Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 479

How one WOW player changed the war in Syria

We we’re catching up on our magazine backlog over the holiday, and came across this amazing story in the New Yorker from a few weeks back. The yearly technology issue had a profile on Eliot Higgins, a tenacious blogger who used his internet savvy to prove that Syria had indeed used chemical weapons. From the comfy of his home in Leicester, he scoured the internet for footage of the offense, turning up mountains of evidence of war crimes.

This is where the story becomes relevant to a site with an eye on videogames like Kill Screen. It turns out that Higgins was a big World of Warcraft player, consuming the game in six-hour chunks after work. Eventually, this energy was converted into much chatter and debate on the Something Awful forum. From there, he became invested in the topic of war crimes. When the civil war in Syria began, he blogged the atrocities with the devoutness of a World of Warcraft player, which as we know, is intense. 

Higgins is the latest among those who are deep into MMOs who have a high profile on the international war front. You will recall that Sean Smith—the American diplomat killed in the attack on the consulate in Libya—was a high-ranking Eve player. What’s particularly impressive about Higgins, though, is how the intensity and commitment that he honed playing Warcraft transferred directly to making war criminals pay. Perhaps these games have more positive impact than was thought! 

So, Warcraft players, this is a request from me to you: after you’re done raiding, please save the world A.S.A.P.

Moshi Monsters: Katsuma Unleashed made me miss the ’90s

This ain’t your, uh ... older siblings’ platformer?

The boundary between first-person shooters and graphic art is a BFG

In the latest Harper’s, Ben Lerner describes 20th century art as a wave of vandalism. If that's the case, then the graphic designer Louisa Gagliardi stays the course with his series of monochromatic illustrations entitled FPS. He has tagged works of well-known graphic artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and John McCracken by sticking a powerful-looking gun on the front. 

Gagliardi’s lone addition is the rendering of the sight, scope, and barrel of the gun, which never looks out of place among the geometric, abstract backdrops. This goes to show that you can drop a gun in front of anything and you'll have a first-person shooter. It’s the most versatile genre ever. No wonder it’s found everywhere. 

Icycle: On Thin Ice is a helluva game, but it’s not the one it thinks it is

Also under discussion here: pennyfarthings.

The Jane Austen MMO is not a joke

Our first thought when we heard there was a Jane Austen MMO on Kickstarter was that this has to be a joke. But when we saw that the project was successfully funded for over a hundred-thousand dollars, we realized it was for real. Ever, Jane: The Virtual World of Jane Austen exists currently as an early prototype, but will now be developed into a full-fledged game.

While it’s undeniably dandy to prance about a virtual cottage in a ruffled blouse or, for you fellas, a fancy cravat, we have to ask: can games add anything substantive to Jane Austen’s extended universe? The period piece is something we’ve seen a lot of with games lately, notable from the Assassin’s Creed franchise, which with the latest incarnation made the hop from colonial America to a Pirates of the Caribbean motif. However, aside from a few new tricks, the thrust of the game remains unchanged underneath. 

Considering that Jane Austen wrote about betrayal, jilted love, and marrying for large sums of money—activities that aren’t traditionally games forte—it’s not immediately clear how an MMO would reveal her works in a new light, although the Kickstarter page offers some hints. The player can choose their character's personality traits, opting for happiness over duty, or sense over sensibility, so to speak. Sleuthing, which is part of the "gossip" system, sounds promising. But embroidery and hunting are traditional fare. If Ever, Jane manages to shake the conventions of massive-multiplayer games and evade the weirdness of Second Life, we could be looking at one hell of a dating sim.

Why aren’t more people talking about FJORDS?

FJORDS—a little-known game about the endless exploration of computer code and glistening cataracts with a hook shot—has been out for just over a month. It was a Fantastic Arcade selection and comes highly-recommended by the ambassador of indie games Brandon Boyer. Despite the accolades, Kyle Reimergartin posted on his blog that his game has “sold 249 copies. It has made $2150. That continues to be amazing to me.”

While he seems happy with the numbers, more people should be playing this thing. FJORDS is mysterious, artful, and potentially genius. It could be another Starseed Pilgrim, last year’s low-fidelity game-designer-darling (the critics never really got on board) that came out of nowhere and caused Braid-creator Jonathan Blow to gruffly Tweet at the press that the should be covering it.

If you still need convincing, allow me to paraphrase Reimergartin's wistful description of his game:

FJORDS is a world that has grown up around all of the impossible doors and endless stairs and irrational foyers of other videogames, places that collapse as soon as they are offscreen, unlivable places.

FJORDS is taking the ferry to work every day for two years. . . in the early early morning, before the sun rises. 

FJORDS is walking through Lincoln Park and thinking about. . . every videogame I’ve ever played.

You can find FJORDS here.

Maybe Phil Fish was right and Xbox One really is “anti-indie”

Microsoft’s relationship with individual creators is notoriously dicey. The hefty corporate entity has taken heat for a number of its policies, such as the displacement of the erstwhile Xbox Indie Games service, and charging the little guy exorbitant fees, causing Phil Fish to infamously tweet “Not Xbox” when asked which system Fez 2 would be for. 

Everyone had hoped that that was a thing of the past. Supposedly, we were heading for brighter days with the Xbox One’s ID@Xbox Independent Developers publishing program (yes, that’s what they are calling it). Over the summer Microsoft announced that any Xbox One could be used by the world over to develop games. 

That may no longer be the case. Although it is possible to convert your expensive new hardware into a dev kit, potential developers must apply through Microsoft first, and doing so could brick it. According to a statement from Microsoft yesterday:

Changing the settings in this menu is only intended for developers for Xbox One, and this alone does not turn the console into a development kit. We strongly advise consumers against changing these settings as it could result in their Xbox One becoming unusable. 

Okay, wow. It seems that Microsoft are keeping things close to the chest with regards to who can make a game for their platform. As for how things will unfold, right now we don’t know. While this isn’t yet catastrophic to creators who dream of self-publishing on the system, it does raise an eyebrow, given the company’s dubious manners in the past, which Fish has called out as “anti-indie.” Hopefully for creatives becoming a developer for Xbox One isn’t as onerous as it sounds.

This game will probably land you on a terrorist watch list

Since this summer when Edward Snowden informed the world that the NSA is snooping on all of us, I’ve been a little more cautious about what I say online. More than a few instant messages that could be taken the wrong way have ended in a nervous joke about now being on the terrorist watch list. 

If you don’t have that phobia, the NSA Game is here to instill it in you.

The NSA Game shows us how easy it is to be mistaken for a potential enemy of the state by emailing, googling, or texting the wrong words. The idea is that you choose between two words; one which is monitored by Prism, the US government’s massive data mining program, and the other, which is safe. The game challenges you to survive for ten rounds. This proves tougher than you might think. 

I’m not very good at all at the game. Some words are obvious red flags: drug cartel, organized crime, hamas, disaster assistance. (In case you’re wondering how the author knows that these words are suspect, they were released through the Freedom of Information Act.) That said, I’m still pretty terrible at the game. I’ve played it four times and the closest I’ve come to winning is round nine. 

What games like the NSA Game tell us, besides to eliminate the word “waterborn” from our vocabulary, is that games have become a viable alternative to traditional news. They can be turned out fast and make a point through what game guru Ian Bogost calls “procedural rhetoric” (not on the NSA watch list, by the way), which is a way of using the processes of computers to propose an argument about current events. The NSA Game gets this right, as you’ll find out at the fateful endgame. 

(Thanks to @graysonearle)

Plumbing the depths with Adventure Time: Explore the Dungeon Because I DON’T KNOW

Shitty tie-in alert!

Amazon's drone program is further proof that Black Ops 2 was prophecy

C’mon Amazon: catch up. Your CEO, Jeff Bezos, got awfully excited showing off your new octocopters, gushing about a drone-filled future. But Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 was way ahead of you!

Ok, so that game didn't have drones that delivered right to your house half an hour after you ordered a shirt to replace the one your friend just threw up on. And yeah, you’re still struggling with getting the FAA to green-light the commercial use of drones. So it’s not entirely your fault that the Amazon "Prime Air" program is still four plus years out. Black Ops 2 probably didn’t have to deal with the FAA when one of its characters attacked LA using an army of drones stolen off of an aircraft carrier named Barack Obama.

But still. If you're going to become our diabolical David S. Goyer-written overlord, Jeff Bezos, get ready to defy the law.