Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 306

One of the most elaborate alternate reality games ever is launching early next year

Augmented reality just got a lot more intense.

Experience the Ferguson shooting from the witnesses' perspectives

A new experimental project by Fusion, in conjunction with Empathetic Media and the Reynolds Journalism Institute, showcases the potential of using virtual reality and game development tools as an apparatus for reporting real-world events.

It's called Ferguson VR, and it allows you to explore the eight eyewitness testimonies used in the case of Michael Brown's shooting by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, MO back in August this year. You don't need a virtual reality headset to experience it, but it is designed for use with one, as well as a mobile phone.

"see how this single incident has given rise to such a wide range of perspectives" 

When you start, you enter a reconstructed scene of the Canfield Green apartment complex in a first-person perspective. Guidance arrows lead you to beacons that each represents one of the eight eyewitnesses of the shooting; they're located in the same spot the witnesses were at the time.

When reached, the beacon gives you a series of graphic representations of the eyewitness's story that you can flick through, panel by panel. As is the case in the real eyewitness stories, these recounts of the events contradict each other on a number of details. "The aim of this piece is to compare and contrast the eyewitness reports—and allow you to see how this single incident has given rise to such a wide range of perspectives," Fusion writes.

It's primitive, but perhaps Ferguson VR is paving the way towards news reports being delivered with virtual reality in the future. And, if you really want to get wild, perhaps we could see more advanced takes on this idea being used in courtrooms for the jury to make better sense of a case. Stick with me.

there's a tangibility in using virtual reality and street level virtual mapping 

Right now, courtrooms are steadily shifting towards using tablets to convey information to jurors, rather than relying on dozens of paper print-outs of maps and interviews relevant to the litigation. Technology is converging all of those separate pieces of evidence into one. So perhaps it makes sense to go a step further, and actually recreate testimonies for jurors to experience themselves, rather than trying to picture them in their heads.

If you want more evidence to support the idea that new technology such as virtual reality could play a complementary role in news reporting, there is some. The South China Morning Post has used Google Maps to offer a tour of the major sites of the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, which took place between September and December 2014.

There are several scenes for you to navigate, with each one containing pictures, videos, and text that explains how each site looked while it was occupied by the protestors. It gives you a chance to map out the size of the protests, to get a sense of geography that you cannot get when watching the events unfold on television.

While these projects don't live up to actually being at these locations, there's a tangibility in using virtual reality and street level virtual mapping that can't be found in other media. Perhaps, in the future, we'll see technology being used to help us understand real-world events better than the reports in newspapers and on TV manage. It seems possible, at least. 

Five things I consumed in 2014

2014 was a year in which one could partake.

The Year in Blank Space

Games are discovering just how full an empty area can be.

Enjoy the hot man-on-man action of Coming Out On Top

Or: Why liking gay porn is totally normal for a straight married woman.

The Year in Anti-Games

Mountain, Goat Simulator, potato salad, and the new nobrow.

How do you make a better political videogame? Here's one idea

If there were an ongoing debate about how best to weave political discourse into a videogame, I'd have to put a vote in for the way Jonas and Verena Kyratzes have always done it.

Sure, I'll give credit to those making short, systems-based games such as the prolific and controversial Molleindustria, but for the most part you only see a surface-level heavy-handedness dive into political issues in the medium. What the Kyratzes do, particularly with their Lands of Dream series of adventure games, is bake the politics into a game's setting, characters, and story.

Importantly, the Kyratzes don't try to deliver a certain "message" with their games, as that goal only serves to simplify a subject that is among the most complex issues in the world. Rather, politics in their games is interconnected, found everywhere and in everything, but not in an overt manner. In the latest Lands of Dream game, titled A Postcard From Afthonia, you're told that even a seemingly nondescript bunch of flowers have formed a worker's revolt.

what the Lands of Dream reflects is the multiplicity of politics 

The Kyratzes often take from the work of William Blake, using the tyrannical figure of Lord Urizen in the games, who embodies oppression with an unforgiving austerity. Urizen's self-obsessed, and notably anti-democratic rise to power, is a constant source of destruction and pain in the Lands of Dream. In A Postcard From Afthonia, which is set directly after the events of The Sea Will Claim Everything, Urizen has declared war against the Fortunate Isles as they revolted against his efforts. And you can bet that any similarities you may draw to recent riots and protests around the world (Ferguson, New York, Egypt, China) is no coincidence.

Meanwhile, we get familiar with the colorful inhabitants of these isles (sentient trees, storks, and dead philosophers), getting to know their struggles, worries, and their personal politics. No single "message" stands out here; it's more of a melting pot of ideas that ring true to this world, some of which may be conflicting.

And so what the Lands of Dream reflects is the multiplicity of politics, focusing on the ideas that different people in their various situations bring to the subject. You'll probably find some notions that you agree with, and others that you can't get behind, all of which encourage you towards an inner debate.

And this is focusing solely on the political reading, which is only a slice of the entire game in truth—the Kyratzes don't make explicitly political games, but games that touch on a variety of topics affecting them at the time. You'll also find silliness, pop culture, and philosophy mixed in with the politics and other subjects. As you play A Postcard From Afthonia, take a minute to read through the descriptions of mushrooms, trees, and even rocks in each scene. You'll find a breadth of tones and topics that'll make you laugh as much other parts of the game make you think.

The strength of this approach to infusing politics into a videogame is that it reflects how most of us interact with politics in our daily lives. We're not usually confronted with a single message, but form political ideas from a myriad of sources—the news, adverts, internet forums, conversations with friends—and we then reflect our views back into the world around us. It's a constantly swirling process with too many different sides to count.

This approach that the Kyratzes take with their worlds of imagination allows us to, ourselves, come to a political view, rather than ramming their personal politics down our throats.

You can download A Postcard From Afthonia for free here. You can also pay $3.33 to get the Special Edition version of the game at the same link.

The autobiographical dress-em-up about pleasing your conservative parents

Did your parents ever say "you're not leaving the house wearing that?"

Punch a $10 million painting and get away with it

Ever wanted to punch a painting? I don't mean a pre-schoolers' red-blobbed masterpiece of their family. We're talking a painting hung with a lavish golden frame in an art gallery, the type that people swan around with fingers curled to their chins, thoughts swirling with admiration. That type of painting. Wanna punch one?

Yeah? Good—now you can, by playing the honestly titled browser game Punch a Monet. You can, as it says, walk up to Claude Monet's $10 million painting "Argenteuil Basin with a Single Sailboat" and, with a brazen fist, punch it. Again, and again, and again.

leave all of life's frustrations to fester in the cracked skin of Monet's paints 

You can watch from behind your violent appendage as a thrilling catharsis erupts inside your cranium, as why else would you do this, if it weren't for emptying your stresses? The fragile canvas rips with expensive wounds with each crashing impact. And a "Damage" counter tells you how many millions of dollars your savage efforts mount up to.

After you leave all of life's frustrations to fester in the cracked skin of Monet's paints, you may question where this game came from, right? Well, you'll probably refresh the page a few times to magically restore the painting so you can destroy it all over again. But once that's out of your system, there are certainly questions that coil into your thoughts, such as "why does this exist?" It may seem a bit too specific of a fetish to have simply blossomed without context, you may think, and you'd be right.

Punch a Monet was designed by Tom Galle, Dries Depoorter, and Eiji Muroichi, who are known collectively as PARTY New York. They've been keeping a keen eye on the news and it's from this that Punch a Monet came about.

You see, last week, 49-year-old Andrew Shannon was sentenced to six years in jail for putting a three-branch tear in Monet's painting with his fist—the same one you've been smacking inside the game. So, yeah, it's a simulator in a way. Shannon did this back in 2012 inside the National Gallery of Ireland before shouting at some of the gallery's visitors, and then being apprehended by a security guard.

He claimed at the time that he was getting back at the state by damaging the painting. But later, nearer to the time of his court appearance, Shannon reckoned that he felt faint and accidentally fisted the artwork. Given that the whole act was caught on CCTV and paint remover was found in his bag, it's no surprise that the jury deliberated for only 90 minutes before giving the guilty verdict.

So let that be a lesson to you: if you want to rebel against the state by punching art it's probably best that you do it inside a videogame. Oh, and don't worry, the original Monet painting was soon restored to its former quality after it was vandalized.   

You can play Punch a Monet for free in your browser.

A brief introduction to dreidel hacking

Religious games sometimes call for intervention from the central bank.