Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 383

Prepare to agonize over moral choices in the Walking Dead pinball game. Yes, really

In one of the most unlikely crossovers yet, Telltale is bringing their trademark zombie apocalypse-inspired moral choices to the pinball table. You won’t just be shooting the silver ball off bumpers to crush the undead then up a ramp to load Kenny’s pickup when the game comes out later this summer. The virtual table by Zen Studios will have legitimate crises of conscience, where you making decisions about who to save and who to leave behind for zombie fodder, just like the acclaimed adventure game. 

This is great news if you long to return to those bleak but content days of Season One when you reared a curly-headed surrogate daughter, even if it is only in the form of a pinball game. But a tiny part of me wonders if this doesn’t show that those meaningful moral choices weren’t so significant. A pinball table only makes them seem more binary and mechanical than they were before—but then, you've heard this before. Is this proof it's time to put a fork in them?

You should totally check out Anna Anthropy’s new book

Designer Anna Anthropy—whose games like dys4ia and Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars look at sexuality outside the normative way ordinarily found in games—has a hot-off-the-presses new book; and as usual, the subject is something near and dear to her heart. 

ZZT the book, courtesy the retro game-focused imprint Boss Fight Books, is an exegesis of ZZT the game, a classic game creation tool for DOS that Anna cut her game-designing teeth on. But knowing Anthropy, don’t expect this to be a straightforward technical account of how she created her first games, but an untidy search for self-identity through games rules and code. 

Great writing about games is a thing we’re obviously a fan of here at Kill Screen, so you might want to add this one to your summer reading list.

Excerpt below:

ZZT limited me in the right ways. It also opened up to me in the right ways. ZZT-OOP is capable of so many things way beyond what its creator ever envisioned, complicated machines comprised of systems of Objects all talking to each other, but it was also really well-suited for the simple stories I was trying to tell. Move a thing around a screen, display a message, ask the player a question. ZZT was the perfect theater to act out my confused childhood fantasies, my flailing attempts at self-identity and exploration. Operas where characters of different genders were captured and recaptured, tortured, held, and gratified.

Out of my confusion and dysphoria I was building worlds that moved and spoke, worlds that responded to my touch.

This demented MacBook is only happy if you shoot yourself in the head

Yesterday, we wrote up NYU Game Center’s student showcase, and one of the stars of the show was Lie to the Devil, a really cool, severely troubling game where a player sits down with a sinister MacBook that tries to con them into putting a bullet in their head. 

No real bullets are involved, because that would be murder, but it nevertheless orchestrates a surreal, unnatural social experiment. I’d describe it as Videodrome meets the Milgram obedience experiment meets a chatterbox, one of those programs that simulate conversation—which is quantifiably nuts. 

Despite the fact this is all obviously fictional, Lie to the Devil elicits a strong emotional response, teetering between real and imaginary. “People often feel guilty about the decisions they made while playing,” Jonathan Zungre, the game designer told me. “I had people coming out saying, ‘I feel terrible. I should have killed myself.’”  

It’s all very theatrical. Here’s the setup: you enter a dark room and sit at a desk before a laptop while a crowd watches you through a large windowpane. Then, things get uncomfortably weird. First, the computer asks you: “Does the pain of others make you feel good or bad?”

Next, you create an avatar, and a cute little pet. Then, the computer tries to talk you into putting a revolver to your head, in effect holding your virtual creations ransom. The object is to win by deceiving the computer. Revealing how to do that would be a spoiler, but if you win you get to unwrap a present with a bow.

There is obviously no physical threat of harm here, hence the cords dangling from the plastic gun in the briefcase, but most everyone takes the game dead seriously, which is fascinating. “The fact that the game attracts a crowd of onlookers gives it this element of accountability,” Zungre says. “Players will very often go through everything the AI asks, because they're being watched by other people.”

If you’d like to see if a demented AI can convince you to kill yourself (and, really who wouldn’t?), Zungre is planning an invitation-only showing in a few weeks. If you’re in the New York City area, you can hit him up on Twitter at @Zungz to get on the list. 

This videogame world degenerates like an old cassette tape

A digital urban myth. 

There you have it. Games are about as addictive as eating a Big Mac

One thing you frequently hear as a detractor from games is that they’re addictive, placing Diablo players on the same boat to rehab as smack junkies. But as the psychotherapy Mike Langlois proves with hard empirical evidence, this is totally blown out of proportion. 

The key piece of evidence to games’ addictive qualities is dopamine, a neurotransmitter released in your brain when you do pleasurable things, like crossing the finish line in Mario Kart in first place, or, you know, smoking methamphetamine.

But as Langlois’s graphs point out, all pleasurable acts aren’t created equal. Games merely double your dopamine amount, which is more than the bump you get from eating, generally, but about the same as you get from sex. Smoking a cigarette blows game-playing away, and when you get to poison like meth, it’s not even a contest, with that dangerous controlled substance increasing dopamine levels by a dwarfing 1200%. Other drugs fall somewhere in the middle on the scale, all above games. 

So yes, gaming can alter your brain chemistry, but, as Langlois says, we need to quit casually throwing around words like “addiction” and “drug” for the sake of rhetoric.

That Broken Punk Metaphor

What do we mean when we call videogames “punk”?

Always Sometimes Monsters combines Atlas Shrugged with Hotline Miami

The results, they are mixed.

Tropico 5 remains an endearing plunge into the mind of a dictator

With merengue!

Today in Skyrim mods: This giant killer rooster means business

We all know that adrenaline-soaked dread of being attacked by a snarling bear in Skyrim. But that’s nothing compared to the fear of being pecked to death by this giant clucking rooster, derp, modded into the game by a Reddit user. But relax! It seems all this male domestic fowl can do is crow and chicken-walk across the yard… for now. The creator Screeps135 has been egged on, derp again, to go back in and re-program the beast with 1000 hit-points and bandit scripting, meaning that it will be a horrible, terrifying killing machine. The Skyrim mod scene is the best mod scene, and this right here is beautiful testament. 

You guys watched a freakish amount of esports last year

We totally get that the Internet is a fantastic place for binging DOTA 2 matches and all, but got-damn did you people consume a lot of it in 2013. A new report from IHS Technology, people who track this sort of thing, has found that a cumulative amount of 2.4 billion hours were streamed to your eyeholes, a truly ridiculous number that nearly doubles the year prior. 

This is of course in large ways due to the explosion of Twitch as the premier hub for watching other people play games, with the number of people watching esports on that fine service tripling since last year. And things are just heating up, according to projections that estimate nearly 7 billion hours will be inhaled online by 2018. Just keep in mind that those all night streaming sessions wreck havoc on grades and performance at the office the next day.