Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 184

The push to make Halo 5 the next big eSport

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

For an entire generation of players, there is nothing sweeter than scoring the winning kill in a Halo death-match and leading your team to victory. With the first-ever Halo World Championship, Microsoft is making a concentrated effort to get these good vibes out of the living room and into a giant eSports arena. But does Halo 5: Guardians, the franchise’s latest installment, have what it takes to make it as the next major eSport?

Halo 5’s executive producer Josh Holmes certainly thinks so. Holmes recently told the gaming site Polygon that they are ready to “fully [embrace] that legacy with the biggest investment in Xbox eSports history.” And Microsoft, the game’s publisher, is putting its money where its mouth is. The company has invested $1 million in prize money for the world championships, with an additional $700,000 raised through crowdfunding, positioning the tournament as a huge event. But funding and throwing a successful tournament with lots of players is only the first step toward transforming a popular game into a successful eSport.

There’s certainly a growing audience for the Halo World Championship to grab. A Juniper Research report published this month forecasts the eSports audience will more than double to 310 million annual viewers by 2020. Today, the NFL reached 220 million people around the world, almost half the audience Formula 1 racing attracts. That fame is fed by fans who attend competitions and tune in via the Internet. “It’s not just about how many people play the game,” said Rahul Sood, the CEO and founder of Unikrn, an eSports company based in Seattle. “The biggest challenge is generating viewership.”

With Microsoft’s vast reservoir of current and retired Halo players, building an audience shouldn’t be much of a stretch. For many of today’s gamers, deathly shootouts between Xbox’s patented red versus blue skirmishes are a defining videogame experience that’s etched in their memories. “It is easy for a mainstream audience to watch a Halo game and understand what is going on compared with watching a game of Defense of the Ancients (DOTA),” Sood explained. “Microsoft has that going for them.”

The game has the potential to become one of the most accessible eSports

The game has the potential to become one of the most accessible eSports by virtue of the fact that so many people are intimately familiar with it. The problem, however, is that, over the past 15 years, the modern landscape of competitive games has already found its tentpole titles, such as Counter-Stike: Global Offensive, which currently presides as the hot shooter. This means Halo is jumping into the bustling world of eSports from the sidelines.

What’s more, as a general rule of thumb, eSport fans prefer the intense strategy of multiplayer online battle arena games like Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storms to the visceral skill of first-person shooters. In that light, banking on Halo to capture the hearts and minds of eSport fanatics is a bit of a gamble. Players are a very fickle bunch, and the games they flock to have little to do with marketing pushes.

“It’s weird because you can’t predict the audience,” says George Woo, who is the marketing manager of the Intel Extreme Masters World Championship. He has helped manage dozens of eSports competitions in different parts of the world. “You have a product you think the audience will love, and they don’t. You have some product that you never think would make it, and it’s popular.”

To his point, Rocket League came out of the woodwork to make a splash in 2015. “As a publisher, you develop a game, you throw it in the market, and you hope people will gravitate to it,” Woo explained. If companies are lucky? “Boom, you’re Riot,” he said, referring to the developer of League of Legends, which is unparalleled in its eSports popularity.

Halo will need a new approach of constantly improving, balancing and updating

One of the greatest challenges that Microsoft faces in creating the next big eSport is that Halo 5 is, well, Halo. “A few years ago, videogames were released kind of like how movies were released, where it came out, a lot of people watched it, and then people started slowly forgetting about it,” said Michal Blicharz, vice president of pro gaming at the Electronic Sports League. “Now we have free-to-play games where people are engaged with a single game for years on end and never get bored of them. That entirely changed the eSports landscape.”

While Halo attracts a dedicated following who plays religiously, the series still adheres to the old blockbuster movie lifecycle: A new game in the franchise comes out every few years and creates a bunch of publicity, before gradually fading into a memory. In order to survive as an eSport, it will need more than a world class tournament to attract players. Halo will need a new approach of constantly improving, balancing and updating the game to keep fans and players interested, according to Blicharz.

This time around, the developer 343 Industries is taking a constantly evolving approach to multiplayer, pledging to provide the consistent improvements and tweaks that eSports need to grow and breathe. This will be particularly helpful as the game attempts to entice players into the arena. The finals in March will host the best of the best, inviting sixteen Halo teams from five different regions around the globe. With such a massive prize pool at stake, players are likely to bring their A-games, and the crown will be hotly contested.

With help from developers and event planners, Halo players can focus through their iron sights to win the big cash prize, while fans who love to watch eSports will be turned on to a new delight.

The epic theater of videogames

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Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section.

Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist (PC, Mac)
By Crows Crows Crows

Davey Wreden’s follow-up to his videogame satire The Stanley Parable earlier this year, The Beginner’s Guide, was an introspective game essay on expression and creativity through games. It was solemn in tone and seemed to speak specifically to the aching hearts of game creators. The other person behind The Stanley Parable, William Pugh found a new team, called it Crows Crows Crows, and together they’ve put together a response with an entirely different taste (although the first-person exploration with voiceover format remains) that’s mostly aimed at game players. Employing the stuttering parlance of UK comedian Simon Amstell, Crows Crows Crows has put together a humorous game about a heist that begs to be followed by the question ‘or is it?’ The answer is, well, yes it is about a heist, but the subject is overshadowed by the Brechtian delivery of the whole experience. To say more would be to ruin the surprise. Suffice to say, it’s a truly theatrical spin on videogames, which may tickle you, and will most likely encourage you to revisit at least once.

Perfect for: Game creators, theater goers, Simon Amstell fans

Playtime: Twenty minutes

Using videogames to combat mental illness stigma

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

Mental illness is a complex, nuanced subject that many forms of entertainment have tried to faithfully portray. Movies such as Silver Linings Playbook and TV series like Showtimes’ Homeland have succeeded to varying degrees, but many attempts fall into clichés that perpetuate misinformation. Despite some mishaps like Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, where those who suffer from mental illness are seen as defective, video games are a powerful vehicle for exploring this topic in new and enlightening ways.

“The challenge games face in regard to the mental health discussion is how to bring these issues to light without falling into the common traps,” Patrick Lindsey wrote in a 2014 opinion piece for Polygon, noting that horror games tend to be the guiltiest of misrepresentation. “Mental illness is horrifying for those who suffer, and it can drastically affect one’s perception of the world, but to focus solely on the spooky and the irrational is to only tell half the story.”

Because players adopt the perspective of the game’s characters, they experience the symptoms and thinking patterns of different mental illnesses firsthand. This gameplay method could help increase understanding and empathy when done well. “Videogames in particular have the uniquely awesome power to virtually place you directly in the shoes of another person, creating incredible opportunities to educate, raise awareness and build empathy around topics like various psychiatric conditions,” said Erin Reynolds, creative director for the horror adventure game Nevermind.

Researchers have found promising leads when using videogames to treat individuals suffering from illnesses like PTSD. Through a method called “exposure therapy,” virtual reality games help patients with anxiety and phobias address their symptoms in safe, controlled virtual environments. By understanding the link between videogames and mental illness, experts can help patients develop coping mechanisms.

Games like Nevermind take a different, yet equally ambitious approach to addressing mental health issues. It uses optional biofeedback technology to help players manage their fear and anxiety response to the scary scenarios in the game.“From the very beginning of Nevermind’s conceptual development, I knew I wanted to work within the horror genre, not only because it would allow for an aesthetic I’m personally drawn toward, but also because of the capabilities horror games have to evoke a physiological reaction and leave a lasting impression on the player,” said Reynolds.

How horror manifests itself in Nevermind is important. While many games still fall prey to perpetuating stigma and misrepresentation, horror games like Evil Within in particular continue to use mental illness as set dressing, vilifying the people suffering from it. Instead of jump scares, however, Nevermind uses “twisted, surreal and oftentimes disturbing settings, sounds and imagery.” The player’s imagination is ultimately more dangerous than the game world itself.

The player’s imagination is ultimately more dangerous than the game world itself.

Reynolds said this is similar to how things often play out in real life. “I’ve found that the things we fear or worry about—be them an upcoming due date, speaking in front of a large group, taking a test, etc.—rarely are actually directly harmful to us,” she said. “Rather, it’s the unaddressed feelings of stress and anxiety that we experience leading up to that event that drain our energy and serve to harm us more than anything else.”

Nevermind wants to teach people how to face their fears head-on, tackling them and gaining the confidence to handle fear and anxiety both in the game and in real life. In doing so, it not only helps people who may be suffering from mental illness, but also begins to chip away at the unfortunate stigma attached to it.

“The more we accurately represent the complexities and ubiquity of all types of psychological distress, the less ‘unknown,’ and thus the less ‘scary,’ it will be,” Reynolds explained. “People might be able to see that an illness doesn’t define them; rather, it is just one aspect of life that the individual has an ongoing struggle with.”

Although creating games that improve empathy and reduce stigma may be a great start, the question of how to treat mental illness remains. Here, too, videogames might have an answer, according to Nicky Case, who creates everything from augmented and virtual reality experiences to games. Case has explored the topic through what he calls “interactive explanations.” Designed in a manner similar to a brief animated short, these exploration narratives provide powerful visual cues and viewer feedback to help illustrate how different complex societal or psychological systems work.

His latest interactive explanation is Neurotic Neurons, a quick primer on the way our brains learn and can be re-trained through treatments like exposure therapy. Demonstrating how neurons create and destroy thoughts, Case makes conquering his lifelong anxiety not only feel possible but actionable. “While doing research for it, there was something stressful looming over me, and I wanted to avoid it,” he said of his own struggles while making Neurotic Neurons.

“Just in time, I stumbled across exposure therapy and learned that while avoidance may feel relieving in the short term, in the long term it just prolongs the anxiety. That really helped me.” Case’s theory is that he can help people understand how to change the way they think through safe exposure to phobias and stressors. This works beyond anxiety and mental illness issues, too, as he’s contemplated using the same method to help people learn empathy toward other cultures and identities.

Neurotic Neurons provides a powerful explanation: Our brains are malleable forms that can, over time, be re-wired with healthier, safer thoughts. “It can be worked through,” he said. “It’s hard, but it can be worked through.”

Finding disappointment at New York’s Museum of Feelings

Open from November 24th to December 15th, the Museum of Feelings has been generating buzz recently as New York’s latest pop-up, announced with a mysterious website and slick series of subway ads that made me want to visit if only to find out what the hell it is. The resulting trip gave me feelings, sure, but not the kind I was hoping for, and probably not those the organizers were going for either.

When I first arrived outside the Museum of Feelings earlier this week, I was greeted with a line and display reminiscent of the Apple Store. Fitting, given that I had to walk through New York’s posh Brookfield Place mall to arrive at the site, but an odd feeling for something claiming to be a museum. The outside of the building looked like any of the other minimalistic white slabs dotting the New York skyline; however, it was accentuated by a purple LED strip as well as a trendy square logo which read “MUSE UMOF FEEL INGS.” The color of the LED’s display was supposed to change to reflect New York’s mood by “scrubbing social media data,” so I checked the color chart on the Museum’s website to find that purple meant the city was calm. Looking at the blank faces of those waiting in line, I had to wonder whether ‘bored’ would be more appropriate.

I joined my friends, who had already been in line for 45 minutes, and proceeded to wait another 30 or so minutes to get inside. Admission was free, but they were only letting us through in small groups. As I entered, I quickly understood why. The Museum was less of a collection of exhibits to explore at my own pace and more of a guided tour. I was handed a card with the Museum’s logo on the front and a reflective surface on the back and told to wait for the Optimism room. As I entered the Optimism chamber, I found a prism shooting out a rainbow of light at the wall and was invited to use my card to reflect the light however I wished. Yeah, it was fun, but something I had done many times before with my smartphone and a well-placed ray of sunlight.

we vegged out in a touchscreen-controlled kaleidoscope room

I was then lead through a collection of other, suspiciously marketable mood rooms—exhilaration, invigoration, joy, and calm. In the first, I got lost in a series of hanging green LED strips meant to resemble a forest. Next up was dancing in a disco lounge with circles that lit up around my feet and altered intensity based on my movement. Thirdly, we vegged out in a touchscreen-controlled kaleidoscope room punctuated by jaggy edges and lava lamp colors. Finally came relaxing in a fog-filled chamber that had me quoting lines from Luke Skywalker’s training on Dagobah to my friends. Throughout this whole experience, the air was thick with fragrance meant to embody each emotion, but I could barely tell them apart. They were noxiously overpowering at times, but more on my mind was the conspicuous lack of any negative emotions. If this place was meant to be a museum, you’d think they would want to capture a wide array of feelings. I asked an employee if we could expect anything like sadness or anger to show up during our trip, to which she responded “Oh, we don’t have any negative emotions here. We think it’s okat to sort of ignore those and focus on the positive.” I imagined how Lewis Black’s Anger from Pixar’s recent Inside Out would feel about that.

Finally, my group entered the tail end of the Museum in the gift shop. Resembling the Apple Store finish of the building’s facade, the sleek white room invited us to smell each of the fragrances used to embody each emotion along the tour, read the ingredients used for each, and make a “Moodlens.” At this point, my friends and I were too hungry to wait in line for the “Moodlens,” but we did look at the display of them on the wall. An evolution of the mood ring, the Moodlens purportedly uses “biometric input” to read one of your selfies and tell you how you feel. You can actually make one of your own over on the Museum website, which will then factor into an overall emotional map for your region. Check mine, apparently the picture of optimism, below.

The whole gift shop felt like some next generation storefront, with the Moodlens meant to lure you in, and the fragance display serving demo purposes. With names like “Exhilaration” and “Optimism,” the aromas felt like brands, and sure enough, you could buy them in scented candle form at a table to the left of the display. Thinking about the free admission, the omission of negative feelings, the pushing of the fragrances, and the trendy ethos of the whole thing, I started scanning the room for some kind of catch. It felt less like I was in an artistic statement and more like I was walking through an advertisement. And then right there on the wall, I saw my answer: “Presented by Glade.”

I wasn’t ready to bust out my tinfoil hat quite yet, but as soon as I saw the sponsorship, I pulled out my phone to double check the Museum’s website. At the bottom was a copyright logo attributed to S. C. Johnson and Son, Inc., the company that owns Glade. Turns out the whole experience was part of a marketing campaign for Glade brand products.

I left experiencing a bevy of emotions not explored in the Museum—disappointment, betrayal, and exasperation. I wouldn’t say I regretted going to the Museum of Feelings, since I did get to see some truly wicked architecture inside the kaleidoscope room, and dance in a lounge that reacted to my footsteps. I’m glad to have these memories, but the disingenuous marketing campaign behind them left me with more of a bittersweet taste than I assume was intended.

Check out the Museum of Feelings website for more information.

SUPERHOT teases something scary in new screenshot

SUPERHOT is getting an official release date soon, according to its latest update, but until then, the team has some screenshots and gifs from the upcoming space-time-shooter to share.

One in particular seems to tease something eerie: the silhouette of a writhing, dragon-like creature cast down from a skylight onto the tiled room below.

Anyone who’s seen footage of the SUPERHOT beta from a few months back is aware of the game’s trippier aspects, regarding things like sinister .exe files and secret groups. The original prototype for 7DFPS had hints of an underlying narrative within its super stylish core, but it certainly dives much deeper in the upcoming full version.

Besides creepy shadow dragons, the SUPERHOT team has also provided gifs of some fancy new projectiles being implemented into the game, including kunai, shuriken, and whatever this is:

SUPERHOT is also adding in a “best time” score. If you’ve played SUPERHOT, even just the prototype, you’ll know what a tense and tactical experience it is to manipulate a situation in your favor—every millimeter of your movement counts. Being able to compete against your own reaction time will probably be a great way to ramp up the stakes in a game that’s already as fast and frantic as SUPERHOT.

Until SUPERHOT Team drops that that release date, check out SUPERHOT‘s Kickstarter updates for all the latest gifs and images from the game.

Introducing the world’s first 8-player, 360-degree NES

The memories a lot of people share with the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES for short) are typically rooted in solitude. Running across World 1-1 for the first time, embarking on a quest to confront Ganon at Death Mountain, venturing through Zebes to kill Mother Brain—all, for the most part, alone. Multiplayer existed in the realms of games like Dr. Mario, but was always confined to only two players. That changes now.

Disney Researcher Bob Sumner and the ETH Zurich team have created the world’s first eight-player NES, one that also projects onto a 360-degree display. Not modding or hacking the system or games themselves, Sumner and company relied instead on connecting separate DIY hardware, such as an Arduino-based multiplexer to plug in six extra controllers alongside the regular two and feeding up-scaled video into a custom tracking PC.

“elevate the NES console experience into a group experience”

The software on said PC stitches together game footage into a panorama, which is then projected onto the upper walls of the display room through eight projectors. A 360-degree view of 8-bit NES games also has the potential to be output through the Oculus Rift, though it lacks the eight-player co-op and obviously the eight projections, the panorama still resides—you just have to look around to see it.

“Basically, we observed that the 8-bit era of gaming had a huge collective influence on so many people, but the actual gaming experience was typically an individual one,” said Sumner, in an interview with Ars Technica UK. “We wanted to turn this idea upside down, and elevate the NES console experience into a group experience where people can play in a collaborative setting.”

Now, how does having eight players work? The Arduino can compute what gamepads work at a given time: be it through the amount of map a single person has traversed in a level, or a specific amount of time (such as five seconds or so) that has passed, and then the working gamepad switches to another person’s gamepad. The end result is an entirely fresh and unique cooperative experience. In the video “Unfolding the 8-Bit Era” from ETH Zurich, the new DIY technology is displayed in all its wild, hectic glory, as complete strangers work together to complete levels and play various 8-bit era games, from Super Mario Bros. 3 to Castlevania—bringing people together, making a solitary experience a collaborative one.

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Photos of system and Eurographics 2015 event from ETH Zurich’s research paper, “Unfolding the 8-Bit Era”

A videogame dares to ask “What is the meaning of life?”

You might head into Dissonance assuming it to have something to say about so-called “ludonarrative dissonance.” Because that’s all people can think about when the word dissonance comes up in the videogame space, apparently. And, actually, upon playing through the first couple of minutes, you might find that suspicion of yours steadily coming true. You’ll be reading along with this virtual novelette and, all of a sudden, a maze game will appear at the end of the first chapter. It’ll seem completely dissociated with what you’ve just read as well as the entire format of reading a book; it’s like it’s been put there just to make Dissonance seem more like a videogame. And so you’ll probably point a finger to the air in this moment and erupt: “A-ha! This game is about ludonarrative dissonance. I’ve sussed it.”

encourages you to think upon the question yourself

You’re wrong. No, Dissonance isn’t about that branch of videogame-specific dissonance. It’s about the meaning of life. The title is referring to the musical notion. The two don’t have anything to do with each other on first thought but by the time you’ve finished Dissonance you might have changed your mind. I’ll explain: Dissonance follows a movie theater projectionist called Bartholomew Brittle as his simple and orderly daily routine is interrupted by the young Clementine Cleu. She appears standing outside Brittle’s workplace one day, follows him in, and then sits down with an audio recorder and asks him “What is the meaning of life?” Dissatisfied by his answer, Cleu vows to return everyday until she gets an answer that she can’t immediately poke a million holes into. This leads Brittle deep inside himself where he hopes to extract an answer.

OK, that didn’t explain what musical dissonance has to do with the meaning of life, but divulging that would be to spoil the story. In any case, what’s more important to Dissonance‘s themes is understanding that there probably isn’t a ubiquitous meaning to life. The narrative framing of the story means that its writer, Phillip Royer, is able to explore a different proposed answer to the central question each day that Cleu returns. The games that appear at the end of each chapter succinctly translate the thinking of each answer into an interactive model. When Brittle concludes that the meaning of life is to fight against the odds then you get to play a boxing match against a computer opponent. It makes sense. (Still, the games can’t be that important if they’ve been removed and the remaining package sold as an e-book.)

Dissonance is a micro-exploration of some of the many different approaches people have taken towards finding an answer to “What is the meaning of life?”, then. As such, it touches upon ideas such as free will versus fate, existential dilemma, and even entertains the humanist revision of the question: “What is the meaning of MY life?” While it’s doing this, it encourages you to think upon the question yourself while reading. Next to the book is a tape player that you can pause, play, fast-forward, and rewind. If you press ‘Play’ then a voice will read the story out to you, and if you hit ‘Pause’ then the voice stops and a gentle soundtrack gives you a chance to reflect, its drawn-out notes breeding thought. It’s made to give you the time to flick forward and back through the pages, to revisit and reconsider thoughts, to create new ones while your mind drifts out on some ethereal note.

All this considered, it might seem counter-intuitive for Dissonance to suggest that there is a single meaning to life. And it does. Brittle eventually lands on an answer to the question that he sticks to but he doesn’t give Cleu a chance to shoot down. Instead, both characters go about their separate lives, never seeing each other again. Despite this, the final answer isn’t wholly satisfying (what did you expect?), and I think that’s the point. The obvious reading is that Dissonance settles on a meaning to life but what I saw is a narrative that is, in fact, against the whole pursuit. We see Brittle physically and mentally torture himself over this question and only finds happiness when ignoring it and getting on with his life. And that seems to be the point of Dissonance; to conclude that getting closer to the meaning of life involves doing rather than thinking. Yet it’s a game that encourages thinking rather than providing lots of things to do. Is that dissonant enough for you?

You can purchase Dissonance on Steam and over on itch.io. The e-book edition is available on Amazon.

Making sense of the static

Rough, discontinuous edges; looming architectural masses; bulging swathes of colour—all of them luminous, or cast in shadow. These are just some of the effects you encounter in the growing genre of freeware horror and landscape games, spearheaded by the likes of ceMelusine, Kitty Horrorshow, and Connor Sherlock. Together, they constitute a “glitch art” known for its lethargic smearing-together of retro graphics with dreamlike and impossible aesthetics. As both “art” and “game,” they express a mix of design constraints and aesthetic choices that elect to make things brash, rough, and beautiful.

But this aesthetic strategy—to paint with a pallet knife, in blocks and smears of colour, rather than with a fine hair brush—has echoes with pre-existing forms of design, and with the architecture, painting and output of the German Expressionists. Those who painted reality with emotion and exaggeration; dream painters.

I first properly thought about this last year, as I walked out of the cloistered, Modernist spaces of London’s Southbank cinema. I stood for a while to take in the fresh winter air over the Thames. The river was a slick, black, wet mark into which lights shone and were swallowed up. A train clanked beneath the tapering glass edifice of The Shard. I had just watched a digitally remastered release of the 1920 German film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. This dark and psychological horror blurs the boundaries between dream and reality; the eponymous doctor, travelling across 19th-century provincial Germany, displays his prisoner “somnambulist” to eager crowds; Cesare (played by gangly, hollow-cheeked Conrad Veidt) beguiles audiences with his half-sleep of death. He follows Caligari’s commands, his word, but shows no signs of waking life, though he answers many of the audience’s questions. “How long will I live?” asks one. Cesare replies, “Until dawn.” That night, the man is found stabbed to death in his bedroom.

German Expressionists painted reality with emotion and exaggeration

The film plays dreamily on its psychological topographies: its architecture of bulging, stark sets, pitch-black recesses, of lines and forms which twist and lean in peculiar angles. Light and shadow are painted directly onto the set in rough and impossibly oily, resinous daubs of white and black. It is as if, under the peculiar presence of the somnambulist, that the entire town has assumed the appearance of a nightmare. Together, the set designers, writers and director agreed to pursue a directly Expressionist style, intending to make the sets as eccentric as was possible. The film was a bold, popular success. Many commented on its jagged transitions of form and perspective, its oblique strategy for twisting and dementing its visual aspect. The early film critic Lotte Eisner has argued that the sets appear to be alive, and “seem to vibrate with an extraordinary energy.”

The hyper-concentrated, jarred and dream-like design has been hugely influential in terms of shaping subsequent horror and expressionist design, in film, photography and art. It’s unsurprising that many freeware and altgames have aspired to create a similarly expressionistic aesthetic, whether consciously or not. These games make seemingly deliberate use of exaggeration, intensity, and contrast, where hard, thick lines replace naturalistic curves and hues. Where gradients are dismissed in favor of blocky swatches of color and masses of shadow. Expressionism—as an artistic practice—was designed to give vent to the dream-like, interior lives of both artists and the modern subjects who were often—but not always—the subjects of their art. Each work was intended to represent not the “thing itself” (the object or landscape as it would appear in a photograph, for example), but the landscape as it might appear in a dream or a nightmare. The intensely feeling modern subject would see stark, bold contrasts where photographs might depict slow and somber gradients. They gave “expression” to what the subject was feeling. An attempt to see—and so to design—the world a little differently.

Kitty Horrorshow and Connor Sherlock have been two of the designers who stand out to me as having really driven this exaggeration aesthetic, creating intensive and dreamlike landscapes which share a number of design references, mechanisms and ideas which the Expressionists, especially architecturally, also pursued. They’re defined by non-linear landscapes, reflective and explorative gameplay, dreamlike visuals featuring impossible geometries and physics. The Tate’s charmingly brief description of Expressionism is helpful here: it represents an art “in which the image of reality is distorted in order to make it expressive of the artist’s inner feelings or ideas.” One of the perfect possibilities of this is contained in the videogame Glitchhikers, which consciously places you in the role of a driver, late at night, “thinking thoughts you’d never have anywhere else,” as the game’s designer’s describe it. A dream highway as much as any “real” road, lit up by glitch horizons, angular blocks, smeared colours. It is a “mood” landscape, and the game, mechanically, sets you up simply to explore that mood and how emotion and ambience interact with landscape and perception.

In a similar way, Kitty Horrorshow’s Sigil Valley struck me precisely for its expressive dreaminess, for its fuzzy re-imagining of depth, perspective and perception, as well as for its unusual use of color and shadow. The game—a first-person landscape exploration—has no narrative, only a location. The valley is scattered with strange, tangled forms—architectural follies set in a blasted moonscape doused in a beguiling purple light, ringed in by sharp-edged and distorted mountains. We are led to believe that this valley is not necessarily a valley in any real place; it is an emotional rather than actual landscape. And the forms that we pursue, and activate, reflect dream echoes of objects that perhaps exist “out there” in an otherwise real world. It’s like dreaming, when you recognize things—people, places, memories—from your waking life, but they have become distorted, whether emotionally or simply because of their remove. A sort of psychological databending, the taking of one set of references and their visual exaggeration. No buildings, no valley, look like this. We are witnessing, and playing through, a distorted echo of them because it seems—for the designer—to better explain how landscapes can pull on us in strange and sometimes emotionally tantalizing ways.

The exaggeration aesthetic creates intensive and dream-like landscapes

The use of peculiar massing and complicated form echoes not only the jagged painting practice of the Expressionist artists, but the product of architects working in “brick expressionism” (backsteinexpressionismus), seen in the massive, jutting form of Walter Gropius’ “Monument to the March Dead,” constructed in 1921. The design work of Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart was equally important, imagining a poetry of glass architecture of impossible, massive and complicated form. Horrorshow’s Dust City features massive, impossible black skyscrapers clustered in a dust bowl of a gold-yellow smoke. The interiors of these building masses—some of which float—are a variety of dream-like environments, far larger on the inside than the outside. Halls of black and blue boxes and platforms; a black lake beneath a red sky; a tumbled island of green grass and pushed over Grecian columns. This amalgam of signs and strange architectural components is precisely expressive of a dream; albeit, the expression of dreams in a digital form.

Like Horrorshow, Sherlock has been making some of my favourite “art” games for a while. His landscapes are almost always filled with some form of sonic and spatial exaggeration; such as the floating, gyrating cubes of Sanctuary, which also calls to mind games like Dream.Sim and sonam. The Rapture Is Here and You Will Be Forcibly Removed From Your Home (or, TRIHAYWBFRFYH) remains one of his most compelling dream-scapes; a misty, rural landscape above which a massive black form descends, as you encounter chunks and dispersed fragments of HP Lovecraft. It is eerie and shocking and quietly terrifying. Little to no exposition means that the expressive landscape becomes one of horror but also, crucially, of reflection. You have to think because, put simply, it’s all you can reasonably do. As the black mass descends, the environment becomes increasingly incoherent, increasingly emotional. A moving painting. Landscape is used to reflect an increasingly perilous emotional and intellectual perspective.

A similarly dark, oneiric landscape is encountered in Marginalia, of a forest diffused by a black-purple light. As ever, trademark dark ambient music threads and compounds the experience. These are textures and collage, of both form and sound. These are games which explicitly unfold through mystery and anxiety. The mysterious sublime is an environmental sublime—of form, mass, solids, light, and how we gauge and respond to them based on our uncertain and wavering perception. These games pull on your emotions; fear, isolation, curiosity. A search for signs amidst the crash and rush of closely compounded images and sensory elements. These games play on the darker, more nightmarish built and designed forms of cinema—the output of German UFA studio, the films of Fritz Lang and Wegener. Like the Expressionists, who were rejecting conventional artistic hierarchies, methods and narratives, freeware developers operate under a mix of resource constraints and aesthetic strategies designed to re-conceive what a game, emotionally, intellectually, and formally, can necessarily be. It is no surprise that the darkest Expressionist films (such as Metropolis or The Cabinet of Dr Caligari) were, too, concerned with questions of deceit, betrayal, insanity, and fear.

So, like the Expressionists, freeware art-game designers have often thought about the relationship between an architectural sublime and the emotional environments which are divorced from conventional commercial concerns and game-like conventions—no obvious victory conditions, no stats, not even enemies to encounter and defeat. The self—the intensely feeling, emotive and beguiling subject of Expressionist art—is locked into the center of the game. Everything we see as a player is an expression of this personal, emotional encounter with an intensely emotional artistic practice which is designed to unsettle and to relocate our perspective as a gamer. There is a feeling that, for the freeware designers, modernity has failed as a project. What we are left with is an intensity of disarray and fractured experience and an attempt to re-approach them through a more appropriate, subjective language. Sense-making through all of the static.

Expressionism is an art transformed by our moods. It is the artist or designer seizing control of the means of representation, and using it to convey horror, anxiety, and pain, but also to communicate—however partially—a sense of transcendence and ecstasy. To give artistic life to dreams. It’s like asking someone, waking from such a dream, to paint what they had seen and remember. The picture that emerges is necessarily partial, fragmented, and deeply personal. In this way, freeware and altgames specifically work like Expressionism because they are not about commercial or popular appeal, but about channelling the designer’s unique and emotional vision—their moods, anxieties and ideals—into a digital space which the player can download and explore for themselves. To walk around in their dreams.

The eternal battle between parent and child becomes a hilarious videogame

What better way to start the day than finding out your baby son is trying to roast himself in the oven? Flare your nostrils wide and inhale that pungent aroma. Ah, the smell of searing tot flesh in the morning. Oh no, wait, that’s a bad thing. That’s a terrible thing! You’re supposed to be a parent and dedicate your every waking (and non-waking) hour to safeguarding this child from danger and death. What the hell is he doing in the goddamn oven?!

This, I’m sure, is not how parenting goes. It’s bloody awful, and hard, and yeah you’re probably going to screw a lot of things up for this kid, like, almost every day. But surely no parent or carer is negligent or maniacal enough to introduce a baby to an oven, right? Oh, okay, it’s just an urban myth. Phew. (Though, there have been cases of babies being killed in ovens before, sickeningly.) In Who’s Your Daddy you’ll be actively working to ensure it stays an urban myth, too. But it won’t be easy.

the baby is drowning itself in the bath tub.

Conceptually, Who’s Your Daddy is outrageous in its hyperbolic yet, beneath that, crushingly true reenactment of the parent-child conflict. That’s probably why it was funded on Kickstarter, will no doubt fly through Steam Greenlight, and has recently topped the hyperlink charts of Reddit. The pitch is simply this: “Who’s Your Daddy is a casual 1 on 1 video game featuring a clueless father attempting to prevent his infant son from certain death.”

One player is the father, alone in the house with his diaper-filling son, and doing his very best to ensure that he doesn’t kill himself while also doing his household chores (which grant special dad powers when completed). The other player is the baby, crawling on all-fours, and desperately seeking a means to avoid the father’s attention so they can suicide when his back is turned. The competition and the humor lies in the disparity of these two goals. While the father is distributing socket covers to prevent electrocution the baby is in the bathroom cupboard drinking the bleach. When the father is trying to put all the toys back into their big wooden box the baby is drowning itself in the bath tub.

Unfortunately, the current alpha version of Who’s Your Daddy doesn’t live up to the promise yet, as to be expected. But despite the janky physics and the obvious balancing issues the comedy of the game is already present. Seeing the baby and father wrestling control of the oven door and its various knobs is stacked with laughs. You can imagine the baby getting properly agitated and screaming “For goodness sake dad, I’m just trying to kill myself in peace, leave me alone” if it were able to speak, while the father is frantically trying to prevent what would undoubtedly be the worst thing to ever happen in his life.

There are two key points to make out of Who’s Your Daddy‘s automatic success. 1) Making light of such an awful and taboo subject (the death of babies) is certainly a viable if risky path to humor. 2) Being a parent, as wonderful as it can be, is a fast track to losing your mind.

You can vote for Who’s Your Daddy on Steam Greenlight. It’s first alpha version is available to download for Windows and Mac here.

Rez Infinite gives a 2001 music shooter another shot at entrancing you

Despite being a child of ’90s clubbing and music television, the 2001 rail shooter Rez didn’t quite resonate with its majority audience as its visionary creators had hoped it would. A small niche of players got it—no, they really got it—but it didn’t have the impact of, say, a killer DJ set sending ripples across the dance floor. And make no mistake: that is what director Jun Kobayashi and producer Tetsuya Mizuguchi were hoping for. Kobayashi has explained that the title Rez is a shortened form of “resolute,” which may be a Japanese-English misappropriation, but the important part is that he understands it to mean “the moment when sound and visuals are totally synchronized.” And not just synchronized with each other; synchronized with your own body and mind, too.

he’s banking on achieving total synaesthesia with Rez Infinite.

There are many reasons for Rez not being appreciated as widely as it perhaps should have been back in 2001 and it’s something that Mizuguchi has pondered lately due to the announcement of Rez Infinite for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR. “Rez was released at a time when most home console games were played on small 4:3 ratio tube TVs, with fuzzy pictures and sound that was barely stereo,” he says. The technology that was most widely available at the time was not primed to deliver Rez in its intended form. But it’s possible that Rez wasn’t only let down by technology but also by the collective player conscience at the time. It’s only in the last decade that euphoric musical experiences have become more widely understood with titles like Dyad, Audiosurf, and Mizuguchi’s own Child of Eden.

With advancements in both areas of those previous failings, Mizuguchi is hoping that the world is now ready for Rez, and he’s banking on achieving total synaesthesia with Rez Infinite. Mizuguchi notes in the game’s announcement that, finally, the Rez experience can now be realized in full 1080p HD and 60 frames-per-second (120 frames-per-second in virtual reality), but he adds that none of these numbers truly matter. “The only thing important about that technology for Rez Infinite is how it makes you feel; hopefully, it makes it easier to forget the fact that you’re sitting in front of a TV playing a game, and instead lets the real world melt away into a swirl of incredible sights and sounds that could only ever exist in your imagination,” he says.

Today’s virtual reality technology makes achieving this ever more viable. But Mizuguchi apparently isn’t satisfied by that. The original Rez had a “Trance Vibrator” that you plugged into the PlayStation 2. It was a big piece of plastic that vibrated along with the music and visuals of the game. I can only imagine how it was used by people to enhance the experience into something, ahem, sensual. Anyway, for Rez Infinite, Mizuguchi and crew have come up with an advanced and far less crude version of the Trance Vibrator. It’s called the Synesthesia Suit.

Unfortunately, the Synesthesia Suit isn’t widely available. In fact, there’s only one of them in the world. How it works hasn’t been divulged but given that the person wearing it in that photo is covered in various colored lights that are visibly struck with movement, and Mizuguchi emphasizing that it helps you to “feel” the game, I’m guessing that it stimulates various muscles as you play. Importantly, it also makes for an entertaining human light show for those queued up waiting to play at whatever event it may appear at.

Find out more about Rez Infinite in its announcement post.