Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 394

“It isn’t technology, it’s culture.” Listen to our founder speak on the future of games

To me, hearing our founder Jamin Warren rhapsodize about expanding the cultural literacy of games is just another day at the office. But he also gets out and evangelizes games frequently, as he did in a talk at the recent PSFK Conference 2014. The subject was how games are becoming the world’s new research and development department, with devices like the Oculus Rift and social experiments like Twitch plays Pokemon leading the way. 

The ironic thing is that while games are frontrunners in inspiring and developing future technologies that often change the broader world, the broader world doesn’t yet fully understand games culturally, in part because they’re a relatively young medium. “I don’t think we have a conception of what videogames as a culture looks like,” Warren says. But we’re making progress, as he explains in the video below.

Jamin is also the host at our Two5Six conference tomorrow. We hope to see you all there!

Check out this beautiful, unreleased PS2 game that influenced Glitch and Ico

The roots of Katamari are in a lost PS2 game.

Democrats and Republicans united by their love of videogames, study shows

Finally, something liberals and conservatives can agree on! As you can see in this chart released by the Washington Post, Republicans and Democrats spend equal amounts of time playing videogames while online. This makes me kind of proud of the medium, as the only other Internet activity donkeys and elephants go halfsies on is finding deals on sites like Groupon. Well, except for the part where videogame players and daily deal seekers have low turnout at the polls. 

Aside from that, the findings tend to support the usual stereotypes, with the size of the bubbles representing the number of people who reported doing said Internet activity recently. Turns out, liberals are more into social networking, listening to music, and seeking employment; while fantasy sports is the most diehard conservative activity you can do. Also heavily in Republican territory is anything affiliated with sports, financials, and watching the national news. 

But back to games. I can’t help but think that all the nation needs is some Congressional Red versus Blue team deathmatch sessions and we’d be just fine.

Last Inua's puzzling take on Inuit culture

as

The personal assistant alarm clock app unfortunately not voiced by Scarlett Johansson

I'm falling in love already.

Mario Kart 8: a review in four dimensions

Back and forth we go.

DreadOut is old-school torture

The scissors-lady snippeth.

Rosetta makes you a genius, for a moment

With almost no sound and an unassuming visual presentation, Christiaan Moleman's Rosetta manages to pique some serious curiosity.

The name Jean-Francois Champollion might mean something to you; it didn't, to me, until I was in his shoes, trying to piece together a couple of hieroglyphs and some scrawled notes.

In 1822, Champollion was the first person to successfully translate the Rosetta Stone. You can try your hand at it, but don't expect the game to help. There's no on-screen popups, no tutorial, and unless you're a lot more knowledgeable about written Egyptian than I am your first recourse will be a whole lot of clicking.

But the game is short—ten minutes, maybe—and easily replayable. You can brute-force it, and shuffle around all the movable bits until you can progress. It is, however, possible to sort of grasp the relationship between a hieroglyph and an English name, between a symbol and a letter—and at that moment just think that two centuries ago a dude cracked the core of an entire language using these exact same methods. 

Games don't go to the "translating dead languages" well often, so go try this one out. 

Watch this guy have an out-of-body-experience with three Kinects and an Oculus Rift

Microsoft might be revising their vision for the Kinect by removing it from the Xbox One, but the motion-tracking camera still has a bright future in creating spooky, immaterial OOB experiences, apparently. 

As you can see in this reality-splitting YouTube video, a long-time VR developer has concocted a way to put a projection of his real body inside of virtual reality via three first-generation Kinects and an Oculus Rift, naturally. And the results are fascinating, even if his shadow self looks a bit squiggly and low-rent. You can see the incorporeal form of Oliver Kreylos waving its digital hands before its face, sitting down at a virtual table, and open computer menus while standing across the room from itself. Combine that with virtual worlds and VR treadmills and automatons that simulate other living beings and the future is looking bizarre. 

Playlist 5/14: Southern Gothic, police states, and gun-happy frogs

Three sure things.