Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 307

The Year in Architecture

Learning to play the architecture of Abstract Ritual, NaissanceE and Frank Gehry.

Boardgames are a pain. This app may help

Boardgames are great, but they are an enormous pain in the ass. This is both part of the appeal and the reason more people don't get into them. They're heavy, generally expensive, they require hours to set up and take apart, as well as gobs of free time penciled into a handful of people's schedules. (We are speaking here of the deep, weighty, Boardgamegeek-type of boardgames, not the anything-goes social interations that, say, the Spiel des Jahres celebrates.) 

So the 700,000 people that have signed up for Roll20 since it launched in 2012 have sought something easier. The online service features video chat, a shared board, automated character sheets and basic lighting/vision effects. In short, everything you need to get up and running in a tabletop RPG, aside, of course, from a handful of friends, those new D&D guides, and some spare time—although the ability to leave a game dormant for a few days without fear of a cat sliding across it is certainly a plus.

Early next year, Roll20 will release an app for iOS and Android that'll digitally augment IRL play, too. One of the creators tells FastCo Labs that currently players are loading up the browser-based version even when they're actually sitting around a table together. Turns out that automated character sheets and numbers keep the game moving no matter what; with the release of the new app, everyone will be able to keep track separately on their phones. As boardgames surge in popularity, olive branches like this will only help ease the transition from Catan to the heavy stuff. 

Header image via P M M

The Year in Ass

Ass is both a source and subject of power, in the real world and in videogames.

We played Lindsay Lohan's videogame so you wouldn't have to

The price of fame? Carpal tunnel, apparently.

Lindsay Lohan wants some of your freemium cash. In the name of irony, of course. Not, like, for money—obviously.

Never-before-seen Smithsonian art collection goes online next year

Jordanian statues can see you offline (and in your sleep).

Find a disturbing truth when rummaging through the wreckage of a home

Forsaken is a game that posits a creeping question: what do your dwelling and possessions reveal about your character? It employs you as someone who is sent to declutter and clean up abandoned houses. The one you get to mouse over is an omnishambles; a putrid disarray of residential flotsam.

As you rifle through broken drawers and punctured mattresses you find items—handcuffs, scissors, packets of pills, a dildo—and are asked to choose from three possible reactions to each in order to build a vague idea of the previous owner. "Is this to hide fingerprints?" or "Is this for work?" read two sentences that emerge alongside a purple pair of latex gloves for to select from.

Being a disgusting wreck of a home, these options fall loosely under a number of despondent or criminal possibilities: a sex worker, a pedophile, a burglar, or maybe a parent with a catastrophic child. The ending analyzes all your choices to hopefully confirm your suspicions with a letter in scrawled handwriting from the absentee you had pictured.

the anxiety of having someone inspecting our living spaces 

My Serbian sex worker had written to her daughter, warning her of the unspoken dangers and ugliness of the European promise that she had to endure, and as I was able to realize with my rummaging. It reminded me of this real letter that a person had left for the person who job it was to clean their abandoned home—"when you lose hope after struggling so hard to always do the right thing ... and no one will work with you ... you just stop caring," they say to explain the mess.

While interesting as an epistemological study of how we perceive strangers, I found that Forsaken also touches on a subject that most residence owners (and renters) will be familiar. Put the shoe on the other foot, and instead we find the anxiety of having someone inspecting our living spaces, exposing your private enclosures.

There's a series of judgements that a stranger to your home cannot refrain from making when entering your abode for the first time. This is known, so you want to create the best impression possible, but also not appear to have made so much of an effort to be suspect of clandestine activity. Unless, of course, you don't care at all and roll happily around in a filth of smells without source, clothes scattered as if struck by a bomb.

Those who do care will clean up frantically before their guests' arrival, stashing away bills in bread bins, throwing a vacuum cleaner around in fits. This is what I have learned from my mother. And so I carry out a similar preparatory routine when knowing an alien will traipse my cream carpets and burgundy tiles. In my new apartment, which I care for dearly, I've even gone through mock guided tours of each room, seeing through imagined eyes to catch any visible scandals.

Even then, I still have to fumble through an explanation of my shelf of faux-snuff movies and imported depravities as being part of my cult film studies at university. Thinking on this while playing Forsaken has led my curiosity toward wondering what my possessions would say about me if I were to die this instant. I think back to that letter and start to worry that it would give the false impression. Maybe I should also write a letter...

You can download Forsaken for free on its Ludum Dare page.

We are slaves to Destiny

Parsing the insidious darkness beneath The Dark Below.

The year games got funny again

Goats, microtransactions, anal probes, pizza: 2014 saw a new form of comedy emerge.

Tate Worlds mines classic artwork for Minecraft inspiration

Jump into paintings, sort of.

A videogame for all you lonely kids (and adults) out there

There may not be a greater intimation of loneliness than a child attempting to play a videogame that was designed for two persons. Picture them sat cross-legged in front of an old boxy television, completely by themselves, attempting to rush their limbs across two gamepads, and sighing with their entire torso when the effort produces no satisfying interplay. See that kid? It's me.

Not just me so it turns out. Folmer Kelly is also that kid and, I suspect, are so many other insular folk out there. Perhaps this includes you as well? Kelly gets a mention as his Ludum Dare 31 entry Entertainment Software for Lonely Children sees him revisiting that childhood pastime.

It's a change that reflects the appropriated goal of the single, lonely player 

More than nostalgia, it's firmly framed as more of a wish fulfilment, with his current mindset as an adult playing a somewhat regretful narrator. Essentially, it's Kelly's answer to the question: what would you say to yourself when you were a kid?

Kelly's boyhood haunt is two-player Pong. And so it's this classic arcade game that acts as an electronic conduit through space and time, transporting us back to his youth as if it were the Ghost of Christmas Past. Not that it's particularly demanding on the artist, but Pong is recreated faithfully here as you'd expect from a person who has had it so grossly burned into their forethoughts. The bare and bold lines—now pink and with kinks at the corners— form that recognizable playing court; two squares abreast a ubiquitous voidspace.

The most divergent and noticeable idiosyncrasy is the way the score is tallied. Rather than points being rewarded to the player that bats the pixel-square ball past the opposition, the points ascend with each successful rebound. It's a change that reflects the appropriated goal of the single, lonely player to this two-player set-up; rallying with themselves for as long as possible.

Also re-purposed for the solitary individual are the controls. "I tried to simulate the frustrating difficulty of having to deal with two controllers at the same time, but for one player," Kelly writes. He manages this by having both bats dictated by a single control set, but the up and down movements of the right-hand bat are inverted, while the left-hand bat moves upwards as you'd expect when pressing up, and vice versa.

Adjusting your balance to these topsy-turvy controls takes some getting used to, and so it's almost a given that you'll miss a rebound at some point. When you do, the court is transformed into a child's oblong head, and a message from the adulthood Folmer Kelly is written along the bottom.

"Remember that most people are too worried about themselves to worry about your appearance or mistakes," reads one of these messages. I found myself nodding along with the wisdom in those like that previous one. If only I could have secured my worries as a child with the knowledge I have now.

There are others that had me chuckling along at how familiar they were. These were those that concerned behavior that, I had thought, were exclusive to me as a child, then being revealed as something more universal, at least for us lonely kids. Such as the rascally, "Stop lying to get attention. You're getting too good at it." It's worth playing if only to see yourself in these messages. But it also, hopefully, acts as a qualifying reminder of how you've matured over the years. Has that loneliness ever left you, though?

You can play Entertainment Software for Lonely Children on Newgrounds. It can also be downloaded for free on itch.io.