Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 188

Cool 3D World’s virtual nightmare poetry escapes Vine in first music video

Why are there huge brawny, hairy men? Why, oh why, are they acting so intimately (and hungrily) with disfigured pigs? And why are they so often seen screaming with heavy anguish into the sky?

These are all valid questions about Cool 3D World that probably don’t have an answer. The one question that can be answered, however, is this one: What is Cool 3D World? It’s a collaboration between two web artists. They are Brian Tessler and Jon Baken (who helped make Staggering Beauty (warning: flashing images)). I’m told that they met through mutual friends and discovered they were fans of each other’s work, so joining forces seemed a worthwhile endeavor. Since that meeting and throughout 2015 the pair has been posting their sublimely unpredictable 3D animated shorts on Vine as well as images that accompany each baffling scene (as if a snapshot to remember them by, forever).

It’s Vine that Cool 3D World has found its popularity (into the millions) and, indeed, the format works especially well for it. Tessler explained why that’s the case: “Vine is great for coming up with short ideas and being able to see them through relatively quickly due to the six second limit. Unlike gifs, Vine allows you to add sound, so we’re able to make funny clips with music and sound design. It was a good meeting point for both of us to figure out our workflow, and make immediately rewarding content together.”

data errors as a way to illustrate extreme emotion.

Importantly, both Baken and Tessler don’t have specific roles in Cool 3D World. What’s prioritized is a creative spontaneity. One of them will have an idea, jump into 3D animation software, and try to hack it together. At some point the other half of the project will join in, maybe add a few bits, and then music and sounds typically arrive after the visuals are locked down. Strangely, this process comes across as being a lot more experimental and loose than Tessler’s solo work, as he described it to me earlier this year, even if it is aesthetically similar. Back then, he told me he was trying to bring out the expressive potential of 3D models and electronic music. This is why he seemed to strain it, make it crude and warped, and also make special use of data errors as a way to illustrate extreme emotion. Tessler told me that he’s inspired by classical musicians and how they used traditional instruments to achieve a high level of emotion, applying a similar creativity to the modern applications of today.

This is why, when one of Tessler’s weary-looking faces stares at you and degenerates into a portrait of a nightmare, it’s not just ‘weird’. There might be something peculiar—maybe even disturbing—that happens inside you when confronted with Tessler’s work. It toys with horror and tragedy at the same time as we’re simultaneously drawn to and repelled by these virtual bodies; when they smile it can be terrifying, when they frown we’re surprised by sympathy. This is something we can all feel in our inner selves but may struggle to verbalize. But Tessler’s work in this pursuit by himself has been outdone by his work with Baken under Cool 3D World. It also adds a lot more humor to the style. Those animated shorts stay with you for a long time due to offering a smorgasbord of emotions.

a videogame is also possible in the future.

Now the pair is looking to build upon Cool 3D World as they’ve seemingly established a symbiosis and can produce more ambitious works. As such, today they’ve released their first full-length music video, called “The Summoning of the Skylark.” Running for nearly four minutes, it depicts an almost inexplicable ritual yet remains somewhat coherent within its own twisted world logic. It starts with a dancer in waist-deep water leaping in arabesque. Then a group of men enter, chanting as portraits against a black background, as if a homage to Queen in their famous “Bohemian Rhapsody” video. These men then morph into animals before praying and summoning the skylark in some distant xeric land. The video ends beautifully and horrifically with these diverse masculine bodies forming as one into a mate for the skylark, flying off into a horizon. The end.

As with all of Cool 3D World’s creations this music video rendered me speechless at first. The temptation is to look for meaning in all this evocative imagery but that’s a mistake. “We both like the idea of music informing the visuals—we finished the track before even starting the video,” Tessler tells me. “Once the music was completed, we discussed emotions it evoked in us, and specific visuals we thought would fit with the music.” The visuals are only there, then, to match or perhaps enhance the emotions that the music explores. It is not designed narratively or even metaphorically; it’s more like a music visualizer except it’s churned through the noxious brains of Cool 3D World rather than a machine capable of producing spinning lights.

As said, this is only the start to Cool 3D World’s gradual expansion beyond Vine and still images. Right now we have a music video but I’m told a videogame is also possible in the future. When asked what kind of videogame they would make together, Tessler says: “Maybe something centered around puzzles, eating, and skateboarding.” Of course. What else?

Keep up with Cool 3D World on its website and on Vine.

Artificial intelligence takes national exam, does better than human average

A futuristic thought experiment, Roko’s basilisk, posits that at some point in the future there may be an artificial intelligence (AI) that will retroactively punish those who knew it could one day exist and still did not help to bring about its existence. While in practice this serves more as a logic exercise than as lore that’s assumed to be true, in either case the assumption is that one day technology will be advanced enough that this could be true.

high enough to have an 80% chance of admission to over 450 higher institutions

While we’re still a long ways off from robots controlling our lives a la The Matrix, AI has, at least in some ways, progressed enough to rival that of human intelligence. The Todai Robot Project, an AI experiment based in Japan, aims to pass the entrance exam for The University of Tokyo—sometimes called “Japan’s Harvard,” for context—in 2021. While the computer still has problems processing questions that require a more complex understanding of human language, such as questions in physics, it does well on questions with more straightforward answers, such as history and math. It recently did so well on national exams, in fact, that it scored 511 points out of a possible 950—a full 95 points higher than Japan’s national average and high enough to have an 80 percent chance of admission to over 450 higher institutions.

Image via Peyri Herrera on Flickr.

Yusuki Miyao, a sub-project director, said in a 2013 interview that he hopes “discoveries and developments will be adapted for use in general purpose systems, such as meaning-based searching and conversation systems, real-world robot interfaces, and the like.” While the National Institute of Informatics (NII) is managing the project, anyone can get involved through their site by either creating an AI that can achieve a high score with the National Center for University Entrance Examinations or by helping the team amass information to teach their AI.

Header image via ActiVision on Flickr.

Star Wars Battlefront is a beautiful diorama

 

After the release of Star Wars in May of 1977, the Kenner toy company could not make enough action figures to meet the demands of an eager consumer base. Even into the Christmas season, the company still had inadequate stock, so Kenner instead sold people an “Early Bird Certificate Package”—an empty box containing a diorama stand, some stickers, and a certificate for four toys to be mailed to the purchaser when they finally became available the following February. People snatched them up, of course, placing empty boxes under trees, assured in the knowledge that in a few short months, their orders would be fulfilled. Now, as I play through a simulation of the Battle of Hoth for the thirtieth time, I find myself thinking about that empty box and the promises of a diorama, and I start to think that maybe the gorgeous sheen on Star Wars: Battlefront is in fact a glossy finish on a paper stand.

My love of Star Wars is inseparable from my memories of playing with the old toys. Born too late to actually see the film in theaters and born too early to enjoy the series of action figures that popped up in the late ‘90s, I collected a cache of worn-out action figures from my older cousin and some neighborhood friends. A broken Snowspeeder, half of a Y-Wing, a fragile and yellowed Millenium Falcon, and a host of action figures with chipped paint and missing limbs became actors and props in inelegant pantomimes of the scenes I loved. The epic battles I’d seen through the kluge of an old VCR playing a copy of a copy of a Star Wars VHS on an even older TV came to life in my hands, even as I remained blissfully unaware of the market machinations that churned beneath my desire to capture that world and its characters.

a glossy finish on a paper stand

As I’ve gotten older, the commercial aspects of the space opera I so love have become apparent to the point of distraction, but I am never one to argue that the influence of the market bears some sort of artistic sin. The comparison between the Galactic Empire’s hunger for total order and the Star Wars commercial machine is an easy one to make, though we should not do so cynically. After all, even the most romantic of us can at least appreciate the complex relationship artists have with their respective markets, cashing in on trends and celebrity as quickly as any other field of work. Divorcing any work of twentieth century art from the commercial pressures of its time does it a disservice, and Star Wars is no different. More so than the Joseph Campbell “hero’s journey” structure, Lucas’ suspicion of military power in a post-Vietnam America, and the risk of turning science fiction cinema—a genre dominated by drive-in schlock and late-night television fodder—into a blockbuster gold, the Star Wars phenomenon gained momentum through merchandise.

We can see evidence of this relationship between Lucas’ creative energy and his merchandising prowess in the earliest film. From the spectacular space battles to the numerous aliens in the cantina, Star Wars begs for its iconography to be incarnated in plastic, and as these creative spheres overlapped, they gave rise to landmark blockbuster brilliance. The Imperial assault on the Rebel’s base on Hoth remains my favorite action sequence of all time, even if it is clear that the AT-ATs and Snowspeeders seem like so much fodder for toy store shelves. Star Wars shows us a universe where walking action figures like a bounty hunter clad in tactical armor could strut with the intimidating cowboy swagger of Lee Van Cleef, where a impish green puppet could be one of the most powerful, fully-realized characters in the entire saga. Such characters were created to sell products as surely as to chew scenery, but they illustrate how creativity and commerce merge and produce fascinating, and sometimes profound, Hollywood art.

Star Wars: Battlefront stands as the latest example of the commercial machine that Lucas engineered. The game advertises itself as a nostalgia-drenched Star Wars experience, and it shows in the details, from the pitch-perfect sounds of the weaponry to the way the ground buckles under the weight of an Imperial AT-AT. Battlefront is, appropriately, an audio-visual love letter to people like myself, who are perpetually chasing an authentic Star Wars encounter. Like the action figures and presold tickets for the film that has yet to be released, Battlefront makes no attempt to disguise its branding. It is a shame, however, that it offers so little in return for an investment.

For everything Battlefront nails, it reveals something crushing in its limited scope. The guns, for instance, sound and look perfect, until the player realizes how similar they are. Ships handle with a Rogue Squadron-esque lightness, which at first feels fun and simple, but the airborne vehicles have such little bearing on the goals of the ground battles that they seem superfluous (at least outside of the aerial-vehicle-only Flight Squadron mode). Teaming up with a squad of heroes to square off against a group of villains is silly and delightful, yet imbalances among the characters quickly make the scenarios lose their charms. As I played, I started to realize that each design decision is committed to offering only a bare-minimum, tightly-controlled slice of a game meant to hook the consumer’s interest for the real release coming soon. The shooting is acceptable, the voice acting barely passable, the maps and scenarios just adequate enough.

to hook the consumer’s interest for the real release

All these problems could be forgivable, even endearing, if Battlefront allowed the player some modicum of control over her experience beyond the election of a few scripted modes. The previous Battlefront games  encouraged the player to mount campaigns across the galaxy during the Galactic Civil War and the Clone Wars, and Battlefront II even allowed players to create playlists of their favorite battle scenarios. In other words, those games provided a toy box experience befitting the Star Wars creative ethos, urging the player to tinker with the pieces of the game to craft her own section of the Star Wars universe. The current Battlefront offers no such option, and in doing so, it avoids the possibility of becoming accidentally wonderful. This rigid design makes Battlefront feel unavoidably like a product, a bit of Star Wars branding on a piece of merchandise devoid of that creative spark that generated so much people love about that universe.

Nevertheless, those moments when a flaming TIE Fighter crashes to the ground as my team battles for control of a key area show the slightest glimmer of what the game could have been—or, crucially, might still become. The machine still churns; the Empire will grow; and some art may yet surface. As it stands, however, Battlefront offers everything my childhood experience of Star Wars did not. For all its polish, it brand-name polish, it lacks that creative energy found in building battles from faded toys and dumb ideas. Battlefront imposes limits and gates on an expansive universe, reigning in instead of expanding the possible ways to become part of that world. As such, the game remains mercenary in its goal of selling an experience solely on those feelings we have about that galaxy far, far away. Instead of offering a chance to inhabit that space, Battlefront only shows us Star Wars at a distance, perfectly preserved in small pocket dioramas tucked away behind the rose-tinted glass of a toy shop window.

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The RollerCoaster Tycoon ride that takes 3,000 in-game years to complete

For all its lighthearted charm, RollerCoaster Tycoon has been oddly capable of indulging the morbid propensities of its players over the years. There’s not a player out there who isn’t guilty of picking up their tiny little park guests and dropping them in the Swan Boat lake, or trying to design a deliberately broken ride that would end up crashing in a storm of fire and metal at least once. Perhaps it was the fact that this otherwise cute sim game could let you do these destructive things in the first place that made players experiment so.

There’s another means of torture that some particularly creative RollerCoaster Tycoon fans have utilized, though. The most infamous of all is probably Mr. Bones Wild Ride, popularized on a 4chan thread that first introduced the madness of its 70-minute duration through a series of screenshots, but another player recently unveiled a new amusement park monstrosity called Kairos – The Slow. Kairos takes a whopping 210 days to complete. Not in-game days, either. Real days. 303,383 minutes. Over 3,000 in-game years. RIP park goers.

The ride itself is one of the slower options offered in RollerCoaster Tycoon’s line-up of theme park attractions. It’s a Car Ride, like Mr. Bones, but it’s the physics rule its creator discovered while building this hellish creation that allows for its insufferable length. According to the architect of this nightmare: “When a roller coaster travels along a track of constant height its speed exponentially decays towards zero but never stops.”

an unrelenting doom coil of a ride

At first glance, Kairos might look like a spiraling descent into the underworld, but it’s just the isometric perspective fooling you. The actual ride is built on the largest map in the game, with tracks wrapping flat around the perimeter and spiraling into the center of the level. From there, the cars are supposed to roll back, complete the spiral a second time, and reach the initial station at the start. Brakes at the beginning of the ride slow the cars down to 4 mph, making for some painfully slow speeds throughout as that number decreases.

There’s no footage of Kairos outside of this Tumblr post documenting it, but you can see The Wheel of Life and Death, another creation by the same player, below—a fever dream of interlocking tracks like an eternal pattern in some abstract medieval hell.

RollerCoaster Tycoon is a strange game. It was programmed by one man… in assembly language. The originals have stood the test of time in ways only the best 90s and early 2000s PC games do, even after a few sequels. That’s thanks not just to its solid foundation, but a creative fanbase that continues to output feats of engineering genius, from perfect roller coasters to viable microparks, but also, occasionally, an unrelenting doom coil of a ride that takes over 3,000 in-game years for unsuspecting guests to complete.

The birth of No Man’s Sky

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Few games have captured the public imagination like No Man’s Sky. Due out in June 2016, the game promises an entire universe to explore: some 18 quintillion planets, which would take some 600 billion hours for players to fully explore. (Who knows, though; never underestimate the public’s appetite for videogames.)

This would all be impressive enough, but what turned our heads was the kaleidoscopic array of colors in which the game is painted, full of toxic green skies and impossibly lush plants, dank caves and deep purple starscapes. The small team behind it drew inspiration from classic sci-fi artists like Chris Foss, John Harris and Ralph McQuarrie. But in a long conversation with Kill Screen founder Jamin Warren, the game’s managing director and creative heart Sean Murray reveals the game’s more personal, and terrestrial, influences, including the Alaskan wilds and his childhood on the Australian outback.

Kill Screen (KS): As someone who liked the Joe Danger franchise, it’s interesting seeing you guys go from that to No Man’s Sky. Does that feel like a big jump to you?

SM: It’s weird, actually. When you say to me that you liked the game, 100 percented it or whatever, that gets me right here. It’s really meaningful because, of anything that I’ve done, it’s one of the things that I’m most proud of. And it’s amazing doing the whole No Man’s Sky thing and talking about it. People are inadvertently dismissive of it. Like, they don’t mean to be, but they’re like “Oh, how did you guys who did that little thing … now you’re doing No Man’s Sky, which seems cool.” And they don’t mean to be (dismissive), and they’re totally right obviously, but there’s this really strong gut reaction to say, “Joe Danger was awesome. I’m really proud of that.”

KS: Well, I played it on the original PS3 when it came out. And it’s rare, because I go through a lot of games, it’s rare to play something that was designed for another system and then moved on to mobile, but one that I felt took advantage of it. There are a lot of games which take advantage of swiping and touch. You really made full use of my fingers when playing the game, so I appreciate that.

SM: We made Joe Danger 1, which was on consoles, then we made Joe Danger 2, which was also on consoles, and we found that process of making Joe Danger 2, making a sequel, very difficult. The company grew—we had been 4 people and then we grew to about 10 people. Making a sequel reminded me of some of the stuff that I had left behind at (previous employer) Criterion, where we had Burnout after Burnout after Burnout, some of the things that I had wanted to get away from, and suddenly I felt like I was running a proper studio and it felt like a job. And also, it became a much more commercial endeavor, like, “the game has to sell this many copies to keep the studio afloat, and as soon as it’s out, we better come out with the next idea.” And actually, we were very lucky with Joe Danger 1. It came out kind of right as the indie bubble was rising. It came out next to Limbo and Braid and those kind of games. And those games were selling really well. And Joe Danger 2 came out when there was a real squeeze on indies. People were playing XBLA and PSN a lot less. And we were really just struggling to stand out. And I kind of felt like, “Is this what my life is now?”

there was a real push to start something new

KS: Is there a moment when you just kind of looked in the mirror and wiped the mist away and were like, “Who am I?”

SM: It was December 2012, and we were on the phone with Microsoft arguing back and forth on where our game that we just released sat on their dashboard and the trouble people would have with finding the game, which was a problem all indie games were having at the time.

KS: Right. Immortalized in Indie Game: The Movie.

SM: Right, right. I remember writing an email, and it was like, “To find our game, the minimum number of button presses was like 17 button presses, and it had just been released.” It was just a nightmare. So we were going through that, and that for me … like, they were great. They said, “Let’s get on the phone, let’s chat about it,” but they couldn’t do it until like 3 or 4 in the morning our time. And no one was in the office, we were off for Christmas. And I just sat there and I was like, “Well, I can sit all day and work on Joe Danger, or I can start something new.” And, actually, the studio at that point brought out Joe Danger on iOS, and that was sort of the reaction of that feeling. That, “Let’s do something new.”

KS: Was that the seed of something kind of new on that Christmas? Was it on Christmas day?

SM: No, not Christmas day. It was like December 21.

KS: Ah, it would have been great for me as a storyteller. It’s on Christmas day, and like—

SM: Everyone had gone home. So we were there at like, Joe Danger on iOS kind of was spurred from that. And there was a real feeling in the studio of “let’s do justice to this game, we’re tired of this battle.” For me, there was a real push to start something new. So I started coding No Man’s Sky like that day, basically. And I remember mailing Graham David Ryan, who I founded Hello Games with, at like 4 in the morning, and giving them a list of things that we’d sorted out with Microsoft about placement on the store and everything, but none of it matters, because we’re doing this thing! Because we had always talked about No Man’s Sky as a game, as a concept. But it was like, “All right, we’re gonna do this.”

KS: Do you remember the first line of code, like, what was the first thing you started with?

SM: Actually, at the end of that day, I had something that looked basically like Minecraft. But Minecraft, like, on a planet kind of thing. And like a very basic version of Minecraft, but that was the starting point.

KS: It’s a prototype.

SM: Yeah. And I remember showing everyone excitedly, and they were like, “He has gone insane. He’s so excited about this thing that looks really crappy.”

KS: So how did you describe it to your co-founders?

SM: Yeah, we’d always talked about, as a high concept, doing a very ambitious game, one set in space, where you could go anywhere and visit any planet. Something kind of without boundaries. That was an aspiration, and it was a thing that would keep us going. Like, even now as we’re working on the final stages of No Man’s Sky, the thing that will keep us going is, “What’s the other game that you’d really like to make?” It’s just always a pub conversation kind of thing. So we used to always have that chat. And we’d kind of describe this game, but I don’t think we necessarily pictured ourselves making it. It was like an aspirational thing.

KS: Like, “Some day, after Joe Danger 7.”

SM: Not even that. Just like, “We’ll draw pieces of this, we’ll make a smaller version of this,” that kind of thing. And the idea I sold the guys on was basically, “We have X amount of money in the bank, from Joe Danger.” Traditionally, I guess you’d use that to make similar sized games, keep some in reserve, that kind of thing. The idea I sold the guys on was, “Let’s just … spend everything we have and make this game.” And our state of mind was such that that would be no bad thing. I remember Graham being like, “If this all ends tragically, then I’m kind of ok with that. I’ll go off and find a normal job. But at least that’s better than the alternative, which is just this forever.” You know, making Joe Danger 7 or, like he was saying, if we made a similar-sized game, he was saying he’d be disappointed if it were successful, because he’d know he’d have to make a sequel and then a sequel to that.

KS: It’s that burden of creativity, huh?

SM: Right. And it would just sort of turn into a slog. Like, at some point, the commercial side of it has to stop. So, the idea of going bankrupt was appealing to him. Then we’d go out in a blaze.

KS: What’s that saying? “There’s no such thing as bravery, only people backed in a corner”?

SM: So yeah, there were definitely those conversations. For us, describing it, you were saying, “How would you describe it to the rest of us?” We had the overall high concept, but that conversation that kept happening was, we would talk about, “Well, we’re making it super ambitious. Like, you can go anywhere, all those kind of things.” But, occasionally, we’d have these conversations like, “Well, if this system that we’re working on doesn’t work, we’ll tone that back. At some point we might start making specific levels, it won’t all be procedurally generated.” And at various points, we’d have little offshoots where somebody would start doing that, and we’d have these little conversations which were like “Are we ready to decide to pull back the ambition of this yet?” So there was a lot of that when I was showing that prototype. I remember it being us gathered around going, “So, actual planets, then. Actual planet-sized planets.”

“Let’s just … spend everything we have and make this game.”

KS: Not like background art or anything.

SM: And I was always just like, “Let’s just see how far this will go.” Dave always describes it as this snowball that we started pushing together, and it just started off really small. And I was just like, “Let’s just see how a big a snowball you can make.”

KS: I used to be a newspaper reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and I always used to envy people who wrote fiction—that if something doesn’t work, if the details don’t fit together, you just create them. But then I thought about it some more, because when you sit down and read an amazing piece of contemporary fiction and you read the description of the universe and you’re like ,“Oh my god, this is not a documentary, someone just invented this place in their head.” And at that moment, everything is possible, but it’s a totally separate challenge. You’re not bound by stringing these facts together to make them work, but you’re bound by the opposite problem, which is that you can do more or less whatever you want in the world of fiction, but that means you need to describe the color of what the rug is, and what it felt like, and character’s mental states and all those sorts of things. So it seems like having levels, at some level, there’s some security in that. But you have carved out a very different set of problems.

SM: Right. Because we have made games traditionally before, so you know how to do that and you know the work involved and you know the ultimate outcome of that, and we spent a year, four of us, broken away from the rest of the company making a prototype, and all throughout that, there was an ongoing conversation: “Are we going completely crazy, should we start making the game properly?” And by properly, I mean in a more traditional way, I guess. I think what kept us going in the decision-making process was that we said we would get into this to go bankrupt.

KS: A sort of Thelma and Louise moment, you’re all holding hands.

SM: We were stupid enough for it to have that appeal to us, but there’s a kind of silliness to that. I think you can only do that if you’re a bunch of friends and you’re encouraged by the camaraderie of it.

KS: Did you all meet at Criterion, or were you all here in Gilford originally?

SM: Pretty much. We didn’t all meet at Criterion, but we’ve all been friends for years. So me and Ryan started at Criterion on the same day pretty much. And we sat beside each other at Criterion for like 4 or 5 years, and we started up Hello Games, and we sat beside each other for another 4 or 5 years. So we don’t even have to talk to each other now, because we’ve had all the conversation we could have had.

KS: Everything has pretty much been said.

SM: Yeah. We know … I could write down any conversation between me and Ryan. I know exactly what he’ll say, and he knows exactly what I’d say in response. And then Dave was a friend who I’d worked with for a few years, and he had actually gone to school with Grant, so they knew each other since they were 6 or 7 years old. So we’re all extremely tightly knit because of that.

KS: Yeah, I can imagine. Where in Ireland are you from?

SM: I’m from down South. The nearest thing is a little fishing village, Ardmore, but that’s about 4 miles away, so we’re kind of in the middle of nowhere, basically.

KS: Has your family been in that area for a long time?

SM: No, my dad and mum both traveled loads. That’s a real Irish tradition.

KS: Travelling a lot?

SM: Travelling, emigrating, whatever. So my mum was born in Ireland, but moved to England, joined the British army, and then traveled a lot with the British army. Went to Singapore, Malaysia, stuff like that.

KS: Oh wow.

SM: My dad went to America to work. He was in New York for a bit, and then San Francisco, and like went as a kid. It’s kind of a classic Irish tale, but he went to America and he had never used a telephone, because they just never used them back home. And he like got a job at Bell Telephone, that sort of thing. And then they still had conscription. So even as an immigrant, you could be conscripted. So he went into the American army and traveled a lot with that.

KS: Was this all before you were born?

SM: Oh, yeah. So they both came back to Ireland, met, settled down, bought a farm, which is like a really good Irish thing to do. And they were farming, there’s like 5 of us kids—I’m the youngest. And then my dad got to about his 40s, mid-40s, and had what I presumed was some kind of mid-life crisis, like “Am I gonna be here all my life?” And he uprooted the family and went traveling, so we spent the most time probably in Australia. I was a real young kid, so it’s all normal to me, but we went to Australia, travelled around a lot farming there for a while. We were in the outback for a while, running this huge farm basically.

KS: Where in the Australian outback were you all?

SM: It would have been Queensland. And it was on this one-and-a-quarter-million acre farm, basically.

KS: What was your family farming?

SM: Cattle. We were near Brisbane on a cane farm for a while. And that wouldn’t have been that they owned them, just that they were kind of running them and stuff like that. Kind of managing a ranch. I was really young, so my memories of Australia are—it sounds really cheesy because of the game we’re making—but massive wide-open spaces, being completely alone basically, and crazy skies as well. My parents claim full ownership of No Man’s Sky.

KS: Are they going to be listed in the credits?

SM: Yeah, yeah. They saw the E3 trailer and they were saying how we used to fossilize dinosaur footprints near where we are and we used to sleep out under that. And they were like, “We did everything for you! Dinosaurs, alien landscapes, night skies!”

My parents claim full ownership of No Man’s Sky.

KS: Do your parents talk about these other places?

SM: Yeah, I think it’s an Irish thing. Irish people emigrate a lot. There’s a real culture of it. You know, and that was forcibly I guess, but now it’s seen as … I guess the American story is, you come to America as an immigrant and find your success and live in America as a good citizen. The Irish success story is you go to America or Australia or England or whatever. You become successful. You come home. That’s the, almost in school, would be seen as the great Irish success story.

KS: Or you send your money back because of low corporate tax rates.

SM: Yeah yeah, there you go!

KS: That is the true Irish success story, make your money abroad and then send it back to Ireland.

SM: So my parents would definitely fall into that, where they would talk of crazy adventures they had had. I’m not sure I would say they encourage us to go traveling, but they definitely see it positively, whereas a different culture would see that as a real negative. Like, you know, my son had to emigrate to find work, like I failed in some way.

KS: What do your siblings do? Did they stay in Ireland?

SM: They’ve all traveled, but they’re all back there now. I’m the real black sheep of the family.

KS: You’re not too far away.

SM: They’re all doctors of one type or another, basically. They all work in medicine of some sort. I make videogames. Rob people’s brains, basically.

KS: Did your parents ever have a place that they talked about wistfully? It might be different for each one of them. I don’t know if you travel, I’ve gotten to travel more as I’ve gotten older, and when I leave New York, I just remember, “Ah, the smell of New York.”

SM: My dad has a big thing for San Francisco. He thinks it’s the greatest in the world, basically. And he would have been there in the ‘60s. I can only imagine what it would have been like, and I think it to him represents the beauty of America. Because it is a very beautiful place, but also all of the cultures mixing. It must have been crazy, going from Ireland where he would have grown up without electricity and phone and then going to America. For me, I would have Australia in my mind, in terms of the outback. That’s what really stayed with me. About 6 or 7 years ago, I went on a trip to the Arctic, basically.

KS: The North Pole?

SM: It sounds more impressive than it is. You basically go to Norway and you keep on going North. But I think travel has this real ability to stick with you. My whole thing was that I was going to see the Northern lights and I totally didn’t, so. But I had a skidoo and went traveling across frozen lakes. It was the first time for me that I actually got that feeling back that you get in the outback: “I’m alone here, completely. If something goes wrong with my skidoo, I’m probably dead.”

KS: Was it just you?

SM: There was a group of us.

KS: From Hello Games?

SM: No, not people that I knew. You were just supposed to go travel in groups and stuff.

KS: For that reason. To eat somebody in case something goes wrong.

SM: Haha, yeah. I crashed my skidoo and I was at the back, and I basically fell like an hour and a half behind everyone else. To the point where I was following tracks, but I wasn’t really sure. And I should have been stressed, I should have been worried. But I was just like, “This is amazing.” I had no idea how to get back. I was maybe going the wrong way. But let me just take this in.

KS: This summer, I went to Hawaii for the first time, and it’s amazing—it’s part of the United States. I mean, if you’re Hawaiian, you probably have very strong thoughts about why that is. But nevertheless, there’s this place on the island of Lanai which is generally, of the Hawaiian islands, pretty uninhabited. There’s only about 3,000 people who live there. And the back of the island has this section where it’s the windward side, so it’s super dry and it’s called the Garden of the Gods. And it’s all red clay everywhere, and it looks like Mars. And so I was with my wife and we get out of the car and we’re like, “This is crazy! This is totally nuts!” And we just like to think that this is something that exists.

SM: I actually came back from that trip and I think I worked at, I actually went to a company called Kuju, which is also in Gilford, between EA and Criterion, and started working on their games. And at that moment, it probably sounds really cheesy, I was like, “I’m going to quit my job. I have no idea what I’m going to do, but I’m definitely going to quit my job.” Just that day to day, you don’t really take any time to think about what’s going on, and then travel, I always find I’ll have my best thoughts getting on a plane going someplace new.

KS: That was a human impulse for a very long time, just to discover, discover. When I was in Hawaii, I was up late one night and I was just very curious. I was on Wikipedia, and you get in these holes in Wikipedia. So I was curious: “How did people get to Hawaii?” And then there are all these smaller Micronesian islands, and I was like, “How did people get there?” They would study the currents and they’d build these elaborate maps with string. It’d be like one person in a tribe would be the wind expert. So they’d figure it out. They knew that if you had a current that was going this way and another going this way, there had to be something obstructing the current. And then they’d get in these boats and lay on their back and figure out which way the current was going and just leave eventually, like, “I know there’s probably an island somewhere that way.” We don’t all have that experience as humans, probably thankfully, but it’s important getting those moments where you feel like it.

SM: But that’s it: that shows you the drive to discover. But you imagine, probably over the course of 100 years, one guy who has that drive gets born.

KS: Yeah. This might be apocryphal story, but I heard this about bees. Like 1 out of every 100 bees has this desire to leave. Like most bees have a set path and they go forth, but 1 out of 100 isn’t wired that way and they try to go some other place. And I think part of the reason why is that if they didn’t, then bees wouldn’t really start new colonies or try to find new places to go, which is pretty cool. So yeah, you’re probably right: not all humans.

SM: Have you seen, I think it’s a Danish film, Kon-Tiki? It’s about a Dutch explorer who wanted to prove that some of these paths were possible. He’s been doing it since the ‘60s, trying to prove various migration paths that people might have taken. So like building the actual boats and then trying to make the trip himself and having no safety net.

being a place that no one had ever been before, that is really exciting to me

KS: When you’re working on No Man’s Sky, do you feel like you’re trying to create that feeling again? Whether it’s the outback or being on the North pole and falling behind your group?

SM: It’s really hard to say that without seeming pretentious.

KS: Nah, go for it. You have thoughts and dreams you want people to experience—that’s not pretentious.

SM: In a non-pretentious way. We were working on Joe Danger and needed something to keep our minds going, right? In games, you never really get to explore, because anywhere you go, the designer has been there before you. So, normally, it’ll be a hidden puzzle piece, so rather than go right on the screen in a platformer, you’ll go left and it’ll be there waiting for you. But somebody’s done that and placed it there for you and built the level. It’s so hard to get true exploration, that feeling of, “Wow, I’m in a real place.” What we talked about was imagine Skyrim or Red Dead Redemption, leaving the cities and the scripted part of the game behind, going out.

If you take Skyrim, for instance, like I like to just walk in the woods and stuff. But the idea of that being a place that no one had ever been before, that is really exciting to me. And the emotion that we wanted to get from people is that emotion of, “I have travelled to a place and discovered it.” That’s an inherently appealing thing. And I was at E3 and I had somebody ask me in a reasonably crowded room—I asked for questions at the end of a presentation—and somebody said, “Aren’t you worried about the fact that the game doesn’t have missions or quests or collectibles, and would you consider putting those in?” And I had a kind of little breakdown. I was just saying, like, because I have this argument with myself all the time, because it would be really easy to put those things in. And we think that, fundamentally, there are enough games that have those concepts. Joe Danger I really love, but you collect coins in it, you collect stars, you collect nuts and bolts and puzzle pieces, we put them all in. And I have collected all of those things in so many games. Scraps of paper.

KS: Pigeons in GTA IV.

SM: And is that why I really play games? Am I proud of that as a games player? When I look back on it, am I proud of it as a games designer for making … Can I feel proud of a game that I’ve made if that’s the only reason people are playing it? I’ve flinched when a game says “54/100,” or whatever, and our core idea is that what you want to do there is, you want to explore and you want to find those things, but is it really the coins that are driving you on? And in that discussion, I had kind of a little outburst like, “Why do you play games? Why are any of us playing games? Are we playing them for those collectibles?”

And then the guy was like, “But what if your game isn’t popular?” And I was like, “I’m actually ok with that.” This is a huge experiment, really. We’re going to build this universe and see if exploration and having to do things to upgrade your ship and suit and weapons and stuff to be able to survive, to be able to travel further, and saying, “Hey, there’s an ultimate goal, which is to get to the center of the galaxy, and you’re all going to explore this universe together.” To see whether that’s appealing or not. We feel like it’s appealing to us, and I probably can’t even work out whether it’s appealing to us because we really enjoy making it, rather than if it’s appealing to us to play it, but the core concept we talked about in the real early days about there not really being any proper science-fiction games that to me gave me the same feeling of reading a book. Right? Like reading actual fiction. Because what I’ve always enjoyed, like if you read The Mars Trilogy, I’ve always enjoyed just the descriptions of those worlds, and I’ll never go to those. And actually, a book can’t really give me that feeling, and a movie can’t really give me that feeling, but a game, because it’s interactive, should be able to deliver that feeling of exploration more than any other medium. So that, to me, was the core of that really exciting idea, which is if you could evoke the true emotion of exploration—that’s a really inherently human thing. I was talking to some other journalists outside of work, and they were saying that a lot of what they do and a lot of what they write about is just videogame tourism, almost. If you look at Twitch streams, what’s the most interesting about games is often just those stories of expression of how you play the game. I don’t know if it’s why people play games. Probably why people play games is that “54/100” coins collected or whatever. But for me, as a developer, the most interesting thing to me is that it’s a really exciting thing.

KS: I think it does drive people, even if they don’t know that that’s what they want. I host a show for PBS Digital Studios on games. We did an episode on No Man’s Sky. It was really interesting in the comments what people’s expectations were. There was kind of a back and forth in the comments like, “I’m worried there’s not going to be enough to do.” And my response was sort of, “You know, the chief motivation for humans for a long time, aside from getting food, was the idea that you’d go to a place and just experience it. It’s something that’s driven humans for a very long time. Like, if that is not enough for you, the problem is probably not with No Man’s Sky. You probably need to figure out why is it that you play games?” Because I think the more that games tap into these elements of what is human, the stronger they’ll be.

SM: I think we have to … this is probably of no use to our interview, but it’s just me talking. Again, at E3, I had somebody from press kind of saying that the moment I took out a gun in E3, they were switched off. Because for them, until that point, No Man’s Sky had been kind of high concept. And they were like “How do you feel…for me, I kind of wanted to explore those worlds and I didn’t want any game systems. I just kind of wanted to be let loose to explore.” And it’s really funny, because you don’t and can’t make a game to please all the types of people who play games, so for some people, exploring will be of no interest, and they’re angry. Like, “Why don’t you put coins in for us to collect?” And you can just not like if it comes out and you read reviews and it doesn’t sound like your kind of thing, you can just not play it. But we think it will be interesting to us and people like us. And other people might say, “No, I don’t want any of these elements. I don’t want you to have a gun, I don’t want…” And it’s not something we had ever experienced—we never got that with Joe Danger. It was never popular enough for people to care or want to try to steer it in a direction. But I think that the idea of it being a walking simulator, where you just go out and explore ambiently, that doesn’t appeal to me. What’s interesting is when you’re telling your story of exploring the island and working out the currents, what makes that interesting is the danger. And the outback, why it stuck with me is that when we got there, the people who lived there giving us this long talk about, “Never go out alone, if you do go out, always carry matches with you, if someone dies, stay with them. Light a fire. Light a fire at 12, light a fire at dusk, light a fire at dawn, don’t move, don’t try to find shade.

KS: “If something happens, here’s what you need to do to live.”

SM: And that’s all the danger of being in the Arctic, that’s what makes that story interesting to me. We want people to have to really earn this exploration. To kind of fight to have to survive. To say, “I landed … look at this amazing screenshot I took.” And for people to realize, “My god, to get there, you would have had to have this and this on your suit and you would have needed this type of weapon, and I want to one day go to visit these places, I want to become a great explorer.” That’s what makes exploration stories very interesting. And so we want to give people that. And so that is the game. Fighting to survive. Trading just to be able to explore. Go further, kind of find your way in the universe, I guess.

///

What’s the next No Man’s Sky? You’ll read about it first our print magazine. Find out more here.

We Are Chicago aims to dispel media myths about poor, black families

When thinking about the black neighborhoods in Chicago‘s south and west side most people will probably see death statistics. This is what the media thrusts into the public’s face time and again. It’s hardly an isolated incident; while purported to be based in fact, these statistics are trumpeted around for their racially charged implications. Bring it up again and again and those who are distant and unfamiliar with these neighborhoods can only associate them with gangland murders. What else do they have to go on? Being poor and black becomes enough for everyone else to fear you. And it seems to be fear that has driven cops to shoot young black kids walking unarmed on their own streets. That’s only the most obvious and violent consequences of this creeping prejudice.

We’re all aware of this now, perhaps more than ever, due to the past year’s events: Ferguson and Black Lives Matter especially. Michael Block and his team started working on We Are Chicago two and a half years ago before, as he says, the subject of this videogame was being discussed by mainstream outlets on a national scale. Block’s intention back then, and still to this day, is to share an engaging story of what it’s like to actually live on the streets that those death statistics are pulled from. And it’s not a Grand Theft Auto-style action romp, but a story about a teenager living life with his family, an experience about the people who exist around the gunshots, who hear them while sat at the dinner table. For this, Block and his team have worked together with people from Chicago’s South Side to hopefully provide an authentic narrative.

In the interview below, Block talks about how We Are Chicago came about in the first place, the specifics of working out the story with writers and artists from the community it’s about, as well as how he and his team is supporting non-profit groups looking to help out the kids and families stuck in these neighborhoods.

KS: You’ve been speaking to and working with people who live in Chicago for this project. But how did you determine who to consult?

During pre-production, our lead designer and I volunteered for an event called Community Action Day. This event put volunteers on the streets of Chicago at popular public transit stops to interview people about the problems they experienced in their lives and the solutions they saw having an effect in their communities.

We interviewed people in the Englewood neighborhood for the whole day and ended up hearing a lot of similar stories about violence and a lack of jobs, affordable housing, healthy food, and good education. The TV and print media, even in Chicago, typically portrays all of these stories through general statistics about gun deaths, poverty rates, and crime rates, but the personal story and the background behind it is far more compelling and impacting. After hearing all of their stories, we knew that these needed to be told in a more personal way and in a way that would follow the questions of “Why is this happening?” and “Why specifically here and to this group of people?”.

To give you some reference in case you haven’t heard of Englewood before, when we asked the people we talked to about the negative things they saw in their neighborhood, they explained to us where their friends had been mugged or where someone they knew had been shot. They would point to the end of the block we were standing on or reference a store a few blocks down. Everyone we talked to had these stories and the crime statistics that the news portrays back up both the content of the stories and their frequency. There has also been a lot of focus on Englewood over the last few years because of the stories and statistics, which has led to a huge increase in the number of non-profit groups working in the area and attempting to improve conditions around employment, housing, food, and education. Even so, the general public perception of Englewood outside of these efforts is severely lacking in context, empathy, and understanding.

Ferguson and Black Lives Matter have shown that many similar difficulties are being faced all across the country

After Community Action Day, we talked to one of the volunteers we were stationed with who grew up and still lives on the South Side. He was very interested in the project and agreed to do an in-depth interview with us about what it was like growing up in his neighborhood as well as put us in touch with a friend of his, also from the South Side, who we interviewed.

Later on, we brought on a writer, Tony, who we found by reaching out to colleges in the low income neighborhoods we were focusing on. Through him we were able to get additional confirmation of the stories and events we had heard from other people. From there, he was able to craft an overarching narrative out of the core topics that we found were the most common. Tony also worked for a period doing counseling for high school kids on the South Side. Those experiences and stories also provided more validation of the stories we had previously heard.

Besides the narrative portion of the game, our lead designer and I both knew two artists who were from the South Side that we had worked with on other games. We ended up bringing both of them on to the project to work on environment art. One of them also helped review the narrative and provided feedback on other content for the game like the characters’ appearances. They were able to add an additional layer of authenticity to the game.

We definitely had to focus on one particular group just from the aspect of trying to make a realistic narrative driven 3D game with a very small team. We ended up deciding on low income African Americans living on the South and West sides of Chicago. There are a lot of different demographics of people living in Chicago who are being discriminated against and misrepresented, but we felt that specifically the African American community in Chicago had a particularly difficult history that myself and most of my friends knew very little about. For context, we also started this project before Ferguson and before the Black Lives Matter campaign was in the national spotlight, so a lot of the issues that are being talked about now were very much not being discussed in the main media outlets when we got started.

While the specific narrative we chose is focused on stories from south side Chicago and particularly the African American experience, things like Ferguson and Black Lives Matter have shown that many similar difficulties are being faced all across the country in neighborhoods and cities of all sizes. It’s our hope that the game will help humanize those issues and create empathy for the communities all across the country that are dealing with similar issues. For the players who don’t live in Chicago, we hope that some of these big national movements will show them that these aren’t just Chicago specific stories and that there is probably a neighborhood close to them that is experiencing similar things.

KS: You mention that Chicago residents came up with the plot points. What kind of story did you want them to help you tell?

We set out to tell a story about the everyday experiences of people growing up in these neighborhoods, so during our interviews we would ask very general questions about what their experiences were like growing up.  Usually people would bring up events or things that happened to them that sounded unusual to me or were vastly different then the experiences I had growing up.  While that was usually very informative, we also made a concerted effort during the interviews to ask people about the positive experiences they had while growing up.  Often times people would quickly volunteer the negative stories (probably for a number of reasons), but when we would ask about some of the good things they experienced growing up, they had plenty of those to talk about as well.

From the very beginning we knew that one of the big issues we wanted to address with misrepresentation in the media was the strong focus on negative stories and negative caricatures. Our goal with the narrative and the game as a whole was to present characters that were accurate and relatable, which wouldn’t have been possible only showing the negative events in their lives.

With a collection of both positive and negative stories about growing up in multiple neighborhoods, we figured out what were the most common themes and events and prioritized those as a key focus in the game. When we brought on our writer Tony, we discussed that prioritized list of topics and made sure that he agreed they were both important and representative of his experience as well. After that, he would write the dialogue and the branching options and we worked with him to make sure it worked in game.

During the course of us reviewing the script, we had a particularly interesting discussion about a section of the game where your family sits down to dinner in their home and a gunshot goes off down the street. Based on my personal experience, I expected the characters to react strongly and to be afraid and maybe even call the police, but Tony didn’t have them reacting at all, they just kept eating. After discussing it with him, he explained that gunshots in their neighborhood were such a common occurrence that they would make sure the gunshot wasn’t directed at their house and then continue doing whatever they were doing.

the pain that we saw expressed by many of the adults we interviewed.

This was obviously something super important to talk about since it represented such a huge disconnect between the way I would have expected the characters to react and the way they did in real life. The trouble was that the most accurate thing to do was something that likely wouldn’t make sense to the player, it would look more like a bug that either the gunshot wasn’t supposed to have played when it did or the reaction animations weren’t playing. After going back and forth with Tony we worked out that it would be appropriate for your younger sister Taylor to be annoyed and for that to start a discussion about gunshots in your neighborhood. This allowed us to have the discussion we needed to have with the player about the gunshot and about the accurate reaction without it feeling like a bug and without the player being unaware of what was going on.

KS: What details did the Chicago-based artists you worked with bring to the virtual environments that you couldn’t have done? Why is that kind of accuracy important to We Are Chicago?

An extremely important part of understanding a community is understanding the visual landscape that makes up that community. If you live on the more affluent north side of Chicago, you will most likely see fancy buildings, nice stores with big windows, and beautiful parks, while on the south side you will often find condemned and boarded up buildings, vacant lots, and lots of bars on store windows with bullet proof glass protecting the cash register. Living in those vastly different visual spaces creates very different psychological effects on the people who live there. By accurately portraying those nuances in the game we are hoping to create some of those same psychological effects in the player.

We want the player, when they walk in to work and see the bullet proof glass, to feel the implication inherent in its presence, that they are not safe working there. As they walk down the street and see signs condemning their neighbor’s house or walk past empty lots, we want them to feel the implications, that their neighbors cannot afford to maintain their homes and that there are not enough people willing and able to take the risk of building something new in their neighborhood. Hopefully as they learn more about the characters, they will also understand on some level the pain that we saw expressed by many of the adults we interviewed. Many were so upset that these things were happening in their neighborhood, to their neighbors, and that often times it was due to circumstances far outside anyone in the community’s control.

KS: Why try to dispel the media misrepresentations you speak of through a videogame rather than any other format?

We created We Are Chicago because we believed that putting people into the difficult situations that we had heard during the interviews would require them to not just witness the results of the choices people had made, but to make and rationalize those choices internally. By presenting you with the realistic options that your character would be presented with, like your friend deciding to join a gang or you getting mugged on the street, we believe you as the player have to think about those situations and your responses on a different level then the passive observer in a documentary film.

Because the story plays out in the context of a game, you have to justify to yourself and to your character why you chose to lie to your mom about your friend or how to confront a friend that endangered your life. Unlike a documentary film where the person or people who are the focus of the film are making the decisions and you can decide whether you agree with them or not, a game removes that level of detachment and forces you to get involved. It’s our hope that through those rationalizations and that involvement, people will engage on a deeper level with the story being told and understand a little better the real life people who shared those stories.

KS: How do players progress through the game’s narrative and what interactions and other game elements inform it?

The in-game experience takes place primarily through branching dialogue options similar to the Telltale Walking Dead games. Between conversations the player usually has control to move their character around in first-person to inspect things in the environment or talk to other characters in the space.

During our interviews, numerous people described crossing the street or sometimes even walking in the street to avoid people they thought might be in a gang or to avoid places that had blind corners or were known to be hiding spots where people may mug you. We discuss the concept of always being on guard by giving the player control to choose which paths to take when walking down the street. Your character’s friends in the game will inform you if you get too close to someone who looks suspicious and help educate the player on what can happen if they’re not careful enough.

we also examine the normality of the gunshot

We also have a few one-off mechanics throughout the game that are used to convey emotions and feelings to the player and build a sense of empathy and relatability. For example, during a scene in the game, you set the table before dinner. While this is a rather mundane event for a video game, it helps create in the player a sense of normality and to reinforce the focus on everyday events in the game. In addition we follow this everyday action that everyone can relate to with an action that is only a regular occurrence for the characters in the narrative and not the player. Immediately after setting the table and sitting down to eat, a gunshot rings out down the street. By making the player feel comfortable and safe surrounded by family and friends and then contrasting that with the violence outside, we hope that juxtaposition of the gunshot with the family dinner has a stronger impact on the player. Through this event and its framing we also examine the normality of the gunshot to help convey the differences between the player and the character in an effort to spur contemplation and discussion.

KS: How exactly are you raising awareness of these non-profit groups working in Chicago’s neighborhoods through the game?

Our main menu takes place in the living room of the main character’s house and we’ve placed the real brochures from the organizations we are working with on the table for you to look through. In each one there will be a link to visit the organization’s website and get more information as well as donate money and sign up for volunteer opportunities. Throughout the game, we are also placing their real posters and handouts in various places that make sense for the narrative (announcement boards at school, on the wall at your work, in a pile of papers at home). In addition, towards the end of the game, but in a place that makes sense for the narrative, there is a section where a representative from the non-profit organizations explains what their organization does to help these communities and how the player can help them accomplish their mission along with further links to the organization’s website.

On top of the in-game presence, we are also contributing a portion of our revenue from the game to each of the non-profits that are signed on and featured in the game. We hope that the in-game materials will increase awareness and hopefully also drive funding and volunteer signups, but at a minimum the revenue share will mean that any sales of the game will directly help fund positive programs in these neighborhoods.

One major goal we had with this project was to ensure that the narrative experience was not only authentic and informative but also engaging. Unfortunately, we’ve seen a lot of games that are funded or essentially heavily designed and directed by other non-profit organizations and they usually end up being not very immersive with walls of text or clunky exposition. We wanted to shift this paradigm by creating a strong game first and working with the non-profits to see how their organizations would fit in to the character’s story. We hope that We Are Chicago is able to show that our model of naturally incorporating the non-profit information into the narrative and the environment results in a better game, with greater reach, and greater benefit to the organizations and the community they serve.

The two groups we currently have signed on are:

All Stars Project of Chicago – http://allstars.org/content/all-stars-project-chicago

All Stars Project of Chicago has two primary programs, the first is a youth training program for kids from low income neighborhoods that involves workshops and paid internships with local companies. The other program is a talent show that provides kids with a positive outlet to discuss what’s happening in their lives or just provide a space for them to express themselves in a constructive way. In addition, they were also one of the groups that ran Community Action Day which was extremely influential in getting this project started. We’re very excited to be featuring them in the game because they provide a positive alternative to the negative events and choices we discuss in the game. By setting up workshops and internships with local companies, they are providing a path to a good career and the opportunities that entails, which gives the kids in these neighborhoods a very good reason to turn down gang recruitment.

Reclaim Our Kids – http://www.reclaimourkids.com/

Reclaim Our Kids is composed of former gang members who go into schools to talk to kids about the experiences they had in joining a gang to convince them not to join in the first place. They will also negotiate on behalf of kids who have already joined a gang to get them out and then make sure they have the resources and opportunities to stay out of the gang for good. With We Are Chicago, we are hoping to provide a space for the kids from these neighborhoods to test out ideas and hopefully decide that not joining a gang is the best option, but we know that not everyone will play the game and that not everyone will choose to stay out of a gang. We’re very happy to be working with Reclaim Our Kids and to be supporting their mission so that they can try to reach the kids that everyone else cannot before they join and to be there to get them out if they’ve already made the choice.

You can find out more about We Are Chicago on its website. It’s expected to be finished in early 2016.

Secret Hitler is mercifully not a joke

“Are you Hitler?”

Note, dear reader, the use of quotation marks. Even though this is the internet, where people go to say such things, I do not believe that you are actually Hitler. Rather, that is an actual question that comes up with reasonable frequency in Max Temkin’s (co-creator of Cards Against Humanity) new tabletop game Secret Hitler.

This is not the setup for a joke. Seriously.

Secret Hitler takes placed in a simplified—though not stable—version of early 1930s Weimar Germany. The balance between liberals and fascists is delicate and consequently the future of Germany hangs in the balance. Players elect a new chancellor and president in each round, which lasts about as long as a Weimar-era government, and seek to pass policies. There are two ways to win the game: pass five policies or root out the identity of Hitler. That’s where the Clue­­-like “Are you Hitler?” question comes into play. As in Weimar Germany, however, both of these tasks are easier said than done.

the fundamental difficulty of identifying evil and doing anything about it.

In the context of Secret Hitler, the titular character is not a person so much as he is an idea. If there was a person who was identifiably Hitler, with all the baggage that name now rightly entails, the game would not be particularly challenging. One cannot, however, know such things in advance. Sure there are signs—Mein Kampf, rallies, speeches—but all this evidence makes much more sense in hindsight. Secret Hitler uses game mechanics to highlight the fundamental difficulty of identifying evil and doing anything about it.

We asked @nytmag readers: If you could go back and kill Hitler as a baby, would you do it? (What’s your response?) pic.twitter.com/daatm12NZC

— NYT Magazine (@NYTmag) October 23, 2015

All discussions of Hitler, even those that acknowledge the challenges of identifying evil, however, are subject to a certain amount of recency bias. In Secret Hitler’s case, it’s hard to separate the game from New York Times Magazine’s weird thought experiment about killing baby Hitler. There is an ethical debate to be had about whether, knowing all that we now know, one could kill baby Hitler. The real challenge, however, is that such opportunities never exist. Even if one didn’t kill baby Hitler in the magazine’s scenario, one would at least know who Adolf Hitler was and what he would become from the start. That’s useful knowledge. Secret Hitler uses the weight of that knowledge to make the challenge of unearthing Hitler more urgent.

Secret Hitler strikes a difficult balance. It is not deliberately unfunny or consciously weighty in the manner of a History Channel documentary, but it is not mining its source material for laughs. The game’s Kickstarter video shows players laughing, because that is something people do when playing games. It’s human. It’s normal. Which is not to say that one cannot laugh about Hitler; Mel Brooks make a credible argument in the PBS documentary Recording ‘The Producers’ that jokes were his only way of striking back against Hitler. But for every clever joke on this—or, to a lesser extent, any—subject, there is plenty of dross to go around. Secret Hitler is interesting, joyful, and mercifully not going for cheap laughs.

You can support Secret Hitler’s development on Kickstarter.

Immortalize your newborn child by rendering them as a creepy 3D model

One of the various things the digital age has changed forever is how parents show off their kids. Before, the most harm a baby picture could do was embarrass you in front of a date you brought home to meet your parents. But according to the WNYC podcast Note to Self, “the Pew Research Center found that 92 percent of children in the U.S. have a digital presence by the time they turn two.”

With the simultaneous immediacy and longevity of a social media footprint, the impulse to show off your cute kid could now have unforeseen consequences. As The Guardian‘s Linda Geddes asks, “is it safe, or even ethical to publish something about someone who can’t give their consent? And as the business models of social networking sites change and digital technology develops, could these innocent snapshots someday come back and bite our children on the behind?”

Will the Internet ruin your precious, unspoiled newly born’s life?

Ultimately, the answer to this hotly debated question is: nobody knows. Uploading your child to the internet could (and very likely is) contributing to the data-sourcing business of social media. But, then again, so is everything else you upload. And people can speculate wildly about the potential consequences an early social media presence could have on your child’s eventual college or job opportunities, but the fact of the matter is that no one can predict the constantly changing tides of the interwebs.

Will the internet ruin your precious, unspoiled newly born’s life? If yes, there’s probably not much you can do about it unless we collectively attack the bigger ethical problems facing the current digital landscape. So if your newly born is already destined to wind up on the seedy channels of the online ecosystem, you might as well do it in style like creative coder Lars Berg.

we just had a son! here’s what he looks like in 3D(i kind of overdid it with the particles): https://t.co/UzTduPPE67#threejs#newkid

— Lars Berg (@laserberg) November 22, 2015

Following the birth of his son Miles, Berg decided to celebrate by doing what he knows best: recreating that joy on a webpage so the world could partake in it. The model captures the exuberance of a new father: the glittering particles that surround the peaceful child encapsulating all the hopes and dreams a parent imagines at the beginning of a new life.

Of course, no matter how adorable the story and intent behind “Hello Miles” is, the 3D model isn’t immune to the pitfalls of the uncanny valley. Like, if you flip the camera to look under 3D Miles, you get an inverted view of his peaceful slumber through the hollowness of his immaterial body.

But, all in all, Berg’s digital monument might just prove to be the new trend for parents who want to remember every detail of their offspring’s first hours on earth. Who knows, maybe 3D printed models of newborns will eventually replace home-made birth videos as the go-to borderline creepy method of archiving such a special day.

See the project for yourself here.

h/t Prosthetic Knowledge

Mad Max: The film videogames are made of

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

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The Mad Max franchise is unique. Not only does it depict a very different apocalypse than the zombie-ridden radioactive tragedies we’re used to, but it also stands as a distinctly seminal Australian film in an age where America dominates the box office releases.

The beauty of its Australian influence originates with director George Miller, who grew up in the infamous outback with a love for film – particularly Westerns – that inevitably lead him to create the character of Max Rockatansky, legendary Road Warrior. In an interview with Variety, Miller himself calls the films “a Western on wheels.”

Mad Max’s striking visual style and enduring legacy not only captured movie audiences worldwide this year with Fury Road, but also launched a big budget game with equally stunning graphics. But its influence on the interactive medium goes far beyond that.

In the Mad Max films, the environment serves as a main character alongside Mr. Rockatensky and his compatriots, depicting the sprawling, intimidating roadways of the Australian Outback According to Miller, Australians have a “love of the open road” that he wanted to include as a theme in the films.

But beyond the spiked car frames and feral marauders, you’ll find the series has a long history of hitting on important social anxieties in Australia, particularly with oil and water. Both are precious commodities in the Mad Max canon, and both draw parallels to modern-day concerns about oil and water scarcities in Australia and around the globe.

In an essay for The Guardian, writer Ben Wilkie explains the symbolism of the Outback and the comforts of the road:

“As we traverse the outback upon these artificial pathways [roads], our greatest fear is that we will become lost, stranded, or our lifeline – the petrol that fuels our vehicles – will disappear,” Wilkie writes, pointing to the topical anxieties upon which much of Mad Max’s fiction is based. “In depicting a society at war over that precious liquid, it is precisely the fear of having to face our last great adversary, an unforgiving landscape from which we settlers are alienated, that the Mad Max films have always recognized [sic].”

Game developer 2K’s Borderlands franchise is very much the same. The open world of Pandora is one that fosters the violence and depravity its inhabitants express. It’s a barren wasteland devoid of hope, surviving on a wild sense of hostility.

In the same piece, Wilkie explains it’s the land’s unwillingness to permit these people comfortable lives that leads to the violence. Put simply, it’s that “their identity and very existence is frequently defined in relation to an often foreboding, unwelcoming land that violently opposes their presence. They are out of place, and they do not belong here.”

Like the land itself, both Borderlands and Mad Max are partially defined by the characters contained within each world. There are no heroes; only self-serving thrill-seekers content with speaking from the barrel of a gun. In Mad Max’s world, fighters are largely cannon fodder, grunts who dream of greatness but rarely achieve anything more than death beneath massive tire treads. The psychos, bandits, midgets, and bruisers of Borderlands all share a similar twisted, grungy, and off-kilter appearance, their bodies scarred and deformed, their outfits a utilitarian blend meant to double as armor and a weapon.

But that’s what makes the Borderlands world so distinct. It’s easy to mow down hordes of screeching enemies with randomly-generated weapons when they’re portrayed as inconsequential, just as it’s difficult to feel anything for War Boys as they fall to their deaths.

There was a surge of vehicular combat games in the late ‘90s to ‘00s who borrowed ideas from films like Death Race 2000, but it’s the best-selling PlayStation franchise Twisted Metal whose roots are deeply embedded within the design of Mad Max’s vehicles. They’re abominations; machines with semi-recognizable frames littered with spikes, chains, blood, paint, and mounted weapons. These once-everyday vehicles have been changed into veritable war machines, created for the use of destroying others with brutal efficiency.

The Twisted Metal series focuses mainly on the combat between cars and how much damage they can inflict on one another. In Mad Max, many of the villainous characters are motivated by the pulsations and roars of an engine serving like war drums as they prepare for a fight. Twisted Metal is similar, arming players with a machine lovingly crafted for the intent of doing harm to meet one’s self-serving needs. It’s a characteristic the franchise has become known for, and one of which Max himself would be proud.

SUPERHYPERCUBE finds common ground between Tetris and Blade Runner

VR had me skeptical, but then again, I’m pretty much always skeptical of new gaming technology. Similarly, when Microsoft’s Kinect rolled around, so too did my eyeballs, right into the back of my skull. I can lazily holler at my Xbox to turn on? Big deal. With VR, I could scan my entire surroundings and yet stay encompassed in another dimension? So what. My perception of VR was comparable to what the editors at Time thought when putting the creator of the Oculus Rift on their cover in that goofy pose: that VR was probably silly. Then I played a demo of Playstation VR launch title SUPERHYPERCUBE, and all that terribly misguided scoffing changed. (Though Kinect remains a joke).

In KOKOROMI’s SUPERHYPERCUBE, the objective is to fit a cluster of cubes into a distant, similarly shaped hole. A simple enough objective—except for when it gets tricky. On the simple side, you use miscellaneous buttons and the analog stick to roll your cube in a specific direction to reorient it. Wearing the Playstation VR headset, ducking to peer around your cube grows tougher and tougher with each growing cluster of cubes the player’s cube absorbs. Your rolling of the cubes becomes incredibly frenzied as the game goes on. In a nutshell, it’s fucked-up VR Tetris.

The game itself feels intuitive, as you peer around your Tetris-esque cluster of cubes in the game’s space, but this becomes difficult as the game’s speed quickens and the cube cluster’s size grows to astronomical sizes. As you flip your cube cluster and quick speed it through a passageway (much like the “hard drop” function in Tetris) you garner points and extra cubes join your cluster—or, if it doesn’t fit, pieces either break off or your cluster falls apart entirely. As I neared the end of my demo, the game’s speed became overwhelming, and my panicked rolling of the cube cluster led to it crashing around where the hole was. It crumbled before my very eyes, and I was presented a game over screen.

But the experience is transcendent: arcade-like through and through, while still being fun and beginner-friendly. I can easily envision sitting on a couch with friends and oohing and ahhing as we struggle to overtake each other’s high scores. The VR is simple but effective: the head-tracking of the headset make the game feel like you’re literally inside this futuristic, technicolored world. The game’s style aesthetically reminded me of the on-rails PS2-era shooter Rez, which easily holds up today.

SUPERHYPERCUBE feels intuitive; the experience is transcendent

SUPERHYPERCUBE plays like it was tailor-made for VR, so it’s hard to imagine that it technically didn’t begin that way. Originally developed for Gamma 3D, a 2008 art and game show in Montreal, the game’s original iteration was very different. The game’s goal and head-tracking features remain the same, though the original used classic red and blue 3D glasses and head-tracking through Wiimotes. But in the past couple years of its development, and its refocus toward VR specifically, KOKOROMI traded the original monochrome color scheme for a vibrant, neon-colored palette. The team says they were inspired by the Southern Californian minimalistic art movement “light and space” and sci-fi films such as Blade Runner, Xanadu, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

These touchpoints evoke the usage of neon, LED, and even natural light to create obscure, often geometric art—art that changes over time or differs depending on how one perceives it. Its influence is littered all over SUPERHYPERCUBE, from the style to the way the colors change as you gaze around your cube cluster, to the ambient music and bright style. This is a game that isn’t focusing on a firm time period for inspiration, but its scope covers many. Who knows where all this VR stuff is going, but, as it stands, SUPERHYPERCUBE will exist in my timeline as the VR game that made me a believer.