Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 73

Near Death is a little too numb

Near Death begins when a woman crashes at the abandoned Sutro Station in the Marie Byrd Land region of Antarctica. There is no ceremonious setup, only the bare-bones facts of her situation: the temperature, the location, the condition of polar night, and the wind chill. She fumbles through the dark with the dim glow of a flashlight before finding one of the buildings of Sutro Station and uses a small personal heater to circulate warmth. Her situation only worsens as her contact cannot extract her in extreme conditions, and she resolves to find some way to survive or escape before the frigid dark engulfs her like it did the outpost. It’s a survival tale at its meanest, most basic core. There is nothing but the slow crawl forward a few glimmers of respite. Unfortunately, that meanness strips away any substance or depth to be found in the struggle for survival.

As the sophomore effort from Kent Hudson and Orthogonal Games, Near Death cannot escape comparison to the team’s previous game, The Novelist (2013). In The Novelist, the player haunts the summer home where a writer and his family retreat, unaware of how the player influences their delicate family dynamic. It’s a quiet game that, despite a somewhat narrow focus on the titular character, explores the complex relationships involved in keeping a family together. Limiting the player’s movement options makes The Novelist, at times, uncomfortably voyeuristic and helplessly bleak; even when the characters do connect with each other, someone’s wants are always lost. Combing the thoughts and writings of the family gives the player an intimate perspective into each character, resulting in a troubling and honest picture of a family haunting the same space.

Near Death forgoes character drama for a story about the methods and means of survival

Whereas The Novelist minimized the player’s ability to explore the house and interact with its characters to maximize the impact of an intimate story, Near Death attempts the opposite—forgoing character drama for a story about the methods and means of survival. That is, Near Death’s narrative drama builds from the arduous tasks required for the protagonist’s survival. Her only contact communicates to her through a teletype, and, though there is enough banter to give the illusion of a character behind that antiquated tech, neither he nor the protagonist becomes anything more than what they do. Actions are the story in its entirety.

Near Death, then, becomes a survival game at its absolute purest. Others in its genre—The Flame in the Flood, Alien Isolation (2014), Don’t Starve (2013), Rust (2013), Miasmata (2012), etc.—all contain something other than the natural elements (a monster, a noticeable art style, a death-and-rebirth feedback loop) to trouble the player as she fights to survive in hostile environments. Near Death, however, has no hook or narrative invention to propel its protagonist forward other than the primal need to stay alive. As a result, she and her contact, despite a few jokes between them, seem hollow and under-developed. If some other part of her character, some existential force other than my directing her with a mouse and keyboard, occupies her mind and drives her toward home, I never learned about it.

This hollowness of character echoes in the empty Sutro Station as well. Aside from a breakroom that contains a pool table and an eerily functional jukebox, nothing about it seems like it was ever inhabited. Traces of human life have all been buried under ice and snow, and while the wilds of Antarctica should maintain a distinctness in the game, the station just seems like another version of an empty house or abandoned outpost I have explored time and time again in recent memory. There may be some lesson here, a sort of Conradian observation about the futility of our desire to tame the dark parts of the world. If so, then it forgets the human element that makes such moral tales resonate. Instead of tension, there’s boredom; instead of revelation, I met another task to complete. For most of the time I spent in Sutro Station, I felt bored, encumbered by the slog from point to point until I could finally leave.

Part of me thinks this feeling of boredom is by design. After all, it is only because I had nothing else to do that I thought meticulously how to move from one section of the station to the next. I looked at the very basic map I found, planned my routes with poles and guiding ropes to anchor my path, set down beacons to serve as guide markers, and took careful stock of the battery life of the flashlight as I sent her stumbling into the dark polar night. I began to notice how the portable kerosene heater worked best in small spaces and found ways to create small pockets in the station to generate a quick burst of warmth before moving to the next objective. Despite its emptiness, I grew somewhat attached to the station that held me hostage as often as it provided respite.

On a couple of occasions, I even ventured out in the snow with the distinct goal of becoming hopelessly lost, and after what felt like a few feet, I turned around and lost sight of the station. The terror of being swallowed by the darkness outside is, perhaps, the game’s greatest quality. It happens suddenly and convincingly after misjudging distance or losing a guiding light through the thickness of the storm that panic causes a sequence of bad judgments that result in freezing to death. Trudging through the oppressive dark and scrambling to patch up broken windows to create a makeshift shelter for heat provides moments of genuine triumph, as long as conquering sections of the landscape can serve as its own reward.

In those moments, Near Death succeeds in eliciting a sigh of relief at finding a moment to breathe in a place hostile to comfort, and, thankfully, the game’s smart pacing means it does not overstay its welcome. Such tension, after all, is no more sustainable than the station at the game’s center. Ultimately, though, Near Death has nothing to say beyond the struggle to navigate the harshest environment on Earth. Perhaps that’s enough, that the story of survival isn’t about conquering the environment but finding a way out. But with the way in which The Novelist uses its conceit of voyeurism and spectral suggestion to tell a story of family drama, I hoped that the minds at Orthogonal had something more thematically ambitious woven into Near Death. Instead, it mostly feels cold and barren.

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My Summer Car captures the youthful spirit of trashing your ride

You like cars, right? I did for a while—car mechanic was my #2 dream job as a kid, sandwiched between entomologist (#1) and Jedi (#3)—until being passenger to a couple of semi-serious crashes meant my excitement was crushed. I still harbor some redneck-esque desire to own a really big truck one day, or to dig up a VW bus out of a junkyard and try going cross-country before I come to terms with its shitty AC, but right now, that’s the extent of my car fever.

Which is good, since My Summer Car’s recent Greenlighting means that my 7-year-old self is going to be resurrected soon, off to her destiny of beer and fishing and barreling through the Finnish countryside in a highly-customizable hunk of metal. Sweet.

cornered the market for permadeath car games set in the 1990s

My Summer Car is a car simulator. I think that’s pretty clear from the trailer, which is mostly flinging low-poly parts around while slightly manic music plays in the background. Someone yells through a phone that you’ve stolen their fuel! This dude unsheathes a wrench. The cashier at a gas station wants to talk to you about his life! That’s cool, but there’s a pile of tires right there and I’m gonna do stuff with them. Oh my god, you just got in a giant car accident! Mourn your sick ride while reaching over into the passenger seat for a beer. You’re still upside down, by the way, and the wheels are still spinning.

Okay, so maybe this is a more than a simulator. It has a lot more to do than just upgrade, what with all of the fishing and alcohol and … moose, I think. It’s certainly cornered the market for permadeath car games set in the 1990s. I appreciate its dedication to realistic mirror hangings, and the fact that you’re apparently able to make your car entirely leopard print. You can chop firewood, which is obviously a must-have for any car game. And it’s in Finland! Don’t forget that it’s in Finland. It’s your standard 1990s Finnish permadeath drinking, wood-chopping and car decoration simulator.

The good thing is that once My Summer Car is out I won’t ever have to bother with another car simulator. I may not even need my real car. The case to move to Scandinavia and learn to fish while deciphering invoices for engine parts is persuasive. Sounds like my dream job.

You can check out My Summer Car on Steam Greenlight right here .

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Alone in the Dark is still creepy in its brightly-colored remake

Today’s consoles might be a bit of hassle when compared to their predecessors. Years ago, when consoles first came out, there was no such thing as DLC, server issues, forcing players to be online in order to access a specific part of the game, or even the game itself. This might be why so many game makers and players have taken to the fantasy console that runs on your PC created by Lexaloffle Games’s founder Joseph White.

White made sure his PICO-8 fantasy console include everything a person might need when creating their game, ranging from code-editing tools, sound creation, sprites, and even maps. Users of the virtual platform can save the games they play in the form of .PNG files and referred to as “PICO-8 cartridges.” However, it restricts creators to a 128 x 128, 16-color display.

“adding more of the original game would require several cartridges”

But that didn’t stop Antoine Zanuttini from creating Alone in Pico—a small remake of Alone in the Dark, the 1992 classic which is considered the “First Ever 3D Survival Horror Game” according to Guinness World Records’s 2008 book. Alone in the Dark, and of course its remake, follows the story of supernatural detectives Emily Hartwood and Edward Camby—you can play as either one. With them, you set off on a journey to investigate haunted mansions that are supposedly infested with monsters and various terrifying creatures.

Zanuttini built his remake, Alone in Pico, using the PICO-8 fantasy console, and was, of course, restricted to its display and limited options. According to his post-mortem, “the idea of making a Pico 8 demake of the classic cult game Alone In The Dark started at Halloween 2015,” and he knew he wouldn’t be able to match the original game’s visuals or detail, “but the mesh complexity in Alone in the Dark seemed doable in Pico 8.” However, he was forced to remove some of the original components of the game such as the complex inventory system and the fighting sequences.

After trying the original game and its remake myself, I have to say that even though Zanuttini’s creation doesn’t live up to the visuals of the first game, it certainly makes up for it when it comes to optimization, fluidity, performance stability and, most importantly, creepiness. The sense of the 128 x 128 16-color display makes Alone in the Dark a completely different experience, while still maintaining the same environments and some of its iconic features.

Zanuttini plans on expanding Alone in Pico in the future, but “adding more of the original game would require several cartridges, and implementing more complex interactions (fight, throwing, shooting …).” He also hinted at the possibility of turning it to a simple 3D application, if people show enough interest in it.

You can try out Alone in Pico yourself in your browser right here.

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Rime’s mysterious island adventure set to arrive next year

We haven’t heard much about Tequila Works’s Rime since it was first revealed at Gamescom 2013, but that’s about to change. Nearly three years since its official announcement, we’ve got word that the adventure game is still in development, and it’s likely to be released in 2017. It’s got new publishers, too—and it sounds like it’s no longer a PlayStation exclusive.

So you can keep up: Rime was previously confirmed as a PlayStation 4 release, but Tequila Works ended up dropping Sony as the game’s publisher and buying back its rights. It’s possible that Rime will now come to other platforms, but nothing has been confirmed as of yet. More information on Rime’s “gameplay and platform availability details” will be announced in early 2017, a press release from Tequila Works and publisher Six Foot and Grey Box confirmed.

“a beautiful and deeply personal universe”

“Tequila Works has put an immense amount of passion and creativity into shaping a beautiful and deeply personal universe, and we’re all excited to share that experience with gamers next year,” Six Foot COO Christian Svensson said.

Some have compared Rime to Ico (2001) or The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker (2002). Comparisons between the games are inevitable, Tequila Works developer Raúl Rubio Munárriz told Polygon in 2014, but that wasn’t the team’s intention. “We looked at the game again because the moment you are compared with such giants you need to deliver or they will destroy you,” Munárriz said.

Maybe that’s why the team’s kept quiet all these years—but that’s just speculation. For now, we can just focus on what we do know: Rime’s pretty island environment is something we want to explore. We want to know why the young child’s been stranded on Rime’s mysterious cel-shaded island, and what he’ll find lurking in its depths.

The Tequila Works website has a little more about the game. Otherwise, you can check out the Rime Twitter account for updated information.

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She Remembered Caterpillars turns personal grief into pretty puzzles

Red and blue make purple. Yellow and red make orange. She Remembered Caterpillars uses the basics of color theory to guide you through its puzzles. Red blobs can only pass over red caterpillar bridges. Blue blobs can only travel over blue bridges. Combine your little blobs, though, and your new purple blob can move over red or blue. It sounds simple—and it is, at the beginning. As the game moves forward, there are more blobs. More caterpillar bridges. More colors. It gets fairly complex, but the objective is always the same: get your blob to the white flower platform so it can bloom and fly away.

She Remembered Caterpillars’s world is dangerous, mysterious. The narrative is gently implied before each puzzle begins; you’re not meant to fully understand all of it. Dangers linger underneath the surface of She Remembered Caterpillars‘s puzzles. You’ll solve them, but certain aspects will still slip through your grasp.

She Remembered Caterpillars’s story is not as straightforward as its puzzles, but that’s intentional. Writer Cassandra Khaw took inspiration from the proliferate and cyclical weirdness of fungi—it’s got a certain tenacity for survival in even the meanest of settings. She initially thought of “retelling the Isis and Osiris myth through a fungipunk lens,” Khaw said. And it makes sense: the Egyptian myth is about life, and death, and then life again. Osiris, an Egyptian god and king of Egypt, is killed by his brother, Set, who takes the throne and scatters Osiris’s body throughout Egypt. After Osiris’s death, Osiris’s wife Isis—filled with grief—recovers the pieces of her husband’s body and brings him back to life. They conceive a child, and he moves on to the underworld.

Khaw and the Jumpsuit Entertainment team got pretty far into the story before the plot took a sharp turn. Khaw’s father died. “I guess the plot change was slightly self-indulgent in a way, a kind of catharsis,” Khaw said. “I wanted to talk about grief and about bereavement and losing your parents: deaths are inevitable in everyone’s lives.”

That’s how She Remembered Caterpillars settled into the story of a scientist desperate to bring her father back—the story of a woman who’d risk all sorts of experiments to save him. “The name of the game hints at a point in time before the blight that is a happy memory,” Jumpsuit Entertainment designer Daniel Goffin said, “as well as an important revelation to the experiment [the daughter is] conducting.” She Remembered Caterpillars is an allegory for their kinship. A happy memory. “[She Remembered Caterpillars] isn’t about giving up, but about acceptance, going through the motions until you at least come to peace with what you cannot control,” Khaw added.

“I wanted to talk about grief and about bereavement and losing your parents”

In that way, She Remembered Caterpillars’ colorful little blobs represent relationships that give “the ability to overcome obstacles that would be insurmountable alone,” Goffin said. On the other hand, hanging onto those relationships desperately “can be an obstacle in itself,” and stop you from “reaching a new place,” he added. That’s represented in the game, too, with colorful bug-like archways with particular preference as to who passes through.

The new places in She Remembered Caterpillars are places you’ll likely want to go. Goffin and his team created a lush, weird land reminiscent of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds (1984)—the game’s environment is thick with a variety of mushrooms and mold, “a vast canvas of weirdness and vegetal life,” Khaw called it. Goffin also cites the European ligné claire style of art (think French artist Jean Giraud or  Belgain cartoonist Hergé) as an inspiration for She Remembered Caterpillars’ strong colors and unadulterated lines. He’s got an eye for cute characters in realistic, detailed worlds.

“We hope to engage the imagination of the players, [and] give them room for their own conclusions and ideas,” Goffin added.

She Remembered Caterpillars will be available on PC and Mac later in 2016. A short, free demo is playable now on Steam.

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A videogame about life that takes “blink and you’ll miss it” literally

After winning the IGF Award for Best Student Game in 2015, Will Hellwarth and the team at GoodbyeWorld Games have been slowly expanding the scope of their experimental game, Close Your. The team recently launched a Kickstarter to help fund their ambitious vision for a game that’s already drawn considerable attention for its unique storytelling tool.

Close Your is a narrative-driven game about the life of a man. Only, the game utilizes the player’s webcam to track their eye movement to tell their story. Each time the player blinks, the game jumps forward in time. With each blink, a person can find themselves anywhere from a month to years in the future. That’s why each narrative scenario for the character will only last as long as the player keeps their attention (and eyes) focused. Once they blink, they can find that their character’s life has literally passed them by.

Hellwarth explained that GoodbyeWorld is looking to seriously increase the scope of the storytelling within the game with the funding from Kickstarter. What was once the story of an average person has expanded into the story of an alcoholic, or a busybody. What was once the story of a man can be the story about a randomly generated man or woman. “We’ve always had the ambition to random roll the player’s gender every game and we almost got it in to the IGF version, so that’s first priority,” explains Hellwarth. The way the game is now limits the player to the life of a male character, but as the game is meant to seriously examine the nature of time on a person’s life, it’s only fitting that the game can generate a more universal experience.

Hellwarth and team wants to dig deeper

When asked if the gameplay would be expanded upon to accommodate the changes planned for characters, Hellwarth explained, “we’re looking at changing the interface completely, it’s very temp/minimalist black and white right now.” The art style has seen a considerable evolution since the original game, adding more details to character models and the environment. “[W]e want to take a little more inspiration from a favorite other indie of ours, Apartment, and integrate the text in beautiful ways as part of the environment.”

Close Your’s Kickstarter campaign video revealed the kind of emotional responses seeing a life pass in the blink of an eye elicits in a person. Hellwarth and team wants to dig deeper into the pathos of their game and broaden the scope so as to reach as many players as possible. So remove the tape from your webcam and let GoodbyeWorld in.

You can support Close Your on Kickstarter. More info on the game can be found on its website.

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Vlambeer has written a book about six years of making videogames

We haven’t heard much from Dutch videogame studio Vlambeer for a while. Since the release of Nuclear Throne last December, they’ve been rolling out updates to that and some of their other games: Super Crate Box (2010), Serious Sam: The Random Encounter (2011), and LUFTRAUSERS (2014) are all getting updates. Besides that, Jan Willem Nijman’s been working on solo projects like DISC ROOM, which was a Humble Monthly exclusive, while Rami Ismail made Breach and Clean, a game about every hotel cleaning lady who’s ever hated you. But Vlambeer as a whole has still been kinda quiet.

open pages sneak us a peek at Super Crate Boy concepts

It turns out that it’s because they’re announcing a book. (Writing? Creating? Compiling, in the time-honored, traditional fashion of digital hoarders.) Vlambeer turns six years old in September, so the book will be called 120 Years of Vlambeer & Friends. Bringing back arcade games since 1896. It’s written by the author of Killzone Visual Design, and looks just as pleasingly chunky and full of pictures as his first book—open pages sneak us a peek at Super Crate Boy concepts and some early ideas for their logo, which it seems was always a bear on fire. (I think Vlambeer means fire bear. I don’t speak Dutch.)

The book is a 20,000 word history of the company, plus interviews and concept designs, and is going to look really pretty on the coffee table that I don’t own. You can also get the Limited Edition, which is signed and comes with all of their games (and some prototypes!), along with a Vlambeer notebook that I would be terrified to write in. Since they’ve managed to get all of this done without us noticing, it’ll be shipping at the end of the year.

But don’t worry about Vlambeer! (Flambé-ar.) They’re still chugging along, and seem to have a host of projects in the works. Plus, they’ll be at PAX West at the beginning of September, so you can still buy shirts and play their games and bug them about what you should write in that notebook. It’s only the book that’s history.

Read Vlambeer’s whole announcement , then go forth and preorder .

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Magic and gender in Final Fantasy VI

Final Fantasy VI (1994) is deeply concerned with the relationship between human beings and technology. The game liberally borrows elements from Western heroic fantasy and science fiction, yet the story and action are centered around two young female protagonists, Terra and Celes, who are variations on the “magical girl” and “beautiful fighting girl” archetypes of late-20th century Japanese pop culture. Placing Final Fantasy VI within the broader context of Japanese society in the 1990s can give us a new perspective on a classic and iconic videogame while also enhancing our understanding of many of the narrative tropes and conventions of JRPGs.       

Final Fantasy VI uses gender as a lens for its exploration of the intersections between biology and technology. The social otherness culturally associated with young women provides a powerful analogy to anxieties surrounding changing definitions of fundamental humanity, expressed in debates concerning issues from organ transplants to oral contraceptives. As in many pop cultural texts in contemporary Japan, Final Fantasy VI explores its posthuman themes through the bodies of its female characters, using Terra and Celes to represent optimism concerning the possibilities for the future of the human species in relation to seemingly magical biotechnologies.

Final Fantasy VI explores its posthuman themes through the bodies of its female characters

The plot of Final Fantasy VI contains many story elements common to contemporary fantasy and science fiction. A thousand years after an unspeakable cataclysm, the human race is once again on the cusp of an industrial revolution. At the beginning of the game, a technologically-advanced nation referred to as “the Empire” is making territorial gains but is being undermined by a small rebel group. The atmosphere of Final Fantasy VI owes an aesthetic debt to the retro-speculative genre of steampunk, which American author Jeff Vandermeer calls a subcultural movement that “embraces divergent and extinct technologies as a way of talking about the future.” In the world of the game, magic co-exists with technology, but it is not used as a direct analogy for technology, nor is it antithetical to technology. Magic also does not serve as a clear allegory for nuclear power, as it arguably does in Final Fantasy VII (1997), and other games in the Final Fantasy series.

That being said, the games consistently link magic with femininity. The female characters of each Final Fantasy game are associated with a unique system of magic that drives the plot and ultimately saves the world. It’s interesting to note that almost all of these women are only half human, if they’re human at all. For example, Aerith Gainsborough from Final Fantasy VII is a descendent of an alien race and is thus able to communicate with the magical energy of the planet, which has been exploited by a corporation whose activities threaten human and natural ecosystems. Likewise, Lightning Farron from Final Fantasy XIII (2009) becomes a l’Cie—a being granted supernatural powers so that she may restore the balance between the natural world and the technologically-advanced society of human beings. In Final Fantasy games, there is a connection between magic, the nonhuman, and femininity. This is also the case in Final Fantasy VI, whose story is centered around the intertwined quests of its two protagonists, Terra and Celes.

Terra and Celes in Final Fantasy VI for Android

Terra is the daughter of a human mother and an Esper father. Espers are creatures that were engineered to serve as living weapons in an ancient war, and their magic is so powerful that they unwittingly brought about an apocalypse in the distant past. After the Empire finds the last remaining haven of the Espers, Terra is kidnapped and brainwashed into becoming a soldier. At the beginning of the story she is repeatedly referred to as “an imperial witch” and feared by the other characters, who only gradually come to appreciate her ability to use magic. Terra, whose existence symbolizes the possibility of a peaceful relationship between humans and magical power, is the focal point of the first half of Final Fantasy VI, in which the player’s goal is to help her gain knowledge of her origins and act as a bridge between humans and Espers. She is characterized by her ability to invoke a transformation from her normal human persona into her bright pink and glowing Esper form—an ability that associates her with magical girls (mahō shōjo), who can invoke powerful magical counter egos at will.

The second half of the game focuses on Celes Chere, a general in the imperial army who has been artificially infused with the essence of captured Espers, a process that has given her the ability to use magic. Like Terra, Celes is 18 years old, but she is powerful enough to have already attacked and burned at least one major city prior to the events of the game. Unlike the other characters, Celes is not frightened of Terra’s magical abilities, nor does she wish to exploit them. Instead, she demonstrates concern over Terra’s humanity, seeing her as a person instead of as a means to an end. Celes’s lithe and slender form, when juxtaposed against her sword and the geopolitical conflict in which she has become a key figure, calls to mind the conventions of the “beautiful fighting girl” (sentō bishōjo), whose female-coded compassion is often portrayed as the solution to an otherwise unwinnable war.

The ultimate fate of the world rests in the hands of young women who wield extraordinary magical powers

In Final Fantasy VI, as in other Final Fantasy games, the ultimate fate of the world rests in the hands of young women who wield extraordinary magical powers. Given the conventions of many works of science fiction and fantasy in the 20th century, in which the main protagonists have typically been male, the game’s narrative emphasis on Terra and Celes is striking. Where do the “magical girl” and “beautiful fighting girl” archetypes come from, and what do they signify?

The 1990s were a high water mark in a tide of magical girls and beautiful fighting girls. This is the decade in which the Sailor Moon manga and anime took Japan by storm before being exported to the rest of the world, where it was soon followed by other stories of young women with sparkling eyes who fought evil in colorful miniskirts. One of the most iconic beautiful fighting girls of the decade, Rei Ayanami from Neon Genesis Evangelion, would not appear until 1995, but the eponymous Nadia of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water was an otaku darling by the time the anime’s last episode aired in 1991. The magical and martial heroines of Hayao Miyazaki, such as Nausicaä from the 1984 film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, were easily recognizable to broader audiences as well.

Influential Japanese cultural critics (most notably Tamaki Saitō, the author of an academic monograph on cute girls in anime) offered various interpretations regarding what these young female characters represented to male audiences, who were accused of being pathological, infantilized, and removed from consensus reality. Meanwhile, North American scholars and cultural critics expressed strong feminist concerns over the sexualization and objectification of young female characters, especially as various aspects of an ideal femininity were commercialized as part of a broader transnational market cultures of capitalistic cuteness.

Sailor Moon promotional art by Naoko Takeuchi

Focusing on the constructions and renegotiations of gender and selfhood enacted by these magical girls neglects broader ontologies of selfhood, specifically as they intersect conversations concerning what it means to be human, less than human, and more than human—or “posthuman.” Videogames are uniquely positioned to explore issues of posthumanism, as they require the player to engage deeply with the digital and the symbolically nonhuman. In videogames, the player must actively identify with and as an artificial construct.    

This posthuman identification provides a unique means of engaging with the bioethical debates that shook public discourse in Japan during the 1990s. This era witnessed a number of political and legal upheavals, many of which were related to the boundaries of the human body. In a 1998 article on the disputes over brain death, science historian Margaret Lock demonstrates how the most intimate facets of the human body are regulated by culture and society. Even something as fundamental as death is “conceptualized not merely as a biological process,” Lock writes, “nor even simply as the demise of an individual, but also as a social process, and it is the involvement of the social order that remained the most important signifier for the majority of Japanese commentators.” Other bioethical issues that came under intense public scrutiny at the end of the millennium were organ transplantation, euthanasia, artificial insemination, and birth control by means of oral contraceptives for women.        

Videogames are uniquely positioned to explore issues of posthumanism

The movement to legalize oral contraceptives is of particular interest to the study of popular media, as it overlapped closely with images of young women in news and entertainment media. Sociologist Chizuko Ueno has recounted the intensity of the sexism suffusing debates over birth control pills, in which effective and affordable family planning was repeatedly linked with sexual promiscuity and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, as well as misinformation concerning health hazards. After a strong push by a group of feminist lawyers and politicians, oral contraceptives became legal in Japan in 1999, but not before the matter was dragged through the realm of popular culture, in which antisocial male media fans were pitted against supposedly delinquent teenage party girls, as well as their counterparts in anime and manga. Apparently, neither real-life nor fictional girls were doing the nation of Japan any favors by refusing to settle down into nuclear families.

In short, the animated, illustrated, and virtual bodies of the young women of Japanese media in the 1990s were not merely symbols for changing gender roles; they were also facets of larger conversations in which the physical bodies of real young women became a notable point of contention in public conversations concerning the changing relationships between medical technologies and the social ontologies of humanity that these technologies challenged.

The two protagonists of Final Fantasy VI, Terra and Celes, are strongly informed by their social context, in which young women were positioned as potentially half human and half “other” in bioethical debates. The magic associated with these two women can be read as a type of posthumanism, or the possibility of technologically enhanced humanity that is rendered less threatening by its association with youthful femininity. By the end of the game, the otherness of Terra and Celes has all but vanished as the male characters learn to use magic due to the player’s efforts. Most players will have come to accept the “otherness” of Terra and Celes as natural over the course of the 40-hour story, both because the use of magic confers a definite advantage in gameplay and because of the emotional identification implicit in the active roleplay necessary to advance within the game. The player learns to accept that the boundaries defining what it means to be human are much more porous and liminal than they seemed at the beginning of the story.

Celes discussing her past with Terra in Final Fantasy VI for Android

As media critic Henry Jenkins has argued in his seminal 2002 essay “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” when we read videogames, it can be productive to focus on “examining games less as stories than as spaces ripe with narrative possibility.” Magic and gender in Final Fantasy VI are not merely themes, but active elements of gameplay deeply embedded within the narrative. Likewise, Terra and Celes are not characters to be consumed, but identities to be embraced and managed. The posthuman otherness of magic, which serves as a representation of both the possibilities and the anxieties embedded within debates on bioethics of the 1990s, is enacted through Terra and Celes, who become the avatars of the increasingly sympathetic player.

In Final Fantasy VI, magic—as both a narrative theme and an interactive element of gameplay—functions as a multivalent cipher for posthuman bioethics, while the culturally ascribed nonthreatening cuteness of femininity endows the destabilization of human identity with positive emotional connotations. The end result is that the world is saved, and humanity, in all its forms, can bravely continue on into an optimistic future.

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A videogame about being an old person trying to understand Pokémon Go

My nana called me up in a panic when Pokémon Go was first released. The news was reporting on stories of kids getting robbed while playing the augmented reality game. I’m sure you remember. Now, I’m no kid … I’m nearly 30 years old. But my grandma wanted to warn me—needed to warn me—about the potential dangers I was putting myself at risk of. “Bad people will try to hurt you, Nicole,” my Nana said. “You don’t know what could happen to you if you play that game.”

That’s what Clayton Chowaniec’s That Pokeyman Thing is about—being an old person who is very, very confused about Pokémon Go. You’ll play as the old guy, a grandfather, who’s got a grandson deep in the augmented reality game. He gives you one of his smartphones (he’s got 12) before he runs off to catch ’em all.

Literally a ball with a face

You’ll chase after him, albeit, at a reasonable pace. You’re a sweet old man, after all. Kids won’t let you pass through checkpoints without showing them your rare Pokémon, so you’re forced into playing the game. If you want to find your grandson (and you do—or else your daughter will put you in a worse nursing home), you’ll need to find yourself a Peekachorps, an Idiot Rat, or Literally A Ball With A Face.

The whole thing, visually, is a nod to the pixely world of Gameboy Pokémon games—complete with 8-bit music by William Crawford.

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“When two persons in search of a Pokémon clash at the corner of Sunset and San Vicente, is there violence? Is there murder?”

Werner Herzog is one old guy confused by Pokemon Go. Chowaniec created Pokeyman as a response to Herzog’s amazing response to Pokémon Go, and as a contemplation of his own mixed feelings on the game. Chowaniec is caught between two conflicting ideas—”is Pokémon Go a shallow time-waster, or an amazing watershed moment in gaming that makes life more fun and brings people together?” Probably both, Chowaniec, probably both.

That Pokeyman Thing is playable for free. Visit the Punch the Moon website for more of Chowaniec’s work.

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Upcoming game brings the undersea wonders of Jules Verne novels to life

There’s something innately compelling about the sea. Perhaps it’s the sheer scale and lightless depths where life can still dwell, or the colorful beauty of its ecosystem. Or perhaps the idea of a thriving complex landscape that we simply can’t survive in is fascinating to us. We, as a species, have worked out how to survive the heat of the Sahara and Mojave, the cold of Antarctica and the Arctic, the oppressive jungles of the Amazon and Congo, and even on the ocean’s surface—but living beneath the waves is still reserved for fiction.

Combine that fascination and fear with architecture usually reserved for the surface, as seen in BioShock‘s (2007) Rapture or SOMA‘s (2015) Pathos-II, and places that would seem pedestrian on land gain a haunting presence, an aura of “this didn’t belong here.” The world of Diluvion is one such place; a far-future civilization adapted to living under the surface, a society of submarines and submerged cities built among the ancient ruins of a familiar world, all of it inspired by the fiction of Jules Verne. And it’s now been announced that it’ll be yours to explore on PC this fall.

In Diluvion, mankind endures beneath the frozen surface of Earth, which was ravaged after some great calamity. Your place in this world is a submarine captain searching for relics and information on past civilizations. Spread across three regions with unique towns, factions, and discoveries, your ship brings on new crews and new equipment at ports, preparing your vessel for the dangers of the deep.

The lightless depths are no less dark and alien here

The new trailer showcases the ever-lurking threats of pirates, fierce creatures, and otherworldly oddities like ships scuttling along the seafloor on crustacean legs, threats waiting to annihilated with broadside combat and evasive maneuvering. You can manage the real-time thrill of these fights in 3D, but can also switch to a hand-painted 2D look to get a cross-section of your vessel. From here, the game more closely resembles FTL (2012), as you flick between each room and attend to your crew’s needs.

Outside of combat, Diluvion will give you the freedom to explore its distant era of ruins and submerged civilization in full 3D, where anomalies and deep-sea fauna await in the ravines and canyons. The lightless depths are no less dark and alien here, requiring special sonar and scanners to navigate effectively.

Diluvion is slated for release this fall on Windows and Mac. More details are available on the game’s site and Kickstarter page.

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