Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 71

The cyberpunk dystopia we were warned about is already here

This is a preview of an article you can read on our new website dedicated to virtual reality, Versions.

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It’s the Sunday morning following a busy week, and my wife and I are attempting a calm moment. She’s flying out in the afternoon for a week-long company retreat, so these last few hours together are significant, our chance to recharge batteries before entering the world of teleconferences and deadlines. Unfortunately, the routine business of maintaining a household—the multitude of obnoxious little tasks that make up most of our days—has gotten away from us over the course of the week, and before we know it our scant hours together evaporate. The very idea of a quiet Sunday morning becomes the stuff of unimaginable luxury.

Which seems weird, because making a sleepy Sunday morning possible for busy people is supposed to be the battlefield on which Silicon Valley lives and dies, what its array of time-saving hallelujahs—apps and micro-transactional relationships with nearby strangers and smart appliances—are designed to preserve, to nurture, to grow more of. This promise isn’t just of sharing a coffee with a loved one; were I not stuck in traffic or encountering delayed flights or wrangling with FedEx’s automated help line, one presumes I could be painting a portrait or learning Italian. I could find the freedom to realize my best self.

We have too few examples of things simply having worked as intended

This is the world of the “Internet of Things” (often abbreviated “IoT”), a network of devices, appliances, and infrastructure embedded with sensors and connectivity so that they can automatically exchange data to better align products and services. In the world of the IoT, my fridge communicates with the containers therein, senses when they’re getting low, adds milk to a home delivery service order. It talks with a step-counter and heart monitor I am presumably always wearing so that I can be told how many miles I’ll have to walk to burn off what I’m about to eat. A ride-share or, even better, a self-driving car arrives on a schedule that self-adjusts relative to traffic. My bills are paid on time, planes are never delayed, washing machines don’t require me to find quarters in the couch cushions, and FedEx delivers my goddamned contact lenses.

It’s a compelling fantasy. We all have anecdotes of the Kafkaesque experience of filing taxes or attempting to dispute an erroneous cell phone charge. We have too few examples of things simply having worked as intended. Having something feel like it “just works” has taken on the aspect of the ultimate design achievement. Part of what’s elevated Apple to ambassadors from distant continents of next-level business is that the products they design simply do what they’re supposed to do. That things should do what they’re designed to do is so counterintuitive that Apple can unironically claim to “Think Different” for having suggested it.

READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE OVER ON VERSIONS.

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Systems thinking reveals the weaknesses of the current American revolution

Revolution is a big word these days. We’re hearing about it a lot on social media, on all things, but its use in modern times is always tinged with the recent memory of the Arab Spring, and before it the color revolutions and aftereffects of the Revolutions of 1989. Now it has crept into American politics with the 2016 election season. Nicky Case, who has previously worked with systems thinking, recently blogged about their attempt to dissect what actually happens in revolutions, through systems thinking.

These outcomes would be revolutionary if they were possible

The word “revolution” has been widely used in this election by supporters of both democratic-socialist candidate Bernie Sanders and reality TV star/Republican nominee Donald Trump. The idea behind that is that if Sanders was elected, the US would have backpedaled from its love affair with capitalism and done something about student loan debt, while if Donald Trump is elected the government will turn into a cosmic force capable of disregarding a Congress that hates him and start building border walls and shit, hastening our transformation into the world of The Hunger Games (2008). Both of those outcomes would be revolutionary—if we go back to the dictionary definition of the word, as turning the country into a dystopian YA novel is technically “a dramatic change in the way something works”—if they were possible.

The operative word here is if. We have no idea what would have happened if Sanders had been elected, or what would happen in November if Hillary Clinton moves to the Bahamas and all of the third party candidates turn into birds. Maybe Trump could build a racist wall. Maybe Sanders could convince the American public that socialism isn’t a bad word. But I doubt it because, as Case stresses, that’s not really how revolutions work.

Via Phil Roeder on Flickr

This is because political power isn’t linear. It may seem like the guy on top controls the guys below him who control all of us, but Case explains (with a great, loopy illustration) that it’s more complicated than that. The head honcho and all of his cronies, along with the systems they represent, act more like checks and balances to each other. For example, a President Trump would be checked by opposition in Congress, the realities of our military capacity, the fact that everyone hates him, and Mexico, who aren’t going to build his stupid wall. The revolution that he promises his supporters may still come—who knows what that guy could do—but it’s more likely that he’d be halted halfway there and the US would be thrown into political turmoil, as has happened to many a revolution before him.

Evolution is a slow metamorphosis of existing structures

So if we can’t fix the guy at the top, what do we do? Case’s answer to this is in the title of their blog post: “Evolution, Not Revolution.” Long story short, evolution may be dull compared to passion and revolution and justice, but it gets the job done and, more importantly, it doesn’t collapse. A whale’s blowhole doesn’t drop back down to its nose just because the guy who put it there wasn’t aware of the consequences of his decision. Evolution operates as a slow metamorphosis of existing structures, so even though it isn’t as immediately satisfying as electing Birdman to the White House might be, it has a lot more potential for sustainable, satisfying change.

Case goes into a lot more detail in their blog post, and breaks down the revolutionary evolution (trademark that) process down into concrete steps. You can read the whole thing here.

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Windows Solitaire cards are invading the real world, pixels and all

Prepare for one of the most famous deck of cards to hit a felted table near you: retailer AreaWare is releasing an IRL deck of playing cards patterned after the Solitaire decks from Windows 3.

Designed in partnership with the deck’s original designer Susan Ware, the Solitaire cards feature the iconic 16 VGA color palette and pixel graphics that inspired many an afternoon of procrastination.

Ware got back into that 90s frame of mind

Solitaire was bundled with Windows 3, and designed to “soothe people intimidated by the operating system.” With its simple black, red and yellow color scheme—included with a variety of interesting deck backs—it became a casual game staple and a version of Solitaire still comes installed with Windows to this day.

Ware is perhaps best known for her work at Apple, designing the early graphical appearance of the Macintosh computer (the lasso and Finder icons are her design) but also designed the classic Solitaire look for Windows.

“I worked on the original pixel art for the on-screen Solitaire cards in 1990 using an IBM PC, Microsoft Paint, and the typical 16 VGA color palette of the time. A lot of those weren’t particularly attractive colors…” Ware got back into that 90s frame of mind to make a few Jokers to complete the deck, features that weren’t included in the original edition of Solitaire.

AreaWare is releasing the deck this year to coincide the with the 25th anniversary of Windows 3 Solitaire. You can purchase the deck from the AreaWare website.

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Heterotopias: The domestic disorder of Uncharted 4

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

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There’s an unlikely thread of domesticity that runs through the heart of Uncharted 4, alongside the exoticism of its adventuring and the breezy violence of its combat. On three separate occasions the game puts us in a house, and asks us about its occupants, casting the player as an archaeologist not of rare antiquities, but the artefacts that tie a place to a person.

The first of these houses, the marital home of Nathan and Elena Fisher, might be imagined as an ideal one; our heroes resting place, their happy ever after. Yet like most homes it reveals itself to be an uneasy compromise, a many layered thing. We begin in the attic; Drake’s “office” and the space he has set aside for the re-staging of past glories. Littered with artefacts, the game encourages us to wallow in nostalgia, as Drake does, recalling the “good times.”

rich with the debris of disordered lives

This listless ego-trip takes place in a space divided in two. At one end of the attic, the golden rays of a dying sun cast the world in a golden glow, yet at the other, the seeping in of early night sets everything in the sharp blue of melancholy. This division is one that comes to define the spaces of the Drake house—the domestic duality of warming comfort of prized memory, and cold purposelessness of an everyday life.

The spaces lit by these contrasting lights are rich with the debris of disordered lives. At first it appears to be charming clutter, the kind that goes unnoticed by those under the spell of their own domestic bliss. But it builds in corners, spills out from cupboards.

Unopened mail, clothes thrown aside, towels twisted on the bathroom floor; here Uncharted 4’s photo-realism finds its true meaning. Not in its rendering of the fantastic but its pained detailing of these interiors, one that insights a kind of dulling claustrophobia. There is sadness here, and regret, in the smear of the dirty windows, looking out on the all-too-near houses of this silent neighborhood.

Houses are, of course, also places of invisible divisions, territories mapped out by the routine movements of bodies. The most obvious in this case is Drake’s fantasy attic retreat, but there are subtler markers. Take the chairs claimed by abandoned clothes, a habit familiar to most of us. Elena claims the office, carefully maintained and ordered but marked with the traits of obsession, the half-closed windows mirroring a narrowed focus.

the home is both a space of connection and disconnection

Drake’s instead claim the kitchen table, cluttered, a lone coffee mug idling there since morning. It is hard not to imagine those early dawns he might spend there in a silent house, beautiful in their isolation, deadening in their routine.

The detail of this house makes a world of it then, an imagined gathering of lives that weave around each other, occasionally touching. It is something universal perhaps, that the home is both a space of connection and disconnection, but there are also particular qualities here.

Most particular of all is the prevalence of frames. Photographs, drawings, posters and paintings sit neatly on the walls, carefully framed and closed. These memories and fantasies confront you at every corner, almost unnerving in their constant presence. Their frames bring out the frames elsewhere in the Drake house too; the frames of doorways and windows, of walls and corners.

Everywhere you look things are closed off, separated out. These frames become a series of traps, locking the spaces of the house into an ever-closing set of 90-degree angles. In my explorations, I find myself pursuing this trend, finding frames everywhere, discovering structures closing in on all sides.

Then, above the bed I come to three framed images, odd photographs that seem bizarre in their focus. They show small sections of sky, blocked, cropped and divided by the forms of ancient architecture. A triptych, they feel like a potent symbol for this entire house: a series of studies of how you can become utterly and inescapably trapped in the structures of your own life.

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Which Passover Plague Are You? is a real question and a real game

Anyone who had the misfortune of going through bible school will know the story: the Jewish people spent generations in slavery, tortured at the hands of great Pharaohs, before God inflicted 10 plagues upon Egypt to free his ill-treated servants. What wasn’t covered in the Abrahamic texts, though, were questions like, what would be the soundtrack to your plague? Or, what’s your revenge color?

What would you do with the power of a god?

Designed by Veve Jaffa, Which Passover Plague Are You? tasks you with the seemingly simple decision of how you, a human representative hand-picked by the big guy himself, will take revenge on Egypt. A click-through series of increasingly eccentric questions reveals strange truths about God’s personality as well as your own. Hover over a sentence with your mouse and it reveals its Hebrew translation.

Despite its preposterous premise, the game actually raises a great point: what would you do with the power of a god? More specifically, how would you use that power to exact bloody revenge on your enemies?

But we wouldn’t be talking about this game if it were that simple.  I won’t spoil it, but Which Passover Plague Are You? proceeds to masterfully weave together themes of morality, death, time, and Y2K.

You can purchase it for the mortal price of $2.50 here.

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Three burly men will set out on a gentle adventure with you next month

Just hearing the name Burly Men at Sea—along with watching its trailers, filled to the brim with a bouncing, benevolent brawniness–effectively communicates what it’s like to play the game. You embark on a journey as not one, not two, but three Brothers Beard, who put the lumbersexual hipster trend to shame. Heeding the call of the blue siren, you join them as they gallivant across the sea and a storybook of various Norwegian haunts.

“We knew we were making Burly Men at Sea before we knew what it would be,” said co-creator David Condolera. “We had that name in our head before we even started making games.”

The name captures the game’s unique sense of gentle masculinity, with a ruggedness that only goes beard-deep. At heart, Burly Men at Sea is a softie, taking you on what married duo David and Brooke Condolera call a “quiet adventure.” The game consists of many branching narrative vignettes devoid of puzzles and high scores, but with plenty of optional and delightful interactive play experiences.

In the demo I played, you explore a lovely fishing town, complete with all the classic archetypal villagers, like an old crone, a surly man, and a smith. Inside one of the buildings is a chicken coop that does nothing to further the plot, but charms you into exploration anyway. Inviting curious players to discover its small joys, you can click on a mama chicken only to watch her pop out an egg that you can then click to hatch a little yellow chickity (you can actually repeat the process five times, bringing an adorably tiny new life into the world each time). It may not have anything to do with the main story at hand, but “it’s something that both enriches it and lets you as the player have more control over the world.”

As detailed by the trailer (above), the game is setting sail for September 29th, where it will be available on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.

the companions mimic the dynamic between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy

But one aspect that is difficult to pick up on in the trailers is their different approach to branching narratives. David and Brooke explained that they didn’t want to fall into the trappings of A/B storytelling, or good/bad moral decision-making. Instead, “we’re trying to let you take action that irrevocably shapes the direction of the story. So it’s much more organic to player action.” Shaping the player’s perception and choices are the three seamen: Hasty Beard, Brave Beard, and Steady Beard.

Aside from being a particularly magical number, Brain&Brain also chose to use three main protagonists because they “think there’s something to three characters with disparate viewpoints.” Taking inspiration from the original Star Trek (1966), the companions mimic the dynamic between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. “Kirk is the steady guy who has to take two separate perspectives and somehow combine them: Spock, who’s logical, and McCoy, who’s emotional. We’re trying something similar, but in this case you, as the player, must determine which perspectives to move toward with.”

You can find more info here and preorder it on the Humble Store here.

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The invisible women of videogames

When I was a young girl, I read an anecdote about Lara Croft—it said that her iconic look was created when her designer wanted to enlarge her breasts by 50 percent but accidentally entered 150 percent in the window. When he saw the effect he decided that it was great and that’s how the heroine should look—and thus the legend was born. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s plausible, and the fact that it is tells us something about female characters in videogames, and how we think about women in general. Or maybe—how we look at them.

It’s well-known that most female characters in videogames are strongly sexualized. This happens especially when their bodies are visible, when they can be made to pose for the viewer, sometimes in a manner so absurd it would break their back. However, this can be avoided by not showing women on screen at all. Think of first-person games, which show the world from their protagonist’s eyes. Most often, these games are about men shooting people with a variety of guns. There are, however, titles that try to avoid that, and whether through coincidence or not, they happen to star women. Perhaps the most known cases of this are Portal (2007), Portal 2 (2011), and Mirror’s Edge (2008). All three games ended up having female, non-white protagonists, who are almost never shown on screen. In Portal, you sometimes see Chell if you place portals in a specific way, but Faith from Mirror’s Edge (I’m talking about the first game, not the recently-released Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst) is shown only in cartoon-like cutscenes and once in the final scene of the game.

as if women in games will only find power in their physical absence

The similarities between these games are striking. All three take place in mostly white, sterile-like environments, fully controlled and fully observed by the antagonists—vicious AI in case of the Portal games and equally vicious authorities in Mirror’s Edge. The only uncontrollable force in these otherwise totally-ordered worlds is the main character, and the only weapon that this character has is her ability to move in unpredictable ways. It’s a significant deviation from most first-person action games, which typically follow male characters who overcome their surroundings by force. Instead, we have these women using creativity, agility, and an ability to see the paths and doors where, for everyone else, there are walls and barriers. All three games are about striving to survive and succeeding at it against all odds—this is reinforced by the fact that the ending songs in Portal and Mirror’s Edge both have the same title, “Still alive.” It’s not the usual brawny triumph sung out at the end of most games, once everything has been conquered. And that difference is significant, with the title of these songs communicating ideas of how we perceive femininity.

The notion that women can move in ways that are unavailable to men is quite common, especially in videogames, in which they are often supplied as an alternate character to the muscular male hero. Another action game—and a popular one—where you can see this is Borderlands (2009), a game that is to action games what The Expendables (2010) is to action movies: purposely over-the-top and genuinely lighthearted. The only playable female character in this game, Lilith, is able to “phasewalk.” She moves through another dimension, invisible, impervious to bullets, and faster than everyone else. Similarly, in the recently-released Overwatch, we have Tracer, who can practically teleport around the battlefield, giving her unpredictability and high-speed maneuverability.

No matter if you’re looking for a scientific definition, a more humane approach, or a more down-to-earth explanation, when looking at the evidence you’ll always end up at the notion that movement is founded on a deep relationship to one’s environment. Good, efficient movement is about being as much a part of an environment as possible. It’s true for sneaking rogues, for Faith from Mirror’s Edge—the city has paths for her everywhere—for Kat from Gravity Rush (2012), who can shift gravity and run on every surface possible, and for many other female characters. The more you are a part of your environment, the more possibilities you see. Or, you could look at it another way, that even if an environment is designed to kill you or control you, women are able to subvert it to their advantage.

This harmony is also closely connected with beauty—good movement is beautiful. It’s a form of art. In Mirror’s Edge, Gravity Rush, and the Portal games, moving is an act of giving new meaning to space. Falling becomes flying; walls, rooftops, and all kinds of architecture become ladders and pavements. If art is about discovering new meanings in well-known forms—and some people believe it is—the heroines in these games are artists indeed.

Art (and “good” movement) is also about mastery. Mastery is necessary to move efficiently, especially when you are jumping from roof to roof, a few hundred feet above the ground. But when we think about movement, mastery, art, and femininity, and the way they all connect, the first thing that should come to mind is dancing. And there is a videogame in which all these things are presented at once—the PlayStation 4 title Bound. As can be read in the short description accompanying the game’s trailer, “Bound transports you into a beautiful, fantastical world that exists in the mind of a woman revisiting the memories of her childhood. You’ll use dance moves to traverse vast environments filled with platforming challenges.”

if an environment is designed to kill you or control you women are able to subvert it to their advantage

We began with the idea that the female body, when made visible, is sexualized, and then moved on to how videogames have avoided this by creating invisible women, rendered so by their first-person perspective and fast movement. But to stop there would be a hopeless end, as if women in games will only find power in their physical absence and the traces they leave. Bound presents an alternate, it being a game in which the body is the most important aspect—after all, the main character is a ballerina. If you watch the trailer, even if you look at it for a second, you’ll realize that the player’s avatar in Bound isn’t sexualized at all, and it is wholly present. Maybe it’s because the creators want Bound to be a game about femininity as seen from the inside: “As the game progresses, the introspective story unfolds through powerful metaphor and imagery, adding emotional depth to the protagonist’s journey,” the description reads.

“Bound” has many meanings in English, some of which are connected with restriction. That brings up perhaps the most important aspect of movement—freedom. Not the kind of freedom that you fight for, but the kind of freedom a person can have even when she is being held captive as a test subject by a mad artificial intelligence, or when she’s a citizen of the city in which everyone and everything is under surveillance.

In Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea cycle (1968-2001) there is a legend about people and dragons being a singular species a long time ago. At some point in history they split up—humankind chose the riches of the world while the dragons chose freedom. But because they were one species, in every generation there are two children, who are both dragon and human at the same time. In the books, three of them appear, all three of them women in a patriarchal society. There is a song, composed by one of them who is only mentioned briefly—Woman of Kemay. It goes like this:

Farther west than west

beyond the land

my people are dancing

on the other wind.

The sense of longing for another, better world, the certainty that this world simply exists, the freedom that comes from this certainty, and the calm strength that comes with it—to me Song of Woman of Kemay says almost all that there is to say about the connection between movement, freedom, femininity, and many more.

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How No Truce With The Furies is pushing videogame writing further

No Truce With The Furies, in addition to being an oil painting come to life, is a game with a very high standard for writing. Developer Fortress Occident boasts a published science-fiction author in its writing team, and the game cites as inspirations text-heavy Infinity Engine games like Planescape: Torment (1999) and the original Fallout (1997). The detail an isometric perspective allows means the studio is able to go significantly more in depth than other games, but the conventions of the medium—long paragraphs of dialogue, often clicking through multiple choices with one character, and passages of narrative removed from gameplay—can be something of a hindrance.

In earlier blog posts, Fortress Occident detailed how the traditional writing approach to most of these games felt wrong for No Truce. Their writers’ literary background meant that limiting the main character’s thoughts to just dialogue and narration was unnecessarily restrictive, and ended up taking away from the writing that they really wanted to do. Bloated dialog between the player character and NPCs was unattractive and tedious, so they got creative in order to combat this. Eventually, they ended up inventing what they call “sense orbs.”

the player can engage with the environment in a way more akin to real life

Sense orbs are in-game popups that hover around the player character’s head and represent one-off reactions to their environment. If you walk into a bathroom, an orb might appear that remarks on the bad smell. A room with windows may trigger an orb about the cars on the road that you can hear outside, or the persistence of the chilly breeze, or even a speculation about the room’s importance to your current case. That way the player can engage with the environment in a way more akin to real life—or a novel, which is allowed the elaboration of descriptive text—while simultaneously encouraging familiarity with the player character.

Building on this goal, Fortress Occident recently posted a blog post about a similar system it has implemented called “afterthoughts.” It’s an attempt to recreate the feeling you get after finishing an argument, or even a particularly spirited conversation, and thinking “man, I should have said [blank].” That’s called l’esprit d’escalier—“spirit of the staircase” in French, or “staircase wit”—and No Truce uses a similar orb tactic to replicate it. Assuming you have a high enough Rhetoric skill, an orb will pop up with a better or more clever comeback, and you can ignore it or roll your eyes at will. You can even turn around and try your luck on the previous conversationalist, though they might not be impressed by your belated reply.

Writer Robert Kurvitz explains that this is all in pursuit of leaner dialogue. While they want to keep things interesting and provide enough material for all character builds to have special opportunities, they also don’t want it to become a chore. He said that “[a]fterthoughts are a way for us to keep dialogues leaner while adding more content for different builds.” No Truce With The Furies isn’t going to be overly long, but afterthoughts and sense orbs want to ensure that there’ll be enough to experience for all play styles once the game is finally out.

Read the full blog post on the No Truce With The Furies devlog .

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Spotify finally recognizes videogame music

You’d be hard pressed to find a song you want that isn’t on Spotify—except, until recently, beloved soundtracks of games like Halo (2001), Portal 2 (2011), and even the original The Sims (2000). The release of Spotify Gamers has further expanded Spotify’s gargantuan library, including pretty much every blockbuster soundtrack you can think of from the last 10 years. The library is extremely current, including cuts from No Man’s Sky, I Am Setsuna, and Florence and the Machine’s gorgeous additions to the Final Fantasy XV soundtrack.

turns games into sensorial experiences

But they didn’t stop there. Spotify is now treating game music like any other genre, complete with familiar company-curated “mood” playlists and community collaboration (including hand-picked songs from publications like Mashable and GamesBeat). Though not entirely comprised of game music, these playlists do a fine job of matching any given play style, from “Power Gaming” to “RetroWave.”

Since its humble beginnings in 2008, Spotify has monopolized the mobile music market, and rightfully so. With a free base version and unlimited play for 10 dollars a month (with much appreciated discounts for students), you have access to millions of songs, and—despite the Apple Music/Tidal beef—a majority of new releases. The ability to download songs directly to your device for offline play has negated the need to purchase music via iTunes or torrenting.

It’s good, then, to see Spotify recognize game soundtracks as the oft-underappreciated art that they are. The sheer popularity and accessibility of Spotify almost guarantees that this music, which turns games into sensorial experiences and experiences into classics, will win new hearts. If you need me, I’ll be listening to some GLaDOS bangers.

Spotify Gamers can be enjoyed for free via “genres” on the app, or on the desktop site here. 

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Documentary captures the mythos of a treasured New York arcade

There’s a certain amount of nostalgia contained within arcades. Their dark interiors lit by bright lights, a cacophony of sound and the steady hum of people talking punctuated by laughter. At their best and worst, arcades are remembered as being sticky, hot spaces where communities came together. These arcades, one in particular, are the topic of the new documentary film The Lost Arcade.

The Lost Arcade follows the life and memory of one arcade, a fixture of Manhattan night life known as the Chinatown Fair. The documentary seeks to document and record the evidence of this cultural institution, a dreamlike, grimy place that closed in 2011.

document the mythos of the Chinatown Fair

Many cities have their boarded up shops, their once thriving businesses that always seem to have closed right before you moved into town. They are made larger by peoples’ memories—from the basement like Videoport in Maine or the demolished Kentucky club The Dame. They’re the spots the locals know, where you can find the last good VHS copy of Deadly Prey (1987) or see that band play before they got big. These are the larger-than-life structures, brought low by time and rent hikes, a last good spot before everything went downhill.

The Lost Arcade seeks to document the mythos of the Chinatown Fair, a place where you couldn’t move to breathe but which had import Street Fighter cabinets. It’s a place so iconic that when it was reopened in 2012 as a standard crane-game and Fruit Ninja arcade, one fan was heard yelling “it’s a trap” from inside its now shiny, repainted walls.

The Lost Arcade follows the stories of the people who found a family in the Chinatown Fair, the “pimps, prostitutes,” homeless and kids that came from all over to play games. It’s a movie about a lost physical place, but also a lost time, and the ways that the former denizens of the Chinatown Fair are trying to reclaim a touch of that magic.

The Lost Arcade is currently out for preorder on its website, and can be seen currently in screenings in select cities.

 

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