “tutorial mode,” rather than yet another combat level.

In one of these sections, an omnipotent force requires the player to perform simple tasks. Walk a few paces. Look around a jail cell. The screen flashes instructions in big, bolded letters when a command has been followed.

“GOOD DOG,” one says.

The player, having thought themselves the master of the game, suddenly finds their relationship to the program reversed.

“YOU ARE NOT IN CONTROL” flashes across the screen.

As effortlessly powerful as the player may be within the confines of the shooter, they have no real agency outside of it. The kind of control a shooter offers, SUPERHOT says, is an illusion. This is a humiliating lesson, and it goes on to form the entire narrative theme. As it finds its pace, the experience involves a constant movement between moments of tremendous power and utter weakness—between ego-swelling combat levels and the crushing servility of having the most basic actions dictated by software.

There are plenty of videogames that make limpid attempts to comment on the striking similarities between following videogame rules and personal determinism. This is the narrative basis for games ranging from BioShock (2007), Spec Ops: The Line (2012), and Hotline Miami (2012) to The Stanley Parable (2013), and Undertale (2015). In each case (and to varying degrees of success), the player is meant to feel guilty for their readiness to submit to the whims of a program. If they’re presented with an opportunity to murder in, say, a game where violence is the primary form of interaction, the story will (perversely) indict indulging in this base instinct. This kind of commentary has wrung hollow far more often than it’s resounded, and SUPERHOT’s first movements into similar territory cause concern. Luckily, the game is delightfully tongue-in-cheek. An apparently infectious program, the in-game computer asks the player to spread word of the superhot.exe software by telling friends it’s “the most innovative shooter in years.” It’s hard to be upset with the story when it’s couched in sly arrogance and winking acknowledgement of its own (supposed) cleverness.

This doesn’t entirely compensate for a narrative that, self-aware or not, is too derivative to resound. But it does keep SUPERHOT’s best feature intact— effortlessly moving the player between constant swings of empowerment and helplessness. There is no shooter quite as willing to prostrate itself before its audience as SUPERHOT while always reminding them that, no matter how tough the game may make them feel, that same sensation can be stolen from them in a heartbeat.

For more about Kill Screen’s ratings system and review policy, click here.