Game Guide: How To Get To Des Moines, Iowa In Insomniac’s 'Spider-Man'

The vast majority of last year’s PS4 hit Spider-Man takes place in a lovingly recreated Manhattan, but did you know there’s a secret way for Spidey to leave the Big Apple and visit Des Moines, Iowa? Read on to find out how you too can reach this unsung jewel of the Midwest.

The streets of Manhattan are littered with all kinds of cars, and as you might expect, they all have New York license plates. All except for one that is. First, you’ll want to head up to the southwest corner of Central Park. There you’ll find a hot dog vendor that you can interact with. Greet the hot dog vendor 29 times (Iowa was the 29th state added to the USA) and you’ll hear a dog say, “Slipknot rules.” At this point you can keep playing the game as normal, but you need to wait exactly 515 (Des Moines’ area code) minutes in real life to trigger the next part of the secret and make sure you’re standing in this same exact spot

Upon returning to that same southwest corner after 515 minutes. The hot dog vendor will vanish in a puff of smoke and in their place will appear a 1997 Ford Aerostar with Iowa plates that read “GR8 PLNS.” This is your ride. Use your web shooters to hotwire the van and get behind the wheel. Now all you have to do is drive to Des Moines. Some people would suggest taking the Lincoln Tunnel, but I highly recommend heading up to the GW bridge because that’ll put you right onto I-80 and then it’s pretty much a straight shot for the next 17 hours. Bring change for tolls.

Once you finally arrive in Des Moines, use the game’s built-in photo mode to take glorious pictures and goofy selfies around all the famous Des Moines landmarks. It’s a very comfortable and affordable(!) place to live. Consider settling down and taking a job at an insurance company. Rest assured, life is about to get a lot easier for your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Please, visit Des Moines!

[Note: this post was originally written as part of an application for a satirical games site]

Top 10 Games of 2016

Before we get to the list, I've got some notable exceptions to list here. Namely, this list is only based on the games I've spent a lot of time with, and does not include certain games that I think I will like when I finally get around to playing them, such as: Final Fantasy XV, Abzu, DOOM, and Hyper Light Drifter. Still, what's here I think makes a pretty solid top 10, and paints a promising portrait of the games to come in 2017.

10. Hitman
I haven't even played Hitman, but I have watched a lot of hours of Hitman being played and it endeared me to the embedded humor in that series that the image and public presentation of the Hitman games has never let on. It's one thing for players to purposefully go against what a game expects and find something absurdly entertaining, but Hitman teases you with those possibilities at every turn and slowly, subtly lets you know that it's OK to laugh at what's going on. I always saw Agent 47 as the personification of everything that is boring about macho bald white male protagonists in games, right down to his Bansky-knockoff neck tattoo. However, in this game, the developers, or at least the people I watched play the game, played up this straight-man routine for laughs, noting the irony that Agent 47 is supposed to be a master of disguise when very few of his costumes are terribly convincing and most of the time the dude looks like the textbook definition of "assassin." When the world of Hitman is approached as an absurdist sandbox, the game not only allows for humor, but is also relieved of the constraints of realism that is so often burden creative design.

9. Furi
There's something kind of shallow and weightless to Furi, but the slickness with which it combines fighting games, dual-joystick shooters, and character action games into a fluid, interchangeable combat system is revelatory. As I noted in my review, Furi isn't a rhythm game, but the action does click with the music at times in ways that makes you feel like you've stumbled into a hidden flow state that perhaps even the game's designers didn't fully intend. This is propelled by the soundtrack featuring some electro heavy hitters (Danger, Carpenter Brut, Toxic Avenger, Lorn) composing original synth grinds that elevate the entire experience beyond what you might expect out of a "free" Playstation Plus game.

8. Inside
I have to confess that I haven't played Inside yet either (but I will! I own a copy now), but given the linear nature of the game, I have watched most of it on YouTube. I know the story beats, and I know how it ends. It's a small story in some ways, but it builds on the foundation that Playdead began with their previous game, Limbo. More than anything, Inside is oozing with production design that seems downright tactile. I confess that my interview with composer/sound designer Martin Stig Andersen may be skewing my perspective a little bit as knowing that certain heartbeats are internally recorded actual heart thumps really enriches my engagement with what the game has to offer. Granted, maybe it's not necessary to know these behind-the-scenes details for the production design to have the same effect, and if that's the case (and judging by the high praise for the game, it is), then all the more reason to pile on the accolades.

7. Kentucky Route Zero: Act IV
Kentucky Route Zero's fourth chapter was perhaps its most anticipated. There was the longest gap between acts so far, and Act III set an incredibly high bar for emotional resonance, thanks to the character Junebug's devastating musical performance. Act IV doesn't play into the hype, instead keeping matters low-key and opting to send the hapless crew drifting downriver with less of a stated objective than a curious aloofness. All of the aesthetic trademarks are here: caves, obsolete technology, magical quirk, whiskey. The result makes less of an impact than Act III, preferring instead to literalize the importance of the journey over the destination that the series' performative play has been hinting at this whole time. As an aside, don't wait until the final act is out to start playing Kentucky Route Zero, lest you remember everything a bit too clearly.

6. Pokemon GO
A lot of folks seem to be acknowledging Pokemon GO begrudgingly, as if its mere status as a phenomenon should be enough to laud it critically. I happen to think the game deserves the praise. It's certainly not perfect and I agree with most of the criticisms that have been leveled against it, but they aren't enough to fully dampen the entertainment I've been able to wring out of this thing. I love booting the game up from my house and seeing if my yellow team still holds the gym housed in an abandoned caboose down on the train tracks, and taking it over if that's not the case. It's made me territorial of the area around my house, which is a place where, as was made starkly clear this election season, I don't see eye-to-eye with a lot of my neighbors on a lot of things. I'm only renting my apartment, but my team owns that gym, and I intend to keep it that way. Also, here's a pro tip: rename your Pokemon; the game is at least 3x more enjoyable when Bosco, Doug, and Drippy are defending your turf instead of the hundredth iterations of Arcanine, Snorlax, and Vaporeon.

5. Slither.io
I can't stop playing Slither.io. There's not that much too it, but I think that's part of what I like about it. It's deceptively simple in the way you play the game, but there are enough analog components that keep it from being something you could win with a spreadsheet. For the unfamiliar, Slither.io is like a large-scale multiplayer version of Snake (you know, that game you could play on a graphing calculator), except instead of not running into your tail, you can't run into anyone else's, and everyone else is trying to make you do just that. Some may consider it a secondary sibling to Agar.io, but I find the strategy in Slither.io more dynamic and the customization options less troll-prone. There are more options at your disposal, even as a tiny snake, than in Agar.io. In Slither.io, even the big snakes need to be on guard as one false move is an opportunity for even the smallest snake to turbo in front of you and end your run. You have to adapt strategies as you go, judging your environment and the risk/reward of heading into crowds. In fact, playing it safe as a big snake gets really boring, playing off your natural temptations to break form and take a dare.

4. AM2R
It turns out Metroid II is actually a pretty cool game, especially when you don't have to play it on a Game Boy. Joking aside, I was genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed AM2R's take on Metroid II. The fan remake is the same basic game structure as the Game Boy original, but with graphical enhancements and a few tweaks and additions here and there. Samus is on an extermination mission to kill every last metroid, which is a horribly dark premise for those of us who are metroid sympathizers out there. However, the mutant metroids in AM2R don't go down without a fight, and the little stinger sound that plays every time one soars into frame had me jolting in fright more times than I'm willing to admit. Structurally, the game isn't all that different from other exploration-heavy Metroid titles. You still need to acquire certain items to open specific doors and traverse one obstacle or another. It's ironic to think about AM2R (literally Another Metroid 2 Remake) as just another Metroid game, but hey, those games are really good and this is a very good one of those. It just happens to have been put together by a fan with a copy of Game Maker, not Nintendo.

3. The Last Guardian
I'm still making my through The Last Guardian as of this writing, but it's left a serious impression on me. It's the sort of impression that I hoped for a long time that the game would have, but feared for just as long that I'd be let down. The way Trico, the adorable chimera, plays off of the way that I understand what my cat is trying to tell me, is pretty remarkable. Sure, I occasionally look to Trico for "videogame clues," as to what to do, but just as often I respond to the digital creature in the moment. What does it need or want? What is it trying to say? Does it actually like me or is it just using me to help it get where it wants to go? And like my cat, those answers don't seem entirely black and white. My cat might be independent and standoffish most of the time, but catch her in a particularly sleepy mood and she'll cuddle next to you on a blanket. Trico's communications are similarly non-binary, and in an environment that basically asks if the puzzle is solved or not, having those organic moments of observation and connection provide a very uncommon oasis.

2. Thumper
Ever since I played a demo of Thumper in a suffocating Airstream trailer, I've been sold on it. Actually, scratch that. Ever since Brian Gibson and Marc Flury coined the term "rhythm violence," I've been sold on Thumper. The game makes simple button presses have visceral impact. I honestly don't have too much to add that I didn't say in my review, but Thumper is a game I find myself coming back to with relative frequency. It's a game that had the guts to ask you to memorize an original score (and it is not your typical score) instead of reciting a pop/rock chart-topper. The result is a game that is about reflexes and finding patterns and discovering and internalizing where those patterns break formation. There can be a flow to Thumper, but more often than not, the game pushes against the limits of flow. It becomes a rhythm highway as survival game. With practice, you might find the music, but until then you'll be lucky just to stay alive.

1. The Witness
No game so thoroughly absorbed my attention and charged my desire to unpack its dense array of symbols, quotes, and puzzles as The Witness. I solved every puzzle in the game (thanks to some hints online) and only wish there was a Zelda-like second quest with a rearranged and remixed version of the fantasy island. There's just so much richness on display; the design is as lush as the banyan forest with all of those bridge puzzles. I mentioned in my review that I wasn't sold on the implementation of the audio-logs, and I still maintain that stance, but I can at least see, on paper, where they seem like a good idea. After all, my argument wasn't that the audio logs were bad so much as redundant and ham-fisted. The truth is that all of those highfalutin concepts are present in the design of the island and its puzzles, and they communicate those ideas with more grace than a pedantic lecture. So, I don't bring them up to complain about the game, but to show how sophisticated The Witness' construction is that it is able to translate these complex theoretical notions into the rhetoric of its systemic framework. Art, scientific fact, the human condition; these are subjects better left as subjective considerations and contextualized platforms for individual thought. The Witness' island does this, and I'm hard pressed to think of any game that's done it better.

Terra Battle Basics - Part 1

Here is my debut episode for my video series that will walk new players through strategies for playing the mobile game, Terra Battle. I've been playing Terra Battle for over 2 years, and the game has changed a lot over that period of time. Many of those changes have added complexity and breadth to the kinds of things you can do in the game. As such, I imagine new Terra Battle players might be a little overwhelmed with the onslaught of modes pulling their attention and precious stamina points in all directions. My first episode here just focuses on the basics of the battle system: how to move characters, arrange pincer attacks, and trigger chain combos that fire unique skills. Look for more episodes in the coming weeks.

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!

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Blips: Theatrically Inclined

Source(s): At the gates of Temple Studios: Where gaming and theatre collide,  The 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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.