Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 38

Small Radios Big Televisions finds the beauty in machine glitches

Small Radios Big Televisions, a game about the joys of broken analog tech, is coming to PlayStation 4 and PC on November 8th. Mostly, it wants you to collect cassettes and play them in a tape recorder: special attention is given to the tape sliding into the tray, the chik of it being locked in, the reel slowly spinning to unwind its contents. For someone who remembers doing this over and over as a child bored in their room, it’s a sensual few seconds; the familiar choreography plugging straight into the spectral residue of fond memories.

But that’s only the beginning. The tapes you play are labelled with a single word like “FOREST” or “ROAD,” typically remote, countryside locations. It is to these that they transport you, playing an azure, perfect moment on loop with its accompanying woozy soundtrack. In these moments I’d believe that Boards of Canada had made a videogame if you had told me so.

their previous perfection has been warped

In the first couple of locations you enter through these tapes, there are gems spinning on clear display. Click and you collect them, bringing the tape to an end. Later, after using the gems to unlock doors in the factory you navigate, you can throw the tapes into a grinder. They look no different on the outside afterwards, but venture to play them on your tape player once again, and you’ll see that their previous perfection has been warped, the music with it.

I believe it was at this point I really started to give a shit about Small Radios Big Televisions. Finally, I thought, a game that gets me—bending data to enter my heart, we skip and hold hands as lords of the tape chew. But let’s not get too carried away. This is a puzzle game after all; a genre I’ve always struggled to get on with. But at least its puzzle components are in symbiosis with its analog desires.

Around its deserted factories are big weighty gears and y-shaped levers hanging from the walls for you to play around with. Lights must be switched on and off, bulky steel doors unlocked, and yes, television screens unscrambled. You operate machinery in celebration of manual labor and 20th century technology (Brendon Chung will be proud). But more importantly, at least to me, it wants you to piece it all together and then break it all—to see the beauty in distortion. You break those cassette tapes not just for the fragmented deformations, the disrupted noise, but because sometimes it’s the only way to find the gem hidden inside that tape.

It is a game in which you succeed on the back of technological failure. It presents a simulation of malfunction that, yes, you do have to puzzle through, but can also enjoy for its aesthetic merits too. And that’s enough, at least for me.

Small Radios Big Televisions comes out for PlayStation 4 and PC on November 8th. Find out more on its website.

 

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Get lost (and found) in the playful world of Hidden Folks

When game designer Adriaan de Jongh (of Bounden fame) stumbled upon Sylvain Tegroeg’s work, he was mesmerized. Tegroeg’s black-and-white illustrations showed a tiny world brimming with folks going about their lives. Every nook and cranny told a story. “I was staring at them for 10 minutes,” recalled de Jongh. “They already had this feeling that there’s this big world … with lots of things happening.”

Jokingly, de Jongh suggested they should make a game around it. Inspired, he cobbled together art “stolen” from Tegroeg’s website, creating a “really bad” interactive prototype where you can zoom in and out as well as scroll through Tegroeg’s illustrated world. When he showed this to Tegroeg, both of them realized they could make something out of it. “I showed him the prototype and [said], ‘This is what I have in mind and I have no idea what to make of this but it seems like a pretty fun game,’” said de Jongh with a laugh.

This kickstarted the pair’s two-year journey in making the upcoming game Hidden Folks. Described as a more interactive version of Where’s Waldo? (1987), the game asks players to find characters within Tegroeg’s hand-drawn black-and-white world. Unlike its inspiration though (where characters are hidden in plain sight), Hidden Folks takes advantage of its interactive features. With the illustrated world coming to life using nifty animations and human-made sound effects, characters are hidden within and behind things, whether it be a tent you need to unzip or a garage door needing to be opened. Finding the characters, then, isn’t just about spotting who’s out of place, but also about exploring and understanding how the world works.

Getting to this playable state wasn’t easy. Given the signature black-and-white style of Tegroeg’s drawings, de Jongh said one of their biggest challenges was creating a language that tells players what they can interact with. “We don’t really have an easy way of telling people, ‘Hey, click on me,’ [because] we don’t really do gradients or make hover effects,” explains de Jongh. While the game’s user interface looks simple and intuitive now, he says it was a year-long process of experimenting, brainstorming, and playtesting with different interactions.

“I really want them to understand and suck in all the little animations”

For instance, de Jongh recalls needing to signal to players that, not only can you tap, but you can also drag to open things (such as slidable garage doors). Putting sound effects didn’t help so they created a tutorial where an in-game hand showed how garage doors could be opened. While it solved the problem, it made the game boring. “I’m basically giving away this sort of discovery [because] I’m telling you what to do. I’m treating you like a four year old and I didn’t really want that,” said de Jongh.

They scrapped the tutorial and landed on a subtle wiggle effect when you tap on draggable objects. It was enough of a hint without giving the whole thing away. “This was extremely effective,” said de Jongh. “It brings back the smile [when they get it], people understand what to do, and also keeps that sense of discovery.”

It’s tiny details like those mixed in with the raw and playful illustrations of Tegroeg’s work that should draw players into the world of Hidden Folks. This was de Jongh’s goal all along: “When they play [the game], I really want them to understand and suck in all the little animations, the little stories that are unfolding, and the world that Sylvain is creating. But at the same time, I want them to engage with that and think very actively about where the characters can be.”

Hidden Folks is currently in development. It’s expected to come out early 2017 on iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android at a later date. Find out more on its website or follow the creators on Twitter ( @AdriaandeJongh and @box6l20 ).

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Videogame invites you to discover someone through their lost phone

You find a phone on the ground outside. You look around, but there’s no one in sight. Hoping that there will be some information to help you contact the owner, you turn the phone on. This is where the preview for A Normal Lost Phone starts. Immediately, four messages pop up on the phone, sent over the last couple hours from the owner’s dad. “Where are you?”; “Where did you go?”

Accidental Queens, the collective that created A Normal Lost Phone, list Her Story (2015), Gone Home (2013), and Life is Strange (2015) as their main inspirations. It feels most strongly influenced by Gone Home, however. The game is framed around trying to find out what happened to the owner of the phone, very similar to the process of exploring the house in Gone Home. In both games, you are interacting with the objects belonging to those who are no longer there, and those objects tell the story. Not only that, but all you can truly do is uncover the past through this exploration, not solve immediate problems. Both games serve as reminders of how deeply we imprint ourselves into the spaces we live in, although in A Normal Lost Phone, that space is digital.

how deeply we imprint ourselves into the spaces we live in

On the Ulule page for A Normal Lost Phone, it says that “it can be a treasure hunt or a complete invasion of privacy … depending on your point of view.” This duality can be felt even in the preview. You can look through all the pictures and texts you want, but uncomfortably, in the text conversation with the owner’s friend Alice, there is the option to send a draft. And the only way to get into other parts of the phone is by sending that text, as if you were Sam, the actual owner of the phone.

The mysteries that unravel in the preview are engrossing. Piecing together the inconsistencies in what Sam has said to different people in texts, impersonating them in conversation, trying every clue to unlock certain applications, all point to a deeper experience just behind the next password. With themes of homophobia, depression, coming of age, and the pursuit of identity, it seems that in playing A Normal Lost Phone we may learn something about ourselves as well.

Play the preview for A Normal Lost Phone here.  Visit the Ulule page here. The full game is due to come out next year.

 

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Mini Metro now lets you fix the subway, while you’re riding the subway

My walk to work is rife with construction; large swaths of land are cordoned off, sidewalks reworked and traffic patterns changed, all because of a big green stripe being added to our Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority maps. A project in the works since 1990, the Green Line Extension project only actually started to take shape in 2012. The MBTA started to put down the bones. And then it was halted. Revised. There’s a new plan now, but things still seem shaky.

As it turns out, reworking a city’s transit system isn’t is easy as plopping a line down on a map. But in Mini Metro, it is. Dinosaur Polo Club’s subway layout game, previously available on Windows and Mac, is out now on iOS and Android. Maybe you can fix the problem. Mini Metro removes the politics of designing a city’s subway system—the only thing that matters is keeping the trains moving. Everything but the system’s tangled lines is automatic; you’ve just got to keep up with the city’s commuters. Don’t make ’em wait too long.

If you’ve played Mini Metro on PC, the mobile version will be familiar. Dinosaur Polo Club has mostly been tweaking the game for optimization on a tiny screen. “We found that [Mini Metro] was very fiddly on phone-sized screens,” designer Robert Curry told me. “So we’ve been focusing on small things to improve the way it feels, like tweaking the sizes of on-screen elements and hit-boxes, as well as bigger things like pinch-zooming.”

Mini Metro doesn’t feel stressful

Pinch-zooming was actually a pretty big breakthrough for Mini Metro on mobile according to Curry. Players are already used to this sort of movement in map apps, that it just feels natural in the game. “It’s kept the usability steady no matter how large the map grows,” he added.

Among the chaos of a growing subway system and not so patient commuters, Mini Metro doesn’t feel stressful. I wish I could say the same for Boston’s public transit system.

Mini Metro is available now on iOS and Android. The desktop version is available on Steam. For more on the game, see Kill Screen’s Mini Metro review.

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Internet communities help beginners build computers

This article is part of a collaboration with iQ by Intel .

The PC modding community turns building computers into a social art form that people of all technical skillsets can enjoy. Constructing a computer from spare parts sounds intimidating, but it’s not just for hardcore geeks anymore. PC modding, the term used for customizing or “modifying” a computer, is going mainstream, and the online PC modding communities are happy to share the craft with newcomers. “I truly believe anyone ages eight and up could learn to build a computer with no problems due to the abundance of information available on the subject online today,” said Hassan Alaw, who runs two of his own computer-modding companies, V1 Tech and Red Harbinger. He said that for a seemingly solo activity, the modding community runs on passionate interactions. “The social part of building computers is really why I wanted to get into it.”

Even beginners can produce a rig that’s uniquely their own

His skills pulled him into a battle for bragging rights in the 2016 Expert Mode: Rig to Victory competition. Like fixing vintage cars or capturing analog photography, PC building takes dedication and a willingness to learn. Bustling online forums not only provide easy-to-follow guides, but they’re also fostering a strong sense of camaraderie by sharing tips, tricks and finished creations. The mixture of practical high-end tech and visual one-upmanship gives beginners the sense of peeking under the hood of the Batmobile. One of master modder Lavins’ recent builds, for example, shows just how magnetic these creations can be. Made in partnership with ASUS and Corsair, it sports a Vengeance LED DDR4. Aside from giving the rig an ethereal glow, it features an overclockable Intel Core i7 and Intel X99 chipset.

Building Dream Machines

Thanks to instructional videos to forums like r/buildapc, building a cool computer is easier than ever. An endless array of ideas and variety of possibly modifications ensure even beginners can produce a rig that’s uniquely their own. PC modding forums, which thrive on the exchanges between enthusiasts, can provide invaluable support and information throughout the building process. Often, forum members exchange words of encouragement, supporting one another’s dreams. Philip Carmichael was just one of nearly 400,000 Redditors gaining expertise on r/buildapc. Two years later, he established himself as a local expert and founded PCPartPicker, a website PC makers use to easily compare and mix-and-match parts. “I started this because I love it—not for money—and now I get to do it as my full-time job,”Carmichael wrote in a thank-you post. “It is truly a dream come true.” More than 400 messages of support followed.

“I grew up really poor but always loved gaming,” wrote one poster. “I am turning 30 in a couple of weeks and I could not be more proud than what I have worked for. I just wanted to share my rig with some people who would appreciate it.” Posts like this are common, and according to r/buildapc moderator LumberStack, this is an important aspect of what makes PC modding groups so special.“Communities like this thrive because people can come help others and learn in the process or show off what they’ve done with their builds,” he said.

PC Modding for the Masses

Alaw believes the internet has the potential to democratize PC building, reducing the intimidating factor and transforming it into an activity anyone can pick up.“One piece of advice I would give to someone getting into PC building or modding is don’t be afraid,” Alaw said. “It’s actually a lot simpler than you think.” He would know: Before fulfilling his dream of turning his hobby into a full-time job, Alaw was just 14 when he built his first rig, the summer before ninth grade. He knew he wanted to play Crysis (2007), the most graphically intensive game around in 2007. This presented a real challenge for any computer to run at a fluid 60 frames per second. At the time, Alaw didn’t have the money for a proper gaming rig, but the desktop his dad had built for him when he was younger was collecting dust in the closet.

Anyone ages eight and up could learn to build a computer

So Alaw sold his laptop and started doing PC repairs to save up money for used parts. Before long, he was disassembling his old computer piece by piece and taking notes and pictures of each step. It was a lot different than the tech he was used to — an outdated graphics card, an unfamiliar layout and oversized ribbon cables — but he got the idea. Alaw successfully rebuilt the desktop, learning more than a few skills along the way.“The best part is that the older computers were actually more difficult to build and understand,” he said, adding that working on an outdated, clunky desktop eventually made putting together his Crysis rig a snap. Before building a system, it’s critical to check component compatibility and interoperability, and be careful when handling components, which can easily be damaged.

Alaw said modders who want to use their rigs for gaming and livestreaming need to invest in top-of-the-line graphics cards and processors. “It takes a lot of the processor to be able to run the game and livestream at the same time,” he said. “If you wanna get ahead of the pack, a good processor is the way to go.” While the Intel Core i7 is engineered for enthusiasts like Alaw, he said the Intel Core i5 serves as a great all-round computing device. That said, everyone should buy the most CPU power they can afford to ensure the rig has the longest possible shelf life. While the knowledge and experience was harder to come by when Alaw built his gaming PC, he thinks the hobby is more accessible now than ever before.

“I truly believe anyone ages eight and up could learn to build a computer with no problems due to the abundance of information available on the subject online today,” he said, explaining that for a seemingly solo activity, the modding community runs on passionate interactions. “The social part of building computers is really why I wanted to get into it.”

 

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Post Apoc Dating Sim will let you make sweet, sweet love to a toaster

“If I ever had rust, would this bother you?”

You’re halfway through a second glass of wine at this point. Tina is sitting on the table across from you, anxiously awaiting a response. Her body is shapely—mainly square, but boy do those four corners look sharp. The shiny chrome of her skin reflects the sun, bright and hot. The two slits located at the top of her form contain soft, delicious pieces of bread just begging to be warmed up. Tina is a toaster. You don’t judge. There’s no room to be picky in the post-apocalypse, and this was starting to get pretty toasty.

“Nothing like a bit of coarse roughness to grate away at my skin…” You respond, offering her a wink. She turns red—from embarrassment, or because she was plugged in somewhere, you aren’t sure. After a little while of exchanging pleasantries, it’s time to get down to business. No WD40 required. You reach across the table and place your fingers gingerly at the base of her lever.

///

Post Apoc Dating Sim is a mini-game featured inside the upcoming point-and-click adventure title Paradigm, created by Jacob Janerka and Jonas Kielberg. “It was originally a small Kickstarter stretch goal,” Janerka explained. “However I had way too much fun with it so I added much more than planned.” The mini-game is pre-loaded on a MegaBro Dupagen (“basically, “), which is used in Paradigm for fast travel. “Clearly, people would want to experience the intricacies and difficulties of what it would be like to date a cross duck-human species”

Watching them pleasure a toaster

Or, perhaps, a toaster. Janerka tweeted out an interesting observation made while showing off Tina—the toaster you can date in the game—at events. “I brought it to a local convention as a side thing for people who have played my Paradigm demo already. It ended up working out way better than expected,” Janerka said. “By far the most satisfying thing is when people date the toaster and get to the end of the ‘date’ and have to fiddle with the toaster.” By the time players figured out the mechanic, they’d realize that they would have to move the lever up and down multiple times. After that, reality would set in: other people in the room were watching them “pleasure” a toaster.

How does one go about satisfying a duck-human or a toaster in the post-apocalypse? It starts off with a questionnaire, similar to 80s dating shows as opposed to the traditional dating sim formula. “After you are finished with the questionnaire you go into ‘foreplay mode’, again according to their bio/personality you use appropriate foreplay to make them happy,” Janerka expained. For example, the duck-human likes to be fed bread crumbs.

Once the sensual foreplay is over then you play a character specific ‘action mini game’ to gain more attraction. Noodle Hands Nelson, for one, needs to receive the highest of high fives in order for some of that hand action later. If you accumulate enough attraction points, you will either get “No Chemistry”, “In Love”, or “Stalker Level” with all the flavor text that goes with it, explaining what happens between you too.

Let’s hope Post Apoc Dating Sim is expanded upon and fleshed out in the future, because the premise quacks me up.

For more information on Paradigm click here.

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The Nintendo Switch wants to be your new, favorite stalker

Cue the establishing shot: a suburban home at night. Its window drapes are open. In the distance, a skyline looms over the horizon like a mountain peak. Inside, a man sits in the dim glow of a television. He’s slouched low, pushed back by the emanations. The marketing rhetoric leans into classic entertainment images: The first 10 seconds of your favorite syndicated situation comedy; The Maxell TV ad of a man getting blown backwards by the cassette tape’s hi-fidelity sound. He’s playing a game. Light strains of composer Koji Kondo’s classic Overworld Theme from The Legend of Zelda (1986) mix with discordant piano tinklings. The camera gets closer to the man’s stubbled face. He’s focused. On the television, Link is on horseback swiping his sword at goblins in a field.

A dog’s bark breaks the atmosphere. Silence. A striking red-and-white logo fills the screen: NINTENDO SWITCH. The music flips to an upbeat guitar-driven rock track. We see the man snap his controller into pieces and connect them to a screen, now showing the same moment he was playing on his TV. He takes his dog out to the park, sun’s first rays just peaking over the trees, and he’s carrying his digital adventure with him. “From the moment we met,” the rock singer sings, “you could see that I was filled with desire.”

This is what Nintendo is chasing—desire—with their next home console, now named the Switch (but known simply as “NX” until yesterday’s three minute tease). They want players to want Nintendo again. The 80s and 90s saw “Nintendo” become the generic term for “videogame.” That mantle has been passed to “PlayStation” or “Xbox” or, perhaps, “Phone.” Games are very much everywhere now. But from the beginning of videogames, location has always dictated your play. In the arcade, you stood at a cabinet. In the car, you took out your Game Boy or Vita or iPad. At home, you grabbed your WaveBird or DualShock. Nintendo aims to break down these invisible boundaries. The teaser video is transparent in showing use case after use case: Play the Switch at home, in a car, on a roofdeck, at a park. The only obstacle now is your rolodex (and the system’s undisclosed battery life).

The trick here is its modular components: At home, a tablet-looking device sits in a cradle, beaming the image to your TV. Need to take off? Your controller snaps into two separate pieces, officially named Joy-Cons, that attach to the screened device, effectively making like Voltron to turn into a handheld device. Arrive at your destination and the Joy-Cons can be taken off and used as simple controls. Flip the system’s kickstand open and now it’s an upright monitor. Where before Nintendo pushed for change in our basic inputs—swinging the Wii Remote to strike a tennis ball, or tapping a touchscreen to pet a Nintendog—the addition here appears to be, rather, a subtraction: A removal of environmental limits. Play as you have before. But wherever and whenever you want.

“Wherever you go, There you are”

Nintendo is fond of latching onto philosophical maxims—in the form of business strategies or social trends—as guiding principles. The Wii was famously an example of applying the lessons of W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy (2005) to the videogame market. The subtitle says it all: “How to create uncontested market space and make competition irrelevant.” Sony and Microsoft were sharks in the blood-red waters of HD graphics and processing power; Nintendo dipped their toes daintily into a calm, cool, placid lake of motion control, making games simple and accessible for all. The strategy worked.

When the late Satoru Iwata introduced the Wii U 2012, he mentioned Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together (2011), a book about our increasing reliance on technology and its isolating consequences. He wanted the Wii U to solve the problem we’ve all seen and participated in: a room full of people, each staring down at their individual screen. The Wii U was meant to coalesce our attentions, like some magnetic Bluetooth tractor beam; Kimmy looks at the GamePad while Tommy looks at the TV, but they’re playing the same game so we’re all having fun! Iwata ended the video with a simple tweak on Turkle’s warning: “Together. Better.”

The strategy did not work.

And so here we are again, launching another consumer product into the electronic entertainment stratosphere. There is no blue water anymore. There’s only the open-air of outside. Or the closed-off interior of your living room. Or your bed. Or the plane. Though no direct mention was made in the tease, Nintendo appears to be guided by another pop psychology message: “Wherever you go, There you are.”

The book of the same name, written by Jon Kabat-Zinn and published in 1994, is a layman’s guide to meditation. Playing the latest Zelda game while your dog tugs on its leash does not strike one as anything Zen-like. Indeed, the idea of a portable, mutable videogame console that can follow you everywhere evokes something closer to the emotional suffocation of a persistent friend who won’t take no for an answer. But in Nintendo’s ineffable way, they take the incessancy of stalking and flip it into charm. Cock-fighting becomes Pokémon. Implied beastiality becomes Donkey Kong. Insatiable cannibalism becomes Kirby. Their ability to tap into themes and symbols in playful, safe, and fulfilling ways is unmatched. Nintendo has a way with everyday voodoo.

Better yet, we do the dirty work for them. Mere minutes after the reveal video, on-lookers were already anthropomorphizing—noting the main controller, a grey tri-slab of sticks, buttons, and handles, looks like a puppy’s face. Or a penguin.

“From the perspective of meditation,” Kabat-Zinn writes, “every state is a special state, every moment a special moment.” The Switch wants to be your own portable meditation machine, imbuing daily tasks with an aura of Nintendo magic. No need to wait until you get home. No need to bargain over TV time. No need to pause while the dog does her business. Wherever you go, there you are.

Playing Nintendo.

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Let’s talk about all the animals in the Red Dead Redemption 2 trailer

We all sat around in hushed anticipation, our hearts racing for our first glimpse at Rockstar Games’s official foray into the current generation of consoles. We could hardly wait, our noses nearly touching our screens we leaned in so close, as if to not miss a single polygon. And then it started, and for one minute and eight seconds, we got our first look at Red Dead Redemption 2. 

Which is all well and good, sure. But did you fucking see all those animals?! Let’s talk about that.

At merely seven seconds we see our first horse, the Cadillac of the prairie, the reason we’re all here. There’s nothing better than saddling up on a trusted steed and taking off across the great American landscape, listening to the almost-rhythmic clop of its four hoofs against the dirt. Or hog-tying unexpected civilians to the back of the horse, dragging them behind, listening to their hypnotic screams for mercy.

At 14 seconds in, we see a deer, and it’s a hell of a specimen. Now, if there’s two things that are undeniably American, it’s Red Dead Redemption and hunting bucks. As a born-and-raised Kentucky native, I’m happy to see such a staple of my country and state being represented in videogames. My hat’s off to the Houser brothers for that one.

Moving on to 17 seconds, we see what appears to be pigs roaming the pen of a farm. But pigs are kinda gross, so I don’t really have an opinion here. Moving on …

a very complicated and nuanced internal food-chain

At 19 seconds, we see natural selection in motion as a grey fox (or not—this has been subject to major debate) takes down and eviscerates a smaller rodent. Clearly, Rockstar has created a very complicated and nuanced internal food-chain system for Red Dead Redemption 2. So, we can probably expect to see animals going nuts all over each other, killing and eating lesser creatures. Which is kinda cool.

23 seconds in we see some stupid birds struggling to fly against winds. Dumb birds, get your shit figured out. When I was six, I went to the zoo with my parents and a bird pooped on my head. Birds suck.

At 36 seconds in we see a ton of buffalo running alongside and around a train. Call me a monster if you must, but there’s absolutely no way I can stop myself from trying to hit a buffalo with a train. That sounds pretty funny.

At 41 seconds we got some cows. Which would be far more interesting had Rockstar not confirmed at 43 seconds in Red Dead Redemption 2 will have good boys! In a quick glimpse, we see an adorable dog having at it with some vultures. I can’t wait to pet every dog in that game. If there’s not a “pet” button prompt, I’ll demand a full refund. Give the people what they want, Rockstar. I fucking love dogs.

This concludes my round-up of animals in the Red Dead Redemption 2 trailer. I guess the game looks cool, I don’t know. What I do know is the animals look great.

For more Red Dead, read our review. For more of me being dumb, read me speculate about what’s going on in this Red Dead teaser image.

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Virtual war zones and the failure of the military shooter

In October 2008, chaos gripped Mumbai for four days as a series of coordinated bombings and shootings killed 164 people and injured hundreds more. All 10 attackers were highly trained and linked to a command center in Pakistan via VOIP technology. The command center, using TV and social media feeds as intelligence sources, gave the attackers a sixth sense in predicting security force’s movements and reactions. It was a grim portent of where we find ourselves in 2016—a place where the deliberate disruption and destruction of public spaces and networks is the latest tactic in modern warfare, a place videogames still fall short in depicting.

After events in Brussels, Paris, London, and San Bernardino, military spaces are no longer confined to designated battlefields placed out of sight and out of mind. Yet, the year of the Mumbai attacks, the closest videogames came to replicating these aspects of urban warfare was the destructible scenery of Battlefield: Bad Company (2008), and the spatial awareness and on-the-fly tactical planning of Full Spectrum Warrior (2004).

9/11 was the catalyst for this weaponization of the everyday, transforming the commercial flight network into a weapon of mass destruction and New York into a rubble-strewn hellscape. Everything since has gotten smaller and more diffuse as our enemies become interwoven into the cities and networks we surround ourselves with.

weaponization of the everyday

Post 9/11, videogames depicted virtual war zones as spaces firmly in our past, whether it was the bombast and grey skies of Call of Duty’s (2003) depiction of 1942 Stalingrad or the tightly scripted and artificial chaos of Medal of Honor: Frontline’s (2002) D-Day storming of Omaha Beach. These spaces were designed to depict combat as it was, not how it is. They could be shocking, they could show us horror, but our experience was caged with both the distance of time and constrictive level design. They gave us infantry charges against fixed positions on higher ground, amphibious assaults with hundreds of casualties, secret raids behind enemy lines, and tank battles across rolling countryside vistas. By dressing the levels in the certainties of history, level design was rigid and static. We could not stray or improvise. This is how it was.

In 2004, Full Spectrum Warrior tasked the player with moving a four-man combat team through the urbanized environs of a fictional Middle Eastern city. Rather than having direct control, the player merely directed the team to move to cover or lay down suppressing fire. Mistakes were punished, with a single bullet being capable of killing a squad member. Every architectural aspect became its own puzzle to be solved. In the player’s mind, the city was reduced to almost abstract terms, as alleyways became flanking opportunities and windows and doorways became potential ambush points.

Even though the game leaned on a fictional space for the player to move through, it still presented the modern city as an important factor in modern military thinking. The city and its architecture were something through which a force could focus its strength.

This idea of the city as a medium was one already discussed in military and urban theory. In his 2006 paper Lethal Theory, Eyal Weizman discussed how the IDF exploited the architecture of Nablus during its operations in 2002:

“Furthermore, soldiers used none of the streets, roads, alleys, or courtyards that constitute the syntax of the city, and none of the external doors, internal stairwells, and windows that constitute the order of buildings, but rather moved horizontally through party walls, and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors.”

This tactic was one of necessity, after the IDF found entrances blocked with barricades or cement, and trenches filled with rubble or garbage. The ordinary avenues of approach were not open to them. Alleyways and windows were often booby trapped. They were off limits and alternative routes had to be found.

In 2009, Atomic Games came close to depicting aspects of Weizman’s Lethal Theory with the now-canceled Six Days in Fallujah. Leaning heavily on realism, with several combatants from both sides of the battle serving as consultants, environments would have played a pivotal part:

“According to the developers, destructible environments are critically important to telling the true story of the events in Fallujah, as the marines eventually learned to blow holes in houses (using C4, grenade launchers, air strikes and more) to surprise the insurgents waiting within. Referring to these moments as “combat puzzles,” Tamte claims that the destructible environments “change literally every aspect of how you play this game.”

the urban environment becomes a complex layer of systems that can be exploited or destroyed

During the First Battle of Fallujah, U.S forces surrounded the city and set up checkpoints. They cut off routes in and out of the city and subjected it to aerial raids and incursions by the Marines. This showed another aspect of urban military theory, with the city’s networks (invisible or otherwise) being key to its survival. In the introduction to his 2013 book, Out of the Mountains, counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen described an argument he had with his friend over U.S operations in Baghdad:

“All that barbed wire, concrete barriers, checkpoints. You shut the city down. You stopped it flowing – put it on life support. You stopped people getting around to do what they had to do. You cut the violence, sure, but you did it by killing the city.”

Like Full Spectrum Warrior and the unreleased Six Days in Fallujah, Kilcullen sees the city as a medium through which a military force can wage war. The urban environment becomes more than just a backdrop, instead becoming a complex layer of systems that can be exploited or destroyed. This notion, employed by both sides of the conflict in Iraq, would soon mutate and take root in the cities of Europe.

In the interim, 2K Games threw their hat into the ring with Spec Ops: The Line (2012). Taking Heart of Darkness (1899) as its story model, it thrust the player into the shoes of Captain Walker, leading a recon team in search of a wayward colonel in a crumbling Dubai.

While Spec Ops distanced itself from any contemporary conflict it still tried something new with its environments and story direction. To begin with, the player moves through familiar looking environments, crouching behind destroyed vehicles and ruined buildings amid a landscape surrounded by never-ending desert. Later, Walker and his team conduct a white phosphorus mortar attack against approaching enemy hordes, only to realize they have inadvertently killed a large group of civilians in the process.

From here on in, Walker’s grip on reality loosens and hallucinations manifest themselves in the environment. The shattered glass and chrome of Dubai don’t adhere to the typical aesthetics of the modern combat zone, but instead act as a metaphor for Walker’s fracturing psyche. Changing from the traditional landscapes of the beginning, the surroundings soon turn into angled geometries and half-sunken structures.

The game plays with idea of the environment as something to be used, but does so in a fairly limited way. The desert begins as mere background, but as Walker descends deeper into the angled geometries and half-sunken structures of Dubai he finds nature has begun to reclaim the city. From this point on, Walker begins to use the environment in his fight. One example has him shooting the glass inside a large, cavernous room, allowing the desert sand to pour in and drown the assembled enemies. If man is the apex predator here, then nature is the great equalizer.

But while the environments veer slightly from the norm, the game presented a potential turning point for the military shooter in another way. It made the player consider the consequences of their actions. It revealed the horror of that oft-used term ‘collateral damage’ and externalized its protagonist’s fraying emotions onto the environment itself.

it revealed the horror of that oft-used term “collateral damage”

Usually the player is merely told the protagonist’s feelings through strained dialogue, but Spec Ops dared to be different by showing us Walker’s descent into madness by coupling it with his journey to the center of a ruined metropolis, linking the two together in a way mainstream military shooters haven’t gone near since. This promised a future where the genre asked the player to consider the effects of combat, not only on civilians but their military protagonists. In a genre predicated on high body counts and swathes of destruction it was something of an outlier.

Maybe this is why critics rallied behind the game, but players and sales were not so kind. Spec Ops is asking the player not only to question their actions in the game, but in every military shooter that came before. Additionally, if the player continues to play games of this genre after being confronted by the madness and trauma Spec Ops presents, what does that say about them?

Placed amid airbases and the destroyed ruins of Washington D.C, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (2009) had a chance to reconnect the most popular shooter series of modern times to some semblance of reality with the level “No Russian”.

The stage placed the player in the role of an undercover CIA agent taking part in a terrorist massacre at a Moscow airport. In terms of prescience it has some cachet. The game depicted a civilian space being used as a ‘soft target’ by terrorists, a tactic that has become pivotal to the plans of ISIS, their affiliates, and lone-wolf attackers. As the player moves through the level, civilians cry out, run, hide, cower, and spin as bullets cut through them.

However, the virtual space lacks context, emotional or otherwise. Up until this point, the game has the player moving through an occupied city and a Russian airbase, traditional settings for military shooters since their beginnings. The game would return to such settings throughout, giving the sense the ideas and issues raised by “No Russian” were ones the creators didn’t really want to pursue. The level, like others in the game, is one where a path has been decided for the player. The navigation of the physical landscape is as limited as the emotional and moral one. Shoot the civilians or don’t shoot the civilians, either way the level ends with the player being gunned down and betrayed. If the player chooses to shoot the terrorists they turn on them and the level ends in failure. The player is made to watch. There’s nothing the player can do but move through the environment and play their part.

One exception in the failure to depict military environments as a reconfigurable medium is Rainbow Six: Siege (2015). Eschewing single player for the most part, the multiplayer gives players a simple Attackers Vs Defenders set up. At the start of each round, the attackers have a small window of opportunity to uncover the defender’s location, while the defenders have a chance to fortify their position using barriers, reinforced walls, boarding up doors, etc.

navigation of the physical landscape is as limited as the emotional and moral one

Once the round begins, the player’s interaction with the architecture and surroundings can dictate the flow and outcome of the round. Walls, doors, ceilings, and floors are (almost) completely destructible by using breaching charges, grenades, or even the puncturing work of bullets over time. If a player has no clear sight to the objective or opposition then they can destroy the architectural barriers impeding them, deforming and recreating the environment to suit their needs.

This gives the game a constant source of tension. An attack can come from anywhere. Siege offers a filtered reflection of our times—where Brussels and Paris become temporary warzones with no place to hide.These tactics of infestation and destruction first brought to bear on cities like Fallujah and Nablus have now been brought to the West. But Siege’s levels fall short, portraying the same old environmental fallbacks such as compounds and anonymous factories. Only a few levels, “Kafe Dostoevsky” and “House,” come close to portraying the reality of combat in the modern metropolis. “House” is an urban space tucked away in the suburbs transformed into a tight, close quarters killbox, whereas “Kafe Dostoevsky” presents a high class restaurant in Moscow that has an air of authenticity about it after the Beslan school siege and the Moscow theater attack.

In the wake of the controversy surrounding the “No Russian” level, the Call of Duty games deviated from the present altogether, simultaneously shifting forwards into imagined futures and hurtling backwards into the murky depths of the Cold War.

This year’s Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is the culmination of this line of thinking, taking the player far beyond the present and even Earth itself, venturing out into the cosmos and upping the pyrotechnics. Military spaces here are pure fantasy, portraying landscapes and buildings cribbed from science fiction and a future that may never come to pass.

The Battlefield series took a similar path. 2008’s Bad Company gave us fantastically destructible architecture, but never really utilized it in a way that encouraged tactical and lateral thinking. Further entries in the series doubled down on this idea while scaling the narratives into imagined East vs West conflicts based on Cold War thinking.

This year’s entry, Battlefield 1, is something of a contradiction. It gives us some of the most destructive scenery elements since Bad Company, enabling players to use weapons and vehicles to reconfigure elements of the environment to suit their tactics and needs. The only caveat is that parts of the levels (at least in the beta and closed alpha) are not destructible, taking the player out of tactical flow when their tank comes across the umpteenth indestructible farmhouse.

both Battlefield and Call of Duty are separated from the present by the barrier of fiction and time

But, while Battlefield 1 brings the series closer to the modern face of war, it has also moved further away, changing up time periods for the first time since the series beginnings and placing the action firmly in the era of World War One. History has already given us the victors and losers for this conflict, stripping away any moral uncertainties the player may have. The context of the ethically grey war on terror remains as far away as it ever did.

In 2016, virtual war zones in both Battlefield and Call of Duty are separated from the present by the barrier of fiction and time. It could be argued Atomic Games’s insistence on leaning towards realism in Six Days in Fallujah is one of the factors in the game’s controversy and descent into development hell. Atomic Games described their game as a survival horror of sorts. It postulated a game that would show us the effects of war, as well as giving us a feeling of the panic and terror of urban combat in the modern era.

Other games, like This War of Mine (2014), Liyla and The Shadows of War, and Unmanned (2012) give the player a very different representation of war spaces. Far from the almost untouchable American mainland, these developers all hail from countries that have seen the effects of war on the environment firsthand. Also, being smaller operations means smaller budgets, which arguably means they can afford to take a risk on a more experimental and controversial game than bigger studios.

This War of Mine casts the player as a group of civilians attempting to survive in a battle-ravaged city. Drawing from the four year siege of Sarajevo, This War of Mine is a game of survival, not conquest. A majority of mainstream military shooters are grafted with an American perspective—they care about heroism and tell tales of victory. But the people behind This War of Mine, 11 Bit Studios, are from Poland and it shows in their game. The experiences of war between Europe and the U.S is notably different, with many buildings in Poland still bearing the marks of World War II to this day, the memory of those years is present and physical, not distant. Here, the environment saved lives, serving as a place of shelter and safety, however temporary.

It makes sense, then, that the bombed-out environment in This War of Mine is presented as something to be moved through cautiously, with potential enemies outnumbering and outgunning you. It also acts as a sanctuary, whether it’s the safe confines of your home base, or the shadows of a doorway that hides the player from a roving soldier. Survival depends very much on one’s familiarity with the intimate spaces of its bleak, dilapidated architecture.

War is something the player moves through but never fully experiences

Liyla and The Shadows of War has the player moving through a platformer representation of the Gaza Strip. Here, the environment is chaotic and ever changing, with the player avoiding hazards such as bombs and drones. As in This War of Mine, the player is reacting to the changes in the environment rather than being the force conducting them. Additionally, the creator, Rasheed Abueideh, is Palestinian, and clearly has an emotional stake in the events the game is depicting. He has gone on record as saying that Liyla is “not just a Game, it’s a case and call for help.”

Unmanned takes an even more outlandish route, putting the player in the shoes of a drone pilot. The game disconnects the player from the environment and the enemy below. It presents drone warfare as monotonous and emotionally draining, interspersed with snippets of violence, home life, and soulless karaoke sessions. While the creator, Paolo Pedercini, has no firsthand experience of drone warfare, the game comes from the perspective of wanting to inform, educate, and foster discussion on the topic:

“[A]t the time there was no public debate around CIA’s covert operations and issues related to unmanned warfare; only Der Spiegel and Wired’s Danger Room were talking about drone wars. My original idea was a kind of semi-playable art installation that simply reproduced the control room of an UAV juxtaposed with mundane conversations. It was meant to present something “invisible” in a cold, detached way.”

That Unmanned gives us one of the more realistic portrayals of a member of the military in videogames is telling. It raises the idea that it’s only when military shooters depict historical or fictional conflict that we are allowed to “play” in them. If they begin to broach the barrier of the present, then the idea of the player deriving enjoyment from something still bringing so much pain into the world begins to muddy the waters. This may be down to the player’s openness to admitting certain philosophies and ideologies over others. As Pedercini has also said:

“In general, you have to consider that the range of acceptable political ideas in Italy and Western Europe is wider [than in the US]: kids occupy high schools, workers actually go on strike, moms and dads march against unjust wars and so on.”

So things stay static, military shooters stay in their lane, and the player is told where to look and how to feel by the established continuity of history. War is something the player moves through but never fully experiences. Other genres that tackle war can go deeper. But in the military shooter, war is always something that happens somewhere else.

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Nintendo Switch lets you take games anywhere

Nintendo has finally unveiled its next big console. Codenamed Nintendo NX, today the Mario-faced company revealed the Nintendo Switch with a proper three-and-a-half minute trailer.

The “Switch” name refers to the console’s dual purpose. Where there was once a time when Nintendo had separate handheld and home consoles, it has now combined the two. Essentially, Nintendo has created its own entry in the Transformer series, except it has no vehicular form or giant robot fists.

it almost feels like a tribute to Nintendo’s history of consoles

In its first form, the Nintendo Switch sits in a dock in your living room (or whatever room in your house you like) that connects to your TV like a traditional videogame console. In this form, you play games with a pretty typical-looking game pad. But that gamepad can also be separated into three parts: the central part put aside, while the left and right sides—those with the buttons—turns into what Nintendo calls “Joy-Con controllers.”

The Switch’s neat little trick is being able lift a central screen out of the dock by inserting those two Joy-Con controllers into its sides. This is the second, portable form of the Switch, which lets you continue playing the same games in high-def, just as you were on the TV, but you can take it pretty much anywhere with you. There’s not yet any word on what the battery life of the Switch’s portable form will be like but Nintendo’s trailer shows people taking it to the park, an airplane, and a car. Oh, and a photo of the console shows that its uses little game cards rather than discs.

But that’s not all. Those Joy-Con controllers technically enable a third form, too. If you detach them from that central, portable screen, you have two smaller controllers so that two people can play in multiplayer (seriously, they’re tiny, I think they’re made for little mouse hands). You just need to flip up a rest for the screen so it can sit independently on a flat surface. And, as shown at the end of the trailer, it’s possible for multiple people to bring their Nintendo Switches together for local multiplayer competitions.

What’s seemingly remarkable about the Nintendo Switch is that it not only caters to the many different ways people play videogames these days, it also almost feels like a tribute to Nintendo’s history of handheld and home consoles and how they were played—from stints alone in a childhood bedroom, family gatherings in the living room, and the days of lugging a console round to a friend’s house so you could have heated nights of competition.

The final thing that we know about the Nintendo Switch at this point is that it’ll be launching in March 2017. You can look out for more info on its website.

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