Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 439
February 20, 2014
Eve Online and Oculus Rift devs say VR will help us transcend "the atoms of this particular earth"
RPS recently posted a completely insane, futurist interview with the CEOs of Oculus and CCP, makers of the Oculus Rift VR headset and the MMO EVE Online, respectively. The conversation produced a bunch of acronyms, obviously, but also the very real possibility that virtual reality will totally transform everything we know about games and pretty much existence itself. You should go and read the whole thing, but here are the quotes that are the most revolutionary.
For starters, one thing they’re working on at CCP are virtual hangouts for EVE players in avatar form.
I see VR as a way to let people have a tight relationship in an abstract way over large distances. To come and meet together. It’s like when people come together at Fanfest in Iceland each year. There’s this immense joy when people actually meet face-to-face and talk about their adventures in EVE in a much more personal way.
And at Oculus, they’re in the process of figuring out how to ditch controllers and let players use their hands in virtual reality, because: who wants a dumb controller binding us to the real world?
Right now the VR controller of choice is a traditional game controller, but we’re still R&D-ing internally what VR control is going to be…. Usually when people put on the VR headset, the first thing they do is go, "This is amazing," but then the second thing is they lift their hand and go, "But wait, when am I gonna see my hands move?" The long-term goal is to bring your hands into the experience. We don’t want to do that in some wonky way. We’re not gonna bring them in until it literally, absolutely feels like it’s your own hand.
And then virtual reality will be persecuted and die for three days and resurrect to save mankind.
Think about it: You’re no longer bound by the constraints of physical reality. And all the constraints of social injustice and disparity, those exist in part because we can’t have six billion people live the lives that, frankly, we live. The Earth won’t sustain it. We’d need ten Earths for that. But this could bring about a place where we’re no longer constrained by the atoms of this particular Earth. We can give people really compelling experiences that are just limited to a small niche of the world today. And they’ll nearly be real.
We'll wait and see about that last one.
Archie Pelago's new project turns a song into a physical space
Dancing through architecture, as it were.
Why Titanfall's colossal minimalism is enormously tiring
In defense of salivation.
Watch Tim Schafer and Pendleton Ward wax poetic about game design
Every year, Double Fine hosts its internal game jam competition Amnesia Fortnight. They usually film it too, because let’s face it, Tim Schafer looks great on camera. This time around they put together a short documentary to placate their charitable fans, giving us a look-see into the game-making process, which is actually just some guys hunched over a computer and not that interesting.
But what’s always compelling are the game design philosophies of great game designers like Schafer, and also of his pal Pendleton Ward of the Adventure Time cartoon series.
This video is full of clever gems like this one from Tim:
[I’d like] to defend chaos. If you know exactly how your game is going to turn out, then the process won’t be fun for anybody. It’s not art anymore if you really know. There’s got to be some element of chaos.
And I swear Ward nearly gets choked up talking about the potential games have to put players directly in the narrative (at around the 11:30 mark).
I love that heightened emotional—What’s the word? Where it just washes over you—that games give you.
Watch the whole thing and I’m pretty sure you’ll leave feeling delighted and enlightened about games.
February 19, 2014
The most Googled stories of 2013 told through videogames, French edition
The world of French politics is filled with violence, sex scandals, and intrigue, pretty much like everywhere else in the world. So what better way to recap the buzziest stories in France in 2013 than by compiling a montage of scenes from violent, sexy videogames?
That’s what digital creation students at la Sorbonne did with this short film "Les Temps Modernes," and the juxtapositions are frequently startling. Watch on with cognitive dissonance as nearly recognizable, fun games are mashed up with tabloid fodder such as Jerome Cahuzac’s tax evasion and Silvio Berlusconi’s prostitution sting. As a side note, I’m canceling my plans to vacation at Marseille.
Watch Jonathan Blow burn through the first ten minutes of The Witness
The Witness has remained shrouded in mystery since Jonathan Blow disdainfully revealed it a Sony conference last year. We’ve heard peeps here and there: Blow has been referring to the gameplay as pattern recognition; writer Tom Bissell was brought on and soon left the project; they hired a professional landscaper. All of this only heightened the game's mystique.
Well, this video of Blow playing through the first ten minutes of the game will demystify some things. It’s fun listening to Blow feign ignorance of how to solve his own elementary puzzles, as you know that must be hard for him.
The Order: 1886's new trailer showcases the story scenes you'll probably check your phone during
Sony has released a new trailer for The Order 1886, which tells us next to nothing about the hotly anticipated PS4 game that features surly curmudgeons battling dark legions in a rainy Victorian London. It appears to be the intro to the title screen. Thanks, Sony.
But, you're in luck. Footage that shows, you know, actual game footage has leaked like a punctured waterbed all over the net. And … well, it looks like Gears of War or The Last of Us, pretty much. Those games were mighty playable, though, and those 19th-century ruinous backstreets sure are pretty.
How Tales of Game’s invented the massive Hoopz Barkley SaGa
Warning: This interview is canon.
Being openly gay means you can't win in A Russian Valentine
An unwinnable Olympic game.
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