Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 39

Robot Sports bring man and machine together

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

From cage matches to laser tag, artificially intelligent machines are opening a new world of sports competition. The finale of the Syfy Channel’s 2013 Robot Combat League was one for the history books. Never before had competitive sports fans witnessed one-ton robots, towering eight-foot high, face off in a mechanical death match.

The two competitors, Crash and Steampunk, banged chests as sparks and smoke filled the arena. Just outside the ring, each robot was controlled by a team consisting of a robo-jockey wearing an exosuit that controls the robot’s arms while the robo-tech controls the legs using a joystick.

Four rounds into the battle, it wasn’t looking good for the racecar-themed Crash. His left hand dangled by a thread, useless. Suddenly, a shower of sparks flew and Crash’s right hand went flying off. “Crash has no hands!” screamed announcer Chris Jericho as the crowd roared.

During the 20-minute repair break ahead of the final round, the Shinsels, a father-daughter duo operating Crash, rushed to pull their battered robot back into fighting shape. Crash entered the fourth and final round flailing broken fists connected to limp arms, trying to strike down hampered Steampunk, which could barely turn its torso. That final round was a stalemate, but Crash and the Shinsels won the match by a score of 30-27. The two-hour fight “was a crazy mix between elation and exhaustion, filled with constant adrenaline,” said Dave Shinsel, a veteran software engineer at Intel who has built robots in his spare time for the past 15 years.

Currently, he’s working on a humanoid robot with advanced object recognition and manipulation skills. Although engineers like Shinsel have been working on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning projects for many years, Syfy’s league showed the enormous potential for live robot competitions. That potential has manifested around the world in a variety of ways, including flying robot competitions otherwise known as drone races.

In March, Dubai’s recent World Drone Prix brought together some of the best drone pilots from across the globe. In June, the Robocup hosted soccer and rescue competitions for humanoid robots. Roborace, a global competition of intelligence and technology, fuses robotics with motorsports. According to PC World, 10 teams, each with two cars, will compete in a series of one-hour races during this year’s Formula E championship season. All teams will have the same driverless cars, but each team will use their own AI to control them. Dubbed the “battle of algorithms,” driverless Roborace cars are expected to hit speeds of 186 mph.

ViZDoom is a competition between AI bots battling it out in Doom. The machine visual learning project pits teams, including one from Intel, and each creates AI code that can react to on-screen action. After a few months, the bots, also called agents, will compete in a world title death match.

the future of robot sports rests in the hands of human innovators

Despite the important role the technology plays in these competitions, AI experts like Shinsel believe that human ingenuity is what’s really on display. He was as interested in the human builders and controllers on Robot Combat League as he was in watching the robots battle it out in the ring.

Whether in Robot Combat League or the decades-old franchise Battlebots, humans have fantasized about putting man-made creations in the ring to tear each other to pieces. Today, Shinsel explained, autonomous sports like Robocup and Roborace may attract a narrow audience interested in the subtleties of superbly engineered machines, but the future of mainstream robot sports rests in the hands of talented human innovators working alongside their mechanical partners.

Looking into the future, Ron Evans, an Intel Software Innovator from the Hybrid Group who frequently partners with robot engineers, envisions a future for machine sports with much less mechanical carnage. “Our need for destruction is being imposed upon these robots,” he said. “It’s a little bit of machismo, and I think a little related to our fear of robots annihilating us.”

From Evans’ perspective, the more productive and viable way forward for robot sports lies in fostering positive relationships between man and machine. Admitting to his own aggressive impulses, however, Evans set out to make a friendlier alternative: robot laser tag.

Evans’ IR Canon prototype is a low-energy Bluetooth setup consisting of cheap Sphero hardware, open-source software, PS3 controllers and rubber bands. It can be used for remote tank wars and aerial dog fights — all without harming any mechanical warriors.

fostering positive relationships between man and machine

Evans argues that robot deathmatches like Robot Combat League can obfuscate an essential underlying factor of sports and computer engineering: teamwork. “Robot wars were the first step,” he said. “Now I think you’ll see much more complex interactions between human competitors and their machines. Like Formula One Racing, man and machine must work together to achieve a difficult task.”

Viewing robot sports as a partnership rather than a cockfight also invites more diverse human talent, according to Evans. “With things like LEGO First Robotics, you see a bifurcation of software and hardware people, the engineer and the pilot alongside each other, like Scotty and Kirk in Star Trek,” he said, adding that robot sport competitions pose “a tremendous opportunity for different types of people to work together.” While top-of-the-line hardware and software brings new capabilities, Evans emphasized the importance of open-source technologies, which allows makers to innovate in a way that furthers competition.

Open-source makes these kinds of competitions available to more people, and using standardized hardware and software can help robot sports move faster into the mainstream, according to Evans. Imagine, for example, if everyone had to whittle their own bat to play baseball. It not only deters newcomers, but creates opportunities for unfair advantages and cheating. Using open-source hardware and software instead, Evans said, “ensures people are on a level playing field, so that it becomes about the talents of the designers, engineers, pilots and drivers.Then it becomes a competition.”

As more kids grow up learning to code and build their own AI-powered machines, robot sports competitions could soon rival the big leagues like the NFL, FIFA and NBA.

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A boardgame about climate change that melts as you play

The world is warming up. This we know. Over its long, long life, the Earth has gone through multiple cycles of cooling and heating up again, or glacial advance and retreat. These are largely attributed to small shifts in the Earth’s orbit, which change the amount of solar energy received by the planet.

To find reasons for the current heating up of the globe, however, we must look to no one but ourselves. As we pump greenhouses gases into the atmosphere, wrapping ourselves in a giant, insulating, carbon dioxide blanket, the sea level rises and the ice sheets shrink; the global surface and ocean temperatures climb; intense weather events wreak havoc for people and animals alike all over the world.

the boardgame that melts

GEOlino, a German science magazine for children, wants to ensure that kids have access to resources that will help them to understand what the human race is facing (and what it’s causing)—in an easily digestible boardgame format. Recognizing the futility of trying to explain such a complex idea to a child using headache-inducing theory and history, GEOlino has made climate change child-friendly with MELTDOWN, the boardgame that melts.

Initially released a few years ago, in MELTDOWN, you guide a polar bear family to the safety of the mainland across ice floes melting in real time. The game provides its players (target ages 2-4, although I think a game or two would put the plight of the polar bear in perspective for me, as well) with a freezer compartment, effectively an ice tray; a set of four dice; and a polar bear family unit of three adults and one juvenile to lead across the ice in this race against time. The spongy blue game board, a miniaturized Arctic, absorbs the melting ice as you play.

More information about MELTDOWN can be found at the game’s website.

via Francis Tseng

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Fantasy RPGs always felt like a desk job anyway

There’s a lot to manage in a role-playing game. It can almost feeling like having a desk job—managing inventory, grinding work, looming bosses. Add with crafting, foraging, and upgrading gear on top of that it’s no wonder I keep asking myself why I repeatedly subject myself to RPG work. Not everyone loves crafting, after all.

Andrew Morrish’s upcoming Kingsway is a fantasy RPG that riffs on the idea that the game is like a desk job, “pointing out the similarities between managing an RPG and daily tasks on a computer,” Morrish said. Players will have to rifle through a Windows 95–inspired operating system to navigate a slew of fantasy adventures. Part of the fun—and the challenge—is “being able to move things around on screen to get as much information as you can handle, while trying not to lose important items in the background,” Morrish added. Kingsway is a game for the multi-tasker in all of us.

the RPG is a desk job

“Enemies and traps are popups,” Morrish said, while “backpacks are the file folders where you organize your items.” Quests, on the other hand, come in the form of email—though you’ll have to figure out for yourself what’s spam and what’s not. With subject lines like “Hot skeletons in your area” and “Mages are angry about this one unbelievable trick,” it’s probably not that hard, though.

The operating system setup, which we’ve seen this year in other upcoming games like Orwell and Hypnospace Outlaw, adds a certain familiarity to the RPG setup. Because of that, the game should be playable to newcomers without much of a tutorial; those of us strapped to a desk all day are already too familiar with this sort of workflow. So load up your world navigator browser, folks. We’ve got some exploring to do.

Andrew Morrish hopes to release Kingsway in early 2017. Follow its development on Morrish’s Twitter page. Find his other work on his website.

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SUPERHYPERCUBE is here to make VR worthwhile

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SUPERHYPERCUBE (PS4)
BY KOKOROMI

In this new dawn of virtual reality, people will try to port all sorts of things into VR that shouldn’t be there. Yet for every egregious Until Dawn DLC, there’s a SUPERHYPERCUBE to remind you that matches made in heaven still exist. Comparable to the look and pacing of Tetris, in SUPERHYPERCUBE you must rotate and arrange a cluster of cubes to fit through an impending wall. Despite sharing some DNA with 2D classics, SUPERHYPERCUBE feels like a beast of its own in virtual reality. Combining that arcade simplicity with head tracking, the it feels right at home when it’s strapped to your face and taking up your full field of vision. Just make sure to plug out between deaths, otherwise you might not even notice as the hours fly by.

Perfect for: VR evangelists, puzzlers, Picasso

Playtime: Several minutes per round

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Masquerada is about as enjoyable as a dictionary

Delivered in the middle of Big Game season, Masquerada looks at first like a welcome relief from war, VR, and Watch Dogs 2’s emoji mask. The masks in its world are a different kind of grotesque. They separate the haves and the have-nots in a rigidly stratified sorta-Venetian society, granting elemental powers to elites who dress like every day is carnival.

The conceit feels fresh, and the city of Ombre is boldly drawn, with heavy black borders around tents and troops to set off freehand suggestions of grass blades and thin ruled lines of stone. The protagonist, Cicero Gavar, dashes around town with his hair swept back like an art deco hood ornament and a little red cape flapping over his shoulder. There’s some muddy intrigue between the town’s six (or so) ruling factions, but all you really remember is the metonym for the guilds, “the colors,” and the parade of bodies in gold, blue, and purple. When characters talk, banners roll down from the top of the screen to show their animated faces, a lavish effect compared to the stony portraits of Pillars of Eternity (2015), the new Shadowruns, or Divinity: Original Sin (2014).

Masquerada can afford the talking heads because it skimps on other RPG trappings. There are no decisions to make in dialogue, no stats to allocate, no equipment to manage (except masks), no items to buy, no quests to pursue. You just walk between glowing green rings that trigger story events or combat encounters. (Sometimes you stop to pick up glowing purple masks on the ground.) Merchants and bystanders light up when you mouse over them, for some reason, but you can’t speak to them or any other non-essential personnel. The game is so insistent on your full attention that it almost never lets you backtrack to a room you just left. At first this approach feels brisk, like you’re flying around the corners of the plot at a speed other RPGs don’t permit. But it’s not really praise to say a game’s at its best when you’re quickly putting it behind you.

I don’t think RPG players have any inalienable rights that are violated when they don’t get to play Loot Tetris or choose whether to romance a living statue or an amphibian. On the other hand, I wonder why Masquerada took the form of an RPG at all. Most of the game falls into a start-stop pattern where you walk a few paces to a story trigger, sit through a long conversation, then amble over to the next story trigger. Without the freedom to talk to strangers, to break pottery, to wander off the golden path, to dig into any corner of the world by choice, we might as well be jogging in front of a scrolling back projection. Why not ditch screen-by-screen exploration and skip between events Telltale-style? What would we miss?

Not the combat. Masquerada’s real-time-with-pause encounters exist only to space out the plot revelations and showcase a few neat monster designs: walking books, thrashing trees, violent pipers. The fights themselves are a free-for-all where no one can hold aggro, walling abilities seem useless, party members forget your commands or stand in place for no reason, and the layers of satisfying complication in a Pillars of Eternity or Divinity become a sad and distant memory. Occasionally, Masquerada would decide one character was “out of combat” and leave him watching the brawl from a safe remove, like a picnicker at Bull Run.

The game’s creators opt for a “not fair but also not hard” approach to ensure you breeze through everything anyway. My only strategy, effective in every fight in the game, was to leave trails of Emberveils (fire-mines) behind Cicero to detonate when touched by a pursuer. When enemies declined to chase, I ran in tiny circles to surround them with the mines, which look like puddles of spilled orange paint. Used alongside a mask that leaves a line of flames in Cicero’s wake, this technique became movingly reminiscent of playing Bomberman on the TurboGraphx-16 when I was 12 years old. But the thrill wore off pretty fast.

it builds up a codex instead of a world

You might expect a game with such a stripped-down chassis to be sparing with words as well. Instead, it’s mercilessly overwritten. Here’s the plot: five years ago, the Contadani (underclass) of Ombre rebelled against the Masquerada (upper class mask-havers) in the War of Bearings, stealing a number of Mascherines (masks) and creating a new faction of Maskrunners (lower class mask-havers) which are of course also divided into many subgroups such as the Dactites (assholes) and the Malecarte (“bad menu”?). Exiled at the start of the war, you, Cicero Gavar, return as an Inspettore (inspector) to solve a mystery for the Vaorone (mayor), who runs the Registry (government) and commands the Portieri (guards), the Regenti (diplomats), and the Vegilus (librarians). Gavar must also contend with the Seimora, the feuding guilds of Masquerada, which include the Luca Infinita (more soldiers), the Sorelles (sailors), the Labores (murderers), the Dieci Sovrani (wizards?) and the Altus Nobili (don’t remember). This is to say nothing of the Songstresses and their Soulsongs, the Dimenticate civilization, and the Accredita—an SAT-like exam that characters reminisce about so much, using such advanced vocabulary, that I was legitimately afraid the game was preparing me to take it.

I’ve read and played plenty of genre stuff; I accept the buy-in at the beginning, where you suspend your skepticism about characters saying “frak” or “hollowborn” or “Nilfgaard” long enough to let the story get its hooks in. But Masquerada never gets there; it builds up a codex instead of a world. Characters keep walking over and hitting you with a shotgun blast of nouns like “I never thought I’d see a Sorelle and a Sicario working together with the White Spire—and in the backyard of the Salt Breathers!” And more often than not these strained statements are preceded by breathy exclamations such as “Ages!” “Silent songs!” “Tides!” or “Lost legacies!” The voice actors, particularly Matthew Mercer as Cicero, lean in to the affectation by adding plenty of deep sighs (I think the meaningful sigh is meant to be the character’s catchphrase) and theatrical readings of lines like “For a city this dark to have a heart so bright…” He spends the last quarter or so of the game in enormous distress, yelling “No, no, no!” or “Ages, no!” or “Please, no!” or “No, oh no!” or “No!!!!” during his journeys between loading screens and glowing spots on the ground.

Somewhere between the tenth and the thousandth “Oh no!” it becomes impossible to take the game seriously. The melodrama flares up violently whenever a character dies; the game stops its herky-jerky forward progress to plunge into the most maudlin and repetitive scenes, and a story that began as a page-turner becomes a page-skimmer.

Masquerada declines as the plot slows down. The herky-jerky pace gets more grating, the mania for proper nouns more distracting. What looked like a scrappy little underdog RPG turns out to be a collection of worn-out ideas. Those who brave the final gauntlet of time-consuming but never challenging fights will forget that the game ever felt breezy or inviting. By the time the villain reveals that they planned out everything ages ago and you’ve done just what they wanted all along, you have to nod in agreement: I guess that’s why it all felt like such a waste of time.

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How videogame fashion inspires real-world styles

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

Fashion designed for the 3D world of PC games is sparking couture style trends, opening new possibilities for cross-industry collaboration. Hoodies and t-shirts from alternative clothing store Hot Topic, with silkscreen depictions of popular and indie PC games, were once the fashionable dress code for anyone steeped in gaming culture. That began to change when high-style brands began connecting with game developers.

Every year at New York Fashion Week (NYFW), it’s increasingly evident how technology is digitizing the fashion world with innovations spanning electrified dresses to virtual reality (VR) runway experiences. Beneath the fashion-tech trend is growing number of interconnections between leaders in the fashion and gaming industries. “The gaming fashion subculture has totally evolved over the years,” said Amanda Erickson, who started the Closet to Console blog in 2011. “When games first started merchandising, it was just a slew of black one-size-fits-all gaming t-shirts.” At the time, she didn’t know how many people shared her interest in combining fashion and games. A few years and several thousands of followers later, Erickson now lives in a world where brands like Louis Vuitton team up with Final Fantasy developer Square Enix. Teddy Diefenbach, the creator of Hyper Light Drifter, believes the shift toward bring game design to high fashion is opening new opportunities. “Collaboration between these two fields of expertise can only lead to new ideas, not to mention great products that would benefit both fashion and gaming,” he wrote in an op-ed on gaming site Polygon.”

technology is digitizing the fashion world

This past May, celebrities strutted down the red carpet at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art during one of the biggest nights in fashion. It was clear that science fiction was meeting reality at the Met Gala when Kim Kardashian arrived in a daring, chrome-emblazoned Balmain gown, looking like a ruler of a futuristic galaxy. The “Manus x Machina: Fashion in the Age of Technology” theme took many shapes, but former One Direction singer Zayn Malik caught the attention of gamers in particular. Sporting an impeccable black Versace suit complete with bionic arms that he designed, Malik confirmed that the classic Mortal Kombat character Jax sparked the design.

He explained to Dazed that by adorning the look of a virtual character, he also hoped to evoke yet another one of his major fashion influences. “A lot of starting references for me are technology and Prince,” Malik said, referring the fashionable music icon. “He was sort of bold and fearless in the way he decided to dress. He created another world with the clothes he wore, and it gave him an otherworldly feel.” Meanwhile, sweethearts Orlando Bloom and Katy Perry made a splash when they turned a gaming design into a real-life fashion accessory. Attached to the belt of Perry’s gown — which some suggested bore uncanny resemblance to the Nintendo character Bayonetta — was a Tamagotchi (1996), the Japanese pet simulator phenomenon from the ’90s.

The 2010 title Limbo, created by Danish game-maker Playdead, was one of the first big critical and financial hits to come out of the indie game movement. Its dark, stylized monochromatic aesthetic pushed the boundaries of game art and design. Years later, the game’s forbidding visuals and animations would influence designer Anouk Wipprecht to make the Spider Dress, which first hit tech industry shows and runways in 2015. Wipprecht’s Spider Dress was inspired by her fascination with Limbo’s notoriously harsh ways of killing the player. Particularly, the scene where a giant arachnid monster “dismantled the player by pinching straight through their [character’s] body,” inspired the dress’ defensive spider legs. Using the Intel Edison compute module, Annouk designed the dress to detect when the wearer felt unsafe, causing its mechanical limbs to strike and protector the wearer’s personal space.

 

In another experimental fashion twist on digital games, Wipprecht also created a bio-sensing unicorn wearable headset that keeps a watchful eye on what peaks the interest of children with ADHD. It’s looks playful, like something out of a fantasy game, but this stylish accessory is packed with neurosensory technology and an Intel Edison compute module that tells a tiny embedded video camera when to record the wearer’s most memorable moments.

Just as games influence fashion designers, fashionistas now influence games. The mutual admiration is leading to some first-of-their-kind collaborations between the gaming and fashion worlds. The 2013 mobile hit Kim Kardashian Hollywood reached 45 million downloads, with her real-world fashion and high-end clothing serving as the game’s primary mechanic. “So much of this game — from the outfits to hairstyles to accessories — are all inspired by looks that I love and hand selected,” said Kardashian. By bringing expensive high-end fashion into a digital world, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood (and its spin-off Kendall & Kylie) makes couture accessible to everyone, no matter what they can afford. Partnering with the biggest names in fashion, the game also includes collaborations with Juicy Couture, Judith Leiber Couture and even the designer behind Kardashian’s Met Gala gown, Balmain Paris.

In the past, the face of Louis Vuitton came in the form of Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss’s striking cheekbones and sashays down runways. But for its 2016 Summer/Spring collection, the brand opted for a more battle-hardened (and digital) heroine: pink-haired Final Fantasy character, Lightning. A campaign video showed Lightning advancing down the runway, striking combat-ready poses, all while wielding a black Louis Vuitton clutch like she was casting a devastating Firaga spell.

Credit: Square Enix and Louis Vuitton

In a gaming-world-meets-fashion-industry interview with The Telegraph, the avatar Lightning described how the collaboration changed the way she saw fashion. “[I realized that] it displays the essence of who you are to the people around you,” she said. “I hope that one day, we can share the same stage, that different worlds can come together. But who knows? Maybe that’s ambitious, even for me.” Louis Vuitton creative director Ghesquière said he hoped the collaboration with developer Square Enix would raise interesting questions about the increasingly blurred line between the world of videogames and high fashion. “How can you create an image that goes beyond the classic principles of photography and design?” he asked in an interview published in The Telegraph. “Lightning heralds a new era of expression.”

Feature image credit: Square Enix and Louis Vuitton

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The challenges of making a Jane Austen videogame

Fans of Jane Austen’s work have brought her world into almost every medium that exists—from radio, with the BBC’s six-part dramatization, to film, most recently with Love & Friendship. It was just a matter of time before someone decided that Austen’s novels would be great inspiration for a videogame.

Judy L. Tyrer, founder of 3 Turn Productions, is that fan, and has just released a beta for Ever, Jane. It’s a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) set in Austen’s own setting, Regency Period England. To start, players arrive in the fictional English town of Tyrehampton, where they can gossip, attend balls, and walk through the window-shops in the developing little town. The game is driven by role-playing and there are a few quests available with more in the works.

duty is a complex topic

Austen’s novels take place just before her lifetime, at the end of the 18th century in England. This was a time of strict social hierarchy, when women were largely dependent on men for financial security, and her novels criticize much of these social structures and conventions. While many are familiar with the romance in Austen’s novels, her moral lessons are less well-known. Austen’s first novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811), which follows the story of the Dashwood sisters, is a good example of her lesser-known themes. While Elinor Dashwood ends up with the man she loves, the younger Marianne does not. Marianne has too much sensibility (or emotion) and not enough sense to see that her mutual admirer, Willoughby, is immoral. By the end of the novel, Marianne is forced into marriage with an older, more honorable and affluent man, whom she eventually learns to love. It is this socially-conscious literary world that the creators of Ever, Jane seek to bring to an MMO. By developing a world based on talk and gossip, Tyrer is hoping to break the genre’s “kill stuff rut” that she believes the genre is stuck in.       

The attempt of Ever, Jane’s creators to replicate Austen’s world is strongest in the visual department. Novels encourage a reader to visualize the scenery for themselves and so the use of low-fi visuals in the game encourage a similar appeal to the player’s imagination. Perhaps in a more detailed game the player would be discouraged from sitting at a piano to play when their character’s fingers could not actually touch the keys. But many times I’ve stumbled upon players describing their musical performances while sitting next to the unmoving piano. I’ve even witnessed a duet by a very scandalous couple, brushing hands while they play a soundless song (there’s no in-game sound yet). There are also plenty of historically accurate visual flourishes despite the limitations. English flowers dot the fields, period appropriate dress is available for male and female characters, and the architecture of the buildings is impressive. Everything you can see delivers the sense of being in that time period. But the fusion of Austen’s novels with MMO mechanics in Ever, Jane is not quite so harmonious.

Character stats are one area of struggle. Usual stats like “strength” have been adjusted for the setting to include status, kindness, duty, and happiness. While these are major themes in Austen’s novels, the game hasn’t achieved the kind of nuance with a character that Austen does in her novels. In fact, one of the book quotes presented on a loading screen seems to betray a lack of understanding of what message Austen is trying to get across to the reader about one character stat: “duty”.

The quote is from Mansfield Park (1814), when Sir Bertram is scolding his young niece, Fanny, into doing what he perceives as her duty. It reads: “you must be aware, Fanny, it is every young woman’s duty to accept such a very unexceptional offer as this.” This Uncle is deeply confused by his niece’s refusal to marry a very rich man, Henry, who has proposed to her. Fanny is too shy, or too dutiful, to explain to her Uncle that she knows this man has poor character (and that she loves another), so she is kicked out of the house. Her position as the pet favorite niece is restored when Henry’s true character comes to light.

All kinds of arguments can, and have, been made as to what this means about the nature of duty. Does Austen think that Fanny’s complex take on duty to her family was morally right, or is Fanny a parody of the ultra-dutiful girl, one who does not exist? Austen scholar Claudia L. Johnson takes the novel rather literally but points out other’s struggles with it. She explains that, “many other critics have averred that something is wrong with Mansfield Park after all … Did Austen undergo a conversion to Evangelism, and thus on the grounds of religious principle dramatize the triumph of seriousness over levity, duty over desire?” Whatever your conclusion, it seems duty is a complex topic. Not so in Ever, Jane. If you follow your duty and increase the stat then you must also choose another stat to reduce (the example given on the game’s website is a reduction in happiness for duty), as if someone could never be both displeased and undutiful at once, as Fanny is in Mansfield Park. While it can be argued that videogames have some limitations as a medium that don’t allow for the complexity that can be achieved in a novel, having complex character stats is not one of them.

However, there are plans to extend Ever, Jane’s character stat system closer to its release, just not in a very Austen-like manner. Tyrer told me that eventually the game will increase your stats depending on who you invite to events. There will also be mini games that you can play to increase a stat at no cost to another. This still doesn’t allow the player to explore Austen’s complex take on the morals of her time. Instead, Tyrer has focused on including Austen’s work through narrative similarity. For example, the game opens with a funeral, just as Sense and Sensibility does. Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy are also in attendance at this funeral (it takes place before their marriage). “If you know [Austen’s] work well we’re trying to sneak in a lot of funny little things that you’ll catch,” Tyrer said. Players may be immersed in Austen’s world but they won’t get to know her opinion on it.  

adopt, marry, divorce, and disown to gain loyalty or frustrate your enemies

The simplistic character stats are not the only challenge—dancing needs some attention, too. Both gathering to dance and the act itself were key social events for gentry of the Regency period. In fact, it offered one of the few outlets for young couples to touch and talk semi-privately. Famous lines between Darcy and Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice (1813) occur around dancing, though sometimes also on occasional walks through the garden. Dancing in Ever, Jane, however, is clunky. I found myself looking away from my partner and at the ground, where I could follow instructions that appeared in the form of footsteps to follow. Tyrer told me that she also believes that looking down to the floor to the dancing instructions isn’t leading the player easily, and so they may move to an auditory cue instead. She also mentioned that they are developing “automatic dancing shoes” that will automate the process of dancing—there’s no mention of restoring a sense of intimacy to the motions, just of getting rid of the annoyance of performing it. Perhaps the dancing could be improved if players could touch hands within the game, or whisper to their dancing partner. Instead, if I want to talk during dancing, I can buy the auto-dancing shoes that free my hands up to type, or earn them through a specific quest. Otherwise, the social importance of dance is lost, and going through the motions seems pointless.

On the other hand, some of the Regency period social systems fit in perfectly within the conventions of an MMO, even making them more logical. For example, instead of conventional direct messages between players, whereby you magically speak to only one of your fellow players—though you’re in front of many—Ever, Jane offers a letter writing system. You can pen a note to your intended beau without having to worry about who is in earshot. Whenever they decide to check their letters they simply walk to their writing desk and can then compose a response. Letters were, of course, the only means of distant communication in Austen’s time, which she used to explore the theme of forbidden and impossible love in her novels. Early on, she wrote an epistolary novel, Lady Susan (1871), composed entirely of letters between the characters. The occasional letter also appears in her later works.

Guild systems are another MMO favorite, where players create alliances with one another. This is easily substituted in Ever, Jane for family systems. You can adopt, marry, divorce, and disown to gain loyalty or frustrate your enemies. As you do so, you’ll also have to consider your family member’s class. Although the beta version is currently free to play, eventually a character’s wealth will be determined by their subscription level—play for free and you’ll have to be a servant, or invest $25 a month to get a nifty title and some property. 3 Turn Productions has received some criticism for making a pay-to-win game, but Tryer insists that it isn’t. She also wants to allow players of all financial backgrounds to play the game. The other potential critique of this pay-in system is that it doesn’t match the social system of the period the game replicates. In Regency period England, class mobility was limited—you were born into a social class and you stayed there for your lifetime, even if you came into some unexpected money you could not normal move up the classes with it. Yet in Ever, Jane characters will be able to regularly move up and down in social class, depending on when they decide to put money into it. To be truly accurate to the time period, Ever, Jane would have to randomize the character’s birth status and hold firm limitations on it (similar to how Rust selects a character’s gender for them). On the other hand, Ever, Jane’s offering of marriages as a way to potentially change classes is a commendable effort towards accuracy. Marrying into significantly higher class families was rare, but there are cases of it.

Where Ever, Jane does manage seamless blends of Austen’s work and MMO conventions gives a sense of optimism to the project as a whole. On my most recent trip to Tyrehampton, I received an invitation from other players to join their bible study. They regularly walked down to the game’s Anglican Church and had their characters discuss the bible as those living in the time period would have understood it. There’s not much religion in the game yet, so these players must have been bringing in their own research to discuss the bible accurately. Clearly, Ever, Jane has encouraged an engagement with Regency period England that few historical games achieve with their own respective settings. Hopefully, 3 Turn Productions can add more complexity and detail to the game as it continues to blossom, especially as it concerns the material of Austen’s novels, instead of just the time period in which they take place.

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Header image: Illustration by Hugh Thomson for Sense and Sensibility, via Wikimedia Commons

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An upcoming game about finding out your neighbor’s darkest secrets

You might be lucky enough to live in a lovely neighborhood, surrounded by friendly people who help one and another and come together during times of grief. However, even among these quite communities (perhaps especially so) there is that one person that always seems to be hiding something from everyone … something out of the ordinary. You might be too shy or too scared to ask them directly, but you can break into their house and investigate for yourself in Dynamic Pixel’s upcoming stealth-horror game Hello Neighbor.

Hello Neighbor has been in the works for a little over a year but recently reached a good enough position that the studio decided to reveal it properly. Pre-alpha codes were sent out to a select few to test it out, alongside an announcement trailer and 10 minutes of unedited footage that will probably make you jump out of your seat multiple times. You can watch that below at your own peril. And, more recently, a “Basement Teaser” has been sneaked out too.

totally unexpected moments of surrealism

As you’ll see across all this footage, Hello Neighbor takes a sandbox format, meaning that it allows you to experiment with different ways to sneak into your neighbor’s house without them noticing—or, if they do catch you, ways to evade them and hide. Important to this is that the neighbor has been built with an AI that learns your behavior across your many attempts. So tricks that you used when you first started playing may not be viable after a while. If you set an alarm clock off and chucked it into the garden to distract the neighbor once, don’t expect it to always work again.

I got the chance to try out the game for myself, and what really stuck out was the tension that Dynamic Pixels manages to create with a mix of audio cues, shadow play, and totally unexpected moments of surrealism. Also worth noting is the game’s art style, which the team describes as “Pixar-style visuals.” It lends a friendly coating to a game that could so easily become way too creepy—it’s an art style that brings out the game’s playfulness.

I would never do anything like the break-in stunts of Hello Neighbor in real life, which probably explains why I can’t wait till the game fully releases next summer so I can finally find out what’s in that guy’s basement.

Hello Neighbor is expected to release during the summer of 2017 exclusively on PC. Find out more on its website.

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Football Manager 2017 simulates the consequences of Brexit on the sport

It’s been a while since Kill Screen checked in on the Brexit fallout. Last time around, David Cameron was still an active Member of Parliament and Nigel Farage was giving awkward interviews about the NHS while looking a bit like Downton Abbey’s gawpy interpretation of Pepe the Frog. How time flies!

In the four brief months since a plurality of Britons voted to commit economic and diplomatic harakiri, the venerable Football Manager series has managed to simulate the decision’s effects on the sport in its next entry, Football Manager 2017. And as Miles Jacobson, the man in charge of the videogame series, told The Telegraph, the results are not promising:

It soon became obvious that the possible ramifications in football were almost endless, and also constantly changing.

“Of course, none of us know what will happen,” says Jacobson, “it changes on a daily basis.

“Six weeks ago I would have predicted a soft Brexit, but after the Conservative Party conference a hard Brexit is much more likely.

“We know Article 50 will be invoked before the end of March, but we don’t know how long negotiations are going to take. They could take two years but there could be a general election within that time. There are provisions that if a deal hasn’t been reached, negotiations could be extended or even scrapped.

Far be it from me to kick a polity when it’s down, but when a sports simulator has now put more thought into the possible permutations and consequences of Brexit than most politicians clearly did, something has clearly gone very, very wrong.

that is to miss the larger-scale suffering inflicted by Brexit

But it is true that Brexit will make life harder for soccer clubs. One of the advantages of European Union membership is that it facilitates the movement of workers from one member state to others—including soccer players. (This movement, incidentally, is not something Brexiteers have ever been fans of, though soccer players are not their main concern.) In a post-Brexit world, obtaining work permits for all but the most exceptional of European players will become harder.

Miles Jacobson

Mind you, Football Manager’s Brexit simulation doesn’t feel entirely laudable. It’s reminiscent of the way that a parallel field, fantasy sports, has turned athletes into abstractions. Every Sunday during the NFL season, you can watch for people complaining how an ACL sprain cost them their fantasy league. That’s what now passes for perspective.

In the same way that fantasy sports encourages a cold attitude towards sportsmen, Football Manager’s focus on the sports-related tragedy of Brexit seems to encourage viewing this scenario primarily through the lens of sports. You can choose to do so, but that is to miss the larger-scale suffering inflicted by Brexit, the xenophobia that just cannot be wished away, the financial crisis it may well wreak. Football Manager can’t simulate those things, but it would be nice to see someone center those things.

Read The Telegraph’s full interview with Jacobson for more info on this topic. Football Manager 2017 is due out for PC on November 4th.

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Red Dead Redemption 2 is real and definitely has cowboys

If you were listening, you could hear most of the internet gasp at the exact same moment. After two days of obvious teases, Rockstar Games has officially announced the long-rumored sequel to Red Dead Redemption (2010). And it’s called Red Dead Redemption 2. Who’d have thought?

All we know about Red Dead Redemption 2 at this point is that it’ll be coming to Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in fall 2017, that it’ll have multiplayer, and feature some swag-looking cowboys. Oh, we also know that we should find out a little more about it tomorrow, October 20th, as the debut trailer drops then. Everything else is speculation, so let’s just indulge that for a moment, shall we?

Cowboy selfies here we come

Looking at the announcement image that Rockstar released yesterday (pictured above), you might guess that Red Dead Redemption 2 will feature Jack Marston—the son of the first game’s protagonist, John Marston—it seems that the person front and center of that image is him. It’d make sense to continue his story given how Red Dead Redemption ended (don’t worry, I won’t spoil it here). But if that’s Jack, then who are the rest of these gruff gunslingers?

We here, at Kill Screen, have been wracking our collective minds trying to figure out who these mystery characters are, and what the answers might tell us about the game. Is this a virtual retelling of The Magnificent Seven (1960)? How many Blazing Saddles (1974) Easter eggs will there be? Will we be able to take selfies, like we could in Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto V  (2013)? Okay, you might think the technology for that last one is 100 years too far into the future to happen, but that only means I get to introduce to you the Kodak Brownie. Cowboy selfies here we come. Oh, and most importantly, if I hogtie a hapless character and lay them on train tracks, will this happen?

Gareth, our lovable writer and artist, went a little further than the rest of us and decided to mock up who he thinks each character in the announcement artwork is (or who they’re inspired by, at least), with the help of a little film history. Take a look for yourself above.

Anyway, the ball’s in your court, Rockstar. We have questions, and we want answers.

A trailer for Red Dead Redemption 2 will be released this Thursday. In the meantime, you can read our review of the first game.

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