Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 275

High school science to go low-poly with Poly Bridge

Like a bridge over troubled waters? 

The gamer-core nihilism of Earl Sweatshirt

An insufferable shit grows up.

The unusual ways algorithms can result in intimacy

Searching for the ghost in the machine.

A newsgame shows there are no perfect options for Syrian refugees

When all options are bad, what do you do?

The Devil's in the details of Pillars of Eternity

Enter a magical world where everyone’s awful.

Ever obsessively played Doom? This is probably what it looks like in your dreams

Doomdream is more of a description than a title. It's an attempt by its creator, Ian MacLarty, to conjure up an "impression of [his] dreams after [he's] been playing Doom all day." That's Doom, the 1993 hell-romping shooter, which mostly everyone is familiar with. If you're not, all you need to know right now is that its levels are typified by asymmetrical labyrinths with low ceilings and forking pathways that often loop back on each other.

It's this architectural theme that Doomdream replicates, sans the spike-skinned imps, and biomechanical texturing. It's entirely white, grey, and red: the colors patterned as grainy pixels, or stretched vertically to form walls that appear to have seen carnage thrown against them (the red in particular looks like smeared gore). As per Doom's twisted sci-fi facilities, the ceilings and floors are staggered at different heights, the separate pieces of geometry obvious to the eye with sharp drops and steps up. 

eager to get out of that repeating terrorspace 

Doom had this jagged appearance due to the limitations of 3D level design at the time; lots of slopes and smooth edges just wasn't viable. Here, abstracted as it is in Doomdream, it highlights the immediate violence of Doom's unfriendly labyrinths, the empty volumes being cut into by saw-tooth structures.

But that's not even the focus of Doomdream. MacLarty tells me he "based Doomdream on being lost after killing all monsters, unable to find the exit—just a maze of abstract architecture." Indeed, it's part of Doom that isn't often discussed despite it more than likely being universally experienced. That's on account of it being the more frustrating part of Doom's labyrinthine level design, at least from a player perspective, as you circle the same tunnels looking for the coveted "EXIT" sign.

Even so, it's an essential part of its horror. After all the monsters are slain, pocking the ground with exposed ribs and pools of blood, you've only the maze for company. It's then that the imposing architecture and its ability to to confuse and lose you gets to shine. You're eager to get out of that repeating terrorspace, and the fast movement speed should make that a quick goal to achieve. But it isn't, and in fact, the blistering movement speed only adds to the muddled panic. You travel Doom's tunnels as they curl round to unseen rooms, or to nowhere at all, meeting at dead ends. It's like you're trapped inside a bronchial tree. Its spatial complexity and interconnected corridors causing you to pace the same territory accidentally.

MacLarty theorizes that, due to the growing fear and frustration of these moments, your brain makes an effort to absorb the forms you rush through into its mental capacity so as to easier navigate them. Perhaps this is why MacLarty revisited these spaces in his dreams; "I think it's the brain's way of making a mental map of the game world," he says. The tumultuous act itself has a particular dreamlike quality too: I've had countless nightmares of feeling lost, stuck in a place that loops itself until it feels unending, as if a sinner's punishment in Inferno. 

It's not just Doom that has this effect on our minds either. As we found out before, videogames and especially abstractions of them have a way of staying with us into our dreams. Bob Stickgold, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, researched this and previously told Game Informer that it seems the high emotions that videogames draw from us could cause our brains to repeat scenes from them during sleep. There's no concrete evidence to be able to say that this is exactly what happens. But it does mean that we can lock Doomdream firmly away into the evidence locker that suggests it is.

You can download Doomdream from itch.io.

How the internet is creating a new, global language of comedy

Comedy without borders.

Chillax, jam out some tunes in this cute, co-op music game

Jamming and playing rolled into one adorable game.

Thumper metes out violence like you’ve never seen before

Also stars the most metal flying space beetle in videogames.

Pleasure your gay car boyfriend to a wild orgasm in Stick Shift

J.G Ballard's novel Crash is one of numerous hellish car wrecks sprayed with both semen and blood. It's a story that marries sexuality with the excitement of traffic collisions. What you might call an "autoerotica." This is the word that Robert Yang has used to describe the last in his erotic gay sex game trilogy—comprised of Succulent, Hurt Me Plenty, and now Stick Shift.

It's a game in which your're tasked with pleasing a gay car. The obvious phallic symbolism of the vehicle's stick shift plays the part of penis. It is gently pumped along to your own wrist movements upon your computer mouse, shifting through the gears to accelerate the sexual excitement in stages, and eventually reaching climax. Unless, of course, you get overzealous and cause the car's revs to tick over and the engine to cut out (finishing early), meaning you'll have to start over.

But Stick Shift doesn't only foreground the way the driver caresses his vehicular boyfriend's genitalia. It's played in split-screen, so that while the suggestive action plays out on the right-side of the screen, on the left-side you get a full-blown portrait of the man behind the wheel similarly enjoying the erotic delirium. This, in fact, was the starting point of the game, born from a suggestion to adapt Andy Warhol's 28-minute film Blow Job into a videogame.

Blow Job is all about expression. You watch a man from the chest up who, it is suggested, is being fellated. You don't know if he is, and so you explore the contortions of his face to reach an opinion. In adapting this idea, the biggest challenge for Yang was in animating convincing facial expressions. It's why he obfuscated the men's faces in his previous games, either with a large pair of sunglasses, or by having their head turned away or cut out by the camera.

Yang overcame the issue of falling into the uncanny valley in Stick Shift by framing the gesticulations of the guy's cheek and brow with the much more obvious gesture of sexually stimulating a car—that he's experiencing arousal should be obvious. But, with this, the uncertain promiscuity of Warhol's film is lost. Yang, instead, takes the conceit in his own direction, exploring themes more in line with Ballard's novel.

human and machine interlocked in post-coitus recovery. 

The critical perception of Crash is that its imagery and themes act as a metaphor for society's dependence on technology as an intermediate in human relations. Its main character, James Ballard, finds arousal in the bruises and scars left by car gadgetry and dashboards plunged into the soft parts of human bodies during crashes. He compares the rushing gullies of the British motorways to the neck of vulvas. The jutting carapace of the steering column is made from a mold of a pelvic region in Ballard's wild eyes.

Yang's Stick Shift draws similar lines. The engine purrs before it growls as the swollen head of its stick is serviced. Once it's over, the exhaust pipe drips hot condensed vapor into a puddle, limply depositing the by-product of its orgasm, while the driver smokes from inside the parked vehicle. There's also a timer that counts down to when you are permitted to replay the game; it's a momentary cool down that represents a refractory period. In this way, all four participants—the driver, the car, you, and your computer—are connected in the moment, human and machine interlocked in post-coitus recovery. The imagery and metaphor is even more appropriate now than when Ballard's novel came out in 1973, before the arrival of sexting and camming.

But that's not all. You may not experience another aspect of Stick Shift yourself as it only appears 48 percent of the time. It sees two cops armed with M4 rifles, riot sticks, and grenades interrupting you during your surging sexual rumpus. Yang connects this to the The Stonewall Riots in 1969, when the gay community fought back against the police by "denying their authority through flamboyance. They kissed and made-out. Free self-expression was its own protest, and it utterly humiliated the NYPD," as Yang tells it.

Similarly, you can have the driver make kissy-faces at the two cops during your own mini-protest, which in turn drives up the countdown timer as a punishment. The purpose of this isn't clear without its context, which is to reflect an experience specific to the queer community when communicating with the police. That it happens 48 percent of the time is a reference to this March 2015 Williams Institute report, which states that "of the LGBT violence survivors who interacted with police, 48% reported that they had experienced police misconduct." 

Knowing this, and combining it with the similarities to Crash, Stick Shift reveals itself as a vignette about a gay man's intimacy with technology, which allows him to live out his sexuality when parts of society would shun him for it. Having recognized my own queerness and eventually accepted it due to the internet, through a computer, Stick Shift's technosexual concept seems less ridiculous (as those I've shown it have judged it) and more affirming than anything.

You can download Stick Shift for free on itch.io.