Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 253

Finally, a typeface for all the words governments never say about surveillance

Surveillance has proven to be good fodder for games. In Touch Tone, a fictional yet fathomable government has deputized its citizenry to spy on their peers by solving puzzles and decoding encryption keys and codes to access private data. Nothing to Hide applies the logic to your every movement. It is a virtual Panopticon that requires your location, likeness, and actions to be visible at all times. Attempts at evasion are futile. Privacy is dead. There are no secrets anymore. These titles use video game mechanics to make the logic of surveillance explicit.  Their metaphors may even be too successful insofar as they make privacy violations appear to be common knowledge when they are actually shrouded in secrecy. 

Enter Project Seen, a typeface that automatically censors so-called “spook words,” that are tracked by the likes of the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ. Here, for instance, is the previous paragraph printed in Seen:

That’s a fair amount of censorship—and I didn’t even mention any specific agencies or nations, virtually all of which are automatically censored by Seen. Which is not to say that Seen is entirely inflexible: Your documents can be censored using strike-through, a form of underline that blacks out the lower half of each glyph, or the good old complete blackout. Whatever form of obscurantism you desire, Seen can provide it.

Whatever form of obscurantism you desire, Seen can provide it. 

Project Seen is a valuable companion piece to the likes of Touch Tone and Nothing to Hide. Its existence helps to explain why these games are valuable. If invasions of privacy are not going to be openly discussed and documents censored in the manner Project Seen emulates, then we’re going to have to rely on the likes of Touch Tone and Nothing to Hide to spur discussions about surveillance. 

The new Terminator movie is what happens when old people get scared of technology

Baby boomers versus wearables. With explosions.

Terminator 4: Rise of the Luddites

The Terminator has become an angry old man who needs help emailing

The baby boomers once feared nuclear annihilation. Now it’s the Apple Watch.

When a ten-second journey through the apocalypse feels like a lifetime

If you've ever fallen before, you know firsthand that time is relative. You could be looking at your watch one minute—the second hand ticking onward in steady calculation—and then, in the next, you could be bending time and space as your limbs fly through the air. When you lose control of your body, the wind blowing back your hair as your rush to meet the floor, you begin to question the certainty of that clock's hand. Falling shouldn't take more than a couple seconds, right? After all, your buddy gravity is there to ensure it ends quickly and painfully.

you begin to question the certainty of that clock's hand 

But instead, you find yourself with ample time to not only realize you are falling, but also to feel embarrassed about the people who are watching it happen around you. "Do they know it's been a lifetime since I first tripped on my shoelace?" you think to them, as you look back and forth between the accursed shoe lace and that boy you like who's standing across the hall, staring at the whole spectacle.

TIMEframe captures the elasticity of time in a different kind of fall. While falling in a classroom allows you to experienced the relativity of time in your body, this game helps you experience it intellectually. In TIMEframe, you to explore a desolate and mysterious world locked in a destructive loop. Every ten minutes (which are actually just a very stretched-out ten seconds), your playthrough restarts, and each time you must venture back into the world to learn more about how it got this way. After the first go around, it becomes clear you are the only living life form in the world. But hints of civilization still lie scattered everywhere, and an unbidden sense of loss follows you as you inspect the remnants left behind. Water glints in the sunlight, but it's stagnant—suspended in midair. A statue reaches for the sun, its face frozen in fear.

Though TIMEframe began as a Ludum Dare jam game in 2013, creators Tyler and Spencer Owen extended the experience to realize the story's full potential. Released just yesterday on Steam, it's received modest attention but vocal enthusiasm from reviewers lauding its mystery, soundtrack (by Clark Aboud), and polygonal art style.

You can buy TIMEframe on Steam for Windows and Mac.

Swipe right for Pin-Pon, the game that turns Tinder into a psychedelic gymnasium

The bizarre merger of dating and technology. 

Going to Hell: DOOM II and the Descent Into Chaos

DOOM II didn’t iterate on DOOM—it opposed it

Let The Endless Cylinder roll over you with its gorgeously surreal alienscape

Until now, Carlos Bordeu has only been known as the 'C' in ACE Team. He's about to become much more. No longer will he be the letter squished between his brothers Andres and Edmundo in the title of the Chilean videogame studio they founded together. Carlos has revealed that he's working on a personal project called The Endless Cylinder and it has all the qualities of a surrealist sci-fi painting, except it invites you to dive in and look around—there's just one caveat: please don't trip over your trunk. 

All that is known about The Endless Cylinder at the moment is contained in the video you can watch below. You are newly born into a world that is "somewhere unrevealed, sometime unknown," breaking free from an egg as a saggy-eyed ball of soft flesh, sporting a floppy speckled trunk and two sturdy if stubby legs. To me, it looks like a chicken has somehow had it off with an elephant: this is the result.

some Hammer Horror experiment gone wrong 

There's a lot to look at immediately. A huge fiery planet with stripy rings blisters in the sky, its gigantic portrait only slightly obscured by the spiky arch leaning out of the ground, and a strange alien plant that somehow supports a huge walnut-like pod on a thin stem. The flora alone upon this world is worth holding a scientist's eye to, wondering how it got so big, or why it looks like a seashell.

But then you see what is truly dominating and threatening the landscape; the so-called endless cylinder. It slowly rolls, crushing everything before it with an unstoppable and unknown mechanism. It's a Lovecraftian idea rendered as moving architecture: bigger than life, bigger than understanding, listless in its momentum, impenetrable and callous. It may not seem to have a purpose in this world but it does if you back out for a sec and look purely at the videogame containing all of this. This cylinder is here to keep you moving away from it. The exploration that begs for you will have to be done with some haste. There will always be somewhere to go—away from instant, crushing death—and the cylinder will ensure that any hidden creature on the land will be disturbed for your curiosity. 

Lo and behold, after the true destructive might of the cylinder is shown off in the video, the planet's peculiar fauna starts to turn up. The first creature delivers two frights, 1) in how it suddenly moves into action from motionless, and 2) how its anatomy resembles both an arse on legs and an upturned mouth with a full-set of teeth. It's terrifying, better understood as some Hammer Horror experiment gone wrong than proposed as part of a working ecosystem. But before you can truly get a breather (or your head around it), an elephant-truck hybrid storms onto the scene, strangely rushed considering it's the only traffic on this terrain, speeding towards the deathly cylinder in either blindness or stupidity.

My response to seeing The Endless Cylinder for the first time went something like this: It's about damn time that we got to play as one of ACE Team's bizarre alien creatures rather than punching them square in the face with a human fist. ACE Team has a longer history than most realize. The three brothers that founded it started with a total conversion mod of Doom II called ZanZan way back in 1999. ZanZan doesn't look much like Doom II (it looks like this), focusing more on melee fighting and taking place in an ancient alien fortress divorced from the part of the universe we're familiar with.

the imagination poured into the environments 

ZanZan is the basis for what would become ACE Team's signature after constructing the vivid tribal lands and wild hybrid beasts of Zeno Clash, its sequel, and the Bosch-fantasy panorama turned videogame Rock of Ages. It's the imagination poured into the environments and the populations that inhabit them in these games that had ACE Team win me over. But the studio's latest title seems to have lost its willful belonging to the lineage of surrealist art. Instead, The Deadly Tower of Monsters takes from 1950s B-movies and it's not quite as compelling, at least for me.

And so I'm pleased that Carlos has gone out of his way to work on something closer to ACE Team's roots, even if it apparently won't be considered an ACE Team game. The Endless Cylinder may be in its early days yet but there's plenty enough on show to have me patiently await its slow-rolling arrival.

The economics of Bloodborne; or, why you keep clocking into Destiny

The Bloodborne economy values its workers.

Kill Screen is hiring a sales associate

Love games? Able to spot opportunities for fun out in the world? Want to work at a cool media company full of smart, excited people? Well, you're in luck: Kill Screen is looking to hire a sales associate. 

We’re looking for someone young, passionate about games as culture, and looking to help grow and learn with us for the long-term. You are a problem-solver who can offer unique perspectives on and anticipate client needs. You are intellectually curious and have an appetite for understanding a broader media landscape outside of games. You are comfortable talking about money and know how to be persuasive in the face of indecision.

Right now, the sales team is just the founder but we’ve been able to work with big clients like Intel, GE, MailChimp, and more. Currently, our main sales channels are branded content, event sponsorships, and editorial campaigns, in order of gross revenue. We’d like to even out the spread.

While one need not be currently living in NYC to apply, ideally this job is located in our Greenpoint, Brooklyn office. Compensation is competitive and includes a quarterly commission.

If you're interested, apply here. 

A videogame that captures a son's final moments with his dying father

Stephen Clark on making a game about his father's final months battling ALS.

There is one problem with every wrestling game ever made

Wrestling is fake. Its games aren’t fake enough.