Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 174

Dig into the brilliant, quiet death of DYG

A faceless figure stands in a field. The shovel tight in grip, its body rises up and down in exhaustion. It lifts the shovel, attempting to dig a hole beneath its feet. The figure is successful and sinks slowly into the earth. But then it fails: the loud ding of the shovel hitting the hard ground rings out. The shovel didn’t cut the soil quite right, not this time, at least. The sun quickly sets behind them, promising only to bury this figure in darkness… and then what? Such is the brief, bite-sized browser-based project DYG; an aesthetically pleasing game of “labor in the field,” as the description suggests.

DYG is simple, morbid, and serene

Artist Burgess Voshell is relatively new to the videogame development scene. In early 2015, he developed the “crush or be crushed” competitive game HEAVY PILLAR. A simple goal radiating in its action: jump around and knock over the heavy pillar. This is how you destroy your equally chaotically bouncy opponent under the monolithic block and ensure your own survival. With DYG, Voshell once more opts for simplicity, but this time finding a more meaningful, subtle message under the surface.

There are no opponents. Just the setting sun quickly diminishing the light of the day and a trusty shovel as your tool. At first, you dig, but you don’t know why. Are you a farmer tending your land? Perhaps you’ve been forced into slavery and dig with a rifle watching your back. The context isn’t revealed. And in the end it doesn’t matter. The title, DYG, it turns out, stands for “Dig Your Grave.” And so what does matter is how far you have dug: either your hole becomes a shallow grave that leaves your corpse open to a hungry vulture, or it’s a deeper one lets you rest in peace with only a gravestone to tell of your existence. You work for your own dignity in death.

It is perhaps unsurprising that Voshell manages to get so much out of a couple of key presses as DYG was created for a class taught by QWOP creator Bennett Foddy at NYU Game Center—QWOP, of course, notable for its dastardly four-button challenge. But DYG is more than simple. It is simultaneously morbid and serene. The lo-fi art is reminiscent of other similarly uncomplicated games, like the colorful environments of Proteus, the bleak space station of Another World, the frenetic neon blood stained arenas of Nidhogg, though DYG is more nuanced than these. The environment never changes, only the light itself as the sun sets. You don’t move, you stay in one place, racing the waning sun, and just dig, dig, dig your way to death. It’s a micro game-essay on the dichotomy of living and dying.

Play DYG for free in your browser here (Chrome or Safari are recommended).

What could an Indian videogame identity look like?

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

Indian game development is booming—or at least it is compared to where it was just a decade ago. Shailesh Prabhu, founder of Yellow Monkey studio and a lead designer on their isometric puzzle game Socioball, says that, “When I started working in games eleven years ago, there were about four game studios. When I started Yellow Monkey eight years ago, there were maybe eight? Right now, there are too many to count.”

That’s in no small part due to the fact that, despite the lack of formal avenues for developers, quality creators emerged throughout the years regardless. Last year Vidhvat Madan, for example, single handedly developed and released the adorable shooter Lovely Planet to critical acclaim. Arvind Yadav raised $36,000 (a right side more than its original $3,000 goal) to Kickstart Unrest, an RPG about Indian mythology. “When I was starting, the only place I could talk to other Indian developers was on a tiny Facebook group,” says Yadav. “Now, we have conferences, meetups, and game jams that happen throughout the year in major cities. It’s exploded.”

Aside from the more independent creative endeavors of Madan, Yadav, and Prabhu, mobile gaming in India continues to be a financial success as well, with titles like Star Chef and Teen Patti Gold each surpassing a million downloads. But while there’s a lot to be excited about, Prabhu views some of the more monetary successes as something of an obstruction for those who might want to deviate from the norm. Many of the financially viable games being made in India right now follow the free-to-play business model that targets a speculative Indian market. While these games, are by all means, fun and entertaining, “I’m still waiting for the day when we can start treating the medium as an art.”

Indian mythology has the potential to make incredible games

Yadav got tired of waiting. Having grown up playing games and reading a lot of Indian mythology, “I was sad that no one was bringing that unique approach to storytelling to videogames. I wanted to see something that I’d grown up with explored in this medium I loved.” So, after completing his second game, he decided he’d just do it himself. What he found was that Indian mythology—and Indian culture as a whole—has the potential to make incredible games. “Giant battles between armies of gods would actually make a phenomenal Total War game,” he says for example, “while more low-key stories about morals and ethics can provide a foundation for a Telltale style adventure.”

On the other hand, different aspects of traditional Indian culture can also prove a hindrance to this kind of expansion. Prabhu says that, “as a whole, we’re a very utilitarian country with very specific habits in regards to entertainment, which can make for a lot of problems in the gaming scene as a whole.” Spending on games isn’t a very common practice, especially for ideal demographics like teens and adults. Yet, despite the roadblocks ahead, both designers imagine an Indian videogame identity that takes advantage of all the culture has to offer. Prabhu envisions pulling from “our rich history of amazing art styles, music, and wonderful use of color. I’d also love to make an original soundtrack using Sitar, Flute and Tabla.”

Aside from mythology, Yadav believes creators might find inspiration in Bollywood, Cricket, dance, and theater. “Considering the sheer amount and diversity of the source material Indian developers have at their disposal, I do hope we do start to develop more of an Indian identity.” Unfortunately, at this moment, studios like Yellow Monkey still need to play catch up. Prabhu explains that the lack of infrastructure in the Indian games industry is a huge problem for them, presenting the team with many logistical headaches. “Right now we’re having issues getting dev kits for consoles for our next game. That’s just one thing designers often take for granted in the west.”

Videogame architecture is failing the poor of the world

As an architect, Alejandro Aravena traffics in a sort of obviousness that only becomes apparent in hindsight. The Chilean’s best works gradually reveal themselves to be fundamentally explainable. This, one might argue, is a more compelling magic trick than the eternal mystery of how some of his colleagues’ wild creations remain standing; Aravena is Penn and Teller to the starchitect’s Houdini.

Villa Verde in Constitución, Chile, is instructive in this regard. Completed by Aravena’s firm, Elemental, in 2013, the 484-unit housing development is composed of repeating peaked-roof forms. Beneath one side of each slope sits the interior of the home, walled in from the elements. The other side is a void, a covered outdoor space for families to use however they wish. Built on a tight budget, each unit is at once an archetypal house and something altogether more flexible. “As with all such ideas,” the Financial Times’ Edwin Heathcote writes, “once you see it, it is difficult to understand why it has not become ubiquitous.”

This same combination of the surprising and the eminently logical can be found in Tuesday’s announcement that Aravena is the 2016 winner of architecture’s highest honor, the Pritzker Architecture Prize. At first glance, he is not the most obvious of candidates, both younger (48) and with a less glitzy or international portfolio than the traditional laureate. With the benefit of hindsight, however, it’s easy to see how this all happened. Having served on the Pritzker jury for six years, taught in America, and delivered a well-received TED Talk, Aravena’s hardly an unknown. Moreover, Shigeru Ban’s Pritzker victory in 2014 suggested that the award’s jury was increasingly interested in architecture that addressed humanitarian and social concerns instead of that which catered to elites. As always, Aravena makes perfect sense once you see how the pieces line up.

Awards tend to say more about those who confer them the works they are meant to recognize. Mozart in the Jungle is not without merit as a television show, but it’s victory at the Golden Globes is in large part a reflection of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s soft spot for new shows, particularly those with foreign cast members. Likewise, it takes nothing away from Aravena to note that the most interesting aspect of his Pritzker win is the jury’s implicit statement of principles. As the Los Angeles Times’ Christopher Hawthorne notes:

“The Pritzker has faced rising criticism in recent years for symbolizing a rather old-fashioned definition of architectural practice, to put it mildly. With a few (but only a few) exceptions, it’s honored men at the expense of women; individuals at the expense of pairs or collectives; architects who work for wealthy, establishment clients at the expense of those working for the poor or disenfranchised; and north over south. It’s basically been the Great Man Theory of architecture as represented by a fancy bronze medallion and a check for $100,000. Choosing Aravena is a departure in terms of the last two categories, but of course not the first two. A modest move in a different direction, let’s say. The Pritzker press release says he ‘epitomizes the revival of a more socially engaged architect.'”

So this year’s award represents progress of a limited (and arguably self-serving) kind. It’s not much, but it’s something, a small step towards expanding society’s image of what constitutes interesting or noteworthy architecture. In the real world, architecture moves slowly. In virtual worlds, however, architecture moves even more slowly.

There are two main architectural typologies in games: the tower game and the city builder. The former is in larger part a vertical reconfiguration of the latter, but that is a statement of architectural principles. Tower games, like Blockhood and Brick Blocks, encourage the player to treat the elements of urban life as fundamentally flexible components that can be rearranged at will. City builders such as Polynomics, on the other hand, are more interested in systems, and whether a territory as opposed to a single building needs can satisfy a population’s needs. These are questions that need to be answered, but they are not the only questions, at least not in the way games can make it appear.

In a recent interview with Dezeen, the German humanitarian aid and refugee expert Kilian Kleinschmidt argued that “the cities of tomorrow” are refugee camps. “The average stay today in a camp is 17 years. That’s a generation,” he noted with reference to European refugee camps. The duration of stays in camps or makeshift housing on other continents can be much longer and all the more challenging. This calls into question the very designation of ‘temporary housing’. Can it even be meaningful if families live in such houses for much of their lives? Is the only difference between a city and a camp the level of care devoted to each? If so, that’s a problem.

The challenges of displacement, particularly over long periods of time, have occasioned all sorts of interesting architectural interventions. Abeer Seikaly won the Lexus Design Award in 2013 for “Weaving a Home,” a flexible tent concept that can adapt to different environments. The project’s renderings could just as easily be used in a future edition of Star Wars. Shigeru Ban, the 2014 Pritzker laureate, designed shelters for displaced peoples in Rwanda, Sri Lanka, China’s Sichuan province, and Japan. Likewise, Arevana’s practice worked on the master plan for Constitucion, Chile, after it was flattened by a tsunami in 2010. The ensuing project is a testament to cost-effective planning and public consultation. Indeed, Aravena credits those consultations with pointing to the importance of large flood barriers.

Where are these ideas in virtual architecture? Games about humanitarian crises, like Syrian Journey and Cloud Chasers—A Journey of Hope, focus on the fleeing part of the refugee experience. This may make for good gameplay in the narrowest possible sense of the term—running, or any gerund for that matter, is the sort of action that can be recreated or controlled—but it’s only a small part of the story. What about those who cannot run far afield? What about the far larger populations who live in refugee camps or are displaced by conflict or calamity? Games are good at imagining wild architectural ideas and challenging players to come up with solutions to big problems in some scenarios, but where real architectural imagination is most needed, they continue to lag behind the Pritzker jury.

Tinder matchmaking is more like Warcraft than you might think

“Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” says the pick-up artist. “I’ve just got more game than you,” says your roommate who wears too much cologne. Comparisons between dating and gaming are commonplace in our web-obsessed culture, and thanks to a recent profile on Tinder from Fast Company, it turns out this connection is less superficial than you might think.

We’ve all been there. You spend hours in matchmaking waiting to get picked for a quick game of Halo, but see no results. You’re swiping right all day on Tinder, but nobody swipes back. In this context, browsing for dates on Tinder can seem a bit like being stuck while looking for matches in a multiplayer game lobby. Even when you’re itching to play, you can’t get started until the game shows you a match you might be interested in. Similarly, Tinder users’ options are limited to who they can find in their queue. It’s a frustrating position to be in, but just as more matches become available when a Call of Duty player “ranks up,” Tinder queues mysteriously start to fill with hotties when the app’s users deem you “more desirable.” So how does this happen?

According to Tinder CEO Jonathan Badeen, Tinder uses a variation of ELO scoring to determine how you rank among the site’s userbase, and therefore, which profiles to suggest to you and whose queues your profile shows up in. Invented by physics professor Arpad Elo to determine rankings among chess players, ELO assigns ranks by judging players’ presumed skill levels against each other. If two players with the same ELO rank play each other, their rank should stay the same regardless of the outcome of the match, to reflect their similar skill level. If a player with a high ELO rank plays a lower-ranked player, though, then the system uses the difference between their ELO scores to recalibrate their rankings.

If the high-ranking player beats the low-ranking player, then her ELO score will only go up a small amount, to reflect the suspected ease of the matchup and suggest more challenging opponents in the future. But if a higher-ranking player loses to a lower-ranking player, her ELO score will drop significantly, to reflect the severity of the upset. As a result, she may find herself matched against lower ranking players until she can prove she’s ready for a tougher opponent.

your ranking is more determined by how you compare to other people rather than personal stats

“I used to play a long time ago, and whenever you play somebody with a really high score, you end up gaining more points than if you played someone with a lower score,” explained Badeen, recalling his days playing Warcraft. “It’s a way of essentially matching people and ranking them more quickly and accurately based on who they are being matched up against.”

The result is a system where your ranking is more determined by how you compare to other people rather than personal stats. The system has since been adapted for use in football, baseball, and even videogames such as League of Legends and Warcraft. So when translated to Tinder, the algorithm can be understood on a basic level as one where who you match with determines who the app shows to you. Get matched with those with a high ELO, and the site will start populating your queue with the people Tinder as a whole finds more desirable. Get matched with those sporting a lower ELO, and the site will only show you people who don’t get as many matches from high-ranking users. Your ELO is determined by the supposed desirability of the people who think you’re worth dating.

So if you want Tinder to think you’re cool, you need to match up with a greater number of popular users and fewer unpopular users. Tinder data analyst Chris Dumler calls it a “vast voting system,” and the site asserts that it’s different from attractiveness ranking app Hot-or-Not because profile pictures aren’t the only factor in who might match with you. Workplace, education, and other self-summary sections play just as important of a role. Essentially, the key isn’t how many people find you attractive, but which people think you’re worth dating.

For a competitive system where everyone is trying to achieve the same goal—win—this makes sense. But attraction is a personal thing, and a system like this might leave those with tastes that cross expectations feeling underserved. What if higher-ELO people match with you, but you’re actually interested in the type of people who normally have lower-ELO ranks? Just because other high-cheekboned and full-lipped ELO titans aren’t interested in them doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be. You might even be driven away by traits that Tinder as a whole finds more attractive. But because the high-ELO community has deemed you worthy, your queue will be filled with them while the type of people you’re actually interested in remain out of reach.

the key isn’t how many people find you attractive, but which people think you’re worth dating

And then there are the users who have trouble finding matches at all, the Tinder equivalent of ELO Hell. Coined by the League of Legends community as being stuck in lower-level matches or not even being able to find opponents at all, ELO Hell is when a player is stuck below what they consider to be their skill level (which is often blamed on incompetent teammates). Because these players’ options for matchups are so limited to begin with, they feel their rank is being kept lower than it should be simply because they don’t have the chance to prove themselves in the first place.

Dating is often framed as a competition, where one has to strive to attract as many people as possible. In this context, it might make sense to use a system born out of competition to rank which “leagues” people fall into. But the end goal of dating is one of the biggest cooperative endeavors people can take on together. Which raises the question: Is a system born out of a war game like Chess really the most appropriate way to judge compatibility?

Explore dreamlike remixes of New York City’s early 20th century apartments

The idea of the New York City apartment as we know it had yet to be established at the end of the 19th century. The inhabitants of huge multi-occupant living spaces were mostly low-income immigrant families, isolated physically and culturally. The change began with Jacob Riis’s 1890 book How the Other Half Lives, which shocked upper and middle class New Yorkers with descriptions and photographs of the abject poverty of the slums. As the 20th century began, improvements to tenement living, changes to laws mandating building height, and the new subway lines paved the way for the apartment to become a fixture in all social classes.

At the same time, the apartment was rebranded as a luxury option—marketing teams distributed brochures that advertised units with ten or more rooms— foyers, kitchens, libraries, vestibules—in taller buildings in more varied architectural styles, Beaux-Arts included. By the 30s, almost everyone in Manhattan was living in an apartment.

Mansion Maniac reconstructs that dream-like outrageousness

Mansion Maniac is a “public domain remix” by Mauricio Giraldo of New York Public Library Labs that collects rooms from these brochures and shows off imagined luxury apartments that build themselves piece-by-piece as you wander your square blue avatar through them.

The logic that governs the project is spatial, rather than architectural—one room leads into any other, as long as there’s a door. Some apartments generated for me felt like I might want to move in tomorrow, others less so: one apartment is nothing but the same staircase leading into the same library over and over and over; another is a palatial front on central park west leading into only a kitchenette. When Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof dreams of being wealthy, he yearns for “one long staircase just going up, and another even longer coming down.” Mansion Maniac reconstructs that dream-like outrageousness created by the wealth disparity at the turn of the century.

If the rooms that appear have enough doors, the apartment can continue to grow to the point where it doesn’t fit in the space it lays out: rooms overlap, occupying the same two-dimensional space. The same halls reappear, the same kitchens… getting lost and stuck in one of these houses feels like Giraldo is at once admiring the scope and majesty of the apartment complexes and criticizing their indistinct qualities of luxury.

As much as Mansion Maniac speaks to the consumption of living space as commercial art and to class segregation of early 20th century New York, it also provides its assets to the viewer, and opens up its source code, making itself available for reconstruction and reuse.

Mansion Maniac (along with other “public domain remixes” Navigating the Green Book and Fifth Avenue, Then & Now) helps promote the NYPL’s effort to digitize their increasingly massive collection of public domain materials. Giraldo also links (on his Twitter) to a blog with a tutorial for other map projects that don’t require significant coding knowledge.

You can play Mansion Maniac in your browser.

Rocket League blasts into the world of esports

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

The easy-to-learn “cars playing soccer” game brings the spectator-friendly accessibility of traditional sports to the technological world of competitive gaming. Anyone who’s had to suffer through watching a friend or significant other play “just one more round” of a videogame will readily admit that most titles aren’t such thrilling spectator sports. While slaying enemies in Halo 5 is exciting for the shooter, it’s a snooze-fest for any player without a controller in hand. One game, however, seems to have cracked that code.

Psyonix’s Rocket League not only pulls spectators into the action, it achieves the sought-after balance of successful competitive videogames: easy to pick up; difficult to master. Within days of its July release, Rocket League took the world of eSports by storm, amassing followers on streaming services like Twitch and securing a place in big-name tournament organizations such as the Electronic Sports League (ESL) and Major League Gaming (MLG).

The secret to its success? Beyond the eccentric combination of cars playing soccer, Rocket League manages to be something other esports aren’t: A game that reads like a sport in the most traditional sense. In Rocket League, the object of the game is the same as any soccer match—simpler, even, since there are no red cards, yellow cards or penalty kicks. Players must put the giant ball in the other team’s goal by controlling a car that can perform only a handful of basic maneuvers: drive, jump, dodge and boost.

Rocket League achieves the balance of being easy to pick up; difficult to master

As any high-level Rocket League player will admit, of course, the simplicity of the controls makes each face-off a serious test of reflexes, speed and familiarity with the game’s physics. “By the time you’ve spotted the ball’s position and are charging down toward it, an opponent has already hit the ball down toward your goal,” said Ryan “Doomsee” Graham, the captain of Team Rocket, a top competitive team based in Europe. “Everybody is trying to improve their speed just that little bit more, and the ball can barely travel two feet before being hit by another car.”

Most esports, on the other hand, look nothing like their non-digital counterparts. Fire up a game of League of Legends, DOTA 2, Starcraft or Street Fighter, or start streaming a match on Twitch, and players won’t see a green pitch with two goals or a hardwood floor with two baskets. Instead, there’s a dizzyingly complex interface packed with dozens of buttons, functions and information readouts. Players execute split-second combos that require thousands of hours of studying arcane, invisible systems.

For the initiated, it’s extremely thrilling. For the n00bs, it can simply be confusing. At the highest level of competitive play, other esports like League of Legends also boil down to contests of speed. The player with the most clicks per second or “actions per minute” gains a huge advantage. In Rocket League, speed and lightning-fast decision-making translate into dizzying spectacles of vehicular athleticism. As influential game critic Ian Bogost observed, game design is always, on some level, “a process of abstraction.” Even reflex-heavy competitive games often translate simple button presses into complex actions, movements and combos (not to mention numerical values). But Rocket League resists abstraction on a fundamental level. The game puts as little as possible between the player’s input and the car’s movement.

From a spectator’s point of view, this means that watching a player fly up, do a flip in the air, and punt the ball into the goal after the clock hits zero—which is exactly what happened at the end of the first Rocket League tournament for MLG back in August—is a lot like watching the same thing happen in the physical world. In this case, it’s better because in the physical world, cars can’t fly.

“Some of the inspirations we had were games like Tony Hawk, Amped, and SSX—snowboarding, skiing and skateboarding games,” said Psyonix CEO Dave Hagewood, who considered having the cars sliding on rails during one phase of the game’s inception. “We thought it was a cool combination to take a trick-based game and put a car into it.” Ultimately, the game’s tricks involved freestyle movements. “The beauty of the game comes in when someone who doesn’t know how to fly first sees it done while watching a stream,” said Randy Gibbons, manager of the top-ranked North American team formerly known as Cosmic Aftershock, which won the first-ever tournament for ESL and went up against Urban in the MLG Final.

Speed and lightning-fast decision-making translate into vehicular athleticism

In late October, Cosmic became “iBP Cosmic,” picking up Rocket League’s biggest-ever endorsement deal. The saga behind Rocket League, however, began long before its little-known predecessor, Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle Cars, hit the PlayStation Network in 2008. Hagewood got his start by designing a vehicle mod for Epic Games’ popular multiplayer first-person shooter Unreal Tournament 2003. Epic then approached him to design the marquee feature of UT2004, a multiplayer mode called Onslaught that focused on—as the announcer liked to say in a deep, gravelly voice—“vehicular manslaughter.” Aspects of Onslaught are everywhere in Rocket League, from the tight yet “floaty” handling of the cars themselves to the way the ball explodes gratuitously every time a player scores a goal.

“That’s my style. I like big explosions,” Hagewood said. “Maybe it’s the Michael Bay-style of making games. “I love that kind of short, quick, very visceral kind of gameplay,” he continued. “And that’s exactly what you see in Rocket League. We pulled a lot of that same kind of style forward.” It might seem paradoxical to find this kind of “maximalism” in a minimalist game. But that might also be the point.

Since its release, Rocket League has shaken up the esports world by delivering a very different vision of what the term “esports” means to most players: Something that feels, looks and plays like a physical sport but is amped up to the extreme. Only time will tell whether the game can grow while retaining the simplicity that makes it so distinct. But one thing is for sure: gamers and spectators can expect to see similar games on the market in the future.

The game of grief

Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here!

Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section.

That Dragon, Cancer (PC, Mac)
NUMINOUS GAMES

Many people pretend to know how you should grieve. Endless self-help books and articles give instructions on what’s “normal” and “healthy” and “expected.” But in an actual experience of grief, you learn something much more terrifying: there are no rules for losing a loved one. No one knows how to get through it. That agonizing uncertainty is about the only commonality. Whether you scream or stay silent, feel numb or like you’re on fire—everyone grieves differently, each experience as senseless and unsatisfying as the last. Stricken with the prospect of losing their their five-year-old son to brain cancer, the Green family decided to make a videogame. In a medium too-often conflated with power fantasies, goals, and high scores, Amy and Ryan Green created a story about hope in the face of defeat. That Dragon, Cancer follows their family into the belly of terminal illness, and the impossible love and optimism that you must find in the wake of insurmountable loss.

Perfect for: Cancer survivors, caregivers, grievers

Playtime: A couple hours

Rainbow Six Siege isn’t happy playing pretend soldiers

I unfurl a breaching charge like a gift, placing its sealed canvas against a boarded-up wall and letting the adhesive do its work. I huddle flat against a clear section of the same wall, switching the zoom on my scope, and pull the trigger. The glorified garment bag of an explosive bursts in fire and shrapnel, cleaving a roughly man-shaped hole through the splintered wood.

I peek through, inching my crosshairs into the opening, watching for motion. My teammates circle around the other side, preparing their own breach using not an explosive but the messy precision of a sledgehammer, courtesy of another one of our operatives. I look further, further—tracers in the air, furious cones of life-ending warning splattering my screen. I drop before I know what’s happening.

My team’s intrusion goes better. Pop, pop, pop. Just like that, the match is over, and the play’s struck.

Tom Clancy’s universe is competence porn

Tom Clancy’s universe has always been about a certain type of pageantry. To put it crassly, it’s competence porn. The politics in Tom Clancy’s universe have always been lukewarm and opaque, especially in the videogames. What matters instead is the spectacle of grizzled experts doing what they do best. Bringing in old men to finish what the young men never could. A middle manager’s military thriller. In this respect, Rainbow Six: Siege is sublime, at least for as long as its structures can maintain its playcraft.

///

If Tom Clancy’s “Rainbow” unit—, a fictitious counter-terrorism unit comprised of operatives on loan from the special forces of various NATO countries—, has a real-world equivalent, it would be JSOC. Created in the 1980s, JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) is a command within the United States Military that focuses on cooperation between the country’s Special Forces operations; they study tactics, communication protocols, conduct training, and commands the Special Mission Units, in charge of some of the most highly classified military operations the US conducts.

Rainbow Six: Siege seems directly inspired by the actions of JSOC’s most famous Special Mission Unit: SEAL Team Six (named as such to confuse the Soviets—there are no units designated SEAL Teams 1-5). Every match in Siege feels like an homage to the Team Six raid fictionalized in the high-intensity sequence that closes out 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty: all pageantry and team tactics, as one team huddles inside a house or similar structure, constructing defenses and planning ambushes while the other team breaches and clears.

The whole endeavor also has the feeling of a training simulation, a highly theatrical Joint-Readiness Exercise where both sides are equipped and prepared with the highest of the high tech. Sliding metal reinforcements shield walls from breaching, while remote-controlled drones let the offense scout out obstacles before entry.

In keeping with the simulated aesthetic, barricades have painted Xs on them, and furniture is pre-arranged in gunfight-ready configurations. A pretend soldier’s ideal playground. The only thing real is the blood.

Over that backdrop, Rainbow Six: Siege proceeds in a series of thrilling, brief encounters. It’s almost exclusively multiplayer, an usurper reaching for Counter Strike: Global Offensive‘s position as the thinking man’s esports shooter of choice. Over time, competitors can unlock different operatives to play as, giving them new military fetishistic toys to play with, new strategic options to apply to the ritual of government-sanctioned breaking and entering. Or, of course, the wealthy or desperate can spend real money to break down the game’s progress walls with Ubisoft FunBucks.

Rainbow Six: Siege is almost reaching for the position as the thinking man’s esports shooter of choice

Matches here feel legitimately sophisticated. Each encounter will likely only use a fraction of the gizmos or locations on offer, allowing for substantial variation and applied skill. A well-performed match feels like an authored military thriller, precise and cruel.

///

If only the illusion wasn’t so precarious. Siege is the first Rainbow Six to emphasize multiplayer over all other elements. In that context, the purely competitive focus here could be framed as daring and original, but more often than not it exposes the game to more reality than it can handle. When everything comes together, the experience soars. In practicality, that rarely happens.

When Ubisoft demoed the game for journalists, the players communicated with each other fluidly and articulately, dropping military lingo in hushed tones. In the wild world of online multiplayer, this is not what you’re going to get. Instead, you’ll find, well, the people who play videogames, running the wide gamut from impassioned to silent to twelve-year-olds. And the network support is troublingly unreliable. After a month of play, I still find myself finishing as many matches as I don’t, the smoky loading screen a familiar enemy. No one ever dropped a match in Black Hawk Down.

These are standard, dull videogame complaints. But Rainbow Six: Siege offers a dedication to a precise sort of fantasy, a vision of imagined excellence that seems entirely underserved by the package in which it’s delivered. This is in many ways the most precise, focused Rainbow Six since the first, which focused on intricate pathing and quick deaths in a quasi-realistic simulation of Special Forces soldiery. That game, however, works in part because it’s a closed box, just one roleplaying commander versus a world of AI assailants. The variable factors of online multiplayer break the tenuous illusions Rainbow Six takes as its foundation. Brechtian alienation isn’t a good look here. Without a single-player portion to better service the military fantasy at the series core, Siege runs thin.

Tom Clancy’s world can be a fun place to spend your time, with some caveats. It requires a fundamental buy-in, a choice to ignore the troubling and naïve politics in favor of an idealized, action hero view of who the Special Forces are and what they do. Rainbow Six: Siege has the basic pieces in place to offer that experience but sabotages them by forcing the illusion to rub against the real world in ways the fantasy isn’t prepared to handle. More often than not, playing Siege, one doesn’t feel like a soldier. You feel like a player. And that’s precisely what this game doesn’t want.

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

What are VR music videos good for?

Top Chef notwithstanding, it is rarely advisable to see how a sausage is made. This is not a new aphorism—aphorisms are rarely new—but technology has given it new resonance. It has never been easier to distribute bonus content, to be ‘closer’ to artists, and to see heretofore-mysterious processes. All this access, however, blurs the line between immersion and sausage making.

Case in point: the release of Swiss artist KnoR’s new EP, “Don’t Go.” There’s all the standard spec, three songs and a music video, but the release also includes a virtual reality app because…why not?

a lot like sitting too close to a laser

Made for Google Cardboard, the app gradually unveils different elements of the song. Bright, flickering lines appear as you move around, searing these elements into your memory, sometimes painfully so. The net effect of the imagery and electric feedback audio is a lot like sitting too close to a laser—or, more honestly, a dying fluorescent bulb. Unlike the song, KnoR’s VR app, which was made in conjunction with the artist Mativa, is lacking in fluency. It comes across as a series of vignettes, each representing one note or sequence.

Is “Don’t Go” a visualization of KnoR’s song or an explanation of its constituent parts? One imagines the intent was something closer to the former, a fluid experience that didn’t really pan out. But in a Google Cardboard headset, you’re too close to have this kind of perspective. Bonus content is about proximity, but VR may offer a bit too much of that. What begins as a refreshed version of iTunes or WinAmp’s music visualizations ends up being all about the making of this particular sausage.

There are, of course, other ways to combine virtual reality and music promotion. In late December, Björk released a VR app/music video for her song “Stonemilker”. The VR experience, which first appeared in exhibits and is also available as an interactive video on YouTube, shows the singer on a beach. She moves about from time to time, and eventually multiple Björks come into view, but there isn’t much more to it than that.

“Stonemilker” embraces the idea of immersion as opposed to what can really be done with technology. Virtual reality isn’t necessarily adding much to the experience, but the technology and paraphernalia walls the viewer off from the world, which is conducive to a focused listening experience. Proximity is not the end goal here; it is just a means to an end.

Between Me and the Night promises magical realism with spooky undertones

When you’re a kid, monsters aren’t just something you entertain as a distant possibility—there are times when you’re, like, 90 percent sure they’re actually there. I can remember several nights lying awake in bed in my childhood home, unable to close my eyes because of my deep conviction that something on the other side of those slatted closet doors had it in for me. The “something” changed over the years (it was Chucky from Child’s Play until I saw The Exorcist for the first time), but my sense that it was more than possible that those fictional characters had tracked me down in real life persisted probably until middle school.

This is what makes magical realism feel like such a childlike genre—the way fantasy comingles so easily and believably with the real world. Salman Rushdie’s novels, for example, unfold with a storybook cadence; in them, fantastical transformations are detailed as simple facts, or the existence of elemental spirits might be taken as a given. When held together by the right hands, these two worlds—reality and fantasy—bubble with a special chemistry. And it looks like Portuguese development team RainDance LX might know the trick to concocting this effervescent mix.

fascination with the porousness of reality

Due out on January 22nd for PC, Between Me and the Night starts out in the attic bedroom of the young, redheaded main character. There’s nothing unusual about the room—an unmade bed, comic books stacked on a desk, toys littered here and there—or even the rest of the house. But within 15 minutes, you’ll encounter multiple wispy phantasms, a television that sprouts long, spider-like legs, and an evil cat the size of an Escalade. These events aren’t greeted with any fanfare whatsoever.

According to creator João Ortega, the fascination with the porousness of reality was inspired in part by his lifelong love of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks series. The difference is, according to Ortega, that reality holds even less sway in Between Me and the Night. “In BMATN there really isn’t a ‘real’ world,” he wrote in the game’s devlog. “It’s like if Twin Peaks was set in The Black Lodge and then there was another door in there that led us to another, even more twisted reality.”

From what I’ve seen of Between Me and the Night, there’s enough of the real world that the bizarre elements are rendered more as absurd than overly “twisted.” But however you choose to describe it, navigating that gloomy house and meeting those outré creatures gave me a familiar shiver, a feeling I remember from when I was still suspicious of what might hide in the shadows of my own house.

Between Me and the Night is currently available on Steam Early Access and will be receiving a full release on January 22. You can find out more about the game and RainDance LX at their website.