Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 223

Direct the frazzled dream worlds inside forgotten video cassettes

The lure of VHS.

Game creator Erin Robinson Swink on the challenge of creating meaningful games

You cannot fail in Gravity Ghost, but it can still move you.

Scrub a hunk down in this gay shower room fantasy

Don't keep him waiting.

Stasis and the horror of the known

An adventure game that confronts death through its optional stories

Sigh, FIFA 16 can't avoid the systemic inequality of women's soccer after all

Kadeisha Buchanan, the best young player at this summer’s Women’s World Cup, is a fantastic talent, the kind of player you can only dream of being. That’s why the news that a select few female soccer players would be included in the latest edition of FIFA was so exciting. That’s also why the news that EA has removed Buchanan and 12 other female players from FIFA 16 for fear of compromising their NCAA eligibility is so disappointing. 

This is, on the one hand, a decidedly old-school story. A videogame developer sets out to make a sports game but has a hard time securing image rights. Been there done that. Ed O’Bannon, whose antitrust lawsuit against the NCAA centred on student athletes’ inability to profit from their image rights, made reference to players on UCLA’s 1995 basketball team having their likenesses used in a videogame without permission or compensation. The NCAA can profit from image rights; players cannot. EA’s current predicament—“The NCAA recently informed EA Sports that these 13 student-athletes would be risking their eligibility for collegiate athletics by being included in FIFA 16”—is hardly unusual.

And yet, since women’s sports tend to get short shrift (not only in videogames), this is also an unusual scenario.

On the back of a successful World Cup, it was hoped that the infrastructure around women’s soccer could grow to the point where it could effectively support a greater number of players. To an extent, this came to pass. NWSL attendance increased 30% after the World Cup. Games started to sell out. Female stars were finally included in FIFA 16. Sure, their clubs weren’t included in the game, but it was a start.

World Cup champion @alexmorgan13 joins #Messi on the historic #FIFA16USCover! http://t.co/LeUM4cOo9s pic.twitter.com/683etOpQjw

— EA SPORTS FIFA (@EASPORTSFIFA) July 20, 2015

Yet the NCAA’s demand that thirteen female players be removed from FIFA 16 is a reminder of how far that start is from the ultimate end goal of building a supportive infrastructure. It is so unbelievably hard to make a living as a female soccer player. You can’t be paid while in college. You could surely earn more doing almost anything other than playing in the NWSL, where salaries range from $6,842 to $37,800. If you’re really lucky, you get to play for a national team, and there’s some money in that—at least in America. But the US men’s team received four times more than its World Cup-winning women for failing to make the 2014 World Cup quarterfinals. Every option on the decision tree is a reminder that female achievements go woefully undercompensated.

Female achievements go woefully undercompensated 

The NCAA separates all sorts of athletes from the profits they generate, but this case feels pettier. There are so few outlets for the likes of Kadeisha Buchanan, so few places to be compensated for their talent and hard work. And now yet another door has been closed. In making FIFA 16, EA operated under the assumption that women’s national teams operated in the same world as their male counterparts, a world where clubs pay and develop players. EA was wrong: not even virtually reality could escape the systemic inequality with which women’s soccer must reckon.

Rambling Through the Garden

A conversation with the makers of The Talos Principle.

Watch 11 hours of cats being adorable to celebrate the best cat game on the planet

We don't need an excuse to talk about cats here. Cats are a pretty big deal. We have a "cats" tag and it's probably the most valuable thing we've got. That is, before we set-up our sister site Kitten Screen and take over th-- okay, that's not actually happening (it is in my dreams), but a "Kitten Screen" is actually why you're here. 

This week has been declared "Game Week with Google Play" in Japan. And part of that involved celebrating one of our favorite videogames from this past year: Neko Atsume. You know what developer Hit-Point Co. did? I can hardly believe it. They had a 11-hour live broadcast of a real-life version of the game set-up inside Osaka's "Neko no Jikan Kita-honten," which is the first cat cafe opened in Japan. It was called "Real-Life Neko Atsume." What else?

Hit-Point went to some unnecessary but admirable efforts to ensure that the room it all took place in appeared similar to the one in Neko Atsume. There's a yellow bowl, a green rucksack, a toy fish, a large cat playground, even a large television that will never be watched. They even made sure that the same breeds of cats that appear inside the game would be in front of the camera, with no exceptions.

one of the few videogames to transcend language barriers 

On top of that, those that tuned in live either on YouTube or participating over social media on September 15th were able to influence which of the "cat-enticing goods" were made available in the room. This included rubber balls, yarn balls, and cardboard boxes. They could have put a cardboard box and some water in an empty room, shoved two cats in there, and let us tune in, and we'd probably be just as happy. Don't they know that?

To be fair, Hit-Point probably hasn't been able to understand much about the success of its game. It's a small company that made a cute cat game and threw it up on the app stores to see it suddenly blow up on its own accord. And what's remarkable about it is that this popularity wasn't exclusive to their home nation of Japan but spread rapidly to the US and other parts of the world. That's surprising because the game is only available in Japanese. If you don't understand Japanese then you'll need this guide in order to be able to play it.

This makes Neko Atsume one of the few videogames to transcend language barriers (without being localized) and gain huge popularity. And why wouldn't it? The experience of being a cat owner is universally identical. One moment the cat loves you, can't get enough of your hands, your succulent tins of moist tuna. Then they turn over onto their backs, presenting an irresistibly fluffy belly, all to lure you in for a quick scratch across the skin. They are lovable tykes that squash themselves into any box-shaped device they can find, popping up unexpectedly with a sleepy head, or a rapid paw when you get home from work. It seems only right that Neko Atsume's popularity was as unpredictable as a cat's next resting place.

Forget space marines. Let me play as the janitor

Stop worrying about saving the universe and just live in it.

Now you can test if your Cities: Skylines creations actually work for humans

In city builder games, the player is god. No capitalization is called for here: She is looking on from on high, but she is not omnipotent; she must watch human forces desecrate her creations from the heavens above. Most games grant their players agency they would otherwise lack, but the risk of POV-induced hubris looms large in city builders. These are games about building human environments, yet the actual humans tend to only matter on an aggregate level. When it comes to the lives of individual citizens, on the other hand, Orson Welles’ speech from The Third Man comes to mind: 

Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?

A mod to Cities: Skylines released this week by a Redditor known as Fr0sz addresses this blind spot by letting players walk through cities at street-level. The mod, which has been likened to a first-person shooter, is the closest you can get to experiencing Cities: Skylines’ virtual metropolises as if you actually lived in them. Judging by this video of the mod, which is a few months old, the results are not entirely life-like, but they are definitely more human:

Many urban projects that are appealing on paper and compelling in photographs fail when it comes to daily use. This problem is indicative of urban planning’s struggle with the human scale or, more generally, human behavior. If a plaza is too big, or too quiet, or too anything, passers-by usually decline to spend their time there. In the spirit of Potter Stewart, city-dwellers know an inhospitable space when they see one. These feelings are squishy and not easily quantified, but the success of public spaces often depends on understanding the finer points of human behavior.

Urban planning has often been used as more of a blunt instrument, less concerned with human scale and niceties than with the projection of power. In the mid-19th century, for instance, Baron Haussmann, who had been commissioned by Napoleon III to renew Paris, carved large boulevards through the city. These boulevards radiated outwards from the metropolis’ centre, displacing all the buildings and people that stood in their paths. As the Auckland University of Technology’s Carl Douglas notes:

By cutting into the body of the city with his boulevards and promoting unimpeded circulation, Haussmann hoped not only to alleviate the social pressures which produced unrest, but also to make the construction and defense of barricades impossible.

If the player in a city builder is not god, she is at least Haussmann. Her power radiates outwards, like tentacles—or boulevards. At a high level, where success can be measures in aggregate term or with reference to whether or not there’s been a revolution lately, this perspective makes sense. But success in cities also exists at the ground levels. Safety, for instance, is not just protection from revolt, but also the ability to walk home comfortably. That’s why Jane Jacobs famously argued that busy sidewalks are the key to safe, vibrant communities. This granular approach to evaluating a city cannot exist in a game that offers a god-like or Haussmannite POV, and that’s why Fr0sz’ mod is so exciting. Cities: Skylines always offered impressive tools to design cities, but there is now a human perspective to counterbalance all this central planning. 

Behind the Sega-core racing tunes of Horizon Chase

These screaming synthesizers are more revival than retro.