Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 376

The curious evolution of Nintendo’s new “amiibo”

Nintendo has always made games with heart; now they’re making toys with souls.

Shenmue and the rise of lonelycore games

An open world of closed-off people.

It sounds like Oculus wants to make Matrix plugs and holodecks a reality

Oculus—those far-seeing, Facebook-owned virtual reality devs—are peering even further into the future, to the time when we will all have Matrix jacks in our skulls and everyone owns a holodeck—the virtual reality cave from the Star Trek universe, not the Russian jelly mold. In a recent Reddit AMA with some top dogs at Oculus Rift, Luckey said that the will continue to innovate with multiple products aside from just the Rift headset “until we get to Matrix plugs into the body and those a long ways off.” 

At first I thought he was being hyperbolic, and maybe he was. But the team continues to speak in this futurist tone, with VP of Product Nate Mitchell chiming in that their research and development department is hard at work on something besides shipping and improving the Oculus Rift headset. Rather they're busy with “the breakthroughs that need to happen to get to the holodeck. There is a lot of innovation you are going to see from Oculus, knock on wood. Especially the hard research that no one has been attempting for a long time,” he says.

Let that echo between your ears: the hard research that no one has been attempting for a long time.

It sounds like their mission statement is actually to bring science fiction to life, which sounds awesome. Except for all those crummy, period-piece holodeck episodes.

Here’s an interesting study into the psyche of online gamers’ gender biases

This may come as a surprise to no one, but men and women are treated totally oppositely in online games. According a new study, the guys who are jerks in online shooters make plenty of friends, while unruly women, not so much. The takeaway in short is that online game communities support gender biases, frowning upon trash-talking females, while admiring their male counterparts. 

Here’s how the experiment worked. Researchers at various universities (Virginia Tech, Ohio State, and Penn State) had one Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3player pose as both a male and female in 238 rounds of deathmatch. During these matches the player would disperse prerecorded audio snippets like “nice shot” and “you suck.” The test player's skill level was also adjusted from match to match.

 

Then, after the match, the player would send friend requests to other players and see who bit. It turned out that the friend requests of the male jerk was far and away the most popular among males, while the nice guy and the quiet guy were shirked. For females though, the silent type was befriended more often, with the trash-talking female lagging behind by 6 percentage points. 

SteamBoy, the illegitimate lovechild of Steam and a Game Boy

While we were in our post-E3 stupor, a dev group went and announced a rather miraculous handheld system that plays Steam games. Due out in 2015, the SteamBoy, as the portmanteau suggests, combines the awesome library of Valve’s popular digital download platform with the play-it-anywhere-ability of a Game Boy. This sounds a little hard to believe considering that a powerful gaming PC would have to be shrunk down to fit in the palms of your hands, but apparently this can be done, to an extent. 

You’re probably thinking that DOTA 2 would surely be terrible on a modified Steam Controller with a 5-inch screen nestled between the thumb-pads. But there are plenty of games that could be brilliant on a portable device, like The Binding of Isaac. Thus the dramatic announcement trailer is potentially almost justified. Almost.

Checking in on the chaotic, user-led iteration of please be nice :(

The game we keep mutating.

Exclusive trailer for Lumino City shows surplus of papercraft, charm

Be still, my little paper heart. 

Tucked into a corner at E3 was a messy, brilliant satire of online culture

Tetrageddon and the heart of the interne.t

Relive E3 2014's excess in this gross, caustic videogame

Murder: 7.2/10

Is EVE Online a videogame or a social network?

How the world’s most interesting MMO sustains itself via social media.