Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 66

A videogame for anyone who’s felt uncomfortable on the dance floor

Team Lazerbeam, the folks behind Snow Cones and Wrestling With Emotions, started their latest game Dress To Express Dancing Success—a dancing and dating simulator—with the intention of creating their least sensible and least complicated game. And they kind of failed.

“Before that we’d been on a pretty bad run of jamming, being really excited, getting super carried away, and having only random bits of our game done by the time the jam was over,” Team Lazerbeam’s Ben Rausch told me. “This disturbing trend started with Snow Cones.” Snow Cones took months rather than the allotted days. Wrestling With Emotions took longer. Dress To Express Dancing Success was supposed to be tiny. The game took Team Lazerbeam one month instead of three days, which ended up being a big improvement over its previous games.

Try to stay cool. You can do this! Believe in yourself!

Dress To Express Dancing Success is the story of a somewhat awkward and self-conscious fashion enthusiast looking to cut loose and meet some hotties at the club. They’re a little apprehensive about dancing—not exactly their forte, but they look good. Real good. A few cuties are hanging at the bar, and they want to dance. And when the cool kids want to dance, there will be dancing. Try to stay cool, try to stay cool. You can do this! Believe in yourself! Dance! With Dress To Express Dancing Success, Team Lazerbeam implemented its revolutionary Dance Orbit Rotate Kinetics—for short, D.O.R.K.—mechanics for endless possibilities of dance moves.

Despite creating a fun, silly game, Team Lazerbeam felt almost uncomfortable putting Dress To Express Dancing Success out. “We’re all weirdly proud of this game, although we also felt kinda ashamed putting it out as well,” Rausch said. “It was just like, ‘here’s this weird thing about how we’ve felt uncomfortable dancing in front of people.’” There’s real heart underneath the wacky clothes and wild dance moves: being comfortable in expressing parts of yourself that you might be ashamed of, that believing in yourself—and accepting yourself—is the coolest thing you can do.

“Honestly, the response has been pretty great given what an unusual offering this is,” Rausch added. “It’s the best feeling to being able to watch our games [on YouTube] being played by these people that really get us.”

Play Dress To Express Dancing Success on itch.io. Other games from Team Lazerbeam include Snow Cones, Wrestling With Emotions, and Pizza Quest.

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Music of the Urban Commute: Designing Mini Metro’s Soundtrack

A year ago, when Rich Vreeland (aka Disasterpeace) said that the work on his score for Mini Metro (2015) would be around 90 percent coding, not many knew what he meant. At the time, the only insight he shared was that the results of his work would create procedural audio for the subway system management simulator.

When Mini Metro was released with what Vreeland calls an “almost meditative” score, it had a different feel to it than I had expected. The pressure and anxiety that comes with the city-building genre, as experienced in games like SimCity (1989), were minimized by the soundtrack, as well as the train engine sounds, the effects of people popping up in different stations—the general musicality of the environment. It resulted in several hour-long game sessions that felt like only 15 minutes to me. “That was the idea,” said Vreeland. “It was to create music that [led to] a very immersive space that would just allow the player to maybe not be stressed out and that they’d be able to play it for longer.”

The lines themselves have rhythms attached to them, as if they were pulsing

While Vreeland says that now, this was not the initial goal of his work on Mini Metro. Along with the twins of the game studio Dinosaur Polo Club— Peter and Robert Curry—he intended to create a system that would give immediate audio feedback to the player according to what was happening on the screen. If a station was getting too crowded, the sound it would emit would be different than that of a new station being created. “[I was] trying to do my best to make the sounds cohesive with each other but also different enough from each other that you could identify different aspects of the subway system,” Vreeland said.

His dedication to that distinction had a lot to do with the creative process of the procedural audio and how he faced the project with the studio. “When I’m working with code I find that it’s very easy for me to put in really long hours and to work well into the night,” Vreeland said about his routine when working on the game. “[It was a lot of] allowing myself to be influenced by feature creep, the idea that when a new idea comes in and instead of saying ‘Oh, no, I don’t have enough time to do that, that’s gonna complicate things,’ I’ll explore it.”

Fortunately for Vreeland, Mini Metro’s abstract nature allowed for this working process to be viable. It didn’t matter so much that he was working with different rhythms, as each level has its own set of harmonies, meaning they all had an individual “core progression” with multiple rhythms possible within that. In the Osaka level, for example, the fast trains that run on the Shinkansen rail lines have a unique engine sound that Vreeland worked on and explored in an hour-long blog video when he was designing it. “The lines themselves have rhythms attached to them, as if they were pulsing,” he said. “Then also, when a bunch of passengers appear at once, they kind of appear in a fan. Different cities have different sounds for that. And the same for passengers getting on trains.”

The idea was to create a language with the music. One that the player learned through its consistency, which was important in a game that relies so much on its audio feedback. This freed Vreeland up to make small changes that would make sense within the culture of each city. “A level like São Paulo has a slower vibe,” he said. For this, he took from bossa nova, a fusion of smooth jazz and Brazilian samba, which was very popular in the country between 1950 and 1960. “Then a city like Berlin, for instance, I was thinking more of electronic music, Elektrowerk. A city like Moscow has kind of a heavy sound of a 19th-century Russian classical sort of thing, and those differences are really subtle from level to level.”

I was trying to create a very confined, restrained sound that was very light

The finer details that went into Mini Metro initially animated Vreeland and Dinosaur Polo Club to develop a separate soundtrack for the game, but working with a procedurally generated score made the reality of that more difficult than anticipated. One of the ideas they had while trying to find a workaround was an app that would run the game’s audio script. “It’s the weirdest thing,” Vreeland said in between laughs. “It’d be like taking the game and stripping [it] out and just leaving the audio.” Other potential solutions they tried included: a pile of assets and samples; recording the audio of a real playthrough in each level; releasing a different soundtrack for each level; and even seeding the soundtrack so each person would get a unique set of Mini Metro songs. “Those are hard to do, those still have the same sort of problems,” Vreeland said. “I find it very difficult to record the game and be like ‘here it is’. It just doesn’t feel right for whatever reason, so I haven’t been able to figure that out.”

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Some months ago, Vreeland posted a two and a half minute song on his Soundcloud entitled “One Week,” which was an experiment he conducted to figure out what to do with Mini Metro‘s soundtrack. Thanks to his notes and the website’s graphical representation of the song, it is possible to notice a pattern between the soundwaves and single out each slope as a unique day of the week starting from Monday. The song starts slowly and calm, and increases throughout the week and along the hours of a single day. By the end of the week, between Friday and Saturday, the song loops until it fades out and finishes even slower than before, on Sunday. He explained that “this piece was like ‘Here’s the average work week for a commuter, someone who uses the subway system,’ where Monday is kind of starting slow and you’re tired, maybe from the weekend, and then your pace kind of picks up, and then by Friday it’s like ‘Woo, party!'” I first imagined the loop as a song at a party, like Daft Punk’s “One More Time”, but Vreeland explained it was also that “sound ringing in your head, and it’s like hammering a hangover. That was kind of the idea. And Sunday was really sleepy.”

The creative process behind Mini Metro demanded Vreeland to have a different working week than the average commuter his music was inspired by, though. He was a freelancer for Dinosaur Polo Club, working from home. And because Mini Metro was procedural and code-based, it influenced his process in a very different way than, say, writing music in a more traditional way. He didn’t only want to work well into the night, it was something of a necessity as he sorted through all of the game’s code, sifting it thoroughly with his eyes.

Even when he’s working on other projects, Vreeland notices different points in which his routine changes. “I’ve gone through phases where I’ll try to set a very rigid schedule for myself, where I’m saying ‘I’m gonna work on this project Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday from this time to this time’. And I found that… I mean, I guess some structures can be good, but I find life, in general, is very chaotic and I’m just trying to roll with it,” he told me. Vreeland is currently expecting another big shift in his routine for his next project with the Hyper Light Drifter team, for which he’s moving to Los Angeles for and will be commuting every day once he gets there.

he could allow himself to get burned out on one and then dip into the other as a break

He couldn’t give further information about this new project but he mentioned that his work on the soundtrack for Hyper Light Drifter, this year’s fantastic action role-playing game, was “very challenging emotionally,” at least when compared with his work on Mini Metro. “I think with Mini Metro I was trying to create a very confined, restrained sound that was very light,” he explained. He also considers Mini Metro more of an intellectual challenge while Hyper Light Drifter came in at the opposite end of the spectrum. It was very emotional to work on it. “When I’m thinking about writing for that, I’m thinking about ‘How can I make this as expressive as possible and just have a really sort of wide variety of sounds and textures to really play with the imagination?’”

As a result, Vreeland found that there were times when he would need a break from Hyper Light Drifter. “I needed to do something that was more laid back and where I could be more detached,” he said. The “emotional attachment” he developed with the fantasy RPG was due to his elevated expectations on his own work. “I saw this project as my primary project when I was working on it, everything else was secondary, so I put a lot of pressure on myself to reach a certain level.” Eventually, Vreeland gave up on some of his ideas, which is a telling contrast to the feature-creep design of Mini Metro. “I wanted the soundtrack of Hyper Light Drifter to be through composed, which means that the pieces would all be really long, like eight-minute pieces with lots and lots of sections, [but] it just didn’t work that way,” he said. “It was really hard to write that way because I was writing on the piano and then translating, and that was a nightmare.”

Despite the occasional ache, Vreeland found the experience of working on Mini Metro and Hyper Light Drifter at the same time really valuable. While the workload came in doubles, it meant that he could allow himself to get burned out on one and then dip into the other as a break. But what he appreciates the most is that he can connect his work projects, all of them blending and washing into each other, the transition encouraging him to take new directions. It doesn’t matter if he’s writing for games, films, or any other medium, as long as he’s having a different experience during the creative process. “I just look at it more on a micro level, project to project, like ‘that project is gonna be different’,” he said. “I don’t want to always be doing crazy procedural audio systems. I wanna try different things.”

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Weekend Reading: Ride The Lightning, Snakepit, and other tales unrelated to Metallica

While we at Kill Screen love to bring you our own crop of game critique and perspective, there are many articles on games, technology, and art around the web that are worth reading and sharing. So that is why this weekly reading list exists, bringing light to some of the articles that have captured our attention, and should also capture yours.



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The tragic story of Sheffield’s Park Hill bridge, Frances Byrnes, The Guardian

In 2001, a man named Jason decided to one-up all the locks left behind on all the bridges, proposing to a woman named Clare with a scrawl of graffiti along a high-up walking bridge, which has since become a highly marketable slogan for true love. “I LOVE YOU WILL U MARRY ME.” The romance between Jason and Clare, however, was more tragic than all the boutique merchandise has let on.

A Gift for Music Lovers Who Have It All: A Personal Utility Pole, Juro Osawa, The Wall Street Journal

You may consider yourself an audiophile. Heck, you might’ve dropped a small fortune in a surround sound system. If you’re Takeo Morita, you believe the the speakers are only half the battle, and if you want the purest quality, you’re going to have to customize your source of electricity as well.

Dancing on a different stage: the balletic inspiration behind PS4’s Bound, Jonathan Ore, CBC

There’s a lot to marvel at in Bound, the new dance-inspired game from Santa Monica Studios. But behind the protagonist to the recent PlayStation game is an actual dancer, whose talents were used to animate and inspire the game. CBC’s Jonathan Ore spoke with Maria Udod about dancing for a completely different audience.

Fear of Rattlesnake Island, Christopher Benfey, The New York Review of Books

Nature conservation, what a great concept, right? Well, even among those who usually put their hat in to conserve surviving pockets of the natural world were a little bit rattled by the thought of preserving a small island in Massachusetts overrun with venomous snakes. Christopher Benfey reviews the history of rattlesnake attacks and their subsequent overhyping.

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Header image by Murdo Macleod for the Observer

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Celebrate National Dog Day with The Release of Undertale’s Soundtrack on Vinyl

Did you know that today is #NationalDogDay? Of course you do. Who could possibly forget the one day a year we celebrate all good boys everywhere? A case can be made that the indie game Undertale is most loved for its dogs and in order to commemorate such a pawsitively great occasion, retailer IAm8Bit is releasing a 2xLP vinyl soundtrack for the massively popular RPG Undertale. The collection was released on August 26th at 10:00 am PDT.

Undertale has been praised for everything from its charming RPG elements to the memorable characters—and who could fur-get the chiptune score composed by Toby Fox? The canine companions you encounter all have distinct personalities and I wouldn’t blame you if you were ruff on yourself for accidentally killing one during a pacifist run. There’s Lesser Dog, Greater Dog, the dog couple Dogamy and Dogaressa, and they’re all very good boys. But then there’s the Annoying Dog, who hounds the protagonist at various points in time throughout the game.

Undertale is most loved for its dogs

Anyone who orders the 2xLP by September 5 at 11:59pm PDT will also get a limited edition 7-inch “Annoying Dog Song” vinyl, so you can get your own extremely irritating four-legged pixel companion (with a digital download provided as well). It would be dog-gone crazy not to fetch these up while you can.

Visit IAm8Bit for more details on the Undertale vinyl.

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Party on down with a skeleton dress-up game

Ever had one of those nights where—no matter what you do, how you accessorize, in sweats or dressed to the nines, after a good day or a bad one—you still feel like nothing but a skeleton with skin crudely stretched over your bones? To make matters worse, this is the sort of night you can’t avoid; giving up on your plans is unthinkable (it’s your final college hurrah, your friend’s engagement party, your own birthday), even as you struggle to make yourself feel and look like a real person.

Those nights you are reduced to a shambling sham of a human being, unable to pass for a fully-fledged self. Then you may find solace (and/or amusement) in Dress Code Human, an endlessly replayable web browser game created by Elenor Kopka, Lucas Descroix, and Konstantin Kopka.

A stray eye has found its way onto one of their arms

In Dress Code Human, your objective is simple: you have two minutes to get dressed for the party of the millennium. The dress code? Human. Will you make it? The game begins with a skeleton awaiting decoration as the timer begins to count down. An open drawer of shifting, oozing flesh-colored blobs with which to cover your bony self is the first stage of party preparation, followed by smaller details such as clothes, accessories, and facial features to mix and match.

Remake and remake and remake yourself; choose between covering your bones in skin from head to toe or leaving some bare, giving you more time to choose a hairstyle, a tattoo or two, and which mismatched eye goes where on your body. After two minutes, the party begins.

I looked at the man I created, his lumpy face and slightly overlapping eyes, his still-skeletal hands, the lone boot I was able to put on one of his feet before time ran out. I’m thinking, ‘I’m not convinced.’ But then the room falls away, the skeleton starts to dance, and others fall in around him. They, too, are not fully-formed, with fleshy torsos but unadorned legs. A stray eye has found its way onto one of their arms. But they dance anyway.

So, on those nights where you almost don’t make it out the door, when your person suit leaves you feeling unreal and exposed, just remember: everyone, not just you, is doing their best to look like a real human. Don’t miss out on the party of the millennium.

Get ready for the party by playing Dress Code Human here.

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Project DIVA X, or: How I learned to stop worrying and embrace Hatsune Miku as my God

Who the fuck is Hatsune Miku? Some may say she’s a Vocaloid, the poster child for the voice synthesizer software engineered by Crypton Future Media. Others may say she’s just an idol, one of the pure virtual variety, playing shows as a hologram from time to time. Others will attribute her likeness to mostly being a videogame character, appearing time and time again as the face of Sega’s Project DIVA rhythm game franchise. But I say she’s something more. Miku is a God.

Dancing, singing, performing extraordinaire Hatsune Miku does not know pain. She only knows happiness, glee, cheerfulness. Except for that time in Project DIVA X when I gave her a totem pole as a present, she wasn’t too happy about that. But still, Miku’s the type of person whose emotions are always dialed up to 11. She wants to feel pleasant 24/7, and if that happiness isn’t maintained, she grows disappointed. Miku’s occasional disappointment reminds me of my mom’s disappointment when I don’t call her back within a day. Or my boyfriend’s disappointment when I insist that no, I don’t actually want mac n’ cheese for dinner for the third time this week. Miku’s saddened eyes burn holes directly into my skull. I feel bad about not cheering up the virtual girl.

Project DIVA X is the 10th installment in the ongoing Project DIVA franchise. I’m personally a more recent fan of the series. My first entry was Project DIVA F (2014), which I quickly poured dozens of hours into after my friend turned me onto it. “It’s great and hard,” she probably said, I don’t really remember the specifics of her recommendation. “It’s the Dark Souls of rhythm games,” someone who makes annoying statements like that might say as a descriptor. It’s a statement that makes me cringe, yet also totally understand. Project DIVA is, quite frankly, not for the faint of heart. It has probably caused carpal tunnel for about a fifth of its players, myself included. But that’s part of its appeal. Frenetic button tapping and screen swiping, mixed with the catchiest electronic-leaning J-Pop one can imagine. It’s magic.

Play Miku at my funeral

Project DIVA X might be the best starting point for newcomers to the series. With the new Cloud system, players are better eased into the game’s different styles. But if you’re itching to play on a harder difficulty than “normal,” the option to switch over to “Free Play” is always available (the sorta-classic Project DIVA experience available from past games). The Cloud system also gives the game a tinge of story through visual novel-y portions, but it honestly doesn’t add much. If anything, it’s just another excuse to admire the ever-unlockable modules (outfits) and accessories for your Vocaloid team.

When I mentioned earlier that Miku knew no pain—I wasn’t kidding. Do you see how she pins that name tag to her bare skin? How metal is that? (Speaking of which, she should collaborate with Babymetal.) If that doesn’t convince you, how about that shark that is literally eating her skull, and she doesn’t seem to mind (or bleed!)? Honestly, Miku probably feeds off of that negative energy, off of all the things in life trying to tear her down. Like Miku haters that don’t understand the independent, bustling creative community surrounding Vocaloids, that ultimately give her life beyond being just software, and bash it ignorantly. Or like that shark that thinks it’s okay to chomp on a teenage girl’s head and get away with it. That’s not cool. Using Miku’s lack of pain as an excuse does not make it a viable one.

Regardless, I’ve been enjoying my time with Project DIVA X. I respect that it’s not a game for everyone—it either clicks with you, or it doesn’t. But this installment uncovered something deep within me that I never knew existed. Love. I love Hatsune Miku. I love all the diversity in the songs producers are able to create for her. I love all her different outfits and accessories, even if there are dumb ones like a baby bib or the shark eating her head. Project DIVA X makes me feel spiritual as I tap buttons at seemingly impossible speeds, finishing the joyous “LOL -lots of laugh-” on Hard. For once, I feel like anything is possible, but most of all, that it wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t have that particular blue-haired angel watching me from above. I’m cemented as a Miku fan for life. Remember to play “AgeAge Again” at my funeral. And thanks Miku, for everything.

Accept Hatsune Miku and her Vocaloid pals as your lords and saviors when Project DIVA X launches for PS4 and PS Vita on August 30th. Also, unsure if you’re into Vocaloid music? This song might be enough to push you over the edge.

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The brilliant clumsiness of Grow Up

There’s a blinking emoticon of a robot waving its arms around. It has the kind of joy that should be reserved for kids at a birthday party, not a loading screen.

Once the bar is filled the robot appears again—now in full 3D, a red shell like a Lego brick—but this time it’s animated like a drunk who’s too inebriated to stand. When I push forward on the analog stick it’s as if my small motion has turned the entire planet under its feet. The robot’s arms flail as if reaching for a pole or an edge to cling to. When it walks, it leads with its wobbly head, the rest of its body trying to keep up as if awaiting the tug of a puppet string, each foot a threat to each other as they blindly scramble for the floor. The giant ladybugs nearby quiver in concern.

The robot’s name is BUD. Every movement of BUD’s is an effort of visible labor. Even turning around on the spot seems to require the force of a tornado—it’s as unpredictable as one, too. Given how clumsy BUD is it seems right that he refuses to face me. I’d be embarrassed, too. I try to turn his head towards the camera but it appears to be sat on the neck of an owl. Probably for the best; you’re a total wally, BUD, and I’d only make that known.

BUD is the inglorious winner here

BUD might be the daftest character left to your control in a videogame. Other contenders include Octodad, but his slipperiness made sense; he wasn’t daft, he was an octopus trying his best to fit into human society. There’s also Mario in those moments when he’s running atop a bumper ball—the momentum just within the bounds of your control—but again, any foolishness isn’t characteristic of Mario as it is the situation he’s in. No, BUD is the inglorious winner here—he’s got no excuse for his failure.

In truth, he doesn’t belong in a videogame. He’s better suited to a Looney Tunes animation. When Bugs Bunny or Elmer Fudd are running at speed but need to halt or change direction, they kick both heels into the ground, clouds fuming from the floor due to the friction. BUD applies a similar logic to overcome any given velocity you fling at him. But he hasn’t mastered the technique that Chuck Jones gave his characters, so when he flies across a surface and you suddenly pull back on the stick, his legs turn into ferris wheels and his whole body slants uncontrollably. Sometimes this fails, and he crashes into the stalk of an enormous mushroom—that’s when BUD performs his tribute to the Transformers, going from a robot to a car wreck in a second flat.

The goal in Grow Up is to climb to the moon. That is … ambitious. Have you seen how BUD stumbles? He doesn’t need to be on the edge of a thousand-foot drop to teeter—he does that with every step. If anyone is fit to make like Jack and clamber up a beanstalk it is not BUD. Don’t put his name down. Don’t bother. Yet it is precisely this ineptitude that makes the game work. Compare BUD to Lara Croft or Nathan Drake and it makes sense. Those two heroes of the vertical ascent are graced with too much skill. It means that, when you cling with them to a cliff edge, their capable one-handed leaps between grips might as well be automated. You point them in the right direction and let them go. No matter how many times Drake slips, or the number of falling boulders Lara evades, the peril of the climb is glaringly artificial. You feel safe in their bodies at any height, any angle.

It is a very different experience with BUD. When climbing, you have to use the left and right triggers to control each respective metal hand. A synthesis between you and this clumsy robot is created as you both clamp down with your fingers; you to a controller, him to a sturdy plant. As he thrusts his little claws in whatever direction you’re pointing the camera, and the stalks he climbs curve and spiral, it is entirely possible to fail to find purchase. And when he falls you both fall. It then becomes a desperate scrabble to get hold of some lower point, frantically pulling on the triggers, his hands pinching at the open air. There are more reasons these moments feel so dangerous. One of them is the spontaneity of the game’s world: at any point during your fall you could accidentally grab a loose rock, suddenly plummeting again. But bigger than that is the possibility of free falling all the way from the highest point in the game to the lowest—compare that to Uncharted, in which Nathan Drake simply expires in mid-air after falling a certain distance. That, paired with the fact that the game won’t reset you after a safe landing, no matter the height, means any significant drop needs to be followed by a duplicate climb, unless you managed to activate a teleporter before you fell. Grow Up may may have a childish demeanor but, unlike other modern platformers, it’s not playing pretend.

the hang glider is simultaneously the best and the worst

What Grow Up achieves is to put the manual labor back into climbing to a height. And in doing that it allows room for expression. Legendary Polish rock climber Wojciech Kurtyka once remarked that mountaineering interweaves “elements of sport, art, and mysticism,” and that what determines one’s success in it “depends on the ebb and flow of immense inspiration.” Grow Up, at its best, follows these words as if a guide to making a game about climbing. This is partly achieved by expanding the game’s playground to the size of an entire planet, whereas BUD’s previous outing in Grow Home (2014) was confined to a series of floating islands. Crucially, you are given little direction as to how to negotiate this planet. The most you get is POD (Planetary Observation Droid), a satellite that gives you a bird’s-eye-view of the globe, showing you areas of interest: the ship parts BUD needs to recover, challenge areas, collectable crystals, and new abilities. With that, you are left to find your own moments of “immense inspiration.”

You might see a large island floating near the top of the planet’s hemisphere and decide that, no matter what, you will climb up to it. BUD’s unsure footing be damned. Not only is such a directive possible, Grow Up lets you determine your own path upwards: that manifests in the hand-to-surface actions, but also in where you throw seeds to grow springy plants that thrust BUD towards the sky, and how you can steer the shoots of Starflowers—the biggest bioforms in the game—as they grow rapidly like green limbs, BUD holding on as if it were a rodeo. It leads to moments of genuine beauty as you climb a steep rock face, driven solely by your own determination, and see small bug families scuttle past you, the distant sun kissing your view from up high with a glorious tangerine zest. Grow Up’s dedication to scalable verticality is all part of the thrill.

Its mistake is in adhering to the ostensible demands of making a videogame sequel. Grow Home had a simple purity to it—you were a robot, it could climb, and so it did, all the way up to space. Grow Up repeats this journey but steadily turns BUD into Inspector Gadget as you complete its trials. Of all the new abilities, the hang glider is simultaneously the best and the worst. Once unlocked, it allows you to swoop across the biomes with ease, jumping from massive heights to go on an orbiting safari. After all the rigid tension of handling BUD limb by limb, the hang glider makes him a perfect vehicle, rushing you with a sudden liberation as you course through the sky, unhindered. But no, no, no. This isn’t what Grow Up excels at! It’s a game about overcoming the pull of gravity, about forcing a body beyond its limits, about pushing when everything else is pulling. Giving BUD the ability to fly (as becomes the case) is equivalent to Wile E. Coyote catching The Road Runner—it misses the point, the gag forced to expire before its time.

Once you’ve acquired the hang glider it’s hard to go back, to force yourself into the grind. But there will be a point when you miss it. As you hurtle through the air, realizing that the challenges that faced you at the bottom of the world—when you were eager to take them on—have disappeared. The hang glider might as well be a helicopter that picks you up and places you at the summit—in this case, the moon. As with the initial, tireless comedy of BUD’s imperfections, those moments of immense inspiration slip away with these new inventions. As a mountaineer with no peak left to climb, you turn your head away from the architecture of the skies, and look instead to return home.

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New grant gives the LGBTQ Game Archive official backing

Adrienne Shaw, an assistant professor in Temple University’s Department of Media Studies and Production, has been working on LGBTQ issues in videogames for over a decade now. But there was an assumption she made about the field that led her down her most recent path. Every time she would talk about her work, someone would inevitably ask her about the history of LGBTQ content in videogames. She assumed someone else would have taken on the task of archiving such work, but she was wrong.



“Every time I wanted to teach about or talk about LGBTQ game content holistically, I felt like I was starting from scratch and really wanted a more reliable go to list,” Shaw told me. She is the founder of the LGBTQ Game Archive. An archive she runs, for the most part independently, with the occasional help of anyone she has the funds to hire.

This year, Temple University announced it was awarding Shaw an academic fellowship and a grant of $1000 to help her efforts of building and maintaining the LGBTQ Game Archive.

Shaw’s archive is, as she describes it, a “comprehensive overview … I wanted to record all the information surrounding LGBTQ content in games. It would be impossible to play every game and record all the instances of relevant content—though that’s a long-term dream of mine—so a record of the records of LGBTQ content are an important part of videogame cultural history I’d like to document.”

“I think we’ll see people start to explore sexuality in a more fluid way”

Shaw makes all her findings public, providing all the necessary citation. The archive is also public and broadly available. A decision, she says, is because, “my work is reliant on the labor of other folks who have captured game footage, written walkthroughs, et cetera. So it only seems ethical to share my work.”

Her documentation goes back over 30 years throughout gaming’s history. In this time, Shaw says, LGBTQ representation has changed a lot, and not at all. While there is a lot more content than there ever was, a lot of the representation has stayed the same. For example, Shaw told me in the 80s there was a near equal share of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and gender non-conforming characters. In the 90s, while the number of gay characters were increasing, the rest were staying about the same. Most were also white, and non-playable characters (NPCs).

“Games have had same-sex romances since the 1990s,” she explains, “though now their romance options seems to have more explicitly coded sexualities whereas in early games it tended to be that NPCs who could be romanced could be romanced regardless of the player character’s gender. The one big change is that there seem to be fewer implicitly queer characters—they are more explicitly labelled LGBTQ characters—a trend we see in other LGBTQ media representation generally.”

Temple’s Scholarship Center has provided the help of an RA, Christopher Persaud, who, Shaw explains, will help her make the “archive” into an “Archive.” The site, currently hosted on WordPress, is now being transferred to an Omeka site for better archival support and documentation. Persaud has been both adding new games and doing a lot of the work bringing the site over. As for the money: “The semester and fellowship just started so we are still working on how to spend the $1000. It might go towards buying games and equipment, travel costs, et cetera,” Shaw says.

The archive currently has 490 games—two more were added the day of our interview, I was told. Each game takes anywhere between three and 20 hours to research, with larger series, such as Grand Theft Auto, taking upwards of 80 hours to research. Notable games in the archive include, Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! (1987), Sonic The Hedgehog 2 (1992), Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (2004), and, most recently, this year’s Firewatch.

It’s Shaw’s plan, if she’s able, to work on the LBGTQ Archive for her whole career; she says she would love to never be done with the project. As for how LGBTQ representation will change in gaming over the next 30 years, Shaw says, “I think we’ll see people start to explore sexuality in a more fluid way and not only represent romance as monogamous. I think we’ll also start to see homosexual and bisexual relationship that is not just relegated to same-sex romance options.” She also believes, given recent trends, transgender characters may get more nuanced representations.

“I also hope that games begin to show more diversity among LGBTQ characters, as the tendency is for major LGBTQ characters to be white, gay, cisgender men while others are more minor characters,” she continues. “I would particularly love to see more games about LGBTQ people told from their perspective.”

You can keep up with Shaw by following her on Twitter. To keep up with the LGBTQ Game Archive, follow it on Twitter or visit its website.

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The disjointed Prague of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Heterotopias  is a series of visual investigations into virtual spaces performed by writer and artist Gareth Damian Martin.

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To me, Prague has always felt like a city uniquely in communion with the past and future versions of itself.

I remember my first visit, a local friend taking me to the once mysterious, now legendary Cross Club: an amorphous labyrinth of scrap metal occupying the lower floors and basement of a decaying, communist-era panelák. Stumbling past the ubiquitous leather-clad and shorn-headed bouncers into one of its dancefloors was like wandering into a William Gibson wonderland, bubbling tubes of mysterious green liquid and angular metal pillars surrounding a stage backed by a whirling sculpture of metal and LEDs. My friend pulled me into the next room, a cat-walked, claustrophobic space like a dayglo version of the inside of The Matrix’s (1999) worn-out hovership, the Nebuchadnezzar.

Yet the next day I found myself in a different fantasy entirely, wandering beneath the dripstone wall of the Wallenstein Palace’s gothic grotto. A work of medieval devilry, it was designed to help its affluent owners consider the slow decay of life, the dark nature of existence and the romantic power of nature. Among the strutting peacocks I gazed up at its accretions, their 500 years of slow growth forming grotesque faces and bodies, like human forms but tumorous and overgrown.

the perfect concrete image of a city of split histories

To find this striking balance, between imagined histories and imagined futures, in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided depiction of the iconic city was something of a surprise. Among the crude metaphors for the social divisions of race and class, and the comical kleptomania of its protagonist Adam Jensen, the game manages a detailed and nuanced portrait of a city of disjunctions.

First, there is the disjunction of monolithic history and garish tourism, epitomized by the idea of the “old town,” which has marked out historic centers across Europe as Disneylands of potted history. For a visitor to Prague, this atmosphere is unavoidable, and in Mankind Divided it is equally ever present. Luxury shops, vast digital billboards, flashy clubs, westernized cafes: images of commercialization at any cost are present wherever you turn.

Onto this, Mankind Divided grafts a language of disjunctive high-tech and brutalist architecture, entirely suited to both the communist-era monoliths and techno-fetishist fashions of contemporary Prague. Perhaps mirroring the games central theme of “natural” vs “augmented,” this pursuit of urban contrast serves instead as the perfect concrete image of a city of split histories, bringing to mind the real Prague’s Nová scéna, Žižkov TV Tower and Frank Gehry’s “Dancing House”. It’s a rare thing in games to see a city like Prague, with its medieval storybook reputation, to be depicted so honestly as a compromised, disjointed thing.

Yet, lingering on the outskirts of its small central fragment of Prague, Mankind Divided also presents the Prague that huddles around this complex, fractured heart. Though more run-down and bombed out than the Prague of today, the red-tile roofscape and fading colors of the painted houses are instantly recognizable, as are the layers of graffiti obscuring them. The courtyards of these streets hide peaceful sanctuaries, the buildings around overgrown and crumbling.

Within this sepia-toned imaginary Prague, Mankind Divide hides a distinct Praha treasure; a rambling bookshop in a turn of the century style. Though incongruous in a paper-free future, Mankind Divided is right in thinking that the city of Franz Kafka, of Jan Neruda, of Milan Kundera, and Vaclav Havel would never give up its books. After all, the imagined Pragues of these writers, are cities in their own right, converging playfully around some indescribable thing.

Yet Mankind Divided also reshapes Prague, contributing its own image to the catalog of imagined images and atmospheres that animate the city. Golem City, a towering pile of prefab metal housing units on the outskirts of Prague, a ghetto for the augmented humans cast out by society, feels extravagant in comparison to the more nuanced hub of Prague. It is the fantasy of the Prague’s infamous techno scene shorn of its playful attitude, and expanded to form a seemingly vast and ornate urban space. I say seemingly, because while the game’s image of Golem City is multi-layered and cut through with endless passages, it is a surprisingly corridored game-space, leading you by the nose through irreducible kipple-packed environments.

its playful use of scrap to build a perfect cyberpunk stage set

This is a cyberpunk standard, hammered into a shape that fits into the Czech Republic. The presence of huge bundles of wires, wreathing the streets in dark shadows, is less a reference to Prague’s ever-present tram and telephone wires, gathered here and there, but more to Golem City’s true origin: the cyberpunk ur-city of Kowloon. The Kowloon Walled City, with its densely packed apartments, its near constant darkness, its dripping wet streets and stories of triad law have made it a powerful influence on the imagery of cyberpunk.

Despite being demolished in 1994, its ghost has slipped into the imaginations of artists and designers across the world, rebuilding it digitally in games and films over and over again. Here it finds some points of connection with Prague, its improvised street furniture and rigorous cataloged low-fi markets feeling appropriate for a city known for its junk shops, and descending into it I can’t help but think of the Cross Club, with its liberally borrowed references, and its playful use of scrap to build a perfect cyberpunk stage set. There is even a central sculpture, hammered out of florescent tubes and abandoned tech, which wouldn’t be out of place behind the DJ booth. On closer inspection I find a pair of shoes hanging by their laces from its center. A comically human detail in an extravagant fantasy. Yes, that does feel like Prague after all.

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You’ll want to pay close attention to The Lion’s Song’s second episode

Episode one of The Lion’s Song, titled “Silence,” focused on the timid composer Wilma’s struggle to overcome creative block while secluded in a cabin in the Alps. The forthcoming second episode, “Anthology,” moves on from Wilma’s story, but it won’t leave her behind.

Anthology switches protagonists to follow Franz Markert, a painter back in Vienna who can see different “layers” of his subject’s personalities. A brief trailer shows him making cheerful conversation with one of his subjects, inquiring about his childhood as a ghostly figure appears by him, presumably one of the “layers” that Franz is channeling. Earlier, a snippet of Wilma from episode one shows her musing on her past history with Franz, who painted her in Vienna before she took her sabbatical to the mountains.

playing with the idea of that going in reverse

The Lion’s Song’s origin as a Ludum Dare jam game originally hinted that it would focus on the connections between people—the jam’s theme was “Connected Worlds”—and episode one provided that with Wilma’s impromptu telephone conversations with a Czech man named Leos. Now, the introduction of Franz presents the opportunity for many more of these connections, especially considering his prominent place in the artistic salons of early 20th-century Austria. That way, he can be tied back to Wilma and forward to (presumably) Emma, the third artist who will play a role in The Lion’s Song’s last two episodes.

But conversation isn’t the only way to connect the protagonists. Along with the traditional method of your episode one choices altering your episode two choices, The Lion’s Song is also playing with the idea of that going in reverse: what you paint as Franz may appear on the walls of the cabin that Wilma exiles herself to in episode one. Whether this is included in episode two as a kind of flashback, or whether it’s necessary to properly go back to episode one and see the art you’ve put up on the walls, isn’t known. Perhaps Franz’s recollections of his time with Wilma will influence her own musings to the same extent.

Luckily, The Lion’s Song’s first episode is currently up on Steam for free, so you can look for pictures in the background that may later be home to Franz’s masterpieces as you wait for the release of the second episode. Brief footage from Gamescom last week shows that it keeps the strong visuals of episode one’s sepia tone, although the environment of Franz’s urban apartment is much different than Wilma’s alpine view. We’ll be able to explore their connection later this year.

You can find out more about The Lion’s Song over on its website.

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