Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 238

Look out, Disney! Banksy's getting into the theme park business

Say what you will about Dismaland, Banksy’s new theme park, but its tagline—“The UK’s most disappointing new visitor attraction”—might be the rare claim that the artist’s fans and detractors can agree about. 

Dismaland reimagines Disneyland as a rotting hellscape. Its perimeter walls and Magic Castle are dirty and crumbling. The central water feature is murky and home to a partially submerged SWAT vehicle. A sculpture of The Little Mermaid’s Ariel is a 3D rendering of retro cathode ray television distortion. However, in a statement quoted in The Guardian, Banksy insisted that Dismaland is not really about Disney: “I banned any imagery of Mickey Mouse from the site…It’s a showcase for the best artists I could imagine, apart from the two who turned me down.” 

To that end, Dismaland’s website lists fity-eight artists as contributors, including David Shrigley, Jenny Holzer, and Mana Neyestani. Naturally, Damien Hirst is also involved in the project. Every day from August 22 to September 27, 4,000 paying customers will be granted access to the 2.5acre site in Weston-super-Mare. Their £3 purchase will allow them to take in the sights, be submitted to literal security theatre when entering, participate in modified fair staples, and view a short film program.  

“Are you looking for an alternative to the soulless sugar-coated banality of the average family day out?” reads a portion of Dismaland’s brochure quoted by Colossal’s Christopher Jobson. “Or just somewhere cheaper. Then this is the place for you—a chaotic new world where you can escape from mindless escapism.” 

Fan service can be exhausting 

At this year’s D23 Expo, Disney announced plans to build Star Wars Land theme parks in California and Florida. This, if you are not a fan of Star Wars, is what Dismaland means by “mindless escapism.” But one man’s mindless escape is another man’s involving experience. Fan service can be exhausting, and the needs of specific fandoms such as Star Wars tend to be catered to at the expense of almost anything else, but it is not mindless by dint of its very existence.

Dismaland is also engaging in a form of fan service: it’s a destination where lovers of Banksy and Damien Hirst can indulge in their interests. It has Banksy doing Banksy things, and Hirst doing more of the same, and David Shrigley reproducing the mascot he created for Scottish football club Partick Thistle. Viewing Dismaland as an escape from prevailing cultural paradigms requires one to believe that modern art is inherently deep and rebellious.

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Irony is dead, and so is satire. The art world is very much in its amusement park phase. Shows like Art Basel: Miami can increasingly be understood as Disneyland for moneyed adults. Heck, Disney expansions can increasingly be understood as Disneyland for moneyed adults. While this may not bet the optimal state of affairs, it is not inherently wrong. Dismaland may be a boon for certain art fans, but the pretence that it is not Epcot’s anarchist exhibit does everyone a disservice. 

Vane strives for beauty and consistency, even in its bird physics

It’s the little things that makes Vane one of the most gorgeous looking games in development right now: the graceful twirl of leaves loosening from thin branches, clouds of dust that kick up behind a small, running figure, or the beating of a bird’s wings against the hot desert air.

In games, beauty isn’t just the product of a pleasing art style. The coding has to do its part too, and a new blog post from developer Friend & Foe Games shows just how much painstaking detail can go into perfecting the systems that many people take for granted.

According to Matt Smith of Friend & Foe, bird flight mechanics in Vane used to follow what he called the “Magic Airplane” model, a mechanical approach that simplified the actual phenomenon of avian aeronautics. It would basically register horizontal and vertical turns and then fake gravity by applying downward velocity, resulting in this:

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The team wasn't pleased with the visual effect this created. Some more tinkering eventually turned out a much more complex algorithm that implements elements like forward thrust, air resistance, and more.

"A big focus for us on Vane is verisimilitude; we want all of our systems, stories, and mythology to be internally consistent," writes Matt. "With that in mind, I set about reworking the flight mechanics to be more 'physics-y' and less robotic."

Matt calls the resulting system the “Pseudo Physics” model, and goes into more detail about how it works in his blog post. To a non-programmer or someone who isn’t great at physics, a formulaic breakdown of in-game flight mechanics might not mean much, but check out the difference these changes make visually:

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One of the most notable things in the second gif is the way the camera moves, which Friend & Foe promises to touch on in another blog post.

You can find out more about Vane on its website and development blog.

Why are tabletop games killing it on Kickstarter?

We are in the midst of a board game boom, and FiveThirtyEight has figured out why: Kickstarter. You should read the whole story, but here’s the crux of Oliver Roeder’s analysis:

“Since [2009], pledges to board and card game projects on the site have totaled $196 million, according to the company. Ninety-three percent of that money went to successful projects — those that reached their fundraising goal. For comparison, pledges to video game projects, including hardware and mobile games, have totaled $179 million. Of that, 85 percent went to ultimately successful projects. On Kickstarter, analog is beating digital.”

(Disclosure: Kill Screen has previously collaborated with Kickstarter on editorial projects. This article was produced independently of those projects and its author had no involvement in the aforementioned collaborations.)

There are a number of metrics for crowdfunding success that you can use—money pledged, targets met, promises kept—and board games appear to be doing well on all of those fronts. In a sense, success breeds more success. “With Kickstarter, there's a definitive launch point when you start the project. You know what the beginning of that process looks like,” Monikers developer Alex Hague explained when I interviewed him in February. Much of this phenomenon is often attributed to Cards Against Humanity, which set a precedent for successfully crowdfunded tabletop games. But there’s more to this story than developers simply emulating a successful project. As Hague put it: “There's a lot of people, there's sort of a cottage industry of folks who can offer best practices and stuff like that: how to start a Kickstarter, what to do one week before, what to do two weeks before.” 

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Interest in developing and playing tabletop games is not new, but new funding mechanisms have made it possible to consolidate diffuse groups and achieve gains in the process. Roeder notes that Kickstarter allows developers to reach larger audiences and figure out what they will actually buy before they’ve already spent time and money on building the finished project.

Figuring out what happens after a project is approved is the relative weakness of this approach to game development. This, it should be noted, is a more general challenge for crowdfunding. In his New York Times Magazine feature “ZPM Espresso and the Rage of the Jilted Crowdfunder,” Gideon Lewis-Kraus noted, “Kickstarter and its crowdfunding competitors have invented a new sort of economic relationship, and a corresponding frontier of Internet acrimony.” This problem affects all areas of economic activity, but tabletop games appear to be doing better than most. Perhaps the formation of supportive digital communities has helped to avoid some of the acrimony Lewis-Kraus witnessed between ZPM and its backers. Playing tabletop games has always required one to work and interact with others, and these skills may be coming in handy.

Kickstarter success is, however, only a limited form of success. Kickstarter has managed to consolidate tabletop gaming communities and make it easier to bring new games into the world. The next challenge is getting games other than Cards Against Humanity to grow outset of Kickstarter’s relatively comfortable climate. As Hague told me in February:

“The interesting thing is the situation we're in now, which is that we had a really successful kickstarter and have fulfilled all of those orders, and there's very little guidance for that post-backer-fulfillment period: once you've sent everything out to the backers, what it looks like to launch the game to the actual public, there's not the Steam Greenlight or indie dev projects that Microsoft or sonny have. As an independent developer of tabletop games, what that moment of launch looks like is really hard to find information about online.” 

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Brutalism has found a second life in Minecraft

The case for preserving brutalist architecture requires some strange contortions. Defenders of gems like London’s Robin Hood Gardens or the Orange County Government Center must claim that buildings whose charms are derived from their heft and imposing strength are at risk and in need of our protection. This may be a necessary measure, but as with having your parents declared unfit to manage their affairs, it comes with a sense of loss.

There are, of course, more tangible losses. In February, after a prolonged debate, the building that was once Chicago’s Prentice Women’s Hospital was demolished to make way for a charmless, beveled glass tower that will serve as a research center. Another one bites the dust. Sure, there are victories—London’s glorious Trellick Tower escaped demolition and was declared a landmark—but it’s hard to escape the fear that brutalist gems are not long for this world. If so, their best hope for survival may be in other realms.

The Royal Institute of British Architects recently took this idea to heart and opened up a Minecraft server for players to build their own brutalist creations. The project, which was organized in collaboration with Minecraft architecture collective Blockworks, ran for a week and produced 119 buildings, many of which are now immortalized in an imgur gallery. While the hard, polygonal shapes of these entries suit Minecraft’s digital aesthetic, the also clearly reference the language of brutalism. A cluster of cubes by Wuxa, for instance, comes across as an updated version of . Another entry has the concrete bird aesthetic of the University of Toronto’s Robarts Library. (The only perk of living across from Robarts for years was hearing tour guides compare it to a different creature every day. Architecture criticism is an art and not a science.) RIBA’s project suggests that the language of Brutalism is not dated—it may only work in specific contexts, but it can very much survive in the 21st century.

Try telling that to opponents of brutalism. This challenge was particularly apparent in a recent episode of the consistently excellent design podcast 99% Invisible, which focused on the legacy of brutalist architect Erno Goldfinger. As Roman Mars noted in his accompanying write-up of the episode on Slate: 

Back in the 1960s, Victorian-style buildings were considered hideous and impossible to repair. We were tearing batches of Victorians down to erect big concrete buildings. But some Victorians were saved—and today, some of them are considered treasures. Concrete architecture now finds itself at an inflection point: too outdated to be modern, too young to be classic. And a small but growing band of architects, architecture enthusiasts, and preservationists would like us to just wait a bit and see. Maybe, with a little time, we’ll come around to love these hulking concrete brutes. 

One can only hope that Mars is proven to be correct. Some days, holding on to that hope is hard work. But brutalism has found a second life online. Tumblr accounts like “Fuck Yeah Brutalism” and Instagram’s @thisbrutallife keep the memory of these buildings alive. The latter’s creator, Corin Gibbon, recently told The Guardian “I first started @thisbrutallife was because I was taking too many pictures of Trellick on my personal Instagram feed!” RIBA’s Minecraft brutalism project can be understood as an extension of the style’s digital renaissance. Since they lack much of the scarcity of space and resources that affects cities, gameworlds are now tools for a strange sort of architectural preservation. Art Deco lives on in Bioshock and, briefly, brutalism once again experience a heyday in Minecraft. Hopefully these digital projects inspire some of their users to bring these architectural styles back to life.  

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