Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 76

Videogame turns job seeking into what it really is: pattern matching

The A Game By Its Cover jam, which finished at the end of July, gave game makers a month to create a game based on of a Famicase game cover. It received 127 entries, some of which were as far off the map as Parachute Pete by grille, Dungeon of Flowers by neilmakesgames, and Secret of Love by nadia—which, by the way, is a “Lesbian based punching simulator.” Among such an eclectic collection of games, Full Time Job, a game about job seeking by Dylan Gallardo, looks decidedly less glamorous.

Gallardo takes the mind-numbing task of job seeking and dilutes it to the minuscule elements of randomness and imperceptible difference that makes actual job hunting so stressful. Staring at 40 versions of the same form begins to blur and color after a while anyway, and that’s exactly what Gallardo has done with the concept. Instead of filling out your former employment history, you’re tasked with adjusting pattern sliders and color wheels to match the undulating design on the left half of the screen.

as questionable as my customer service experience

The number of different factors means that it’s near impossible to match this pattern exactly, and even the ones I thought I’d gotten closest to—one of which was almost entirely black, and, like that one time you didn’t get hired by Target summer of your junior year of college, felt impossible to miss—ended up with scores between 13 (vague but bad, probably) to 60 (much better but also probably bad), with no indication of where I messed up or how to fix it. I guess my estimation of that grey print on blue-green-black-whatever background was just as questionable as my customer service experience at age 16.

Gallardo’s attempt at abstracting the frustration of job seeking is effective, all the more for the way it only took about six failures to send me into a crisis of inadequacy. I’ll probably never get that pattern down exactly right, but that’s fine. I didn’t really want to work at Target anyway.

Play Full Time Job on itch.io , and check out the rest of the A Game by Its Cover jam entries here.

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Spaceplan gives you a delicate view of the universe

Jake Hollands’s Spaceplan starts with a blank screen, the controls of your space ship are damaged, and the only way to start it up is to click on the Kinetigen on the top left of your screen. I click, and every click gives me a single watt of power. Solar panels, I’m then informed, will cost 10 watts. Uh oh. It appears I’ve found myself a clicker.

This is a disaster. Clicker games have been my kryptonite since I left my computer powered up for six weeks in university to corner the cookie market in Cookie Clicker (2013), and when I did the same at work, years later, for Clicking Bad (2013).

“Watching orbital motion can be hypnotizing”

Be it no surprise that Hollands was inspired by his love for A Dark Room (2013) and Cookie Clicker when making this game. “I’ve wanted to explore games which feature quite ‘mundane’ gameplay as a vehicle to carry polished aesthetic and silly narrative for a while,” he said. “Also wanting to create a game which tries to look lovely only through graphic design elements—typography, UI, geometric shapes. It’s a scary task for a game, but one that the clicker genre is made for.”

In terms of aesthetics, Spaceplan nails what it’s going for. It’s one of the best-looking clicker titles I’ve seen. As you click on the Kinetigen to power up, you’ll also enable the damaged systems around your ship. Hollands is an artist first, and the user interface sings with his talent. You can see your ship orbiting a tiny planet, and each of the items you buy appears on the “planet looker,” from monolithic potato towers to Spudnik satellites.

That reminds me: everything you buy in this game is a potato, or some variant thereof. Landing a probetato on the mystery planet requires you to wrap it in heat resistant baking foil first, so it can stand reentry. It’s patently ridiculous, but it works. But Spaceplan doesn’t go the way of Cookie Clicker, seemingly solving the planet’s food problem by way of an infinite supply of baked goods. On the contrary, Hollands says that his game only runs for five to six hours, mentioning that he hates clicker games with endless play, and so has no plans to extend it.

He’s the kind of person who wants to deliver something memorable, not life consuming. It’s why he’s most proud of the little touches “ like the screen glare which dims when you enter shadow.” Other favorites of his include how your resources get cut off temporarily if there’s a lack of sunlight, and his ultimate move of turning the sun into a black hole—”all of the satellites and planets use proper gravitational physics, which I think is another mechanic which helps to set it apart from other clickers. Watching orbital motion can be hypnotizing,” Hollands said.

All these little design touches mount up to make Spaceplan the exception to my recent avoidance of the genre. The fact that it looks smart from the get-go is a strong advertisement too. It’s definitely snared me again … the tab has been open for the last six hours as I’ve hopped in and out of writing. Uh oh.

You can play Spaceplan in your browser right now, if that’s what you fancy. 

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The Wild Eternal wants to explore what it means to be lost

An elderly woman stands upon a tall cliff overlooking a foggy wilderness. The fog is so thick that only the tops of the tallest trees can pierce through it. There are also buildings, strange landmarks that dot the foggy valley below. They seem ancient and forgotten. This is where players will begin The Wild Eternal, standing on a cliff, looking out at a world that might just hold the key to ending the loop of rebirth.

The Wild Eternal is being developed by a small team, just three people in fact. Two of these people are brothers: Casey and Scott Goodrow. Scott handles all the programming while Casey handles the art and writing. The idea for The Wild Eternal came from the two brothers and their love of games like Everquest (1999), with big worlds that let players tell their own story.

“What does it mean to be lost in a game world?”

“We were particularly interested in the satisfaction and difficulty of building mental maps of spaces with limited information,” Scott explained in an email to me. “Such as if a part of the world weren’t accessible, or if two levels were stitched together in a seemingly impossible way.” This idea of a“hidden” part of the world led Scott and his brother to the high concept idea behind The Wild Eternal, which Scott described as: “An adventurer standing atop a vista, surveying the landmarks that poke above the fog, and then descending into a foggy valley filled with interesting obstacles to distract them from their path.”

The Wild Eternal tells the story of a 68-year-old woman named Ananta. Her life has been filled with hardships from living in the 15th century Himalayan foothills. And more recently in her life she has developed cataracts and arthritis. Ananta now fears the future, the next chapter of life. As Casey explains, “Her mindset at the onset of the game is: ‘My life was really terrible and I’m afraid that if I die now I’ll be reborn and have another really terrible life, so I want to escape that cycle of suffering.'” Ananta has a problem, but she has no knowledge of how to fix her problem. Casey and Scott describe Ananta as “extremely lost.” Which is one of the main themes in The Wild Eternal—being lost in different ways.

From the start, the Goodrow Brothers have been thinking about being lost and what that means to the player. “I think from the beginning we were trying to approach the game design with open minds,” Casey explained. “What does it mean to be lost in a game world? How can we allow the player to be lost but still have an engaging moment to moment experience?” To aid Ananta in her quest to end the cycle of life she seeks guidance from The Lord of Lost Dreams. The Lord is a talking fox who pops up from time to time to help both the player and Ananta. The fox is the key to reaching new areas and eventually reaching your end goal. Help the fox by collecting God’s Crystalline Tears from landmarks and in return the Lord of Lost Dreams will open doors and pathways for you.

While the narrative might sound somber, Casey and Scott hope players experience more that just sadness while playing The Wild Eternal. They’ve added things they hope will make the player laugh or even pique their curiosity. But Casey admits that, overall, The Wild Eternal is a very “chill experience.” Casey explained further: “We try to leave a lot of space for the player to just wander and be present in the game, listen to the music, think about what they’ve just done or learned, peer into the foggy distance at a critter, etc.”

Far off in the foggy distance is the key to what you are looking for. Maybe that next tall spire poking out from the top of the fog is where you need to go. There’s only one way to find out. It can be lonely out here in the fog. Thankfully, you have a fox to keep you company.

The Wild Eternal will be available on PC later this year and other platforms in the future. The Wild Eternal will be heading to Steam Greenlight soon. You can also check out the official site or follow the game on Twitter.

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Become the god of your own topography

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Mu Cartographer (Windows, Mac)
BY TITOUAN MILLET

Much like David OReilly’s Mountain (2014), Mu Cartographer is a visual toy about exploring a planet from a distance. Unlike Mountain, however, Mu Cartographer allows you to interact with the landscape itself through a strange machine. In the game, you are a treasure hunter and, by jiggering the knobs at your disposal, you see different layers of the topography. Through experimentation and close attention to detail, you peel back the landscape’s colorful secrets, like pyramids and temples. Shaping the glitchy peaks and valleys through various filters leads you organically from one mystery to the next. As you become more familiar with the impenetrable controls of your viewing machine, you also come to understand more about your archaeological subject.

Perfect for: Archaeologists, David OReilly, treasure hunters

Playtime: A couple hours

 

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Hey, videogames, enough with the bad sex

It was obvious The Witcher 3 (2015) wasn’t going to be a sexy game the moment I met Keira Metz. Curvy and blonde, Keira first appeared submerged in a tub of artfully positioned bathwater, then in a dress hung open so wide it would need heroic amounts of magic or starch to keep its contents confined. Keira wouldn’t look out of place waltzing onto the set of a third-rate porn flick, looking for a rough, manly, monster-hunting plumber to fix her pipes. She came across as just another videogame Barbie doll, and from that early point in the game, The Witcher 3 seemed destined to be yet another parade of them. For all the artistry and taboo breaking that games have indulged in during their history, they’ve always seemed to run scared from sex. Mostly, it’s simply been absent. Perhaps that’s no surprise when body graphics that aren’t laughably grotesque is a relatively recent invention. When it has oozed and slithered its way into games, sex has, by and large, done nothing but reinforce the unrelenting male gaze. Think of the Leisure Suit Larry series and its endless parade of weak frat-boy jokes, or the cheap voyeurism of Night Trap (1992).

Beyond these early examples, when vaguely plausible human-looking polygons did arrive, games instead tried to shock us. From the infamous Hot Coffee scene in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004) to Manhunt 2‘s (2007) porn theater, game studios purposefully used sex to engineer controversy. In pretty much all cases up until this point, commercial gaming had done only one thing with sex: used it as easy leverage to shift merchandise. Everyone knew it and so that same sense of crude, vulgar manipulation seeped into the scenes themselves. The result is the sort of sex you’d expect to find in a dog-eared book of airport erotica, or the obligatory bedroom scene in an ‘80s action flick. Material of the kind that becomes boring through sheer ubiquity once you’re beyond 16 years of age. Yet there are other books and films in which sex seems engaging and real, something that adds to the narrative rather than merely helps to sell it. Something that can, on occasion, feel illicit, even erotic. People have been making books and films like that for decades. Videogames? Not so much.

The focus is necessarily more on actions than on characters

The Witcher 3’s presentation of sex isn’t surprising, then, but it is disappointing as, according to an interview with its creators, things were supposed to change. Its predecessors featured sex, as did the novels that originally spawned the series, and they did so in an unusually naturalistic way. There was foreplay. Characters giggled, clearly enjoying themselves. They even made the occasional misstep, just like real people do when they’re aroused and in a hurry. This sense of authenticity is a crucial component in presenting sex scenes that don’t feel exploitative. By setting intercourse in a believable manner, it helps it to feel like an authentic next step in the narrative, rather than something that’s been slotted in for titillation. It also allows the writer or director to leave out the most intimate details, allowing the most erotic organs of all, our minds, to fill in the gaps with whatever details we desire.

Take Alan Hollinghurst’s celebrated novel The Folding Star (1994). Its many sexual scenes tend to dwell on simple details of anatomy, without particular emphasis on erogenous zones, or on the physical consequences of the act besides the pleasure. One scene, for example, sees the narrator describing the way he and his lover end up covered in one another’s sweat, then lingering on how handsome he finds his lover’s face, shoulder, and hair. It’s a scene between two gay men, yet written so beautifully as to be capable of arousing readers of any sexual orientation.

This is why, when the creators of The Witcher 3 at CD Projekt Red promised explicit sex scenes constructed from 16 hours of motion capture, my heart sank. Even though the series had the pedigree to suggest its writers understood that portraying good sex is more than just realistic body images, it sounded like their approach would be nothing more than another tawdry sex-as-sales-pitch. In answer to this charge, CD Projekt Red suggested that the sex would, instead, be used to draw the player into the place of Geralt, the main character. Previous games have established him as promiscuous and The Witcher 3 allows you to continue in that vein. But now the proposed idea was that, through the game’s portrayal of sex, we would come to appreciate that his one relationship, with sorceress Yennefer, was particularly special. If that was the intent, then that part of the game failed, utterly.

Read that again. A sexually overactive man who does, really (we’re told), want to promise himself to just one woman… eventually. He only wants to fool around a bit, or perhaps a lot, with whoever takes his fancy first. And we’re supposed to believe that adding even more explicit sex with this one chosen woman will help to establish that this single relationship is somehow different and deeper than the others. If there’s a thinner excuse for repeating the typical scenario of a licentious man managing to trick a particular woman into being a regular partner, I’ve yet to hear it.

Many of the sex scenes in the game are framed similarly. First, there’s a sudden and long digression from the action-packed meat of the game. During the quest “A Matter of Life and Death,” for example, you’ll be involved in a barroom brawl and possibly a card game tournament before suddenly plunging into a lengthy and convoluted series of dialogue options. The jarring change of pace with a love interest in the scene make it clear what’s coming. And when it does come, the actual sex is brief and chopped to pieces. During coitus with Triss Merrigold, there’s a panning shot of her body before and after, interspersed with rapid angle changes to ensure you don’t see too much detail. This is the way sex used to be filmed in blockbuster movies. The camera serving as a leering gaze followed by a fast flicker over body parts that mimics the quickfire spectacle of an action scene. It’s a technique so overused that Hollywood dropped it a decade ago, yet games are still playing catch up.

The result is the sort of sex you’d expect to find in a dog-eared book of airport erotica

Geralt’s romance with Keira Metz demonstrates how weakly the game uses sex as a narrative device. The encounter happens relatively early in the game and is such an easy, obvious path to take, that it puts an immediate lie to the idea that extra sex might encourage role-played dedication to Yennefer. The foreplay during the encounter is littered with excruciating lines like “slip into something more comfortable,” uttered without apparent humor. The eventual coitus is fleeting, and once again chopped into pieces, this time like the stills in a naughty Victorian zoetrope show. The consequences are non-existent. Yennefer never finds out and, naturally, Geralt’s exposure to magical mutagens has usefully rendered him sterile.

Adding consequences to the act is part of the context of a sex scene, and context is perhaps the most important aspect of all to help that scene feel a part of the wider narrative. The story needs to spend time establishing characters and the reasons why they’re choosing to sleep with one another. Then, afterwards, it needs to examine the repercussions of what has happened. Otherwise the story is bookended with sex and it feels purposefully abrupt, out of place, as though it exists only for shock effect. People are merely fucking, without any illustration of why that might be important. Don’t Look Now (1973) contains what is perhaps the most critically-acclaimed sex scene in all of cinema. It’s relatively tame by modern standards, yet its erotic power remains undimmed. The reason is simple: it’s used as an enormously powerful hinge that turns the wider narrative. The couple involved are grieving, and we understand this encounter is a desperate release for them both. The consequences are that the protagonists have begun to divest themselves of some of the terrible emotional baggage they’ve been carrying. It then seems more realistic that they can move on and engage with the rest of the plot.

The Witcher series is no stranger to depicting the consequences of sex, but the first iteration did so in a disturbingly regressive manner. Successfully concluding each of the many romance options in the story resulted in Geralt receiving a commemorative card. Almost literally it allowed you to collect women through the act of having intercourse with them, turning realistic female characters into notches on the digital bedpost. Its successor, as discussed, represented sex in a more positive and naturalistic manner. But its linear plot with sexual sidelines still allowed Geralt to sleep around as he chose without fear of his peccadilloes impacting his central heroic quest. 

As an open-world game full of character and cutscenes, at first glance The Witcher 3 would seem to have the capacity to do better. To become more like Don’t Look Now in placing sex as an important narrative device that impacts the story and its protagonist. There is time for Geralt to establish relationships with the women in his life. There are many opportunities for the consequences of his choices to make themselves known. Yet, with the notable exception of the multiple endings and a ménage a trois that ends badly for the witcher, little of this is ever explored. On the assumption that the writers knew the importance of context and framing, as evidenced by the brief sex scenes in previous games, the question is why?

I suspect that this issue arises from the nature of gaming itself. Namely, it is an activity in which we participate directly. In this, it is fundamentally different from books and films. Yet this also dictates, to some extent, the subject matter of a game. An active media lends itself well to depicting active subject matter: violence, sport, strategizing. So the play in the Witcher games consists mostly of excuses to keep Geralt killing things. Although the series features more dialog and character depth than usual, there isn’t enough to set up a deeper context in the narrative.

None of this bodes well for the inevitable move into virtual reality sex

A fine illustration of this problem is given by the creative, sex-positive game Luxuria Superbia (2013). Its journey down endless, colourful tunnels that you have to stroke and coax with the controls might be a crassly obvious metaphor but in most other respects it tries hard to offer a more meaningful, more artful representation of sex. It’s clearly feminine, for one thing, and attempts to evoke its theme indirectly, inviting the player into an act of giving to receive consensual pleasure. Yet, as a game, it fails to entertain. Demanding patience rather than action, it quickly becomes repetitive and predictable.

Indeed, it’s a failing that’s common among games that try to plug this yawning abyss in subject matter. How Do You Do It (2014) is a brief game about how children puzzle over the meaning and the intricacies of the forbidden act of sex. Although short, it’s full of thoughtful symbolism that questions the taboo around discussing the subject with children. Yet to absorb this requires no more than one timeboxed play, a couple of minutes jabbing randomly at WASD keys. At the more narrative end of the spectrum, Gone Home (2013) tells a deeply involving story of sexual awakening, yet offers limited exploration and puzzle elements. In realizing the potential of games as art, many titles seem to forget that satisfying play is central to the traditional concept of “game.”

This is the fundamental problem with sex in big commercial games. The focus is necessarily more on actions than on characters. No matter how “realistic” the depictions become, they lack the wider furniture to ever make sex feel like something other than an awkward inclusion. Indeed, it’s part of a wider problem with including adult themes in a suitably mature manner within a medium full of underdeveloped, immature characters.

None of this bodes well for the inevitable move into virtual reality sex that’s going to be hitting the mainstream in the very near future. Early samples suggest it’ll be little more than a new frontier for the porn industry: instant gratification with a headset and a fleshlight. While games such as Spec Ops: The Line (2012) and This War Of Mine (2014) suggest that the medium is capable of being thoughtful and reflective on the consequences of violence, it still seems to demand consequence-free sex. And so long as players continue to believe in the myth of that possibility, perhaps they always will.

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Desktop Dungeons is the perfect back-to-school game

As the end of August looms ever-closer, the reality of having to go back to school is probably getting a little too real for some of you. Luckily, there’s a game out there to help ease you back into the grind.

Desktop Dungeons is so perfectly suited to quick lunchtime sessions or passing the time while you sit in the hallway waiting for your next class that it should come in your parents’ next care package. Each session can take as little as ten minutes, and the randomly generated dungeons ensure you’ll be doing something new every time you play.

Our review praised the game’s surprising depth: its consistent strategic layer provides rewards over time, as well as poking fun at social games and RPGs. You can even, despite the name, get it on iOS and Android for the ultimate quick fix: we’re not suggesting you play during your next lecture, but it also wouldn’t be difficult, you know?

It also supports cross-device saving, meaning you can start a session on your laptop and pick it up on your phone, and, most importantly, it’s cheap, so you can pick it up and still have money for food this week.

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Sponsored by Lenovo. Speed and precision in your hands. Lenovo Ideapad Y700.

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Parachute Pete, a game about destroying planes in the bloodiest way possible

The game jam A Game By Its Cover 2016 is over, leaving behind many interesting and wonderful games. Inspired by fake Famicom game cover art, some of the games got weird, and that’s certainly the case for Parachute Pete. The game is immature in the best way, bringing together the terrifying majesty of a massive military aircraft and the brutality of chopping up bodies with giant engines.

In Parachute Pete you control a tiny, weaponless green plane, with the goal of destroying aircraft (bearing a suspiciously familiar face on the tail) that are roughly 500 times larger than yourself. How do you do this without weapons, you may wonder. With people, of course. No, not by dropping soldiers who board the plane and destroy it from within. By dropping paratroopers who gently drift down with their parachutes, and then, if timed correctly, are violently sucked into the engines and chopped to bits, spraying the plane with their blood. You need to get enough of these poor guys into an engine for their bodies to clog it up and cause an explosion.

immature in the best way

Of course, the aircraft you are trying to destroy are armed to the teeth, so timing is key, lest you be blown up by their barrage of rockets. Over the course of the short game the rockets get faster and more frequent, so you’ll have to put your little vessel in increasing peril to drop your paratroopers into the engines. But even if you succumb to their many missiles, you’ll only have to go back to the beginning of the level, where you’ll be greeted again by a tongue-in-cheek, Duke Nukem-esque voice pumping you up for the next round of human sacrifice and destruction.

Parachute Pete pulls from a sense of nostalgia for the violent web games young teens played in the early to mid 2000s. Parents shook their heads at their kids shooting virtual humans, but there remained a wide space for kooky slapstick violence. From throwing your skateboarder down a set of stairs, to launching kittens from cannons, blood splatter reigned supreme. Parachute Pete continues in that grand tradition, painting the world a cartoonish red, one sad dead paratrooper at a time.

You can download Parachute Pete for free here.

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The Girl and the Robot unveils its fairy tale very, very soon

Ever since The Girl and the Robot’s interactive fairy tale first showed up on Kickstarter, it stood out amid a sea of games about shooting stuff as an earnest attempt to be sweet. Take a look at the protagonists or the old Europe inspired castle they wander around in, or listen to a clip of the recently-released soundtrack, and it’s clear that Flying Carpets Games isn’t so much going for the Brothers Grimm appeal as it is their defanged, happy-ending younger cousins.

Obviously, The Girl and the Robot does take inspiration from the classics, which is evident after a quick look at the trailer and screenshots. The walls and buildings are a simple yellow, accented occasionally with oranges and greens that don’t make it look any less like a children’s book. The girl, too, looks like she walked out of a fantasy novel. It’s the robot—a clunky but charming suit of armor that I’m pretty sure I saw in Harry Potter—that causes you to double-take, but then again… after a glance at the trailer and your big metal friend in action, that makes sense, too.

The creators of The Girl and the Robot cited The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) and Ico (2001) as inspirations in their Kickstarter, as well as the sweet, atmospheric films of Studio Ghibli. It’s not hard to see where those fit in: the Queen’s concept art gives off serious Zelda vibes, and you could easily see the girl and her robot fitting into the iconic My Neighbor Totoro (1988) bus stop poster.

But the game’s makers are taking a chance here too, especially when introducing the character switch mechanic that allows you to control both the girl and her robot in turn, crawling through inaccessible spaces with the girl and fighting monsters with the robot. It’s not the first game to try such a thing—Thomas Was Alone (2012) comes to mind, as do most LEGO games—but for the most part, the opportunity for complex puzzles and non-routine exploration has been underused. Hopefully The Girl and the Robot will take advantage of this, because what we’ve seen so far of the castle looks too lovely to only be walked through.

Good news though: we’ll find out how it all adds up very, very soon. Almost three years after their Kickstarter first launched, The Girl and the Robot’s release has been confirmed for August 18th. Their Steam page is already online, so all you have to do is stay patient and see for yourself.

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An exhibit for admiring the labyrinthian cityscapes of anime architecture

When I visited Tokyo, Japan earlier this year for the first time, I was struck by its block-by-block awe-inspiring architecture. From the woven-like walls of the Daikanyama T-Site bookstore, or the mirrored, cave-like entrance to the Tokyu Plaza Building on the cusp of Omotesando and Harajuku, Japan takes its architecture to highly modernized, nearly impossible heights. And it makes sense, for a country whose animation has been setting the standard for fictional architecture since the early 1980s. Animated architecture that looks to both the present and the old, and twists it into something new for the future. Luckily, there’s a new exhibit on display at The Museum of Architectural Drawing in Berlin, celebrating the highly-detailed, labyrinthian background art that is often forgotten.

Concept design for Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004). Pencil on paper, 176 × 250 mm. Illustrator: Takashi Watabe Copyright: © 2004 Shirow Masamune / KODANSHA · IG, ITNDDTD

The aptly-named “Anime Architecture” exhibit shines the spotlight on just that: the environment art. The towering, bustling cityscapes of classic cyberpunk-leaning anime, with the snake-like pipes and cables that weave seamlessly through its architecture. The fictitious cities once only dreamed up in the words of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson’s fiction, realized visually once the pen went to paper in Japanese animation. Berlin’s “Anime Architecture” exhibit, curated by Stefan Riekeles and Nadejda Bartels, features a number of original drawings from iconic anime, such as Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995). For many of the sketches, this is the first time they’re being seen outside of their respective films, previously residing in studios’ old cardboard boxes, collecting dust.

The exhibit was borne of a dream Riekeles and his colleague David d’Heilly had back in 2007, where they began visiting animators in their Tokyo-based studios. The idea to focus on background illustrations and concept art came naturally for Riekeles, according to an interview with The Creator’s Project. As oftentimes with background art, the soul of the production is on full display, despite how fleeting it may be. Inspired by Hong Kong, according to Riekeles, anime artists looked to the specific city for inspiration. “The idea was to evoke a feeling of submerging into the deep levels of the city, where a flood of information overflows the human senses and a lot of noise surrounds the people,” he told The Creator’s Project, specifically regarding Ghost in the Shell‘s artistic flare. “The artists were looking for an expression of a crowded space.”

Snake-like pipes and cables weave through anime’s architecture

Many of my favorite scenes from anime have a lot to do with their environments. Like the towering skylines of Neo-Tokyo in Akira’s (1988) opening bike race, soundtracked by the pounding drums of “Kaneda’s Theme.” The lived-in grime of Mars’s capital city in the year 2071, as seen in the standalone film Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (2001). The susceptible-to-another-apocalypse, dystopian city of Tokyo-3, the scene for many mecha battles, in Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995). The environments in anime and manga are often sprawling, dizzying, and may even appear a bit real. Despite being the background to the action, in a lot of cases, the environments can breathe more life and context into the world it represents than the actions of its characters.

“Anime Architecture” is on display at The Museum of Architectural Drawing in Berlin until October 16th. To learn more about the exhibit, you can click here .

Header image: Background for Ghost in the Shell (1995), cut 335. Gouache on paper and acrylic on transparent film, 280 × 380 mm. Illustrator: Hiromasa Ogura Copyright: © 1995 Shirow Masamune / KODANSHA · BANDAI VISUAL · MANGA ENTERTAINMENT Ltd.

Background for Ghost in the Shell (1995), cut 509. Gouache on paper and acrylic on transparent film, 270 × 380 mm. Illustrator: Hiromasa Ogura Copyright: © 1995 Shirow Masamune / KODANSHA · BANDAI VISUAL · MANGA ENTERTAINMENT Ltd.

 

Layout for Ghost in the Shell (1995), cut 509. Pencil and coloured pencil on printed paper, 240 × 370 mm. Illustrator: Takashi Watabe Copyright: © 1995 Shirow Masamune / KODANSHA · BANDAI VISUAL · MANGA ENTERTAINMENT Ltd.

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Orwell will have you play as the surveillance state for once

You might not be surprised to find out that Osmotic Studios’s narrative exploration game Orwell is firmly linked to George Orwell’s 1984 (1949). Orwell takes place in a dystopian world not unlike that of 1984; Orwell’s world is called The Nation—and security is the highest concern of the government. A series of terrorist attacks sparked a secret (and totally creepy) security program called, well, Orwell. And guess what? You get to control it. You’re Big Brother.

The whole game takes place on a desktop—think Her Story (2015) or Cibele (2015). Orwell compiles information from websites, messengers, and public records; it’s up to you to decide what’s relevant to your case.

It’s a game about asking questions—why was she in this place at that time? What are her possible motivations? Did you check her social media profile? You’ll ask lots of questions while creeping on The Nation’s citizens, but Orwell won’t give you answers; you’ll have to find those out for yourself, by looking through characters’ social media accounts, dating profiles, or personal websites. On a more invasive level, you’ll be looking through their private messages—stuff hidden deep in their cell phones.

You’ll probably feel uncomfortable asking the sorts of questions Orwell forces you to ask. That’s the point, though. The team over at Osmotic Studios is confident their game will be used as an “instrument to evoke all kinds of emotions in players,” Taylor said. “Perhaps even [our players will] feel like they never have felt before when playing a game.”

You’re Big Brother

“We do feel like that in a way there is an urgent need to discuss these kinds of topics,” Taylor said. “As things go, it couldn’t be any more relevant now, with political parties making promises about security by increasing surveillance measures all over the Western world, just as it happens in The Nation.”

And it’s not only the Bad Guys who have something to hide online; almost everyone has an online persona to go alongside their offline life—Orwell focuses on the complexities of managing these (at times) conflicting personalities. It’s an exploration of the balance between security and freedom, of trading privacy for connection.

Orwell will be released in late 2016 for PC. More about the game is available on the Orwell website.

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