Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 368

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TV and film are full of bad dads, but games are doing better

"[On TV] if there is a dad in the home, he is an idiot. It must have reflected our own discomfort with dads being competent," said Hanna Rosin on a panel about the future of fatherhood this weekend at the Aspen Ideas Festival. "You put a dad in front of his kid, and the dad gives the worst advice. You put a dad in front of a toaster and he burns the house down."

Alexis Madrigal echoed the refrain: "As a new dad, I've often been struck with horror at dads I see on TV. On the small screen, dads are dolts, dads are idiots." And while there was certainly some bright spots in advertising this year, most notably this Dove Men+Care ad, the exceptions were exactly that: exceptions.

Ironically, games are one place that generally avoid the stereotype of the bumbling pop. It's done this chiefly by ignorance—that is, simply ignoring that they exist. That's certainly better than carrying the baggage of generations of gender inequity, I suppose, but it is one bright spot of progressiveness in a medium that struggles to keep its values in stride with public opinion. At our first Two5six, Broken Age game designer Tim Schafer reflected that one of the chief inspirations for Vella was his own daughter, who asked why she couldn't find characters to play.

Our own Jess Joho reflected on the "dadification" of videogames through the emergence of characters like Lee from The Walking Dead and Joel from The Last of Us. And while other mediums generally focus on fathers of young children, games are leading the way in showing fatherhood as a lifelong activity, one dotted with the pains of sacrifice, as Jess wrote:

Don’t get me wrong; dadification has done great things for videogames, for us. But I know we have to leave him to make our own decisions and mistakes. As fathers, we failed—and that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Like real fatherhood, no matter what choices you made or how hard you fought, innocence would always be lost. 

Even though many of the images of fatherhood are via surogates, that's good news, believe it or not. And if Rosin is looking for more examples of fathers of significance, games would be a good place to start.

Shop class gets algorithmic and metaphysical with cube-within-a-cube mod

We don’t often get the chance to talk woodworking here at Kill Screen, but this instructional video on how to cut a block of wood into a square that is suspended inside another square—also a block of wood—lets us dream of a nerdy foray into the industrial arts we never knew. 

You may think master carpenter Steve Ramsey has used some wood-working legerdemain such as carefully reconstructing the outer cube with glue to fit the little one in there, but not so! As we see in this tutorial, all it takes is some skill, patience, and forethought with the drill press. 

Watch and go from mildly curious to rearing to try this at home, as he whittles down the block of wood into a metaphorical enigma. 

Now you can play reality in third-person perspective, too

Because real-life needs third-person perspective too, Polish software modders Mepi have created this strange, perspective-shifting Oculus Rift mod, which allows you to view the world from an over-the-shoulder view (and keep tabs on your bald spot to boot). 

Possibly the most cumbersome wearable technology ever, all you need to recreate the effect of moving around in a game like Skyrim or Bayonetta at the park or shopping mall is a laptop stuffed in a backpack, a VR headset, and a long pole attached to a video camera erected from your spine. I’m guessing wearing this will get you escorted from the premises of, like, most public places. 

But the premise of how VR can reengineer our visual perspective is as fascinating as ever, as we’ve seen with gender-swapping experiments, VR shamanism, and projecting images of your own body into 3D space. The third-person mod even has thumbsticks for swinging around the camera for a side view, which makes my head feel like it’s splitting in two just thinking about it. 

Weren't a fan of Shadows of the Damned's garrulous humor? Blame EA

I tend to think of Grasshopper Manufacture’s Shadows of the Damned as a prototypical Suda 51 game: a perverse, sexually frustrated, B-movie kill-fest that is nevertheless a lot of fun. Your protagonist’s gun is a talking skull named Boner.

But according to Suda, the game as he envisioned it wasn’t supposed to turn out that way. Instead, it was the overseers at Electronics Arts, who financed the game through their Partners program, that told him to change things. “That game went through about five different versions,” he told Edge. “For example, originally when Garcia took out his gun and looked through the laser sight, it was ringed with flowers. And then around the circle of flowers were little leaping bunnies.” That means no tumescent, public-restroom-stall-humored, Ay, caramba-ing sidekick.

But the cuteness baffled the Electronic Arts Partners board, who apparently wanted the game to appeal to more American teenage males, who don't like bunnies. “Those meetings felt like court interrogations,” he said.

So we eventually wound up with an internal monologue of bad penis jokes—not that Suda is beyond that, of course. (Ahem: No More Heroes.) But it would have been great to experience his original vision.

Facebook's social experiments are only the beginning. Games have been toying with us forever.

It's only play-testing, right?

Shockers Bluff is your new dinner party ice breaker

If "Feel the Pain" is your favorite Dinosaur, Jr. song, then you're in for a treat.

Michael Hand of the Revision3's show DIY Tryin' has put together a devious game concept that will surely upset everyone you know and likely send another to the hospital. Titled Shocker's Bluff, the concept is simple. Three players hook themselves up to be with electrodes and connect them to a computer. The computer shocks two of the three participants but not the third. The goal is for a fourth person, ostensibly, to figure out who the faker is. Drinks and merriment ensue.

Connecting games to physical feedback is one thing. We have haptic systems everywhere, but the desire to inflict actual pain on players is something few designers deign to do. Painstation, created by Volker Morawe and Tilman Reiff of the artist collective//////////fur//// art entertainment interfaces, was one of the few exceptions. A giant hulking box of unhappiness, it was a standard game of Pong that would punish you for errors with a series of burns, shocks, and slaps. As Pippin Barr wrote, games like Painstation and Shocker's Bluff are less about the physical sensation:

Our experience becomes a kind of "pain tasting" experience. We’re interested to find out what each pain is like, not so much tolerating it as swilling it around our nervous systems like connoisseurs.

This form of "touching the hot stove" is actually connected to our childhood desires to seek out risky play. Ellen Sandseter, an early childhood researcher at Queen Maud University, has found that kids naturally are drawn to six types of risky play including exploring heights, handling dangerous tools, exploring solo, and, of course, just being near something dangerous. (See more in Hannah Rosin's excellent Atlantic feature.)

That's good to know. And you can explain that to friends when you're hooking them up to Shocker's Bluff. They'll understand.

Paris gets more Paris-y with this 3D botany app

Frenchest news post ever.

Check out these four frazzling exploration games from Glitch Jam

Let us also note: free!

The agony and the ecstasy of Aban Hawkins & the 1001 Spikes

Know death.