Kill Screen Magazine's Blog, page 98

Duello wants to be a realistic sword fighting game, but mostly it’s funny

Any videogame that aims to represent the things we can do with our bodies (i.e. attain realism) has to bring in some kind of abstraction to make it look or feel familiar. Take, for example, the Assassin’s Creed games, in which combat isn’t really meant to be realistic as much as it’s supposed to capture the frenetic fights of action movies—full of brutal sound effects and finishing moves with sweeping cameras.

Likewise, there is Chivalry: Medieval Warfare (2012), one of the few games with first-person sword fighting, whose goal is to provide a robust and competitive multiplayer arena. As in a lot of multiplayer games, players have developed their own meta game, with exploits and strategies you wouldn’t find anywhere else. Super jumps and weird timing tricks aren’t particularly common in real-life fencing.

bodies and blades bounce off each other comically

Aiming in a totally different direction is Duello. It’s a new game that wants to tackle historical fencing with a “realistic” approach. Its wig-clad protagonists are dressed in brightly-colored versions of 18th-century garb and carry pointy rapiers that you can waggle about with the right analog stick. It’s just in the earliest of alphas for now, but you and a friend can duke it out in split screen.

A realistic first-person fencing game has to be able to let you look for openings in your opponent’s defense, it has to let you take distance back and forth and trick your opponent into thinking you’ve made a mistake. Modern fencing, at least, can be an incredibly fast sport—which is part of why it works so poor on television.

At the moment, Duello’s QWOP-like goofiness of movement gives it an earnest charm. You can advance and retreat jerkily back and forth, or swing your arm around, or hop straight into the air to get that surprise edge. It’s physics-based, so bodies and blades bounce off each other comically, and if you’re not careful you might trip and have to pick yourself up off the ground. This humor is accented by the self-serious blood-red text that splashes across the screen when one player stabs her opponent enough: “Player 2 is dead, honor has been satisfied.”

While a difficult undertaking, a realistic fencing game definitely isn’t impossible—Nidhogg (2014) actually does a pretty good job of forcing the give-and-take of space and the timing plays of sport fencing in a 2D game. It does also have dive kicks and man-eating dragons, though, so I’ll be excited to watch how Duello chooses to abstract the sport into its historical premise as development progresses.

You can buy into Duello’s early alpha over on itch.io.

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Don’t just look at these Rube Goldberg machines, play with them

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Perchang (iOS)

BY PERCHANG LIMITED

The over-engineered contraptions of Perchang do look a lot like Rube Goldberg machines but they differ very slightly. That difference is that they aren’t strictly there for you to look at; you must also operate them. The goal is simple each time: ensure a pre-requisite number of tiny balls enter the hole before the timer finishes. Without your interaction, this won’t happen, and so you have to press your thumbs on the screen to activate fans, or flippers, or tilt a plank at the right time. The complexity is upped with each new level as expected, with the introduction of a new device in each new “area,” which proves compelling. You will feel like a child once again playing with a new wooden toy. Crucially, you aren’t given enough time to get bored of that toy as another one is pushed in front of you frequently. There’s a delightful physicality to the proceedings—the joy of operating gizmos and watching a machine at work.

Perfect for: Children, engineers, toy makers

Playtime: A couple of hours

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In Stellaris, every star looks the same

There’s a moment in Dreamer of Dune—Brian Herbert’s 2003 biography of his father, science fiction author Frank Herbert—that is worth noting for the way it skirts the idea of reference in sci-fi. It describes the Herberts’ reaction to the release of Star Wars in 1977:

“The film was shocking to me, for all the similarities between it and my father’s book, Dune. Both featured an evil galactic empire, a desolate desert planet, hooded natives, strong religious elements, and a messianic hero with an aged mentor. Star Wars’ Princess Leia had a name with a haunting similarity to Dune’s Lady Alia of the noble house Atreides. The movie also had spice mines and a Dune Sea.

I phoned my father and said, ‘You’d better see it. The similarities are unbelievable.’

When Dad saw the movie, he picked out sixteen points of what he called ‘absolute identity’ between his book and the movie, enough to make him livid. He thought he saw the ideas of other science fiction writers on the screen as well, including those of Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Ted Sturgeon, Barry Malzberg, and Jerry Pournelle.”

What’s interesting about the quote is Herbert’s simultaneous inability to see distinctness despite commonality—as though Lucas’s Jawas are the same as Herbert’s Fremen—and the complete lack of acknowledgement that he himself had lifted (just as Lucas might have lifted from Dune) details from other sources: an entire language from the Middle East, and a whole theology from Islam. Dune uses words like mahdi, dar al-hikman, shaitan, jihad, and shai hulud, which are Arabic and refer back to various concepts in the history of Islam. In the same vein, Alia’s house—Atreides—situates Dune in reference to the doomed family of the mythic Atreus, where brother murders brother, uncle murders nephew, father murders daughter, wife murders husband, and son murders mother. Books are made of other books: Lucas was no more stealing from Herbert than Herbert stole from Aeschylus.

Nevertheless, science fiction has a habit of lifting from earlier works as a part of its grounding. Arthur C. Clarke used the image of the devil in Childhood’s End (1953); Dan Simmons’ Hyperion (1989) and Fall of Hyperion (1990) relies heavily upon the writing of English poet John Keats—the second book even stars a reborn Keats. Dune, as mentioned above, lifts the Middle-East and Islam onto Arrakis. Asimov’s Foundation series was inspired while reading 18th-century historian Edward Gibbons’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). This is not to say that only historians can write science fiction—only that the best sci-fi, like the best horror or fantasy, never stands solely for itself but represents something else. Reference then becomes a way of making the metaphor clear—not as shorthand, but as a tool; not as a crutch, but a color on the palette.

reference then becomes a way of making the metaphor clear

In this context, the previous work of Paradox Interactive—the development studio behind Stellaris—is worth commenting on. In all of the studio’s previous grand strategy games, the player is presented with a more-or-less historically accurate map and then given the opportunity to kick the orthodox narrative off track. Starting Crusader Kings II (2012) in 1066 gives the player the opportunity to replay William the Conqueror’s claiming of the English throne. Alternatively, she can save Harold Godwinson from receiving an arrow to the eye, and repel the Norman bastard’s invasion. In the utter alternative, she can win England playing as Harald Hardrada, the Norwegian king also invading England at the time. Christianity can fall to a reformed, rejuvenated Norse faith, England can win the Hundred Years’ War, and a united China could westernize in 1884. In essence, the model of Paradox Studio’s historical games is that of fanfiction: an established canonical narrative is presented (i.e., our history) and the player is free to write their own divergent story—say, that of a restored Muslim Andalusia or an Axis-allied Greece—which buds out from the host narrative.

Stellaris is distinct from this model, however. There is no canonical narrative or setting for the game to appropriate. It is a grand strategy game like the Europa Universalis series or Victoria II (2010), but it places players in the role of a nascent stellar empire. Having just discovered faster-than-light travel, and armed with a species of customized appearance (from a six-eyed koala to a fungus-based life form) and particular ethos (from militaristic xenophobes to peaceful materialists), the player explores the galaxy and builds a stellar empire. The game is meant to evoke that kind of wide-eyed wonder that the night sky holds, placing the player, at first, in an empty galaxy that holds such promise and excitement.

Yet it remains just as fictive as their previous games, but in a manner largely derivative of earlier works of science fiction. That is, almost every element in the game references something else in the sci-fi canon. The player can create xenomorph armies (1979’s Alien) or gene warrior armies once the “Gene Seed Purification” technology is researched (Warhammer 40,000’s Space Marines) to invade other planets. She can build sentient starships (Ian M. Banks’s Culture series). End game crises can include an alien swarm arriving from beyond the galactic rim (Warhammer 40,000’s Tyranids, or Blizzard’s Zerg), an AI revolt that seeks to exterminate all biological life (Mass Effect’s Reapers), or invasive, blue beings made of pure energy (Titan AE’s Drej). Other, planet-specific events can pop up, including a note about a species of small, brightly colored and highly co-operative creatures that straddle between flora and fauna (as in Pikmin). This is not to say that the game is plagiarizing the original sources, or even lacking in imagination—just that it consciously borrows most of its raw material from elsewhere, and that in turn the videogame represents an aggregate of the cultural landscape that is science fiction.

Granted, not all of Stellaris’ references take their direct cue from existing sci-fi properties—yet they still function the same way. Take one event in particular: the appearance of a small, ceramic object orbiting a star: “It should obviously not be there, yet somehow it has managed to find its way into close orbit.” The event is a reference to a line of argument made by British philosopher Bertrand Russell: “nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the Christian God just as unlikely.” The argument’s broader interpretation speaks to the burden of proof being on those who make claims, yet it remains a common barb in the argumentative atheist’s quiver.

Stellaris then becomes a series of inside jokes

The irony in Stellaris’s reference to Russel’s Teapot depends on the player species’s dominant ethos. Some will see it as just a weird conundrum, while the more spiritual species will take it as a favorable sign from the divine. The reference then becomes a clever joke: a point against belief in God is transformed into a point in God’s favor. But its special force depends on the reader getting the reference, just as the Pikmin joke depends on knowing what Pikmin are, and so on. Stellaris then becomes a series of inside jokes, comprehensible especially to those “in the know.”

In relying on references, then, Stellaris looks exactly the way you would expect it to look because the player has been there before, seen it before, and knows what to expect. But in being so familiar it loses that sense of alienness that the promise of space travel entails. And it is not surprising to see that its community is in the process of cutting out the substitution and pursuing the referent. We are a few months away from the inevitable slate of mods to the base game that permit playing in the Warhammer 40,000, Star Trek, Star Wars, and Mass Effect universes—essentially bringing the experience full circle as the game returns, ouroboros-like, to the universes that spawned it. At the same time, Stellaris will receive the regular genuine care that Paradox shows all its games through free patches, adding content, new features, and bug fixes.Though, tellingly, these patches are all named after science fiction authors—Clarke dropped on the first of June, Asimov was released on June 27, and Heinlein looms just over the horizon. Stellaris then operates less as a piece of fanfiction, and more as an echo chamber for these kinds of references.

In that sense, it can be contrasted with the pillars of its source material. Take, for example, the simultaneous and paradoxical familiarity and alienness of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which tells the story of a human ambassador visiting a frozen world inhabited by a unique variant of humanity. Instead of the binaries of gender, those native to the planet Winter are caught in a static, agendered state for most of the month. Every 26 days, those humans then experience a contextually-based shift into either biological maleness or femaleness. Part of the pleasure of the novel lies in those moments where a sense of common humanity is fundamentally undermined by stark difference: without gender binaries to serve as a kind of typological original, the world is starkly mono-cultural and monotone. Large-scale wars—binary conflicts writ large and dramatic—are absent from Winter, while its people view the more traditional division of genders as a perversion.

But despite these alien details, the world is deeply human. One character, for example, faces an exile just as keen as that of Dante’s from Florence in the 14th century. Another is placed in a frozen internment camp that evokes One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). These comparisons work not because The Left Hand of Darkness explicitly makes them (it doesn’t), but because they’re both trying to describe the same kind of experiences: bitter exile, forced labor in a frigid environment. References across science fiction work in the same paradoxical way: similitude highlights difference and vice versa. The end of The Left Hand of Darkness asks for stories of the past and stories of the future because the former gives the latter their clarity: “Will you tell us how he died?—Will you tell us about the other worlds out among the stars—the other kinds of men, the other lives?”

The Left Hand of Darkness tries to portray alienness in a way very different from Stellaris: it does not rely upon shorthand, but upon the portrayal of the alien qua their own alienness and hence familiarity. Like Mass Effect, Dune, Foundation, and countless other sci-fi universes, it builds its extraterrestrial world from the ground up. Stellaris only borrows from all of their palettes to paint its own picture of the night sky—and a game about aliens feels all the less foreign as a result.

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Watch the man who creates No Man’s Sky’s creature sounds at work

No Man’s Sky feels like the game that keeps on giving. Before even reaching its long-awaited release date it has managed to capture imaginations with both its improbable construction and the mind-bending problem solving of its creators at Hello Games. Perhaps it has been because its talented team, in particular art director Grant Duncan and programmer Innes McKendrick, as well as figurehead Sean Murray, have been so eager to share their solutions with the world in a series of talks that all deal with the same issue: how do you maintain artistic control in a near-infinite game world?

First there was Duncan, who at GDC 2015 told the world how he used an army of robot drones to capture animated GIFs of the quintillions of planets in the game so he could canvas their aesthetics. Then came a talk from McKendrick at Nucl.ai where he explained the mathematical formula that allowed Hello Games to create worlds that had undergone hundreds of years of erosion without ever modelling that process. Meanwhile, Sean Murray and his ever growing beard have been stalking around casually explaining astounding things, like the way every star in the game’s night sky is an actual visitable place or simply taking whole rooms full of people to planets that no living person has seen before. Though they may have been accused of opacity in relation to the gameplay of No Man’s Sky, it’s hard to make the same accusation in terms of the access Hello Games has provided to their development process.

there is something heartwarming about watching Weir

Now it’s the turn of audio director Paul Weir to enlighten us on his approach to scoring an infinite universe, in a talk from this month’s Sónar+D conference in Barcelona. A pioneer in procedural audio, Weir is quite the evangelist, and despite his softly-spoken approach it’s hard not to be convinced by his work. While the full presentation is a fascinating insight into the field, I’ve selected the best moment for those unwilling to sit through an hour of developer chat. Namely Mr. Weir using his custom software “VocAlien” and a tablet to perform the voice of an alien creature live. Have a watch:  

Maybe it’s just me, but there is something heartwarming about watching Weir, clearly a tinkerer and a perfectionist, shift his tablet around with the utmost concentration, and, remarkably, producing creature sounds that even Skywalker Sound would be happy with. The fact that the “energy” of the creatures’ voices is performed like this by Weir for each archetype and then captured to be fed into the game, only makes it more fascinating. That means that every one of the game’s near-infinite creatures has been performed by this one, slightly hyperactive, elegantly attired man from Liverpool.

Perhaps, in the end, that is the attraction of the odd tales and herculean achievements of the development of No Man’s Sky: Everyone involved seems to be distinctly down to earth and yet unshakably focused on the integrity and quality of the game. A bunch of geeks, in the best possible way. And the result? Well, you just have to listen to Weir demoing the music system, filled out by performances from the band 65daysofstatic. Paul Wolinski, a band member and self-professed geek, has clearly been converted by Weir, stating in a recent interview that “10 years down the line […] It’s gonna be a case of making algorithms to make music rather than making music itself.” And as Weir’s demo reveals, this is an exciting future to be approaching.

Even in the less-than-ideal recording, a rich sense of atmosphere and narrative pervades, conjuring a game world we have yet to see. Backed by Weir’s infectious sense of excitement, the whole thing is artistically rich and yet distinctly human. In a world of PR bluster and back-of-the-box bullet points, that feels like a gift to me.

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Scorn slowly reveals its fleshy face with a new trailer

The camera slides over an unknown melding of flesh and bone, something tumorous growing in the edgelight. Towers of meat and sinew stand in a sickly fog, their scale and anatomy twisted beyond recognition. Like the 1979 teaser for Alien, the camera lingers over these textures, as if under such close scrutiny some occult meaning might be revealed.

This is the teaser for Scorn, and it sets out a strong vision of fleshy worlds and cadaverous landscapes. Like that infamous Alien trailer, it is a masterpiece of atmosphere, a slow accumulation of tension that creeps under your skin. However, unlike that Alien trailer, which builds to a frantic flashcut montage of violence and fear, Scorn‘s simply grips our nerves ever tighter, refusing to release us with a jump scare or gunshot. Stare, it says, at the world we have wrought, and be afraid.

Ljubomir Peklar of developer Ebb Software admits the purposeful slowness of the trailer comes from “watching too much Tarkovsky.” For him, this unnerving crawl reflects the game’s own pace, “slowly pulling you into the world.” And what a world it is. Built from the decaying remains of H. R Giger’s signature biomechanical shapes and Zdzisław Beksiński’s dreamlike constructions of calcified bone, it feels like the fullest commitment to the visual design of those two master surrealists we have ever seen.

But Scorn goes beyond that, drawing its inspiration not just from the visual signature of these artists, but the meanings encased in their works as well: “The style was not chosen just because it looks cool but because it correlates with the ideas of the game,” Peklar said. In particular, Scorn endeavors to step into that dream-space that these great artists conjured, not one of disembodied, floating wanderings, but fleshy materiality.

Peklar is insistent that the dreamlike nature of Scorn is not “something completely outside of our reality” or “purely metaphysical.” It is instead an attempt to engage with the very meat and bone of our mortal bodies. The “dream-like nature of the world is there to compress, heighten and exaggerate the materialistic aspects of the world,” said Peklar, suggesting that Scorn will be a visceral, immediate experience, not a space for wandering introspection.

Beneath the skin of each of us lies a monster

Yet there is something in the trailer’s slowness that cracks open its imagery, pushing it beyond gory shock tactics and towards a more poetic tone. As Peklar mentioned, Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky is an influence, and while his imagery might never have strayed into the hellish fleshscapes of Scorn, the richness of his cinematography can be felt here. Take his opening to Solaris (1972) for example, his lingering shots drawing out the powerful strangeness in the movement of the weeds under the stream. The same unflinching focus is later applied to the boiling surface of the planet Solaris, its waters as much a part of an impregnable natural system as that of our own world.

Scorn, in its anatomical focus, seems to turn the same focus to our own bodies. Beneath the skin of each of us lies a monster as terrifying as the figure we see stalking a corridor in the trailer’s latter parts. Our bodies, within their hallowed chambers, offer sights to match the bulbous and queasy constructions that Scorn’s world is built from. As it does in the only gameplay in the trailer, where a quivering, mutilated creature is fixed in the sights of a cartilaginous gun, the game seems to be asking us to simply look, and not turn away. What could be more terrifying than that?

You can find out more about Scorn on its website. It’s slated to arrive on PC in 2017.

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Go on a dreamlike journey with The Endless Express

From the creator of Lieve Oma—the game where the only fail state is disappointing your grandmother—comes an unfinished game about traveling on a train. The Endless Express is a continuation of a 2014 game jam entry in which your character falls asleep on the train, and then needs to find their way home.

It’s a game that manages to capture the feeling of being lost as a traveler through a series of peculiar creatures, an intern-made schedule, and the light swaying momentum of the train itself. The unfinished corridors of the train stations, the untextured boats in the distance of a far-off lighthouse feel unintentional and incomplete, but they also look as though they have been drawn from memory rather than extracted from reality. It’s a fitting effect.

plenty of oddly profound scenes to discover

Hence, with its future uncertain and full scope unrealized, The Endless Express has the feel of a half-remembered dream. You can easily fall off the map or the train into an endless abyss, where the only thing in your line of sight are train tracks reaching out into nothingness. Even when you’re not descending uncontrollably, there are plenty of oddly profound scenes to discover, such as a teenager and their hot rod waiting outside of a boarded up gas station, insisting they’ll go for a ride when the station opens up. A frog-like creature sits on top of an empty lighthouse over a near-empty sea, and talks about going home. It’s delightful and surprising in the best way.

The art, which seems a combination of the Lieve Oma aesthetic—pink trees in blossom, nature against a solid-colored canvas—and something a touch more surreal and is lovely, there’s no better word for it. And even if you have no interest in finding your way home you’ll always find something else to look at, to pull you in some other direction.

If you’re interested in further discovering the archaeology of incomplete games, you can check out Emily Short’s “Bring Out Your Dead,” which allowed developers to submit their unfinished works.

You can find out more (and play) the Endless Express over on itch.io.

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Mare will use your gaze to guide a lost girl through mystical ruins

On June 3rd, 2016, a little over a week before E3 2016 began, Visiontrick Media quite boldly announced a new game. Called Mare, it’s to be the studio’s first virtual reality game, one that places an emphasis on exploration and the player’s senses. In the announcement post, Visiontrick noted that they’re still working on their other game, Pavilion—a fourth-person puzzle/adventure game we’ve been eager to get our hands on—but they felt it was time to let the world know about Mare too, especially as it was to appear at E3 as part of the IndieCade Showcase.

Visiontrick wanted to make Mare while VR is still relatively new to the world, at least in its current iteration. They saw the uncertainty around the medium as an opportunity to create something “unusual” and different from the current experiences VR offers. Hence, Mare will have you indirectly leading a little girl through a mysterious world riddled with ruins. The girl is lost in this world, but not completely alone, as she is accompanied by an equally mysterious mechanical creature known as BIRD.

“the more subtle and peaceful side of VR”

Similar to ustwo’s Gear VR game Land’s End, Mare uses the player’s gaze to move the game forward. The idea is that you observe and take in everything the game’s environments have to show, while guiding the little girl with the same movements of the head. As well as influencing the actions of the girl, your viewpoint can affect those of BIRD, even though BIRD is just as capable of making its own decisions from time to time.

“People praised the simplicity of the controls focused on immersion, and the feeling of the VR experience being natural without making it a gimmick,” Rui Guerreiro of Visiontrick told me. “And that it was one of the better VR experiences they tried so far; a game with an unexpected nature that felt like a small part of a much longer experience.”

Prior to showing the game to people at E3, several Vine videos and dozens of screenshots were released, providing a general idea of the game’s visuals and sounds. The environment is immediately eye-catching, and is sure to stand out the most: the washed-out colors of the ruins and grass contrast superbly with the girl’s red dress, and the lighting draws attention to the vertical scale of the place, witnessed from the high angle of BIRD’s view.

Guerreiro explains the game’s design dictated the art style, but more importantly, it all had to look and feel natural. “Creating contrasts between the stillness of the ruins and, for example, the movement of a lonely tree that sways with the wind, we believe it’s a subtle and natural way to control how the player gazes the environment and how [they] may feel surprised by changes in it.”

What the little girl will encounter throughout her journey is unknown, as is the true nature of BIRD, but Guerreiro has made it clear that Mare’s main goal is to provide people with “something unique that doesn’t exist elsewhere in VR, and also something that uses the more subtle and peaceful side of VR.” Environmental design, audiovisuals, and the player are by far the most paramount things to Visiontrick and, by extension, Mare. The importance of the latter is even evident in their artistic statement on IndieCade, where they say, “In the center of the whole experience is you, immersed in the game world…”

Mare currently has no release date, but is set to come to the Oculus Rift. There are currently no plans to bring it to other VR hardware. Pavilion, meanwhile, is still set to release later this year for PC, PS4, and PS Vita.

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The Southern Fried Gameroom Expo is a reminder of what we’ve lost

Long cast as the home of hospitality, green tomatoes, and civil war memorials, the South is pushing back against a more current War of Northern Aggression. Gaming expos born north of Mason-Dixon line have prospered: Penny Arcade Expo began in 2004 outside of Bellevue, Washington before expanding to Boston, Australia, and Texas. Gen Con, founded in Wisconsin by the father of Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax, focuses on tabletop gaming and calls Indiana home. The largest and oldest retro games convention is still California Extreme, set in Santa Clara the past 20 years. But Southerners love games, too. And Preston Burt wants the world to know.

That’s why he founded the Southern Fried Gameroom Expo in 2014. I attended the third annual gathering of pinball fanatics and retro game enthusiasts in Atlanta, now held in the Renaissance Waverly Hotel, a building aptly named for the festivities. When you walk inside and spy a pin you haven’t played in years, you might just feel born again.

///

Roam the 2,500 square feet of soft carpet in the hotel Grand Ballroom and see the clash of two very distinct forms of luxury. Above, light shines down out of giant modern art chandeliers, each a square of over one-thousand trapezoidal crystals suspended from the ceiling. Below, hundreds of machines popular in the Reagan Era glow and throb. Each light source is borne from an unnecessary burning of fossil fuels. Each stems from one form of aristocracy or another: such posh lamps once lit the dusty wigs of politicians, just as the flickering strobe of The Getaway: High Speed II (1992) shrunk the pupils of teens with nothing better to do. We’re bored, sustenance so easily provided. We’ve beaten the animals. We’ve earned this temptation.

Many are here to play and remember. A proud few are here to compete.

“You gotta take a breather now and again to reassess,” Tim says, in a red t-shirt and khaki shorts. “Get some food. Then go back in.” He’s a competitor in the Pinvasion III tournament, an event sanctioned by the Professional and Amateur Pinball Association (PAPA) that’s going on concurrently with the expo. Not all advice is as useful.

“Fuck!” Jack steps away from The Walking Dead pinball table by Stern. He turns 180 degrees, faces away from the glass, and stares at the plush carpet, its design like stepping on a room-sized roccoco burgundy tie. His last ball just drained, his score lower than he’d liked. His black shirt was a good choice—a deep solid hue provides less distraction against the reflecting surface. But the tight jeans should have been left at home. Many of the competitors here are in cargo shorts or relaxed fit denim; this is not a style competition. This is all about the silver ball.

And silver hair. Out on the expo floor where every game is set to FREE PLAY, the wily veterans are learning their youngins something fierce. One older gentleman stands in front of Safe Cracker (1996), an ambitious pinball contraption with a complicated back-glass of circular light. His orthopedic shoes remain planted. His right hand keeps moving up against the machine’s right side, above the flipper button—it’s hard to say whether this is a palsy or the calculating jiggle of a man who knows how to nudge the unit just right to rack up a high score. He does well. I step up and lose three balls nearly immediately.

A kid hops up to take my place. I stand over him, risking predatory concerns from a nearby parent. “I was never here,” his shirt proclaims. He’s a full-body player; each slap of the flipper is accompanied by a tiny jump and a leg kick. His shoulders swivel. The Dot Matrix display fills in with a threat: “Guard alerted to your presence,” it reads. The kid shrugs. No big deal. He’s cracked this safe before. The Multiball begins. He keeps it going as long as he can until the final ball drains.

the silver ball draining down between your impotent flippers

“Oh!” he yells out, one last jump. Final score: 514,000. The young one has bested both of his elders. Hope remains for the future.

People react the same way in the Free Play area as those playing in the tournament. Even with nothing on the line, the sight of the silver ball draining down between your impotent flippers is a painful vision. Most play with humility and joy. Some smack the top of the machine upon each lost ball, a curse bellowed aloud or swallowed under their breath.

One gentleman in front of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1993) is zoned in. Between rounds he shakes out his hands. He wipes sweat from his brow. His time spent in front of an illustrated Gary Oldman bears no consequence other than the memory of a high or low score. There’s something melancholy about the urgency with which he, and others, manipulate these slanted obstacle courses with a single sphere and some physics. But also inspiring. Perhaps this is their only venue in which to seek out victory. Maybe this mechanical realm is a safe space, a dumping ground for mounting frustrations. Better here than at home.

On Day Two of Pinvasion, pressure mounts. A dude in a red cap and low-slung jeans steps away from the Congo (1995) table and points his finger to the ceiling. He holds it there, walks away slowly, then pounds his first into his hands with a slight grimace. From a distance it’s hard to tell if this is frustration or triumph. The smell of ketchup hangs in the air. Later I see another player point in the air, and I realize it’s to signal the organizers over to record the score, good or bad. I have much to learn.

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Elsewhere in the hotel, panel discussions and Q&As are scheduled. One is with the actor who played the boy in The Last Starfighter (1984). But conversations in quiet rooms do not seem to be the point of the Southern Fried Gameroom Expo. Step into the main expo floor and the reason becomes apparent: Over 200 pinball tables and arcade cabinets, turned on, blinking and bleeping, awaiting your frenzied inputs. One back room focuses on fighting games, those one-on-one street fights that dominated the ‘90s scene. The machines are lined up side-by-side; this is important. There must be the threat of shoulder-rubbing with a stranger. This is what an arcade, and by extension the SFGE, offers that a 52” LED 4KTV with surround sound can not. There is an intimacy to this other kind of space invasion. Two of you stand in front of a hulking machine the size of a hot refrigerator, staring into the burning glass. Your elbows clash. On-screen, your digital stand-ins clench fists and beat each other’s faces pulpy. One is the victor and stays. Two humans have shared something impossible to contract over Wi-Fi. Tonight, the disease is spreading.

But aside from competition and nostalgia, there is a third reason to attend: commerce. Almost each machine includes a “For Sale” sign, with the owner’s name and phone number. And this is where SFGE and a growing number of expos separate themselves from the more commercial, industry-driven shows attended by current publishers. The point of shows like this, and Portland Retro Gaming Expo (October 21-23), plus Free Play Florida (November 11-13), is not to sell you on a promised future but keep the past alive. And plugged into your outlet. These are singular pieces of culture impossible to replicate as downloadable apps. These have weight and electrical cords. They are anachronisms. Inside these pop-up expos in hotel ballrooms, for three days at a time, we’re reminded how far this art has evolved, and how much we’ve lost.

A small crowd forms around a man in overalls playing a game I’ve never seen before, Ice Cold Beer (1983) by Taito. You maneuver a metal rod up a vertical playfield using two joysticks, one controlling the left axis and one controlling the right. A ball rests on the rod—the goal is to drop the ball into a sequence of holes, each numbered and lit up. Imagine a 2D version of those old wooden labyrinth games and you’re close. It’s a simple concept, powered by gravity and inertia, but as I push the ball slowly upward, with a small crowd watching, my heart pounds.

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This and other electro-mechanical wonders like SlugFest and Nudge It and Bell Ringer make me mourn the days before electronic games had been codified into the narrow confines of today’s industry.  It’s true that in 2016, there are more games being created than ever before. But many are limited to the predetermined inputs of 1) joystick + button controller, 2) mouse + keyboard, or 3) capacitive touch-screen. Much can be done with these as the default. But too many remain bound by expectations and standards. Arcade games were built for a singular purpose, their controls and screen custom designed to deliver an idea. Modern games are grafted onto devices built for a million and one pre-existing conditions.

the power of inefficiency

And while experimental games made for singular experiences continue to be made and shown-off at spaces like IndieCade or ALT.CTRL.GDC, they are invariably niche, never meant for wide distribution. Yesteryear’s arcade oddities were set up in pubs and pizza parlors. You now have to seek out the strangeness of Crank Tank (2015)—35 years ago, you could drop a quarter in the washer at your local laundromat and wait out the cycle in a makeshift tank cockpit playing Battlezone (1980). Now you spend that time looking at the same 5” screen in a billion pockets across the globe. Events like the Southern Fried Gameroom Expo remind us of the power of inefficiency.

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On my way out, I pop into the Classic Console room, featuring systems from the Magnavox Odyssey to the Wii. The last station before the door out is a standalone Ultra Pong machine; a kid no older than three is twirling the paddle controller and watching the vertical bars slide up and down. I watch for a moment. He turns and says, “You can play with me.” No question mark in his voice: this was not a request but an invitation. I dutifully pick up the controller.

As a college instructor in my day job I’ve learned that grade inflation is real; expecting to succeed with no effort perverts our children’s sense of work ethic. This pre-pre-schooler was no exception. I wanted him to grow up knowing the true taste of loss so that it’s sourness would spur him onto greatness. I beat him in three straight games: 15-6, 15-9, 15-1. It wasn’t his fault—this machine was born 40 years before he was, and his motor skills are still developing. The beauty of the Gameroom Expo is that it allows the present to visit the past again, or to see it for the first time. On this day, the future wins: With his last and only score, the child points at the “1” and says, “Gotcha!” Even in victory the old man has been defeated. The child giggles, savoring the hard-earned goal.

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Inside wants to devour you

Everyone who has ever played Éric Chahi’s Another World (1991) remembers the “Beast.” Emerging from a pool of water, you see a four-legged silhouette perched menacingly on a nearby ledge. The creature then exits to the right. On the next screen it appears momentarily in the background, but you’re distracted by the poisonous worms crawling towards you. By the third screen you may have forgotten about it altogether until crossing an invisible threshold triggers it to appear. It snarls. You run. It chases you. But you didn’t run soon enough, and it catches you, kills you, and sends you back to the pool of water.

But this time you’re ready. You start running immediately. It still doesn’t look like you’ll make it to the rope hanging three screens away, but you have to. This is a videogame after all, and the people who make videogames don’t make puzzles that can’t be solved, obstacles that can’t be overcome. So you keep running. You hope. You jump. And as you catch the rope you exhale, except it’s not the end. It snaps and swings you over to the other side of the Beast. So you run the other way as it closes the distance. You keep running, and three more screens later a hooded figure appears and pierces the creature with a laser. You let out a long sigh of relief—and then he shoots you too.

men with flashlights try to hunt him down and strangle him

People remember this scene because for a few moments it made them forget they were playing a game. Rules and systems crumble and the façade of calculated outcomes fall apart to reveal something more immediate and spontaneous. The boundaries between winning and losing that helped create those moments slip away and all that’s left is the impression of a time, a place, and a feeling.

This is the template for Inside’s success. So clean, pure, and polished, its only residue is the sense of having shared in someone else’s life and grappled with the conditions that propelled it.

When Inside starts, three words appear on the screen: “Press any button.” These are the only words in the entire game. Their unbridled optimism points toward unlimited possibility, but the reality is very different. A small wooded area comes into view while a boy dressed in plain clothes stumbles forward. You can steer him, make him jump, or have him grab hold of things. It’s simple and uncluttered, as if designed for the original Nintendo controller. You can press any button to begin the game, but after that most of them won’t do anything.

The boy is faceless. Just an anonymous lump of dots on a screen. He could be anything, do anything, but this is what the creators decided for him. And then they dropped him in a forest while men with flashlights try to hunt him down and strangle him. It’s a raw deal, and one the rest of the game commits to complicating with every new puzzle, sound, and visual detail. But everything blends together too well to break the game into parts like this.

At one point the boy is running through a warehouse when a dog starts barking in the distance. Keep him running and you eventually see a fence you can climb with a boarded-up door on the other side. But as you get closer the dog appears in the middle of the frame, small at first, but soon much larger as it descends on you from the background. Fortunately, you hop onto and over the fence just in time, pausing to admire the scene before getting to work on the door.

an ambiguity about who is really in control

But the boy is small and there are a lot of boards. Then you notice the dog has left as its barks get quieter. It’s then that Inside pulls a dastardly trick. The dog is not bound by the same side-scrolling geometry as you and the boy. It doesn’t have to hop the fence as you just did. It can go deeper into the warehouse and circumvent it altogether. That’s when the dog stops simply being a narrative set piece to build suspense and becomes part of the puzzle.

Limbo (2010), Playdead’s previous game, delighted in its brutish minimalism. The creators seemed to enjoy shredding the needless baggage that accompanies most videogames as much as their protagonist. No collectables. No dialogue. Not even colors. But Inside takes the conspicuous absences of its predecessor and transcends them. Rather than flaunting a sleek, highly-stylized design, it balances every one of its creative drives—bleakness, desperation, companionship, discovery—in such a way that the experience that’s produced isn’t overwhelmed by its presentation. The shadow it casts can make Limbo feel like a prototype by comparison.

Inside doesn’t eagerly brandish its juxtapositions like Limbo. Instead, they subsume one another. The introduction of color makes the visual contrasts more subtle, and the dynamic relationship between bold foregrounds and detailed backgrounds draws from a more nuanced visual palette. Pastoral scenes give way to industrial spaces. Funnels of light cast harsh shadows. Hurried footsteps followed by the barking of a guard dog cuts through the silence in a way that makes it louder than both. And the interplay of action and reaction, from the player to the boy to the environment, creates an ambiguity about who is really in control that persists long after the final scene.

Traversing Inside requires viewing its objects, structures, and people as interchangeable devices, each to be manipulated in order to open the next door, climb the next ledge, or escape the next threat. It’s an undercurrent that surfaces in more explicit ways as each new act progresses. The tension in using another person in order to save them begins early on with the player forcing the boy off a cliff, but grows more disturbed and layered from there.

Inside feels acutely human

Where death offered a through line for Limbo, both thematically and materially, Inside is less rigid, and thus more encompassing. Death is not funny in Inside. It’s cruel and sad, even when it’s unavoidable. Inside‘s boy doesn’t get buzz-sawed or impaled. He gets strangled by strange men or mauled by dogs. He suffocates underwater, choking as the liquid fills his lungs. Inside doesn’t encourage subordinating the flesh in service of experimenting with puzzles. The boy wants to escape and you want desperately to help him. When it does employ dying as a tool, it’s in the service of other narrative elements rather than sadistic glee. The sonic blasts reverberating across a narrow chasm in an underground cavern show the cruelty of the gauntlet laid out before you. When a surveillance machine spots the boy it tazes him and drags him away, insinuating there might be worse things in Inside‘s world than death.

To the degree that Inside has an animating force, it’s one provided by something like the paradox of condition described by Simone de Beauvoir in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947). “[Men] know themselves to be the supreme end to which all action should be subordinated, but the exigencies of action force them to treat one another as instruments or obstacles, as means,” she wrote. If Limbo was obsessed with the consequences of an action, or their absence, Inside is haunted by the link between control and freedom.

An air of totalitarianism permeates the game. Where Limbo was otherworldly, Inside feels acutely human. Its horrors are familiar and man-made, no matter how strange and surprising they appear in the moment. As the player you control the boy, but sometimes the boy is controlling other bodies as well. Sometimes you get him killed; sometimes he gets them killed. But because he seems unique in some way, surrounded by a world hostile to him—and to you, and your relationship together and its seeming independence from programs running in the background—you push on together and try not to look back.

But this independence is an illusion. “The more widespread their mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by uncontrollable forces,” de Beauvoir wrote. And the closer you and the boy get to the end, the more inescapable it feels. The hierarchy of control is revealed to be something else. Inside is perhaps the closest I’ve ever come to feeling like a videogame was actually playing me.

Developers have mostly moved away from pre-rendered cutscenes in favor of having scenes play out in-engine with the player still in control. Quick-time events are an attempt to make the cinematic playable. Characters keep walking and talking in the background even as you explore a room and analyze its contents on your own. The result is supposed to be more fluid and natural.

Inside breaks down the distinction entirely. Everything is a puzzle. Everything is part of the story. Including you. Its world doesn’t just feel “alive,” it feels seamless, which is why when you search for the strings holding up the puppets, or a man behind the curtain, you won’t find one. Playdead’s greatest feat in creating Inside was making it look like they never created it in the first place.

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Forget fighting Pokémon, it’s all about doing battle with Ennui Teens now

Header image: A “suuuuuuper early” image of Bravery Network

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One of the reasons Bravery Network is being made is because Damian Sommer, creator of Chesh (2015) and The Yawhg (2013), couldn’t find anyone to play Pokémon with.

“I played a lot of competitive Pokémon,” said Sommer, “I still do, actually. It’s just a lot of fun for me. I’m the best Pokémon player I know, but I’m not that good in the grand scheme of things. I don’t really have anyone I know who can take me on.”

Sommer laments that people don’t always seem to appreciate Pokémon’s player-on-player battle systems. It often takes a back seat to the collecting aspects of a series that shouted “GOTTA CATCH ‘EM ALL” as its war cry, a battle plan to merch hundreds of cute gibberish critters for en masse virtual and physical consumption. Unlike Pokémon’s many clones, such as Robopon (1998), Dragon Warrior Monsters (1998) and that Looney Tunes game, Bravery Network is focused on the arena. And instead of animals being forced to gouge each other for our entertainment, this game pits celebrity ennui teens against one another.

playing nice-nice with opponents to make them hate you less

Set in a future where medicine has not only cured all what ails humanity, but made them nigh invincible and ageless, Bravery Network depicts a future-sport called “Bravery.” Teams of five attempt to make their rivals surrender by any means necessary. “Violence, usually” says Sommer.

The version I played is in its early stages. The fighting system as-is isn’t friendly for a single session, the subject of capturing youthful pugilists remains a “contested issue,” but a lot of the visual elements are a treat. Fights are in a virtual grid and the combatant kids—accessorized with battle armor and the future-world’s latest accoutrements—are floating magenta cut outs drawn by cartoonist Kelly K. Some fighters look like they’re ready to arm wrestle robots while others look like they’re going for high tea at an anime convention. With myriads of stats and a UI of hovering windows, Bravery Network looks like a hybrid between ICQ and Thunderdome.

Gloam Collective, photo by Zack Kotzer

Some attacks deal traditional damage, some capitalizing on strange speculative technology, which Sommer described as a sort of sorcery. Others go straight for the mind, playing nice-nice with opponents to make them hate you less, or talk about grabbing some lunch to make them hungry. Bouts are overseen by Jeffery the Referee, who appears very excited to watch these folks fight.

“I like to say it’s our take on Pokémon,” said Sommer, “or what Hearthstone (2014) did to Magic: The Gathering (1993), we’re trying to do to Pokemon. Which is basically take the root of it and strip it down a bit and tweak it.”

Bravery Network is the first game by the Gloam Collective, a supergroup made up of Sommer, Taylor Bai-Woo (creator of 2015’s I am dead where are my keys), Alex “Droqen” Martin (creator of 2013’s Starseed Pilgrim) and Kelly K.

You can look out for updates on Bravery Network on its website.

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