Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 252

My Lucky Day exposes the lottery for what it is: a poor man's tax

“The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men who made their living simply by selling systems, forecasts, and lucky amulets. Winston had nothing to do with the Lottery, which was managed by the Ministry of Plenty, but he was aware (indeed everyone in the party was aware) that the prizes were largely imaginary. Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being nonexistent persons.” - George Orwell, 1984

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Everyone loves a lottery. You pay minimal amount of money, sometimes on a weekly basis, for a big dream that appears only inches outside your grasp. You give the cashier just $5 for scratch tickets, but what you're buying is much bigger than a scratch ticket. You're buying hope—a hope that keeps the dingy walls of your local alcohol distributor from closing in on you.

When you look at the statistics for lotteries, a disturbing pattern emerges. This is not a game for all to play (and inevitably lose) in good fun. Everyone from Orwell to Business Insider agrees: the lottery is a thinly veiled poor man's tax. A disproportionate amount of people who cannot spare the cash flow for a gambling habit participate (read: lose) in the lottery, and the government is only becoming increasingly dependent on their loses. In fact, a 2008 Carnegie Mellon University study declared the lottery "a vicious cycle that not only exploits low-income individuals." On NPR, Cornell University economics and management professor David Just calls the lottery's fueling force "the desperation play. People don't treat it like entertainment. Instead those—particularly those who are poor—are treating this more as an investment opportunity. It's their Hail Mary pass to try and make it big."

"It's their Hail Mary pass to try and make it big" 

My Lucky Day is a game that takes umbrage at the "just for fun" logic many use to justify the existence of the lottery. You play as a man who dreams of picture-perfect beaches and boat side mai tais. In reality, he's a hunched over, balding smoker who shuffles between dimly lit rooms and his local lottery distributor. There is no definite end to My Lucky Day. It begins with a dream, moves on to a waking nightmare and the harsh glow of a TV, and ends with the failure of said dream—before it repeats, again and again.

In this game, the lottery acts as the common ground between the world we're promised, and the world we're actually given. While advertisements fuel the protagonists dreams, the lottery cashes in on the impossibility of his imagined future. The most active interaction in the entire game is the simple act of picking up a coin—representing the protagonist's hard earned money, presumably—and dumping it onto the lottery distributor's counter. True to the statistics, My Lucky Day's main character depicts the routine of an unemployed or retired person who appears to lack much else to live, outside of fantasies.

In the three times I played through My Lucky Day, I never once came even close to feeling a sliver of excitement or fun when the lottery numbers were called out. From the very first number onward, it becomes clear that you are not a winner. And on the other side of this feeling is the certainty that you are a loser, confirmed over and over again by the sing-song voice of the lottery presenter.

The game's system appears to mimic the odds of an actual lottery, so the team of creators behind My Lucky Day (which includes a Kill Screen writer, Luis Wong) plan to track every player's results. "The most played number is 23, it has been played 5 times," reads the latest update on the game's website. "No player has won yet."

You can play the numbers yourself in My Lucky Day for free on any browser.

In its ongoing attempt to recreate the entire world, Netrunner heads to India

Hacker culture meets Hinduism.

This PS1-style videogame is basically Speed with hysterical vehicle physics

Speed, the 1994 film in which Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, and assorted extras hurtled around Los Angeles in a public transit bus, was a fun movie about absolutely nothing. With that in mind, here is OmniBus, an arcade-style game currently being developed by Chicago’s The Buddy Cops that takes Speed’s premise and suggests that it is really a story about physics.

Why is this happening? Well, because OmniBus’ creators decided that the low-poly bus in their PS1-style game has no brakes, and really the only difference between a movie villain and a game developer is some moustache twirling. For what it’s worth, The Buddy Cops are less villainous than Dennis Hopper’s character in Speed insofar as buildings do not appear to be filled with innocent bystanders and the game’s scoring punishes injuries to your bus’ passengers. The lack of brakes is hardly generous but they could have been far crueler.

For good measure, OmniBus sets challenges for the player to complete while driving the brake-less bus including “robbing a bank,” “survive a demolition derby” and “take people on a tour without spilling.”  That last command gets at the physics component of OmniBus; the game’s developers have ruled that thou shalt not flip the bus or drive it off the edge of the two-dimensional gameworld. Now you’ve been warned.

OmniBus does not yet have a release date, though one can only hope that, like its bus, it is hurtling at full speed towards our PCs. 

[Gifs via TIGforums]

"Punk, originality, and videogames": a conversation with Friendzone

Bringing videogames and anime to hip-hop.

Do not stop and do not think while playing Strawberry Cubes

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STRAWBERRY CUBES (PC) 
BY LOREN SCHMIDT 

Strawberry Cubes is a platformer that gives you a toolset instead of a jump button. You already know too much. For this is a game that works by keeping everything secret and telling you nothing. It's about navigating a lo-fi living maze comprised of broken memories located around your grandma's house. But none of this makes sense. Nothing does. The only way to progress is to ask: what does this do? And then trying it out. You must piece together room formations, rearrange spaces as they distort, figure out morbid symbols, and walk by an ever-evolving gallery of cellular automata. It's intentionally confusing but not impenetrable. Why is there a frog button? Why am I climbing bones? Where do I plant these seeds? Don't ask; just do. Similarly: don't ponder, just play.

Perfect for: Glitch children, game breakers, miscreants

Playtime: You'll work it out.

Shut up, Her Story

Her Story might be a good videogame, but it's the worst kind of crime fiction.

Soundself returns from the wilds, trippy as ever

Soundself returns from the wilds, trippy as ever

Enough with the post-apocalypse. What about the pre-apocalypse?

A lot of games are about saving the world, but Eco might actually do it.

Oh right, so that's what you do in No Man's Sky

"So what do you actually do?" It's worrying that this has been the biggest question surrounding No Man's Sky for the duration of its public existence. At the same time, that mystery is what has probably kept us engaged for the past two years. Every time one of its features is outlined it's like a math professor rambling incoherently at a class of dimwits looking up at him with bemused faces and admiring eyes. "How?" we ask. "HOW?!"

Even if No Man's Sky ends up being actually quite mediocre when played, the way its creators have flabbergasted us by firing out numbers too high to fully understand, and stories of tiny drones doing mass quality assurance, has proven entertaining. Its slow-reveal presentation has been a masterwork of engaging our curiosity and sustaining our disbelief.

One mystery down, up pops another 

But now it's time to start breaking down that mystery a bit at a time. The Lovecraftian monster that embodies everything unknown on the stage in front of us must be revealed for its scaffolding and recorded sound effects. The illusion demystified. This arrives in the form of an 18-minute long video of No Man's Sky programmer Sean Murray sitting down with IGN to demonstrate and explain a little more about it.

There are a few big ideas to take away from Murray's words that help us digest what No Man's Sky is all about. But there's one scrap of knowledge bigger than the rest. While any suggestion that there's any specific way to play the game is held at arm's length by Murray, he does talk about a somewhat universal goal. It's the center of the universe. You start on an outer ring of the universe and, without any prompting, you'll probably end up working towards the center. Why? It's the biggest light that shines in the game's galaxy map. And as with the beacon that called you wordlessly from the distance in thatgamecompany's Journey, that light will draw you in, and upon arrival it'll reveal something that Murray says will satisfy most players enough to decide that they've essentially completed the game.

Typical. One mystery down, up pops another to eat away at us. But this is more comfortable isn't it? We now know that there's a spine holding No Man's Sky together. As Game Informer put it some months ago, there's an endgame. Before, we had been flailing around in the unknown, riding on the backs of promises hoping that a destination would magically appear. It might be how you felt upon leaving education, yet to find a vocation that fit—a place, a person, a point. The entirety of life was before us. Now what? You can't explore forever. But the existential crisis is over and we can move on with our lives in what we presume is the right direction.

the overwhelming vastness of existence 

In retrospect, isn't this antithetical to what gripped us so much about No Man's Sky up until now? It promised this entire universe to us, not unlike our own, full of opportunity and beauty to salvage. But this idea was too big. It was an impossible monster that would swallow us up. The game's scale and apparent lack of objective (outside of watching alien creatures roaming) was too close to the truth we cover over in our own lives. This is why we've built structures over the years, institutions that hold us together and give us purpose—without them there is none. It could be argued (and I'm sure it will be) that this is the foundation of, say, religion. Lost? Join our church and know your way. It's why, when we think for ourselves for too long, we end up asking what the meaning of life is. The answer is probably too terrifying for us to handle: there isn't one. Some people find god, some people get stuck into a career, but we're all trying to cope with the overwhelming vastness of existence and its possible pointlessness.

This is why we invent and consume. And if there's one reassurance for us after IGN's in-depth look at No Man's Sky it's that there will be plenty of crafting and consuming to do (watch the second video above). We'll all be happy just eating shit up and pouring it out someplace else. We'll mine resources, discover creatures, shoot sentinels (and get GTA-style wanted stars in return), and turn everything we interact with into Units to be sold on for upgrades to ships, suits, and weapons. All of it subservient to the grander pursuit of reaching the center of the universe: travelling further and further, exploring toxic planets with our new breathing machines, finding even rarer minerals for a bigger payout. It's a game of turning procedurally generated atoms into experience and commodity. And so, you can do whatever you want in No Man's Sky, but your humanness will make sure that above all you'll keep busy.

Magic Mike XXL and the human side of ogling meaty man bits

Magic Mike, John Marston, and butts butts butts.