Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 172

Psst, call centers are monitoring your emotions now

Like most arts graduates in their twenties, I have two voices: the one I use for day-to-day interactions and the one I’ve cultivated working in service positions. The former is more sarcastic and the voice I’m likelier to employ without thinking, but the latter is genuine. When I say “have a nice day” in my service voice, I don’t not mean it, I’m just putting in more of an effort. There’s a more traditional word for this effort: labor. But what kind of labor is it? The service voice is definitely a part of menial work, but even feigning interest is a form of emotional labor. That emotional component is what makes it so easy to momentarily lose one’s service voice; it’s easier to robotically stock shelves than it is to modulate your tone at all times.

Welcome to the creeping gamification of the workplace

Help is possibly on the way. Cogito, a startup that began as a research project at MIT, has developed voice-monitoring tools that it says can help keep conversations on the right track. Although the company has conducted DARPA-funded research into tools to monitor PTSD in returning soldiers, its latest offering puts many of these same principles to work in order to improve the experience of call center clients and those who serve them. As MIT News explains it:

“Analyzing voice signals, the software determines customer engagement by tracking, for instance, if callers sound annoyed, disinterested, or confused. Speaking fast or interrupting, for instance, may indicate annoyance; an unusual series of pregnant pauses could indicate disapproval or lack of comprehension.

The software will also notify the agent if they’re building rapport with a customer, accounting for various voice signals, such as proper pacing, speaking with confidence, and expressing empathy for the customers’ situation.”

Maybe this is good news. That’s how Cogito sees it. “Through our voice analysis, we can help bridge the communication gap between customers and agents,” CEO Joshua Feast told MIT. Insofar as reading customers can be difficult and remaining mindful of your own voice is even harder, that’s a fair point. Data can be a useful tool in this regard. It can also be a micromanagerial cudgel. The constant measuring of your connection, your pacing, and your intonation, no matter how well intentioned it is, could easily begin to grate. Welcome to the creeping gamification of the workplace!

Cogito Dialog is basically a Rorschach test designed to evaluate how you feel about labour practices in 2016. If a startup hands out Fitbits to its employees and then they share and discuss sleep patterns to improve productivity, some will find it helpful and others will find it invasive. Both of these things can be simultaneously true, it just depends where any given employee decides to put the emphasis in this story. To avoid dissent, the company therefore chooses to hire based on that wonderfully vague term, “cultural fit.” And, in a sense, that solves the problem: All the company’s employees are happy and the company is small enough not to preclude all possibilities of employment for those that don’t fit. But what happens when this problem manifests itself at scale, when the imperative of keeping a job starts outweighing qualms?

Cogito is no more sinister than all sorts of workplace technologies, but it is a good reflection of the changes to the labour market over the past couple decades. “Today, a decade and a half after the [Office Space’] release, both office work and service work exert even more affective demands on workers,” writes Ian Bogost in The Atlantic. “Once work became a function of the individual mind, hand, and soul rather than the time and effort leased by a company for its ends, all labor—from waiting tables to pushing papers—became a process of singular creativity.” Going through the motions and just working from nine to five is no longer enough. Consequently, the range of workplace tasks that can be measured is growing. While measurements like attendance are focused on the menial aspects of jobs, dialog is emotional labor, even when it involves a customer who wants cable support.   

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Hyperspektiv, a “modern kaleidoscope” to deform reality

Allan Lavell has broken the fulcrum that holds reality together. Last year he gave us a way to turn any media or camera feed into glitched-out gifs—glitch art as easy as applying Instagram filters. He called it Glitch Wizard. But that was last year. Lavell has moved on since then. Get with the times, people. It’s all about Hyperspektiv now: his newly released “modern kaleidoscope” for iPhone. It’s fucking wild.

If Glitch Wizard was a way to distort reality then Hyperspektiv lets you leave it behind entirely. It has a range of FX for you to inject into your phone’s camera feed, turning landscapes into hypersurfaces of bleeding color and beautiful corruption. You essentially become a VJ—a video-based DJ—playing with an art tool straight out of William Gibson cyberpunk (one of the effects is even called “NEUROMANCER”). Where shit really begins to make your head spin (in the best way possible) is fine-tuning your selected FX, adding mirrors to multiply patterns, glitch edges, increasing gamma, warping the 2D image into a 3D shape. You can easily get carried away.

And it seems many people are. Since its arrival, Hyperspektiv has been used by a beatboxer who uses touch macro to turn his mouth-sounds into FX triggers. Fashion photographer Chris Shintani also captured model Carmella Rose using Hyperspektiv’s dimension filter. Panoramical creator Fernando Ramallo also played around with it, inviting us inside his entrails. Then there’s electronic musician Richard Devine, who has been making tiny looping music videos that explore the more abstract possibilities with the app.

“Push the boundaries”

In fact, it seems that Hyperspektiv has proven particularly popular among DJs and electronic musicians. And that comes as little surprise given that Lavell made Hyperspektiv in collaboration with Boreta and Grenier from the three-piece electronic music group The Glitch Mob. How this happened can be easily traced from Lavell’s work on Glitch Wizard. While looking to increase the outreach of Glitch Wizard (this was before it was released), Lavell noticed The Glitch Mob through the Glitché website, deciding to take their tour photo, run it through Glitch Wizard, and tweet it them. This was the result:

Turns out that The Glitch Mob loved what Lavell had done and so began a series of conversations with Boreta in particular. But it wasn’t until they met up at Game Developers Conference 2015 that they decided to ignite a collaboration on something fresh. Skip forward some months and Hyperspektiv was born.

Lavell says that what he wants people to do with Hyperspektiv, most of all, is to experiment. “Push the boundaries,” he says. “Both in what you shoot and how you shoot it.” After the beta testing produced some surprising results, Lavell knew he wouldn’t want to miss out on what people were doing with Hyperspektiv, hence he encourages people to use the #hyperspektiv tag to showcase their creations. It’s all over Twitter and Instagram, supplying a feed of mesmerizing images and short videos for you to get lost in.

Lavell also teased that Hyperspektiv is only the beginning. “The version of Hyperspektiv that we are releasing to consumers at this time is a distilled version of an even more powerful tool,” he says. “We’ve kept this internal for now —it was used to create the effects that you find in Hyperspektiv. Some of our beta testers have already felt out some of the feature set of this more powerful entity, and asked for them in their feedback.”

You can purchase Hyperspektiv for iPhone over on the App Store.

Resident Evil Zero is where monster movies go to die

2002’s Resident Evil for the GameCube was a luxurious, Gothic remake of the 1996 PlayStation original. It came out a year after Fatal Frame and Silent Hill 2, slotting perfectly into their bleak new visions of horror: unrelentingly dark, art-directed to the nines, and tense as shit.

Resident Evil is creepy despite its ludicrous premise: you poke around a huge, dark mansion while fending off zombies and various oversized snakes, spiders, and sharks. Central to the game’s success is its atmosphere: the vivid, lush pre-rendered backgrounds buzz with animated touches, like flies around a lamp or lightning flashing through a window. The sound design is all thudding doors, lonely footsteps, moaning corpses, and funereal synthesizers.

Unrelentingly dark, art-directed to the nines, and tense as shit

My point is that this is the most luxe survival horror game, a remake justified by the sheer love lavished on every detail. Its immediate follow-up, coming not eight months later, was Resident Evil Zero. You can, as with Resident Evil before it, now download this game in a nice shiny HD version on your console of choice.

Zero functions as a retread of a remake. It retains the bespoke nature of the backgrounds—an overturned, lolling bottle of wine, amber pools of lamplight—and bolts on a hugely obnoxious, fiddly partner-management/inventory system. You play as small lady Rebecca Chambers—who’s essentially a palette-swap of the original Resident Evil’s Jill Valentine—and swole jackass Billy Coen, and have to switch between them to complete such taxing puzzles as “put the ice pick on the dumbwaiter and send it to me, buddy” and “play that piano to open the secret passage so I can come back, thanks.”

Sidebar: the first line of dialogue from Billy Coen, again one of this game’s two protagonists, is “So, you seem to know me. Been fantasizing about me?” Billy has sick fucking tribal tats and a cool haircut. He also carries a dope lighter, and can push heavy-ass objects. Rebecca is small, has anime-big eyes, and … carries a chemistry set. Good looking out, nerd.

Luckily, this thing is still gorgeous. Unlike the Silent Hill games, which thrive on murky, abstract haze, the art direction here benefits from clarity. The baroque Ecliptic Express train is a wonder of design and detail, despite not being scary in the slightest. In fact, it’s patently stupid: the game opens with another cool dude, wearing a white dress with a wide V-neckline, attacking the train with leeches. Another thing: there is a giant scorpion in the dining car. He comes through the ceiling. Later you have to find a gold snake ring and a silver snake ring to open the conductor’s briefcase. Inside his briefcase, sitting neatly at the very bottom, is a keycard. Nothing else is inside, because this is a Survival Horror Game, and they don’t have to make sense.

Resident Evil Zero is kind of like a retirement home for rejected monsters, actually: the first three bosses are, in order, giant scorpion, giant centipede, and giant bat. Granted, the first Resident Evil was loaded with Super-Size enemies too, like giant snake, big shark, oversized plant, and large spider, but it also had a lot of other stuff going for it. It was a weird mash-up of zombie movies and macho action cinema, all squashed into one indelible setting: the Spencer Mansion.

Resident Evil Zero is kind of like a retirement home for rejected monsters

The game was always dumb, of course. It went to great lengths to justify its being set in a mansion full of abstruse puzzles—they didn’t want anyone to find the secret lab, obviously!—and makes you save using typewriter ribbons. But they absolutely nailed that mansion. It was foreboding and maze-like, following its own bizarre internal logic. Nothing in Resident Evil Zero has that kind of consistency. It’s a pretty mess barely worth the aesthetic lavished upon it. If you feel at home putting the scimitar onto the mantlepiece to open the third floor alcove, reading the words “This door is locked from the other side,” or kicking downed enemies to make sure they’re dead, you already know you’ll want to replay this.

Everyone else? Don’t leave the mansion.

Visit the ghost of high school past in Oxenfree

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Oxenfree (PC, Mac, Xbox One)
NIGHT SCHOOL STUDIO

Ghosts haunt all high school kids. Whether its that publicly humiliating story you can’t shake from your preteen years, or the apparition of “what might’ve been” if you’d asked your crush out; adolescence is a haunting experience. So maybe that’s why we keep torturing our teens in horror movies, games, and novels. The branching narrative game Oxenfree explores the more existential questions of teen horror: rather than a pure whodunit, the game keeps you enticed through clever writing and spot on atmosphere. It follows the ill-fated journey of a group of high school friends who decide to seclude themselves on a creepy island. But beyond generic teenaged tropes, Oxenfree encapsulates the awkward hope and horror of adolescence on a universal scale.

Perfect for: Holden Caulfield, the cast of I Know What You Did Last Summer, Telltale fans

Playtime: Four hours

Nature, Play, and Spirituality in the Pacific Northwest

A massive mountain stands before you, its miles-high peak slashing at the clouded skies. All around you stand enormous trees and tall volcanic boulders, their jagged surfaces covered with moss. A mist hangs in the air. Taking in your surroundings you set off into the mist, towards the mountain, your mind racing with equal parts excitement and curiosity at what new adventures await you within the trees.

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While it’s easy to imagine the above scene as part of a massive open-world game such as Skyrim, for the people of the Pacific Northwest—or Cascadia, as many call it—such moments are commonplace, and it’s not just because of their surroundings.

Cascadia, named after the mountain range that spans the entire region from North to South, is made up by the US states of Oregon and Washington, and the Canadian province of British Columbia. Cascadia is one of the least religious parts of North America, with over a third of the population being religiously unaffiliated. Nearly half of the populations of Portland and Seattle are religiously unaffiliated. But instead of an atheist haven—of which only a small percentage of the population identify as—this non-religiously affiliated population, known as “Nones,” are emblematic of the region’s lifestyle. Instead of religion, Nones turn to nature for their sense of belonging and spiritual fulfillment. This has colloquially become known as “nature religion.” Despite the name, “nature religion” does not involve invoking ancient pagan gods nor saturnalian orgies in the dead of night. In a piece for The Oregonian, Oregon’s biggest newspaper, Melissa Binder describes nature religion as “engagement with the great outdoors that stirs the soul of the hiker and leaves the rock climber speechless.” However, in many ways, “nature religion” could just as easily be called the Religion of Play.

For those unfamiliar with the theory of play, it considers play an evolutionary trait that helps mammals, humans included, learn and understand their world and even pick a mate. Psychologists throughout history, including Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, to modern day videogame critics and designers like Jane McGonigal, have studied play as a means of evolutionary development, molding the theory as they do. While such a definition of play likely conjures visions of young children running around outside, this theory applies to virtually all forms of playing, at any age, and covers everything from tabletop games to field sports. The positive effects of play are easy to measure; those who engage in sports are physically healthier, and those who take part in imaginative play (think live-action role-playing games or videogames) are often more goal-oriented, and display a stronger sense of learned optimism, which is the ability to deal with fears and cultivate positivity in stressful situations.

Many of the activities popular in the Pacific Northwest—backpacking, mountaineering, kayaking, skiing—are forms of play. Furthermore, many of these activities have been further gamified: hiking takes on a treasure-hunting quality with geocaching; mountain climbers seek to add their name to the summit registers atop the peaks of Mt. Hood, Mt. Reinier and others, like a real-world leaderboard. In fact, there is an entire club of mountaineers, the Mazamas, that requires summiting a mountain to gain membership, a challenge comparable to joining an elite, real-world MMO guild. Play, then, could rightfully be described as the very sacrament of this Cascadian “nature religion,” if not the religion itself. Cascadians, when expressing their love and appreciation for the amenities their landscape affords them, are in many ways expressing their love of play. However, not only is play an everyday aspect of life for Cascadians, this relationship to play extends to the region’s economy as well.

Play is the very sacrament of Cascadian “nature religion”

All across the verdant landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, the videogame industry has a palpable presence. Major studios like Bungie, 343 Studios; smaller teams like Klei or Fullbright; even major console manufacturers like Microsoft or Nintendo of America call the region home. Similarly, monolithic tech leaders like Google and Apple have a presence, with Seattle and Portland becoming burgeoning tech hubs. Meanwhile, Vancouver B.C. has held a reputation as the “Canadian Hollywood” for some time now thanks to its lucrative film industry. Next to lumber and agriculture, Cascadia’s most valuable exports are tech, videogames, and other forms of media. Considering the importance play holds in the very cultural fabric of the Pacific Northwest, it seems fitting that many of the biggest and perhaps most forward-thinking videogames were conceived in cities like Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver.

Media set in the Pacific Northwest tends to feature a certain milieu, one that rides the line between supernatural sci-fi and magical realism. Such tropes were made popular thanks to TV shows like Twin Peaks, Gravity Falls, and a handful of X-Files episodes, and thus tend to feature a ‘90s aesthetic. The reality of life in Cascadia features fewer alien abductions and pan-dimensional portals than these series would have you believe. But the supernatural tropes are an effective metaphor for the way Cascadians experience their natural surroundings. This is true for videogames set within the region as well.

Alan Wake, a 2010 action-horror game from Finnish studio Remedy Games, takes place in the fictional town of Bright Falls, Washington. From the music and the atmosphere, to the way the game is sectioned off into in-game “episodes,” Alan Wake embraces the same aesthetic that Twin Peaks ascribed to the Pacific Northwest over two decades ago. However, its form of play is authentically Cascadian. Much like how avid hikers and geocachers scour alpine landscapes in search of hidden caches or idyllic vantage points, Alan Wake tasks players with exploring and paying close attention to their surroundings. At night, the denizens of Bright Falls are stalked by shadow creatures. To defeat these photophobic monsters, the player must take advantage of everything from spotlights and lamps, to flares and flashbangs, exposing the environment to light, and making hidden items and pathways visible. While this serves a utilitarian purpose by hindering enemies, it also parallels the joy of experiencing and exploring nature. Through activities like the aforementioned hiking, mountaineering, etc., participants shed a light, so to speak, on their surroundings; learning them, discovering previously unseen nuances that enable a deeper level of connection and appreciation with the landscape.

Similarly, the Japanese horror game, Deadly Premonition, which also released in 2010, is influenced deeply by the unsettling and weird world of Twin Peaks. However, instead of asking players to struggle through their surroundings to find relief from unrelenting pursuers, Deadly Premonition presents its open-world setting of Greenvale, Washington as a character in and of itself. Simply existing in the world affects the main character, Francis York Morgan. His clothing will get dirty, and he will become tired or hungry, giving tangible effects and consequences to engaging in exploration. Furthermore, Deadly Premonition’s plot, for all its well-trodden supernatural influences, deals with the duality of mundanity and spiritual/supernatural events in similar ways to how the Cascadians partake in nature religion.

One of the few games to both be made in Cascadia and set in the region is Gone Home, the debut game from Oregon-based studio Fullbright. Like Alan Wake and Deadly Premonition, Gone Home, is heavy on exploration. Players take the role of 21-year old Kaitlin Greenbrier, who returns from a year abroad to find her family home in Arbor Hill, Oregon strangely unoccupied. At first blush, Gone Home seems to be working within the same supernatural and thriller tropes that Alan Wake does, but by the end of the story, the game completely subverts expectations, instead revealing itself as something far more mundane—yet infinitely more touching—than a horror thrillride. Much like exploring the forests and mountains of Cascadia, which often appear as if they’re holding gateways to fantastical worlds or eerie tales, the reality is far more grounded. But what Cascadia lacks in real elves, aliens, and yetis (depending on who you ask), it more than makes up for with the unparalleled beauty and awe. Despite its primarily interior game world, Gone Home can fill players with that very same sense of joy as they discover the story to be found in the topology.

What Cascadia lacks in real elves and yetis … makes up for with unparalleled beauty and awe

Recent games like Oxenfree and Life is Strange deal with the expected Pacific Northwestern tropes of teenagers and paranormal experiences, but much like those previously discussed games, they also explore the importance of the connection between a person and their natural surroundings. While Oxenfree examines these ideas via survival horror that leans heavily on the supernatural side of the Cascadian milieu, Life is Strange does so through interpersonal relationships and moral grey zones, all of it pitched against a seemingly mundane setting.

The influence of these regional themes has even begun to touch games not set within Cascadia, such as the survival game The Long Dark or the upcoming adventure game Firewatch, which are set in the wildernesses of northern Canada and Wyoming, respectively. Despite the distance of their settings from the Pacific Northwest, both games are rooted in a deep connection to nature, teasing the magic hidden just behind the surface of their bucolic mundanity. This proves that these themes endemic to Cascadians, their culture and nature religion, has a quality that can be exported. And it’s through employing the rich facsimiles of these places that videogames can play host to, that this transaction can happen, allowing even those who do not live in the Pacific Northwest to construct a relationship with its magnificent wilderness.

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Photos: “Cascadia Curves” by W & J is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

“Pinnacle Lake Hike” by Adam Barhan is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Dujanah will bring magical realism to Islamic struggles

Space travel, alien babies, Justin Bieber—this and more has been the subject matter of the Sluggish Morss games, a series most known for the YouTube freakouts that occur when played by the uninitiated. Today, the co-creator of Sluggish Morss, Jack King-Spooner, has announced his newest project called Dujanah over on Kickstarter. But if you’re hoping for another “WTF game” to pull faces agape, well, you might be disappointed.

Sure, King-Spooner may be known for games that stretch their journeys far into the abstract but he’s moved away from that in more recent offerings. Beeswing, released in December of 2014, was a quiet and deeply personal game about King-Spooner’s hometown in rural Scotland. On the other hand, the most recent entry in the Sluggish Morss series, Days of the Purple Sun, left behind the expected fever-dream narrative in exchange for a more approachable multiplayer model that put competition front and center. That said, the two games are recognizable of King-Spooner’s style, if nothing else than for his familiar art style: a blend of digital graphics, claymation, and collage.

decidedly in the realms of magical realism

Dujanah, while marking a return to King-Spooner’s narrative focus, doesn’t seem to be stepping back into abstraction. In fact, it looks to be the most widely accessible story he’s attempted so far. The game is said to follow the eponymous Dujanah, a woman living in a fictional Islamic majority country in the midst of a military occupation by foreign powers. The allegory isn’t too cut and dry, though; the world of Dujanah is decidedly in the realms of magical realism, and populated with plenty of strange denizens and surreal landscapes to discover.

Make no mistake, this is still a King-Spooner game, but it might be harnessing the stranger elements of his style for greater purpose. His signature claymation, for example, is still present in Dujanah, but this time is being used to represent the adobe buildings of countries like Morocco. This is only a guess, but it seems likely the split between King-Spooner’s love of folklore and the spill-over from his own wonderful imagination will mingle in fascinating ways with the rich Islamic storytelling tradition.

For those who may be concerned about a Scot fellow making a game in a fictional Islamic setting, King Spooner had a few words of reassurance when I spoke to him on the matter: “As with all my games, I have spent time researching and talking with people relevant to the subject and I plan to continue doing so, should the funding be successful…I’m not interested in maintaining the ideological and symbolic ‘otherness’ that many media decisions exacerbate.”

You can find out more about Dujanah and support it on Kickstarter.

What if all videogames were Breakout?

Pippin Barr is a stalwart example of a videogame scientist. He’s one of only a few who fit that title—people who constantly experiment with videogames, testing their boundaries, remixing their components, taking curious lines of thought to their furthest iteration. Take his latest as an example. Called Indie Bungle 2: Breakout Indies, it imagines for us the games that a “shitty cloning company” (specializing in clones of games to turn a profit and not, say, sheep or humans) would make had it only the technology to produce variations of Atari’s 1976 arcade classic Breakout.

This idea didn’t come out of nowhere. He’s taken two of his previous experiments—which we can imagine as conical flasks full of bright liquid—and mixed them together. The first one is Barr’s 2013 game Mumble Indie Bungle, which shows us the games a cloning company would make if it heard the titles of the games it was cloning incorrectly (i.e. they were mumbled, get it?). The second one is his 2015 game tapestry BREAKSOUT, which remixed Breakout a total of 36 times. Imagine them now, in those conical flasks, Barr stood with one in each hand, crowing over them as he pours them into each other to create a new, wild videogame mixture. And voila: Indie Bungle 2 bubbles and froths out of the hissing liquids.

the simple importance of considering what you’re going to use to make something

The result takes five recent ‘indie games’ (read this if you’re wondering why I’m tip-toeing around the term) and applies their look and either their themes or mechanical idiosyncrasies to Atari’s basic arcade game. All of what Barr achieves here had me recall a line from last year’s The Beginner’s Guide. It’s delivered by the honeyed voice of the game’s creator, Davey Wreden, who says: “Every videogame runs on what’s called an engine, which determines what the game can and cannot do. So in other words the engine is a set of tools for game development.” That’s not the particular line that popped up in my mind. That comes a few seconds later: “The tools available to the creator shape what kinds of creative work they’re going to end up making.”

These are obvious facts but ones that probably aren’t considered enough given how much they impact a game someone has made. In fact, there’s a whole history of technology shaping art: the rise of oil-based paints in the 15th century meant painters could blend colors better than with the egg-based paint before, changing how they thought about light and illusionism; the invention of the Vitaphone sound-on-disc technology led to cinema’s first musicals in the 1920s; the 1967 Beatles album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club got its sound due to new production techniques like varispeeding and the wah-wah pedal—the medium truly is the message. And Barr’s experiment is one that explores this.

He limited himself in order to better discover how a game can be molded by the restrictions of the tools used to create it. He shows us the simple importance of considering what you’re going to use to make something, as well as the how and why. This is true for all creative works. We like to think of art as the pure gift of a talented designer’s hand but often their skill is born in a learned pragmatism; simply knowing what the available tools are able to do and how to make the most of it.

this opens up new potential for a 40-year-old game

At the same time, Barr also attests to the creativity of the author when faced with blockades in Indie Bungle 2. The Breakout variations he has fashioned are not as ridiculous or poorly adapted as you might think. They’re actually rather smart. The five games re-purposed include Justin Smith’s endless and deliberately bland sports game Desert Golfing (2014), the playful take on childhood explorations of sex with plastic dolls how do you Do It? (2014), Barr’s own videogame adaptation of Marina Abromovich’s long-duration performance The Artist Is Present (2011), and Terry Cavanagh’s invert-jumping platformer VVVVVV (2010).

But the one I want to highlight is Barr’s Breakout version of Tale of Tale’s 2008 musing on death, The Graveyard. Barr has you tediously break through a solid rectangle made of many smaller blocks in “The Grave Breakout.” Not helping matters along, the ball drags itself around the screen in stops and starts. It matches the frail walking pace of the old woman in the original game, the grayscale pall of death hanging colorlessly over the screen. It works. But where it gets especially interesting, at least for me, is when you make it to the bench on the other side of the screen.

You’re rewarded for your patience with something unexpected. Barr has created a way to deliver spoken narration through Breakout. You have a series of blocks to break, as is typical, but each one unlocks the next word in the sequence—rather than each block corresponding to a randomly assigned word so that it would produce gibberish. In this way, sentences are formed as you play, and an abstract story delivered. Barr’s unexpected discovery here seems almost profound; a fresh spin on an old arcade game that has it work surprisingly well as a narrative tool, and all without sacrificing the original format and its challenge. Insignificant as it may seem, this opens up new potential for a 40-year-old game, it now being another tool in the game narrative designer’s kit. Now, imagine how much space there is left in more modern game engines, for them to deliver more than yet another 2D platformer (a la GameMaker) or yet another first-person exploration game (here’s looking at you, Unity). Indie Bungle 2 suggests it’s a lot.

You can play Indie Bungle 2: Breakout Indies in your browser.

In praise of the “bad” design of Tharsis

Tharsis begins with an event of astronomical improbability. Somewhere in the interplanetary medium, a meteoroid floating through space at 25 miles a second occupies the same bit of spacetime as the spaceship Inktomi, which is hurtling towards Mars at 11 miles a second. The ship and its crew have been travelling for weeks; the meteoroid, millenia. And there, in the emptiness of the cosmic void, they somehow meet. An impact; a burst of compressed air; a body blown into space; a crippled vessel drifting toward Mars. What remains is a quartet of crew and a fistful of dice to navigate the chain-reaction of failures that stand between the Inktomi and its destination, an unknown transmission from the Tharsis region of Mars. Success is about as likely as it seems.

As much a boardgame as it is a videogame, Tharsis—the third game from the Santa Cruz-based studio Choice Provisions—takes the crisis management of Faster than Light (2012) and pairs it with a taut, elegant, and maddening ruleset reminiscent of Pandemic (2007). On each of the game’s 10 turns (representing 10 weeks of travel), a new calamity arises—broken air filter, electrical fire, etc.—demanding the crew’s time and resources. Worse, the mere act of movement between ship modules injures the crew, and the team becomes less effective as food runs out and tensions rise (cannibalism is more-or-less inevitable). But even a player who has mastered the delicate art of distributing crew resources faces a bigger challenge: the whims of chance. Fixing anything depends on rolling specific numbers; bad rolls cause injury, or worse.

the game is nasty, brutish, and short

Sounds unfair? It is. Despite the obvious care that went into designing Tharsis (one telling detail: post-cannibalism, the dice turn a grim shade of red), the game is nasty, brutish, and short, which helps account for the lukewarm critical response it has received. In an emblematic negative review, Tyler Wilde of PC Gamer writes that the game is “too random and murderous to be enjoyable.” He has a point. It took me nearly two dozen attempts to win Tharsis, and I (unscientifically) suspect that a significant percentage of games of Tharsis are mathematically unwinnable by the second turn. When I finally did win, my success had less to do with my growing comfort with Tharsis’ mechanics and more with a long string of favorable rolls. The sole survivor of my trip to Mars, near-death and newly cannibalistic (among recent releases, only Sunless Sea shows such a taste for human flesh) brought me no sense of achievement. After all, what did I do but get some lucky dice? What I actually felt was closer to a sense of empty relief that I’d scraped by through no doing of my own.

So, yes, it’s perfectly true that Tharsis is intensely unforgiving, unfair, and unsatisfying. But what’s at stake when we take that to mean that Tharsis is “bad”? To be sure, there are worse criteria for evaluating the quality of a game, but, under this logic, games can be “good” only insofar as they are able to fluff the player’s ego. What creative possibilities does this solipsism, this belief that we deserve fair play from our games, foreclose? Is it possible to dissuade ourselves of the notion that an unfair game is a poorly designed game? I’m not suggesting that games should be easy, of course—Super Meat Boy, Dark Souls, and any other number of excellent “hardcore” titles present a bigger challenge than Tharsis. But the difficulty of these games has nothing to do with “fairness.” If anything, Super Meat Boy is relentlessly predictable, the opposite of what makes Tharsis so challenging. Still, if we accept that games have no responsibility to provide us success or closure, what kinds of interpretive horizons do we open up? What do we permit games to say that they couldn’t say before?

From this perspective, Tharsis isn’t the carelessly designed, poorly balanced dud that a number of critics have made it out to be. Instead, we can read the game as a meditation on the existence and inescapability of randomness, the imbalance of human perception with our astral insignificance, and how we might recognize and transcend—or at least come to terms with—our self-centeredness.

Aristotle is often credited as the first philosopher to take seriously the idea of chance, which he examines in his study of being, Metaphysics. Events, Aristotle writes, have four fundamental causes (“material,” “efficient,” “formal,” and “final”) which, together, he calls “aetiology,” the root of our modern term “etiology,” the study of and search for causality. Yet aetiology, in Aristotle’s telling, doesn’t account for every phenomenon in the natural world; there are also “accidents,” which occur without recourse to the four fundamental causes. As he explains, “there isn’t any definite cause for an accident, but only chance, namely, an indefinite cause.”

a meditation on the existence and inescapability of randomness

“Indefinite” to whom? Aristotle’s point isn’t that accidents don’t have causes, but that the causes of accidents are not and cannot be known by a human subject (that’s what makes them accidents). In other words, any event whose causes are sufficiently obscure can only be perceived as “random,” which means that randomness is not something that exists in the world, but is rooted in human perception and knowledge (or, more likely, lack thereof). Moreover, the need to label events without obvious causes as “random” is emblematic of the (Kantian, Hegelian, Wittgensteinian etc.) idealist impulse to place human consciousness at the center of being, regulating and organizing the world around us as if it only exists for us.

To the luckless astronauts of the Inktomi, the meteoroid that “randomly” occupies the same place and moment in spacetime as their vessel surely takes on a significance as big as life itself. The impact must also seem like a stroke of absurdly bad luck. But there’s nothing unpredictable about the path of a meteoroid, pulled along through space for an eternity by the forces described in Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation. The only reason this particular meteoroid acquires significance—indeed, has its “being” bestowed upon it—is because it becomes an object of human tragedy. (Consider also: astrophysical convention states that a meteoroid becomes a meteorite at the moment of impact—that is, its “nature” changes the moment it comes into contact with the human). The only perspective from which the meteoroid’s appearance is “random” is that of the myopic human, unwilling to entertain the being of objects before they commune with humanity.

In the last decade, philosophical realists have labeled this form of solipsism “correlationism,” the fallacy that the world exists only as a correlate of the mind. Why should human subjectivity, this new realism holds, be the ontological center of existence? How self-centered we are to believe, as Judge Holden of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian exclaims, that “whatever in creation exists without [our] knowledge exists without [our] consent.” When we limit ourselves to what is and can be known by humans, we cut ourselves off from the messiness of existence in all its forms. Call that nihilism if you must, but what’s at stake in this seemingly eternal debate between idealism and realism is nothing less than the place and meaning of humanity in the horrific, godless brutality of being.

Tharsis helps us see this, and can help us come to terms with our existence in a universe that exhibits a profound disinterest to the reality of human life. Rejecting the conventional flow of play that exists solely to be mastered and overcome, Tharsis cheats us of the success and closure we thought we deserved. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Tharsis’s inescapable dependency on chance, reimagined not as a defect but a feature. Many videogames use pseudo-random distribution as a crucial element of simulation, but Tharsis goes to unprecedented lengths to make these mechanics not only essential to victory but highly visible. More than a reference to the tabletop boardgames that inspired Tharsis, the rolling of dice directly atop the action suggests the conceptual importance of chance, in addition to its mechanical importance.

Each thing simply is

Accepting that a game need not exist to be won strikes me as one step toward accepting that the universe does not exist for us, nor in spite of us, but alongside us. A curious blindspot in our cultures of criticism says something larger about the place of humanity in being. Because out there in the interplanetary medium, there is no god to petition for mercy and no government to establish dominion. We can cower before the callousness of being, or we can accept it and find a way to live with it; even in deep space, there’s nothing malicious about a meteorite, an electrical fire, or a faulty power compressor. No matter how devastating their effects are, they bear no ill-will towards their victims. Each thing simply is; it did not come in peace, nor in conflict, neither savior, nor foe; they simply are, carrying on in the unbearable meanwhile of being.

So it matters that Tharsis is a game of chance, and it matters that chance has to be enough. Ignore it if you want—I doubt anyone would blame you. Tharsis might not be a “great game,” but if we suspend our solipsism for a moment, it can teach us something about human endeavor in an indifferent universe. Something grotesque, something disquieting, but something we should learn all the same.

After all, what is our earth—our home, our pale blue dot—if not a spaceship?

The tricky legal problem of videogames depicting historical figures

Games that seek to represent significant historical phenomena are, by their very nature, reductive. Real-time gameplay is, Timebound’s multi-year push notifications notwithstanding, not on the table. Beyond the time imperative, creative works must also make narrative and dramatic choices. These constraints are in no way exclusive to games; the process of making media necessarily involves making artistic and practical choices. Up to a point, that’s fine. In fact, it’s desirable. But what recourse is there when these choices are disputed?

Three children of the Angolan “rebel” leader Joseph Savimbi recently announced that they were suing Activision Blizzard’s French subsidiary for the depiction of their father in their 2012 title, Call of Duty: Black Ops II. They allege that the game defames Savimbi by portraying him as a murderous “barbarian.” As such, they are seeking €1 million in damages.

“Black Ops II paints Savimbi as some kind of brute”

The problem Savimbi’s children raise can either be thought of in narrative or legal terms. The former was addressed when the game came out in 2012. As Marissa Moorman and Sean Jacobs wrote at the time:

“Black Ops II paints Savimbi as some kind of brute with his halting English and screams. But he was, in fact, a consummate media figure and understood the power of western press on public opinion. Three clips – the first in French (with Portuguese subtitles), the second in Portuguese, and a third in which Savimbi answers questions, in English, at a surreal ‘Unita News Conference with Republicans’ – provide a brief contrast to his depiction in Black Ops II. He spoke many languages fluently. His English speech and diction was refined – not the kind of brutish bush English they give him.”

In purely creative terms, Black Ops II is uncharitable to Savimbi. His record does not merit complete deference—his UNITA forces fought for Angola’s liberation from Portugal before forming an uneasy truce with the Portuguese against the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola—but Activision’s approach to this complicated story is heavy handed at best. It’s also worth noting that Savimbi only really shows up as local color when one white character is in the country to assist another. None of these complaints necessarily merit legal redress. Indeed, the legal standard Savimbi’s children must overcome is significant. “France does have laws that permit a defamation action in the case where the alleged defamation affects the deceased person’s relatives in that it causes them suffering or reflect upon their reputation,” media lawyer Alex Tutty explained to The Guardian. French defamation law does differ from its American equivalent, under which Manuel Noriega previously sued Activision for his representation in the same game, but the odds are still against Savimbi’s children even if France is a more favourable jurisdiction.

Courts are … not really capable of settling narrative debates

This case does little to separate the legal and narrative facets of representation. Savimbi’s children clearly object to the game’s representation of their father, whereas Activision, per The Guardian, maintains that its representation of the man was favorable. At its core, this is a debate about textual interpretation. Courts can settle such matters on relatively narrow grounds, but such outcomes rarely settle the underlying debate. There is a significant range of options within the realm of what courts will allow, and most discussions of narrative choices fall within that parameter. Courts are, for entirely logical reasons, not really capable of settling narrative debates.

Conversely, narratives cannot be looked to as alternate forums for legal disputes. Most recently, this has been the case with Netflix’s Making a Murderer. Where the legal system fails, the theory goes, documentarians can step in. There are, of course, limitations to this theory. As the New Yorker’s Kathryn Schulz points out:

“we still have not thought seriously about what it means when a private investigative project—bound by no rules of procedure, answerable to nothing but ratings, shaped only by the ethics and aptitude of its makers—comes to serve as our court of last resort.”

The different strengths of legal and narrative systems are hardly new, but they are problematized by an increasingly legalistic element in discussions of popular culture. As part of the latest revitalization of true-crime, audio and video documentaries are increasingly used to work out problems the legal system did not. Conversely, with the rise of franchises in film, television, and games, characters are increasingly thought of as intellectual property—legal and economic units above all else. What sort of finality can we ever expect in such a culture? Narrow legal answers that leave everyone unsatisfied, albeit for understandable reasons. In all likelihood, the Savimbi children will fail in their pursuit of damages, which will end their chapter of the story but leave the broader question of how to interpret the way Black Ops II treats historical figures exactly where it always was.

How depth-sensing technology is changing videogames

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

For anyone who has tried to get down to a catchy pop song while holding a controller during a round of Just Dance, or missed a clutch tennis shot because the Wii didn’t sense the swing, hands-free depth-sensing technology is a saving grace. When players can control a game using gestures and a computer that “sees” like a human, the options become a whole lot more interesting. Enter Intel’’s RealSense camera, which allows users to do everything from change their background during a video chat to scan 3D objects. The 3D depth-sensing camera technology has found its way into an array of tablets, laptops and all-in-one PCs, and has ignited the imaginations of game creators and players alike.

““We are interested in using gestural control to create a feeling of transformation and a real sense of tactile wonder in the space between you and your computer screen,”” said Robin Hunicke of Funomena when describing the company’’s upcoming origami-inspired game that will use Intel RealSense technology. ““We’’re always interested in pushing the boundaries of what games can express,” she said. “But even as we’’re building something that challenges your assumptions, we’’re actively embracing your input as a player.””

RealSense brings new play experiences

Certainly, there are plenty of cool, technophilic features to geek out over. Players can control a game with their whole bodies or a tiny flick of their pinky fingers. Users can play a hologram keyboard or scan a beloved pet cat into Minecraft and make her explode —if she will sit still long enough. As the new crop of depth camera-supported games prove, RealSense brings new play experiences that are fun, inventive and even therapeutic (well, except for the cat).

Laserlife

Taking its cues from electronic producers and the club scene, the game Laserlife is all about moving and grooving to thumping music. It works as a showpiece for RealSense’’s gesture controls, letting players control an in-game character with their bodies, even though users are playing as an alien intelligence with laser beams instead of human arms. ““We primarily do depth detection — stuff you cannot do with a regular camera,”” said Alex Neuse, the co-founder of Choice Provisions. Because RealSense has an internal infrared camera and laser projector, it can detect the distance between objects. It also knows if an object is in the background or foreground.

The result is gestures that make intuitive sense. Instead of inflexibly absorbing the memory molecules as they pass into a player’’s hands, the player actually has to catch them. ““It’’s almost like we’’re designing the functionality of the controller, and the controller is your body,”” Neuse explained. As such, the team found itself imagining what would make bodies good controllers. They experimented with what felt natural while sitting upright in front of a computer. The end result is that players snake their hands like they’’re hanging their arm out the window of a moving car and hand-surfing the wind, while also shooting lightning from their fingertips, Emperor Palpatine-style.

Neuse, who previously had a big role in the Bit.Trip games, found designing a game around natural human interface to be liberating.  “As much as I love this,”” he said, holding up an Xbox gamepad, ““It is very restrictive, in a sense.”” The problem, he explained, is that designers are always thinking about how to make a game that users can play with the traditional gamepad. Thus gamers tend to get more of the same. Games based on features like sense of depth, however, are a relatively unexplored frontier, which Neuse said fosters creativity and innovative mechanics. Laserlife is one of the first exploratory steps.

Nevermind

A 2015 award nominee at the IndieCade game festival, the spooky Nevermind relies on RealSense technology’’s biometric capabilities to measure a player’’s pulse. It then uses that data to ramp up the chills, scares, and surrealism as necessary. “It feels almost like magic,”” said Erin Reynolds, the game’’s creative director. The ultimate adversary in Nevermind is not some final boss, but the player herself. A jittery player must learn to confront anxiety and slow her racing heart rate in order to progress.

More than a clever idea, biofeedback technology could have a big impact on games at large. Biometric-reading cameras offer feedback loops that enable developers to design games around body data. One logical use for this is to adjust a game’’s difficulty based on how stressed out or comfortable the player is. “You don’’t have to make a game that is one size fits all,”” she said. “”The way it works is that the camera is sensitive enough to read tiny fluctuations in the skin tone.””

A jittery player must learn to confront anxiety

Every time the heart beats, blood gets pumped through the vessels in a person’’s face, making her complexion ever so slightly rosier. Though this is invisible to the naked eye, the camera can read it, which indicates just how precise the technology is. Beyond games, camera-based biometrics could bring an emotional component to computing more broadly. Reynolds believes that in the future, our smartphones and laptops will use biometric data to “know what is going on subconsciously with the user.”

For an example, Reynolds foresees computers that know when users are upset and will try to manage that agitation before they can hit send on an angry text or email. “There is a lot that can be done to personalize the experience to the user and how they feel at any given moment,”” she said. “It feels like we are living in the future.””

Intel Block Maker for Minecraft (tentative title)

After weeks spent building a manor from Minecraft blocks, it is only natural that one would want to fill it with stuff. An upcoming app makes use of RealSense’’s 3D scanning technology to do exactly that. Since RealSense sees the world in 3D space instead of as a flat image, the process is as simple as holding a favorite action figure or toy mech in front of the camera and slowly rotating it. Voilà! The scanned object is transferred into the world of the game in voxel-based glory.

““It’’s not meant to be a hardcore modding tool,”” said Mark Day, the app’s chief developer. “”It’’s something that a 10-year-old could use.”” Being that this is Minecraft, though, there is one minor, destructive catch. Once inside the game, the object takes on the properties of dynamite, so players must be very careful not to detonate that bonsai while decorating the virtual house. “We’’re kind of using the tech in a way nobody intended,”” Day said, noting that he sees no reason to stop at blocky objects.

A number of facial scanning and tracking applications like FaceShift outfit virtual avatars with facsimiles of the viewer’’s face. But Day believes that as 3D cameras replace the standard cameras and webcams on PCs and devices, the player will have the option to scan their entire body into games. Just imagine how epic all those selfies in Grand Theft Auto will be then.