Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 371

Here comes Google’s cardboard, DIY alternative to Oculus Rift

Apparently, you don’t need a hefty black face-mask with rubber straps to access the constructs of virtual reality. All you need is a sheet of cardboard, an Android phone, and a little ingenuity. 

Oh yeah, and you’ll need Google’s new app Cardboard, which, when run on a mobile situated inside a homemade cardboard mask, presents an in-your-face view of Google Earth, Street View, and other VR-ified versions of Google apps, like watching YouTube on a huge screen. The downside is that you are wearing a paper mask on your face. And you thought Google Glass was styleless! 

This has very noble intentions, similar to the aims of groups who build cardboard computers to spread computer literacy. Virtual reality is a potentially important tech that with potentially huge accessibility issues. Cheap, ready-to-use VR equipment could lead to a swelling of grassroots creativity in the space. 

You can find a template for constructing your own paper headset here. 

Watch this new MOCA documentary on how the FPS has evolved beyond shooting Nazis

We’ve written before about how the shooter genre is expanding into a wider variety of games that can do nicer things than shooting dudes in the head. We did a PBS Game/Show episode about that. Also, I collected interviews with the creators of games that use shooter mechanics in surprising ways, like Proteus, and MirrorMoon EP, among others. 

Now Giant Sparrow’s The Unfinished Swan, a whimsical game about discovering a forgotten kingdom by splattering it with paint, is the subject of a new mini-documentary from Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. They beat a familiar drum: we need games that do other things than shooting guns, because while a game like Wolfenstein: The New Order is amazing, it doesn’t appeal to everyone. 

Watch below:

Space Email returns with all its absurdity, less the abuse

Back, with 100% less offensiveness, hopefully.

Steam owes its success to openness, but not too much openness

Valve’s semi-walled garden is an industry standard.

On fighting wisely in Dragon Quest VIII

Ritual sacrifice.

These walls are literally breathing life into architecture

Maybe your high friend wasn't imagining things.

Darpa makes the cyberpunk fantasy of VR hacking a beautiful reality

Cyberspace is portrayed in works of sci-fi as a beautiful virtual world where hackers and cyber-criminals vie for the security of databases. In real life, the intrigues of cyber warfare are less appealing, reduced to some guys hunched over their laptop. But with Plan X, the experimental wing at DARPA is making the battleground for cyber warfare of our cyberpunk dreams.

Plan X is a virtual reality interface for Oculus that may one day be used to disengage hackers the William Gibson way. “It’s like you’re swimming in the internet,” a DARPA project manager told Wired. And looking at the demonstration in the video below, which makes use of two Razer Hydra motion-controllers, this isn’t hyperbole. The strange levitating globes which operators can dive deep into reveal layers upon layers of symbols, data, and code. 

While the proof-of-concept technology is years away from prime-time crime fighting, the agency says that the system will have the ability not only to fend off attacks, but to go on the offensive as well. 

Watch and be hypnotized: 

Playlist 6/25: Deceit, befuddlement, and shovels.

V I D E O G A M E S

There’s now a whole lot more women making games. Keep it up!

As we learn in a new survey from IGDA group, there are now twice as many women in the game industry than there were 5 years ago, in 2009.

While this is progress, looking at the chart above is kind of sad. Specifically, you can also glean from the report that 22 percent of professional game-makers are women, while 2% are transgender. The rest? Men, at 76% of all game development employees. It’s undeniably a very male-dominated industry. A fairer ratio of gender in the game studio has been called for by campaigns like #1reasonwhy, while Google’s Made with Code initiative encourages girls to learn how to code. It sounds like the message is getting out. Let’s hope this is a trend that continues.

Star Citizen’s crowdfunding campaign now exceeds the GNP of Tuvalu

Star Citizen, the spiritual successor to Wing Commander, continues to inhale gobs of cash from the crowd, recently breaking the $47 million dollar mark, which is nuts. Passing this milestone gives players the added feature of engine tuning, allowing them to tinker around under the hood of their ship. If (when) this reaches $49 million, the devs will add a rare species of space plant, which blooms one night every 100 years. It sounds like they are running thin on stretch goals. 

For the record, this puts the budget for a game about spaceships shooting other spaceships far above the gross national product of the tiny British Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu, which generates only around $36 million in goods and services in a year. But Star Citizen is still a good ways off from Kiribati at $167 million, the next highest on the list. That we are talking realistically about an astronomically budgeted Star Commander successor is a true sign that the videogame universe itself is expanding.