Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 173

Californium brings Philip K. Dick’s vision of the world to life

“Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed. Nothing changed; it just spread out farther and farther in the form of neon ooze. What there was always more of had been congealed into permanence long ago, as if the automatic factory that cranked out these objects had jammed in the on position.”

—Philip K. Dick,  A Scanner Darkly, 1977.

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Dimensions merge in Californium like pools of spilled ink on paper. Each one is given a predominant color so that they easily contrast—it makes the strange effect lucid if not any easier to get your head around. A cold, austere blue world leaks through in small spheres, its bathroom sinks and rigid cabinets consuming 3D pockets of the tangerine-orange version of 1967 California that Elvin Green inhabits. He may have a “brain corroded by mind-bending drugs and dime-store alcohol” but it doesn’t explain the intra-dimensional phenomena before him. Does it?

Upon playing an early version of Californium, it’s clear to see for any acolyte of the man, that it takes its ideas from (and is also a tribute to) noted sci-fi author Philip K. Dick. His oeuvre of fiction is the obvious source but the more prominent one is his spiraling thoughts post-1974. It was at this point that Dick was feeling the combined effects of schizophrenia and long-term recreational drug use. He had visions that revealed to him a supposed truth hidden from us all: there are multiple realities. Dick even went so far as believing that he could pick up signals from these other realities as they were beamed across the planet. Those who have read it will know that this is what protagonist Horselover Fat in Dick’s 1981 novel VALIS experiences.

Dick’s final years leading to his death resemble a fraying computer

We know that VALIS is a semi-autobiographical fiction as it mirrors the thoughts and confessions that Dick wrote down in his sprawling collection of notes. These were published as The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick in 2011. “That I am in direct mind-to-mind touch with extraterrestrial intelligence systems has been obvious to me for some time,” Dick wrote, “but what this means is not in any way obvious.” A year after VALIS was published, Dick had a stroke, his brain ceasing any and all activity, before the machines keeping him alive were switched off. Dick’s final years leading to his death resemble a fraying computer; color and images tearing across the screen before the final thrash of data dissolves completely. He was at his creative best when paranoid, delirious from drugs yet highly aware of the world, reaching inanely into inhuman curiosities. More and more he came to resemble the characters he had written: Bob Arctor in A Scanner Darkly, Rick Deckard in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Joe Chip in Ubik.

Elvin Green in Californium is the archetypal Philip K. Dick protagonist. That is to say, he’s another version of the author himself, projected into yet another imagined reality. Typically, Green’s life has gone to the shitter. Daughter gone. Wife departed. A writer with writer’s block and an apartment cluttered with pills and papers; there is nothing of worth left in this man. This is when the television speaks to him. “I guess it’s the end of the road for you, Mr. Green,” it says through the static. No shit.

This talking, surveying machine (a common element in many of Dick’s novels) begins Green’s multi-dimensional journey either into a newfound clarity or a determined madness. You are tasked with hunting down more of these televisions, strewn as they are across the game’s small slice of Orange County; found in apartments, behind restaurant counters, one of them sits in a dumpster. Their location in back alleys and among the garbage is significant. It’s canon to Dick’s unstable fictions. Not only did he write of a perceived visual language seen in the formations of windswept trash in his 1976 novel Radio Free Albemuth, but in his personal notes, he also scrawled: “I do seem attracted to trash, as if the clue—the clue—lies there. I’m always ferreting out elliptical points, odd angles.”

Further, upon discovery, each of these televisions display a number—as a Roman numeral, perhaps in reference to Dick’s delusion that his second personality was a Christian in hiding from “hateful Rome”—that tells you how many symbols are in hiding in the local area. Many of these somewhat tedious-to-find symbols are among detritus, either of the streets or of rotting apartments, in toilet blocks, or behind fidgeting furniture and street signs, glitchy and corrupted by the scientific disturbance. You seek out these symbols to unlock the spheres of that penetrating alter-reality, letting its cerulean theme absorb pockets of Green’s reality. This becomes a repeated activity, at least in the game’s first chapter (and world), that leads to the method by which Green is able to travel to a new dimension.

But that second reality (of a total of four, it seems) is only glanced at in this preview—a towering blue metropolis in which Abe Lincoln is worshiped as a despot—and so our focus has to be on that starting location: the shiny orange-yellow version of California. The place is a reflection of where Dick himself spent the last years of his life, Orange County itself, estranged and cynical. It’s stylized to his vision of California as a commercial wasteland of repeated images and lookalikes. In a 1994 BBC documentary on Dick, fellow sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson describes Dick’s vision: “Everything that I see is plastic and glass and gaudy colours, and strangely made. Human beings begin to take on an odd look. Our clothes are the same sort of plastic oddness, and therefore our eyeballs begin to take on kind of a glassy look. The entire world begins to take on a kind of a fake, artificial ‘made’ quality.”

It gives them that immediate plastic look

All of this can be seen vividly in Californium. The painted colors of its high-rises are so bright and ubiquitous as to be almost unbearably fake-looking. There’s an indisputable commercial glow about the place that is struggling to keep its shape. The slanted fonts of shop signs flicker in their neon disguise. The same model of luxurious car cruises the asphalt to resemble a production line. Rooftop palm trees and billboards hold up the skyline. This street hides the same artifice that the sunglasses in John Carpenter’s 1988 movie They Live reveal. There’s also something to be said of Californium artist Olivier Bonhomme’s work in comparison to that of celebrated French cartoonist Jean Giraud. For the sci-fi detective novel The Long Tomorrow, Giraud created an illustrated interpretation of its urban sprawl: a tall labyrinth of mercantile architecture, criss-crossed with the tangle of downtown traffic at every level, all of it washed in bright yellow. Whether Bonhomme meant to recall Giraud’s work with his own sun-kissed city isn’t certain, but it’d be an appropriate gesture to make, as it was that particular cartoon metropolis of Giraud’s that would go on to inspire Ridley Scott for the designs of Blade Runner (of course being the film adaptation of Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?).

Beyond the inanimate are the people in Californium to consider, though, perhaps there isn’t much difference between the two. In conversation, the residents you meet seem fine if a little displeased with Green; the government agent, the editor, the landlady, the policeman. But they look anything apart from fine. In this 3D world, they are realized as obtrusive 2D sprites, the kind that pivots to face you from whatever angle you stand from them, unable to forgo their perpetually frozen expressions. Flat shadows and cut-out features. It gives them that immediate plastic look that Robinson described. (Perhaps they are androids…) While this sprite technique is nothing new to videogames, when you’re looking through Dick’s eyes, it takes on new meaning—an effective tool in realizing Dick’s world as he saw it.

As dense as it already is with glossy simulacra, it seems that Californium will only spread out from this starting point, across the length of Dick’s work. We will see through the glassy eyes of the man in his penultimate years, light and shape steered towards our brain as they were to his, California a rich text for the theater of meshugaas. Except it doesn’t throw away the author’s theories as delightful madness, instead giving them another chance as plausible fiction, for us to realize what Dick had come to terms with when he famously said, “It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.”

You can find out more about Californium on its website. It should be out for PC later in 2016. It’s being made possible by ARTE, Darjeeling Accueil, and Nova Production.

The problem with empathy games

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

A niche genre of videogames hopes to inspire players to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, leading to an important discussion about how players experience empathy. Biofeedback videogames feed off players’ physiological responses, impacting gameplay in new and interesting ways. But what happens when developers create games designed to evoke a specific emotional or psychological response?

Empathy games attempt to answer that question. These videogames aspire to enhance a player’s understanding of an outside perspective, particularly those pertaining to real-world struggles and inequalities, through interactive experiences.

“You have to start with, ‘I want to take someone on an emotional journey. What is that emotional journey?’” Vander Caballero, Creative Director at Minority Media said about the development of empathy games in an interview with Gamasutra. “Then the question is, ‘what can I bring to someone’s life that’s going to be important and meaningful for them, a lesson that will help people in their life?’” he said.

In 2012, Caballero, used the term “empathy game” to describe the conceptual underpinnings of his company’s game Papo & Yo, which told the story of a Brazilian boy growing up with an alcoholic and abusive father. That same year, personal and autobiographical games began garnering attention from wider audiences with titles like Cart Life and Dys4ia giving the genre an overall boost.

The rise of the empathy game genre, however, brings up some interesting issues surrounding players’ psychological responses to these games, and how exactly people should go about playing them.

Clinical psychologist and Intel research scientist Margaret Morris studies how technology can cultivate interpersonal connectedness. She described two types of empathetic responses: the first is physically feeling what someone else feels and the second is seeing from that other person’s perspective.

It is possible to measure whether games engender either response. In the case of physiological empathy, Morris would ask, “Does the player’s respiration rate or body posture start to mimic the person or character they’re trying to engage with in a game?”

Or, in the case of perspective taking, Morris would ask, “Does a player describe the character differently?” “Does the player describe the character’s struggles and goals with more specificity extent after playing?”

STAND-IN SOLUTIONS TO REAL WORLD ISSUES

Most videogames that strive to forge empathetic connections between players and subjects rely on this method of perspective taking. Encouraging perspective-taking in a videogame isn’t always easy, and many game developers struggle to get players to form true emotional connections with the characters and storylines.

Anna Anthropy, creator of Dys4ia, an autobiographical tale about the decision to begin hormone replacement therapy as a trans woman, has been both an empathy game pioneer and one of the genre’s staunchest critics. Anthropy played with the concept of perspective-taking during a gallery show at Babycastles in New York City, where one of her pieces was simply titled “Empathy Game.”

In “Empathy Game,” players literally walk in Anthropy’s shoes. Aside from donning a pair of her old boots and strolling around the gallery, participants were also encouraged to record on a chalkboard their “high scores” for distance walked—leaving ample room for them to lie about how far they actually travelled.

This is a common question when assessing the genre’s success: Do the players invest in the game’s storyline or are they more concerned with beating levels and achieving a top score?

“It seems like the people with the greatest investment in the ‘empathy game’ label are the ones with the most privilege and the least amount of willingness to improve themselves,” Anthropy said, noting many of the empathy game’s conceits in a recent blog post.

MOTIVATE SUPPORTIVE ACTION, NOT JUST EMPATHY

For one, the focus on player takeaways and outcomes often outweighs consideration for the artist’s intent, a particularly vexing practice in the context of autobiography. Many applaud empathy games for the stories they bring attention to, but the long-term impact of such brief mediated experiences in terms of changing player behavior still proves questionable.

While “Empathy Game” comes off as a biting critique of the categorical label it’s named after, it isn’t cynical about the power that games have to create meaningful or educational experiences. Rather, the piece questions the sometimes superficial rewards and self-applying merit badges players win for merely sympathizing with someone else’s struggle.

Morris notes that ultimately it is important that games motivate supportive action, not just empathy. “Real world” actions are the most important outcome measures.

Anthropy’s sequel to Dys4ia sheds some light on how much has and hasn’t changed since people first started talking about empathy games. Shortly after returning home from her New York show, Anthropy was struck by a car while using a crosswalk. She made a game about the experience and its immediate aftermath called Ohmygod Are You Alright?, billing it as the sequel to Dys4ia.

The mostly text-based Ohmygod grapples with heavy concepts such as trauma, anxiety and empathy – with a direct, autobiographical voice. The game also brings full circle the empathetic potential of games and the problematic way “empathy games” can be inserted as stand-in solutions to real world issues.

Still, the period of time since Dys4ia was first released has been an important one. While many believed the seeds of empathy would already have sprouted and borne fruit, Anthropy’s Ohmygod instead illustrates absences: absence of a supportive community, absence of health insurance, absence of financial stability, etc.

Many players have profound experiences when they play Dys4ia and games like it. But Ohmygod serves as a potent reminder that after a player is done walking in Anthropy’s boots and exits the game, there’s a lot more to do before crossing the street.

Radical Rockits is out to make the jetpack fun again

Pity the poor jetpack, forever stuck at the dweeby-but-not-practical stage of technological development. Sure, the jetpack looked neat when Buck Rogers used one to zoom through the sky in a 1928 edition of the comic series Amazing Stories, but it’s basically all been downhill since then. In order to take off and even fleetingly maneuver, jetpacks have to be large and bulky, which is fine if all you want to do is take off and even fleetingly maneuver. But what if you want to look cool while doing it? Good luck with that; the jetpack is the Google Glass of aviation devices.

But if the jetpack can’t be fun in real life, maybe it can escape gravity and its unrelenting feebleness in the virtual world. That, at least, is the promise of Radical Rockits, which the developers at Rage Squid describe as “a physics jetpack sandbox without any objectives.” That is a reasonably fair assessment insofar as the game offers no winning condition. One simply flies about the game’s polygonal island for as long as possible, spinning and flipping as exuberantly as is permitted. Players can either share control of one character or each occupy a quarter of the screen with their own adventures to be compared and contrasted.

you realize why the jetpack was once such a promising idea

Even though Radical Rockits has no score, it’s a bit disingenuous to say that it is a game without objectives. Surely staying aloft is an objective. If you’ve crashed to earth, there really isn’t much else for you to do. That isn’t a design flaw; it’s just how the game works. Thus, while Radical Rockits is much sleeker than its real life equivalents, its experience is still bound by the same physical imperatives.

Radical Rockits at least manages to maintain a modicum of cheerfulness about the jetpack. Its world is bright and fun and you want to spin around for as long as possible. Playing it, you realize why the jetpack was once such a promising idea. Whether such a moment is a cause for optimism, however, remains up for debate. As NASA researcher Mark Wells told Jetpack Dreams author Marc Montadon: “For a lot of us, the future once looked very exciting—so it’s a nostalgia for that lost future. Now the future looks more scary than anything else.”

You can download Radical Rockits for free on itch.io.

Shut Up, DOOM 3

This article is part of a series called Shut Up, Videogames, in which critic Ed Smith invites games old and new to pipe down, or otherwise. In this edition, he looks at the most recent addition to the legendary first-person-shooter series, DOOM.

I know DOOM has a contingent of fans and critics who enjoy discussing it—its level structure, its weapon layouts, its enemy design—in excruciating detail. I know that, for some, a single room in id’s 1993 shooter can warrant microscopic inspection, lest the mathematical precision with which John Romero laid the game out go under-appreciated. I know what DOOM is supposed to be. In the wider sense of gaming history, I know, of course, what it represents. But it’s never seemed to me that intelligent. It’s a very smart game, years ahead of its time, and I love it to bits, but to approach it like some do, as if trying to decode the intricacies of a classical piano concerto, feels to me ignorant of one truth, absolutely undeniable: the levels in DOOM are a nightmare.

conceptually its level design is a mess

Reid McCarter and Patrick Lindsey co-authored a fantastic essay for this website about DOOM II, and how its level design echoes the Hell imagery of Hieronymus Bosch. “If god is order and the influence of Heaven one of words and law, then the antithesis of this is a Hell devoid of reason,” they write. “DOOM II‘s design compliments its minimalist plot in a fairly profound way, reflecting the influence of the underworld as a disordering of all logic.” In DOOM II, Romero’s chaotic level design finds a context—I agree entirely with McCarter and Lindsey that it suits the “Hell on Earth” narrative set-up. But where we differ is when they describe the original DOOM as “carefully laid out to encourage progression.” I find it just as vague, convoluted, and impenetrable as DOOM II. I find myself trawling impossible corridors and ludicrously-sized rooms, looking for a keycard, mechanism, or some kind of lateral floor or ceiling device that will move things forward, bored out of my skull. This idea that DOOM is deliberately and forensically mapped out to ease comprehension and create a sense of “flow” (to use awful, pseudo-game design jargon) baffles me. I enjoy the game a lot, but at no point do I feel like I’m experiencing the work of a master craftsman.

That goes triple for DOOM 3. Not just physically but conceptually its level design is a mess. It tries to be an expressionistic Hellscape, like DOOM II, but also a working military base, like Half-Life, and between those two aesthetics, gets completely lost. You have to be entirely soulless not to let videogames effectuate and perform. It takes a special type of joyless windbag to complain about games “not making sense,” or to point out plot holes and illogicalities—if you play a game like DOOM, and whinge about enemies jumping out at you, implausibly, from all directions, you’re likely missing the point. But the famed monster closet contrivance, whereby a section of a wall slides away to suddenly reveal an enemy hiding within, feels incredibly lazy in DOOM 3. Bear in mind that diaries, PDAs, and all manner of artefacts are scattered around the Mars base in an attempt to make it seem more plausible. Bear in mind that, presumably to emulate Half-Life (something the game does A LOT) and create a greater sense of place, DOOM 3 opens with a perambulation around the guard station, the cafeteria and the maintenance rooms—also bear in mind it’s maybe 20 minutes before you kill your first enemy. DOOM 3‘s designers try to create a sense of familiarity and mundaneness, but then dispatch you down unfeasibly long corridors, into rooms that seem to bear no practical purpose, to face monsters that are launched at you from thousands upon thousands of inexplicable hidden compartments.

WEIRDNESS FEELS ENTIRELY FUNCTIONAL

The early Resident Evil games were a great combination of verisimilitude and visual abstraction. Manhunt, by Rockstar, mixed them well also, as did Metal Gear Solid. Real meets unreal is an aesthetic that plenty of videogame designers had pinned down before 2004. The makers of DOOM 3 however seem to lack imagination. Instead of embracing the context of this new, would-be-plausible environment, and having enemies spawn in different ways, they recycle the old tropes from DOOM. As a result, the Mars base is too haunted house and filled with booby-traps to feel credible. At the same time, the surrealism, expressionism, abstractness—however you want to term it—doesn’t come through—because monster closest and popcorn spawns are familiar videogame tricks. DOOM 3‘s attempt at weirdness feels entirely functional.

Plus, it ruins the gunfights. When enemies can appear at any time, in front, behind, or on the player’s flank, thinking and planning both become moot. What’s the point in considering your environment, moving tactically. or engaging mentally in any way when you can—and will—get jumped every second by teleporting enemies? You’re not looking to see where they’re coming from. You’re not choosing weapons best suited to a new situation. You’re not deciding which one to take first, second, third. You’re just reacting, on-the-spot, to a reflex test. It’s all physicality and no mentality—it’s the equivalent of working on a production line, pulling the same lever every ten seconds to pump jam into the donuts. Gunfights need context and stakes. These might be slightly fetishistic words to use, but shootouts ought to be choreographed and balletic. There needs to be a sense of where, what, and why, otherwise it’s just a bland game of whack-a-mole.

Presumably, nobody told the creators of DOOM 3, but it’s not enough to just dump baddies on screen and have people shoot them dead. The act of firing a virtual gun and killing a virtual thing, and watching its virtual guts fly out, isn’t worth a thing unless there’s context. And it doesn’t need to be a big, novelistic context. The creatures in DOOM 3 don’t need character profiles and soliloquies. You just need a sense of “I’m trying to get here, to do this, and these enemies are coming in from this direction to stop me, and this is why.” When the Covenant arrive in a dropship to prevent Master Chief from reaching Halo before them, that’s it—that’s enough. But DOOM 3 doesn’t even manage that. If the level design is a conflict between real and strange, the combat is stuck in a similar limbo, between believing that guns and blood and killing are fun by default, and refusing to budge on that incredibly reductive ideal.

Touching Obama’s hair and my hope for the future of games

We’re taking MLK Jr. Day off, but thought it’d be worth revisiting this post, which originally appeared on the site January 22, 2013. 

At least half of America is still enjoying the afterglow of this weekend’s inauguration festivities. The president delivered a landmark speech—a call for unity on his own terms—and the significance of a black man being elected to the highest office in government for a second term need not be weighed here.

But my mind kept wandering back to a story from the Times last May. It was about a photograph (in fact, the one above) that had hung in the White House for more than three years. Its meaning is self-evident but its explanation is not.

The young boy is named Jacob Philadelphia (!) and his father was ending a stint on the National Security Council. As is customary of outgoing political positions, Jacob’s father requested a family photo with the President. With a former Marine for a father, Jacob had surely met plenty of black men of power and repute during his short life thus far, but there was something alluring about the President. His presence was so enchanting that Jacob asked Obama a simple question:

“I want to know if my hair is just like yours,” he asked.

It’s a simple question but a powerful gesture. It’s a moment of recognition and recollection. For all children, identifying what is and is not like you is of utmost importance. In nature, it’s called imprinting and it’s the same insanely logical impulse that leads Chinese panda researchers to dress up in panda costumes. We want to be what we see, for better or for worse.

We want to be what we see, for better or for worse.

David Axelrod, Obama’s longtime adviser, and no novice to the cold and calculating nature of politics, offered the best assessment of Jacob’s interactions with the president. “Really, what he was saying is, ‘Gee, you’re just like me.’ And it doesn’t take a big leap to think that child could be thinking, ‘Maybe I could be here someday.’”

That “here” is of utmost significance. It is a place occupied in the mind of Jacob in the distant future of where he hopes, even at his young age, he will occupy. Yesterday on New York City’s local news, a reporter interviewed a gaggle of black and Latino children about what their future ambitions would be. The usual suspects appeared: president (natch), astronaut, football player. It’s always astounding to me the breadth and loftiness of children’s ambitions. And it makes sense. You are what you see—we have black presidents, black astronauts, black football players. The real question for me, though, was—where are the black space marines and dragon slayers?

A couple years ago, I finished my playthrough of survival horror game Dead Space. It’s a wonderfully terrifying game that invaded my sleeping subconscious for several subsequent nights. (That is a good thing for a horror game, I am told.) At the close, your protagonist Isaac Clarke, the character you’ve spent countless hours battling Necromorphs (a.k.a. zombies) as, is finally free from his space battleground and heaves a sigh of release to remove his helmet and power up his escape craft. What we see is the weathered face of a white man with greying hair.

When we remove the headgear of gaming’s greatest warriors, what color eyes and what type of hair will we find?

This is not a critique of Visceral Games’ decision to make Isaac Clarke white, but, for me, this was a moment much like Jacob’s interaction with the president. This was the man I had embodied for a dozen hours and there was a jarring disconnect between the man that I am and the man that I had played. He didn’t look like me, and the connection between me and Isaac stuttered a bit. He was just an avatar.

When we remove the headgear of gaming’s greatest warriors, what color eyes and what type of hair will we find?

Last month, I did an interview with KALW in San Francisco alongside game designer Anna Anthropy. She made a point to a caller that she couldn’t relate to games like Grand Theft Auto and Metal Gear Solid because the main characters didn’t reflect her own experience as transgendered.

I found this position extreme (if I’m not transgendered, couldn’t I levy the same critique of her games?), but Anna did point out something that should be glaringly obvious. If games are to claim their mantle as the most important medium of this century, then their subjects need to reflect the breadth of human experiences that exist across a range of identities.

If you are mixed race like I am, you no doubt had moments of confusion about your place in the world. Why does grandpa send tamales each month to your mother? Why do I need to wear lotion? Why does dad take so long at the barbershop? These are resolved in later life and I was fortunate enough to have parents who walked me through those answers.

When the time comes for a child to ask “Who am I?,” games, like all great art forms, should have an answer.

But I also grew up on the cusp of the Internet age and before a time when 99% of all teens play games. When the time comes for a child to ask “Who am I?,” games, like all great art forms, should have an answer. The worry is that the response, more often than not, is nothing at all.

There are, of course, signs of progress. Papo y Yo. The leads of Rockstar’s games. The forthcoming Guacamelee. But honestly, lists feel reductive and it’s not merely about filling a quota. I can’t help but believe that that sense of destiny and progress, which Obama invoked in his inauguration speech, is out of step with the world of Master Chief, Commander Shepard, and Booker DeWitt. This is a country where for the first time in U.S. history, whites of European ancestry account for less than half of newborn children.

These days we hear of a game industry in flux—one under siege for its connections to violence, one in search of a business model that will last the next decade, one looking for a way out from under the weight of endless sequels. Game publishers, big and small, express frustration and doubt over what the future of games might hold for them.

But perhaps gamemakers are asking the wrong question. They are seeking a what rather than a why. If in need of inspiration perhaps these stirring words from the President’s address could guide the values of games for the next century:

We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.

If this will not suffice, we need to quickly find a better refrain.

Oxenfree glows with teenage charm

The internet has been quietly buzzing about Oxenfree. Its status is held as the next über-cool opus of teenage ennui. But, for a second, forget all of that. Let’s just look at the damn thing.

Oxenfree takes place on a small island in the Pacific Northwest; a tourist spot frequented after dark by local high-schoolers who go there to party. The scale and beauty of the place are often breathtaking, with hills and cliffs that rise high over the ocean, beaches that open onto uninterrupted sea, and giant caves that hide creepy illusions. Walking trails crisscross the island, taking Alex and her friends from waterfalls to dense woods to open meadows, all dotted with hints of the former lives that were lived there, stories to explore along with the landscapes.

For a world that’s rendered in basically two dimensions, there’s a surprising amount of depth to each frame. Trees and old buildings loom behind the hills Alex crosses, half covered by the purple darkness that’s closing in on her. The group’s figures are reduced to quaint miniatures against that backdrop, and their colossal surroundings thrum with a kind of Emersonian life. It’s an environment that invites wonder, and every scene feels edged with a little extra magic, a certain sparkle or a trick of the moonlight. For Alex’s best friend Ren, that magic might also be baked into some brownies he brought along; for the rest, it’s stashed in a cooler that Nona’s sister stocked for the trip. To be sure, wherever they intend to seek it out on the beautiful Edwards Island, this magic has nothing to do with teenage ennui.

You go there to forget all your teenage bullshit

To be clear, this is not a place you go to rehearse your teenage woes—it’s where you bury them, under fun and friends. You head to the beach and cover up that bad taste in your mouth with cheap beer and cigarettes. You go there to forget all your teenage bullshit. That’s exactly what Oxenfree’s group of friends intend to do as they participate in the time-honored tradition of staying overnight on Edwards Island and getting a little sloppy by the sea.

The story kicks off with Alex riding the ferry with Ren and new stepbrother Jonas. Alex is cool and somewhat detached, lost in thought when the story opens on her. She leans over the railing absentmindedly as Ren chatters in the background, not missing a chance to comment on everything from the voice on the ferry loudspeaker to the quality of the sugar cookies in the Edwards Island gift shop. Jonas tries hard to keep up, but he’s clearly feeling uncomfortable as he navigates his way around Alex’s circle. Later, you meet up with Nona and Clarissa on the cliffs descending to the beach. Nona is soft-spoken and seems genuinely nice, but Clarissa is itching for a fight from the start. Never satisfied, Clarissa possesses a well-cultivated air of condescension, always ready with an eye roll and seemingly unable to be cool for even a second.

Whatever the state of affairs between these five, they all agree on one thing: tonight is not the night for heart-to-hearts or tearful talks about the future; it’s time to be young and have a good time (cue Japandroids song). Oxenfree’s Edwards Island turns out to be a perfect figure for this liminal adolescent space, somewhere close to but sufficiently separate from the pressures of the workaday world. Civilization waits cruelly in the wings while you, as Clarissa puts it in the game, “lay on the beach and drink until you can’t remember where you are.” The subject of college or anxiety about the future peek in occasionally, but they’re quickly deflected, scuttled by a groan or some self-consciously witty turn of phrase.

This is part of what makes the “teenage drama” aspect of Oxenfree so special: that it manages to only ever deal with it briefly or obliquely, choosing instead to foreground these high-schoolers’ pursuit of some Dionysian mandate. That doesn’t mean that the confusion and alienation we typically associate with adolescent angst aren’t present, but held at this safe distance, they suffuse into the story and dialogue much more organically, adding a warm glow to the narrative rather than commanding it.

every line has to be a zinger, every phrase a pose

Much of the game unfolds in dialogue, which Night School Studio patiently develops into a science. The ebb and flow of conversation is determined by the meanderings (aimless or otherwise) of the team on Edwards Island. Finding new areas or bumping into new people introduces different threads and causes casual interruptions, reminding players that conversation in real life often evolves in fits and starts, dwelling too long on this or skipping quickly over that.

The words themselves are also very finely tuned. They conform easily to the rhythms and inflections of high-school-ese. Almost every sentence carries with it a tacit plea to be seen as cool, and thoughts don’t seem to have any value to Alex’s friends unless they can be fired off with a smirk and a wink—every line has to be a zinger, every phrase a pose. The cumulative effect of this might be a little too sweet for some palettes (admission: I felt this at times), but it’s undeniably true-to-form for teenage jawing.

Of course, it’s not long before things start going wrong, and the annual bash on the beach is interrupted by powers beyond our ken. Playing with signals on a small shortwave radio yields some surprising results while exploring a cave near your bonfire, and a whole parallel realm of paranormal forces and figures collides with the real world. Radio technology has always hinted at parallel realities—inviting you to consider the invisible world of information and sound traveling through the air around you—and as a result, the introduction of this media makes for an elegant twist, unraveling a supernatural story out of otherwise typical teenage interaction. Oxenfree harnesses these chills deftly, channeling them into a heady mix of environmental horror and personal anxiety.

In the end, Oxenfree is absolutely a game about teenage bullshit (forgive me for being a little disingenuous earlier). But it manages to revitalize that narrative by focusing on feeling more than substance; it glances at each character’s inner struggle rather than serving it up for a full meal. The supernatural side of the story carries some of the weight here as well, mirroring Alex’s own story of grief and isolation even as it performs the work of all good ghost stories: reinterpreting your immediate surroundings and enchanting the mundane. If you’re looking for a story that valorizes adolescent struggle by iterating all of its existential complaints, you’d be better off looking elsewhere. But if you miss the naïve wonder, the warmth of lifelong friends, and the thrill of still having rules to break, Oxenfree can take you back.

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Horror lurks behind the nighttime driving of Dead End Road

There’s something existentially terrifying about driving at night. For my money, it has to do with that unpleasant combination of velocity and darkness. The swath cut by your headlights is only enough to catch fleeting images. Is that a hitchhiker you see on the side of the road, or an unnervingly convincing scarecrow? The red eyes in the darkness ahead might be the taillights of a truck, or something much worse. Like any great horror film, a highway at night gives you only glimpses of what’s actually there; it lets your imagination do the rest.

I should mention here that, actually, for me, all driving is pretty terrifying. Being a life-time public transportee, I never got around to learning that particular skill, so if I’m behind the wheel of a car something has already gone horribly wrong. But that’s where I find myself in Dead End Road, a game about the worst road trip ever.

it’s important to keep your eyes on the road

You, the driver, have conducted a forbidden ritual of the blackest magics in exchange for one granted wish. Without even the decency of providing a Monkey’s Paw triplet, the dark powers granting your request begin a hot pursuit for your immortal soul. Unless you can backtrack to the witch who helped with the infernal spell and get her to undo the mess you’ve made, there won’t be a return trip.

Your tormentors won’t give you up without a fight, though. Alongside the ordinary life-threatening dangers of a nightly drive, your trip will include ghostly apparitions, gruesome visions, and various other paranormal phenomena. But it’s important to keep your eyes on the road while battling the forces of darkness; focus too much on getting the radio to stop satanically burbling and you might find yourself in a head-on collision with a truck.

While there aren’t any dates mentioned in Dead End Road, it feels grounded in a previous era, from the fuzzy film grain to the paper map on which you navigate your hellish journey. The late night pharmacies cement the retro aesthetic, selling you quaaludes over the counter—which, of course, turn out to be the best antidote for stress brought on by demonic possession.

Dead End Road sometimes gets a little gauche with the visions of grotesqueness, or a ham-fisted attempt at breaking the fourth wall. But it can be celebrated for its simple touches that, as always, are the most effective. Your headlights flickering as you turn into a long cornfield or a maze-like row of dark houses. Something in your rearview mirror that wasn’t there just a moment earlier. It’s the creeping fuel that lights your terror.

You can purchase Dead End Road on itch.io. 

Monarch Black to bring grace and lasers to the flight of a butterfly

It’s a shame Monarch Black isn’t more committed to going slow. When it does, as in the first 30 seconds of its trailer, it almost has an Ozu-like sense of the beauty in stillness (or, to be correct, a slow-tracking camera). We watch a butterfly, tiny in the widescreen demarcation of the frame, distant enough from us so that it is not more than a focal point for our journey through the game’s procedurally generated, alien wonderscapes.

We pass by glowing pyramids and forests cold with blue; fractured tops of urban towers and spiraling architecture in the sky; Japanese blossom and a strange factory of cuboids. So slow we travel that, at one point, bugs can be seen silhouetted as they sit on gigantic leaves staring at an unseen horizon, all human-like, as if a scene from Pixar’s A Bug’s Life (1998). All the while, the edited transition between each biome is blended with the chord changes of the mesmerizing swell of strings in the background. Every element tells us to relax into this flight guided by the butterfly.

a game that will have us transfixed by sight and sound

The impression that these first 30 seconds gives is of a game that will have us transfixed by sight and sound, everything else is absent. Until it’s not. As if an angry executive has charged into the room, Monarch Black‘s trailer suddenly brings in the action at the 32-second mark, called in by a gratuitous growl from a deep bass hit. The camera, no longer slow, only knows how to be erratic. And then it all gets a bit Star Wars as the butterfly goes off-the-rails—the camera stressed to follow—doing furious battle with other winged insects, complete with firing lasers. No kidding.

This might be expected from a man who has spent 15 years as an electronic musician—there must always be a ‘drop’. The creator of Monarch Black is the New York City born-and-raised Matt Schell. After working with labels including Warp Records and collaborating with the likes of DJ /Rupture and Modeselektor, he decided to lose the moniker Matt Shadetek along with the career in music he had been pursuing. Now he’s Matt Mirrorfish, and has spent the past two years raising his kids and teaching himself how to program in C#. Monarch Black is his first videogame.

Unfortunately, rather than ambient or chill, it seems that Monarch Black will be pounding house or full-on club in tempo and volume. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In all truth, Monarch Black is a re-skinned space shooter: butterflies are war fleets, while spiders and phasmids sat on plant stalks act like the defensive turrets on a freighter. There’s nothing wrong with a space shooter. But Monarch Black shows potential to also be stripped of the hostilities (and lasers) in favor of something closer to Johan Gjestland’s upcoming, luscious procedural flying game Fugl.

In other words, Monarch Black could purely be about admiring beauty rather than destroying it—is there a stronger icon for that than shooting a butterfly? All that said, perhaps there’s potential for Monarch Black to offer both experiences across two different game modes. I’d fully support having a non-shooting option that focuses purely on exploration alongside the gung-ho butterfly battles. If not, at least we still have those first 30 seconds of the trailer to watch on repeat.

You can follow the development of Monarch Black on its website.

h/t Screenshot Daily

Artist uses GTA V to investigate the motivation behind modern terrorism

There is no logic to it, but it happens with enough regularity to be memorable: A tragedy occurs, and days later, journalists report that if it wasn’t for a quirk of fate it might have taken another victim. To wit, Dutch cyclist Maarten de Jong switched flights from Malaysian Airlines flights MH370 and MH17 at the last minute. The former flight is still unaccounted for and its passengers presumed dead while the latter was shot down over Ukraine. There is no genius in finding a cheaper flight or one with a shorter layover, as De Jong did. Nevertheless, he lived and others with tickets did not. There are no real lessons to be gleaned from De Jong’s experience. You will not have better chances of avoiding calamity by asking yourself what Maarten de Jong would do, but that does little to quell the temptation.

Even though random luck such as De Jong’s is fundamentally meaningless, it still informs how we think about tragedies. This idea courses through French digital artist Hugo Arcier’s 11 Executions. Filmed within the universe of Grand Theft Auto V, the 35-minute short film reenacts 11 different tragedies, some of which have been drawn from the headlines. To say the film consists of 11 executions, however, is a bit misleading. Each execution is actually carried out twice, with the game’s AI deciding on the precise details of when the shooter starts shooting or who gets shot. The tragedy itself is inevitable, but the question of who lives and who dies is largely random.

Though it was filmed within a game and relies in no small part on that game’s AI, 11 Executions demonstrates very precise formal control. Each execution follows the same pattern. The camera follows the murderer in a long tracking shot as they approach their victims. The precise moment at which this prelude will end is one of the short’s larger mysteries. Then the violence starts, some of it is seen but much more is heard while the camera lingers on the bodies of the dead. 11 Executions is plenty brutal, but it feels no need to show everything. The whole point of the exercise is to highlight how these simulations of the same incident differ; Arcier establishes the basic plot and then relies on his viewer to notice the small, random differences that crop up.

the camera lingers on the bodies of the dead.

The problem with 11 Executions lies in its larger ambition, which Arcier describes as “[using] the power of simulation of video game and try to clear up the motivation of these incomprehensible acts.” There is, however, nothing in the film—or its constituent segments—that explains why any of these actions are happening. Each segment opens as the murderer walks up to their victims. The decision to act has already been made. Consequently, the film never really clears up any of these motivations.

This does not mean that intentional acts of violence cannot coexist with a certain degree of randomness. The motivations of terrorists are largely understandable even though there is not always much logic to why victims were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Life allows for these dualities. 11 Executions, for all that it does well, tries to do the same but comes up short.

Oxenfree’s supernatural teenage drama will also become a movie

Have you played Oxenfree yet? Probably not, given that it comes out today. Do you think you’ll play it, or just wait for the movie? Oh! I forgot to tell you—turns out there might be a movie in the works.

This seems fitting given that Sean Krankel and Adam Hines, the two founders of Night School Studio and the creators of Oxenfree, put together a team comprising Telltale and Disney alumni to produce the game. The talent behind this videogame learned from movies and animation and now the result of their work will be fed back into the machine that enabled it. And, hey, we can’t complain, hungry as we are for hypertext and context in the Internet age we half expect the stories we consume to blossom with a multimedia logic.

Rest assured, that appears to be the treatment that Oxenfree will be getting soon, courtesy of Robert Kirkman and David Alpert’s (both executive producers of AMC’s The Walking Dead series) Skybound Entertainment. Oh yes, Oxenfree will be much more than just a videogame and a movie. Skybound has plans to “bring [Oxenfree] to additional mediums such as film, a web docuseries, merchandise, and more.” Indeed, the first three episodes of the docuseries started rolling out on January 11, ahead of the game’s release today, on January 15.

the transition from videogame to movie could potentially fare well

With all this going it’s about time you got familiar with Oxenfree if you haven’t already, then. It’s a supernatural thriller set on a partly abandoned island in the Pacific Northwest. A group of teenagers head there after dark to throw their yearly party on the beach. But after exploring some of the island’s eerier mysteries, they’re thrown into a confrontation with the paranormal that splits up the group, wreaking havoc on what they hoped would be a good time. The game is largely guided by conversation between characters as they move from place to place on the island, driven by clever story and dialogue that Night School Studio smartly placed at the core of the experience.

Given that Hines and Krankel of Night School Studio both cite films as key thematic touchstones for Oxenfree’s narrative—they name-check The Goonies, Stand By Me, and Poltergeist in the first docuseries episode—the transition from videogame to movie could potentially fare well, but all of that remains to be seen. For now, those interested in a spark of teenage drama and a spooky paranormal mystery would do well to check out the game.