Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 234

You'll miss Instagram's squares when they're gone

Instagram announced on Thursday that its signature 1:1 aspect ratio was no more. An update for Android and iOS clients will allow users to upload full-sized portrait and landscape photos. The square will remain Instagram’s fundamental unit, but its value as a cultural currency has been devaluated. Without the hassle of using third-party apps or aggressive cropping to fit images into a square frame, one can only expect the proportion of oblong images in Instagram feeds—currently estimated at 20%—to increase.

As The Verge’s Ariha Setalvad points out, this is good news for tourists at the notoriously tall Eiffel Tower. It is also good new for all but the most rotund fashionistas, who previously “[had] to choose whether to crop out either their new haircut or their new shoes.” Fair enough. Those people are surely happy about this. But that doesn’t mean this change is the greatest of ideas.

The square created a language 

Instagram’s square frame was always limiting, but it was also interesting. For better or for worse, it encouraged specific forms of visual composition. The best images on Instagram were often those that made the most of these constraints. Some subjects, such as food photography, benefited from Instagram’s aesthetic. Other subjects, as Setalvad’s Eiffel Tower example attests, could not thrive in this environment. That was the trade-off inherent in Instagram: It was not suitable for everyone or everything, but it was more interesting for this very reason

What is Instagram without the square? Now, more than ever, it is Apple’s camera app tethered to a larger social network. It is another feed of images in a digital world teeming with feeds of images. It is, above all, another victory for hardware at the expense of software. If a camera can take landscapes and portraits, I should be able to share landscapes and portraits, goddammit!!! Instagram is a layer of technological intermediation between your camera and the world. By way of intermediation, it imposes its opinions, such as what constitutes the optimal aspect ratio, onto its users’ images. Instagram is more than a pure conduit because of that. Remove those opinions, however, and Instagram is just a reflection of a camera’s capacity.

A photo posted by Lauren (@lnhenry) on Aug 27, 2015 at 7:20pm PDT

Users do have recourse against these opinions. Writing about the attribution scandal involving Instagram celebrity “The Fat Jew” (née Josh Ostrovsky), The Awl’s Brian Feldman noted, “Adding repost functionality [to Instagram] has become a cottage industry.” A similar industry devoted itself to escaping the tyranny of the square. Thus, Instagram’s Ashley Yuki told Ariha Setalvad “For the average person, one in every five stories in their feed looks like it's natively supported in our app, which is not great.” These “not great” moments can be solved by appending functionalities that snuff out lesser implementations. This is how Twitter came to have the retweet and why Instagram now supports a plurality of aspect ratios. The add-on section of the App Store functions as an outsourced R&D lab, gradually expanding the worldview of popular apps.

How, then, does a large company tell the people in its R&D lab that their opinions are wrong—not wrong in any objective sense, but wrong in terms of what the mothership seeks to achieve? Ashley Yuki’s feed problem could be solved by discouraging letterboxing, but that would involve telling users that they are incorrectly employing Instagram. The customer can always—or at least frequently—be right, but that requires the app to be wrong on a regular basis. The customer is admittedly sometimes right, as in the case of Twitter’s retweet function or the calls for better attribution on Instagram. It is nevertheless hard to look at the evolution of the app ecosystem and not think that, on the aggregate, apps are growing less opinionated instead of developing smarter opinions.

A photo posted by Mario Molina (@nemario) on Aug 27, 2015 at 6:27pm PDT

Instagram’s square frame was far from perfect, but at least it gave the app a worldview. It structured user behavior and the aesthetic of shared images. To that end, Instagram has rarely made full use of the devices on which it operated. But much as new games really, really don’t need to make the most of VR technology just for the sake of making the most of VR technology, photography apps don’t always have to make the most of cameras. There will always be another app for that, and it may be worse off for its lack of convictions. 

The square is dead; long live the square!

Death Positivity in Videogames

Changing the mechanics of mortality.

Lovely Weather We're Having brings you back outside and into the sunlight

Julian Glander doesn't need to glamour you with guns, collectables, obstacles, death, or sex. He has the weather, a lovely pink dog, and rocks for you to kick around. The vibrantly colored world of Lovely Weather We're Having doesn't take you back to a specific time necessarily, but to a mind set, when the world seemed bigger and brighter and more mystifying. Though you can cast Lovely Weather under of the wide net of an "exploration game," it focuses on a more organic discovery instead of the forward, chronological beats of a walking simulator. By mimicking the same forecast as the one outside your window, Lovely Weather creates an abstract experience with direct parallels. In it, you survey the twists and turns of the world's inhabitants rather than just the environment itself.

You can vote for Lovely Weather We're Having on Steam Greenlight and/or visit the official website.

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KS: Why make a game about going outdoors? I'm sure the irony isn't lost on you, but what do you hope to achieve specifically? 

There's a huge disconnect between our platonic idea of "outside" and what's actually out there. We think about tranquility, oneness with nature, new experiences. In reality it's mostly cars, and harassment, and people trying to sell you stuff, and bugs crawling on you. So, Lovely Weather We're Having is sort of the heightened fantasy version of going outside. 

A lot of games are designed around this cycle of conflict > resolution > conflict. I have enough of that in my real life, so when I play games I don't really get anything out of accomplishing tasks or winning things. In my opinion, it's more appealing to move around a space and see what's up, on your own terms.  

I got a really nice message from a girl who said she used my first game to calm her down when she would start having panic attacks in public. That really drove this one forward. 

KS: Do you have any favorite or most influential moments from being outdoors?

Not necessarily cherished moments, but these are some different moods and weather vibes that keep coming to my mind:

This summer in Pittsburgh we had a lot of thunderstorms, and I am so into watching them on the front porch. It's like watching a movie or an art exhibit because it's happening right in front of you but not touching you. And it's very romantic when the power goes out.

Being a teenager in suburban Florida, walking around by myself in the spacious, pastel suburbs where they filmed Edward Scissorhands. There is this hot, buzzing sense of dread that fills the entire state of Florida.

catching turtles, building rock sculptures, falling out of trees 

The design of the environment in the game is based on a neighborhood I lived in in Georgia as a kid. When I was 7 we moved into a yellow house surrounded by trees, lakes, etc.—all very idyllic stuff. I spent a lot of time outside catching turtles, building rock sculptures, falling out of trees. At the time I thought it was so boring, and I just wanted to be on the computer playing Neopets 24/7. But it was really formative.

KS: How do the weather systems work in the game?

Long answer: the program grabs a rough location from your computer (within a few miles, nothing too personal), and checks that against the OpenWeatherMap API which throws back a big pile of data. The main variables are temperature, time of day, cloud coverage, and precipitation. That affects the appearance and sound of the environment, as well as the mood of the NPC's and the conversations they want to have. 

Short answer: Look outside; if it's raining outside, it's raining in Lovely Weather We're Having.

KS: How does the weather affect you personally? What's your favorite kind of weather? What about the characters in the game?

As it happens, today is the first time all year I can put on a huge sweater, so I'm really pumped up. It's so corny but nothing beats the beginning of Fall: drinking coffee, reading in a cemetery, listening to Belle and Sebastian. It reminds me of the start of a school year, the air of possibility (before everything goes wrong).

Even though they're not necessarily human, the characters in the game are affected in the same way. Some of them are tired at night, some of them want to party, and some of them think that's the right time of day to divulge their darkest secrets to you. Exploring these characters is a pretty central part of the game, but I should emphasize that there aren't really any mysteries to unlock or goals to accomplish— at least not any that the the game rewards you for.

It's a cool challenge to write these characters, knowing that they're non-linear and everyone will explore them in a different way. But it's the same when you get to know a person in real life, right? We hardly ever discover each other chronologically.

KS: Do you think people have lost touch with natural cycles like weather?

I hadn't thought about that. Our relationship with weather is certainly changing. When we make small talk, the weather is a neutral, lowest-common-denominator basis for conversation. But with the climate crisis, even saying "sure is hot for this time of year" is a bit politically charged, and it hints at the really gloomy anxiety that we'll be underwater in a few decades. Yikes. 

In Printed Mars, space exploration is a creepy VHS home video

Welcome to the future! Truth be told, it’s pretty grimy.

At various moments in time, this assessment could have been applied to both Mars and the VHS tape, which is convenient because Printed Mars is about both of those things. In Vladstorm’s game for Mac, PC, and Linux, your pixelated character wakes up in the midst of a rocky formation. Who are you? What are you doing here? You only know you’re on Mars because the planet’s name is in the game’s title. Very helpful. In an attempt to answer those questions, you go for a walk. There are objects you can interact with, though many of them are rather discouraging. There’s blood on the printer and dismembered body parts on tables. Computer readouts contain memories of characters running away. From what? Well, the game’s documentation speaks of headless robots, so that’s encouraging. In hindsight, maybe your Martian character should have just slept in this morning.

Printed Mars’ visuals are the main reason you should be glad your character woke up this morning. Whereas characters and objects are rendered in the style of an 8-bit graphic that has a lost a few bits to the ravages of time, the backgrounds have he eerie quality of early VHS home videos. Both of these styles are lacking in photorealism, but they are lacking in their own special ways. This juxtaposition therefore serves to illuminate their unique characteristics: the VHS backgrounds are loose and grainy whereas the foregrounds offer a crisper interpretation of abstraction. This layering effect has less to do with loveably bad green-screening than it does with the early films of the Lumière brothers, which layered different forms of unreality on top of one another. The net effect, which is simultaneously retro and futuristic, puts a strong claim on your eyeballs. 

The sound design of an arcade

Chicago’s Bit Bash splits the difference between an art gallery and a music festival.

Flappy Bird meets dubstep in Flywrench

Flappy Bird meets dubstep in Flywrench

Test your rhythm with Flywrench

Time your moves with the beat in Flywrench

Spin, flap, and slide your way through the disco madness of Flywrench

It’s your turn in the spotlight- just make sure it doesn’t fry you

The NFL is awful. Here���s how Madden could help

The conflict of playing an NFL promotional tool.

Rain World shows off its eerie locales with new videos

Strange crops. Horror grass. The Wall.

The names are bizarre enough alone, evocative of Roadside Picnic's hellish anomalies, but this isn't the world of the Strugatsky brothers we're talking about. It's Rain World, the game that simultaneously has one of the cutest player characters and some of the weirdest and most sinister enemies I've seen in a while.

all manner of creepy in the world of slugcat 

If you want a better look at what I'm talking about, check out the gallery of gifs the creators of Rain World just posted in a Kickstarter update, or head over to the post itself and view the short videos showcasing each thing individually.

Rain World beta: Aug gifs

There's all manner of creepy in the world poor Slugcat calls home: stilt-legged demon deer, sentient weeds, murky waters home to huge insectoid sea creatures, and more.

The sharp contrast between Rain World's cute, at times cartoonish character Slugcat and the brutal violence brought on by its many horrors reminds me of Heart of Darkness, an often overlooked platformer from 1998. No relation to the Conrad novel, but worth a look if Rain World catches your eye.

For more on Rain World, head over to its Twitter.

Stray Cat Crossing will spirit you away and into a nightmare

Like watching Disney movies during a bad trip

Can’t sleep, baby’ll eat me

Who said cartoons are just for kids?

Welcome to Disney’s Midnight Channel

It’s like Zelda, but...I need an adult

Experience the slow crawl toward death and decay as a lonely old lady

I watched the movie Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles in a film class during college and it brought me to the brink of insanity. For those who are not familiar with the three-and-a-half-hour Belgian movie released in 1975, it predominantly consists of the mundane activities of a single mother's life caring, cooking, and providing for her son. Divided into three acts that take place over a three day period, the movie depicts Jeanne Dielman going about her daily routine: making breakfast for her son, preparing dinner, setting the table, bathing, grocery shopping, eating dinner with her son, prostituting herself after putting her son to bed, before repeating it all over again the next day. Jeanne Dielman is a masterpiece, snagging the 19th spot on the Village Voice's 100 Best Films of the 20th Century and capturing the true and silent horror of domesticity. To survive a viewing of Jeanne Dielman—uninterrupted and fully awake—is to experience the unending agony of a woman walking through life only half-alive.

The Fifth Apartment is a Ludum Dare game that, like Jeanne Dielman, respects its subject matter enough to take it slowly, while also respecting its audience enough to maintain a certain subtlety. Depicting the limited, isolated life of an old woman in a Parisian apartment, it forces the player to pay close attention to the slow yet ceaseless passage of time. Whether morning or night, the clock ticks away loudly, counting down each belabored second of this woman's existence as she walks across the same rooms, inspecting the same mundane objects. Her walk animation proves purposefully sloth-like, every action coming to feel like a huge effort. On the balcony, the sounds of a bustling, happy city can be heard wafting up from below. The silhouettes of neighbors can be seen just across the way, but they might as well be on a different planet. Life continues on beyond the dark and dusty walls of this apartment, but you are not a part of it. You cannot be part of it.

the tension culminates into visible disintegration 

Using a very Jeanne Dielman-style timestamp, the game establishes a steady, inevitable tempo that only disintegrates once the protagonist begins to unravel. In Dielman, small yet telling changes in her routine behavior tip the viewer off to something hidden just below the surface. The Fifth Apartment begins with only a few hints at paranoia—a demonic whisper in the bathroom, a mention of seeing teeth in a flower pot. Eventually, the tension culminates into visible disintegration, throwing out the rules and pacing established so diligently in the fiction earlier.

As with the 1975 Belgian classic, The Fifth Apartment leaves you with more questions than answers. Just about the only thing you can be certain of is that you don't blame her. Having lived inside her skin and experiencing the unspoken torment of isolated domesticity, you come to understand these women we so readily call "crazy."

You can play The Fifth Apartment for free on your browser.