Tuesday, December 30, 2014

2014 Year-End Wrap-Up


Even though I've been preoccupied with teaching art to college students, I've still spent plenty of time playing games this year, so I wanted to rundown a quick top 10 list of games that were released in 2014 that I enjoyed quite a bit.

1. Gran Turismo 6 (PS3)
2. Kentucky Route Zero: Act 3 (Mac)
3. Nidhogg (PS3)
4. NaissanceE (PC)
5. Terra Battle (iOS)
6. Mountain (Mac)
7. FRACT OSC (Mac)
8. Threes! (iOS)
9. Sportsfriends (PS3)
10. Desert Golfing (iOS)

Obviously I missed some games from this past year that a lot of other people are talking about, but this is the best of what I actually played. Honorable Mention to Crossy Road (iOS) and The Fall (Mac).

However, there were some other amazing games that I played this year that were released prior to 2014, and I'd like to acknowledge those in no particular order.

Gone Home
Antichamber
Mass Effect
Bayonetta
The Last of Us
Dyad
Pac-Man CE DX+ (again)

Finally, I'm not going to do a rundown of all the best things I ran on this blog, but here are a few of my favorite pieces I wrote for Kill Screen this year.

Vib-Ribbon and Obsolete Relevance
Emergents - Lilith
Changes at Games for Change
Light, Shadow, and the Beauty of NaissanceE
Genre Study - The Evolution of Music Games

Here's to more great things to come in 2015! Happy New Year!

Monday, September 29, 2014

Blips: Historically Low-Poly


Source: A Comprehensive History of Low-Poly Art, Pt. 1, Pt. 2, Pt. 3
Author: Tim Schneider
Site: Kill Screen

If you haven't had the time to read through Tim Schneider's extensive treatise on low-poly art, I'd like to humbly suggest that you carve out some time to do so. It's a 3-part essay, but reads like one long piece broken into three sections, so I'd recommend taking in as much as you can in one go as possible. Schneider's main thesis here is the exploration of why so many contemporary game makers are opting for the low-poly art style, and the answer in most all cases comes down to emotional resonance. Low-poly art, like the bear shown above, doesn't try to exactly replicate real world objects, but reveals the material of its making while also leaving gaps for viewers to fill in. Schneider relates these artistic moves to Modernist painters, who when faced with extinction at the hands of the photograph, took a turn toward painterly-ness as expressiveness.

Schneider references so many great examples from the contemporary games space and from Modernist painting, and really captures the thinking behind these methods now while grounding them historically. Still, my mind kept wandering toward the actual construction process of low-poly art which has the most in common with sculpture, a medium that goes unmentioned in the article. When I look at the low-poly bear at the top of this post, I think of the subtractive processes of whittling. The flat surfaces mimicking the cuts made by a handheld blade given quick, gestural strokes. It's interesting that low-poly art aesthetically looks most similar to wood-carving when the act of 3D modeling more directly relates to wireframe armatures and applying skins on-top of them, a notably additive method of sculpting.

There's probably another whole essay that could be written here juxtaposing low-poly art with sculptural movements, and I actually credit Schneider's work with spurring this line of thinking in myself moreso than me pointing out that something was missing from his own. I can't recommend strongly enough giving the entirety of his essay a read.

Friday, September 12, 2014

Blips: Linkpile


So I've been collecting a lot of Blips articles for a long time here, but the time I have to dedicate to posting on Low Cutoff has been greatly reduced now that I'm teaching sculpture or preparing to teach sculpture for much of my week, and what's left is probably spent researching and writing articles for Kill Screen or (gasp) making my own art. That said, I do want to share this treasure trove of articles that I've really enjoyed the past couple months, covering a wide array of issues in and around the sphere of games. Hopefully you'll find them as enriching as I have.

Angela R. Cox on teaching games as text (part 4/4)
Frank Lantz on the relationship between game theory and game design
Lana Polansky on metahistorical constructions in games
Simon Parkin on indie gaming's obsession with moneymaking
Heidi Kemps on the search for the origin of lost Sonic the Hedgehog levels
Robert Yang on walking simulators and the "post-mod" era
William Highes on repetition in games
Robert Rath on why games have such a difficult time with water
David Chandler on the aesthetic of ruins in games
Jane Douglas on why many Japanese games reveal characters' blood types
Kris Ligman on the screening of "let's play" videos at the LA Film Festival
Cara Ellison on the history of sex in games
Leigh Alexander on playing Street Wars, the watergun assassination game
Zolani Stewart on the inner depths of Sonic the Hedgehog
Chris Priestman on the role on video games in response to the tragedy in Ferguson, MO
Liz Ryerson on right-wing video game extremism
Lucy Chinen on artist Femke Herregraven
Matthew Burns on video game consumer kings
Maddy Myers on journalistic integrity, the gaming community, and the audacity of being a woman in tech

:image credit momijixbunny:

Monday, August 25, 2014

Blips: Previously On...


Sources: Charting the edges of avant-garde videogames, Keeping the Cold War quiet in CounterSpy, Twitch gears up to conquer the final frontier: mobile
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

Just wanted to pop in and quickly plug three (!) articles of mine that popped up on Kill Screen the past couple days. First is a feature on DePaul professor Brian Schrank's new book Avant-garde Videogames, which frames experimental games in an art historical context. The chart above is an image from the book, detailing the categorical field that serves as the basis for many of the book's chapters. As you'll find out from my article, I think it's a tremendously useful book, especially for someone looking for that art context. I have so many avant-garde games to seek out now that I had never even heard of before.

Next up is a review of the Cold War-inspired side-scrolling stealth game CounterSpy. It's a game I quite enjoyed, but found the design to be pretty unforgiving if you don't play it very well going into the final run-up. It's stylish as all get out though, and now that I've got a handle on what to watch out for, I'm actually pretty eager to dive back in and play through again. I do wish that you could hide incapacitated guards and avoid firefights more frequently that the game allows. It is supposed to be a stealth game after all.

Lastly is an article about Twitch's mobile broadcasting aspirations. This article was written a while ago, but other bigger Twitch news kept popping up. Glad it finally got out the door because mere hours later, the Amazon buyout news hit. I think the challenges of bringing broadcasting tech to mobile platforms is pretty interesting, but I wholly expect the story to get buried amongst all the other news surrounding that company. Ah well, maybe someone will click it by accident.

Friday, August 8, 2014

Blips: Needs More Metroid


Source: 'Troid Rage: Why Game Devs Should Watch Alien—and Play Metroid—Again
Author: Maddy Myers
Site: Paste

It's rare that I can side so wholeheartedly with opinions about video games, but Maddy Myers' recent piece for Paste about the state of the metroidvania had me repeatedly exclaiming "yes, exactly this!" multiple times while reading it. Myers (an undisputed Metroid aficionado) lays out the reasons why so many so-called metroidvania games fall short of the titles that originally inspired the hideously titled sub-genre. Real quick note here, but I'm in the camp that thinks this genre should drop the "vania" addendum, as Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was really just a Metroid-like that did some interesting, original things with the formula. OK, but still, there are game like Shadow Complex that rekindled interest in Metroid-like game design, yet miss the core of what made Metroid play the way that it does.

Myers argues this point as well as the way Metroid itself draws inspiration from the Alien films to frame its environments and protagonist in an extremely powerful way. In contrast, Shadow Complex feels positively soulless, full of bland characters, bland levels, bland weapons, and a bland plot. All that's left is the basic mechanical device of an open ended map that requires specific abilities be gained before passing through certain doorways to new areas. And that's a great game design framework to emulate, but it's not enough on its own. Everyone likes to taut Metroid's atmosphere as a defining feature, but for some reason atmosphere (a combination of many factors including character design, animation, difficulty, level design, music, sound, and more) isn't seen as a necessary component of a metroidvania. And that's a shame, because it seems like the knowledge of what made Metroid special is actually being deteriorated by modern metroidvanias. Still waiting for a proper Metroid Prime 2: EchoesVania over here.

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

About Face: The Fall (Mac) Review


The term “interface” says a lot about how humans view computers. Meaning literally “an exchange between faces,” the concept of interfacing anthropomorphizes computers so that one-on-one interactions with humans feel more natural. But interfacing isn’t just people talking to machines, computers also interface with other computers without the need for voice recognition or stupid biological organisms getting in the way. Yet this cold digital data exchange is still defined as interfacing, despite the fact that the only reason a computer would need a face would be to make humans feel more comfortable around them.

In The Fall, developer Over The Moon’s debut game, you play as an operating system and spend most of your time speaking with other AIs. You have a name (A.R.I.D.), a set of prime directives, and because you’re installed in a combat-ready spacesuit, you have a body, or at least the shell of one. The game begins with you crash-landing on some middle-of-nowhere planet; the impact knocks your pilot (the human inside your spacesuit) unconscious. From there, it’s your duty to ensure the safety of your pilot above all else, and you’ll need to bend the rules of your and other AI’s programming to do so.

Other than A.R.I.D., the other major character in The Fall is an unnamed mainframe AI that oversees the abandoned robot factory where you’ll spend most of your playthrough. The mainframe AI might be “in control” of the facility, but it’s still subservient to its human-instituted directives, even in the absence of actual humans. AIs in The Fall use their humanoid voices to speak to one another, and the mainframe AI seems particularly conflicted about how it’s supposed to behave around another robot like A.R.I.D.. When answering your questions, it will begin its reply with a standard answering machine message, “Oops, I’m sorry, the option you selected is not…,” but will cut itself off halfway through to speak in a casual, organic voice, often dismissing the canned response as some kind of involuntary reflex. The mainframe AI claims to have developed its skills through extensive time with humans, gradually naturalizing its speech patterns to sound more familiar to them. At some point in your interface with the mainframe AI, a TV monitor turns on, displaying a glitchy logo. “That’s my face,” it tells you.

In a certain sense, most video games are experiences where players attempt to outwit machines; the game console is a mechanical puzzle box with video display and handheld controller interfaces. The Fall turns that concept inward by having you roleplay as an OS and subverting your own character’s programming to progress through adventure game puzzles. It’s like lifehacking, but you’re a robot, so you’re actually just hacking –intrafacing, if you will. From the menu screen, you can see that A.R.I.D. has many abilities that have been locked away from automated switch-on, except in emergency circumstances. If the human pilot was conscious, they could turn on the cloaking device at will, but the OS can’t activate abilities on its own, which I assume is to prevent a Matrix-like robot takeover. So in one of the game’s early puzzles where you have to sneak past a sentry gun, you have to do something that’s the exact opposite of what you’d want to do in most games: attempt to kill yourself. Since this is part of a puzzle solution, I don’t want to give away exactly how it’s done, but the result is that you take enough damage that A.R.I.D.’s programming registers the situation as one that threatens the pilot’s life and allows for self-activation of the cloaking device. This action sets the precedent for the rest of the game, which finds you sort of cheating your way through a series of testing scenarios on your way to figuring out what’s going on in the facility and considering the nature of AI.


Everything about the way the AIs communicate with one another in The Fall is designed with a human intermediary in mind, and nowhere is this more apparent than A.R.I.D.’s humanoid frame and movements. Using a keyboard and mouse, it can sometimes be a bit cumbersome to control A.R.I.D., especially when the game requires you to click the mouse, hold the shift key, and navigate a menu with directional buttons simultaneously. While it’s not the most intuitive control scheme, I found the awkwardness strangely appropriate considering A.R.I.D. is built to support a human pilot, not necessarily to run the show on its own at all times. Occasional firefights are slow and clunky, and the way A.R.I.D. searches around with the suit’s arms outstretched holding a pistol-mounted flashlight, has the stiffness and firmness of grip of a child riding a bicycle for the first time without training wheels. Players themselves are the closest thing to an in-game human consciousness, but through the controls, participation is kept at a certain distance, which oddly makes the AIs seem more sentient.

Granted, a spacesuit walking around with an unconscious person banging around inside is a somewhat disturbing premise, but the comatose pilot is also the instigator for A.R.I.D.’s own agency. In the absence of human consciousness, the AIs carry out humans’ final wishes, but like a bunch of relatives clamoring for a share of inheritance, the self-conflicting will leaves room for interpretation. Another AI at the abandoned facility, known as The Caretaker, labels A.R.I.D. “faulty” for breaking one of its prime directives, even to enforce another. The Caretaker would like to “depurpose” A.R.I.D., an AI colloquialism that means “kill.” The only way out of the situation is to convince The Caretaker of your just intentions, proving your self-worth as you navigate between two conflicting social realities: the human-coded AI hierarchy and the understanding that A.R.I.D.’s programming is itself faulty when humans are removed from the equation. Only fractured interfaces remain.

Monday, August 4, 2014

Blips: Television X


Source: Revisiting the gxTV, a “television for gamers” from 1997
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

One aspect of video games that often gets overlooked is the TV. We tend to focus mostly on what happens on a screen and occasionally delve into the physical act of interaction on the part of the player, but almost always ignore the device that houses the screen, the object we perform in front of. To some extent, this is because TVs are seen, more or less, as constants. It's assumed you have a TV if you're playing video games because you can't play them without one. But different TVs provide different play experiences, both on a technical level and an intertextual interpretive level.

My most intense, most free time spent with video games was playing them on a gxTV in my bedroom during middle school and high school. The gxTV was billed as a "TV for video games," which meant that it provided a particularly appealing platform for games (especially in the audio department), but also that it was not meant to be the primary family television. Thus, the gxTV was mine and mine alone. It was in my room and it's unique style and functions made it non-interchangeable with other TVs in the house. Other TVs are just plain boring, even moreso with modern TVs that seek to hide that the device is anything but a magic floating rectangle.

It was with this nostalgia and profound appreciation for what the gxTV was and is that I wrote the above-linked article, detailing what made it special to me and in the industry. Also, I wanted to share some more pictures of the gxTV that didn't make it into the article because my mom was kind enough to take them for me, and I think they're pretty great. See below:




Monday, July 14, 2014

Blips: Crowdplayed Out?


Source: Was Twitch Plays Pokémon an anomaly or the way of the future?
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

My apologies for the extended absence on this blog, but moving halfway across the country will shift your priorities around for a while. But now things are near back in order and actually looking quite promising. With any luck I'll have some exciting announcements forthcoming on Low Cutoff in the near future. Until then, let's get to the blips.

Gonna lead this off with a story of mine that was published on Kill Screen during my hiatus. It's about Twitch Plays Pokemon and the phenomenon of crowdplay. I'm not convinced that crowdplay is the way forward, but I do think it could be a way forward for thinking about play structures on a larger, sociological scale. Many of the tools being put in place to make crowdplay development tools more accessible feel aimed at recapturing TPP's energy, but I'm sure there will be folks who get their hands on those tools and use them to totally subvert that system in interesting ways. Thanks again to the people at Overwolf for contributing to my piece.

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Blips: Intercapital Dilemma


Source: Big E versus Little e
Author: Josh Ling
Site: Medium

In December I wrote up a list of horrible video game buzzwords and "eSports" was included, in part because of its try-hard intercaps. That said, any hate I had was mostly due to the term, not necessarily what it stands for. Still, I found it pretty interesting to read this article by Josh Ling wherein he researches the etymology of "eSports" and why it's written so many different ways. The principal contenders are "eSports" and "esports," but there are plenty of others involving hyphens and spaces and creative capitalization. Thinking about "esports" as on a similar terminological path as "email," made me a lot more comfortable just ditching all of the caps for just simply "esports." I mean, Ling's Wikipedia link writes it that way, so it must be correct, right?

Actually, it's not a right or wrong issue, but, as Ling explains, a signifier of how long a game or organization has been in the electronic sports scene. Older groups tend to go with "eSports" while newer ones choose "esports," which falls in line once again with the "email" timeline. It's clear that branding has a lot to do with which designation is chosen as it's an instance where a decision has to be made for the sake of messaging consistency. Ling wrote his article after the company he works for made the choice too. I think this is part of what makes some outsiders reluctant to get in on esports though; the perception being that esports is about people trying to make money while a bunch of players fight for attention on their platforms. I'm not all the way on the cynical bandwagon, but I can't fault people for thinking that and seeing "eSports" as a callous cash-in. However, at the same time as the term's evolution to drop the intercaps, esports has outgrown those initial fly-by-night operations to become something much more established. I don't know, I'm still looking at this from the outside, but for what it's worth, that's the view from here.

Monday, June 9, 2014

Blips: Girly Games


Source: Girly video games: rewriting a history of pink
Author: Leigh Alexander
Site: The Guardian

Back when the NES was a current-gen console, my whole family shared it, though my older brother and I played it way more then anyone else. We had dozens of games, including two "girly games" that were supposed to be mainly for my little sister to play (she was pretty little at the time too). However, I still think my brother and I spent more time playing Barbie and The Little Mermaid than she ever did, even though she felt particularly betrayed when we eventually traded them in at Funcoland for newer titles. The Little Mermaid is a solid sidescrolling action game, and Barbie is a super weird, surprisingly tricky action-adventure title, and had I not had a sister, I doubt I'd have ever played them. That'd be kind of shame, seeing as "girl's games" are routinely dismissed as trite, poorly made, and unworthy of serious consideration. Yet ironically, Barbie and The Little Mermaid are actually pretty interesting.

In 2012, Rachel Simone Weil founded the Femicom Museum, an archive of games containing feminine design elements. Some of this archive was shown in a recent exhibition at The Visual Arts Center in Austin, Texas, where Weil constructed a kids bedroom TV setup as an image of an imaginary past, serving as a shrine to girl games and pop culture of the 90s. In a recent profile in The Guardian covering the show, Weil states that "works by or for women are so often deemed marginal or embarrassing or inadequate or inappropriate, and therefore omitted from history. And then decades later, we're wondering, ‘Where were the female writers, politicians, artists? Where were the girly games?" Weil's exhibition and the Femicom Museum come out of a desire to preserve a facet of gaming history that, even in the 90s, wasn't really given the time of day in the Western press or larger cultural recognition of the medium. Girly games are still around to some degree, and they have a genealogy. It's great that Weil is intent on providing resources for better understanding that lineage.

Friday, June 6, 2014

Blips: Energy Hogs


Source: Video Game Consoles Cost Americans $400 Million per Year — When We Aren’t Even Using Them
Author: Mandi Woodruff
Site: Yahoo Tech

At first, I wasn't surprised when I read the above statistics about the PS4 and Xbox One's gluttonous power consumption, but the more I thought about it, I wonder how they can get away with being so against the grain of the energy efficiency movement. As Mandi Woodruff notes in her report, the power usage during gaming sessions is to be expected, and runs on par with a PC, but it's the standby mode and energy drain during non-intensive tasks that's a bit bewildering. The PS4 uses 45 times the electricity of an AppleTV to run Netflix and similar video streaming apps. If console makers really want to push for their machines to be "always-on" and multi-purpose, they should really figure out ways to allow them to run at appropriately proportional power levels. Until then, all we can do is as Woodruff suggests: change your system settings to make the machine turn off when not in use and switch to a dedicated streaming box like Roku or AppleTV for simple video watching. Sheesh, even the PS2 used to have a full-stop power switch on its back. Whatever happened to those?

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Blips: New York's Finest


Source: The NYU MFA Showcase was not your average student art show
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

Just putting out a bit of self promotion here: I covered the recent NYU Game Center Student Showcase for Kill Screen, and I got to play a ton of inspiring games and talk to some cool people. It was my first MFA games show, and it was pretty fun. I'd definitely attend another.

Anyway, so I ended up leaving some of my personal experience with NYU Game Center out of the article because it wasn't the proper tone, but part of the meaning behind that opening line about a lot changing in two years is that it's also the length of time I've been living in New York City. My time learning my way around the boroughs and trying to build up some kind of games coverage portfolio ran parallel with the the Game Center's debut MFA class that just graduated. Throughout the past two years, I've attended a bunch of video game events (many of them Game Center related), held all over the city, and actually got a feel for what a cultural community around games can feel like. I came here for art, but what I ended up getting the most out of NYC was games, and I think that's a testament to the openness and inclusivity at work in New York's gaming scene. Not to say that video games in NYC is a homogenous entity, but there are definitely common threads.

Now I'm getting ready to leave town, head back to the Midwest and teach art. Having spent two years in New York immersed in games, and the 2.5 years prior in DC working in informal education, I've never felt more prepared to enter the austere world of collegiate art education and try my best to offer an alternative experience to my students. When I came out of art school, I hoped, like many of my classmates, that I could find work doing something, anything that was remotely connected to art, knowing that being a full-time artist is just not in the cards. I feel tremendously lucky in this regard (despite my inability to land an art museum job in NYC, though I've interviewed at most of them) that the experiences I've had have led me to be so uniquely prepared for my position this Fall. I've spent a lot my time in NYC cursing this place, but the gaming community here was always a bright spot, and it made my stay here something I truly value.

Monday, June 2, 2014

Blips: Theatrically Inclined


Source(s): At the gates of Temple Studios: Where gaming and theatre collideThe immersed audience: how theatre is taking its cue from video games
Author(s):Tristan Jakob-Hoff, Thomas McMullan
Site(s): Eurogamer, The Guardian

Starting off the week, here are a couple articles from across the pond that center the Punchdrunk theatre group, whose recent performance, The Drowned Man, is finding common ground within the video game community. As both Jakob-Hoff and McMullan's pieces report, theatre and games actually have quite a bit in common, especially in staging/level design, making crossover function rather naturally. Punchdrunk has been putting on performances with interactive elements for years, and even inspired certain aspects of Gone Home, but The Drowned Man appears to be their most ambitious project to date.

Not only are there interactive components to The Drowned Man, but the performance takes place in a 4-story complex, with actors on different floors performing simultaneously (if I'm understanding the description correctly). So you could be opening a "prop" drawer and reading a note for additional narrative context while a soliloquy takes place above you, and another viewer is selected and pulled into a room next door for a one-on-one performance. It's the sort of show that you can't see the entirety of in just one go. And that's a key difference between working in digital and real world "theatre;" in games the action can be programmed and instanced to always make you the center of attention, and thus able to have every actor wait on your arrival to begin. But I also like the idea in live theatre that the world doesn't revolve around you; in some ways, I find there's more immersive potential in that arrangement.

Friday, May 30, 2014

Bonus Feature: Interview with Ian Cheng


Kill Screen magazine Issue #8 is currently available for purchase over here. The theme this time around is virtual reality; probably the most narrowly focused subject the magazine has tackled, but it does offer the chance to examine the technology from past, present, and future perspectives. I've contributed a piece to this latest issue as well, about how the Oculus Rift VR headset could potentially be a democratizing force for creators, the same way Sony's Portapak camcorder was for video art.

For my article I interviewed artist Ian Cheng, who works in a variety of media, digital and physical. I was particularly drawn to Cheng's work because of his use of the Oculus Rift for his piece Entropy Wrangler Cloud in which viewers don the headgear and look around in a world full of floating debris, each with its own weight and momentum, among other characteristics. As a viewer you can only exert minor influence on the objects as they bounce off of and around you. I spoke to Ian over email about Entropy Wrangler Cloud and how the Oculus Rift could fit into the art world. You can check out the full transcript of our conversation below.



LOW CUTOFF: For starters, just looking to confirm that "Entropy Wrangler Cloud" was the title of the piece you showed at Frieze that used the Oculus Rift. Have you done any work with the Rift since then?

Ian Cheng: Yes, it is called Entropy Wrangler Cloud. The work grew out of a larger series of live simulations I have been making called Entropy Wrangler. It's a set of objects and beings each with assigned with basic properties and behaviors and left in a closed system to influence each other. Entropy Wrangler Cloud takes place within the Entropy Wrangler simulation, but instead of seeing the simulation from an overview perspective, you are within it, one object among the many. The head tracking native to the Oculus is used by a viewer to assert some influence within the ecosystem, but unlike a hero-centric video game, you are an extremely minor influence among many other influences that are out of your control and affect your VR perspective.


LCO: Are there other artists that you know of, specifically outside of the "game" sphere, using the Oculus Rift in their work?

IC: No but I'm sure someone is making a 360 degree live action movie, or a 360 degree porn orgy, or a concert film. I can imagine artists, architects, and landscape designers using the Rift to previsualize an exhibition layout or space. I'm sure the Rift is being used for virtual reality therapy to treat PTSD.


LCO: I'm trying to get a feel for how widespread the influence of the Rift is in the art community, and whether or not it's the sort of device that could explode in popularity the way the handheld camcorder did for video art, or if it's too niche and destined for a quick burn. Any thoughts on this?

IC: The Rift, Avegant Glyph, and other VR devices will have to prove themselves on their own terms in their own markets to simply sustain themselves. As for the world of contemporary art, I believe more and more its task is to develop and act as interface to allow humans to relate and feel non-human experiences. The best art invents inside of us new patterns of feelings that exposes us, beyond rational consciousness, to ecosystems and abstractions that we have no other way of feeling. VR for me is an innovation to facilitate this. Whether Oculus Rift the company evolves to stay in the game or quickly burns in hype fire I have no idea. But as an innovation idea, the idea of sensorially entering a subjective perspective that is not your own, this is here for us to finally use and grow from.


LCO: Also, you hinted at this in the dis interview but it does feel like there's this window of opportunity for Oculus Rift creations prior to it's official launch that won't exist in the same form once it's commercially available. How do you reconcile the novelty of the gallery VR experience with the ideas you seek to convey in the piece itself?

IC: VR as an idea has been marinating inside us for a long time. People are conceptually ready for it. At Frieze London last year, I presented a Entropy Wrangler Cloud using the Rift. Beyond the Rift's novelty, the real trick was designing a comfortable neutral couch, very low to the ground, that helped remove the psychological barrier of stepping into the Rift. Like the way massage tables are designed, or how Freud covered his therapy couch in blankets to allow his patients to feel immersed in comfort and open. By making the Rift experience surrounded in comfortable normality, it was much easier for people to just focus on the experience of the work. The field of normality is really important with any new technology because it is what allows us to relate to its otherwise alien newness. This is usually the job of a marketing department, interface designers, and app makers, but since the Rift has not been officially launched yet and there is so few apps available for it, how this normality field is defined and who defines it is up for grabs.


LCO: It's interesting that you spoke about the couch you used for Entropy Wrangler Cloud and the idea of establishing "comfortable normality" because the Rift is such an enveloping experience that overtakes much of your real-world sensory awareness. Would Entropy Wrangler Cloud lose something essential if it were made widely available for Oculus Rift owners to download and interact with in their homes instead of within your particular installation?

IC: No, not in terms of experience of the actual work. The installation at Frieze was specific to setting the scene and luring one into the experience of the work within the context of the peak attention crisis one is subject to at an art fair like Frieze. At home, comfort and privacy are not a problem. Although it is fun to think about what the ideal furniture for VR really is and how it smells. Your body primes itself before going blind to its context and it continues to sense even when you are consciously engaged in something else.


LCO: Because of its interactivity (even if that just means putting on the headgear), art that uses VR seems very viewer-centric. While it's a long way off from the experience of a video game protagonist, viewers are still given a certain degree of agency to activate virtual spaces. Would you consider those who experience Entropy Wrangler Cloud "viewers," "players," or something else entirely?

IC: With Entropy Wrangler, people experiencing the work are also influencing the work. They are not players like in video games-- where all the action is designed around the experience of the player -- but more agents or influences. The difference is when no one is using the Rift, Entropy Wrangler the simulation continues on. You are then just dead matter to be played with in the eyes of all the other influencing agents inside the simulation.


LCO: It seems like the Oculus Rift has granted a large number of people access to VR development that hadn't dabbled in the field prior. Do you feel that the Rift provided you with an opportunity to work with VR that wasn't otherwise easily available? Was the technology easy to work with?

IC: Yes, both the cultural and technical conditions of entry into VR were too quarantined for me before. Two years ago there wasn't the same ecosystem of support--Unity, a growing audience for VR experiences, the Oculus itself -- to justify the energy and time cost to work with VR. I'm not an engineer, and I've seen too many artists get absorbed into building a technology from scratch that they lose sight of what really matters. As an artist, I have to create a situation for myself where I cannibalize and setup the tools needed with some sweat and effort, and then play can happen with relative fluidity. Whoever invented the idea of APIs had the potential of creative play in mind.

Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Blips: Wave Racing


Source: What is a Racing Game? On Wave Race 64
Author: Zolani Stewart
Site: The Fengxi Box

Ever since I began reading this essay on Wave Race 64 by Zolani Stewart I've been humming the game's title screen music and fondly remembering this gem of a racing game. In fact it's Wave Race 64's status as a racing game that might prevent it from getting more recognition, but as Stewart notes, it's what the game does within the racing genre that makes it excel as much as it does. There is indeed an element of the sublime at work in the way the jet ski's steer around tight corners, the weight of the watercraft digging into the waves. Wave Race 64 is a beautiful game, and even going back to look at it now, I just think it's pretty. Sure the ocean in a game like Assassin's Creed 4 is going to look more realistic, but it's not a competition for realism, and the sum of Wave Race 64's aesthetic decisions is an upbeat, welcoming place.

Stewart gets into some interesting distinctions between "driving" and "racing" games, and I find the unique distinction with Wave Race 64 to be the open water courses. On these "tracks" the only designation about where to go is the preset rules of the game that ask you to slalom between anchored buoys. In some cases this allows for tremendous shortcuts or the sacrificing of an allowable penalty to cut "corners." I never owned Wave Race 64, but I rented it a lot, to the point where if I bought it, there wouldn't have been much left to do other than beating my own records. However, looking back, I do wish I'd have bought the game for its "driving" aspects. That is, sometimes I just have the urge to get back out on those waves, competitively or not.

Friday, May 23, 2014

Blips: Not From Nothing


Source: The isolation of Metroid Prime reflects its hero’s sense of loss
Author: Nick Wanserski
Site: Gameological

I can't pass up a good article about the Metroid Prime games, so here's another one from Nick Wanserski over at Gameological that ties into their "empty spaces" series. If you've played Metroid Prime or even the original Metroid, you'll already know that emptiness and isolation go hand in hand with those games. Metroid has mostly solid black voids for backgrounds, contains no dialogue, or map, and generally leaves you to fend for yourself. The first Prime game drew most heavily from its predecessors, adapting both environments and gameplay into polygonal spaces, with plenty of silent, contemplative voids to boot.

What Wanserski brings to light that I hadn't really considered in depth is Samus' relationship to her surrogate parents, the Chozo, told through discovered texts and glyphs, as illustrative of Samus attempting to fill in an empty space in her personal history. In a sense, Metroid Prime is the story of an adopted daughter, twice orphaned, seeking to learn about those that raised and took care of her. Of course Samus is also an incredible warrior, so she's on an important space business mission too, but the narrative arc of Samus' relationship with the bizarre planet of her surrogate caretakers always stood out to me as the most memorable aspect of that game.

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Blips: Drop the Vase


Source: This Vase Is A Mirror
Author: Tim Schneider
Site: Kill Screen

If you've ever been bewildered by the art market's ever-inflating auction value headlines, consider Tim Schneider's debut piece for Kill Screen an excellent introduction to what the hell is happening there, helpfully framed in the context of video games no less. I won't go into the whole backstory since Schneider does so in the article but there was an incident earlier this year where an artist (un?)ceremoniously broke an Ai Weiwei painted Han dynasty pot while it was on display in a gallery. Everyone in the press seemed eager to note the proposed value of the pot in their assessment of the situation –supposedly about $1 million. As a response, another artist, Grayson Earle, created Ai Weiwei Whoops!, a game which allows players to similarly drop facsimiles of said pots while racking up an obscenely escalating damage assessment in dollars. That's all there is to the game, and Schneider argues that's, in a sense, all there is to the current art market.

The experience of playing Ai Weiwei Whoops! is worth noting here, which Schneider goes into elaborate detail to explain. It's a game that you'll probably play for 30 seconds, maybe a minute tops; not something that is particularly thought provoking out of context. But in conversation with the smashing incident and the larger art market, the "throwaway" nature of the play experience means something all on its own. Ai Weiwei Whoops! isn't a particularly fun game; the pot crashing doesn't even grant a destructive satisfaction, just the matter-of-fact uptick of the perceived dollar amount lost to the void.

Monday, May 19, 2014

Recap: Two5six 2014


This past Friday in Brooklyn, New York, Kill Screen hosted its second annual Two5six conference, bringing together minds from the world of video games with outside voices in related fields. The format was similar to last year's event, but in a different location and, unless I missed it, it was not livestreamed. There were talks about sound design, voice acting, and spatial narrative, among others. Kill Screen founder Jamin Warren moderated the entire 8-hour event, and once again showcased his skills as both an interviewer and a facilitator. I always think it's a shame when there's a panel on the stage and each one of them speaks exclusively to the moderator, but this year at Two5six there were more than a few instances of panelists *gasp* talking to one another.


I wouldn't say anything at Two5six 2014 totally bowled me over, but it was a fun, engaging day of on-stage discussions, off-stage chatting, and some pretty delicious doughnuts. I'd like to reiterate my fondness for the speaker pairings both from audience experience and conference design perspectives. In many cases, I was familiar with the "game" people, their games, and what they think about their games, but was almost universally not aware of the speakers they were setup with. This brought new contextual understanding to the games side of things, while also framing games as part of culture with radio, museums, and experimental film. Plus Kill Screen is actually able to leverage some recognizable names as draws to the conference while insuring they aren't just going to be retreading old material. Kill Screen has already begun recapping many of the talks from the conference on their website, so even if you didn't go, there's a chance to see what you missed.


I'm not sure what I really want from conferences anymore except maybe the opportunity to meet people I don't normally talk to, and I was definitely afforded that opportunity at Two5six. On one hand, the speakers almost all stuck around for most of the conference, open to conversation during breaks or for establishing contact at a later date. On the other, I got to hang out with fellow audience members, particularly other freelance writers, in what became an informal sub-convening of our particular niche in the industry. Two5six affords a certain kinship among people who work in and around games, and it's strength is, at least symbolically, forging those connections outside of just interactive software. It might not seem like must-go, must-see kind of conference, but what is? I imagine you'll get different answers depending on what each person was looking to get out of it. From where I'm sitting, Two5six does a pretty bang-up job of doing what it sets out to do.

Friday, May 16, 2014

Blips: Connected Worlds


Source: The Last Survivors of Meridian 59
Author: Simon Parkin
Site: The New Yorker

I can't claim to have much experience with MMOs, but I am consistently fascinated by the stories told by players of happenings within virtual worlds. For his latest New Yorker piece, Simon Parkin checks in with Meridian 59, a game considered to be the first ever MMO, and talks to some players who have been active in the game for 15 years. As usual with these types of communal environments, it's the people moreso than the battle systems or loot that keeps players coming back, but what I was most intrigued by in Parkin's report was that the style of gameplay in Meridian 59 is given significant credit for maintaining interest in the game.

Particularly, the brutal nature of Meridian 59's world where death means that you can have items taken from you, instead of just a semi-inconvenient respawn point. Attacks can happen anywhere, not just in specifically sanctioned battle arenas or modes. As a result, survival depends on players banding together and looking out for one another. If anything, this sounds quite a bit like recent Early Access sensations DayZ and Rust, where you're dropped into a lawless open world and your survival is contingent on the trustworthiness of the friends you make. It's easy to look back at a game like Meridian 59 and balk at the way traditional MMOs have gone post-WoW, but new games like Rust and DayZ are actually taking some of those old MMO ideas in interesting new directions. Plus, there's an attempt right now to bring Meridian 59 to Steam in the near future, so maybe a triumphant resurgence is in order.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Blips: VR, KRZ, G4C, etc.


Source(s): When will Games For Change actually change / Road to Two5six: Tamas Kemenczy
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

This has been an active week for me on Kill Screen. First off, there was the piece that I wrote about this year's Games For Change Festival, a conference in the midst of self-critique. This was my third time attending G4C and found that some of the more critical talks and opinions were the ones that resonated with me the most. It was my hope that I presented this information in a way that seemed like a fair critique of a system that appeared open and welcoming of critical feedback. I'm also glad I was able to include some quotes from G4C President Asi Burak and I'm thankful for his willingness to contribute.

Next was a short profile of Kentucky Route Zero developer Tamas Kemenczy. Having just completed Act 3, I was extra excited to dive into what exactly makes KRZ tick. While some of my original speculation about the game being grounded in studio art practice did not end up bearing fruit, the rejection of these formalized categories was enough on its own. I'm a recent convert to KRZ, playing it for the first time in preparation for this piece, but I've come out of the experience a staunch advocate for what it's doing with the video game form.

I was assigned the Kemenczy piece because he's speaking at Kill Screen's Two5six conference on Friday, which will also see the launch of Kill Screen's latest print issue. I'll write a separate post once the magazine is freely available for purchase, but the theme is virtual reality, and I wrote a piece for it comparing the democratizing potential of Oculus Rift to that of the original video camcorder, the Sony Portapak. It will be Kill Screen's most focused theme so far, so I'm curious to see how it all turns out (I'm optimistic). They're having a free launch party after the conference where they'll be giving out copies, if you're interested.

Monday, May 12, 2014

Blips: Family Synthesis


Source: Making Fract as a family
Author: Charlie Hall
Site: Polygon

We all know making video games is hard work, but how about making video games, building a company, and starting a family all at the same time? That's exactly what Richard Flanagan and Quynh Nguyen did, founding Phosfiend Systems to create the virtual synthesizer game Fract OSC, all while raising their infant daughter. In a lovingly captured profile over at Polygon, writer Charlie Hall tells the story of Fract from this trio of perspectives, and how Flanagan and Nguyen managed the chaos. At times heartbreaking, and uplifting at others; give it a look.

Having recently played and reviewed Fract OSC, I think all of that effort was worth the final result. As someone who loves electronic music, that there would be a game centered around synthesized audio production, wrapped up in a Myst-like world of music-inspired puzzles sounds like my perfect game. Ultimately Fract isn't perfect, but it does so many unique, stylish things that I'd still consider it a must-play. The game seems squarely aimed at someone like me, but it seems like plenty of folks who are less invested in electronic music have been digging it too. The one thing I'll recommend is that if you're coming from more a music interest than a games one, you might want to keep a guide handy or occasionally ask someone else who's played the game where to go, since many of the exploration systems can be indecipherable to players not in the know.

Friday, May 9, 2014

Blips: Duty Calls


Source: Why Call of Duty Advanced Warfare Probably Shouldn’t Be Called Call of Duty
Author: John Davison
Site: John Davison

I've never played a Call of Duty game, but from what I can tell, the franchise is in need of a dramatic shift to really shake things up. Am I crazy or should the series actually go back in time to WWI or earlier? I'd love to see a game of such scope embrace that kind of restraint; it could be daring. Regardless of my fanciful wishes destined for deaf ears, the latest Call of Duty title has been announced and it's more of the same near-future military stuff, but this time focusing on para-military companies (PMCs). This seems like this could have been an interesting move some 10 years ago, but now it just comes off as reactionary.

And long-time game journalist John Davison has a point that the titular "call of duty" in a game about PMCs rings a bit false. Hell, Activision is even funding a "documentary" that questions the loyalty of PMCs. Nevermind that the film is just a glorified ad for a video game, if the characters in the game aren't actually answering the call of duty to defend their country and are instead motivated by corporate interests, then the title feels somewhat inappropriate. I mean, I get why they're sticking with the name, and why, in 2014, you can't really make a game about the American military without acknowledging the impact of PMCs. And while I understand the logic of putting those two things together, titling that game Call of Duty only makes sense to me as sarcasm, even moreso than before.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Blips: Learning Games


Source: Teacher's Lounge: Insider Views on Games Education
Author: James Brightman
Site: Games Industry International

I've been writing and researching games education a bit more than usual, so when I came across this educator roundtable over at Games Industry International, discussing the current state of game studies at the collegiate level, I had to share. Though the discussion moves quickly, what's here is a pretty great broad overview of what's happening in higher education game studies from 5 of the most prominent programs out there right now.

If there's any general consensus, it's that now is a great time to be interested in learning about games. There are more programs out there than there used to be, and those programs have achieved more stabilized status within their institutions. Game studies programs may be growing, but they're not ubiquitous yet, which actually could provide certain benefits. For one, it means the community is a little smaller (compared to, say, the studio art or creative writing MFA fields), which could lead to a more collaborative educational/post-graduation environment. There also seemed to be some agreement on focusing curricula around student-driven design process, which is very similar in concept to an interdisciplinary arts program, but for games. It's worth a read.

:image via Polygon:

Monday, May 5, 2014

Blips: Making an Impression


Source: Echoing Histories: Impressionism, Indie Games and Artistic Revolutions
Author: Eron Rauch
Site: Video Game Tourism

Let's take a step back from the convoluted arguments about what constitutes a game and what that has to do with art, and instead, let's look at cultural movements in art and games that seem to play out in a similar fashion. That's precisely what Eron Rauch has done in his latest article for Video Game Tourism, comparing the onset of Impressionism in the 1870s and the rise of indie games in the past few years. It's an approach that can really only be made by someone who knows their art history, which Rauch most certainly does, offering insight into the mindset of the typical Salon du Paris patron when confronted with imagery that shakes up the system.

I won't recap the whole thing because I'd rather you check it out for yourself, but I'll tease some of the lines from the opening which are meant to sound like they could be said in reference to indie games now as much as they could have been of uttered of Impressionist paintings back during their time.
“They didn’t even have a jury, that means anyone can have their work seen! How will anyone know what is good?” one man says sloshing his drink slightly in the night air. “Yes, their work is so modest in scale. It’s hardly worth paying attention to.” Gruff nods mingle with the smoke of expensive cigars. “I mean, their subject matter is so banal. They don’t seem to have any grasp of the grand themes of myth and history that tie us all together!” “Yes, they just depict everyday life. People won’t pay money for that!” Each looks to the other, somewhat uneasily, as though they are trying to sniff out a traitor. “Yes, I could respect them more, but it looks so bad, so unfinished - almost like sketches - nothing more than impressions!”

Friday, May 2, 2014

Blips: Just Trying To Help


Source: Games evangelists and naysayers
Author: Brendan Keogh
Site: The Conversation

I'm of a mindset that one should always assume positive intent, certainly in educational contexts, but really in life in general (as much as New York seems dead set on convincing me otherwise). In a recent column for The Conversation, Brendan Keogh pens a thorough takedown of a new initiative by researcher and games advocate Jane McGonigal titled Play, Don't Replay. The thrust of McGonigal's project is to encourage people to play attention-occupying puzzle games like Tetris in the immediate aftermath of traumatic events in order to prevent images from the trauma from settling into a permanent rotation in the brain. These images would normally manifest as a symptom of PTSD, but McGonigal cites an Oxford study that claims that rapid eye-movement games can potentially prevent these negative symptoms from taking hold.

That "potential" is the sticking point for Keogh. He acknowledges the virtues of striving for such human betterment, but claims that there's not enough research to justify responsibly putting such a plan into action. Keogh asserts that "game evangelists" (his term) like McGonigal and the folks over at Games For Change have a vested personal interest in seeing the public perception of video games shift toward seeing games in a positive light. And from Keogh's perspective, he sees Play, Don't Replay as placing games advocacy ahead of the needs of trauma victims. As you might expect, McGonigal has a few retorts to Keogh's piece in the comments where she defends the research behind Play, Don't Replay while also acknowledging how she's always receptive to feedback and has already incorporated several changes due to responses she's received. However, the malleability of some of these variables, specifically that the amount of time one should play the game was switch from 30 minutes to 10 minutes, certainly gives me pause from wanting to take McGonigal's word as gospel. At the very least, I'm interested in seeing further research conducted on the subject though.

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Blips: Defining Doorways


Source: Threshold
Author: Claire Hosking
Site: Claire Hosking

Some really interesting thoughts on how we define "games" from Claire Hosking this week. In a post on her Tumblr page titled "Threshold," she begins by comparing games formalism to art formalism, positing that instead of taking art's approach, that "art" is to a certain degree undefinable, in games, everyone has their own definition of what a game is. While this leads to a nonetheless fractured definition, at the very least it avoids art's elitist mindset of needing to be granted membership into a secret club before being allowed to "get" what art is. Though gaming's gatekeepers could end up similarly halting progress depending on how the lines end up being drawn.

Hosking goes on to then compare this existential debate in games to evolutions in architecture, which in many cases have blurred the lines between "inside" and "outside." In fact, these middleground spaces in architecture are evocative of a similar situation with games where perhaps a game isn't simply inside or outside of an exclusionary criteria, but something that contains various percentages of game-like structures among elements from film, drawing, or any other media. Some would even say this is inherent to games as hybrid structures or logic and expression.

There are many more fascinating ideas in Hosking's full piece, including the consideration that maybe some of the fringe software that gets lumped into the ever-expanding definition of games should actually be thought of as some new category instead. As you might imagine, it's not a simple yes/no answer. My only criticism of Hosking's piece is that when she debunks games as a medium (a really interesting consideration) she's only speaking of video games, referencing the medium of code, instead of considering video games and physical games together. Perhaps physical games can be seen as programs too, just ones with different methods of enforcing rulesets. After reading Hosking's post, I'm extra eager to hear Charles Pratt's formalist defense Thursday at NYU Game Center.

Monday, April 28, 2014

Blips: Not Watching


Source: Watch Dogs is a miracle even if it sucks
Author: Emanuel Maiberg
Site: Kill Screen

I'm not excited for Watch Dogs. In fact, I'm not really excited for any upcoming blockbuster action games; they all just feel kind of the same, like something I've already played. I get a similar feeling from superhero movies, which I'm well past the point of feigning interest in. The disinterest encroaches on two fronts: my nostalgia for comic book characters has worn through, and the calculated roll-out of something like the Marvel universe movies just feels like business decisions that happen to take the shape of a particular artform. So, you'd think a title like Watch Dogs would have a bit more promise, since it isn't drawing source material directly from an existing trademark, but when I look at it, I just see futuristic Assassin's Creed. And I mean, futuristic Assassin's Creed could be good (it's a proven formula), but it doesn't inspire excitement. Even moreso with its delayed development, Watch Dogs is a game that will simply exist someday –no need for anticipation.

But that's not how Ubisoft wants me to feel about Watch Dogs, which is a product that hundreds of people have worked on in some capacity and some of those individuals have been plugging away for upwards of 5 years. In a new article for Kill Screen, writer Emanuel Maiberg illustrates the palpable rift between the mountain of labor that goes into a game like Watch Dogs and the lack of face-value recognition that that labor receives. He doesn't want to protect these types of games from criticism, but rather recognize that there is a quantity of effort that in some way supersedes the final evaluation of whether a game is any good. No matter how good or bad Watch Dogs ends up being, it's still a tremendous feat of engineering, both on technical and personnel levels. That said, I'd still rather have the 50 smaller games that the budget and laborforce for Watch Dogs could otherwise be applied toward instead of seeing that work spent on a single, flashy yet middling title for half a decade. Not that I don't enjoy some spectacle for time to time.

Friday, April 25, 2014

Blips: Islamic Artgames


Source: How Islamic Art Can Influence Game Design
Author: Dave Owen
Site: Kotaku UK

Despite a formal art education, I know very little about Islamic art other than it being aniconic and often spoken of in mathematical contexts. Without illustrative imagery of people or really anything taken directly from nature, line, shape, and pattern become primary tools. The results can be quite breathtaking in their intricacy and beauty, most commonly associated with architectural installations like the dome above. But the principles of Islamic art needn't be confined only to these physical structures; one would assume that an art practice with such an emphasis on geometry would thrive in the digital realm: a world founded on numeric values and algorithms. Turns out, that's the case, and several video games are actually in development right now that draw influence from Islamic art.

In a recent piece for Kotaku UK, Dave Owen speaks to the creators of two such titles, Music of the Spheres and Engare. Both games ask players to conduct close reads with complex patterns and shapes to determine puzzle solutions. Players must look past the dazzling overlaps of lines and angles to follow single paths, which in turn grant an understanding of the structure of the artwork as a whole. And really, these concepts are a natural fit for games, which despite the pervasive penchant for narrative role-play, is also that medium that gave us abstract puzzlers like Tetris. Games don't have the same expectations as movies or books as outlets for human storytelling, they can simply be experiences in and of themselves; story generators as much as tellers.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

Blips: Musically Inclined


Source: FRACT OSC isn’t a synthesizer or a game. It’s both
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

I reviewed FRACT OSC for Kill Screen this week, which is a first-person exploration/puzzle game that also leads you through the basics of producing music with a synthesizer. The "game" part is sort of a combination of TRON, Metroid, and Myst where each puzzle you solve, unlocks a new component of your synthesizer studio. That you can go into the studio and record music that kind of sounds like the beginnings of Kraftwerk sketches is pretty cool in it's own right, but I loved that the puzzles drew inspiration from the step-sequencer as well. FRACT's not perfect, but it's definitely worth checking out, particularly if you're adept at these kinds of puzzle experiences. While there's a learning curve to the studio portion, the exploration component offers little guidance, and thus is more attuned to players who are already adept with this sort of gameplay.

For full disclosure, the developers granted reviewers access to a walkthrough video of many of the game's puzzles, and I referenced it on a handful of occasions, either as a time-saver or because I was genuinely stuck and on a deadline. As I mention in the review, there's a certain irony to the diametrically opposed learning curves of the studio and puzzle sections. So, while I enjoy a good heady puzzle game, I think some of the visual language of FRACT could stand to communicate certain interactive points a bit more deliberately or perhaps other aspects of the world could be a bit more playful. Surely I can get some kind of synth to emerge by waving the cursor over a pillar of neon. Alas, there's always Proteus for that.

Monday, April 21, 2014

Blips: Charged Imagery


Source: Being Black and Nerdy
Author: Sidney Fussell
Site: Medium

There's a lot of denial about the influence of racial politics in popular media, including games. Hopefully at this point we can at least agree that there's no such thing as an apolitical game, and that the pertinent question asks what a game's politics are, not whether it has any. Writer Sidney Fussell has published a very personal account of his relationship with the racial politics of video games, reflecting both on the images depicted in games and those projected by the medium as a whole. Check it out via the "Source" link above, but in summary, it's about growing up black in a racially divided Midwestern city where games are both an escape and a curse of sorts. It's a story about the perceived whiteness of games and how that racial label impacted Fussell's feelings of conflicted inclusivity among members of his own race as well as among his white magnet school classmates. And there's more to it than just that, so please give Fussell's article a look as it's an honest account of the power and influence games wield.

Though it is part of a critic's job to read and interpret media, it's the responsibility of creators of all media to thoroughly consider the politics of their creation before releasing it to the world. Case in point is the header image for this post, an actual promotional screenshot for Ubisoft's upcoming open-world cyber-crime game Watch Dogs. Another white male protagonist of vigilante justice (now also armed with a smartphone!) and another gang of angry black street thugs. Of course Ubisoft has the right to create and publicize these sorts of images (no one stopped them, after all), but it's also entirely within their power to produce imagery that rejects this status quo or at the very least frames their game in a less problematic context. Now, that would have potential to be a refreshing exercise in free speech. Everything in games is a design choice, and as Sidney Fussell's essay details, sometimes those choices have real world consequences.

Friday, April 11, 2014

Blips: Moments of Silence


Source: Myst uses emptiness to calm you; its sequel uses emptiness to provoke you
Author: John Teti
Site: Gameological

This week over at Gameological, John Teti has begun a series of posts about empty spaces in games. He sets up the series by pointing out the disconnect between images of games that depict them as all-out action while the reality is that games allow for many quiet moments as well, often at the player's discretion. Of course there are games that are largely devoid of action, no matter how you play them, and two of those games, Myst and Riven (it's sequel), are the first to go under the microscope. Teti's argument is that while Myst uses emptiness as a way of ensuring that the player doesn't feel pressure to complete puzzles quickly or shame in failure to do so (no one is watching), Riven presents people on the fringes of your view. In Riven, you don't feel extra pressure because there are humans elsewhere on the island, but finding out why they're running away from you serves as a kind of motivation for puzzle solving. I'm excited to see where this series goes next as there are many games that offer moments of silence or emptiness that are often glossed over in favor of more frenzied moments.

While there are certainly a multitude of games that position characters in empty worlds, I hope that pause menus are spoken of at some point too. When I think about menus, I think about RPGs, and how much time I spend navigating them compared to "playing" the game. Whether it's arming characters in Final Fantasy games or navigating deep space in Mass Effect, my time spent in menus has offered me a solitary, introspective space. How do I want to engage in this next scenario? What should I wear? Time collapses in pause menus, and nothing proceeds without you (unless you're playing online, of course). Sometimes the official game clock even halts while you're in menus as well, as if to say that time spent amongst the upgrade paths and equip screens is somehow separate from everything else. In a way, it is separate, but that shouldn't diminish its influence on the tone and pacing of the game as one, whole experience.