Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 82

Kursk will turn a real submarine disaster into a documentary game

As a 6’7 (2m) man, the cramped quarters of submarines are anathema to me. So, when I saw the teaser for Jujubee Games Studio’s submarine survival game Kursk last year, it’s fair to say I was horrified, and more than a little uneasy. It wasn’t only due to the small virtual spaces of the game, either. To bring you up to speed: Kursk will explore the tragic story of the nuclear-powered submarine of the same name, which sank during a training exercise on August 12th, 2000 with all 118 crew members still on board. That’s some tricky subject matter.

Jujubee claims Kursk will be “the first proper adventure-documentary game in history,” with a plot based largely on known facts from the disaster. To this day, the exact reason the stricken submarine sank to the bottom of the Barents sea is unknown, but the game will center on offering players the chance to learn more about the vessel, which you can see in the newly released screenshots (which you can see above and below).

respectful of the very real disaster they’re using

My worries that the game might appear callous were matched by a lot of those leaving comments on the teaser last year. Still, Jujubee was founded by veterans from CD Projekt RED, Traveller’s Tales, and Infinite Dreams, so it seemed worth giving the team the benefit of the doubt. But now we don’t need to merely hope that their sensitivities are in the right place, as last week it was announced that Kursk would be coming to Gamescom in Cologne, where it’ll be playable. 

“The Gamescom showcase will be the first opportunity to check out the actual gameplay, visuals, and sounds from Kursk” said Michał Stępień, Jujubee’s CEO. “No one before (has) had a chance to see the game in motion.”

So yes, this is going to be the first time anyone gets to get their hands on Kursk. Hopefully, reports from Gamescom will reveal whether the studio has managed to take the appropriate steps to be respectful of the very real disaster they’re using for the focus of their game. Fingers crossed.

If you’re at Gamescom, you can check out Kursk all the way through the event in Hall 10, A-019. If you’re not at Gamescom, there’s an official site .  

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Rethinking the shooter for the VR age

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

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Header illustration by Gareth Damian Martin

Although videogames have been around since the early fifties, the first known electronic shooter actually appeared in 1936. The Seeburg Ray-o-Lite, best described as a sort of proto–Duck Hunt (1984), was a light-gun game utilizing a photosensitive vacuum tube and a moving target painted to look like a duck in flight. Whenever the player pulled the trigger, a beam of light would issue from the rifle controller; if she managed to hit the sensor on the duck, it’d drop upside-down, and a new number would illuminate the scoreboard at the top of the machine.

A coin-operated affair intended for arcade use, housed in a varnished wooden cabinet, the Ray-o-Lite more closely resembled a jukebox than a Pac-Man machine—though it effectively marks the births of both the light gun and the first-person shooter. It’s a reminder of how far games have come in less than a century of innovation, and yet that, with each new technological evolution, there’s always a period of some crudeness: Wolfenstein 3D (1992) has to come before Halo 5 (2015), in other words. This takes time.

The things that make VR challenging are also what make it interesting

The next such shift is already be happening. Futurists and sci-fi fans have clamored for proper virtual-reality hardware for decades, and it’s here at long last. But the truth is that there’s still the question of how many other players might be willing to make the leap from something along the lines of Call of Duty: Black Ops III (2015) to the more primitive goods being offered on VR platforms right now. Musician Brian Eno once observed that innovation in art comes from some combination of limitations both technical and self-imposed. As he put it in 2013, “When something is new, you don’t know how to make it better. In fact, you don’t even consider that you could make it better. You just think, Jesus, this is amazing.” This is good to remember when surveying the current state of VR development.

READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE OVER ON VERSIONS.

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Lonely Star brings a lo-fi apocalypse to the Weird West

“FAIR FIGHTS ARE GOOD, IF YOU ARE IN A MOVIE, OR WOULD LIKE TO BECOME DEAD.”

This is told to me by a crystal in the middle of a desert, surrounded on all sides by dust and cacti and one single, solitary highway. It’s the third of these I’ve found, sprouting carelessly out of the cracked earth, there for no other reason than to give advice, vehemently and repeatedly. Their surreality never comes into question. Lonely Star, it seems, doesn’t like to spell things out.

I found the first crystal one map south of the demo’s introductory map, a conclave of teen collectors and budding warriors and borderline fanatics, bound together by an unreadable leader named Tom Magus and a ticking clock counting down to the end of the world. Other writers have described it as a cult, and they’re not wrong: the first few minutes, especially, just reek of charismatic sociopaths who want you to drink the Kool-Aid. That is, before the magic kicks in.

Lonely Star is intimately concerned with the details of its world

The crystals are an early symptom, but not the first. Tom Magus’s opening monologue has that honor as he sends you on a quest to gain the “magic” of fire, gifts you a key to the Underworld, and warns you not to linger too long with the dead. The quiet guitar music and flickering camp lights make this hard to digest. Isn’t this just a Western, or someone’s dead-Earth apocalypse?

Subconsciously I wait for this magic to be exposed as fiction, written off as either the ravings of a fanatic or a spiritual knowledge too amorphous to be properly grasped, settling in the ambiguity of religion. Neither happens. Instead I find crystals bursting from the ground like weeds and things much darker besides. It’s hard to explain just how quickly I panicked at the first approach of ghosts—quick and colorful and turning the rest of the world dead black, as the music goes suddenly harsh—and their only harbinger is a cloud of yellow dust chasing you across the screen. Run, lest it touch you.

The environment comes from the last few months of human existence, 2012 AD, which we’ve lived through and I can say with some certainty never looked quite like this. This sorcery, whatever it is, is from the Star—on its way back to Earth, bringing vicious things. By all accounts, it’s the end of the world. You know it, Tom Magus knows it, and I certainly know it after encountering those ghost things.

But it’s also small-scale. Lonely Star is intimately concerned with the details of its world, whether it be the way walking next to a light blinds you to the corners of the room or the certainty that, yes, you can pet every single friendly dog romping around the corners of the cornfields. The brothers who make your ghost-killing gear also collect tapes, and barter that you’ll bring back whatever lost tapes you find in exchange for a sharper machete. A farmer outside their garage calls your name, then stops himself mid-sentence: you’re on a quest, menial labor can wait. Past them, a pregnant woman leans against a wall, pondering why her fear of giving birth is stronger than her fear of the world ending. Her partner volunteers that it’s because birth is an individual responsibility, whereas the apocalypse falls on the collective; she agrees, and says she’d like to name the child Eve—clichéd but appropriate. Tom would object, she sighs, and wishes you good luck on your quest.

Lonely Star’s demo is over an hour long, and it’s impeccably polished. The lo-fi visuals are a wonderful choice for its mix of surreality and rustic America, and the music, composed by Topher Pirkl of Yellow Chord Audio, doesn’t shy away from both extremes. Were it not for flashing walls at the ends of a few maps, I wouldn’t have been able to tell that I was playing a demo. The Kickstarter, which has about a month to go, is about making the transition from “good prototype” to “good game,” but Lonely Star looks well on its way there.

Back Lonely Star on Kickstarter , follow their Twitter , and play the demo here .  

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Impossible Bottles only needs one beautiful GIF to win you over

Recently, Honig Studios tweeted out some incredible visuals that were part of a collaboration with artist Rafael Varona, the animator and illustrator of upcoming mobile game Impossible Bottles.  Based in Berlin, the production company is made up of designers, developers, and writers whose goal is to create memorable interactive experiences. And judging by the thousands of people awed by the GIFs that were tweeted out, they’re well on the way towards that goal.

The premise of Impossible Bottles is that an inventor wants to create the first eternal source of energy by bringing his gigantic mechanic golems to life, generating enough power to satisfy global demand. However, this is deemed too dangerous as the robot would have to be connected to the global electric grid. And so the scientific community shuns him.

Eventually, the scientist expands his work to run a maze underground, housing his creations in secret. When he connects the mechanical beasts to the grid, they move erratically—causing major power outages to the world above. Your goal as the player is to help guide this genius inventor on his quest to fix his incredible machines, providing an endless supply of energy to the world by solving puzzles.

“We’ve been through an iteration process to define the core game mechanics, and how they apply to each level and how they’d influence the illustration and animation,” said designer Jiannis Sotiropoulos.” Expanding their work with Varona and the visuals, Sotiropoulos said that, “During this process we played with the idea of having a more spiritual/naturalistic theme (so Inca deities and a shaman rather than a robot and a scientist) instead of the industrial/mechanical theme. But the robots and expressiveness stuck with us. We’re now working on more levels with different robots for each one.”

repair the machines so that they move in a perfect, harmonious loop

Each level of the game will be split into two parallel environments. Above ground, which will take up 20 percent of the screen, and below ground which will take the remaining 80 percent. At the beginning of each level, the lights will be sparse above ground and only shadows can be seen by the player. With each correct action, the scene will become brighter, signifying progress. Below ground, the player controls the scientist and must solve puzzles by interacting with the environment to repair the machines so that they move in a perfect, harmonious loop.

Impossible Bottles is slated to be released on iOS and Android in 2017. More information about the game and studio can be found here.

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The Professor Layton series has a new main character, and she’s a girl

The Professor Layton series of puzzle-adventure games has always been about one man and his boy sidekick. But that’s changing. As Gematsu reports, Level-5 has announced what I suppose you can call a reboot of the series with Lady Layton: The Millionaire Ariadone’s Conspiracy. As the title alludes to, it’ll put you in the shoes of Katrielle “Kat” Layton, the titular professor’s daughter.

Taking place some years after the original series, the game starts with Kat attempting to track down her father, following in the Professor’s footsteps as she solves puzzles across London. Gradually, Kat begins to earn her own reputation as a detective with a knack for scientific and deductive reasoning. Case in point, a fan translation of the announcement trailer shows more of her skills in detail.

Kat is confident, determined, witty, and charming

What’s surprising about this announcement is that it would have been so easy for Level-5 to go down the traditional route of turning Professor Layton’s long-time apprentice Luke Triton into the series’s new main character. It’s a fresh and unexpected turn, especially after Nintendo held firm with keeping the protagonist of the Legend of Zelda series male, despite a number of fans asking for a female main character for the next title in the series due out next year.

But the gender of the main characters isn’t the only significant change with Lady Layton. Turns out that Kat finds herself in a world where the Professor is a little older, Luke is absent, and a new set of characters—familiar with the Professor’s work, no doubt—are forced to work with her. Not to mention, Kat is confident, determined, witty, and charming. Through her, she presents an opportunity for players to rediscover Professor Layton’s world, expanding on Level-5’s London without straying too far from the original series.

Lady Layton will be out in Japan and the West in 2017. The game is slated for 3DS, iOS, and Android release. More information can be seen here on the official Japanese website.

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Embrace your fetish in a videogame about washing a giant foot

Ashi Wash is a ridiculous game with a ridiculous premise—a terrible, funky foot comes crashing through your ceiling. It’s got a serious fungus problem. (I’d suggest crashing into a doctor’s office next time, foot.) Its toenails are overgrown. Also, it can talk. The giant foot makes it pretty clear—in its greasy Brooklyn accent—that you’re to wash it; if you don’t, it’ll “smash ya house up.” Thems the rules, after all.

Troy Grooms, Matt Murphy, Alex Zako, and Julian Francis created Ashi Wash during the summer edition of My First Game Jam, held on itch.io. The prompt was to create a game that puts a spin on a myth or folklore tale; the crew headed to the internet for ideas. That’s where they found Ashiari Yashiki—which loosely translates to the Foot Washing Mansion.

“What do I look like? A pizza? Get these freakin’ mushrooms off me!”

The Japanese tale is pretty similar to Ashi Wash—minus the crude Brooklyn accent: “at the time when the flowers were sleeping and the ushimitsu plant was blooming,” a translation reads, “a horrible rotten stench would invade the house, and a giant foot bristling with hair would descend from the ceiling accompanied by an enormous sound.” If you washed it, it’d just disappear back through the ceiling. If you didn’t it’d stomp through your house until satisfied.

Ashi Wash takes the myth to an extreme; the foot has a serious fungal infection (lots of mushrooms) and horrendously overgrown toenails (so bad that you’ll need hedge clippers to trim ‘em).

Grooms, Murphy, Zako, and Francis hope to create a “more polished” version of the game one day, but they’re not sure when they’ll release it. There’s a lot of stuff they had to cut from the game, including some primo voice acting: “What do I look like? A pizza? Get these freakin’ mushrooms off me!” It’s stuff guaranteed to make you laugh then cringe, stuff that’ll definitely make it into the next iteration.

Ashi Wash is available for free on itch.io.

(Image via Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai)

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The future of electronic interaction can be found in the middle of Kentucky

The reason higher education combines “arts” and “sciences” is because all art is, in essence, an emotional and psychological experiment. People want to experience joy, fear, ennui, etc., but aren’t always able (or willing) to experience the events that would normally create such intense feelings. In this regard, the artist is the mad scientist and the audience members are all rats in her maze.

“I’m usually more interested in what’s happening outside the screen than inside the screen,” says Matt Hudgins, videogame developer and creator of Speculo, an art installation that uses a digital camera to record the viewer and filters it through a kaleidoscopic effect. “That’s how I feel about all the games I make. I try to make people do weird things outside of them.”

The “Rules and Play” exhibit at Lexington, Kentucky’s Living Arts and Science Center is a collection of interactive art installations that runs from June 24th until August 26th. Some of the pieces represent traditional games. For example, Robin Baumgarten’s Line Wobbler (2014) has clear instructions, rules, and goals. The audience member uses a joystick to move a green light up and down an electronic rope and waggles it to the side in order to “attack” the red lights that appear. John Meister, one of the organizers of the exhibit, called Line Wobbler a “one-dimensional dungeon crawler”.

However, most of the installations did not follow the mold of traditional games, which have explicit objectives and clearly defined end states. In fact, several of the pieces stayed true to the spirit of an “interactive art exhibit” and allowed for broader audience interpretation and experimentation. Samantha Rausch’s Figure 8 fills an entire room with a worm crafted out of purple and orange cloth. It sits atop several pedestals and, as people move around to see it from different angles, motion sensors change the lighting and cause speakers to emit an electronic whine.

Down the hall, Fong Tron—created by Andrew Allred and Chris Winninger—invites two gallery participants to hold a touch screen. Each screen has two glowing circles that each participant can move around independently. As they move the dots, the sound is distorted in different ways. And if the two people look on a nearby monitor, they see both participants dots (instead of just their own) and learn that they can coordinate their dots and harmonize the audio. “I like the idea of seeing the relationship between an image and sound,” says Winninger. “And how you can represent things in two domains. So you can have visual representation that means something in terms of sound, and vice versa. [With Fong Tron] I was kind of trying to tease at the boundaries of computer science and art, and algorithms and art.”

In a corner of one of the rooms sits a bed with a canopy that suspends dozens of cloth strips cut to varying lengths. Above the strips are lights that change colors based on the movement of the strips.

The creator of dream a bit bigger darling, Amanda Hudgins (disclosure: Amanda Hudgins also writes for Kill Screen), laid on her back next to a friend as they waved at the strips like cats. Her friend explained that she’d been having extreme anxiety for the week building up to the exhibit. “I’ve been having anxiety every day for weeks, said Hudgins’s friend, “and this is the calmest I’ve felt.”

a unique experience that can’t be had in the comfort of one’s home

And despite the bed with canopy, a more elaborate interactive experience on show is Kyle Seeley’s Emily is Away (2015). Against a wall adorned with informational posters sits a dorm room desk with a laptop and various college paraphernalia.

A Sony Discman with headphones has a mix that includes Green Day and post-Californication Red Hot Chili Peppers. In the desk drawer are allen wrenches, an instruction manual for an IKEA bed, and a pencil sketch of original superheroes.

The idea is to create the environment of a college student circa 2003, and the entrée for this piece is the laptop with a faux AOL Instant Messenger lookalike where the participant can engage in scripted conversations that lead down branching paths. While the software could just as easily be released in a web browser, something about wearing the headphones and sitting at a desk reeking of particle board creates a unique experience that can’t be had in the comfort of one’s home.

Three virtual reality exhibits are also on display. Gardens by Ralph VR is a polygonal garden. At the opening, a young girl plucked virtual flowers and said, “Mom, can we get this?” Her mother laughed and said that the girl’s father had asked the same thing.

Babel On by Al Baker is a planetarium exhibit that, according to its description, “simulates an ascension of the Tower of Babel.” And the third VR experience is part of a collection called Art Alive: Inuit Art Brought Alive by Pinnguaq that celebrates the work of Inuit artist Pudloo Padlat. The audience member sits in a chair with the VR headset and observes polygonal oceanic creatures, such as penguins and whales.

Virtual Reality has dominated the news cycle lately, but the technology is only now available to the public, and it will be even longer before the mainstream is comfortable using it (or can afford it). Since the Living Arts and Science Center is mostly known for children’s programming, “Rules and Play” is able to reach a different audience than the typical trade show. Plus, RunJumpDev, one of the organizers of the event, is a nonprofit dedicated to educating people about game development. In an interview earlier this year, their president—John Meister—said, “They’re not all going to go into the game industry. But they’ll learn to program or do graphic design or write. They’ll all get to work in teams. And basically they’ll take those skills and can go into any of those industries.”

Videogames have a stigma because the majority of audiences don’t know what sorts of things are being done through interactivity. And in most people’s minds, playing a “game” requires a certain investment in time and attention. By highlighting methods of input and user agency in “art installations,” people can better understand game mechanics and their uses without dedicating the effort into “playing a game.” While this is a pretty weak facade, it’s enough to get people engaged. It’s not unlike calling comic books “graphic novels”; it doesn’t change the content of the medium, just the perceptions of a handful of snobs.

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The audience appeal of an exhibit like “Rules and Play” is to learn new ways that art and media can accept and reinterpret input. This could be something as simple as filtering video data through a kaleidoscope or transferring touch screen gestures into audio samples. This could also have greater implications. After all, several of the installations used motion sensors, which means that they are tracking movement.

The recent success of Niantic’s Pokémon Go has forced the mainstream media to question how our interactions can be recorded and transformed. In an age where phones record people’s deaths and drones are used to kill suspected murderers, the ways we interact with technology are constantly evolving. And yes, Line Wobbler is a far cry from the dystopia of Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987), but that’s exactly the point. While the artists are learning from how people interact with their pieces, we—as audience members—are learning how these technologies can be used and abused. And the more we know, the less likely we are to become unwilling participants in someone else’s experiment.

Exhibits like “Rules and Play” show how the mad scientists can work with us maze rats, not against them.

“Rules and Play” runs from June 24th, 2016 until August 26th. On two occasions, the artists will be available for a gallery. Those nights are June 24th and July 15th.

All photos taken by and belong to Malinda O’Quinn.

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Weekend Reading: The Good Taste Of Bad Things

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



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On Sonic ‘06, Zolani Stewart, Mammon Machine: ZEAL/Medium

Sonic the Hedgehog. Not any Sonic the Hedgehog, but T H E Sonic The Hedgehog from 2006, a last-gen-next-gen start for Sonic that’s as confusing today as it was 10 years ago. A decade onward we’re still trying to figure it out, and Zolani Stewart’s deconstruction is as good an attempt as any.

The Mom Who Moderates Her Daughter’s Rowdy Twitch Chat, Cecilia D’Anastasio, Kotaku

Society has somehow ended up in the place where online comments are understood to be a necessary evil, because as a planet we’re routinely adamant about needless self-destruction. So it’s unsurprising that it’s a total rollercoaster of a story when Cecilia D’Anastasio profiles a mother who reigns over her Twitch-streaming daughter’s infamously horny comment section.

 

You Should Be Terrified That People Who Like Hamilton Run Our Country, Alex Nichols, Current Affairs

As someone who instinctively links that Rap the Musical skit from Mr. Show every time Hamilton comes up in Slack, yes, I will also share with you this essay about how, by tickling certain liberal sensibilities, Hamilton becomes some real bad historical revision.

My Father, the YouTube Star, Kevin Pang, The New York Times

Growing up with American sensibilities in a Chinese household, Kevin Pang and his father locked horns in confusion and haven’t always been the most thorough communicators. This is partly why it must feel so surreal to the food writer to discover his father has become a celebrity chef online.

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Header image by Cate Wurtz (lamezone.net)

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New documentary hopes the “indie” game invasion of Japan is a good thing

One of the first things that Anne Ferrero says to me is that her new documentary isn’t “Indie Game: The Movie [2012] in Japan.” She tells me this as she’s aware that many people will assume that to be the case. But it’s not just a matter of a director looking to ensure that her potential audience isn’t misled: there’s a lot more to it.

Much of it is summed up by one of Ferrero’s interview subjects in the documentary, Alexander De Giorgio, the chief organizer of Tokyo Indie Fest. “I think it’s dangerous to try and compare the Japanese indie scene to scenes in other countries because they all evolved in different ways,” he says, “they all have their own strengths and weaknesses.” The documentary, called Branching Paths (subtitle: “A journey through Japan’s indie game scene”) constantly surfs this danger, and Ferrero seems aware of it, as she should.

the word “indie” has a foreignness to it

It starts out in September 2013, at the Tokyo Game Show (TGS), which is Japan’s biggest videogame-focused event. But this one in 2013 is significant as it’s the first after another event launched in Kyoto during March that year called BitSummit, which prompted the TGS organizers to host their own indie games area for the first time ever. Ferrero says that BitSummit 2013 “could be considered the first point of recognition of ‘indies’ in Japan”—that is, via the Western understanding of “indie.” And here we meet another point of contention, and another reason that comparisons to Indie Game: The Movie are discouraged by the filmmakers.

In Japan, “indie” is a new term being applied to its independent game creators, and it comes from the West. Its arrival in Japan, as depicted in Branching Paths, is the start of an energy that builds around cultural exchange between Japan and the West. The dominant notion by the documentary’s end is that, for Japanese indies to survive, they need to market their games to the West. This idea has arisen as Americans and Europeans move over to Japan to start their own studios, to start new videogame events and meetups, and to publish small Japanese games for Westerners that have a chance of standing out in an increasingly crowded sea of Western independent games. It’s all driven by a focus on economics, and the documentary does well in depicting how this rises over the two-year period it covers, and the structures that emerge to support it all in that time.

But the point is the word “indie” has a foreignness to it, and there’s a sense that it’s being imposed on the most marketable Japanese independent games and the people who make them. Before this, Japan exclusively used the word doujin to refer to its independent creators. And it’s not just those making games: anyone who is making music, anime, manga, or art in general for themselves, is referred to as doujin. Most of them are hobbyists and are seen briefly in the documentary at Japan’s famous Comiket (comic market), which attracts around one million visitors every year. Ferrero shows up with her camera at the Comiket held in November 2013, where she finds ZUN, who is probably the most successful doujin artist of them all. He’s famous for his Touhou series of shoot-’em-ups, which he’s been making for about 20 years now, and attracted a huge fan base in Japan who tirelessly create anime, fan games, manga, even Touhou-themed bands. “Taken as a whole, it might be bigger than the major consoles,” ZUN tells Ferrero of Touhou‘s spread. That’s not him boasting—he’s a meek man who doesn’t seem to be changed by his success—that’s just the truth.

ZUN captures the zeitgeist of what was happening around the Japanese independent games scene in 2013. He speaks of the uncertainty and doubt about how Westerners and the word “indie” are changing Japanese games. It’s a feeling that isn’t really returned to afterward in the documentary but resonates throughout. “There’s been a paradigm shift in how creators see doujin,” ZUN says. “It’s become less and less about making only what you love and enjoying the process. People want to succeed. They want to hit it big. In that way, I think doujin are turning into indies. I don’t really know if this is a good thing or a bad thing for doujin.”

Whether it is good or bad for doujin is never answered in the film. Instead, when Branching Paths is confronted by the split its title seems to refer to, it follows the one signposted “indie” rather than “doujin.” To wit, it takes what might be deemed the optimist path, the one that sees the Western influence on Japan as healthy. That’s not to say that it isn’t healthy, as there are many signs that it is, but it does leave the documentary with an unanswered hole of inquiry. The implication is that the Westerners seen mingling with and leading the Japanese scene are helping Japan to help itself. We see the effects of how these Western ideas have pervaded, such as crowdfunding, which is depicted only as a runaway success through the Kickstarters for the Mega Man designer-led Comcept with Mighty No. 9, and the Castlevania designer-led Inti Creates with Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. What’s missed out in the documentary, which is no fault of Ferrero’s (it happened after her filming period), are the more recent troubles that Mighty No. 9 went through—extensive delays, disappointed players, and mediocre reviews.

Back in March 2012, during a Q&A after an Indie Game: The Movie screening, Fez (2012) designer Phil Fish said that modern Japanese games “just suck” in response to a question by Makoto Goto, a Japanese game maker. During BitSummit 2013, Goto spoke to Kotaku‘s Brian Ashcraft, who had covered the story of what Fish had said during that Q&A. “That was rude, sure, but I really want to thank Phil Fish, too, for what he said,” Goto said. “I think his remark really motivated Japanese game creators to work harder. I know it has motivated me.” You can’t tell by watching Branching Paths whether what Goto said has any wider truth to it. Are Japanese game makers any more motivated by what Fish said? Did they even hear him? There’s no evidence to answer these questions. Nonetheless, as a viewer who’s aware of this narrative, while watching Branching Paths there’s a sense that it’s documenting the echo of Fish’s words. But it’s not an echo that originates in Japan; it comes from the West.

Ferrero started making the documentary as it was the first time she had heard the word “indie” around Japan’s game-making scene. She was pulled towards it by Kimura Yoshiro, who she had met over a coffee in the summer of 2013, which was not long after he had left the “industry” to go independent with his new studio Onion Games. A year later, Koji Igarashi left his position at Konami and went the same path to co-found ArtPlay, Inc.. There was a taste of independent games as liberation in the air that older Japanese game makers wanted to pursue. Ferrero’s documentary focuses on this idea a lot and seems to suggest that the West is to thank for it. It doesn’t spend so much time capturing the struggle of Japanese game designers—older and younger—as they try to adapt to the Western practices being introduced to them. But what’s there suggests another, more worrying narrative.

he wants to focus more on fostering a Japanese-ness in the local game scene

“Shortly after Minecraft (2009), when indies seemed to become really popular abroad, many foreign companies contacted me, asking me to localize my doujin games,” said Nal of Japanese indie studio Edelweiss in the documentary. “Honestly, I think just succeeding in Japan is still hard. The biggest markets are still overseas. Once your game is well-rated abroad, then it seems Japan pays attention.” Nal has seen success in the West with games like Astebreed (2014), but he seems saddened that his games don’t see as much success in Japan, partly because Japan’s PC game market is still very small. Later on in the documentary, Ojiro Fumoto (aka moppin) recalls how some of his Japanese friends described his game Downwell (2015) as feeling very Western. It’s known that the game is inspired by Spelunky (2012) and sports many comparisons to it, which may explain these comments. Fumoto also says that his thinking may be influenced by the Western games he played while living in New Zealand in his younger years.

By its end, Branching Paths depicts Fumoto and Downwell as the one Japanese “indie” game that might bring the Japanese independent scene to the rest of the world—it’s built up as the breakout hit that might revitalize the entire country. But Fumoto, who is the last talking head in the documentary, downplays his own success to finish off by saying that he wants to focus on Japan and building up the independent game scene there. He doesn’t say it directly, but it feels like he’s implying that he wants to focus more on fostering a Japanese-ness in the local game scene, separate from the Western touch that has helped him. This Japanese-ness presumably already exists in the doujin creators who haven’t embraced Western “indie” persuasion. The challenge seems to be convincing the rest of the world that it’s worthwhile. But you have to wonder if that’s what they want to happen.

As ZUN said, the notion of “indie” in Japan is very different to “doujin.” Indie is a Western appropriation that seems very much driven by money and becoming a full-time game maker. It’s all about marketing Japan to the globe. But the few doujin artists making games shown in Branching Paths say they’re happy working on their games in the evening, after work, taking as long as 10 years to create what it is they want, just enjoying the process. Some of them, such as Keika Hanada, creator of Fata morgana no Yakata (2010), have even managed to hit it big in Japan’s PC market all by themselves. It goes some way to challenging the underlying message of Branching Paths that West is the way to go.

“Right now I think we value entrepreneurs and those who make it big the most,” said Inafune during his interview. Inafune criticizes the Japanese mentality which he says values its salarymen more than its artists. The worry is that “indie” in Japan might reinforce that, valuing those who can make money and find success with their games overseas more than the other successful artists making games for their own people. The impression that Branching Paths leaves is that the independent Japanese studios who do find success tend to have Western designs and are picked up by Western publishers. Or, quite simply, are a Western team living in Japan—these, especially, are given a lot of air time in Branching Paths.

Recently, Sony has taken to hanging banners around Tokyo Game Show declaring that “PlayStation doujin? (Update: Ferrero replied to this: “Actually, there’s a Sony program for this in Japan called “Play Doujin!” which started in 2014. It’s one of the many many things I wanted to put in the documentary and has been cut to make the movie a little easier to understand.”)

You can find out more about Branching Paths on its website. It’s available to purchase digitally on Playism and Steam.

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David OReilly’s next game reminds us we’re not the center of the universe

Everything wants you to question the scale of our world—and your place in it. Designer David OReilly used the game to expand on his first venture into the game space with Mountain (2014), wherein you’re able to inhabit the perspective of a mountain, a non-human thing. From there, he began experimenting with ways to connect a unique perspective to everything.

Humans have the tendency to believe we’re the center of the universe—that we’re special—and we’ve felt that way for a while. It’s a “very old prescientific idea that we’re somehow the center,” OReilly told us in an interview, which will be printed in full in Issue 9 of our print magazine, due out in early August. “The whole progress of science for the last few hundred years has been more and more realizing how insignificant we are.”

OReilly wanted to give our perspective—as humans and as individuals—to every single object in nature. “That’s why we have this idea in Everything of being able to be a hundred things or one—you’re completely divided between those things, because there’s a case to be made that we are all, of course, connected.”

“realizing how insignificant we are.”

Everything is exploring complex ideas on the nature of our existence, but OReilly doesn’t really think you should agonize over Everything‘s meaning. “It’s ultimately, like, a joyful project,” he said. “It’s not serious, and by serious I mean strict or something you should stroke your chin at and really have some ‘deep thoughts’ on.”

Jamin Warren’s full interview with Everything developer David OReilly will be featured in Issue 9 of our print magazine, due out in early August.

For a limited time, use the discount code RELAUNCH to receive 10% off your purchase of Issue 9, or off a 4 issue subscription.

The post David OReilly’s next game reminds us we’re not the center of the universe appeared first on Kill Screen.