Kill Screen - Pitchfork

Chris Marker: Open-World Pioneer

Henry Crouch — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 05:00:00 -0500

Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound… disembodied.

— Chris Marker, Sans Soleil

Experimental multimedia artist and filmmaker Chris Marker passed away last Sunday at the age of 91, leaving many to reflect on his work and mourn the loss of a great innovator.

My own exposure to Chris Marker’s films began in college, during a seminar on Personal Narrative in Photography—ironic, given that Marker was notoriously elusive to the public’s eye. Our professor, knowing well the futility of explaining what we were about to watch, gave little remark before queuing up Sans Soleil: It was the kind of movie one had to experience firsthand. As the screening came to an end, we made no sound. It was a haunting silence: What had we just witnessed? Was it documentary? Memoir? Science fiction?

Sans Soleil unveiled the world familiar to me in altogether unfamiliar ways, proposing an interwoven narrative of travel, philosophy, and first-person account, leaving me dizzied to speculate on grave questions of psychological and societal concern. The movie, widely considered Marker’s greatest achievement, helped to define the essay-film genre, a form that, according to critic Timothy Corrigan, “describes the many-layered activities of a personal point of view as a public experience” and which, for Marker, allowed charged and intimate associations between found-footage, music, and fiction.

Despite our predisposition for linearity, caused by a predominance of un-challenging media, Marker believed in the power of open-endedness, much in the same way that many contemporary videogames offer non-linear experiences. In 1997, he created a CD-ROM game called Immemory, an interactive archive of photographs, sound, video, and other ephemera culled from his archives. In what one might describe as a “sandbox game” by modern standards, Immemory stakes its claim in exploration rather than routine, allowing players to investigate a world and chronicle a story of their own within the media set forth by its creator.

Not unlike the open-world game, Marker’s films unfold poetically, inviting speculation and allowing viewers to piece together their own story. A nameless narrator frames Sans Soleil, recounting letters sent to her by a fictional documentary filmmaker who wanders not only through disparate landscapes, but also through a travelogue of ideologies, fictions, and histories. In one letter, the filmmaker shares his idea for the plot of a science-fiction movie, featuring a protagonist from a future where “remembering” does not exist. Instead, total-recall has replaced our fallible memory:

After so many stories of men who had lost their memory, here is the story of one who has lost forgetting, and who—through some peculiarity of his nature—instead of drawing pride from the fact and scorning mankind of the past and its shadows, turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion. In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision, to be moved by a portrait, to tremble at the sound of music, can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history. He wants to understand. He feels these infirmities of time like an injustice, and he reacts to that injustice like Ché Guevara, like the youth of the Sixties, with indignation. He is a Third Worlder of time. The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet's past is as unbearable to him as to them the existence of poverty in their present.

Who was this “Third Worlder of Time”? How could one have “lost forgetting,” or lack a comprehension of unhappiness? Man’s unstable identity— refracted through history, rewritten by memory and obfuscated by desire—is manifest through much of Marker’s work. It insists that we are constituted as much by what is present and knowable as by what is unknowable, by what comes before and after us. Cinema, science fiction and videogames alike reveal this to us in their capacity to look beyond our every-day banalities, a fact which Marker was well aware of.

La Jetée—Marker’s most popular work, and the basis for Terry Gilliam’s sci-fi thriller, 12 Monkeys—also tells the story of a man from a dystopian future, sent back in time through his own memory to search for a key to preventing the world’s apocalypse. Lasting only 28 minutes and told almost entirely through black-and-white still images, the film has become a celebrated milestone in fiction set around time-travel paradox and the narratives of human struggle therein.

Though videogames owe much to Marker’s imaginative and open-ended stories, he ultimately preferred the use of cinema as a time-based medium, using it to capture the specificities of time and place, and the poetic malleability in film’s many applications. Marker challenged genre and opened the medium of cinema to new forms; through his visions of the world, he changed our own.

We will miss him, if only to await his imminent arrival in the future, where he might bear us some forewarning of our past.

Resonance marks progress for women in games.

Danielle Riendeau — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 16:00:00 -0500

This past June all but erupted in discussions about women in games. At E3, from comments by Tomb Raider Executive Producer Ron Rosenberg about a potential rape scene in the upcoming game and the idea that players will want to “protect” the heroine, to the flurry of controversy over Hitman: Absolution’s provocative trailer, the show brought out the ugly side of the gaming industry in a big way. June also saw Anita Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter success for her video project—Tropes vs. Women in Videogames, and the subsequent vile backlash.

Amidst all of this, Resonance—a classic point-and-click adventure title developed by XIII Games—was released to critical acclaim and introduced the most progressive female videogame character to date. The game tasks players with leading its four main characters—a doctor, a cop, a journalist, and a scientist with intertwining backstories—through a near-future techno-thriller plot.

Conversations around the game haven’t much mentioned its female lead, Anna Castellanos, and just how radical she is. Anna reads like an antidote to all of the negativity surrounding female representations in gaming. She is the definition of a positive, complex, likable character—strong, with a difficult past, but the furthest from a “victim” stereotype one can be. She is a woman of color, and a medical doctor—an element reinforced by the gameplay, in which only Anna can access certain parts of a hospital setting, thanks to her credentials. She’s attractive, but by no means over-sexualized, and she holds her own in any number of difficult situations, including a scene where she evades an attacker in her own home. In many ways, she is exactly what feminist critics have been looking for in female characters.

“Anna was intended to be the emotional center of the story, and it always made sense for that center to be a woman,” says Vince Wesselman, the writer/designer and creative lead of Resonance. “I didn't have any high-minded ideals or message behind the decision to make her a woman of color. It seems like ‘white heterosexual male’ is the default identity for main characters in games (and movies and television), and the only reason a writer diverges from that is if the story is specifically dealing with what it means to be of that particular gender or minority group. I just wanted to cast that notion aside.”

"I didn't make these choices to make the game's cast resemble the census results of an average American city, but would it have really been so wrong if I had?"

The concept of diversity—depicting characters outside of the “white, able-bodied, heterosexual male” “norm” in games—is still very new for many gamers that were raised on predominantly white macho heroes, and the conversation surrounding it has often been fraught with tension. Game developers have repeatedly shied away from featuring women and people of color (and the double minority—women of color) out of fear of upsetting the status-quo expectations of the buying public and the possibility of backlash.

“I've seen a couple reviews or comments that suggested that I included Anna, as well as the ‘token’ black guy and old guy, in order to check boxes on some list. I didn't make these choices to make the game's cast resemble the census results of an average American city, but would it have really been so wrong if I had?

“I was worried, somewhat, about sounding stereotypical when writing the character of Anna because I was writing outside my comfort zone and knowledge base,” he continues. “But then again, in some ways, she's my daughter. She's an American but has roots in another country and culture, as my daughter does. She was either born in America or moved with her family to America at a very young age, as my daughter did. She grew up speaking two languages, but mostly took to the language spoken at school and on the playground, as my daughter did. She speaks English without an accent.”

The easiest place for the writing to have gotten bogged down—or for the story to have gone down an ugly, stereotypical path—would have been in Anna’s troubled past. Players actually take control of her as she navigates childhood nightmares, and flashbacks reveal both physical and verbal abuse in her history. But instead of ending up a “victim” stereotype, like Bonnie from Red Dead Redemption or the insinuations about the rebooted Lara Croft, or one of the countless female victims lining the great halls of videogame character history, Wesselman treats the character with respect and a realistic sense of strength. The designer credits his mother, a therapist who works with children who have experienced trauma, with his own desire to see a character rise up from that sort of past.

Kill Screen’s own Sarah Elmaleh voiced the character, and noted her own appreciation for Anna’s ability to overcome.

“She isn’t reduced to victimhood because she’s got lots going on,” says Elmaleh. “She’s a doctor, a professional. Without being full-on goofy, she does have a sense of humor. She’s comfortable expressing herself in this group of dudes. These things all point toward a persistent resilience in her.”

“It’s not the same as toughness, which is usually less fascinating to me,” she continues. “Anna feels things very deeply; she’s affected and even damaged by them, but she gets up and goes to work and flirts a little and moves forward. I think that’s compelling and realistic. Many of the people I admire most in life—men and women both—are strong not in spite of, but because of their comfort in vulnerability.”

So, what’s next after Resonance and its non-issue treatment of a realistic female character? The gaming landscape is slowly but surely starting to change, as evidenced by the sheer inclusion of more female leads in games of all sizes. Going back to E3 2012, for example, we saw the first playable female character in an Assassin’s Creed game, a lead based on Academy Award nominee Ellen Page in Beyond: Two Souls, and even a strong teenaged female character in The Last of Us (we’ll reserve judgment for Tomb Raider’s actual treatment of Lara Croft for a later date). Throughout the early 2010s, we saw the powerful ubiquity of fans who prefer a female hero in the blockbuster Mass Effect series—so much so that BioWare changed its marketing to reflect that fact.

“I have no idea how to educate the masses other than to wait until they grow up and experience life a bit,” says Wesselman. But he certainly does have a game plan: “The only thing that I can do as a creator is, again, think of my daughter and think of the kinds of games I'd like her to play someday and the women I'd like her to look up to.”

Elmaleh cites a number of recent articles. “We’re coming out of an era of stock female tropes, negative or idealized, that exist relative to stock tropes about men; that merely react to them. Resonance represents a really neat response to these questions as an indie adventure game,” she says. “Graphic adventure games have always had run of this broad possibility space with wildly varying settings, tones, and concerns.”

"Whether you could project yourself onto them was less important than simply wanting to understand and spend time with them.”

She points to 1998’s Grim Fandango as a perfect earlier example, with sassy, strong female characters and riotous situations.

“They can be set anywhere, about anyone—lady of color doctor! Fella of color journalist! Nerd scientist! Grizzled, tubby cop!—the gameplay consists of puzzles and conversations from the mundane to the fantastical.

“An underlying concern [in games] is that you won’t be able to seamlessly project yourself onto a protagonist and thus successfully engage with the game. With adventure games traditionally being in 2D, the protagonists faced out at you; they were known to break the fourth wall for direct address. They were independent-minded and sometimes outright mutinous, refusing to act out your more thoughtless or spiteful ideas. Whether you could project yourself onto them was less important than simply wanting to understand and spend time with them.”

Spending time with Anna was something of a revelation. As a female gamer who works in the racial and sexual justice nonprofit world, and someone who spends a great deal of time defending games to those who rightly look down upon them because of so many games’ overwhelmingly juvenile treatment of women (to say nothing of their treatment of people of color, or queer characters, alas, the list goes on), here was a character that spoke to me.

The secret, poises Elmaleh, is good writing, attention to detail, and a desire to see some honesty in every character.

“You don’t have to reinvent the wheel for your characters to be compelling and dignified,” she says. “Uncharted flanks Nate with a Girl Next Door and a Sultry Other Woman, and they are written, directed, and performed with such intelligence and subtlety that they’re lifted out of stereotype and into something lovely. And we’ve also been gifted with one of the all-time finest performances in a game, by a leading lady of many stripes and orientations, in a shooter—in this case, through simply obeying the [design] mantra of ‘Options and Choices.’ I think I might go spend some time with my second of three female Commander Shepards right now.”

Wreckateer doesn't satisfy our love for destruction

Jon Irwin — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 05:00:00 -0500

Destruction is in our DNA. Maybe that's because all of us are doomed to erode, the foregone conclusion to a life of building ourselves up, only to inevitably, irretrievably, fall down.

Kidding! It's fun, is all. You build the pillow fort so as to knock it over. You rake leaves into piles only to jump into them, scattering your hard work. We're hardwired to destroy what we create. (See: Pete Townshend's Stratocaster, the USA's 60-percent divorce rate, the 1998 Florida Marlins, etc.)

No game from my youth captured this feeling better than the boardgame Crossbows & Catapults, originally released in 1983 and created by the prolific French designer Henri Sala. I came across it maybe five years later, in elementary school and happy to play with toys while crouched on the carpet. Each player constructs a miniature medieval city of plastic bricks. You place your plastic flag atop your plastic tower, which is manned by plastic people and defended with the titular plastic weaponry. Each side has a collection of plastic discs—read: boulders and/or cannonballs—which you then fling back and forth in a calculated effort at amassing big-time wreckage. There's an official set of rules to play; as is often the case in war and love, I'm pretty sure we ignored those and blasted each others' structures until all that remained were ruins.

And so when Microsoft announced Iron Galaxy's Wreckateer as one of its “Summer of Arcade” downloadable games for Xbox 360, a small part of my stomach flipped in delight. While everyone else called it a “3D Angry Birds,” I knew what it really was: a virtual Crossbows & Catapults.

Except that it's much more similar to Angry Birds. You use Microsoft's Kinect to mime the loading and launching of ballistae, flinging projectiles toward a succession of castles overrun with annoying goblins, trying to crush as much as you can. Wreckateer has two major differences from Angry Birds: 1) It takes place in 3D space, and 2) it uses motion control.

Something about games with 3D environments still hinders the inexperienced player. Which is odd, since we live in a world comprising, last I checked, all three dimensions, and most of us have little problem walking through a tight hallway. Place a controller in the hands of someone who doesn't normally play games, though, turn on the latest Call of Duty, and watch them perform a series of ground-staring, wall-bumping stumbles.

There's a reason New Super Mario Bros. Wii, a 2D platformer, sold more copies in two months than its 3D predecessor Super Mario Galaxy did in two years. Flatness flowing left-to-right is easy: the movement of reading, the language of charts. It is how we simplify the most complex of processes, from evolution to chronology. It is why Angry Birds has been downloaded over 100 million times, and why Wreckateer won't be. X and Y make sense; add that finicky Z axis, and whoa Nelly, where are we again?

This is why the advent of motion control, and of technologies like Kinect, is so important. Our columnist Abe Stein wrote about sports games and the paradoxical benefit of simplifying complex movements into button presses. And while I agree to an extent, I also think there's much to be gained by allowing true, kinetic energy back into play.

In traditionally controlled games, a swiveled stick and tapped button are capable ciphers, easy to execute and symbolic of athletic prowess. But, for the player at home, there is very little physicality. It's all in your mind. Motion control, when successfully employed in games, returns intuitive sensation to your body. In Wreckateer, you pull back the crossbow by pulling, not tapping. You add english to the flying boulder not by nudging a pad in your hands, but by pushing your hands themselves.

Further, most real-world action cannot be directed as gracefully as a series of button presses. Take a rubber band in your hand and fling it across the room. Did it go exactly where you expected? Probably not. Not to the degree that a game player, fine-tuning the aim, angle, and velocity with a DualShock, could have predicted. And so we have our games cheat for us, giving us unrealistic expectations of control, because they are games and an explicit connection to reality and its physics-based rules is not always what we sign up for. Motion control allows chaos back in. Our motor skills are finite, often dubious. Our movement through the world is much more Stumble-and-Grope than it is Calculated Perfection. Our games should, at least sometimes, reflect that. In this regard, Wreckateer succeeds in aping our own imperfect flailings.

Games often ask us to destroy our surroundings—even when they don't, we do anyway, in games from SimCity to 2008's Boom Blox. Wreckateer tries for this universal sense of glee but, like a styrofoam cannonball, flies low and falls short.

You proceed through a sequence of castles. It's your job to destroy them, for some reason; your two helpers, both medieval caricatures (one of which is named Wreck Wreckington—this is the level of nuance on display here), never fully explain. This is no experiment in ludonarrative dissonance—the castles exist to blow up, the end.

A computer-controlled minion loads up the ballista with one of a half-dozen projectiles. You, in your living room, step forward and bring your hands together—your onscreen avatar successfully mimics your behavior and grabs onto the machine. Step back and lean down, and now you're pulling the crossbow backwards. The Kinect follows your movement with impressive precision, enough so that slight inch-by-inch shifts affect your aim and velocity. Pull your hands apart and your avatar does the same, releasing the flying shell into the air.

As the rock floats in slow motion towards its target, you affect its trajectory in various ways. Some rocks can be swatted up/down/left/right, as if pushing them with phantom hands. Others split apart into four smaller rocks held together by psychic energy. Another sprouts wings and flies—thrust your arms out in a Y-shape and manually pilot the rock into the tower's base, soaring through floating icons on the way boosting your score or speed.

For a game about flying balls of destruction, everything moves slowly—a curious but effective choice, reminding me of a kid holding a balled-up sock in their hand, pushing it through the air, and making “whoosh!” noises, approximating a great meteor about to land on the earth/carpet below.

But perhaps more fun than colliding into towers of stone is missing them altogether. In a way, Wreckateer turns into an airborne sandbox (sandstorm?), where the fun arises from finding out what you can and cannot do: grazing roofs; flying around corners; aiming high in the air only to land a foot away; spooking goblins sailing around in hot-air balloons; crashing through doorways, hitting nothing at all.

Perhaps such passivity feels satisfying because the actual destruction lacks a certain panache. The destructible environments show off some shoddy physics and weak effects, a problem when the entire premise of your game is to destroy the environment. I'm reminded of certain highlights from my middle-school filmography, when I used a VHS camcorder to render such incredible effects as the “Disappearing Apprentice,” whereby a magician friend pointed his finger at his little sister, I hit the REC button to stop filming, my friend's sister moved out of the frame, and we placed a liter of 7UP in her spot and continued filming, thereby zapping our poor apprentice into a lukewarm bottle of carbonated soda.

When a flying boulder crashes into a tower in Wreckateer, the resulting explosion reminds me of that cheap magic—the textured wall of stone is immediately replaced with a shower of toothpicks and crushed Oreo.

In another odd choice, due to low budget or a design team high on something, every moment of impact is celebrated with miniature firework displays, not overhead in the sky as if to celebrate all this magnificent wrecking, but over the damage itself, like haphazardly tossed sprinkles.

Why am I bothered by insufficient window dressing? The game itself is fun; the mechanics are addictive and work quite nicely, with Kinect's all-seeing-eye noting your hand movement and gestures well enough for such simple demands. What it fails to do is improve upon the gold standard: my nearly-10-year-old's brain computer, processing outrageous scenarios and fantastical explosions with every pulled rubber band and plunked-over chunk of plastic.

Wreckateer wasn't built for me, though. It was built for today's nearly-10-year-olds, born in the Angry Birds age, who just might have a hoot blasting virtual boulders into digital walls. And if not, there's always the carpeting, some socks, and a few piled-high toys.

Indie games? Developer Suda51 stays punk.

Michael Thomsen — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 16:00:00 -0500

It is a particular sickness of writers to want to make sense of everything. Writing about a game requires a logical and linear sequence of ideas to be connected. Criticism says that works are important, but that one's interpretative understanding of a work is even more important—even in praise it is a defeat at the hands of the audience. Videogames agitate this phenomenon to an unusual degree because of the discrepancy between their functioning as systems and their signification as art, which critics like me hasten to interpret with stern attention.

The games of Japanese developer Goichi Suda (aka Suda51) are hostile to interpretive idealization in every aspect—from Killer7's elegant and obnoxious decision to take movement away from the joystick, to Lollipop Chainsaw's embrace of masculine fantasies about teenage sex and idiocy. In a speech given at the Game Developers Conference in 2007, Suda attempted to cohere his work under the umbrella category of punk. “I hate doing things that other people do,” he said. “I like to do what other people are not doing … developing games that nobody else will think about.”

Ironically, the punk label was eagerly embraced because it was safe and familiar, and it has led to a generally simplistic characterization of Suda’s work. Art such as his is often mistaken to represent uncomfortable or unflattering aspects of reality. But Suda's work does not signify a coherent set of values. It is an art of nonsense that cannot be reduced by criticism into an essential state.

There are many little meanings, but no big meaning.

Irreducibility is a defining characteristic of surrealism, a tradition that illuminates Suda’s work. In his Surrealist Manifesto, André Breton described the "mind" as something that "attempts to embrace everything." Its mechanism for experiencing the world makes descriptions of things that are separate from their beholders futile and dishonest. "Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown, classifiable," Breton argued. "The desire for analysis wins out over the sentiments."

Killer7 (2005) is Suda's most purely surreal work, an incomprehensible jumble of tones, characters, and interactive fragments that still make sense as a unified experience. Not only is movement arbitrarily reduced to holding down a button while the game code moves you further along its branching train tracks, it asks you to shoot invisible enemies that are detectable only by listening for their shrieking laughter. In other words, the most basic requirement for the game's central mechanism—shooting—is made impossible by a presentation that inhibits sight.

One plays Killer7 in steps, holding down a movement button and listening, then holding down a shoulder button to look in first-person view, then pressing another button to activate a scan effect to make the enemies visible so they can finally be shot. This disruption does not imply any particular thematic or emotional interpretation. Instead it is hyper-formalist, creating space to observe all of the disparate elements involved in a shooting action that's usually streamlined in videogames toward a point of perfect convenience.

Joined with this mechanic is the game's character switching, in which one must morph into seven different people, each with their own particular weapons and movement abilities. This evokes the opening question of Breton's Nadja, the surreal novel, which opened by braving the cliché "Who am I?" Scrubbed free of sarcasm, the question is the essential counterpoint to surrealism's romance of the irreducible. If there is no summary truth to any thing in the world, then the subjective viewer given to interpret all these things must also be considered irreducibly complex.

"This sense of myself seems inadequate only in so far as it presupposes myself," Breton wrote. Killer7 begins by presupposing many selves that are freely interchangeable, each of which is expressed through a paraplegic old man named Harman who can literally absorb their corpses. In the build-up to the finale, the game reveals each of the seven personas is actually a former victim of Harman's. But even this sense of character does not illuminate Harman in any explanatory way. His "self" is a literal assembly of other people's selves, which all but eliminates any conception of self that we might have for him. He is not a person so much as an open potentiality for any person.

In subsequent games, Suda's flair for disruptive mechanics and irreducible selves has migrated toward self-conscious juvenilia. Inspired loosely by Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo, an anarcho-acid film with a heavy debt to surrealism, Suda created the No More Heroes series (2008, 2010). The two games are a vulgar confetti of childhood fantasies—what a boy infatuated with wrestling, lightsabers, and pornography might imagine to be his adult life ("The mind which plunges into Surrealism relives with glowing excitement the best parts of its childhood," Breton wrote in the Manifesto).

What matters is not the meaning but the depth and urgency of the experience.

No More Heroes' signifiers are so fecund they seem to psychoanalyze themselves at first. Travis is driven to kill his way through the ranks of the world's most dangerous assassins by the promise of sex with a mysterious blonde who makes a point of always appearing before him in some barely clothed manner. The grand villain is Travis' childhood love—and half-sister—who was sexually abused by Travis' father and who has now become the top-ranked assassin in the world. She also shares the name of Travis' cat, with whom players can relax between missions; feeding her, letting her sit on Travis' stomach, and nuzzling her head for a few peaceful moments.

Yet there is no coherent moral frame which all these psychoanalytic signifiers could be made to fit in—the player feels the urge to use them as pieces in some act of moral block building, but the further one goes the more incongruent the pieces seem. As in Killer7, the game only seems to be sensible in small increments; but as each additional layer of detail is added to its story, it becomes a collection of associated fragments whose only meaningful connection to one another comes from the projected moral framework of the person who observed them all.

In Nadja, Breton admitted it was impossible to not see connections in his rambling list of memories, places, posters, books, letters, drawings, and music—used to evoke the spirit of a lost love affair—and yet he found it "quite impossible to establish a rational correlation between them." He hoped this absence of sensible relation would "send some men rushing out into the street, after making them aware, if not of the non-existence, at least of the crucial inadequacy of any so-called categorical self-evaluation, of any action which requires a continuous application and which can be premeditated."

No More Heroes' gameplay embodies this nonsensical arrangement of disruptive fragments with its beam-katana swordplay, though in a simpler way than Killer7. The periodic draining of the virtual katana's battery requires pauses in fighting while players recharge it with a vigorous and masturbatory stroking gesture. The fighting is further interrupted by a "Dark Side" mode which supplements Travis' attack abilities with superpowers that warp the screen in psychotically saturated greens and purples, the dramatic tension of combos and counters obscured by the blood geysers that come from enemies that can now be decapitated with a single hit.

The assassination missions are broken up with side jobs that include working a gas station, collecting coconuts on the beach, mowing lawns, harvesting scorpions from a grassy lot, and sweeping for buried mines. No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle made these games even more incongruous by transforming them into 8-bit throwbacks at complete odds with the 3D atmospherics of the rest of the game. Again, it's easy to confuse the obviousness of what these individual elements signify—Dark Side mode is a clear metaphor for a psychotic break; side jobs are a comment on the simple mechanistic connections between videogames of all eras—but there is no all-encompassing signification. In contrast to, say, Grand Theft Auto IV, a game that coheres as a long and sarcastic tightening of a tourniquet around a well-meaning sucker who is slowly turned into a villain by repeatedly allowing himself to be a tool for thugs, crooks, and power brokers, the No More Heroes games are fragmentary and inconclusive. With all their psychodramas, toy fetishes, and strained male arousal, there are many little meanings, but no big meaning.

/ / /

Suda's recent games have narrowed even further in tone and aesthetic, dampening the sense of randomness and irreducibility by seeming to embrace the shrill dead end of exploitation cinema. Shadows of the Damned and Lollipop Chainsaw favor linear structures and streamlined mechanics that minimize the disruptive elements from Suda's earlier games, revealing a thinness to each game's systems. Suda had always favored game design by contrasting disparate ideas rather than deep-diving into the mechanical complexity of any one mechanic. In both recent games, the story aesthetics and gameplay seem to adhere to the rules of their genre rather than subvert them. These games rely on tasteless confrontation in tone alone to enliven overfamiliar gameplay mechanics.

Shadows of the Damned is the masculine version of the violent exploitation tale, in which a "MexiCan" is led through hell to save his kidnapped girlfriend by an obvious penis stand-in, a talking skull gun called Johnson, which must be discharged at all the intervening demons protecting the man's girlfriend. Lollipop Chainsaw was developed in partnership with Kadokawa Games and former Troma writer James Gunn, whose work on Tromeo and Juliet ridiculed the tendency of men to cover their emotional neediness with porn and sexual fixation. Lollipop Chainsaw trades the masculine exploitation cliché for a feminine one, a waterheaded cheerleader whose sexual signification makes the zombies she's fighting fantasize about her defilement. One especially elastic enemy dreams of severing her head and "fisting" his anus with it.

For some it was impossible not to see these depictions as advocating a view of women that is incessantly sexual and bent toward the phallocentric male-pleasure paradigm. Lollipop Chainsaw is one of Suda’s most readily interpretable games. Just as one might argue against it as an example of misogyny, one might counter-argue that most all the men in the game are rotting zombies who are identified as the enemy, and the two male characters who are trustworthy are desexualized. Juliet's boyfriend Nick is a severed head, and his lust has no instrument for expression, save the emotional and intellectual ties between him and her. Her father is a protective rockabilly bear who has no sexual interest in anyone save Juliet's mother, and he eventually accepts Nick because he trusts Juliet’s independent ability to chose a partner for herself.

Interpreting the game as an empowerment yarn, however, where a woman gets to violently mutilate all the drooling sex monsters around her, doesn't quite scan—especially considering the game's creative heads are all men, and the majority of the audience for action games with chainsaws is very probably male. It might be more honest to see Lollipop Chainsaw as a bizarre ventilation of guilt, acknowledging how lurid and disfiguring these clichés must always be—men depicting themselves as monsters who need defeating at the hands of their own cultural creation.

But then this is the trap surrealism lays for us. Here I am, knee-deep in counter-interpreting signifiers in a work that, finally, has nothing to signify. Lollipop Chainsaw creates the urge to see models of morality and, in the tradition of exploitation, provokes disgust for what it knowingly leads its audience into interpreting. I am finally just talking about myself and using someone else’s body of work as the reason why people should care about my particular view of these elements. Surrealism seduces each beholder with the promise of reason discovered, which we cannot resist because its discovery is always self-aggrandizing. "In every domain the mind appropriates certain rights which it does not possess," Breton wrote in concluding Nadja. "Beauty neither static nor dynamic. The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph."

Seismography is probably the best description of Suda's work. He is not an arranger of psychoanalytic or sociopolitical metaphors, but a composer of contrasts meant to induce sentiments of bigger and smaller magnitudes. What matters is not the meaning but the depth and urgency of the experience, something which surrealism evokes by juxtaposing non-sequiturs. Suda’s recent turn is a formal gesture that exploits our need to see art in terms of the sense it makes.

An earthquake can "mean" an infinite number of things because it affects an infinite number of lives, landmasses, and natural phenomena over time; it collapses structures placed along the surface, swallows individual lives, and reshapes continents. We respond to earthquakes but they cannot be defined in terms of our responses to them. Suda is finally not a punk nor an exploitation artist, but an arranger of structures and associations whose inevitable collapse are a seismographic heartbeat away—nonsense spaces crawled over by the brain-bound watchers who only want from the world a sensible illusion of their own making.

Is Pocket Planes the most boring game ever?

Ryan Kuo — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 11:00:00 -0500

The independent developer NimbleBit released Pocket Planes on Apple devices last month to general snark and reluctant tapping. In a conversation about Pocket Planes the remark most often made is that Pocket Planes will get old.

“I mean. You know it’s going to get old. Eventually.”

“Like it’s fun until you realize it’s not really fun.”

“I was playing Pocket Planes every day until I started playing that new procedurally generated famine simulator with the electroacoustic soundtrack. Holy fuck.”

“This is not going to last.”

The paradox is that nothing inside Pocket Planes ever ages. You can leave a woman stranded on layover in Guangzhou and when you come back in five years she will still be standing in her slot, her idiotic eyes burrowing two blank pixels onto your touchscreen, waiting to be lifted over to Budapest. The aurora borealis will be fixed in the same arc over Reykjavik. Your dormant airline company won’t be in debt, and even when all the polar ice caps have melted in a century, the Earth in your pocket will be intact.

In this era the most meaningful play is thought to emerge from human-powered story engines like EVE Online, an online space opera whose players engage in market manipulation and real-life corporate theft; and Journey, a collaborative desert pilgrimage that plays like artistic speed dating. Meaning is hard-wrought in sandbox games like Minecraft, where it is laid brick by brick; and Spelunky, where it gets blown out of the earth (at great risk to your health). So I find the totally meaningless play of Pocket Planes refreshing. Its data sits merely suspended in a can, nothing but numbers.

To be sure, the game does create a meaningful fiction, but only since its images are figurative. You build an airline by loading planes with passengers and cargo and sending them to their destination cities, ideally making a profit. Depending on the virtual distance, the flights could take anywhere from one minute to several hours of real time. When the time has passed, planes back on the ground, you can start again.

The gameplay is a quick sequence of taps: 1) Tap a departure city on the world map; 2) tap the plane icon; 3) scroll through a list of departing people and cargo; 4) tap on them; 5) tap the flight icon; 6) tap a destination city; 7) tap the FLY! button.

NimbleBit’s little Bitizens don’t have the heart to explain the meaning of my life.

Pocket Planes might be mistaken for a productivity app. It’s filled with to-do lists that you never manage to empty. There is also the implication of money. You have to fund flights and buy new airports with gold coins. If you want the newest planes that carry the most and fly the fastest, you need to spend Bux, a rarer fare. The thing is that the same Bux let you instantly complete flights, doing away with the waiting game; and you can also exchange Bux for more coins. The sticking point for Pocket Planes detractors is that you can use real money to buy Bux. They just want you to spend money!!!!!11—you’ve been warned by the fair play brigade. But Pocket Planes clearly does not care how much money, coins, or Bux you have. You could run your airline into the ground with very poor decisions and the little people would still look at you the same way. Without judgment.

What the Bux really buy you is pause. What was so important that you couldn’t wait 20 minutes for Mary Jimenez to reach Istanbul? Moreover, why do you even need all of these new planes and airports if you’re fundamentally performing the same act regardless? The Bux throw your impatience as well as your boredom into sharp relief. Playing Pocket Planes, you might actually become disgusted with yourself. This is a good thing. Like in last year’s unforgiving Dark Souls, you can’t avoid examining your impulses and perhaps your guilt. You understand exactly what you are buying.

Although Nintendo sometimes implores you to take a break, the average videogame does not ever acknowledge the vast amount of time and attention it demands (whereas time and attention are the mechanical backbone of Pocket Planes). Perhaps this is why we’re compelled to justify afterward all that inordinate time and attention spent, not only with quantifiable things like achievement points, but also with meaningful observations and conclusions like

The Citadel in City 17 provides a master class in showing how the player’s goal remains unreachable until the player reaches it at the end

and

My cat died last week and climbing that mountaintop with the unnamed stranger in Journey has expressed something intangible and yet inarguably authentic about my relationship to other humans.

Are these really the feelings we think we’re paying for? Perhaps the issue is that wishful thinking, such as the notion that one is important or magical or smart or even interesting, or maybe Batman, still pulls a lot of weight in making videogame systems appealing to play with. These fantasies are as thin as the skintight costumes of Silver Age superheroes. The mouse click in Diablo III transforms you into a cool demon slayer, but also a vegetable with arms. The nature of videogames is that we are not currently able to decide which one matters more.

Yet nothing is compelling about running a fake airline—especially not when Pocket Planes is apathetic by design. There is no empowerment in tapping a name on a list. You might level up, but you don’t know what you are leveling toward. Articles about Pocket Planes tend to mention how the author was hoping to build some kind of towering enterprise (before that got old); but they naturally assume this is a game about ascending and feeling fantastic. The airline’s expansion goes outward, from Moscow to Glasgow to San Francisco, and life basically goes sideways.

In other words this is not a happy game, but a radically boring one. It should be telling that there is no music, but only the sound of sitting in an airplane: a dim roar of atmospheric pressure coursing outside an aluminum cabin pumped with compressed air. You can almost smell the reheated chicken breast.

Many people I know have abandoned Pocket Planes because it seems to go nowhere forever, and the dark joke of the game is that we spend forever taking fake people everywhere. For me, playing the game involves a feeling of resignation—to the hard rules of a built world, to the apparent lack of a better thing to do, to the knowledge that time will never move any faster or slower than it does. And you are certainly running toward nothing; and the program is running there with you.

You could run your airline into the ground with very poor decisions and the little people would still look at you the same way.

This is why I appreciate Pocket Planes. It is a series of entirely banal decisions with no special meaning. I took a person to one city and made some money. I took two packages to another city and made slightly less money. But the first trip took a little longer than the second one. These are merely results that differ from one another.

A few more insignificant decisions I made:

1) I bought an airport in New York for 51,000 coins and had to close it minutes later. The reason being that all of my planes were too small to fly across the Atlantic.

2) I replaced two of my two-seater planes with five-seaters. The five-seaters were less profitable than expected because they were more expensive to fly, so I replaced them with two more efficient three-seaters.

3) Instead of boarding three passengers at Venice who were traveling in opposite directions, I waited five minutes for new travelers going in one direction to appear. There were still not enough travelers all going in one direction, so I filled the plane anyway and did not turn a profit.

The reason I like deciding these things is because my choices come with no strings attached. I do not have to be orchestrating a story or a mechanical metaphor every time I happen to press a button. I don’t want to “tell” my own story, either. I’ve had it with this increasing assumption that the best play is about meaningfully exploring and experimenting with scenarios and variables and plans and shit, and not sulking on the couch with no particular interest and nothing better to do.

Pocket Planes is life-affirming in the sense that it makes me conscious of my own difficult mass, like reaching around to scratch a difficult spot, or having a hard time going to the bathroom. These are not things we imagine ourselves doing in a new videogame, because they are realities we would rather ignore. Nonetheless we always ask questions like: Why am I doing this? Why am I still here? What is it doing for me? What if I spend money? In Pocket Planes, these questions finally have no precise answers. We are always stuck trying to control a situation, and maybe it doesn’t exactly mean anything except that we happen to be stuck there.

NimbleBit’s little Bitizens don’t have the heart to explain the meaning of my life. The only things they do are shuffle back and forth, stare out of tiny eye sockets, and sometimes update their status on Bitbook. But once when I was tapping through my planes in the sky something remarkable happened. The plane was flying upside-down and sirens were going off and the pilot was silently screaming. When I tapped back the plane was flying normally again and the pilot’s scream had turned into a contented yawn. Nothing needed to be said.

Learning to love the inhumanity of Spelunky

Jason Johnson — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 05:00:00 -0500

Conventional wisdom says that good things come to those who wait. But if videogames teach us anything, it’s that good things come to those who learn to love. You dive in blindly, feeling out their structure like a blind man tapping on the sidewalk with a cane. You submit yourself to repeated failure and mechanical harshness. But if you are lucky, you become entranced. On July 4, I began to learn to love Spelunky for Xbox 360, which admittedly is not an easy thing to do.

Spelunky may be the perfect existential game, though you wouldn’t know it from screenshots. Tribal artifacts have never looked so adorable. Yet the cutesy graphics give way to an archeological dig into hell. The flat tiles of its world could be glyphs from a Mayan codex, spoken by a misanthropic god and written down by enslaved worshipers. A man-eating plant munches on a caveman. A bat is caught in a spider web. The path is blocked by an evil-looking stone statue that shoots out spikes. A dead tribesman is lying next to it, repeatedly being stabbed by the spikes. And when I take out an enemy, I feel required to torture it. I whip it repeatedly as it lies unconscious; or pick it up and throw it into a spike bed. These little scenes of cartoon malevolence create a lot of anxiety: What will happen if I do this, this, this, and this, but not this or this?

Today existentialism usually comes up with regard to nervous breakdowns—the ubiquitous existential crisis. There is a good reason. Anxiety plays a huge role in the best ideas of existential thinkers. Friedrich Nietzsche believed extreme mental anguish—which accompanies nihilism, the shaking conclusion that universal truths and religious beliefs have no underlying foundation—is necessary to become a free spirit. Martin Heidegger thought that we should face up to the fear of death and live authentically. The 18th-century theologian Søren Kierkegaard said that a knight of faith must “work out [his] salvation with fear and trembling.” Perhaps Fyodor Dostoyevsky summed it up best, though. He wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, “When I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful.”

This should sound familiar to anyone who has played Spelunky. It is a game where you screw up, feel bad about screwing up, screw up, screw up again, and screw up some more. (I could go on!) In our Kill Screen review, Jon Irwin came to the conclusion that it made him hate himself. His frustration is understandable. When I first tried it, exhausted after a long day of barbecue and mosquito bites and warm beer, I could barely escape the first level. After 10 or 20 very brief games spent mishandling bombs and walking into dart traps, I sat the controller down and seriously questioned my abilities. “Am I this bad at videogames?” I sighed. It was a desire to overcome my self-doubt—not for thrill or enjoyment—that brought me back.

Spelunky is a one-two-three punch of notoriously hard game types. It is the roguelike masocore platformer. Just reading that trio of words may inspire little spasms of angst. “Platformer” sounds safe enough, though it does imply a threat of falling. “Masocore” is taken from masochism + hardcore, and the genre is known for swatting your character like a fly. Hearing the word “roguelike” gives me the feeling that the game would rob me at gunpoint to buy crack. This isn’t far from the truth. Roguelikes are dungeon hacks that thrive on chaos, and can be compared to playing Russian roulette with a random-number generator and a dwarf—which is something to worry about.

To love Spelunky is to wring your hands around a gamepad nightly. Playing is a complex articulation of button presses, and must be pure hell for anyone with obsessive-compulsive disorder. To get to the exit at the bottom of the floor only requires that you have nimble fingers, but it often leads to a chain of events more complicated than the logical steps in a Christian apology. One, drop an urn on the head of a bad guy. Two, jack his boomerang. Three, throw it at the vine-climbing monkeys. Four, take care to catch it when it comes back to me. Five, cross the vines and nab the golden skull. Six, discover that a damsel in distress needs saving. Now I have to juggle between the boomerang, the golden skull, and the woman because I can only carry one at a time—and don’t want to leave any of them behind. So, I take care to 1) toss the skull down over the ledge, 2) then the boomerang, and 3) lastly the girl, then 4) hurriedly hang over the ledge myself, and 5) cautiously jump down, 6) quickly grabbing the girl and 7) sticking her in a safe spot before she runs into danger. I continue like that.

The erratic level design makes this even harder than it sounds, but that’s why Spelunky is so exciting. You are constantly in the act of discovering, because the mines are different each time. The computer shuffles through all the pieces that compose a level—the acid-spitting snakes, the floors and ceilings, the sapphires and gold—and deals them out randomly. A complaint you often hear against this type of design is that you can’t memorize it, the way I could probably draw a perfect map of level 1-1 from Super Mario Bros. on a cocktail napkin. Spelunky requires that you be in the moment. You must be totally methodical, but also completely spontaneous––ready to change at the drop of a hat. It forces you to live dangerously. As Nietzsche wrote in The Gay Science, “The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is: to live dangerously!”

It isn’t necessary to dig very deep into Nietzsche’s most provocative work to see why Spelunky counts as existential. In fact, you don’t even need to open the cover. The answer is right there in the title: Die fröhliche Wissenschaft; The Gay Science. It’s paradoxical, if you think about it. How does someone live in such a way to be lighthearted and frolicking and carefree, as if they were falling in love, and at the same time approach life with the workmanship and rigor of the pursuit of science? It seems impossible.

Yet that is exactly what happens as you play Spelunky. First, I was confounded by its harsh, inhuman mechanics that bent not only my hands, but also my brain, and what felt like my spine and skeleton around the sharp angles of its diabolic structure. Perhaps out of morbid curiosity, I stuck with it. Strange enough, I began to like it, just a little. The more I got to liking it, the more rigorous and skillful I became. And the more rigorous I got, the more I enjoyed playing. In this way, I fell deeper and deeper into the experience, until eventually, I forgot that I was contorting myself at all, and in this awkward position, I found that I was approaching a state of bliss.

The bliss didn’t come from rigor—from wrestling with the internal logic of a cruel and inhuman system. It came when the rigor had become second nature—and my exhaustion had itself been exhausted—so that I was able to play and frolic in the strictness. And it came just as Nietzsche described it. “It continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it,” he wrote.

That is why I love Spelunky. I guess the irony here is that Nietzsche would probably cringe at the thought of his perspective being used to explain a videogame. Nietzsche believed his gay science would provide a way forward in the future, once the world freed itself from religion and Greek logic. It is a method for creating future worlds, not subscribing to preexisting structures. But maybe it’s okay for games to point the way. After all, Nietzsche was also a believer in brief habits. He thought it was human nature to fall head over heels in love with someone or something—but also to fall out of love, and then move on to something new.

Photograph by Mauro Luna

The passive-agressive argument at the heart of Outwitters

Ryan Kuo and Richard Clark — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 15:00:00 -0500

Aside from its candy-coated presentation, Outwitters—the new iOS game by the creators of Tilt to Live—is a typical strategy game for two or four players. Each turn, players spend resources called Wits to create, move, and attack units, the goal being to eliminate the enemy base. Like in most modern multiplayer games, turns are taken remotely. Ryan Kuo (twerkface) and Richard Clark (deadyetliving) corresponded between turns, but kept their notes hidden until the end, when they saw what was left unsaid.

Turn 1: twerkface
My desk, 3:56 p.m. Sunday

Each team in Outwitters has a unique special unit. The Adorables have a transporter and the Scallywags have artillery. The Scrambler is team Feedback's special—a floating brain that converts enemy units into your minions.

I'm still angry about the unfunny, unwarranted, and unlikable dubstep comment you tweeted at me, unsolicited, last week. So I am playing with Feedback because I want to publicly embarrass you with the move I pulled in our last team game. My concern is that I’m going to win before getting the chance. At seven Wits, the special units are the most expensive to produce and don’t usually appear until around 10 turns in. Rich, I’m trying to say, perhaps in the most passive-aggressive way possible, that I am mad at you.

Turn 2: deadyetliving
My computer (when I should be in bed), 12:44 a.m. Monday

The theme music plays louder than a jet engine when I start up Outwitters. I figured I could knock out this turn before I sleep. Now my ears are ringing and these bright colors are too much. I am adding 15 minutes to the amount of time it will take me to sleep tonight. And why would anyone want to play as the Adorables? Their teddy bears and playthings are utterly unsatisfying compared to the robot team, which has the most satisfying sound effects of all—grinding gears and electric discharges.

All I can see—because of the fog of war—is that you've captured the bonus space that gives you more Wits per turn. I'll do it too. But I like to play defensively, to wait and see. Thankfully, Outwitters actually rewards inaction, letting me save my Wits for later turns. Next turn I should have four extra!

Turn 3: twerkface
The toilet, 9 a.m. Monday

The blip of an asynchronous game plays an important role. A game occurs in the space between our occupations, and the clarion call must move us to abandon them. The Outwitters blip is unlike Ascension’s mystical chime and Carcassonne’s eager herald. It’s a pair of ascending tones that feels both inhuman and effortlessly modern, a proper bell for a smartphone.

So I got your notification. I’m late for work and you were unusually late in returning the turn. Because you didn’t take my lure—the Runner dangled near your Soldier—I’m sending it to kill your Medic, which you seem to have left unused. That Medic’s health boost saves units. Without the boost, a single blow from my Heavy will destroy your Soldier lurking below.

The slow dance of this hex game brings me back to UniWar, one of the earliest async games on the platform, which stole my 2010 summer along with the World Cup. I’d sit with a beer in Berlin cafes and exchange rounds with friends in Cardiff and Sydney for an afternoon.

Turn 4: deadyetliving
The office, 10:06 a.m. Monday

I don't use the Medic well, anyway. He seems like such a waste. My Runner will barely make a dent on your Soldier, but at least he'll distract you from the bigger guys closer to my base.

This turn is being interrupted a lot by emails and notifications, which is actually nice. It's fun to move, take a break and think, and then move again, as opposed to playing the turn straight through. But then a guy literally came into the office and distracted me for about 20 minutes. I have no idea what I'm doing now, so I guess I'll just end the turn.

Turn 5: twerkface
Someone’s bedroom, 10:34 p.m. Friday

It’s cold here in Somerville, Mass. I haven’t packed a sweater. How has it gotten so cold? We’ve been through a lot of drama the past few days. I announced I’m leaving and you responded intensely. Despite our open conversation, I’m not sure where we stand with each other. Now I’m looking for a new place to live. This game feels like an unambiguous way for us to interact—a shared experience that is totally separate from everything else between us.

But it’s also precarious in its own way. Outwitters is colorful and cute, but the one-tap moves are a deceptively heavy commitment: since the fog of war hides enemy activity, you can't undo your smallest mistakes.

Your moves in broad daylight are also enigmatic. This is the central question of any Outwitters game I play with Rich Clark. Do you know what you are doing, or do you not know what you are doing? Your Runner bounces off my Soldier like a jellybean on the sidewalk, and is as good as dead. I’m heading to your base on the boardwalk up above. Since the bases only have 5 points, there's no reason waiting to make a hit.

Turn 6: deadyetliving
In bed, 4:27 p.m. Sunday

I hope you appreciate that I'm taking time out of my Sunday—a particularly unique one when my mom is in town to visit—to play asynchronous iPhone games with you. Do you appreciate this, Ryan?

For a moment now we’re in sync, and I’m watching the way he responds to my input, seeing that I’ve quickly altered his world.

In truth, I'm tired and exhausted from being on tourist mode. Yesterday we saw some big bridges up close from a boat. Today I drank a bourbon barrel-aged stout at a bar that was also an aquarium. Nothing is better for rest than asynchronous games, where I can doze off between strategic maneuvers if I like. I mean, I didn't, but I could.

You sniped my Runner—this makes sense to me. I've saved up enough Wits to spawn a Scrambler, which will hopefully have a chance to brainwash one of your minions and turn them against you. Yes, that would be spectacular! I've positioned him just out of sight (hopefully) behind a soldier.

Turn 7: twerkface
A kitchen stool, 1:24 a.m. Monday

I’m back from a long day of apartment hunting and The Dark Knight Rises and I’m listening to Yelawolf videos in the background. And now you’re telling me you like dubstep? Your counterattack on the boardwalk feels feeble—notice how my Medic-assisted Heavy elbowed past yours, and is a step from cracking your base in half.

Turn 8: deadyetliving
Lynn's Paradise Cafe, 10:54 a.m. Monday

I'm not sure, but I think I just pulled off something pretty great. Here I am, figuring I'll take a quick turn in the middle of this world-famous breakfast restaurant in Louisville. I'm sitting in the gift shop, waiting for my mom and her friend, and realize that my expensive Scrambler has paid off.

The Scrambler brainwashes your Heavy, and then my original Heavy and your brainwashed Heavy gang up on your Soldier, destroying him swiftly. This is, I will say—extremely satisfying.

"You ready?" my mom says.

"Yep," I answer.

Turn 9: twerkface
My own bed, 12:51 a.m. Tuesday

So I wasn’t expecting you to use my own trick against me, though it seems obvious now. I didn’t see the Scrambler hidden in the fog of war. Apparently you can rush the special units on the production line if you’re economical with your early Wits. Well played.

On top of this shit, we’re late wrapping up this article and I need to post it Wednesday morning. I’m now relying on this game to end soon—and even as I push you back, I am desperate that you aren’t going to respond, that it’s my fault for waiting all day to take this turn, and you won’t see it until tomorrow morning, when you’re busy at your "real job." Please play.

Turn 10: deadyetliving
The office, 11:38 a.m. Tuesday

I’m back at work, which is depressing. But it made my day when I opened the app and saw you had written "O.m.g." in response to my last move.

My goal at this point is not to get too excited and try to destroy your base too early. I'm going to work on clean-up, taking out as much of your guys as I can, so that I can attack the base later on with little to no worries. I think I'm onto something.

Ryan ... are you scared, Ryan? I hope you are scared. I hope you are afraid of losing your first game of Outwitters to me in front of all of your dear readers. I hope one of the last things you write for Kill Screen will involve you losing to me—possibly the worst Outwitters player in existence.

Turn 11: twerkface
The office, 11:41 a.m. Tuesday

You shouldn’t be throwing your Scrambler into the line of fire like that. Don’t use it just because you can, because it’s going to hell this round. Why is your Heavy just standing there? I suspect you’re getting cocky. I would feel smug if I didn’t deeply need you to play this game with me.

Turn 12: deadyetliving
The couch, 12:24 p.m. Tuesday

Lunch is my favorite time for asynchronous gaming. I usually play during the interview portion of The Daily Show, as I am doing today.

It looks like you're hanging in there, but your moves seem more desperate and predictable than I'm used to. Ryan, you've expressed an interest in "wrapping this up today." Are you sure you're ready for this?

Turn 13: twerkface
The office, 12:36 p.m. Tuesday

Some think Outwitters is an unbalanced game—that it’s too easy to pump out Runners, which cost 1 Wit and can cover the whole map in two moves, like a poor man’s Zerg rush in StarCraft. But as others have pointed out, you spend those Wits on situational awareness. A well-placed Runner would have spotted your Scrambler five turns ago because it sees the furthest. When we started this game I assumed I would see through your crap, and now I’m paying for it with one Medic versus your whole army.

Turn 14: deadyetliving
The office, 1:56 p.m. Tuesday

You have a Medic and a Runner. I have you surrounded. It's time to give it up. Run into death's open arms. Accept your fate.

But I’m creating a Soldier for good measure—I have a feeling that Runner's going to be up to no good.

Turn 15: twerkface
The office, 3:23 p.m. Tuesday

Back to the Runners then. As it turns out we’re doing a lot of running in DayZ, which Tom spent all yesterday downloading and installing on the office PC. We’ve just exited the little house and realized that the zombies run—straight at you—and now we’re running on the pavement that looks like the country road where I grew up. I abandoned PC gaming long ago because of things like having to extract seven separate packets to run a zombie mod of an army simulator I never wanted to buy, but I have to admit this feels like a much more pressing issue at the moment.

Turn 16: deadyetliving
The office, 4:05 p.m. Tuesday

I definitely spoke too soon.

Turn 17: twerkface
The office, 4:07 p.m. Tuesday

We finally found a 12-gauge shotgun in an empty barn and blew a zombie to pieces! But we were killed by an unseen bandit and the game is over. It turns out humans are the real monsters. Meanwhile, I think this Outwitters game is turning around, now that I have landed on your Wits pipeline. I really just want to distract you from my own base.

Turn 18: deadyetliving
The office, 4:28 p.m. Tuesday

I'm not letting you win, Ryan. You think you can just brute-force your way in and it's not happening.

Turn 19: twerkface
The office, 4:28 p.m. Tuesday

Of course it worked.

Turn 20: deadyetliving
The office, 4:31 p.m. Tuesday

Oh my gosh. I had no idea you could sit your Runner on top of my base and keep me from spawning guys. And now you've done it at a most unfortunate moment. I will never forgive you for this.

Screw it, I'm taking my Soldier and gunning for it.

Here are other things I'm doing in the same moment: applying for a job, texting my girlfriend, finishing up my work. But in this moment, all I really care about is hearing that two-toned notification sound. Ryan, I want to beat you so bad. Do you realize how much this will mean to me?

Turn 21: twerkface
The office, 4:35 p.m. Tuesday

Your strategy is finally transparent. You want the Soldier, your one remaining unit, to blow up my base before I destroy yours. It’s sound math: We both have 4 points left; your Soldier can bring it down in two turns, while my Runners are half as powerful, and one of them is busy occupying your factory. But it’s a somewhat desperate strategy, a last shot.

It’s lovely when the opponent’s faraway intentions emerge, the uncertainty gone. For a moment now we’re in sync, and I’m watching the way he responds to my input, seeing that I’ve quickly altered his world.

We’re not done, but the second-guessing, the cat-and-mouse, has ended—but for one move.

Turn 22: deadyetliving
The office, 4:34 p.m. Tuesday

Two notification sounds blare at once: my girlfriend's text and your latest move. Which do you think I checked first?

Oh my gosh you didn't do anything. I mean, obviously, you did something—maybe out there in the fog of war—but what? My Soldier deals 2 damage each turn, so you need to kill him next turn to win. I hope you know what you're doing. Wait, of course I don't.

One more turn and this could be over. OH I HOPE SO.

Turn 23: twerkface
The office, 4:40 p.m. Tuesday

GG. It turns out Outwitters is not only about tactical awareness and quick strikes, but about regional dominance. When my Scrambler brainwashes your Soldier, you lose by default, even though the “score” is 4-2. Even I am surprised, because I’ve never made an indirect win. You’ve lost control.

Turn 23: deadyetliving
Sitting in my car, 4:40, Tuesday

This is how I found out I lost this game: I was walking down the hallway, leaving work, feeling pretty good about myself, when I heard the voice of a small child proclaim: "You lose!" The voice came from somewhere in my pocket.

I'll be honest, I have heard this sound numerous times before. But this time it caught me somewhat off-guard. I was sure I'd had you. There was no way you could have destroyed my base this turn. It just wasn't possible. But then I sat in my car and watched as you brainwashed my very last Soldier. Because you had a Runner stationed over my spawn point, I was unable to create a new one, and the game was over.

I hope you are satisfied, Ryan. It was, in fact, close. But I don't know—winning by a technicality. Is that really how you want to go out?

Growing apart from Tony Hawk's Pro Skater

Drew Millard — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 05:00:00 -0500

Reset is a series of second looks at influential, interesting, or forgotten games through a contemporary lens.

It seems so long ago, but people used to actually give a shit about ska. This was a thought that my brain experienced at 3:30 a.m. last night as I played Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD, spending 80 percent of my time fumbling around crashing into things, trying to will my muscle memory to kick in and help me remember the correct combination of button taps it took to make Tony Hawk pull a sick 900 on some bizarre fanutation of a half-pipe in the Downhill Jam.

To reiterate: People used to give a shit about ska. I know this. I am certain of it. But as the horns on Goldfinger's "Superman" hit me like Tony Hawk slamming into the ground because I accidentally made him do an ollie slightly too close to a rail, I couldn't for the life of me remember why. "Superman" is the lone holdout from the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater soundtrack to make it to the port, which takes a bunch of the levels from the first two Tony Hawk games and lets you complete them in a fairly limited “Career Mode.” It was my favorite song on the original THPS soundtrack, and it's probably my favorite song on THPSHD’s, but for totally different reasons. The first time around I loved "Superman," it was mainly because it didn't scare the shit out of my 10-year-old self like some of the really intense hardcore songs on the soundtrack did. I love the fact that "Superman" is around for this rodeo, because it reminds me that it is 2012, it doesn't look like the Mayans were right about the world ending, and I'm not 10 anymore. I would say, "Hold me, Tony Hawk," but right now Tony's too busy losing his balance in the air and getting ready to bounce 10 feet high because he was going too fast and is no longer in the vicinity of the quarter pipe he was previously interfacing with.

Let's go ahead and get the "genuine critical assessment" out of the way so I can talk about my feelings. The controls on this lag something tremendous, the physics in the game make absolutely zero sense, and the level selection—maps culled from the first two games in the series—seems to have gone into my memory and recovered all the places I strongly, strongly disliked as a youth. On top of that, THPSHD helps serve as a reminder that Tony Hawk was always the worst part of his own games; because they threw you into environments where the world was your canvas, but Tony, both in-game and IRL, only excelled at tricks on half-pipes. It might be an unreasonable gripe, but if I'm buying a game I want to want to be the person on the box, not to have to shuffle around looking for Chad Muska. But I can't be mad at any of these things, even if they add up to a game that feels like a hollow shell of those it seeks to recreate. That would involve getting mad at myself, because Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was such an essential part of my life for so long that that I probably can’t imagine myself without it.

As a child, I had a routine. My mom would pick me up from school, I'd do my homework as fast as humanly possible, and then I'd play Tony Hawk with the same level of single-minded commitment that I usually reserved for whenever a new Harry Potter book came out. In high school, I repeated this process with Tony Hawk's Underground, and in college spent a semester hiding out from the rest of the world playing Tony Hawk's Project 8 in the dorm room across the hall from mine. The Tony Hawk games always seemed to come to me whenever I needed them most.

When I was in elementary school, the game tapped into those same instincts that make children want to be firefighters and astronauts and stuff, except unlike being an astronaut or the king of Spain, becoming a skateboarder was insanely easy. All you had to do was say you skated, and then you were a skater (now that I think about it, it's a bit like being a "freelance writer" in that you just have to say you freelance, and somehow that makes you a freelancer). So, I got my parents to buy me a skateboard. I was still an avid Tony Hawk-er when I entered middle school, and from there I managed to make friends, listen to interesting music, and generally have things to think about besides the terrible, fiery gauntlet that is the onset of puberty. When THUG hit, I was old enough to realize I hated the minuscule North Carolina town I'd grown up in, but was still too young to actually do anything about it. But after I'd managed to unlock Gene Simmons and skate around the satanic warehouse that was his in-game lair, all of that seemed to matter a little less. I might not have been able to control my own destiny, but at least I could control Gene Simmons. Tony Hawk found me at another key juncture in my life as a thoroughly unenthusiastic, thoroughly depressed college sophomore. I'd dropped my major and was fairly certain that my girlfriend hated me, but felt a crippling need to not break up with her (this is, in my experience, something that depressed people do—they hate their lives but are loathe to actually do anything about them lest something go even more awry). Fairly convinced that nothing was going to be okay, ever, I took to the Hawk, becoming immersed in the game's sugar rush. By the time the semester was over, I'd completed something like 78 percent of the game. One day, I tried to fire up my friend's Xbox 360 only to discover that I'd played the game so much that the disc had worn out. Then, I went outside. I realized I wasn't depressed any more.

I don't exactly know why, THPSHD doesn't grab me by the lapels and demand to be played like Tony Hawks of the past. Maybe I'm just really annoyed by the lag. Or maybe it's because there's no pressing psychic need for me to play it this time around, no future skateboarding careers to plan, no small towns to avoid or depressions to wait out. It's not a bad problem to have, but it makes me wonder whose fault it might be. Is it mine for asking too much of a game that's meant as a tossed-off, downloadable distraction? Or is it Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD's, because it can’t make me care anymore?

The meaning we ascribe to events in our lives is rarely apparent to us while we're experiencing them—it's only the long view that offers us the perspective we need to understand what was actually going on in our heads. I never realized I was playing Tony Hawk as a means of escape; I was mostly just looking for something to do. But now I understand that those games offered serious catharsis for me at a time when I needed something, anything to distract me. I'm really not a kid anymore, and that really upsets me. By all rights, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD should help me deal with this: it's a game that was with me for nearly a decade of my life, again sitting in front of me, asking to be played. But as I enter the iconic first level of the game, a warehouse stacked to the brim with nonsense to skate over, I feel nothing. I need to give it a few years. Then I'll know what went wrong. Until then, I'll probably have that goddamn Goldfinger song stuck in my head.

Putting Ico into words

J. Nicholas Geist — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 05:00:00 -0500

J. Nicholas Geist has taken apart and rebuilt the mechanics of Fumito Ueda's minimal classic Ico into words. You can see and interact with this poetic reimagining on our website today. Go to "In Balance and Imbalance" at Kill Screen Daily.

Toronto's new silver ball hideout, The Pinball Café

Zach Kotzer — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 05:00:00 -0500

Toronto’s last standalone arcade was a nameless corner in the basement of Union Station. It had a solid wall of various pinball tables, a few shooters, a broken change machine, and one to two paper-bag-drinking strangers at any time. When the arcade vanished unceremoniously, around a year ago, so did a dependable, if dirty, arcadium. At one time being littered with them, the city no longer offers zoning permits for arcades.

Approaching 40, Torontonian Jason Hazzard and his wife, Rachel, sought a new venture in The Pinball Café on Queen Street’s west end. Though new, the café is already the talk of the town and appearing on nearly every local television program. It’s not a massive spot, even compared to surrounding convenience stores. There are nine machines rumbling and dinging along two walls, parallel to a chalkboard with the scores for serious players to beat. Currently, most of the machines are Stern releases from the past decade; AC/DC, NBA, and Ripley’s Believe it Or Not, cut with a few classics; Comet, Xenon, Mata Hari, Black Hole, and The Addams Family. Hazzard has customized the Addams machine with fresh LED lights and a tiny plastic alien sitting in the electric chair above the center scoop. The new lights glowing underneath the bumpers make the balls shimmer as they zips across.

Before opening the café, Hazzard ran a moving company. Though successful, it made him miserable. The stress of moving often made him and his movers the target of client frustrations. With the big four-oh on its way, Hazzard wanted an out. “I’m not going to live in this prison that I’ve created for myself,” he remembers telling his wife.

One client, exhausted from the move, had left Hazzard with a pinball machine in his office. It was Bally’s 1979 table Supersonic, a vintage set themed on nothing but riding an airplane. It didn’t take long for Hazzard to notice where his employees spent their off hours.

“These were young guys. They didn’t grow up with pinball and yet they were obsessed,” Hazzard says. His staff began challenging their friends after hours, and according to Hazzard the fight for the leaderboard became a “violent” and aggressive battle. Soon Hazzard picked up a second vintage table, Mata Hari. The inspiration to open an uncanny café became organic at that point. There was just one problem, one that’s haunted the machines since their invention.

Long ago, arcades were seething, darkened halls of youthful no-goodness. They gave parents second thoughts. They were meeting points for drug dealers and recent users. Hazzard’s establishment is usually filled with young parents, hip folk, and even the Toronto Ontario Pinball League (TOPL), but these distinctions don’t change written bylaws.

Dormant since the ’80s, Toronto zoning bylaw No. 438-86 basically dictates that a restaurant can only house two coin-operated games, whereas an arcade is allowed 20. It has put Hazzard in an odd position, given that the city also no longer offers arcade permits. “That’s just an archaic law that never got dealt with,” says Mike Clinton, the president of TOPL. “Back then, pinball was considered illegal. It’s still probably illegal according to the law.”

Gord Perks, Queen West’s councillor, worked with Hazzard on a minor variance—a workaround that is much less expensive than a total rezoning. For Hazzard, it’s a bizarre nuisance. For Toronto residents, it’s strange gossip. Perks does believe arcades used to be a problem, and that many attract unwanted characters, like that nameless corner in the basement of Union Station.

But on a Saturday afternoon, the fully lit Pinball Café has children clamoring to try out older machines like Comet and The Addams Family over present-tense franchises like Iron Man and Transformers. The most suspicious-looking fellow is a regular who resembles Edward Furlong in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and he seems to be tagging along with his dad. Even on the days of the week when the café remains open until midnight, the Pinball Café attracts more pinball junkies than junkies.

A few blocks up from Queen West and The Pinball Café, a small bar, Unloveable, installed a Star Wars pinball machine for free play. Across town, a store named A&C Games opened a variation of an arcade in its basement, previously a karate dojo. Neither A&C nor Jason’s venture is strictly for the kiddies, but they illustrate a radical shift in tone from what urban arcades used to be, and the new kinds of spaces where people are willing to toss out quarters.

Hazzard’s space isn’t loud, damp, and full of expired M&M machines and cigarette stank. It isn’t where anyone will steal your backpack while you play Dance Dance Revolution. Some may call Hazzard’s café or other new boutique experiences the gentrified arcade, but it is certainly cleaner, hipper, safer, and sharper than the dens that required civic regulation. It’s a place where parents introduce a new pastime to their kids, instead of a place their kids sneak off to during class. If you miss crowded places to solicit between Area 51 sessions, then you’ve lost a tactile gaming experience to the console. Pinball fans have known that feeling for years.

Photographs: Roger Cullman Photography

Baths on how to follow the ghost rules.

Henry Crouch — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 05:00:00 -0500

The music of Baths doesn’t clang, crash, or thud. It bubbles and oozes, glistening and gliding as if carried on the wind from some distant, oblique sentiment. Vulnerable and weird, Will Wiesenfeld’s lyrics delineate locales of gay eroticism and revelation. He’s an aesthete in the classical sense, judging from a look around his apartment: clean, organized, muted in colortones, filled with talismans of pleasure like figurines, comics, and Japanese pop-culture paraphernalia, each with its own designated area, each in its right place.

Wiesenfeld has been releasing music since his early teens, drawing from a multitude of sources, not least of which are videogames (his songs feature titles like “Turian Courtship” and “Pokémon Potluck”). Today we’re sitting in his living room in Canoga Park, Los Angeles.

You spent all of last year touring, and you did some touring early this year?

Not touring, but I did play shows. I went to Japan—it was awesome. We ended up going to this place called Nara, which is a daytrip from Osaka. It’s the city of deer: The ratio of deer to people is one to 10. They’re all over the streets. I have all these videos of deer biting my butt and making weird noises and just chilling. It’s amazing.

I’m not trying to play any shows for a long time. I needed to get focused on the [upcoming] record. I’ve been so eager to start playing shows with the music I’m working on right now—it’s music that I have in my head as being the kind of music I make for the rest of my life…

You and your older brother both grew up with videogames. Have you been playing games since you’ve been back home?

Yes, I’ve been playing Skyrim a lot. It’s a beautiful thing to escape to and hang out in.

Do you identify as a gamer?

I don’t say “Yo, I’m a gamer” to people, but when people ask if I play games, then yes, of course I do. Growing up, Nintendo 64 and PlayStation were the systems everyone had. Especially in the West [San Fernando] Valley, every kid had them—every kid that “was” somebody had them.

Spyro was my first big thing. This was outside of the really cheesy computer games I played growing up. We played the shit out of Math Blasters, but the PlayStation was my first non-educational, exciting game experience.

Since you’re a musician, did you play PaRappa the Rapper back in the day?

Yeah, and I found it impossible. It was the hardest game I’d ever played.

I just replayed PaRappa recently and found myself thinking, “Wow, this is so much easier than I remember!” I think as a seven-year-old, I lacked the coordination to play it…

That’s why a game like Spyro is perfect—because it’s not about dexterity; it’s about exploration and casual immersion. I really love story-driven games, even if they’re simple. Limbo is a perfect example: It’s a small story, but it plays out perfectly over the four-or-so hours of gameplay. That, and Journey. That game plays a lot like how I listen to music—does that make sense? It’s almost as though I’m just weaving through it, letting myself discover things slowly. It’s so perfectly casual and inspires a very emotional connection, even though it’s not forcing you to do anything.

As a musician, is skill or mastery secondary to a process of discovery?

Yeah...and that’s not to say that I hate skill or something. In writing music, I’m never, never trying to force it down anybody’s throat. I’m not making any grand political statements. I’m not aggressive about it, and I don’t like aggressive games. I can get down with watching people play Halo or Call of Duty, but it’s not what I’m looking for in a game. Then again, I love Mass Effect—but that’s so story-driven, so….

I faintly remember you writing an open-letter to BioWare back in the day, asking for them to include gay characters in the Mass Effect series…

It was right when Mass Effect 2 came out. The argument was more that, for the amount of depth and realism that they put into the games, to not have a single gay character—even just in the human race—seemed a little absurd. I wasn’t looking necessarily for a gay romance, but a gay character at least.

And obviously you weren’t the only person to speak out and ask for a more diverse cast, as BioWare included gay romance options in Mass Effect 3

And I commend [BioWare] on that. I think they did it very well. It did weird me out a little that my [romantic option] was with Kaiden, but it played out better than most of the straight romances in the game. My brother played as male Shepherd trying to romance Tali, but Tali died, so he tried to get with Liara, and [their make-out scene] was less eventful than when he didn’t make out with her. There was more emotional connection and more dialogue when they didn’t get together.

Are you a Renegade or a Paragon?

Paragon. I can’t stomach being a Renegade. It’s the same reason I can’t really play aggressive videogames. I don’t want to watch the character I’m playing, whom I think is so noble and has all these important relationships, go out and shoot people for fun. It’s very dark and weird to me.

I often found myself selecting Renegade dialogue choices by accident without realizing it...

...and then having go back and re-do it. Yeah. I do that all the time. For all that can be said about “choice” in videogames, there are some times that I can’t stand how many options I have and how ridiculous some of the options are. That happened to me in Mass Effect 3 a lot: I’d be faced with only two choices when, in reality, there was another option.

Is diversity in videogames important to you?

I don’t care if gay characters become extremely prevalent in games. It’s a question of the reality of a story. If a story like Mass Effect, in a universe that is so complete, doesn’t have any gay humans and there isn’t even a reference to why, then I’m troubled by it. Granted, in a game like Super Mario Bros. I don’t need a gay Mario. [Laughs] But it’s always disappointing when something in any medium has a weak storyline and doesn’t obey its own “ghost rules”—that’s a term my dad uses to describe a fictional scenario that breaks its own logic.

Would you say there are “ghost rules” to your music?

I’d like to think so, although I wouldn’t be able to identify them. The challenge of making music is in wanting to make music challenging.

You also mentioned earlier that you never aim to make aggressive music or push an agenda.

Yes—I want my music to be cohesive, not arbitrarily challenging, like a song that moves lyrically or narratively in a completely different direction than its music. But if it’s just sort of gimmicky, then that’s really bad. It’s really hard to find that balance.

I think that’s the difference between something that’s preemptively conceptual and something that’s poetic.

Right. That’s what I’m trying to do. I have a lot of ideas going into songs, but I’m also trying to create something poetic, so it’s very difficultsometimes. Sometimes it comes naturally. I don’t really have any definitive answers for my own music.

I find it more troubling when people are entirely sure of themselves and what their art means.

I’m never sure. I get close, a lot. But I’m never completely sure.

That seems to echo with your interest in music as a mode of discovery for both listeners and creators.

The most exciting thing to me is when someone who doesn’t normally listen to my type of music loves my music. Of all compliments, that’s the one. That’s when you think, ah, I’m doing something right.

Why videogames need to keep their distance from real sports.

Abe Stein — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 11:30:00 -0500

I have taken up golf. Or something kind of like golf. Really, I have taken up the hobby of hitting golf balls at the driving range. I have yet to work up the nerve to go alone to a golf club, those gregarious havens of open-armed welcoming, and play a round of golf. Golf clubs send out groups of four to play, and I don’t look forward to being the random guy who screws up a day of golf for three friends by being lousy.

I can get the ball off the ground. However, nine out of 10 shots pushes at a 45-degree angle to the right of where I am aiming. I have heard that golf is hard, so I don’t beat myself up about it.

Hitting 80 shots of golf every weekend, though, has made me keenly aware of my body in motion. Golf being a game of finely tuned mechanics, I focus on every nuance of my swing, from the turn of my hips, to the bend of my knee, the rotation of my wrist, to the plane of the club swing as my arms descend.

Corporeality manifests in sports videogames in a myriad of fascinating ways. However, the body is often considered a separate experience, since you can easily learn to perform actions in a videogame—whether dunking a basketball, kicking a field goal, or throwing a curveball—that would require significant training to execute in real life. The most involved sports skills are performed with thumbs while seated.

But the body is not completely removed. Rather, the interface is mapped in interesting ways to the controller in hand, and the performative action is abstracted and simplified. Consider the swing of a baseball bat in MLB 12: The Show. There are actually several ways the action of a swing is distilled in the game, the simplest being the press of a button timed to an animation for a swing. That worked in R.B.I. Baseball, too, 25 years ago.

Another way to swing in The Show, similar to the “Load and Fire Batting System” from MVP 06: NCAA Baseball, involves rocking the right thumbstick back to mimic the “loading” stage of a swing, when a batter shifts his weight onto the back leg and rotates his hips. Then a thrust of the thumbstick toward the ball represents the explosion as the “charged” body uncoils like a spring, firing with the arms and bat following through. In this thumbstick action, the motion of the thumb models the more complex motions and mechanics of a swing.

Many sports games take a similar approach to dealing with corporeality of an athlete at play. Basketball games will have players rolling the thumbstick to have the player spin, or rocking the thumbstick left-to-right (or vice versa) to mimic a crossover. Golf swings, pitching, field goals, soccer dribbling—many different skills are abstracted into thumbstick movements.

Other games approach corporeality quite differently. Many of Bennett Foddy’s games experiment with how players control the body of their avatar. QWOP, the sprinting game where you individually control the motion of the arms and legs of a runner, might be the best known of Foddy’s corporeal sports games, but lately I have been playing and thinking about Little Master Cricket. In this game you use the mouse to control the mechanics of a cricket batter as he swings at shot after shot. The cricket batter is like a marionette with invisible strings tied to your mouse. The limbs are all connected and jointed, but you must learn to gracefully move those interconnected parts to execute a swing.

Learning to hit in Little Master Cricket is nontrivial. The game is hard, and I spend much of my time playing the game feeling pretty clumsy, as I would trying to manipulate a puppet on strings. I don’t believe Foddy is simply trying to play a joke on players, though the clumsy motions of his characters are quite amusing. Foddy’s sports games highlight the complexity of actions in what seem to be the most basic sports tasks.

In a way, this is how I feel at the driving range. I am aware of my interconnected limbs, and the causality of my movements. As I arc slowly through a practice swing, I consider the action and reaction of each of my movements—the turn of a hip, the lifting of a heel. Thoroughly dissecting a complete action like a golf swing, I am soon overwhelmed by the complexity of my body in motion. So much is involved that when I try to change one small action, I alter any of a dozen other parts of the swing, creating a cascade that I cannot interpret.

This is why I have never taken to motion-sensor sports games. I soon put away the Nintendo Wii version of Tiger Woods to pick up a thumbstick-controlled game. I don’t like sports games that use Microsoft Kinect or PlayStation Move because the tracking of the body is still not sophisticated enough to account for how each part of a motion can affect the outcome. Hitting a golf ball with a Move controller in Tiger Woods, though perhaps still challenging, is far less difficult than hitting that tiny dimpled ball with a real club. At the range, I’m a hack; in the game I’m winning the PGA Tour.

These are videogames, after all, which provide the sensation of performing a difficult athletic feat without the extensive training required. However, with a thumbstick motion or series of button presses, I am always aware of my distance from an athlete. This gap between playing and doing allows us to suspend disbelief and have a more immersive sports game experience. Motion controls, which aim for realism by tracking our body movements, don’t bring me closer to the action. Instead, they reinforce that what I am doing is not real; and that if you replaced the Move controller with a club, that clumsy-ass swing would deposit golf balls into the pond at the driving range.

Boomshakalaka! explores the intersection of sports culture and videogame culture.

Image by Quasimondo

How videogames value the "queer art of failure."

Yannick LeJacq — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 10:00:00 -0500

The possibility, and reality, of failure is an essential component of what makes any videogame engaging. Yet in the real world, the concept of “failure” is universally deplored by social and political institutions. What explains this profound discrepancy? I spoke to philosopher and queer theorist Jack Halberstam about his work in The Queer Art of Failure to get a broader understanding of failure, capitalism, and how penguins really have sex.

What first interested me about your work was the central premise of The Queer Art of Failure—something that relates to videogames, at least on a rhetorical level, since failure is so important to games. But “failure” in the context of a game is often a specific and finite point. What is your definition of failure?

I understood failure to be a shifty, changeable term that over the last 10 years of this boom-bust economy had become fixed to the idea of financial failure. There are so many different ways to fail, and to fail in interesting ways, as many have pointed out—everyone from Beckett to Malcolm Gladwell. But because we’ve become so focused on the economy we’ve come up with really, really crude standards for success and failure. Success tends to mean profit accumulation, and a certain adherence to heteronormative structures in your personal life—that you be married, that you have kids, etc. And failure more and more is the failure to accumulate wealth, and to be properly situated in a social arrangement that involves marriage and kids.

So the queer art of failure, then, is a kind of anti-capitalist, as well as anti-normative, way of being that has much more to offer in terms of thinking about how to navigate this world that we live in now than just striving to accomplish the various benchmarks of success that have been laid out in this recent phase of globalization.

Gay marriage has become a big issue again in recent weeks with the contest over DOMA and the president’s statements. But in the framework you’re describing, the entire debate is less of an effort to reorient the problem than it is to change the rules of the game so more people can win.

It’s precisely that; it’s not asking to be admitted to structures as they already exist. To say, “We’re gay, we’re respectable, have two good incomes, we’re raising children,” to take advantage of the tax credit that’s also granted with marriage—that’s not going to change anything. Instead, gay people have crafted some interesting ways of being intimate and having sociality and kinship outside of the marriage network. To abandon those just because the club that always said “no” to you now says “yes” is pathetic and misguided.

What do you see as the alternative? Or are you supposed to even have a clear picture of what these new models would look like right now?

Well, there are alternatives; they’re everywhere! People who live together, serial monogamists, people who are involved in polyamorous relations, people who are single. Single people are increasingly the statistical majority in certain age brackets. But they remain as pariahs, people who, socially, we can’t accommodate. So dinner parties have to be coupled up for the fear of this one single person who will come and disrupt all the couples. There’s a new book coming out by the man Michael Cobb called Single, and he argues that the real marginalized category in everyday life is not the gay or the lesbian, but the single.

The same way that divorce itself is understood as an act of failure.

Yes, but more and more people are recognizing that divorce is a good thing when it comes to raising children. Why? Because the couples separate and they actually split custody. Parents have weekends off, kids get to be around multiple sets of adults instead of one set of adults. Suddenly there are more adults caring for children. Of course divorce can be financially disastrous, especially for women, but a lot of time it’s actually creating alternative arrangements that relieve this incredibly humdrum way we tend to parent in this country. The grind of it is relieved.

I know people who are so-called happily married who quite envy their divorced friends because they have this different arrangement that looks pretty good! The only way that you can discipline people into staying married no matter what the circumstances is to suggest that divorce is the failure of marriage. That feeling of failure actually keeps people in these arrangements that stopped working about 10 years ago. And that’s why one needs much more flexible and supple models of success and failure.

“Even in the virtual, failure is a much more ubiquitous experience. But that’s where you learn valuable lessons.”

In games there’s often an absolute “win” state you can achieve, and an absolute “failure” state—when your character dies or someone has more points at the end of the timer. But you’re describing something much more chaotic—economic crises are noted for their volatility, where someone can go from succeeding to failing almost instantaneously.

There’s that zero-sum model of success and failure, where people were being offered massive mortgages that they know they can’t afford. But they’ve already made their investment in this crappy American dream. Any rational person would know that that wasn’t possible. But because of this marketing of the idea of success, people are ideologically committed to models of success that, either way, they can’t afford. That makes you susceptible to the kind of hucksterism that has characterized the financial market for the last 10 years.

So there are very serious consequences to keeping such rigid models of success and failure, and to believing that success is something that you deserve—something that because you’re a good person is just going to come to you.

Given that, I’m wondering why you didn’t focus more on military issues. Doesn’t the polarization of success and failure trouble the entire definition of something as permeable and ubiquitous as the “war on terror?”

Economics is merely an example. The real focus is the fact that queer people, because they’ve been told all along that they’re failing—failing to be proper men and women, failing to have the right kind of sexuality—they already have different ideologies. And they have insight into the capacity and potentiality of failure. Given that we’re living in a world of the 1% and the 99%, the 99% apparently need instruction in how to fail gracefully.

Videogames offer you one way to win—you either win or you lose. There’s also a lot of repetition in videogames. You need to lose a hundred times or a thousand times in order to learn how to win. So you may have to replay the level over and over again to truly explore all the different things that are out there waiting for you, or all the different simulations that map the landscape that you’re in. So even in the virtual, failure is a much more ubiquitous experience. But that’s where you learn valuable lessons. Only after having learned those can you actually finish the level. There’s something very zen-like about that that also allows us to access these different models of success and failure I would call queer.

That’s interesting, because I would think today the corporate trend toward gamification does the opposite—it subsumes the interesting and potentially subversive possibilities of gameplay back into a reiterative form of capitalism.

I resist that argument because it sort of predetermines that nothing can be an escape route. And, I mean, then what’s the point of anything really? If everything just feeds back into capitalism—everything is either good for capitalism or bad for capitalism—there’s a futility to everything. I find that logic kind of cynical.

There are a lot of alternative worlds around us that had different models of success and failure embedded in them. Curiously, one of those worlds was animated film. So I became very interested in computer-generated images that allowed for a three-dimensionality that was different than earlier forms of animation, and also participated in very different narratives than the linear cartoons before them had done. There’s both queer and anti-capitalist material in those stories and worlds that we might find surprising and instructive.

In the book you argue, “While animal documentaries use voice-overs and invisible cameras to try to provide a God’s-eye-view of ‘nature’ and to explain every type of animal behavior in ways that reduce animals to human-like creatures, we might think of animation as a way of maintaining the animality of animal social worlds.” This seems counterintuitive to me, at least in terms of the technical and artistic approach to modeling animals in a movie like Finding Nemo. The developers have to think of how to make the faces of these “animals” as expressively human as possible as opposed to the way they’d be depicted in, say, Planet Earth.

There’s a long history of these animal documentaries with the deep man’s voiceover where you watch animals doing things that are, frankly, inexplicable. But the voiceover, because it is often telling you a very familiar story, makes it seem as if the animals are doing exactly what the people are describing. The best example is obviously The March of the Penguins, where you get this baritone voiceover by Morgan Freeman telling you that this is an elemental journey to reproduce life, and that there’s a certain grace and elegance to it. What you’re actually watching are incredibly awkward birds being forced further and further out because of the melting of the icecaps due to environmental conditions, and the incredibly difficult act of reproduction that relies on a few of the penguins managing to reproduce and all of the others huddling around them to make a giant thermos. So you could narrate that sequence very differently.

“Unfortunately it remains a boy’s thing with the odd girl thrown in.”

But the other point is that the narration is basically using the animals to tell a story about humanity. It is true in animated films that the creations are “brought to life” by giving them faces that sometimes even match up with the voice actor—like Dory and Ellen Degeneres. But when they develop the sequences and the characters for the animals they’ve chosen to represent, there’s a lot of study of these animal societies because they want to get some things right in order for other things to be believable.

I’m not saying that they are “scientifically” right, but they do obey a different logic than a human one. In A Bug’s Life, Pixar became very interested in animating bugs, partly because the bugs were very easy to make with their new technology. But then they realized that creatures like ants are social insects; you have to have a lot of them. With linear animation, drawing a bunch of ants and making them all different is really hard to do. But in CGI, you can actually create a crowd of ants that is distinctive for being multiple and diverse.

How you render that is really tricky, so they came up with a new algorithm. But once they created it, they really wanted to use the technology! So now they need narratives that fit the narration of multiplicity and collectives. That’s how you end up with these basically Neo-Marxist narratives of collective revolt that actually do have something to do with social insects. Of course in the movie they get married … there are any number of aspects of human anthropomorphism projected onto them. But the point is that there are narrative lines in these films that are recognizably human, and then there are narrative lines that are recognizably ant or chicken. It’s their combination that makes something interesting happen. Whereas the kind of documentaries that we thrill at like March of the Penguins almost ignore the penguins. You really have to wonder why we love so much these narratives that turn them into little mini-people.

I wonder if you can point to the same method in relating to the programmed objects that have been created in a videogame. If you’ve created something with its own internal logic, are you just attaching a human perspective to make sense of it? Reading something like Ian Bogost’s Alien Phenomenology I wonder about that—what do all the different components of a complex system like a videogame think of themselves in their own terms?

Ian sort of wants to hold on to this idea—I’m not going to represent his view very well—that all objects exist equally, and therefore it doesn’t really make sense to start bringing in these categories of race, sex, gender, and class into our discussion of objects. But as the Tomb Raider story suggests, even in the realm of objects and avatars, there are still prevailing hierarchies that oddly seem to be structured by race, class, and gender, and that then determine the meaning of certain characters or their vulnerability. So I think he’s too optimistic about the disappearance of human structures in relationship to objects.

I think in some bare way, videogames contain the process or the promise of becoming something else entirely when you play them—you’re able to lose your individuality, however temporarily, when you enter into a fully realized virtual world. Something about that seems fundamentally queer, which is why I find it so silly when people debate so specifically about something like a gay character being in Mass Effect.

That’s fascinating, though, that in a realm where there can be inter-species, inter-alien kinds of intimacy, you still have the most foundational kind of taboo against intimacy. That points to the fact that videogames promise access to other worlds, but they just don’t always deliver. It’s such a straight, white-guy world. While that has been changing, and there are opportunities for all different genders in the gaming world, there aren’t so many people who are invested in creating these alternate worlds. That’s just how it seems to me as a non-player.

When you say a white guy’s world, do you mean the society traditionally built around videogames?

I think so. Unfortunately it remains a boy’s thing with the odd girl thrown in. All the issues you’ve been raising with something like Tomb Raider are related to the assumptions about the availability of the female body to the male body. While we may be in a new realm, we still have male bodies who want to do things without consent to female bodies. There are certain things that remain constant, no matter how much the terms or logic of the game changes.

Image: dys4ia

The sounds of violence in Diablo III.

Yannick LeJacq — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 11:30:00 -0500

This past March, NPR’s “On The Media” ran a segment on the changing standards for how violence is portrayed in film—not in terms of how graphically it’s visualized, but how moist it sounds today compared to the dry, cracking punches of early crime fights. Videogames have a shorter history than film, but they have no shortage of lush compositions of violence. I got in touch with Joseph Lawrence, Blizzard's sound design supervisor for Diablo III, to hear about the humble origins of the game's gruesome noises.

What’s a sound that you really like from the game?

I’m a little biased because I actually did it, but the cackles of the skeletons when they laugh uncontrollably. I did them very early on when I was trying to figure out what those guys sounded like. You actually have to sit there and wait for a while, but then they just burst into this maniacal laughter.

[Cackles maniacally]

That was before we were union, so all of that got grandfathered in. Now we wouldn’t be able to do such stuff unless I got a SAG card, but back in the old days we were able to do that.

I played as Witch Doctor, so I think a lot of my favorite sounds are those really gushy explosions. How did you get those?

Well when we started this game, we all knew that we were going to need an absolutely metric ton of gushy, gooey, squishy sounds. 'Cause that kind of stuff is everywhere in the game. Over the years we’ve done numerous sessions for those—we’ve put our hands in giant vats of yogurt, glue. One particularly disgusting session that just looked horrible by the time we got done was this pile of stuff I’d been manipulating with my hands—it started off as bits of spaghetti, then I mixed in some yogurt [and] chocolate sauce; I think there were some packing peanuts. All these different liquids have a different viscosity and way they sound sticky. We used all manner of vegetables; by the time it was done there was this big pile of disgusting brown goo. There was even a New York steak at the bottom of it that I was slapping against to make splat sounds.

I can’t tell you how many trips to the grocery store I had to turn in to the accounting department when I’d bought 10 watermelons and crab legs. It’s like, “Mmm, what’s for dinner? Doesn’t really look very good!” [Laughs] The grocery store is just a playground for a sound designer. There are so many things there that make an interesting noise, and there’s no end to the combination of things you can squish together and smash.

You were basically standing in a studio alone with a large bowl of disgusting salsa?

Yeah, just moving it around, squishing it with your hands, hitting it with something else. You experiment until you find something that’s really interesting. Usually we’ll have two people in a room, because once your hands get completely covered in goo then you don’t want to be touching a recorder. So we have one guy running the recorder and the other one doing the goo-mangling. You’ve got to always be open to experimentation, because there’s really no book you can open that says: “How to manipulate yogurt to make interesting sounds.”

The thing also is that sounds are so soft, so if you’re not careful you won’t notice them at all. Sometimes we’d have to move the mic literally a half an inch away from what we were trying to record and turn the levels way up. You get a sound that’s really unique—something that the average person would never hear in a million years because they’re just not listening for it.

What’s a sound you discovered like this—completely unexpectedly?

There’s a trick I’ve modified over the years as it's evolved—originally you would have to light something on fire and then get away from it rather quickly. So you’d have to make these fuses with some gunpowder—I poured a little bit of gunpowder over two-inch masking tape, folded it over, and it made a great fuse.

Certain types of gunpowder would make these amazing fiddles and whistles as the fuse burned. So I started experimenting with these elaborate constructions of masking tape and gunpowder. After three or four trips out to the desert to do this thing, it really evolved. You see it especially with the Demon Hunter, but pretty much with every class except maybe the Barbarian. A lot of casters have the whistle sounds that we did in those fire sessions. I’m still working on that, actually.

"The grocery store is just a playground for a sound designer."

What about some of the nonhuman voices in the game? One of my favorites is the Witch Doctor’s fetishes.

A lot of those fetish monsters came in as we trying to hit a really important deadline and we just had to get them in really fast. I actually think the fetishes are based in part on the little crypt-child voices.

Very high-pitched and sort of whiney, yeah.

Those are actually … I think it’s my voice. Those got done a really long time ago, back again before we were union. That was a really important tool that we don’t have anymore—because we’re sound designers, we know exactly what we want to do. We can hear it in our head, and a lot of us used to just do it on the spot. We would just grab a mic and spit out what we thought we needed and then take it and process it immediately.

The flipside to that is, some of the union actors that we use now for monster noises are absolutely amazing. Some of the stuff they do, it just doesn’t sound like it’s coming from a human being. You watch these people and you’re like, “That is not possible; that dude is possessed or something.” I miss the days when we could have done more of that, but at the same time now we’ve got this stable of monster actors.

Specific actors that only did monster voices?

Yeah. Dee Baker, he just does some amazing stuff with his mouth. [Laughs] I guess there’s no other way to put it. He sticks his fingers in his mouth, he’ll put objects in his mouth, anything goes. There’s a lot of people we had come in just to do that. We’re pretty lucky to be that close to LA to get access to the talent up there.

How did you work with making very heavy impacts in the game register? The Barbarian has so many abilities where he makes the whole ground shake in one way or another.

Very early on in this game I realized that I wanted it to be: If you hit something, or when you break an object, it had to be powerful. I wanted you to want to hit something, because it’s so satisfying. Generally when you hear stuff like that, it’s not just a single sound that’s firing. We’ll have the main body of the sound—say the impact, which will be a solid mid-range thump. Then over the top of that we’ll have another randomized layer of sword sounds—the metal content. And then there will be another layer of squishy sounds. Each one of those layers has multiple sounds that we’ll randomly pick, so if you have, say, ten permutations in each layer, you’ve got a pretty big range of randomized possibilities.

Because this is a hack-and-slash game—you’re out there just whacking on stuff and blowing stuff up. It has to be satisfying, because that’s all you’re doing!

How do you see the sound in this game relating to the sounds in Diablo and Diablo II? In my write-up of the beta I commented on the whistling of the loot-drop that brought me back to the original game.

It was always a question of which ones we were going to use, which ones made sense, which ones we thought we could make better. We wanted to pay homage to the earlier games and keep a sense of continuity. Over the years a lot came in, and a lot went back out. One that’s the most recognizable we called “the flippy sound.” When the monster dies and the loot flips out, there’s a little [whistles]. That’s the same exact sound from Diablo II, it just made sense! I couldn’t imagine trying to make that one better—after a while you don’t even hear it anymore. But the older fans, they loved hearing that.

Another one is the health well, that [slurps]. The original gold sound just wasn’t holding up under the compression that we were using—often high-pitched metallic stuff will just totally break down under compression. It had to be something new, but close enough to the original that people still appreciated it. It’s there because it’s gold, but after an hour or so you kind of tune it out.

After speaking with Joseph, I sent over a list of some of Kill Screen’s favorite monsters and moments from the game to see if they could chime in more specifically about the ingredients in each. Sound designers Michael Johnson and Kris Giampa weighed in as well.

The festering maggots in the Witch Doctor’s “Grasp of the Dead” spell

Mike: The Festering Maggots were made by me by combining two predominant layers: The first was a recording of a wet silicon oven mitt being folded back and forth, and the second was various goo and gore sounds that fellow sound designer Jonas Laster had recorded by utilizing hand soap and other gruesome things.

The Toad of Hugeness

Mike: The vocalizations for the huge toad from the “Plague of Toad” spell were made by pitching down real recordings of bullfrog croaks. The tongue-whoosh impact on the enemy target was a bullwhip highly saturated and compressed for effect. The swallow was just a recording of someone taking some gulps from a cup of water and really close mic-ing it for that proximity effect that you get. That really sold the size of the frog for me.

The Demon Hunter's “Rapid Fire” ability

Kris: Rapid Fire took many iterations before we stuck with the one we shipped with. We wanted to have it sound aggressive yet organic at the same time. It basically consists of a few layers that are triggered randomly with every shot, which happens very, very quickly. You will generally hear the wooden “chunkiness” of the crossbow, along with some low-end thumps mixed with a ricochet type of sound every now and again to give it a little bit of a machine-gun type feel. Along with each projectile shooting off, there is a “firey” type of loop attached while also triggering aggressive sounding one-shot whooshes as it flies away from the player. We didn’t want the loop to be too audible for the player, as it could easily cloud up the mix too much. So you don’t hear the “firey” loop of the projectile too much as it flies away from the player, but you will hear it more obviously as it flies by your head if you play co-op with another Demon Hunter.

The Demonic Hell Bearer

Mike: The vocalizations for the Demon Hell Bearer (Siege Wall Monster) were performed by voice actor Fred Tatasciore and recorded by Mike here at Blizzard. Once we had the recordings from the voice actor I pitched them down quite a bit and layered in all sorts of animals—primarily pigs, tigers, and bears. The Vomit Soldiers (Demon Troopers) were basically Fred Tatasciore pitched down with some bass-enhancement plugins, and then layered back on top of themselves, offset, and recorded out as a final audio file.

The Witch Doctor’s “Acid Cloud” ability

Mike: The actual spellcast sound was a mixture of verbed-out voices, lava bubbles, paint splats, and some steam iron chuffs. The residual acid loop that you hear after the spell is cast is actually Mike recording some heated-up olive oil in a skillet with water being trickled down into it.

Spelunky makes me hate myself.

Jon Irwin — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 11:30:00 -0500

My waddling explorer with the red clown nose has come so far. I pluck a golden bust from a crumbling bridge and stand two jumps away from the exit, a simple door laced in vines, when it happens again: A monkey jumps on my back, steals my loot, and throws it aside. I leap after the thief, knowing I shouldn’t, and miss, only to graze an orange frog with serious indigestion, and I lie crumpled and stunned, cartoon birdies flying around my cartoon head, and as the frog explodes, opening a hole in the ground through which I fall into a giant Venus Flytrap that swallows me whole, I come to a simple conclusion: I hate Spelunky.

The beginning shows our hero walking dutifully into the caves, his destiny yet to unfold. Each time, three opening lines introduce the task at hand, randomly assorted from a preset list of first, second, and third lines. Sometimes they sound like a poem; other times a grand epiphany, or a suicide note. They echo the waking words of a person ready to face the day with vigor and drive. And though they're likely meant as a joke, they reminded me of my own daily mantras, and how pitiable and unadventurous they had become.

The game itself seems quite simple: Thrust into a series of caverns, you push forward, jump from platform to platform, collect money, dodge or kill enemies, and try to reach the end safely; you open crates and treasure chests; you buy helpful items from merchants; you find power-ups that expand your abilities. Et cetera. The description could be applied to hundreds of games.

But then small nuances reveal themselves. Pick up a rock and throw it past a dubious-looking statue, setting off a hidden trap. Place stunned enemies on a bloody altar and wham!—the body poofs into an upward-floating spirit, a sacrifice to the gods. You’re unsure what is gained, but the act feels substantial. Bomb that same altar and be cursed with a torrent of spiders. You have angered the gods. Thou hath been smited. And you will be smited again.

To play Spelunky is to ask for punishment. By pressing Start, you allow the game’s unseen developers to repeatedly punch you in the face. Plenty out there enjoy the pain. The hardcore gaming community has aligned around Spelunky as its most recent savior; follow journalists, developers, and Day One buyers on Twitter and prepare for an echo chamber of love. Markus Persson, aka Notch, the creator of Minecraft, says, “Spelunky is wonderful! […] I can’t stop squealing.” Tim Schafer of Double Fine asks, “Spelunky, why do you hate me so much?” But you can hear the fondness behind the fear. The outpouring resembles the magnified screams of masochists, all asking for more, please, harder, thank you.

The game’s challenge stems from your own vulnerability. Each environment—from dank Mines to lush Jungles to frosty Ice Caverns rendered in luscious 2D high-definition sprites—is rich in deadly flora and fauna. You start with four hearts, each depleted by the slightest tap of a bat’s wing. (You can only regain hearts by finding “damsels” [a lady, brute, or lazy-eyed pug] and bringing them to the level’s exit.) Lose them all and the game is over. No continues. No second chance. No return to a checkpoint two minutes ago, or 20. You go back to the beginning of the entire game and try again.

Play enough and certain shortcuts reveal themselves. But the push/pull between life and death here is so taut as to be almost entirely cruel. You soon become dulled to the pain, pressing forward stubbornly, aching for momentum that never comes.

This is because each stage in Spelunky changes upon replay. Platforms, enemies, traps: all are randomly generated. In other platformers, repeat the same sequence enough and your fingers remember the necessary moves—muscle memory takes over, and you can now make that jump repeatedly. In Spelunky and other “roguelikes,” a subgenre named after the 1980 dungeon crawler Rogue, all foresight is neutered, your memories leeched of value. You have learned, but the lesson keeps changing.

Imagine trying to learn the words to a song, but each verse is improvised, and no chorus repeats itself. To try and play such music is to tap into madness. Spelunky is the definition of insanity, eviscerated and flipped inside out. I do something different every single time but always accomplish the same thing: Failure.

Playing Spelunky amounts to making a series of bad decisions, one after the other. The design, in spite of its randomness, provokes. Gold shimmers alongside a statue beset with thrusting spikes. Do I risk death to line my pockets? Every step, you must balance survival with wealth. Need an extra set of bombs? Buy some from the shopkeeper—or better yet, grab them and run. The ’keeper races after you, a pinballing, shotgun-wielding instrument of vengeance. I found myself tempted to incite the shopkeeper’s anger, even though the thievery is suicidal. As the saying goes, you can’t take it with you—when you die, all accumulated money and items disappear. With no experience points or leveling-up mechanic, the only thing gained is the realization of your own ineptitude.

Stages shift not only in arrangement but tone. Sometimes the stage will begin darkened, only a torch at hand to light the way. Sometimes the stage will be populated by capricious undead. Always you are one false step or precarious leap from death: a snake bite, an arrow plunged into vital organs, a pummeling by a caveman, a piranha's incisors, a fall too steep, a proximity mine. Take too long exploring, and Death itself materializes to take you away.

Game Over has always equaled a kind of dying. To lose means you are out of “lives,” whether by alien laser or bottomless pit. Take a hit and your “health” dwindles. Your temporary failure is almost always seen as a death.

But rarely has an avatar’s untimely demise provoked in this player so intense a response. “Intense” isn’t quite right—the word conveys a sharp, momentary pain. The pain Spelunky gives is an enduring throb, punctuated with, depending on the moment, self-pity, sheer rage, or a dull finality of surrender. The first time I jumped off a platform and landed in a pit of spikes below the screen, my wife’s cat had sauntered into the room. Our Tortie must have seen the shine in my eyes, recognized the look of a desperate hunter, and kept its distance. An hour later, after my next missteps—into a sea full of giant piranhas, or a never-before-seen hive of mutant bees—I felt nothing but the immediate press of my thumb on the X button, signaling a “quick retry” and another futile chance at survival.

That’s why death is so alluring, so horrific and pure: It is always uncontrollable, unforeseen. Yet somehow, using our evolved brains, our diet books and half-hour jogs and fat-free butter, we always think we can win. And we will never not be wrong. This is the lesson Spelunky teaches us.

Oh, I could beat the game: Go deep enough underground and survive the four increasingly complex caves and I’d come out the other side, bruised but still breathing. It’s just bloody unlikely. The game itself flaunts my skim odds. The Player Stat screen boils all that time and energy down to a single triptych. My Player Stats after a week of play:

Plays – 198. Deaths – 198. Wins – 0.

Spelunky belongs to that recent category of indie platformers that feature brutal difficulty as a selling point, but it acknowledges our efforts with a unique morbidity. Super Meat Boy’s all-at-once replays were a grand celebration; Bit.Trip Runner’s immediate restart acted as purposeful amnesia; VVVVVV’s constant checkpoints and minimal animation envisioned the ultimate vacuum of space as a game. Mossmouth’s take is different.

My dead character does not simply vanish and respawn. An instant reincarnation is too merciful. At the center of the Game Over screen is a Polaroid photograph of my corpse. In the thickened border, a single phrase, the Kill verb itself: Impaled; Stomped; Eaten; Beaten Up; Poisoned. A yellow sticky note describes the cause: “I fell on some spikes.” “I’ve been destroyed by the jackal-headed god Anubis.” The first-person pronoun is the tip-off. This isn’t the game describing my failures; this is a journal. The menu screen itself resembles the pages of a frayed book: my Adventurer’s diary, the type of journal into which intrepid travelers scratch their musings upon spying new worlds. Instead of exotic cuisine or inspiring vistas, our hero documents his perpetual demise. Spelunky turns the oft-fondled Moleskine into a catalogue of death.

Stay stubborn and you begin to live longer, and more consistently. For me, this happened around Play 199: I finally gave in and heeded the rules of the caves instead of my own animalistic pangs for gold or treachery. I hopped across rope-vines with practiced expertise. I whipped a Tiki Man’s head, grabbed his boomerang, and flung it across a watery expanse to knock away a bubble-spewing snail. I evaded UFO fire and stomped a Yeti. I was finally, if briefly, in control of a cursed world. And then I died again. And began to wonder if such pain was worth the time and effort.

I realized I didn’t just hate Spelunky—I hated what it taught me about my own proclivities. Playing this game, or any game, means I run on a wheel that goes nowhere. When, by some mystical act of grace, I reach the end of a cave and nab that carrot, the satisfaction rings hollow. “I did it,” I tell myself, fueled by the same shred of hope we burn through every time we cast ourselves into the fire of imagined progress. I tried over 200 times, the game reminds me, and failed every time. Some find strength in repeated failure; we tell ourselves we’ve burnished our skin to rhino-solidity. But the scar tissue weighs us down. We exit this troubled world and enter another one, our own, and wonder why we suddenly feel so heavy.

My experience with Spelunky did little other than bleed time and raise my blood pressure. That’s not to say the game is bad. Rather, it’s like anything that flaunts its superlative wares to the detriment of the user: impulsive sex, hot fudge sundaes, the Ducati 1098S. Its brilliant, repetitive struggle shines a light on my own: I'm self-employed for the moment, inefficiently at that. My caves are lit with fluorescent lamps, my poisonous spider the aforementioned hairball-spewing cat. For the first time, a hard game that sucked me in wasn't just a hard game: it was a 46” high-definition funhouse mirror, a questioning affront to my stagnant life station. It reflected my own journey, one that looked more feeble with every mistimed leap.

Maybe I don’t hate playing Spelunky. Instead, Spelunky makes me hate the flawed participant, the unworthy one. It makes me hate myself.

Why Nintendo has more power than we think.

Jon Irwin — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 11:00:00 -0500

The dust has cleared nearly a month after the recent Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, and an unauthorized non-scientific analysis of said dust found the molecular make-up to be 95-percent gunpowder residue, 4-percent dehydrated plasma, and 1-percent Nintendo fans that self-immolated upon the conclusion of their E3 press conference.

In recent weeks much has been written about all that violence. In most of these write-ups, the author lambastes the stunted creativity and prepubescent maturity of the industry. Most also include a disclaimer that reads something like: "Gratuitous violence dominated nearly every conference/booth except Nintendo's." (Emphasis mine.) Those that expanded their coverage of Nintendo beyond the simple shoulder-shrug gave a similarly lax review. Its new console, the Wii U, releases this holiday season. Fans expected a blow-out of much-loved franchises and revelatory new ideas, cut from the same cloth as Super Mario 64’s re-imagined 3D kingdom or Wii Sports’ intuitive athletics. They never came.

Or at least you wouldn't think so, given the enthusiast press' response. On Spike TV, directly after the press conference ended, one of the four commentators was asked for his thoughts. His simple, dismissive response: "Where was Zelda?" This, not nine months removed from the release of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword for Wii, and a year after a 3D reimagining of Ocarina of Time for its handheld 3DS. The question is indicative of the general reaction: For every other company, we complained about what was shown. For Nintendo, we complained about what wasn't.

And yet the exact idea Nintendo focused on—the genesis of its new console, and its touch-screen controller—is a direct answer to all those questioning this year's emphasis on derivative violence. Here was the pygmy elephant in a room filled with other, larger elephants: its skin, a pleasing hue of blues and yellows, primary colors, somewhat sharper this time around. But nobody noticed it amidst all that spurting red. Well, at least one outlet noticed: Seth Schiesel writing for The New York Times. To give the new console some context, Schiesel explains that six years ago, when Nintendo launched the Wii, a system with a preposterous name and underpowered hardware, its focus on unique experiences and devotion to new audiences helped propel the system to extraordinary success. But the entertainment landscape has shifted dramatically; in that time, the iPhone, iPad, and Kindle have all launched, and we've become a household of solo-screen watchers. From laptop to e-reader to phone to television and back again, we might inhabit the same space but our attention moves with the frequency of Montezuma's bowels. Noted researcher and author Sherry Turkle wrote about the phenomenon in her 2011 book Alone Together. And in a pre-E3 video conference, Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo Corporate Ltd., referenced Turkle and her book as the exact issue they hoped to solve with their next system. Iwata said,

New technologies in general have made life easier and more efficient. But we have to wonder what this will mean for the nature of human relationships moving forward. So one of the challenges we set for ourselves was creating something that will help unite people rather than divide them.

The more digitally connected we are, Turkle is saying, the more isolated we become, attached to that burning oracle in our hands. Nintendo’s solution is to fight one paradox with another: a controller with a screen, a kind of tablet fused with traditional controller buttons that can be used together with the television to engender a more social play experience. For games, this might mean offering separate mechanics to two different types of players. But other opportunities abound.

Just as the Wii made bowling in your home possible and more fun than it should be, the Wii U could recast common diversions in tantalizing ways. One example showed how the simple act of sharing an online video can now become a type of play: Bring up your favorite viral clip on your private controller screen, cover the large TV screen with virtual red velvet curtains, then open them up in a flourish to reveal a video of a French cat bored with his existence. What was once a sequence of handing over a phone or peeking over someone's shoulder is transformed into a living-room theater of intrigue. That’s what Nintendo is pitching. It aims to sell its next console as not just another box that plays games, but a device that strengthens your community. The tagline for Wii U even tweaks Turkle's concern into a strength: "Together. Better.”

And the gamers and games press yawned. To the fan who plays a hundred hours in Skyrim, the idea of sharing YouTube videos with your mom or boyfriend fails to activate the sweat glands in anticipation. In fairness, the effect also seems unbalanced with the cause. The claim of this second screen improving our lives is akin to Ford touting the life-saving capabilities of Sirius radio. The added functionality may be keen, but Howard Stern ain’t saving my head from possible contusion—that’s the airbag’s job.

Of course, any new tech product launches from a soil fertile with hyperbole. Right now, all Nintendo has shown is a still life of bountiful crops, the platonic vision of what might be: a convincing illusion at best. Bite into that fruit and all you’re eating is press-release paper.

Forgive the metaphor-mixing. My problem in writing about Wii U is the same one Nintendo is trying to solve in marketing its next machine. What does it do? Why is this important? How is this different from the Wii? The fact that mainstream outlets as diverse as CNN and Jimmy Fallon have mistaken the Wii U as an add-on for the previous system is a major concern for the Kyoto-based company.

But the potential for something remarkable exists. That so many scoff before even placing one hand on the device is irksome at best, irresponsible at worst. The sheer fact that, in a pre-recorded video essentially revealing their next huge product to the world, the president of Nintendo evokes "the nature of human relationships" as a singular concern is one of the few things keeping me from losing faith in an industry more and more concerned with the bottom-dollar. To be sure, Nintendo's decisions also hinge on money; it is a business. But it realizes the best strategy is to wade into risky territory, to try and actually affect positive change. To be derided for this, while others seem content to push out more polygons and slit more throats, reveals too many observers as narrow-minded and grossly unimaginative, with memories slight as octogenarian goldfish.

Nintendo has launched new hardware before based on the whims of an American researcher. Harvard professor Clayton Christensen championed industry "disruption," or the creation of new "blue ocean" markets instead of competing directly in the blood-red water filled with others trying to out-do each other. The existence of the Wii derives explicitly from this stance—using cheap parts in unusual ways to create new experiences where others have yet to tread. Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, summarizes Christensen's idea in a 2007 editorial explaining the company’s recent philosophy:

Provide a new product that actually underperforms on an established industry metric for "progress," and substitute an alternative that typically is smaller, less expensive and easier to use. Initially, the "core" of any industry will scoff... [But] the next generation of R&D should balance what's under the hood with what users want to hold in their hands.

Clearly, Fils-Aime had a horse in the race. Based on units sold alone, it’s hard to argue his horse didn’t win. But a new season is upon us, and the situation is repeating itself with the Wii U. The core sees something unusual and looks away. Industry experts question its ability to push graphics, its "power." But the subjectivity of that term is forgotten. Nintendo doesn't equate power with numbers. To them, power has always been something you play with. It’s a noun modified by Nintendo's very identity. Power is creating empathy from lines of code. Power is seeing something in a new way, regardless of pixels or processing speed.

But power also comes with success. Last year, Nintendo lost money for the first time in its history of making videogames. Wii U is the company’s next power play. As competitors race to the clouds, Nintendo stays moored to the ground, on its own path again, peeking under rocks nobody else thinks to overturn. What might it find there? Will others follow? I hope so. But until then, it’s content to work in ways no one else does, seeking answers to questions no one else asks. In an industry filled with followers, Nintendo is alone. Better.

Image: Pikmin 3

Spec Ops: The Line shows us that war is hell. Except when it’s fun.

Yannick LeJacq — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 11:00:00 -0500

You died!

Death in videogames is just as pivotally important as it is profoundly misunderstood. That is not to say that any game—much like any person—has the answer to life's most meaningful and disturbing questions. But the hamfistedness of death's approach in videogames reveals this intellectual and artistic failure more starkly than in any other medium.

YOU ARE DEAD, God of War screams in all-caps, bludgeoning you with the fact as bluntly as everything else in the game does. Red Dead Redemption squeezes it down to a single word as the screen fills with blood: DEAD. Solid Snake's intercom companion screams out his name desperately until a gunshot confirms his mortal state in one of the most famously obnoxious death screens in the history of the form.

And now, this.

You died!

When I spoke with Tarl Raney and Corey Davis of Yager about their studio's sophomore effort Spec Ops: The Line, they both kept coming back to one specific word when describing the game: gray. Gray is that intermediate color between black and white, the ambivalent moral position between good and evil, the awkward juxtaposition of enthusiastic PR teams and boyish fans screaming about how awesome it'll be to blow someone's head off, and the sobering reminder from that, this time, a military shooter is supposed to actually be serious business. Much was made of the inspiration Spec Ops drew from the murky waters of war literature and films like Apocalypse Now and Platoon that turned American cinema away from the fierce, uncomplicated jingoism of John Wayne.

The point in all the buildup to Spec Ops: The Line was clear. Games like Call of Duty and Battlefield lacked the moral gravitas to say anything interesting about war. But this game was different. This game was going dark. Weapons, in Davis's words, would be "really fucked up." Heads would get blown off, but not in the awesome way. This time, death was going to mean something.

So then why is the game telling me this, You died!, with such excitement it warrants an exclamation point? Even Call of Duty had the odd quote from Eisenhower or Dick Cheney to add some weight to your death. Here it is just an explicit statement of fact, as glib and excitable as a tweet.

This is the first weird moment in Spec Ops: The Line, the first time I can't tell if the game is purposely messing with me or artlessly juggling weighty themes with no real sense of purpose.

Spec Ops: The Line starts normally enough. So normal the introduction feels brisk and illusive. You walk into a desert full of broken-down cars and bleeding soldiers. Your character Martin Walker, voiced by the ever-present action star Nolan North, intones something about a mysterious message from his old commander. The word "fuck" is sprayed around liberally. These are soldiers, or at least what videogames have taught me are soldiers. That means they say "fuck" a lot and generally have a good time despite the mountain of corpses and charred remnants of civilization around them.

Soon, things get weirder. Much weirder. You stop shooting that bland brand of vaguely Middle Eastern bad guys with turbans for faces and AK-47s for arms and instead start shooting American soldiers. People send you gloomy threats over a radio in a manner deeply resonant of any Ken Levine masterpiece like System Shock or BioShock. Walker gets angrier, screaming "fuck-face" at his enemies and grinding curses through his teeth as he tears more and more Marines to pieces. Your two squadmates press on, increasingly confused by your furious antics.

Confusion more than anything becomes the de facto emotion. Every few moments after a frantic firefight, your teammates stop to ask what exactly you're doing. During combat, everybody continues to scream helplessly trying to ask what the hell is going on. "We need to talk about what happened," one of them says after you've left a makeshift shelter where you hid from a flash sandstorm. There is no progression, only more confusion, more chaos.

All the while, the game itself continues to taunt you in the loading screens after you die.

How many Americans have you killed today?

Time itself is ambiguously paced. While it took me several days to complete the game, coming out the other side of the story I realized I had no idea how much time had passed in the turmoil between beginning and end. Was it really just one day?

This is all your fault.

This message starts to pop up toward the end of the game, when seemingly invincible "heavy" soldiers towering above me continued to shred my squad as we scrambled for cover or, failing that, a simple hiding place to take respite from the growing storm.

Then finally, the most ridiculous message of all.

You are still a good person.

Given all the hyperbolic expectations of just how dark this journey was meant to be, I couldn't help but laugh.

On one level, this seems like darkly self-aware humor that Spec Ops is bringing to a genre that has no real sense of humor. Late in the game as you're approaching the lair of one of the radio antagonists, he asks you where all this senseless violence comes from: "Is it the videogames?"

Maybe Martin Walker is trapped in the same bizarre feedback loop bereft of reality that imprisoned Cole Phelps in L.A. Noire. Or maybe this war, if it can really be called a war, is hell. Maybe hell is permanent doubt. Why else would the three main characters continue to scream, "What is going on?" Shouldn't they have some sense of that by now? But, really, none of us do. Looking back over my notes, I come across the line, "still don't really know what's going on, people are yelling and shooting."

That pretty much sums it up. Every so often, Walker is approached with a choice his squad also squabbles over. And every time, more senseless carnage ensues. "There's always a choice," the sniper quips. But more often, the game simply puts you between a rock and a hard place: do something terrible, or fail to advance entirely. In a particularly poignant moment, Walker is deposited next to a cannon that can lob white phosphorous—a weapon notorious for its use by both Saddam Hussein's regime and American military forces in Iraq. I tried to cross the valley below several times without using such brutal force, but every time we were shot straight out of the gate. Spec Ops forces you to do something terrible, then walks you through its warpath just to rub your nose in it.

This isn't subtle, but it's certainly interesting. It's hard to consider the writing in most military shooters given how intensely functional the majority of it needs to be—directing the player to make sense of the battlefield so they don't become overwhelmed by the swarm. What's left to actually construct as narrative dialogue then comes across as grandiose or pontificating as it tries to reflect on what, as the characters themselves ask, is really going on. Spec Ops approaches this form with a tactful sensitivity that sets its dialogue apart, probably because the game’s publisher, 2K, made the wise choice to lead with Walt Williams—a writer with more experience writing outside the genre. But still, try as I might to recall something else, the most memorable line that sticks out to me from Spec Ops: The Line is "Tango Down!" simply because Walker shouts it every few seconds.

But maybe that's why the rest of Spec Ops: The Line is so weird. Writing recently in the Atlantic, Michael Vlahos suggested that the latest iteration of the commercial juggernaut Call of Duty shows that American society is stuck in the morass of a "culture of defeat" given that the soldiers have begun to clothe themselves in the same ceremonial garb of their presumed enemies. Spec Ops takes the opposite approach-fixing the entire focus of the game on the American soldiers and refusing to let your gaze wander to anything else. There are civilians and natives somewhere in this land, sure. But their place in this story is incidental—the real horror is shared between the soldiers themselves. As the story progresses, Walker himself continues to mention the survivors he wants to save. But it sounds more and more like a vague chore he’s trying to remind himself to do, like picking up milk at the store on the way home, than a legitimate humanitarian crisis.

Something is more enticing about the violence itself, Spec Ops clearly wants to suggest, than the promise of rescue. But dealing with a genre renowned for anything but subtlety, the game only knows how to hammer this over your head as aggressively as Captain Walker curb-stomps his enemies. It’s a bold idea, sadly without a voice more subtle than a loading screen asking, “Do you even remember why you came here?” It’s a game waging war with itself on every level, questioning and juggling every motif precariously even as it deploys it. This is not a “culture of defeat” so much as it is a culture of self-cannibalism.

That is the hidden of beauty of Spec Ops: The Line, the greater reason that nothing in the game seems to make sense, why even the title screens are trying to hammer you over the head with the game's supposed moral ambiguity. References to Apocalypse Now are certainly overwrought and invite unfair comparisons. But one thing the two do have in common is their shared weirdness, the resistance to a genre form packaged too tightly and woven too neatly to say anything interesting or meaningful about military conflict.

Spec Ops: The Line is not a perfect game. But those imperfections are almost necessary in their own right. Military shooters, now so deliberately crafted and churned out with brutal efficiency, blur space, time, and narrative together into a giant incoherent mess of turbans and rattling machine guns and scary Russian accents. To speak to the form, Spec Ops had to be flawed. The numerous mismatched references, points of imperfect cohesion, all read like a farce of a form stuck on such a high pedestal it no longer notices how ridiculous it sounds.

And, really, humor is exactly what those kinds of stories need right now.

Buddhist metal duo Yamantaka // Sonic Titan on Mark of the Ninja

Jason Johnson — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 11:00:00 -0500

As a proper introduction indicates, the prog-metal-Buddhist-art rock band Yamantaka // Sonic Titan plays many roles. This is a sign of the times. We create stylized versions of ourselves on social media, and take on the part of heroes and monsters in videogames. This may sound like a fractured way of living in a postmodern world, but according to Ruby Attwood and Alaska B, role-playing is a practice older than the Buddha himself. Videogames too, with their emphasis on repetition and math, have similarities to the ancient ritual of meditation. We caught up with the band at Bottletree Café, a beer-and-a-shot joint in Birmingham, AL., to talk about cosplay, mathematics as a pathway to the infinite, and their new song on an upcoming videogame.

You did a track for the Xbox Live Arcade game Mark of the Ninja by Klei Entertainment, the developer of Shank. What is your personal investment in games?

Ruby Attwood [lead singer, bell ringer]: I just like the classics. I grew up on a farm. I didn’t have TV. I didn’t have a PC until 2003. I’m not a Luddite. I think technology is wonderful. I just haven’t had a lot of experience. We are actually planning on doing a videogame to coincide with our next album—a shooter game like Gradius.

Alaska B [drummer]: The one game I love to death is Earthbound. The idea is that you are a group of children running around fighting stop signs and stuff with yo-yos and bottle rockets. It’s endearingly goofy. But it’s also really deep. It pokes holes in culture. If you read into it, you can get lost in that game.

Aspects of your performance have been compared to cosplay. Is that something you relate to?

Attwood: I relate to the fashion aspect of cosplay. Some fans want to embody a character, and that’s fine, but there are also people who look at it as a serious fashion project. They won’t buy a costume from eBay. They spend years making a mecha costume from fiberglass. They buy real hair and sew it by hand to make their wig.

B: I’m fascinated by cosplay. Especially the idea that cosplay as a cultural practice is the result of the East being pulled into the modern world really fast after World War II. Japan had a god-emperor for many years. When you lose that aspect, which has been engrained in culture for so long, people need new idols. So pop idols took their place.

What about the aspect of dressing up specifically?

B: In shamanism, people would embody deities and literally believe they were them. Cosplay is another way of doing it. The obsessive nature of creating a perfect costume and being that thing is like the rituals of Mardi Gras Indians and Peking opera. It’s the same thing with people who glorify Chun-Li and dress like Chun-Li. There is a freedom you feel when you dress up as something else. It’s not about becoming that thing. You’re not really destroying your own identity, but expanding the bounds of what your identity entails. It’s no different than Buddhist people saying they are scared of death, and the only way they can deal with it is becoming Yamantaka and being able to defeat it.

Yamantaka // Sonic Titan is an unconventional band name. What is Yamantaka?

B: Yamantaka is a manifestation of the Buddhist deity Mañjuśrī. Yama is the Buddhist god of death. The story goes like this: Yama was tormenting a village, so the villagers called on Mañjuśrī to scare him away. To do this, Mañjuśrī embodied Yamantaka. [The name translates to “terminator of death.”—ed.] He multiplied his number of heads, so that he could yell an infinite number of screams. He grew a thousand legs, so that he could surround Yama on all sides. When Yama attacked, Yamantaka grew thousands of arms. That’s a theme in Buddhism. Multiplication is the only way to understand exactly how big the universe is. We can only do so much through our own bodies. The concept goes beyond us into the infinite.

The band is known for wearing unusual costumes on stage. Is Yamantaka a role that you play?

B: They say that embodying Yamantaka is dangerous, because you can lose yourself into madness. You can evoke Yamantaka by imagining yourself as him and bringing out his nature. It’s about imitating what you are scared of. But you are straddling a dangerous line.

What is the relationship between Buddhism and metal?

Attwood: Death metal is very central. I am attracted to Buddhism because it addresses the ideas of nihilism and existential problems. There’s nothing. There’s just chaos, right?

B: In the temples, Buddhist practice involves either silence or chanting or repetition. There is repetition in pop music. There is sound and fury in Buddhist rituals.

What is the point of repetition?

Attwood: It keeps your mind busy. When your mind is focused, you realize that you can observe your own mind. Then, you can observe yourself observing your mind. Then, you can observe yourself observing yourself observing your mind. The Buddha’s focus was so intense that it could go back further and further, until he could see many subtleties of the workings of the mind.

I’m not seeing the connection. Could you give an example in terms of your music?

B: Have you ever played the drums? You have to turn your mind off. At the same time, you can’t turn your mind off and play. We have a song called “Counting Track.” It is determined mathematically. There is so much math going on. There are all these mathematical equations that I developed on the drums. While everyone else is chanting and singing, numbers are running by in my head. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9. 1-2-3-4. 1-2-3-4-5. 1-2-3-4-5-6. It’s maddening. But after a while, it ceases to be equations. The equations become patterns, and patterns become reflex responses. The next thing you know, I’m not thinking about anything at all. I don’t have to pay attention. I’m sitting there looking at the arcade game Big Buck Hunter in the corner.

Attwood: The chant in the song is taken from a really old Japanese poem. It means, “What do I care about silver and gold?” It’s really about the insanity of counting.

B: Once I’m running through the numbers, they lose all numerical meaning. They become senseless. My reptilian brain turns on and is going “dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut-dut.” It’s very emotional, but I can’t describe the emotion. It becomes a spiritual experience of repetition. The numbers become every moment—every drum hit.

It’s like the way we think of time, and look at the clock and count the movement of the second hand. But time really isn’t like that at all. It’s just a constant movement.

B: Buddhism is like that too. When I’m doing the mantras, I know I have to say a line 108 times, but if I didn’t have these beads around my neck [makes a gesture like she is counting her prayer beads, which are shaped like tiny skulls], I’d have no idea how many times I did it. That’s also how pop music works when you let yourself go. The “Counting Track” fucks you every time you try to lock in on it. 15 and 9 and 12 and 7 are all mashed together and multiplying each other. They are spiritual numbers. It uses Chinese numerology. Nothing lines up. I write drumbeats where even I don’t know how long the song will be. That’s hard to predict when you just have numbers telling you what to play. Humans can’t keep on top of numbers.

Attwood: I’ve definitely experienced a certain level of what people would call silence on stage. It’s like when you lose yourself while driving, and you don’t really know how you got home, but you are vaguely aware of it. Sometimes I get to the end of the song and I have no idea what happened.

How do you know when to stop?

Attwood: Our older performances never had a set length. We didn’t have songs. We’d get in trouble too. We would always end up playing over or under our time slot. We’d go until the end of the tape, or until something broke. Then, we were done.

BEST OF KS MUSIC: How is a videogame controller like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band?

KS Staff — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 15:30:00 -0500

We tend to forget that the body is part of the interface, and that essentially the screen is a membrane between the world of your vision and the universe of the chip. Part of the dynamic is machines built around the human body, but it’s also about retaining the human body as well.

What’s interesting is that there are cultural differences in the way people organize their bodies. People of different generations and backgrounds tend to have different interfaces for themselves, which is part of why the Wii when it was first introduced was considered so revolutionary. It’s not just that movement became more kinesthetic, but it was a subtle shift in the population that the machine was hailing. The Wii was about hailing casual gamers and female gamers. I was speaking to a colleague who went to E3 and saw the Wii demo. She said that it was the most female interface she’d seen.

Digital media is about trying to bring the dynamism and flexibility of digital information into context with the pleasures of real world play. Early theorist of games Roger Callois said there were four elements of gameplay and one of them is the pleasure of motion. That’s a large part of what you find in all games, but the more recent innovations have allowed players to capitalize [on it]. It’s more pleasurable to play boxing in Wii Sports than to play Fight Night on Xbox. I remember Punch-Out as a kid. There was a joystick with a little button and you had to build up to the big button. Each of us had a different dance when we hit that red button. We pounced on it. We hollered and hooted. There were a million ways to hit that button.

The simplicity of Punch-Out meant more choice for the players, but even with the Wii, you as the player have less power. You’re forced to conform to the expectations of the machine. It requires a greater degree of physical discipline, particularly in terms of submitting to authority. There’s a form of authority in all physical things. Chairs are different everywhere, because [of the way] people use their bodies in different parts of the world. To me, the Wii will always be like sitting up straight. You’ve got to swing that golf club just so and part of what’s lost is the improvisational inventory.

The most valuable art forms are those that critique and engage the interface. The delivery mechanism and the medium serve to puncture the illusion between art world and real world. That’s what the innovations from cubism to abstract expressionism were trying to remind people—that you’re looking at the canvas and not the world. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band wasabout reminding people they weren’t a live band. Game developers should be the same way. They are trying to get players to challenge the assumptions they bring to the table.

Aram Sinnreich, former director, OMD Ignition factory, formerly professor of media, culture and communication at nyu

Videogame controllers are a projection of how the companies want to be viewed. Starting with the Wii or DS, those are really a sign to me that Nintendo wants to be perceived as a serious business. I live in Geneva with lots of bankers and it’s always funny for me to see them playing their DS. They don’t want a colorful device —they want to look serious.

My favorite in terms of balancing the need for the hardcore and casual was the Super Famicom controller. It was the right shape with the four buttons and two shoulder buttons. To me, that’s one of the most perfect devices ever made and it’s easy to get a grip on.

nicolas nova, user research/ design ethnographer for lIftlab

Are game controllers too complicated?
It’s not so much diminishing returns as it is diminishing audience. You’re basically taking a whole segment of the public and saying you will not learn this. The more complex the product, the more dedication it takes to use, so, by natural market forces, it’ll be a smaller group.

One of the problems with your standard game pad is that it has no natural mapping to things in the real world. If you look at Guitar Hero, the buttons are mapped to something that’s very natural. With controllers, there are the thumb sticks that give us some orientation, but what are the A and B buttons? There’s nothing natural that maps to that so we have to match abstract concepts.

I was immediately thinking about an instrument like the piano which is complex, but we do teach it to children. Music has really strong patterns that allow us to learn. The scale is replicated on that board right there, for example. You don’t have to re-learn the “controls” every time you move to another part of the piano. There was a great article about how games are like opera in that they have this arcane language, so people who appreciate games learn all the nuances and appreciate it deeply. To outsiders, it’s more and more complex and looks almost baroque. If you understand the complex control schemes then there’s an incentive to spend time learning. To the outside, it looks like a fool’s effort. The first time you used a fork you were bad at it too.

tracy fullerton, Director of the EA Game Innovation lab and Associate Professor at uSC

Interview: Rustie used to produce like how gamers game.

Drew Millard — Thu, 31 May 2012 15:30:00 -0500

To listen to the music of Glaswegian producer Rustie is to feel alive. His music makes you feel like you're rushing through one of the nine million iterations of the temple in Temple Run. His DJ sets are similarly frenetic, drawing upon nearly every type of music as long as it's fun. I sat down with Rustie in the Warp Records office to discuss the concept of motion in music, his childhood, and the concept of immersion as a producer.

Your music feels very propulsive.
For me, all music conveys movement. That’s one of the things that makes it possible; it’s always evolving. Just depends on how fast it is.

What about music that’s inherently arrhythmic?
It’s still moving, it’s just a different type of movement. If it doesn’t have beats or rhythm, it’s just more fluid, like a river.

When you make electronic music, you’re physically pushing buttons, as opposed to strumming a guitar, which creates a fairly strong link to games, I think.
I do both—I’ve played the guitar since I was ten, and I’ve played videogames since the eighties. I guess it’s a different means to the same end, really. There’s not much difference between plucking a string and pressing a button, I think.

What is your earliest memory?
Being home, crawling on the floor (laughs). The first thing I actually remember is being in the kitchen in the dark and seeing the glow from the refrigerator. It’s one of the first things I remember.

Tell me about your elementary school experiences.
I enjoyed them. Got to play, the work wasn’t too hard. I drew pictures and played with instruments. It was fun.

At what point did you decide you wanted to do music professionally?
I think when I was probably twelve. I’d played in bands, and I guess when I was fifteen I started to play with turntables.

What were your first influences in those first bands?
Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr. Pearl Jam, the whole grunge scene.

What sparked the sea change from grunge to DJing?
The Beastie Boys. They were doing the punk thing as well, and started to do hip-hop, and from there I got into hip-hop. I tried beatjuggling for a little while, but I didn’t have the patience to practice. It’s so limiting—there’s only so many ways to make fucked-up sounds. That’s why I got into producing more.

Do you find value in gaming?
Yeah, I think so. They teach you not to take life too seriously. What is life anyways? It’s just an illusion of images, which is what a videogame is. If you can make that connection, you won’t take life too seriously.

Do you see production as an inherently immersive experience?
It just takes up so much time, energy and you’re definitely creating this world, this range of sound and rhythm and color. It’s an immersive world.

What’s the longest you’ve ever sat down and made music for?
A couple years ago I was single, and I’d just stay up for two days making music, turning into a zombie, smoking spliffs and drinking coffee and working exhaustively. I don’t do that anymore.

Can you come up with good ideas that way?
You need silence in between sound to tell what’s good. Once you’ve finished something, if you give it a couple weeks to breathe and you don’t hate it, it passes the test.

Why can't you sell drugs in Jay-Z's new Facebook game?

Drew Millard — Wed, 30 May 2012 15:45:00 -0500

"I was born in sewage/born to make bomb music."

With this couplet, Jay-Z begins "This Can't Be Life," one of the finest songs in his classic-packed discography. Despite being released on The Dynasty: Roc-La-Familia, a relatively minor work in Jay's world, the song—featuring Beanie Sigel and Scarface trading bars with Jay over a yearning Kanye West beat—details the typical Jay-Z narrative. Start out poor and unhappy, struggle a lot and work hard, and eventually you'll find money and be happy. It's the typical American success story, Horatio Alger for the hip-hop age.

I found myself listening to "This Can't Be Life" today after I learned of Empire, Jay-Z's new game. In it, you play a small-time hustler with big dreams who hopes to make it out of the projects and find success (in the game, this means being able to afford living in Manhattan). The game is being released over Facebook, which is interesting and also makes total sense—with its vaguely open world and social gaming implications, it reads as something of a hip-hop Farmville, with light overtures at latter-day Grand Theft Auto titles. In Farmville, you are cultivating a farm. In Grand Theft Auto, you are cultivating a decent career in the drug industry. In Empire, you're cultivating, well, an empire.

Jay once famously rapped, "I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man!" on Kanye West's "Diamonds," and Empire proves the continued prophetic nature of that line. In it, you're "hustling" generically, taking day jobs and making mixtapes and engaging in rap battles to get by. This is not what Jay's legend says that he did, however. If you put all of Jay-Z's songs on a Wheel-Of-Fortune-style apparatus and then spun it, ten times out of nine would you land on something that mentions the fact that he sold drugs when he was younger. The entire conceit of Reasonable Doubt, Jay's first (and still best) album was that Jay had already made millions of dollars trafficking cocaine, and he was now just rapping for the sake of rapping rather than to make money. That Jay-Z was dangerous. The new Jay-Z, with his business holdings and family and Facebook games, is a walking press release. Yet he's still in many ways trading off of his past as a drug dealer. While it's disappointing that one does not get to explicitly sell drugs in Empire, it's not surprising. It's perhaps toothless and a little unrealistic, but it's not surprising.

The Games We Rap #6

David Calvo — Tue, 29 May 2012 16:00:00 -0500

[Click here to see the full image]

David Calvo took the following tweets from DTown and Riff Raff and illustrated them to see what they'd look like if they were a game. Click here to enlarge.

If you keep waiting for the perfect moment, the only thing that will happen is that you will get older.......... -DT
— DTown & Mello Dee (@DaKreek) May 28, 2012

CAN i PUT U iN MY POCKET ?
— RiFF RaFF (@RiFFRaFF_SODMG) May 26, 2012

Our favorite music games.

Jason Johnson and Drew Millard — Thu, 24 May 2012 15:00:00 -0500

Jason Johnson and I have never met in real life, but we both like videogames a lot. We talk a lot over G-Chat, and the conversation tends to turn to videogames. We decided to synthesize these conversations about our favorite music games, and put these conversation into article form.

Rock Band has keytars down, but does it have a pair of well-oiled skins and make you clap your hands? I don’t think so. Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat may have terrible, terrible music, and it doesn’t even require you to have a sense of rhythm, but it gets one thing right. It has bongos, which are probably the coolest percussion instrument of all time. (Okay, the dulcimer is also pretty amazing, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing Santoor Hero any time soon.) Sitting on the floor cross-legged and pounding away on a pair of plastic bongos is fun as shit—albeit tiring, and your hands go numb from clapping before long, and it scares my cats—but still, fun as shit. Even sans the drum kit, Jungle Beat would be a highly unique, creative, and overlooked Nintendo platformer, where Donkey Kong runs, jumps, and beats the crap out banana-hoarding simians. Its hook is that it feels like playing in a reggae band.

As far as music creation games go, Electroplankton is as good as it gets. Bjork’s Biophilia app was visually interesting, but not very fun. On the other end of the spectrum, Korg DS-10 emulated the iconic MS-10 analog synth on a Nintendo DS, but at that point I’d rather be playing the real thing. Brian Eno’s ambient iPhone app Bloom was nice—to go to sleep to. But Electroplankton's trippy collection of musical ecosystems actively encourages you to play. Each of its ten environments are inhabited by happy, glowing organisms, like dancing chemical formulas, and spores moving in strange arrangements, as arpeggios burst into sunshine. You can effortlessly improvise very pretty noises that sound almost as good as a Phillip Glass song, or a minimalist composition by Oval. There are even some translucent deep sea creatures for you to jam on, which play hyper chiptune music and manage to imitate your dubstep artist of choice.

The soundtrack to Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP is good, composed by singer-songwriter type Jim Gutherie, a past member of Canadian indie rock outfits such as the synthy, harmonic Islands, the pastoral Royal City, and the folky rock project Human Highway. But that’s not why it’s on my list. It’s here because, for a solid hour, I geeked out playing tree boughs like synth pads, and plucking waterfalls like the strings of a harp when, in fact, I was supposed to be walking across a grotesque moonlit pixel-land to kill an evil “Shadow Dude” (game’s words, not mine) who is loosely based on Ganondorf from The Legend of Zelda series. The game is bookended by a struggle against infuriating triangles at the beginning, and a lot of walking to get nowhere at the end, but in the middle is an intoxicating fascination with a world where music flows like mead.

-Jason Johnson

Well, now time for my picks. When it comes to music games, I’m unapologetically populist and unapologetically anti-exercise, so while I enjoy the idea of the massive, geeky shared rhythm experience that is Dance Dance Revolution, I myself am terrible at it because I tend to run out of breath very quickly while playing—those of you who might take this as an argument that I should be playing DDR, fall back, because you are wrong. Instead, I’ll go with Guitar Hero III, because it took the doctorate-level rhythm-and-reflex requirements of DDR and concentrated these things to the four fingers on your left hand. That’s change I can believe in. GHIII was the cause of my 2.75 GPA during my second semester of Freshman year, but I’m fine with this, because I can now type really fast with my left hand. What was so great about Guitar Hero was it was exactly what it said it was going to be. There was a plastic guitar, and you got to play it by pushing buttons, and it kinda-sorta felt like playing a guitar. This is good for approximately one semester’s worth of distraction, until you’ve either beaten the game or are stuck on that one Stevie Ray Vaughn song (you know which one) and officially hate the thing. For me, “Pride and Joy” was my white whale. Unlike Ahab, I had the good sense to switch games rather than go down swinging (or singing).

Those of you looking for music games that offer experiences independent from simply that of the music, look no further than Shawn McGrath’s Dyad, just released on the PlayStation Network. Imagine a tube that extends until infinity. And, like, you go down this tube super fast. As you shoot down this tube and you connect these pairs of colored dots together, depending on the order in which you make pairs, you create music. It’s amazing, and it feels zen as shit. The music’s great, too, because McGrath and his musician David Kanaga are fans of actually awesome music, so you’ve got subtle nods to the skittering drums of Chicago Footwork, and sirens and bleeps and bloops that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Zomby record. And when you slip up, you don’t die—you just go back, to the tune of a DJ’s turntable being rewound.

My other favorite music game isn’t actually a music game at all. Instead, it’s Chrono Cross, the classic RPG that is just my favorite game of all time in literally every single way. The soundtrack to Chrono Cross seemed integral to the game in nearly every way, providing emotional shorthand that let my twelve year-old self know how I should be feeling as I played through the game. And I played through it, and through it, and through it, until I basically wore the discs out. The score, composed by Yasunori Mitsuda, felt big in ways that games I’d sunk similar time into (if I recall, other big games for me at that time included Rayman, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and, like, Ape Escape). When you turned the speakers in your TV up and played Chrono Cross, you knew you weren’t just trying to put a monkey back in a cage. You were doing something important. You instinctively knew this, because the songs told you this. Sounds a lot like a music game to me.

-Drew Millard

Five Videogame-Oriented Thoughts from El-P's release party

Craig Jenkins — Wed, 23 May 2012 12:00:00 -0500

El-P, figurehead of the dearly departed Definitive Jux label, is hip hop’s own Philip K. Dick if ever there was one. His music is filled with bleak observations on love, war and death, and Cancer 4 Cure, his BNM’d third solo album carries on tradition with panache. El and a who’s who of new New York rap packed out Santos Party house on Monday night for the C4C release party. After short sets from Def Jux alumnus Despot and Brooklyn upstart Mr. Muthafuckin eXquire, El-P ran through most of the album proper and a spattering of career highlights bolstered by a few guest appearances. Here are five videogame related dispatches that coursed through this gamer’s mind throughout the night.

Truth be told, I have video games to thank for introducing me to El-P’s music. Cannibal Ox’s “Iron Galaxy” (off the El-P produced Cold Vein) was featured in 2003’s Tony Hawk Underground and ended up being a staple of the dozen-song soundtrack-within-a-soundtrack that I eked out of the game’s schizoid underground-rap-meets-punk-and-metal musical accompaniment. Remember the eureka moment when developers realized they could license pre-existing songs for game soundtracks? Remember when Rock Star’s Grand Theft Auto series came along all “Hey, I heard you like soundtracks!” and blew everyone out of the water by providing ten different radio stations to choose from?
I’ve been playing a lot of the Xbox Live Arcade build of Minecraft with C4C as my background music lately (No disrespect to Minecraft’s own gorgeously spectral soundtrack!), and it seems to me that the album and the game are ideologically of a piece. You’re all alone in this world, and you have to fend for yourself. You can do whatever you want as long as you’re aware that the clock is ticking, and darkness brings danger. You get to feeling like Charlton Heston in Omega Man after a while.
Killer Mike and Despot joined El-P for C4C‘s “Tougher Colder Killer”, and the difference in size between them is quite pronounced. I got to thinking about which MC I would roll with if the show turned into a Left 4 Dead kind of survival horror affair. You have El-P, the tech-obsessed explosives expert, Killer Mike the lumbering tank with mean melee skills or Despot, tiny and quick with great jokes but a terrible threshold for damage? I’m pretty sure I’d have to go with Despot. A little gallows humor goes a long way during a zombie outbreak.
El-P called out Heems from Das Racist to recreate the stuttering “in the world” sample that runs throughout C4C’s “True Story”. Heems made a mean human MPC. Das Racist first caught my attention with the 8-bit game that served as the video for the Shut Up, Dude cut “Who’s That Brooown?” Gaming has begun co-mingling with other forms of media, and some of the results have been astounding (see Community’s “Digital Estate Planning” episode, most of which was presented as a 16-bit Titmouse platformer). I’m pumped to see what left-field pairings the future holds.
C4C is rife with ruminations on death and dying, from the wartime confessionals of “Tougher Colder Killer” to the domestic violence revenge story, “For My Upstairs Neighbor”, with its chorus of “If you kill him, I won’t tell.” It got me thinking about the finality of death and how video games have increasingly subverted it. You die in Call of Duty, and you immediately respawn. Role-playing games went from graciously situating save points throughout the map to just saving automatically. Killing death in video games has allowed developers to create longer, more involved gaming experiences over the years, but something in me misses the moment of hot rage I felt when a lack of extra lives and continues took me back to the title screen.

Here's video of Despot and Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire performing a new song from the party:

Interview: Traxman on hearing color and the ghosts of Chicago past.

Drew Millard — Tue, 22 May 2012 11:00:00 -0500

To the Chicago DJ/Producer Traxman, sound isn’t just a series of vibrations. It’s a conversation, carried across culture and time, something to be interpreted and reinterpreted. Something to be worshipped. Something worth obsessing over. To him, it seems, music is the same as, say, the Elder Scrolls series—you take what works for one era, update it for the new, and constantly try to innovate. I spoke with the Traxman over Skype to discuss Chicago’s rich musical legacy, the way he perceives sound, and what it means to have a legacy of your own.

How long have you been making music?
24 years. I’ve been DJing for 31 years.

You’ve seen everything in Chicago music history. Why do you think Chicago is such a great music town?
Ever since the forties and fifties, what we were doing here was like nothing else. The blues were coming up in Chicago just as well as the South, and we had gospel. And these labels had relationships with DJs at the time, and that, historically, set the place for a lot of Chicago soul. We’ve got a big scene, and it’s been like that for years—Curtis Mayfield, Jerry Butler, Chaka Kahn. A lot of people. We’ve got a lot of history.

Do you think the distinct eras of Chicago dance music are in conversation with each other? Your album has a lot of throwbacks to older styles, but filtered through the rhythms of Juke.
I was just trying something out that I knew was missing. I had the idea that the album was half a big statement on people around the world, but it also comes from whatever modes I was listening to at the time—I’d take this part, take this part, take this part, and it came from listening to music. It’s part of having a producer’s ear—if you’re going to sample a record, listen to the whole record, from the beginning to end. Get something out of it. Once you get something out of it, you can go back and use what you’ve heard to find what fits. A lot of ideas just are ideas. Let’s just say the track is already done, but I haven’t done it yet. It’s done in my head. A lot of my tracks just come from years of ideas. It’s my interpretation of music that I grew up to.

How many hours a week are you doing music?
I can’t count. Let’s just say from eight in the morning until six in the evening. Every day. Some days I’ll sit back and watch Law & Order: Criminal Minds, or basketball, or cartoons.

What kind of cartoons do you like?
Old school. Tex Avery, Tom & Jerry. I ain’t too crazy about a lot of the new cartoons. I like The Jetsons.

Do you have kids?
I have four children. Those are my little guys. I’ve got a daughter. She dances. I’m not gonna push them into music, but it’d make me proud if they wanted to do whatever their father was doing. My youngest, they see what I do, so they gravitate towards it. I show ‘em, so for all I know they might just take after me, or take it to a whole ‘nother level.

That feeling of watching someone carry on your legacy is really cool.
I’m like that with a lot of my homeboys, actually. They’ve been around me all their life. One of my guys I started DJing with, Big Pablo, I pretty much helped raise his kids, and now his older son is a sound engineer. You can do a lot of things with your life, and you’ve got to show ‘em that they can take it and elevate their life a whole different way.

Do you know DJ Nate? Where is he right now?
Nate’s really a rapper. He’s not saying he’s not fond of DJing. He’s a cool guy. I talk to him. We’re from the same side of town—West Side. He told me that really wasn’t his interest at the moment. He’s got so many other projects coming up. He raps and does other stuff, and I guess he was chancin’ it and didn’t realize he was going to put something out that people around the world would be listening to.

He was the face of Juke for a second.
To the masses of people who didn’t know, of course. You can’t really blame them, but once people got educated they realized there was more to it. But he was Planet Mu, of course. He was the first, him and DJ Roc. His stuff was good, but once they started hearing the DJ Spinns and the DJ Rashads, and the Traxman, they were like, “Whoa!” We were the ones creating the sound that was what was being done now. We have to educate in the music and show the younger ones what inspired us, and the patterns that let you be creative to add new sounds, or old sounds. It’s like taking a record and adding color.

Can you explain that a bit more?
It’s color like riding a car. You’re seeing things. Let’s say certain areas are like in a different zone, a different time. No people. It’s like seeing things—some buildings represent a song. It could be purple, it could be blue, it could be yellow. Like, “Itz Crack,” that’s a purple-ish-bluish record to me. “Itz Rock” is silver-greenish to me. “Lady Dro” is reddish-pink-black. It’s colors. It’s weird, but it’s just the way I hear stuff. I’m a little bit deeper with it. I try to find something out of it. I was just talking to DJ Spinn before you. He’s out in London. I never thought my shit would get that big out there. I’m just trying to make some tracks, man! [Laughs]