Quantcast
Channel: Radiator Blog
Viewing all 495 articles
Browse latest View live
↧

Theorizing local games cultures in a post-TIGSource era

March 13, 2017, 10:35 am
$
0
0
Colin Northway tweeted this about a week ago:

As Colin implies, I suspect there is actually no real equivalent of a central "cultural nexus" like TIGSource today. In fact, I've been in on the ground floor of several attempts to make new TIGSource-likes, such as Super Friendship Club and Makega.me, and both of them eventually petered-out in the end for one reason or another. I'm still not sure why, but maybe it's possible that internet forums are a poor fit for what we need these days?

The indie games moment arrived, and has now stabilized into a satellite commercial industry of the game industry. We don't need a central place like TIGSource to imagine it or to advocate for indies to exist. Commercially indie showcase events like Day of the Devs, The MIX, and Indie Megabooth have been been running for a while and will probably keep running.

Today, what would be a public game organization's "mission" now? Everyone has so many different needs and concerns. It's kind of absurd that we even imagined one global "public" that TIGSource was supposed to serve? Local games community problems here in New York City are very different from local problems in, say, Pittsburgh or Capetown or Teheran or Shanghai. One single internet place cannot hope to address all of that.

Many local communities and friend groups have Slacks and chatrooms, but most of these are private and unlisted -- they don't have the "public" face that TIGSource provides / provided. What, are you going to invite Colin Northway to your Slack now? Even if he accepted the invitation, he likely wouldn't stay very long, because Slack requires constant (hourly? minute-by-minute?) engagement and labor to function as a community -- and it'd still be difficult for Colin to understand the tone of your Slack, or what it's really about.

To me, a public games culture should serve two functions: (1) help a local community cohere together, and (2) articulate that community's voice(s) and concerns to the rest of the world.


So that leads me to wonder, what if the internet isn't the answer here? Maybe we should focus our efforts off the internet.

I'm specifically omitting annual big events and amazing festivals from this analysis (Hand Eye Society has a great list of those) because I question whether these climactic celebrations (even the one that I curate in NYC) actually help for long-term community-making. Doesn't a once-a-year event still elevate games culture to a pedestal as a rare once-a-year thing? I'm also omitting hybrid co-working / advocacy spaces like Glitch City or GameNest, even though they do great public work they are also still primarily developer-facing co-working spaces.

Here's my argument for the work that a local games culture organization does:
  • more than just developer-facing networking events
  • not dependent on huge institutional sponsors ("independent" from commercial industry or academia) so that more people feel like it's for them (vs. for industry, for academics)
  • (ideally) official non-profit tax-exempt status
  • regular access to a venue, whether by having an understanding with a venue or ideally by operating a permanent space themselves
  • runs casual public-facing events several times a year, ideally once a month or once a week, that aims to regularly support and connect locals
And here's a few local games culture orgs and places that, to me, exemplify that pattern:
  • Juegos Rancheros (Austin, USA) is a long-time indie game culture institution, and to my knowledge, they still do an open social every month at The North Door. They punctuate each year with Fantastic Arcade as part of Fantastic Fest. Official non-profit.
  • Babycastles (New York City, USA) does local arts and music shows, as well as unique game installations about diverse themes, at a permanent venue (!) near Union Square. They do lots of different partnerships with local universities, museums, and artists around the city. Official non-profit.
  • Heart Projector (Vancouver, Canada) runs small pop-up curated shows, with guest curators selecting eclectic work and a great team of local volunteers making it happen. I even got to be one of their guest curators one time.
  • BAR SK (Melbourne, Australia) SK has a strong reputation for custom controllers and installations, and they opened up a permanent venue called BAR SK with frequent small shows and exhibitions rotating regularly. 
Again, I'm NOT saying Slacks are useless or big games events are useless, and I'm not saying TIGSource was useless. However, those things are kind of useless as a "cultural nexus" for the local public to feel like they're a community, and for outsiders to see and recognize that community.

I argue there should also be something that combines the casual everyday sociality of forums with the geographic focus of an event, and maybe these can emerge as our new "cultural nexus(es)" of games -- not one huge monolithic internet game culture, but instead a constellation of different local games cultures around the world.
↧
Search

Bleeding between alternate realities in Metal Gear Solid 5 and other open world games

March 16, 2017, 8:00 am
$
0
0

I was playing the open world stealth game Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain (2015) and I kept failing Mission 33 ("Subsistence: C2W")... The "Subsistence" label means it's a remix of a past mission, but this time you have to complete the mission without any starting loadout, and rely purely on whatever equipment you find after you begin the mission.

The goal of C2W is to destroy some buildings, but "Subsistence" means you don't begin with any explosives -- and once you start attacking the base, they call-in an enemy helicopter that will kill you very quickly. So your two options are (a) sneaking around and clearing out the base quietly so you can destroy the buildings in peace, or (b) finding some heavy weapons (conveniently, some nearby guards carry rocket launchers) and quickly blowing everything up and escaping before the helicopter kills you.

I kept failing with either strategy, so I decided to look up some tips. The online guide suggested a rather dishonorable trick... (1) destroy the nearby anti-air radar station while in "free roam" mode, outside of the mission; (2) then, finally start the mission, set your own helicopter deploy point right on top of your mission objective; (3) and basically kill everyone with the helicopter's giant overpowered chain gun, easily earning the top S-Rank rating for your performance.

My (wrong) assumption was that changing the world in "free roam" mode would not change the world in "mission" mode. In most cases, this was still true... except in this one instance, the radar station was leaked between alternate realities.


In fact, if you trigger specific circumstances the first time you play it, as Mission 4 ("C2W"), the game even lets the mission objectives bleed / leak between the "free roam" and "mission" dimensions. Here's what the wiki has to say about it, emphasis mine:
If the player manages to destroy the communications equipment in the Eastern Communications Outpost before starting Mission 4: C2W, Miller will give the briefing as usual, only for Ocelot to cut in and tell Miller that the equipment is already destroyed [...] The method can only be accomplished if you start the mission while in free roam mode.
So if you (unknowingly?) accomplish your mission right before beginning the mission, the game world does not have time to "reset", and instead your mission briefing will play out like this:
Miller: Boss, you need to put a hole in the Soviets' reinforcement systems by putting in a hole in their base-to-base comms network. Head for the eastern communications post, and destroy its comms equipment.
Ocelot: Hold it Miller, it's already been destroyed!
Miller: What? The comms equipment... all of it?!
Ocelot: All of it.
Miller: Uhh... well, great work, Boss. Mission complete!!
In one sense, this is a totally annoying "gamerism" inconsistency that seems to break the rest of the simulation's rules. In another sense, this is the game developer winking at us, and congratulating the player for finding this edge case.

It represents a common design problem in systemic open world games: What if a quest needs a character to deliver a speech, but the character is dead? We need alternate realities to make sure content is repeatable at any point, but how do you reconcile a consistent world state between these alternate realities?

You could script the quest logic to account for this edge case (as C2W does), but maybe the simpler approach would be to make the character invincible or unkillable. Some games might even selectively respawn and restage the critical characters, like Gravity Rush 2 (2016) cleverly situates the mission as a flashback ("I remember when this mission happened long ago...") and that explains why the character is still alive or why the world is still pristine within the bounds of the mission.


It's useful to setup this hermetic divide early-on, where you must "enter" a mission isolated from the rest of the open world. It might use the same physical geography, but a "mission world" is basically an alternate universe where game systems and populations are setup around this specific setpiece for this specific moment, and it is endlessly repeatable or recreated. Then at the end, your mission rewards are allowed to go with you as you leave the mission.

Consider Shadows of Mordor (2014), which has a compelling NPC level-up system / society. When an NPC kills you, it gloats and levels-up their standing within the NPC ecosystem. (But if I recall correctly, "critical" missions let you die and restart instantly.) In this game, a mission's world is still instanced separately from the main game world... but the consequences bleed outwards back into the main simulation, even when you fail.

(Speaking with creative people outside of games, this is the sort of thing they hate about video game structures: constant repetition of tasks and challenges, with no real emotional arc or purpose for plot. We do it over and over in service of the Simulation God.)

Meanwhile, Bethesda's open world games are interesting precisely in the way they let the world state bleed into missions all the time, or let separate missions bleed into each other. In Morrowind (2002), you could acquire a flying power in one event, and then confront the game's final boss at the top of a volcano within the first few minutes of the game. (Every subsequent sequel has omitted a flying ability.) Or in Skyrim (2011), a quest gave me 2 powerful companion NPCs until I reached a destination, so I deliberately took detours and completed other quests with these allies alongside me.


I've also written about how my favorite quest in Fallout 4 (2015) is "Diamond City Blues", a "slow quest" that bleeds into the rest of the world... There is rarely any isolated "magical mission dimension" in these Bethesda open world games, it is all part of one continuous place. (The quest scripting is probably a buggy nightmare, but it's definitely worth it.)

We prize the continuity and connectedness of open world games, but I hope I've demonstrated that actually they are discontinuous all the time, and a truly contiguous open world "true immersive sim" structure is somewhat rare in games for a variety of design and production reasons. Simulation exists on a rich spectrum and continuum. I think that shows this idea of "pure simulation" games, like Warren Spector's imaginary "one city block" holy grail, is not only difficult to make, but also -- would it actually even be any good?

 RELATED: notes on discontinuity and interiors in open worlds (May 2014)
↧
↧

"Take ecstasy with me": a manifesto for Gay VR

March 21, 2017, 8:40 am
$
0
0

Before I explain what the heck I mean by "Gay VR", let's review why Gay VR would be necessary. I gave a MVR talk on this topic at A/D/O a few weeks ago, and someone tweeted my slide above and it went mildly viral. A quick explanation:
  • "failsons" (failure + son), coined by popular "dirtbag left" podcast Chapo Trap House, are a particular type of 20-30-something men who have failed to fit into capitalism for whatever reason -- they don't have promising jobs, or careers, or relationships, or futures -- and they definitely feel the shame of it. When they hit rock bottom like this, do they blame capitalism and start listening to Chapo Trap House, or do they blame women + people of color and they join some Reddit hate mobs?
  • But when they buy video games, the right-wing failson finally fits into capitalism in some small way, and so they stake their self-worth on it. Instead of philosopher-kings, they are consumer-kings, who think they're so good at consuming video games that they can impose their radical conservative racist misogynist politics on the rest of gamer culture...
  • ... and they basically succeeded, thanks to tacit support from the game industry. It's now way too late to reverse this deeply unhealthy attitude toward art and media, and gamer culture is never going to get "better." These toxic conservatives have basically shit the bed, and now that shit will stay there forever.
To save a newly emerging VR culture from this poisoned gamer culture, I believe that we must act now, to fortify and insulate pockets of VR culture from the inferno. Ideally, we all pursue many different strategies in tandem, and here's a tactic that I'm working on, it's two short sweet words: Gay. VR.


The goal of Gay VR is to make VR completely universally entirely gay. Let's flood VR with gay stories, gay ideas, gay images, gay bodies, gay feelings, gay systems, and gay interactions. Some of that will be making gay games and gay VR art, but some of this work will also involve talking about VR and developing a theory of gay VR.

Here, I take a cue from José Esteban Muñoz's idea of queer utopia. Specifically, Muñoz argues that no one is truly queer, and queerness is always an ideal that we chase. Queerness is always "not yet here."

Compare "gay rights" vs. "queer rights." Gay rights are a politically stable platform built by huge advocacy organizations to lobby for specific incremental reforms; we can even name specific gay rights concerns like gay marriage, HIV/AIDS treatment, ENDA, FADA, HB2, etc. Gay rights are pragmatically concerned with the present, the here and now. In contrast, no one can agree about what "queer rights" exactly are, and that's the whole point. It's nothing and anything at the same time.

The power of a weird utopian call to Gay VR is also in how it is nothing and anything. It is a horizon that we will never quite reach, but the general trajectory will help us see each other and come together. The apparent impossibility of the demand is crucial -- if we consider why Gay VR seems impossible, then we can better understand the forces arrayed against VR artists.

It's important to note that we resist along these utopian lines in gamer culture already: for instance, the fact that every single character in popular video game Overwatch is super duper gay.


When we ship Hanzo / McCree together ("McHanzo") as a double hungry-vers-bottom couple that can't stop groping each other, it is not "pragmatic" and does not directly repeal anti-trans bathroom laws -- but it does help us ponder what is stopping the industry from creating entirely gay character casts (answer: fear of right-wing gamers) and it does help us imagine worlds where men can be cute and tender with each other. Saying "everyone in Overwatch is gay" isn't just fun and horny, but it's also a crucial political strategy that re-frames what Overwatch means and who controls cultures.

And just like queerness and gay horny Overwatch tumblrs, we think of VR as a utopian project. Ask any VR evangelist and they'll confess the technology is "not yet here" but argue there is still so much untapped potential to explore. In this way, VR always seems to be over the horizon, in the future.

Now, can we actually save VR from collapsing into a technocapitalist wasteland ruled by entitled consumer-king whiners? Considering all the forces arrayed against us, no, we probably cannot, but maybe in the future there will be some way to make sustainable spaces for VR artists and weirdos.

In his book Cruising Utopia, Muñoz exemplifies this communal pleasure of contemplating new possibilities with a line from a Magnetic Fields song: "take ecstasy with me."



"take": do something on your own power, of your own initiative, on your behalf

"ecstasy": Muñoz means ecstasy not just in the sense of extremely pleasurable drugs or euphoria, but also religious rapture. Spiritual ecstasy enables vision and foresight and prophecy.

"with me": let's do this together, as a community, because the value of ecstasy is in taking it together and strengthening our bonds

When we combine two improbable utopian projects like mass collective gayness and VR, it's like a miraculous double-impossible utopia. And once we dream of banishing the heteronormative consumer-king usurpers and conquering VR, why stop there? Imagine even grander visions of gay AI, gay computers, gay continents, gay mountains, gay caves, gay rocks, gay sand, gay physics...

So please come join me in making VR so fucking gay that the worst of toxic gamer culture will stay far away from it. Wow, doesn't that sound delicious? To me, that would be like... ecstasy.


(HEY, ONLY READ THIS IF YOU ALREADY KNOW ENOUGH INSIDE BASEBALL TO TALK ABOUT GAY / QUEER IDENTITY: Christina Xu asks, "Curious about why/when you switch between queer and gay here; why "queer utopia" but "gay VR"?"... my answer is that my work centers specific gay sex acts between men, it'd be disingenuous to claim that is queer sex? But in a weird way, I do consider centering gay sex to be a queer project: it is non-normative and anti-respectability, interferes with narrative of homonationalism, etc. There's also a debate about whether "queer" is more useful than just expanding "gay" to be an umbrella. As someone who is gay, I do often wish gay men were more radical, and maybe this is my attempt to try to queer "gay" again?)
↧

Lighting theory for 3D games, part 5: the rise and fall of the cult of hard shadows

March 28, 2017, 8:00 am
$
0
0
This is part of a series about a critical theoretical approach to understanding video game lighting, while staying grounded in technical realities, and not focusing on a specific game engine.

Last time (part 4), we ended with the idea that video game lighting is a carefully assembled pile of hacks / effects that hopefully seems like a unified phenomenon of light. It might seem annoying to fuss over many details all the time, but this bespoke workflow exists because we need so much control to make sure the lighting calculations doesn't slow our game's framerate.

One of the most "expensive" (computer-intensive) parts of 3D video games is rendering shadows. To calculate a shadow in a video game, we must test-fire many light rays out from the light source. If these rays hit anything (see diagram above) then that means the light casts shadows past that object. To give you an idea of how much we sacrifice to shadows, Crytek said in a 2013 SIGGRAPH talk that they offer ~20% of their frame budget (5-7 FPS out of 30 FPS) to the shadows. (20% of their entire game! just for shadows!)

Since shadows are so expensive to do, it's impressive when we manage to do it anyway. But that also means we want shadows to pull their weight and help sell the game, to justify the work we put into them. We worship shadows while praying for something in return.

The cult of hard shadows began on February 21, 2001, at the Macworld conference in Tokyo:


(The awkward silence at 3:13, before the audience realizes they're supposed to applaud, is fucking beautiful? I can't even imagine how ugly and appalling and artless that would've looked to a Japanese audience in Tokyo.)

Watch the video above. Yes, that's pre-dead pre-turtleneck Steve Jobs (!) hosting John Carmack, one of the founding fathers of first person shooters and 3D game rendering. Literally every surface in this tech demo is swimming in flickering shadows, only possible with the new state-of-the-art Geforce 3, implying that all those graphics-loving gamers will definitely buy a Mac now! Notice that Carmack has a somewhat different agenda: he can't stop talking about his "unified shadows" system and how it will revolutionize video game rendering. This is a sermon, a proposed vision of the future.

This was also the long-awaited first showing of the hotly-anticipated Doom 3 to the entire world. Does Carmack tell us what the game is about, or even how many different guns it has?... No, in fact, Carmack never tells us anything about the game itself. Who cares how Doom 3 plays? What matters is how it looks and how expensive it will look: shadows, shadows, unified shadows, hard shadows, shadows shadows.

Carmack does accurately sum up the state of video game shadow technology in 2001: a loose patchwork approach with separate shadow systems for the game world and its inhabitants. Popular first person games at the time like Counter-Strike or Serious Sam didn't even have any projected character shadows... and here was Doom 3, ejaculating per-pixel shadows all over the place. Preach it!!!

It was a huge shock to a game industry that was neglecting shadows, and given Carmack's influence and stature, a generation of level designers and modders internalized that shock for more than a decade afterward. We all got hard for hard shadows.


In the Natural Selection map ns_nothing (2002), I remember its "high-res" (well, at the time) high-contrast lighting from recessed ceiling grills seemed so impressive. That effect required advanced knowledge of mapping tricks like invisible light-blocking brushes, spotlights with high constant falloff, and hacking "lightchop" luxel density. Likewise, when working on Black Mesa Source, I also remember the Blast Pit maps (circa 2007-2008) impressing me and fellow designers with its high contrast grating shadows, requiring similar advanced level designer tricks, but at a sharper resolution beyond even Half-Life 2's levels (2004).

When I say "hard shadows", I mean "hard" in two senses: visually crisp and high contrast, as well as difficult to craft. This wasn't a thoughtful artistic homage to film noir aesthetics, this was about proving who had the sharpest shadow penis. This lighting style was about pushing technical boundaries, to render sharper crisper shadows than the engine was intended to do. In the case of ns_nothing and other colossal Natural Selection maps with distinct lighting, the modders were even afraid of breaking the Half-Life 1 engine's core memory limits. We wanted shadows so bad that we were willing to break the entire game.

And while we recognized and accepted that technical cost, I think there was also a deep unconscious design cost: Shadows only exist if we build surfaces to cast and receive those shadows. Notice that Blast Pit room pictured above has to use plain (boring?) concrete textures and a simple boxy shape, to make sure the shadows stay crisp and legible. Does that result in a better game, or a better screenshot?

In this way, we sacrificed entire levels, rooms, and hallways, to feed the shadows and our notions of high craft and perceived production value. But let's not stop there! What if you sacrificed an entire game just to render cool-looking hard shadows?



id re-debuted a Doom 3 demo at E3 2002. Just like in 2001, lights compulsively flicker. The wildly swinging ceiling lamp at the end seems especially desperate. More than a year later, and Doom 3 basically still didn't grow past its tech demo roots. In gamer culture, I'd say we still fondly replay Doom 1 or 2, and adore the recent Doom 4 as a fresh return to form -- but Doom 3 is now remembered as this awkward aberration most people can skip.

Instead of flying around huge demonic blood castles to fight a dozen flaming skulls, Doom 3 had us creep along narrow corridors and pause every few minutes for a "monster closet" cutscene. It also shipped with a notoriously infuriating flashlight-juggling mechanic, provoking a fan-made "duct tape" hate-mod downloaded 80,000 times within 24 hours of its release. (The Doom 3 BFG edition admits this was a mistake, and patches in a Half-Life-style flashlight instead.)

Many of Doom 3's design problems in 2004 stemmed from that fateful announcement in 2001 to showcase its shadow volume tech. I argue that it basically strangled the level design. Modders note that Doom 3's shadow-casting lights need to be kept small and spaced-out with little overlap. To make sure small lights don't feel so small, we need to keep the room small... etc. Apply that claustrophobic thinking to every level of the entire game, and you can imagine how disastrous it'd feel at a time when the open world design was taking over the industry. If Crytek recommended giving 20% of your game to the shadows, then I'd say Doom 3 sacrificed maybe 50%+ of its soul.

Ignoring us impressionable Carmack-fanboy modders, why didn't the rest of the game industry jump on the unified-hard-shadow bandwagon?


Well, the problem with casting everything in your entire game with hard shadows is that it's not particularly photorealistic, nor useful for lighting design.

In real-life, shadows are rarely so dark and crisp. Instead, shadows are usually soft and blurry and translucent, with umbras and penumbras and layers. In the diagram above, notice how the umbra is the darkest inner part of the shadow, and the penumbra is the fuzzier outer boundary of the shadow. Doom 3's shadows don't have penumbras, just umbras. If you're obsessed with photorealism in games like the AAA industry, then this is one huge glaring deal-breaker. (Notably, cartoon cyberpunk game Quadrilateral Cowboy cleverly uses these crispy shadows to strengthen its non-photorealistic aesthetic.)

And remember part 3 of our series, where we talked about three point lighting? To review, three point lighting is a standard style of lighting setup where you overlap light coverage to soften shadows and create interesting gradients. If your lighting engine doesn't let you overlap lights or soften shadows at all, you're literally ignoring centuries of lighting design theory. Basically the only mood that Doom 3 could reliably pull-off was "INTERROGATION" / "DEER IN HEADLIGHTS", which is interesting a few times, but ultimately gets pretty boring pretty fast if you repeat it over and over, even for a horror game. It doesn't allow for enough range in different moods.

Today, no modern game engine uses Doom 3's shadow volume technique due to its inflexibility and the many constraints it imposes on lighting systems. Instead, everyone (even Doom 4) uses shadow mapping / "cascading shadow maps" which thinks of shadows more like "maps" -- pictures that we overlay over the world.


These days, if you wanted a specific shadow pattern, you might just paint a "light cookie" (Unity) or "light function" (Unreal 4) texture, which burns a picture of a shadow into the light falloff. These are conceptually similar to a "cuculoris" ("cookie") or "gobo" in stage lighting, a sheet / stencil that you attach to a lamp to project patterns.

This texture-based approach solves our earlier problem with casting shadows: we no longer need to physically build out light recesses or metal grates to cast a specific shadow. Instead, we can just paint whatever we want in Photoshop, and then throw any quality of light wherever we want -- soft, hard, crispy, blurry, rainbow, whatever. And now because it's so easy to do, casting a dark sharp shadow across a room no longer earns as much street cred as it did before. In fact, sharp "hard shadows" now signify a poorly-tuned lighting setup, and makes a photorealistic game seem less expensive / "worse" in comparison.

Surprisingly, Doom 3 had a similar "light texture" function all along, but used it relatively rarely. Late-stage Doom 3 modders like Matthew "Lunaran" Breit (who later worked on Quake 4 in the same engine), or the team at The Dark Mod, experimented with light textures to fake soft blurry texture-based shadow falloff in the Doom 3 engine -- a laborious one-off level designer hack that Carmack likely would've detested as an attack on his beautiful grand "unified shadow" sermon from 2001.

Personally, I just think it's funny how Half-Life 2 modders worked so hard to fake hard shadows, and Doom 3 modders worked so hard to fake soft shadows... but that also suggests a false equivalence. The cult of hard shadows never really had a chance.

Of course, that doesn't mean the cult is completely dead. It just means there's a new god to worship.

We'll meet this new god next time, in part 6: the holy grail of real-time radiosity.

(PREVIOUSLY: part 4, "how to light a video game world.")
↧

Vote "YES" on Radiator 3 for Steam Greenlight!

March 30, 2017, 8:00 am
$
0
0

So I've been giving some thought as to what a sequel to Radiator 2 would look like... and I think it'll be a similar format, with a flagship game + other bundled scenes in the same package. It's fairly straightforward to put them all together in one deployment, which is probably one nice advantage to making all my games in the same Unity project folder.

Introducing: the highly anticipated sequel Radiator 3. (Steam Greenlight page is here.) Right now the only segment that's definitely going into it is Rinse and Repeat, I'm still deciding what else I'd want to include with it... What will be new in Radiator 3?
  • Steam Achievements and gamepad support
  • SteamVR support! Probably targeting a "Standing" spec, for Oculus Touch / Vive support.
  • remastered super duper ultra high HD graphics and hair physics
  • ... and so much more!
Please vote YES on Radiator 3 for Steam Greenlight, and please forward it to your friends and parents. Together, we can make Steam a steamier place!
↧
↧

"If you walk in someone else's shoes, then you've taken their shoes": empathy machines as appropriation machines

April 5, 2017, 8:00 am
$
0
0

In a 2015 TED talk (pictured above) VR filmmaker Chris Milk claimed that virtual reality could be the ultimate "empathy machine". Instead of fading away into irrelevance like most TED talks, this concept of the VR empathy machine has somehow survived into 2017. VR boosters like the United Nations' VR program and influential podcast Voices of VR continue to push this line of thinking.

I'm here to argue absolutely in the strongest terms: I am against the promise of any claim to a "VR empathy machine", and I am against it forever.

The rhetoric of the empathy machine asks us to endorse technology without questioning the politics of its construction or who profits from it. Empathy is good, and VR facilitates empathy, so therefore VR is good -- no questions please. (And if you hate VR, that means you hate empathy!) It's a disturbing marketing strategy, and I hope it's obvious how making a refugee tourism simulator your "flagship" VR experience can come across as an extremely cynical use of pain and suffering to sell your product.

I also doubt any empathy machine supporters have ever been the actual "target" of an actual empathy machine. Ironically, as empathizers, they seem totally unable to empathize with the empathized, so let me spell this out. The basic problem with empathy machines is what if we don't want your fucking empathy?

You might think this is a photograph of hell itself, but it's also the "Scotiabank Digital Factory"
First, let's get some other basic questions about VR empathy out of the way: How do you know this is actually empathy you're feeling? Do you really need to wear a VR headset in order to empathize with someone? Can't you just fucking listen to them and believe them? You need to be entertained as well? Are you sure this isn't about you?

I'm very familiar with people annexing other peoples' experiences under the banner of empathy. Specifically, I've been making realistic 3D games about gay relationships for a while, and the vast majority of my players and fans happen to be straight people. This leads to a widely-held but incorrect assumption that I make my games for "straight people to understand what being gay is like" -- and some of the worst homophobes on YouTube even call my games "gay simulators" so they can react with disgust toward it.

This "straight empathy" suddenly makes my games more about "how beautiful and benevolent the straight people are, to tolerate my gay existence instead of vomiting" -- instead of highlighting gay culture or queer solidarity, as I intended. I want to imagine fantastic worlds where straight people aren't as important -- and yet, they demand that I dance for them in VR, whenever they want, forever. For this reason, I hate it when people think my games are like empathy machines. I don't want your empathy, I want justice!

As usual, tech needs to step back, and maybe, for once, consider the possible cruelty of what they're doing and demanding of people. Empathy, like any emotion, is not just a buzzword to decorate your bank-branded tech startup playground (see photo above) -- it is also a complicated tool with history and politics to its deployment.


In her book "Long Past Slavery: Representing Race In The Federal Writers Project", historian Catherine Stewart talks about one of the most powerful "analog" empathy machines ever built: the American slave narrative. You can read the full write-up on Slate for a more detailed account, but I'll try to summarize it right here and now:

During the Great Depression, the US government sent out researchers to interview elderly ex-slaves across the American South to record their experiences and histories about slavery. This sounds like a great and noble thing, putting people to work to record and recognize the pain of oppressed people -- but, uh, that's not exactly how it actually turned out.

For one thing, the researchers were mostly white people. And they weren't just any white people, but local white people who had enough privilege to be educated to read and write and win government research positions. They were white people often descended from educated slave-owning families across the South. Some of the interviewers were even members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

So let's try this """empathy""" experiment. Imagine you are an ex-slave, forever traumatized by white people enslaving you. One day, totally unannounced, your former torturer's white friends knock on your door and ask you about your life as a slave...


Would you tell these white people about how bad white people were? Or...
  • You would try to put a positive spin on slavery, and tell this white person that it wasn't so bad, white people were always fair and good, and even claim that you deserved to be whipped.
  • Or maybe you would change the subject, tell them some folk tales. It'll seem to them like slave culture was so exotic and eclectic that it was a "shame" that it ended.
  • You could even tell a story about how you're afraid of ghosts and how white people remind you of ghosts. They're more likely to accept stereotypes of black superstition than tales of white cruelty.
When Stewart compared white interviewers' reports with the smaller number of black interviewers' reports, she found that black interviewers recorded many more upfront stories about cruel oppression and pain. In some cases, white supervisors would even advise their black researchers to look for more "variety" because they had enough of the "white people are bad" content, they wanted to hear more about the "good times" during slavery... So what seemed like "raw""authentic""immediate" stories to white readers (even if they were Northern abolitionists) were actually these extremely constructed and self-conscious stories that black people told to appease white people.

Black people were just trying to survive white empathy. In a similar way, are Syrian refugees trying to survive UN VR empathy, even as many of them blame the UN for not doing more? (Don't count on the UN to forward these objections, though!)

Do black people want you to feel better about enslaving them, or would they prefer safety and resources and equal treatment in the eyes of the law? Do Syrian refugees want you to appreciate their resilience, or do they want political justice and stability and to return to their homes?

If we want to empathize, we must always question who really "benefits" from our """empathy""". But VR empathy machines, especially slick UN-sponsored empathy productions built to milk donations from millionaires at Davos, definitely do not foster any kind of that critical reflection.


To quote Wendy HK Chun's excellent talk at Weird Reality: if you "walk in someone else's shoes", then you've taken their shoes. If you won't believe someone's pain unless they wrap an expensive 360 video around you, then perhaps you don't actually care about their pain.

I think empathy machine apologists are lying to themselves. The "embodied""transparent immediacy" of virtual reality (or much less, 360 video) does not obliterate political divisions. Even a culturally-advanced medium like books can barely chip away at the problem, so VR definitely can't. In this political sense, VR can't actually offer any embodiment, transparency, or immediacy to anyone. At best, VR can only offer the illusion of empathy.

I don't use the "A-word" lightly, but I think this is such a bad look for VR culture that we must deploy the white liberal kryptonite immediately: VR empathy machines are just VR Appropriation machines. They are fundamentally about mining the experiences of suffering people to enrich the self-image of VR users... or, even worse, they're about mining the experiences of suffering people to enrich the cultural appeal of VR brands?The world is going to shit, and VR wants to profit from it. Great!

Wait, no. Yuck. Gross. Let's try to be better than this, OK?

***

FAQ

Q: Shouldn't we try to reclaim or rehabilitate "empathy"?
A: Nope. Like tech's poisoning of "disrupt", empathy is now toxic and radioactive, so let's bury it underground for 10,000 years. Someone else will reclaim it, but it will not be us. Let's call this a strategic retreat. You have better things to do.

Q: What would an ethical "empathy machine" look like?
A: It would be made by the empathized community, to benefit the empathized community. Which probably means it can't be on VR, because currently anything made for VR mainly benefits the VR industry. This is not a technological problem nor a design problem, it is a cultural and political problem. VR is currently an expensive tech dude toy, and it will take a long time for VR culture change, if ever. Don't use the suffering of others to force that culture change, because anyway, it won't even work.

↧

Spring 2017 progress report

April 11, 2017, 8:10 pm
$
0
0
I usually plan my project work roughly month by month, swapping out projects based on timeliness / recent progress. Here's my plan for the next few months:
  • My historical bathroom sex game The Tearoom will hopefully be finished and released by the end of this month / early next month. Most of the main functionality is implemented, I just need to fill-in some more content and do more user testing. Will hopefully have a lot more to say about this soon.
  • I need to dust-off my sexy strip-Go game, tentatively called AlphaGogo. I aim to finish and release it near the end of May / first week of June, soon after the next Google DeepMind AlphaGo tournament ends in China. When I last worked on it, I had some intermediate-level Go AI working on a 9x9 board. The idea is that it'll teach you how to play Go, and then the sexy "Go daddy" coach will take his clothes off with every match you win. Go usually has a reputation for being really abstract and dry, so I wanted to inject it with some humor and intimacy.
  • I have another project marinating on the side, it's a sexy pole-dancing stripping game, and it's a possible collaboration with a musical artist. One crucial touchstone for this one is the 1983 film Flashdance, which has a gorgeous iconic burlesque scene -- but then the other 90 minutes oddly condemns stripping and sex work as immoral? It has some strange politics and sexual anxiety that never completely evaporates from the whole "sexy dance" genre film lineage, even today.
  • Over the summer, I want to go back and finish Good Authority, a critical city-building sim inspired by the biography of Robert Moses called The Power Broker. People enjoyed the initial prototype, but they also didn't even get to the second half of the game, or even knew half was missing -- so we're trying to re-design the core gameplay to alleviate that. More on that later, when we've figured out more of it.
↧

new feature: subscribe to e-mail notifications for updates to Radiator Blog

April 17, 2017, 10:12 am
$
0
0
Due to a reader's request, Radiator Blog has finally joined the 21st century and now offers an e-mail subscription service via FeedBurner integration with Blogger. (FeedBurner is an old Google acquisition that scrapes and re-formats RSS feeds. RSS feeds kind of fell out of fashion like 10 years ago, but you can still access this blog's RSS / Atom feed directly if you want.)

To subscribe for e-mail notifications on new posts and such, you can type your e-mail address into the sidebar widget near the top-right of this page, or the footer widget at the very bottom of this page. Or use the sign-up form on the FeedBurner website itself. It's up to you. Here at Radiator, we're all about choice.

I will not share your e-mail address with anyone... not even with myself, because I'm probably not going to login to the FeedBurner dashboard ever again. It's all automatic now. Ah, the wonders of technology...
↧
Search

Level With Me: Half-Life 1, complete!

April 19, 2017, 8:00 am
$
0
0
I do a first person video game let's play livestream show with level design / environment art commentary called Level With Me, and I've just finished playing through Half-Life 1.

I started with Half-Life 1 because it's a game I know pretty well, so I thought it would be a good first choice while I figure out how to do all this streaming malarkey. I'm still learning a lot about how to play / pace / perform, but I hope it's been entertaining and educational to watch nonetheless.

I've collected all 14 episodes into a playlist for your convenience. Each episode is usually less than an hour long. Also, you can "like and subscribe" the channel, and/or hangout during the live broadcast on Twitch every Tuesday usually from 6-7pm EST (GMT-5).



I haven't decided what the next game will be. If you have any strong opinions, please leave a comment. See you next week!
↧
↧

Radiator 3 is Greenlit on Steam!

April 21, 2017, 8:00 am
$
0
0
Radiator 3 is officially greenlit for distribution on Steam! Thanks everyone for your support and votes. Look for the game sometime in Fall 2017.

Some fun stuff: in Steam, apparently I can set the game page's "primary genre" to action, racing, simulation, rpg, etc... as well as "sexual content" and "nudity." Nudity games! I like the sound of that. Wonderful genre.


↧

A survey of video game manifestos

April 24, 2017, 8:00 am
$
0
0


I've written a few manifestos for making games -- Radiator 1 had a short "PIES" manifesto, and these days I also work off a loose "games as culture" not-manifesto and a more recent "Gay VR" utopian manifesto. To me, a manifesto is a funny thing because you're trying to predict what you're going to make over the next few years, and people will easily be able to judge you for it. (Well, Robert, did you actually achieve Full Gay VR, or did all that stuff fizzle out? I guess we'll see!) In this way, I think a manifesto is like a weird paradoxical show of strength as well as vulnerability. It's a bit of a risk.

There is, of course, a long history of manifestos, and any time you write a manifesto you're also participating in that history. The most famous manifesto is, perhaps, the Communist Manifesto. In art, we have a Futurist manifesto, a Dada manifesto, a Surrealist manifesto... in film, I've always admired the Dogma 95 manifesto... and in technology, there's the Hacker Manifesto. Most of these manifestos try to distill a complex ideology into a page or two of bullet points and prescriptions, and that's part of the fun of it. Discard relativism to the wind, and let's shape the world to our vision!

In games, we've had a variety of visions. Older industry folks often like referencing the Chris Crawford GDC 1992 "Dragon" speech or the Bruce Sterling AGDC 2008 keynote... but here I'm going to try to confine my discussion to stuff that explicitly says it's a manifesto, because I think the label matters. Let's start, shall we?...


Here's maybe one of the first manifestos in video games: the Scratchware Manifesto in 2000 was anonymously written by Greg Costikyan, who later went on to found the ahead-of-its-time indie game storefront Manifesto Games. At the time in 2000, the supposed shareware revolution of the 80s and early 90s had solidly gentrified into a hellscape of big publisher gatekeepers monopolizing brick and mortar retail, so I'd cut Costikyan some slack for what reads today like weird retail-inflected language focusing on quality and value:
What is scratchware? The phrase scratchware game essentially means a computer game, created by a microteam, with pro quality art, game design, programming and sound to be sold at paperback book store prices. A scratchware game can be played by virtually anyone who can reach a keyboard and read. Scratchware games are brief (possibly fifteen minutes to an hour or so), extremely replayable, satisfying, challenging, and entertaining.
Why the term scratchware? Scratch; chump change; nickles and dimes. Ware; warez; software.
Why do we need scratchware? We need scratchware because game programs cost too much for most people. Games are running $35 for last year's model and upwards of $55 retail for the latest title. Most aren't worth that much money. Consider the one-time-through linearity, lack of replayability and derivative gameplay that many games suffer from, then reconsider the price that the publishers of these games are demanding again and again and again... [...] the philosophy of scratchware embraces the idea of value; of worth. This philosophy provides for a new frontier of thoughtful ideas, reasonable design goals and careful and dedicated craftsmanship.
As you'll see later though, this idea that we must urgently change how games relate to money -- that urgency will persist for a long time, and continues to be a huge problem today.

Paolo Pedercini wrote a Molleindustria manifesto in 2003. It's very much about political conflict, whether in the field of video games, or more broadly against Capital with a C. To me, it reads like it's less about what video games should "be", and more about video games should "do" and how they should affect society:
What? Molleindustria is theory and practice of soft conflict – sneaky, viral, guerrillero, subliminal conflict – through and within videogames.
Where? Molleindustria was born in the soft core of Capital’s processes of valorization. She is daughter of cognitive labor, of shared information, of entertainment that becomes politics and vice versa.
How? Molleindustria advocates for the independence of games from the market’s domain and its radical transformation in media objects able to criticize the status quo.
How??? Understanding and subverting the deepest videogame mechanics without resorting to dull antagonistic translations or artsy self-referential divertissement.
Soft? Soft as the gray matter, a battleground contended by services and commodities; soft as the matter that swallows and produces: software.
Tale of Tales issued a Realtime Art Manifesto in 2006. It's very much about the sovereignty of the artist and a rejection of commercial trends, but it's also surprisingly prescriptive about what the medium and "interactivity" are, in a way that I think most gamers would actually agree with?
Realtime 3D is the most remarkable new creative technology since oil on canvas. It is much too important to be wasted on computer games alone. This manifesto is a call-to-arms for creative people (including, but not limited to, video game designers and fine artists) to embrace this new medium and start realizing its enormous potential. [...]
 1.  Realtime 3D is a medium for artistic expression.
 2.  Be an author.
 3.  Create a total experience.
 4.  Embed the user in the environment.
 5.  Reject dehumanisation: tell stories.
 6.  Interactivity wants to be free.
 7.  Don’t make modern art.
 8.  Reject conceptualism.
 9.  Embrace technology.
10. Develop a punk economy.
(Obviously, I strongly disagree with number 8!)

The Arcane Kids Manife$to is a circa 2012 (?) manifesto with text that, brilliantly, I can't even copy and paste, since it's a Photoshopped image of the Steam OS X interface. I also really like how Tale of Tales' RAM argues for a "punk economy" above, but down here, the AxK M$ warns, "do NOT call us punk." It's like these manifestos are in conversation. I also like how the declaration "fuck formalism" might contradict "play with structure", maybe a manifesto is supposed to be in conflict / in flux with itself:


More recently in 2016, Pietro Righi Riva argues for rejecta, a "nontraditional playable media manifesto" that seems to be very much about the shape and process of the game: how long it should be, how long it should take to make, how much it should cost. That focus on production and quality is very timely in the "indiepocalypse era" of 2016, and the use of *specific numbers* evokes the Scratchware Manifesto's prescriptions:
1) The game must flow like a river, time must exist beyond player’s action [...]
2) Setting must be strictly instrumental to content and meaning [...]
3) Source material and collaborations must be found outside of games and related subcultures [...]
4) No game should last more than two hours [...]
5) No game should take more than six months to produce [...]
6) Human condition must be the topic, genre games are not acceptable [...]
7) All video game tradition in form, style, and content must be rejected [...]
8) Acting and performance must be central assets and affecting gameplay [...]
a) Rehearse, don’t test, reject full control as a creator [...]
10) The game must be socially accessible, aim for minimum sustainable price, maximum reach [...]
And lastly I want to highlight Llaura Dreamfeel's brief for the "FLATGAME" jam -- I'm not sure whether she'd call  #flatgames a manifesto, but to me, her jam instructions really read like a manifesto to me, so I'm going to break my own rules about only talking about stuff that labels itself a manifesto. Or, I guess you'll be the judge:
1. Create works where you only control/play with movement of pieces around the screen (the player or anything else) and no further interaction, or even collisions. [...]
2. Make art physically, and try to complete it in under an hour or so. [...]
3. No sound effects, just a single track of ambience/music/background. [...]
4. Release it! The idea is to aim to make the game in an hour or two, and to actually do it in half a day. [...]
(Bonus 0. Flat games should be inspired by or recreate real events and places. Feel free to exaggerate/reinterpret and fictionalize. [...] Space as time. art as time. time as time!)
* * *

It's all so exciting, isn't it?

Maybe we should all just write manifestos? A #GameManifestoJam?

In that spirit, feel free to link to other manifestos / your own manifestos in the comments.
↧

The war in heaven: a three-dimensional VR culture clash

May 2, 2017, 9:49 am
$
0
0

Virtual reality is a weird collaboration between several different fields / industries, and each practice brings its own assumptions and baggage. When I go to VR events and conferences away from the influence of games, I often feel bewildered and confused by the different language and norms.

One time I was at a businessy VR event near Wall Street and some tech-biz guy said he had a "VR-ready industrial robot" deployed in a warehouse, and would any angels [investors] be interested in taking a tour? I was so confused (what the hell is a VR-ready industrial robot?) so I joked aloud, "is it a sex robot?" -- but no one else reacted at all, they just continued with the conversation and asked him about market caps or something, as if I didn't even say anything! Not even a pity smirk or furrowed brow or roll of the eyes!

This is part of a larger skirmish about language, and about how to talk about VR. The PC manufacturers have adopted "VR-ready" as a euphemism for "expensive gamer computer"... In tech, you have to be able to refer to an investor as an "angel" without laughing and bursting into flames. These are kind of trivial examples that don't seriously impede communication, but I do think they hint at how we're trying to shape cultures and norms for VR. There's not even agreement about whether to call VR "VR" -- maybe VR is just a subset of "AR" (augmented reality), but really those are both just subsets of "MR" (mixed reality) -- or maybe let's unify under the recent umbrella term "XR" (x-reality?)... terminology and labels and language matters.

And since angels are involved, I guess this is a war in heaven.



One useful flashpoint in the VR culture clash is the debate around 360 video. Basically: film finds them to be a useful stepping stone while they wait for volumetric tech to get better, game developers usually hate them and think they're the absolutely worst, and tech doesn't care either way as long as they get to profit from it.

The common critique against 360 video, as inherited from video games, might go like this: VR is best when it's interactive, and "strong interaction" involves a wide expressive range of user input with a wide range of meaningful novel responses. By this standard, most 360 video is weakly interactive, since it takes only one input (rotational head tracking) and outputs only one possible outcome (a linear video that always unfolds the same way.)

The average 360 video is such a non-interactive that it makes the interactive drama parody scene in Francois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 adaptation look like Dwarf Fortress! ... But watch that scene closely: we're supposed to look down on the two TV actors as (gay?) domestic men fretting about silly bourgeois house arrangements. Truffaut's "weak-minded housewife" character, of course, is completely captivated by this bad "interactive" mixed-reality-TV drama about nothing, while the Enlightened Rebellious Intellectual husband rolls his eyes. You can't separate this critique of interactive drama from its lazy reliance on 1960s gender tropes -- the scene relies on them in order to "sting." Similarly, it's impossible to ignore the politics latent in a seemingly intellectual "apolitical" formal critique of anything -- and especially impossible to ignore how gender works in games, tech, or film.

So when I confessed on a stage at Versions, "I kind of hate 360 video," I watched the front row of the audience -- a row of mostly women -- shift in their seats and harden. With that statement, I was basically attacking their careers and artistic practice. It was really convenient that I had all this formal intellectual argumentation for why this VR research by women is suddenly "wrong" for "the medium"... I totally accept how my statement might have came-off as yet another man telling women artists what to do. Ironically, my critique comes from the first wave of VR theory spearheaded by women: Janet Murray's ideas of immersion, Marie Laure-Ryan's analysis of narrative as virtual reality, and Brenda Laurel's research in smart costumes, all rely on theories of performance and active participation. (And like, Brenda Laurel was at Versions too, and she dislikes 360 video too! I wish she'd back me up on this!!)

But anyway. This is why I'm trying to be more constructive than "360 video sucks" -- because even if I think it's ultimately a dead-end for the form, I also realize that it's a domain where a lot of women work -- and honestly, the average 360 short is still more culturally relevant and conceptually stronger than 99% of the current Steam VR catalog.

So my current thinking is that there are currently 3 general camps for VR (games, tech, film) and 3 general dimensions to VR (real-time, real-world. and immersive.) Here's a handy diagram:
(click to enlarge diagram)
Three possible dimensions / qualities to VR:
  • "real-time": live, dynamic, responsive to user input in real-time, cares about "improvising" new content or arrangements for every person or every play
  • "real-world": uses cameras or others sources to pipe-in data from the real-world, cares about social relevance and connection to reality
  • "immersive": cares about integrity / consistency / coherence of the simulated diegetic world, cares a lot about suspension of disbelief
Three camps of VR, with what I see as their voices / strengths / weaknesses:
  • GAMES: real-time + immersive = VR as simulation, world
    "We did all the shader and engine research. You're welcome. Also, kids these days don't use Facebook or watch 360 videos about refugees -- they play Minecraft."
    Did all the initial tech research, has the closest ties to the GPU industry. Focuses on deep formal explorations of interactivity and craft, but that depth also results in very narrow conceptual vision. Still suffering from Stockholm syndrome of being held hostage by conservative gamers; thinks civilization always needs another robot zombie shooting gallery game as long as it has a new hat. Obsessed with solving locomotion, as if mouse-look is intuitive and not exclusionary. Games understand players, but not people.
  • FILM: immersive + real-world = VR as experience, performance
    "What's the point of deep games and markets if people don't give a shit about any of it? Great job with the Kinect and Google Glass, by the way."
    The oldest of the three industries here, has already weathered huge technological shifts before. Culturally relevant and conceptually experimental, more accessible and inclusive than other camps. Wants to make big claims about impact, but doesn't do the homework of thinking rigorously about structuring interaction or participation. Home of the empathy machine cult, which misconstrues montage theory as psychology instead of aesthetics. Film understands viewers, but not people.
  • Tech: real-world + real-time = VR as network, market
    "Depth and cachet are useless if there's no way to use it easily. And who's going to study and manage your audience? Good luck paying the rent with your little experiments."
    Building all the VR manufacturing, network infrastructure, and markets, praying the bet will pay-off in 5-10 years as a new industry that rivals the smartphone era. That long-shot long-view certainly helped tech in the past, but right now, stuff like social VR is often embarrassing, incoherent, and tone-deaf -- which is maybe what happens when you think VR is just a stop-gap until some sudden AR-AI singularity in the near-distant future. Tech understands user data, but not people.
As I think about all this, it strikes me: why isn't there a camp that's just about everything... real-time, real-world, and immersive? Well, no one is stopping you!

These aren't supposed to be rigid definitions that lock you into a warring faction. You don't have to swear your fealty to games or tech to betray film, etc. Rather, I'm just trying to articulate and identify the generalized "values" that I think each field is trying to impose on VR.

Or should I say AR?... or MR... or XR.... ?
↧

Games-related NYC end of year student shows, Spring 2017

May 4, 2017, 8:00 am
$
0
0
If you're around NYC this month, a bunch of games-related university programs are running their end of year shows. It's always very rewarding to see the fruits of so many students' sweat and tears (a lot of tears), and it also doubles as a fun social event where you often run into old friends or Twitter acquaintances.

Here's a rough schedule (in chronological order) and some brief commentary about what to expect from each show. Hope to see you there:

New York University, IDM (Interactive Digital Media)
IDM is a program focused on the intersection between technology and performance -- so they see games primarily as part of a broader study of interaction design and art, rather than games for the sake of games. Accordingly, a lot of their student projects are often more about the types of magical thinking that a game-like frame enables, which I'd label as a conceptual lens toward games. For more info, see the IDM Show Spring 2017 website.

(Downtown Brooklyn)
one night only: May 5, 6-8pm at 2 Metrotech Center, 8th Floor


Parsons School of Design, MFA DT (Design and Technology)
MFADT is the graduate program where I studied, and where I've taught for a few years. Like IDM, the playable projects here are more interested in narrative or conceptual goals, and do not focus on hardcore gameplay or tactical depth. However, there's also a strong tradition of hardware hacking -- the 2017 IGF alt.ctrl award went to a Parsons team. For more info, see the full "SPECTRUM" website.

(Union Square)
BFA DT Sophomore show, May 6, 5-11 pm (music at 8pm) at Babycastles, 137 W 4th Street
AR / VR / games, interactive showcase: May 11, 4-8pm at 2 West 13th Street, 2nd Floor
main exhibition, opening night: May 16, 6:30-10pm at 6 East 16th Street, 12th Floor


New York University, ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program)
As Parsons students we often considered ITP to be a friendly rival, but now I just see them as a slightly weirder and scrappier cousin. Like MFADT, the playable projects at ITP shows are usually more about a narrative or conceptual focus, but unlike MFADT, they often rely more on performance and installations. For more info, see the ITP 2017 Spring Show website.

(Washington Square)
opening night: May 16, 5-9pm at 721 Broadway, 4th Floor


New York University, Game Center
This is the main department where I currently teach now. Unlike MFADT or ITP, we don't really do much hardware or fabrication because there's no real technology mandate here, so we also show a lot of non-digital analog board games and card games too. That said, this year, I'm pushing to show a little bit more VR stuff. For more info, see the 2017 Student Show website.

(Downtown Brooklyn)
one night only: May 18, 6-11pm at 2 Metrotech Center, 8th Floor


... and that's all I've got. Again, see you there maybe!
↧
↧

"Consider the Chair" in Heterotopias 002

May 9, 2017, 9:35 am
$
0
0

For the new issue #002 of the video game architecture zine Heterotopias, I've contributed a piece on chairs in video games (though I focus on Half-Life 2) and about how these games' chairs function -- from the paradox that we are rarely allowed to sit in these chairs, to the "environmental storytelling" of the chairs' placement and arrangement, to the chairs' materials and history as a designed object. At the end, I posit a speculative political future for chairs in video games.

If you're into level design, you'll basically love Heterotopias. I've been a fan since issue 001, where they have a great interview with a Kane and Lynch dev about trying to evoke the alleys of Shanghai. I urge you to support this fine publication, and consider buying an issue to support independent games criticism. I'm also honored to appear next to all these other great writers, and Gareth / Chris were phenomenal editors. 10/10 would write again.
↧

Eyes on the prize...

May 14, 2017, 3:52 pm
$
0
0

I've been working hard on my historical bathroom simulator The Tearoom, and I'm desperately trying to finish it within the next couple weeks. Basically, I've been doing lots of art passing and tuning. I've added the two last characters, for a total of 4 possible dude archetypes to encounter in the bathroom. I also have 2/8 possible dicks implemented, I still need to add 6 more, but at least I have the workflow and functionality figured out. In the meantime, please appreciate all the care and detail going into modeling the bathroom stalls -- and enjoy them in their clean pristine state, before I dirty them with layers of graffiti...



It was difficult to find decent bathroom stall reference photos. The game is set in 1962, so I need bathroom fixtures that look somewhat old. Unfortunately in Brooklyn / New York City, making your bathroom look like it came out of the 1920s / 1940s is very trendy right now. So not only do my fixtures need to look old, they also need to look somewhat cheap and utilitarian. The photos above represent some of the references I settled on: I wanted some of the old cheap institutional feeling of the stalls in the first photo, while feeling like the antique bathroom tech in the second photo (a Victorian era public bathroom in Toronto)... and then for some of the specifics of construction and parts, I used the diagram in the 3rd image.


I'm also consciously being very wasteful with some of my art assets: for instance, the individual screws on the panel brackets are beveled 20-sided cylinders, which is a preposterous waste of 3D geometry on such an "insignificant" detail -- except when the game is precisely about celebrating the bathroom as a central game space, and so it's suddenly not such a waste anymore, but rather a targeted investment. I want the player to notice the detail here, and the only way to do that is to put detail there.


Anyway, wish me luck, and more likely than not I still won't be finished by the end of May and I'll still have to delay the game's release, but at least I'll be closer...
↧
Search

So I'm joining NYU Game Center as full-time faculty in Fall 2017... (and a bit about adjuncting)

May 22, 2017, 11:48 am
$
0
0

So some brief career news stuff -- I'll be joining NYU Game Center as full-time faculty ("assistant arts professor") starting in Fall 2017 (along with Matt Boch). This might be a bit confusing. Wasn't I already teaching at NYU? Well, I'm so glad you asked...

Until then, I was/am still a part-time "adjunct" teacher at 2-3 different university programs around New York City. Adjunct faculty are treated very differently from full-time faculty: we don't usually get any benefits or health insurance, we are paid much less and at a per-class rate, and we have no real guarantee of re-appointment / job security. The average US adjunct (more than half of all faculty across the US now) would be pretty lucky to make more than $30,000 USD a year by teaching 5-10 courses a year, assuming they can hustle that much work together. (You'd also be very stressed-out and unhappy with such a heavy work load. I've heard horror stories of some adjuncts trying to teach 6 different classes at once across New York and New Jersey!)

Meanwhile, my adjunct situation is a bit unusual. The pay in NYC is a bit higher, and NYU / New School adjuncts unionized to negotiate better contracts. If you adjunct anywhere else in the US, you might have much lower pay and no union. I was also lucky to be working in a "hot" field right now, where I have a rare skillset and my classes fill-up regularly. If I were teaching first year writing and composition, I'd be considered infinitely replaceable. If I was teaching a class about 19th century Estonian poetry and only 3 students registered, the university would likely cancel the class for low enrollment. Compared to those cases, teaching video games and VR is like a golden ticket.

It's hard to talk about all this because the individual people involved -- the academic bureaucracy of directors and administrators -- are often perfectly kind people. It's not one person's fault, or even one department or university's fault. The bigger problem is cultural and systemic throughout the entire world: is a university supposed to organize knowledge and help educate everyone, or is it more like a fun resort where you drink and party and hopefully make friends with rich people? Well, if you're a university and the US government defunds you for the past 50 years, and a recession wipes out your endowment, and your alumni donors think you're getting "too PC" to deserve their money, then maybe it makes more sense for you to become a resort... etc.

Anyway. Promotions like this are pretty rare, and almost never happen for adjuncts like me. I'm thankful for the support of all my mentors and colleagues over the years, and I'm sad that I won't be teaching at Parsons MFADT or at NYU IDM anymore -- but also, again, I'm thankful for this opportunity to invest more of my time into teaching / research / being a "public intellectual" or whatever.

Some of the stuff I've been doing with a public bent already:
  • curating and helping to organize No Quarter, an annual NYC show where we commission new public games from 4 developer auteurs
  • broadcasting Level With Me, my weekly stream about level design on Twitch / YouTube
  • writing about VR, talking about VR at various events
And here's some of my plans for Fall 2017:
  • hold "open office hours" on the internet (kinda like Zach Lieberman) where anyone most people can call-in for advice about whatever
  • help spin-up NYU Game Center's streaming operations (you're gonna love "Bennett Foddy's Amiga Minute")
  • wear one of those professor jackets with elbow patches
Plus, I'll be sharing an office with all-American game studies good boy Charles Pratt. (Oh dear.)... Who knows what wacky arguments we'll have on a daily basis?! Stay tuned for our inevitable reality show.
↧

From modders to mimics: a people's history of the "prop hunt" genre

May 26, 2017, 1:58 pm
$
0
0
This post contains minor gameplay spoilers for the first hour of Prey (2017).

Contemporary game design is built on the blood, sweat, and tears of countless modders. MOBAs, tower defense, realistic squad shooters, walking simulators, survival royales, all started as mods. (For those keeping score: Aeon of Strife for Starcraft 1 or DOTA for Warcraft 3, innumerable tower defense UMS maps for Starcraft 1, Counter-Strike for Half-Life 1, Dear Esther for Half-Life 2, Day-Z for ARMA.)

Add the "prop hunt" to the list. The prop hunt is interior design meets hide and seek, where hiders "hide" in plain sight, disguised as the decorative clutter common in video game worlds, and seekers must guess what is inanimate clutter and what is sentient clutter. Arkane Studios' recent sci-fi shooter Prey (2017) cleverly commercializes this mechanic in a way that modders never could, and while it's nice to know they're paying attention to current trends, I think it's also important to remember the modders that usually get erased from game design histories. In this case, I argue that modders predate AAA design practice by at least 19 years.

CrateDM was a Quake 2 mod released on April 14, 1998, made in an hour by Chris "Shatter" Holden. As far as mods go, it was really simple from a technical perspective: a small map full of crates, and a PPM (plugin player model) that let players appear as crates, and no custom code or anything... which, I think, is brilliant. We often argue video games are made of code, and here was a new game genre created without any code at all!

Here is Holden's process and notes from the readme.txt:

Later on one day, I was experimenting with some PPM stuff while I was working on a new one, and I made a crate ppm. Now, this was just for testing things in the way of ppm creation, but I laughed my ass off watching it move around the map. I considered the possibility of DM one on one with both players using this crate ppm in a map with a lot of crates, thus you could spot running and "blend in" so to speak. I didn't really see any of the q2 maps that had the number of crates that I was looking for, so I spent around less than 20 minutes and tossed together a single room map. This room was just a large room with a LOT of crates and weapons/items. I sent the mod over to a friend and we played for several hours having a great time with it. The gameplay was insane, since the whole time it's just funny to see a crate sliding around the map, and then when you're mid battle, all of the sudden, your opponent disappears. It was extremely fun and creepy, so i figured, why not release it?

But first of all, I warn you, this is VERY simple, I made this entire thing in under an hour, the crate ppm is nothing more than a crate, period, don't expect anything flashy in this. It's just good fun with a dumb idea. :)

This is also real fun with bots, since it's harder to see them, but they can see you anywhere.
This confession betrays a lot of modder's anxiety: He only spent 20 minutes on the map! "Don't expect anything flashy"! It's "just good fun with a dumb idea"! The young Holden of 1998 really wants us to believe that he barely cares about what he's made, and he's merely dropping it on us as a courtesy. But I think he made something arguably much more interesting than what he was doing commercially as a professional muzzle flash artist for a now-forgotten Quake-like, and if we read a lot into this, then maybe it was emotionally necessary for Holden to play down CrateDM as something supposedly insignificant and trivial.

Fortunately, his fans were less bashful...



In 2002, Paul Ehreth made his own version for Half-Life 1, a mod called Boxwar. The community hub Planet Half-Life had this to say about it at the time:
Those of you who cut your FPS teeth many years ago may remember a little minimod for Quake 2 by the name of CrateDM. The idea was incredibly simple; everyone was a crate in a level full of crates. Before you begin to roll your eyes, consider this one simple fact; when you stop moving, you blend into the background. Thus sets the stage for one of the more unique gaming experiences out there. [...]

[...] Boxwar isn't the kind of thing that you play in order to be competitive or prove skill; rather, it falls under the category of "weird fun." Just select a box style and have fun sneaking up on people. It's really rather eerie to see the boxes gliding around the rooms and hiding. In fact, a third-person view feature lets you position yourself properly among stacks of boxes to blend in more effectively. If you can make it without being seen, you can often hide yourself higher up on a stack of them for a real surprise to anyone who's watching at eye level.
Boxwar's most notable feature is the third person camera view, essential for understanding your body as a box instead of a person. It shows how a disembodied perspective helps us understand our relation to the rest of the game world, as part of a little diorama / scene we are assembling -- we better understand how well others will see us, and how we might blend-in with the rest of the world.

Both CrateDM and Boxwar settled on crates partly because they've been historically lampooned but also partly because of the design constraint on clutter: you needed to render a lot of in-game objects all at once, and plain boxes were basically one of simplest possible things to render. As computers and internet connections got better, that freed up games to pursue more complicated objects beyond just crates...



Suicide Survival was a Half-Life 2 Deathmatch mod by Tobias Baumann released on November 28, 2008, pitting humanoid gardeners against sentient potted plants. The third-person camera'd shrub players must hide / blend in with the scenery, then pop out and detonate on first person camera'd gardeners. For self-defense, the gardeners only had a book they could throw at a potted plant; many gardeners complained the book velocity was much too slow to catch a speeding plant. I guess the design was skewed heavily in favor of the potted plants because that's what leads to great moments, like getting caught unaware by a plant you thought was safe, or looking over a courtyard full of 30 potted plants and trembling with fear.

With this emphasis on multiplayer survival jump-scares, Suicide Survival was contemporary with other asymmetrical hide and seek Source mods like The Hidden, where one invisible monster player faced off against a SWAT team of players. However, the problem with The Hidden was that squinting at invisible things is boring to play and to watch. In contrast, the absurdity of watching a sneaky shrub is much more entertaining.

But then why stop at shrubs?



Prop Hunt was a Team Fortress 2 server-side mod by Luke "Darkimmortal" Foreman, first released on October 22nd, 2009. The BLU team players were Pyros who lost health if they sprayed flames from their flamethrowers, while the RED team players were Scouts disguised as various "props" like buckets and trees and chimneys, trying to survive until the timer runs out. I think the main gameplay innovation here was to flip the dynamic: instead of hiders ambushing seekers, it is now seekers who try to flush-out the hiders. As the video shows, it's less scary and more frantic slapstick, resulting in more motivated seeker players. It's much more replayable than Suicide Survival.

The crucial technical factor was in the art and level design. Team Fortress 2 maps circa 2009 were big enough and had enough pre-existing clutter everywhere -- and not only that, but all the props were evenly lit in a flat cartoon style, which helps imposter props look identical to pre-placed props. In this way, I think the prop hunt could only have emerged around 2009 with this critical mass of factors: rising industry-wide standards for cluttered worlds combined with a trendy non-photorealistic art style and Valve's production resources / server SDK support.

By expanding the crate-hunt or shrub-hunt into a generalized prop hunt, we also elevate this mechanic to improvisational interior design. When you play prop hunt, you have to ask yourself, would the level designer have placed a tree there? How does that rock relate to the other rocks, which rock doesn't belong? And if we transplant that thinking into a genre synonymous with environmental storytelling...



Prey 2017's "mimic" NPC is a crab-like alien monster that can disguise itself as any similarly sized object in the game -- and then when you least expect it, it pops out and attacks you.

Historically, mimics in RPGs usually disguise themselves as enticing objects like treasure chests. Prey's mimic certainly continues that tradition, sometimes taking on the guise of valuable item pickups like medkits or weapons, but it also builds on top of that history by mixing in some of this recent prop hunt tradition. Sometimes the mimic AI will turn into a cardboard box or a chair -- in a locker room, it might turn into a nearby towel -- or in an office, buckets or mugs or even a "wet floor" sign are all fair game.

Prey mixes Suicide Survival's sudden anxiety with Prop Hunt's variety of disguises, but also goes where modders can't: it adds complex pre-scripted and systemic AI with frantic alien movement animations. Can a mimic climb on walls and ceilings, can it disguise itself as shelves or light fixtures or people? For a while, you have no idea what's the mimic's limits are, and that's why the first few hours of Prey are brilliant: the game successfully trained me to run away from office chairs and lamps. With this, the mindless fidelity and production value of AAA games performs a mimic maneuver itself, transforming into a meaningful gameplay mechanic AND NOT ONLY THAT BUT that mechanic conveniently involves admiring the normal maps! And there's a semen gun?!... Well done, Arkane, well done.

While Prey never quite matches those first few hours again, and maybe didn't sell as well as it should've, we can still understand it as the culmination of 19 years of modders' research and experimentation, ending in a banner year for objects in games. Here in 2017, the amazing PS4 game Everything debuts as the walking simulator of prop hunts, and object-oriented ontologists are stirring up Twitter wars in arguing for objects over people. And outside of games, we collectively fear the rise of AI, drones, internets of things, and weaponized smart homes...

But I'm not afraid! Prey has taught me how to productively deal with this anxiety around objects: just hit it with a wrench.

RELATED: if you liked this, check out the "People's History of the First Person Shooter" series I did for Rock Paper Shotgun back in 2012.
↧
↧

On that one brilliant episode of Murder She Wrote that thinks VR is kind of bullshit

June 9, 2017, 8:38 am
$
0
0

Murder She Wrote was a long running TV show about an elderly mystery novelist (played by Dame Angela Lansbury) who happens to solve all these murders wherever she goes. Like other long-running TV shows on CBS about older women having adventures, it was popular mostly with grandmothers and gay men -- which is why it's so surprising (or maybe unsurprising?) that it also had one of the most accurate on-point less-rosy depictions of 1990s VR on television.

If you want to know more about the episode "A Virtual Murder" (S10 E05), read Laura Hudson's full write-up for Wired.

If you're in a hurry, here's a brief synopsis, along with my short analysis... but first, please enjoy this GIF of someone (spoiler) shooting a guy in a VR headset:


Synopsis: Lansbury's character is the narrative designer on a new VR game, but the Silicon Valley VR startup is having some trouble -- they need to finish a build to appease their investors. When their creepy lead developer gets murdered and his source code is stolen (some really bad version control practices here) it is up to Lansbury to figure out who did it. She comes up with a plan to hack the VR simulation to trick the killer into revealing herself... and it turns out that the murderer did it because she was jealous of the dude's devotion to VR instead of her, and the missing source code was just a red herring to divert suspicion.

Let's back up and unpack some of the stuff going on in the episode:

First, Lansbury is a sort of proto-Janet-Murray figure who is fascinated by the expressive and narrative potential of virtual reality. While Murray ended up defining that perspective with her book Hamlet On The Holodeck, that book was published in 1997 and this episode aired in 1993. So instead, I'd argue that Lansbury's character might be modeled a bit after Brenda Laurel, who wrote Computers As Theater, first published in 1991. In that book, Laurel applies classic Aristotelian dramatic theory about well-structured plots and catharsis etc. to software engineering.

Lansbury's character faithfully follows Laurel's approach: whenever there's talk of bugs and glitches and viruses, she understands these phenomena as part of a cyber-theatrical aesthetic of VR and computers. Bugs aren't "real", they are social constructions argued into existence by users, and as such, bugs become tools if the user's needs change. With this methodology, she's the only character who understands how to user-model and test the killer's mind.

There's also surprisingly little fantasizing about VR in this episode. To depict VR in this episode, they don't do much CG, instead they just pixelate some FMV camera footage of real-life actors. VR, first and foremost, is depicted as a mimetic shadow of real-life human interaction that can be commodified as a business by Silicon Valley. I argue it's supposed to look a bit cheap because this show is a little skeptical about the ultimate promise of the technology. In the show, VR users look dorky and oblivious; the system is buggy and breaks several times; developers work on VR by sitting at terminals and typing on keyboards. This isn't exactly a futuristic or utopian vision of VR, instead this vision is grounded in present-day human interfaces and flaws. If VR reflects its creators, and its creators are flawed, then of course VR will be just as flawed?

Most TV depictions of VR of this era (namely Star Trek: The Next Generation, or even VR Troopers) focus on VR as a powerful technology that augments human potential. I think Murder She Wrote is one of the few shows that was interested yet skeptical, arguing VR could be a new narrative medium as well as a bullshit commercial entertainment product. We say that VR immerses humans, but maybe we have it the wrong way around: society immerses VR? Pretty insightful for 1993!
↧

Against simpler times

June 13, 2017, 12:33 pm
$
0
0

Years ago, I wrote about a hypothetical 2013 Queer Feminist Agenda for games. What an innocent time that was! Back then, I argued that we needed to pursue industry-wide reform, build-up theories of queer games, and combat gay apathy about queer politics.

Obviously a lot of that didn't really pan out, and now the world feels totally different: since 2013, Gamergate, Ferguson, Pulse, and Trump all happened, to say the least. Many people have now left video games for greener pastures, or have taken on more urgent politics beyond games... and anyway, Twitter just feels so much more stressful now. It's honestly kind of hard for me to still care about video games like I did back then. (Did we really use Twitter to argue about formalism in games? That's what we used Twitter for? Wow.)

Four years ago, we were talking about #1ReasonWhy, and GDC started the Advocacy track. Did any systemic reform actually happen? Did the industry end up hiring and retaining more women and black people? Did it get better for minorities? Some good-intentioned straight white male allies probably believe that "we won" because several games at E3 have black women in them. But beyond video game characters, I still feel like we're still having the same old conversations about the same old basic shit. The "discourse" feels extremely stagnated. It's hard to feel like there's any progress when every new Milkshake Duck of the Month pulls us back to basic questions like "wait why is it bad to harass women again?" and then suddenly the gamers are torn between supporting women / minorities vs. liking games about Blade Runner. As I've argued before, games probably aren't going to get "better" through this kind of desperate moral math.

Four years ago, we were also talking about a "queer games scene" and thinking about how to direct that momentum. For a variety of reasons, that energy ended up dissipating. On the plus side, there are definitely more people doing this work now, which is good, but there's also much less appetite for concentrating it into a "scene", which hurts our visibility and solidarity. Well, at least there's now a loose body of thinking and theory about queerness in games? I contributed to a new book literally called Queer Game Studies, which came out of the first Queerness and Games conference in 2013. When people ask what "queer games" are, I can now point to that book and event, even though it doesn't really feel so urgent to me anymore.

These days, I imagine a lot of us are very tired and disappointed, and I get it, and yeah I feel it too.

But however we feel, we definitely shouldn't nostalgize that supposedly simpler time, that now-mythical era before monthly milkshake ducks and anime frog nazis. That promise of 2013 (or 2012, or 2011, or 2010, etc.) is long gone and we can never go back. Instead, we must forge new kinds of promises and new kinds of trust.

We're still alive. We can still make new energy, new movements, and new alignments. And yeah, it won't feel the same. It won't feel like what we had before, or even what we think we had before. But I promise you, at the very least, whatever it is -- it will be ours.

↧

On "Let's Meat Adam" by Soulsoft

June 18, 2017, 8:02 am
$
0
0

Let's Meat Adam is a short gay erotic-horror visual novel puzzle game about being a hunky West Hollywood white dude trapped in a gory escape room. It was released back in March 2017, but I didn't see anyone talk about it, so now I'm bringing it up, and I want to unpack both its commendable bravery and its mistakes.

I think my main beef is the inconsistency. First, it's as if 3 different artists worked on this game, and none of their visual styles cohere. But "inconsistent" also describes the game's politics: it admirably wants to reconcile intersectionality with the gay eroticization of white muscle dudes. This is a difficult design problem that I also struggle with in my own games! So much of the culture of gay sex, touchstones like Athletic Model Guild or Tom of Finland or Kenneth Anger or Joe Gage or the vast majority of gay porn, focus on a small subset of body types. It's surprisingly difficult to refer back to that history without perpetuating that same narrow focus.

Let's Meat Adam, bravely, tries to address this problem head-on. However, I think it doesn't quite succeed...

(⚠ SPOILER ALERT: I'm going to discuss the plot, structure, and ending of the game!... ⚠)



You are Adam, a hunky white 20-something aspiring-Instagram-model with one of those Macklemore haircuts, trapped in an escape room game gone wrong, with dudes from other gay "tribes" around Los Angeles: a trendy gym bunny, a lanky middle-aged daddy, a lumberjack muscle-bear, etc. That kind of cast is pretty par for the course, but there's also an unusually diverse set of gay people of color: a foppish fashionista, a bitter hipster twink, a stouter darker-skinned queer nerd. (Wow, more than one?!)

As you progress through a series of rooms and solve somewhat arbitrary escape room puzzles, your group gets picked-off one by one with gruesome violence: exploding faces, dismemberment, torture, etc. Applying torture porn aesthetics to gay bodies felt surprisingly provocative and creepy to me, especially within the erotic tradition of visual novels. We're asked to maximize our group's survival, but at the same time, we're also supposed to optimize who to fuck.

At the end, you find out it was all rigged, and some of your supposed friends are the true mastermind killers (!)... but who? Who faked their fear and/or death to divert suspicion, and why?

It turns out the murderer masterminds are the supposedly sympathetic victimized people of color: the fat dark-skinned nerd, the neglected East Asian twink, and your masculine-passing Latino friend, are all sadistic killers who manipulated everyone into feeling sorry for them! They form a twisted queer leftist conspiracy to murder gay white men for their fatphobia / misogyny / racism. Oh my god the murderers are literally SJWs run amok!!!


Now, a horror story about fat effeminate queer men of color methodically murdering every normative masculine gay white muscle dude they see -- is, to say the least, a pretty novel premise to explore. It really does strike at the heart of the "no fats / no femmes / no Asians" discriminatory bullshit going on with US gay men today. I really want to commend the writer for building-up that premise, and they even portray the murderers' pain as partly justified and sympathetic.

But unfortunately the catastrophic problem with Let's Meat Adam is that it "plays it straight" in the end, thus compromising its entire message. Since you play as the totally repentant Good White Guy Who Just Didn't Know He Was Racist, you get to sit down with those radicalized murderous social justice queers and Lecture For Your Life:
  • Sure, gay white men discriminate against fat people / feminine people / people of color all the time...
  • But imagine this outlandish conspiracy to murder all hunky white dudes. See, both sides are at fault!
  • Did you try saying please? All you have to do is to tell white gays to not be racist. They didn't know they were being racist!
And with that speech, the killers are completely convinced and decide to spare you.

Huh?!


It's disappointing for a gay torture porn game to end with the basic-as-hell message that, yes, indeed, violence is bad. A more self-aware, campier (and dare I say "gayer") story treatment could've melded Scream with Pink Flamingos. Follow an absurd situation to its absurd conclusions. You could've "queered" horror! Instead, this game's Perfect Ending shows you and the other hunky white guy falling in love and fleeing decadent violent West Hollywood forever... to move to peaceful laidback Portland, Oregon, which is -- no offense to Portlanders -- literally the whitest city in America.

Again, within the history of gay eroticization, a focus on white beefcake isn't surprising nor notable. But what makes Let's Meat Adam feel so jarring is that it pretends it's oblivious, then dives into a surprisingly penetrative (ahem) moment of self-awareness... only to emerge blissfully oblivious again, with zero lessons learned.

Maybe a much more generous reading of this game would argue that this is all on purpose, to function as a sophisticated inverse agit-prop maneuver about how even a murderous queer social justice conspiracy can't change gay white men.

I don't believe in the gymnastics required for that interpretation, but I still recommend playing Let's Meat Adam if you're interested in sex games with politics, and I still want to commend the author for attempting to unpack a complicated issue in an unusual experimental way, even if I'm not quite sure it gets there in the end.
↧
Viewing all 495 articles
Browse latest View live
Search