KILL SCREEN

ISSuE nO. 0

VIDEOGAMES. VIDEOGAMES? VIDEOGAMES!

THE MATURITY ISSUE: SEx, DEAth AnD DyInG A BrOthErly COnnECtIOn PEtEr MOlynEux
ALSO: Controllers Controlled Where is My Heart? Walkthrough to a Made-Up Game Several Explanations of Our Name Our Residence Evil

Kill Screen would like to thank

John Portman James Pikover Tiff Chow MR. DREAM Klaas Wassenaar Alex Wawro Zach Klein N'Gai Croal George Broussard Greg Spenser jason bergman Jeff Hammerbacher Steph Thirion Allen Murray MJ00 Matt Munley Joshua Fishburn Jose R Gonzalez Bruno Justin Lai Bruno Dion Brice Coquereau Chris Ainsworth Jose Zagal Kent Zabladowski Rick Alexander Pixeljam Rich Gallagher Michael Abbott Tyler Weir Ryan O'Donnell Adam El Araby Matthew Wiggins David Costello Fred Zeleny Mike Nowak Paul Evans Peter Rubin DMZilla Simon Carless Steven Leung Celestine Arnold Mattathias Schwartz Sorcha Brophy-Warren Teri and Nicky Dahlen Fred Benenson Lindsay Elliot George Quraishi Kickstarter Yancey Strickler Ben Gilbert Gus Mustrapa Michael Highland Michael Hastings-Black

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Editor/head Guy Jamin Brophy-Warren Managing Editor/Important Guy Chris Dahlen Designer/Creative Guy Anthony Smyrski | smyrskicreative.com Contributors/unpaid Guys & Gals Leigh Alexander, Tom Bissell, Brock Davis, Rob Dubbin, Reinier van der Ende, Zack Handlen, L.B. Jeffries, Jason Killingsworth, Ryan Kuo, Matthew Shaer, Logan Walters. Cover Christophe Beauregard christophe-beauregard.com Back cover Chris Sweeney chrissweeneyart.blogspot.com

Kill Screen is published quarterly by Kill Screen Media, Inc. PO Box 1189 New York, NY 10156 Vol., No. 1. Winter 2010.

For subscriptions, please visit http://shop.killscreendaily.com While Kill Screen welcomes the submission of unsolicited work, it cannot accept responsibility for their loss or engage in related correspondence. Please send work to submissions@killscreendaily.com For additional information, please visit www.killscreendaily.com Printed in the United States.

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CONTRIBUTORS

leigh Alexander Leigh Alexander is news director of industry trade site Gamasutra, author of the Sexy Videogameland weblog and columnist at Kotaku, and contributes cultural commentary and reviews to a variety of outlets. tom Bissell Tom Bissell is the author of four books. His new book, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, will be published in June. He teaches fiction writing at Portland State University and lives in Portland, Oregon. rob Dubbin Rob Dubbin is a writer for The Colbert Report and the co-author (with Adam Parrish) of Earl Grey, a text adventure. He maintains an online journal of author bio criticism at biostock.tumblr.com. Zack handlen Zack Handlen is a freelance writer whose work can be seen regularly at The Onion AV Club. He has never beaten the 1989 LJN video game adaptation of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. l. B. Jeffries L.B. Jeffries is the pseudonym of a law student from South Carolina. He posts a weekly column on thePopMattersblog, Moving Pixels, providing game reviews and whatever else captures his fancy. Jason Killingsworth Jason Killingsworth lives in Dublin, Ireland. Hes the Games Editor for Paste and the Music Editor for Irelands Click magazine. You can read his weekly games column Start Press on the Paste website. His gamertag is ProfaneSaint. ryan Kuo Ryan Kuo is a Brooklyn-based artist and an editor at Crispy Gamer. Symptoms he has experienced while gaming are headaches, shortness of breath, and nausea. Find him on Xbox Live and Twitter as twerkface. Matthew Shaer Matthew Shaer writes for the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and Bookforum, among other publications.

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CONTENTS

Why Kill Screen? Our Residence Evil Pause: The Many Faces of a Space Invader Air Traffic Autumn Society Naming Rights Controllers Controlled Us Vs. Them Play In Isolation: Where Is My Heart? Childish Ambitions Pause: Pitfall Peter Molyneux Player One, Player Two Walkthrough for a Made-Up Game

4 10 16 18 24 26 30 36 40 46 52 54 56 60

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Game designers are obsessed with the money shot Jason Rohrer

WHY KILL SCREEN?

A name explained, defended, and heralded
4 | KIll SCrEEn WHY KILL SCREEN ?

By JAMIn BrOPhy-WArrEn

o this may be premature since I hardly know you, but let me tell you a secret. This magazine was supposed to be called something else. Kill Screen stemmed from a (I presume) drug-infested dream that a certain Tom Bissellsays he experienced at some point earlier this year. It must have been sometime between when we broached the idea over tikka masala in San Francisco in March, and one of our numerous nighttime sessions of Left 4 Dead a game that I would gladly contend is a communications facilitator on par with Gmail or Instant Messenger. But the point is, I thought Kill Screen was a swell name that encompassed all the kinetic and visual energies that would emanate from its pages. (To be all technical about it, the phrase comes from Golden Age of Arcade terminology and refers to the end of a game forced by a programming error such as the unplayable 256th level of Pac-Man.)

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yOur BODy IS A BAttlEGrOunD.

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WHY KILL SCREEN ?

And of course, like any good manager, I was completely wrong. I (un)wisely shared the title with the writers, who were decidedly negative about using the word kill in any shape or form associated with a magazine about videogames. Wed been down this road before with school shootings and the new specter of videogame mania. Why add fuel to that fire? they said. People just wont understand, and will write off a serious attempt to write about games as a circle of teenagers, balls clutched firmly in hand, spouting off the double names of all the Metal Gear Solid characters. And if there was one thing we didnt want, it was teenage balls. So, to my beloved and unpaid writers, let me explain to you why I changed our title to Kill

Screen at the last minute and why everything is about killing, dying, and expiration. In games, death is a natural part of the process. Perhaps its helpful to think about dying in videogames as akin to the concept of jiva in Hinduism. Hindis believe that a soul is immortal but is tied up in the jiva. The jiva is subject to all the impurities and pains of this world, including death. But death is viewed not as a calamity, but as part of the process of reincarnation and renewala temporal resting period that allows the jiva to learn and recuperate before it tries again. Ultimately, the jiva continues on its journey, living and dying along the way. The prospect of infinite, replayable, and fully reparable quietus has fascinated me since

I was responsible for endless calamities, both adventitious and calculated. Walking a bomb into a fray and ejecting all of the characters from the screen was the apotheosis of my gameplay experience.

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childhood to a pathological degree. In my world, death was deliberate and creative, but only in the hands of someone welltrained at creating phenomenal and spectacular methods of dying such as picking up my brother in Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers and hurtling us both into the gaping abyss. Death was my means of enlightenment. It was how I defined my identity in games I was the spoiler. When I played Super Smash Brothers through college, I was responsible for endless calamities, both adventitious and calculated. Walking a bomb into a fray and ejecting all of the characters from the screen was the apotheosis of my gameplay experience. My roommates told me that I was being a dick, but I desperately defended my compulsion. That in-game kamikaze was my tic, my Tourettes an uncontrollable itch only sated when I was rolling in giggles from my latest deadly caper. Clearly, whoever recorded the Betrayal voice for Halo has the same fetish. Let me be clearthis was not griefing. This was not wanton. This was not juvenile. It was certainly opportunistic (I was the worst and needed something to even the playing field). But there was something primal about dying in games that I saw as laudable. Something special was happening at that strange intersection of jiva and soul. Death was an echo of something I couldnt repeat in real lifea temporary flirtation with immortality and a chance to be, dare I say, creative in erasing myself and others. Its novelty lay in being able to step outside of the games explicit goals Finish the mission! Get to the chopper! in favor of something else, such as hurtling my four-wheeled minions in Skate headlong off the mega-ramp. Joy fused with pain to birth utter obliterative bliss. I could die for hours. And somewhere along the way, game designers realized that death was awesome too. It was the mid-90s and gore was cool. Spines were being ripped out of bodies and Trent Reznor was imparting his imminent darkness onto videogame soundtracks. It was videogames crimson
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period a signpost en route to the uncanny valley that marked that blood was the new black. What I saw was an abandonment of the airy reverence for death that I had cultivated throughout my childhood. I blame Mortal Kombat obviously. And as the graphical capabilities multiplied, each successive generation of games reimagined death as the money shot, a global chorus of Finish Him. It was the extended cut scene. It was the custom animation. It was Mad World, in all of its monochromatic Sin City violence, gorging itself on one violent execution after another, well past the pitch of bacchanalia. But where is that line? Whats good death and whats bad death and how are we to tell the difference between the two? Ah, the sticky part. I went to an all-boys high school, and I can tell you that the curiosity and morbid obsession with the climax is the creative force behind the wild sexual activities that dot the pages of Urban Dictionary. Sex was conceived as functionala matching of orifices with an exponential number of combinations. Fantasy begat reality. They made up a term for rubbing whatever all over a womans bedsheets and a host of other DSM-worthy activities. That act of naming made it real and escorted all sorts of ridiculous coital arrangements into the checklists of adolescent teens and even more adolescent college freshman. The boys of La Salle College High School couldnt imagine anything mutual about sex it was something you do to a girl. Theres no collaboration, only execution. (Two-piecing and one-shotting, in Gears-speak.) That distinction between done to and done with is what animates my fascination with death in games. A done to scenario is a game like Saw which, much to the delight of the half-dozen Eli Roth fans, plays out exactly like the movie. In Saw, youre supposed to survive, but really the game is about dying. Its about torturing your character and watching to see when he breaks, fails one of the riddles, and gets his head wistfully
WHY KILL SCREEN ?

But where is that line? Whats good death and whats bad death and how are we to tell the difference between the two? Ah, the sticky part.
exploded by one of Jigsaws ridiculous puzzles.Its about reaching your bare hand into a toilet full of hypodermic needles. Konami knows this type of deathplay elicits a response. And thats what makes games like Saw so boring. Women will tell younothings less sexy than predictability and you know what, men secretly are the same way. The almost-nude catwalk of Victorias Secret is far more appealing than the topless bar. The lingerie model offers the suggestion of possibility without making its presence obvious and ergo, inferior. Bad death in games is the untassled bosom, the obviousness of pornography. You have no relationship with the victimhe or she is only a vessel to enact damage upon. Isnt the bluntness of Resident Evils You Are Dead the same directness achieved by a facial? It certainly builds the same waythe same anticipation and expectationthe knowledge that something glorious is about to happen which is finally capped by an explosive discharge. Only its a chainsaw running through your enemys neck rather than a hand between your thighs. Games like that tell you what to do and expect you to do it. Youre the lion, theyre the hoop. Rinse, wash, repeat. And its the same trick over and over again, and you know its a trick and yet you ritually succumb to its monotony because the flaming ring is so desperately alluring. Those games are a drug and they are a lie. We should be wholly concerned with the done with. That should be our expectation with a gameits a partner. Good death is steering what the game has provided towards an unexpected end. The relationship thrives on the unexpected and the unintentional. The more options the game gives you, the less it relies on rails and guideposts, the better the experience will be. Its when I slide Nathan Drake toward an enemy, kick him through a broken window, and then jump out after him to see where the body lands in the CG environment. Its the errant taxi cab accidentally bumping Nico Bellic down a flight of stairs in Chinatown. Its putting your Sim in a swimming pool and then removing the ladder until he drowns. These are all optionaand in some cases illicituses of the game and thats what I enjoyed most about them. I felt enabled to do something I wasnt supposed to do. But I could also walk away. My participation was optional and that made my relationship with the game unique. It was the simple ability to say no. And that was a reflection of how far Id comewhen I was child, I spoke like a child, I understood as a child, and I thought as a child Theres no handbook that can prepare you, no predictive model for success, although there might be a video afterwards. Its mutual, interactive, fused with pathos, occasional pain, and frustration, and hopefully, part of a larger diet of emotional congress of which the experience is one of many apexes, both on and off-screen. It is, hopefully, what Kill Screen is all about.

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OUR RESIdENCE EvIL

By tOM BISSEll

Other games were nothing more than a collective prologue

o it begins here, in your stepfathers darkened living room, with you hunched over, watching as a dateline title card 1998 JULYforcefully types itself across the television screen. 1998 July? Why not ENGLAND, LONDON? Why not, A time once upon? A narrator debuts to describe something called Alpha Teams in medias res search for something called Bravo Teams downed chopper in what is mouthfully described as forest zone situated in northwest of Raccoon City. Okay. This is a Japanese game. That probably explains the year-date swappage. That also makes Raccoon City a valiant attempt at something idiomatically American-sounding, though it is about as convincing as an American-made game set in the Japanese metropolis of Port Sushi. You harbor affection for the products of Japan, from its cuisine to its girls to its video games. To your mind, then, a certain amount of ineffable Nipponese weirdity is par for the course, even if the course in question has fifteen holes and every one is a par nine. A live-action scene commences in which Alpha Team lands upon a foggy moor, finds Bravo Teams crashed chopper, and is attacked by Baskervillian hounds, but all you are privy to is the puppetry of snarling muzzles shot in artless close up. To the canine puppeteers credit, the hounds are more convincing than the living actors, whose performances are miraculously unsuccessful. The cinematography, meanwhile, is a shaky-cam, Evil Deadish fugue minus any insinuation of talent,

style, or coherence. Once the hellhound enfilade has taken the life of one Alpha Team member, the survivors retreat into a nearby mansion. You know that one of these survivors, following the load screen, will be yours to control. Given the majestic incompetence of the proceedings thus far, you check to see that the games receipt remains extant. For most of your life you have played video games. You have owned, in turn, the Atari 2600, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Sega Genesis, the Super Nintendo, and the Nintendo 64, and familiarized yourself with most of their marquee titles. The console you are playing now, the console you have only today purchased, is categorically different from its ancestors. It is called the Sony PlayStation. Its controllers are more ergonomic than those you have previously held and far more loaded with buttons, and its games are not plastic cartridges but compact discs. Previous consoles were silent but your new PlayStation zizzes and whirrs in an unfamiliar way as its digital stylus scans and loads. It is 1997. The PlayStation was released to the American market one year ago. You missed this, having been away, in the Peace Corps, teaching English, which service you terminated in a panic sixteen months short of your expected stay. Now you are back in your hometown, in the house you grew up in, feeling less directionless than mapless. You are also bored. Hence the PlayStation. The live-action sequence has given way to an animated indoor tableau of surprising detail and
OUR RESIDENCE EVIL

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PhOtO: JOS A. MOrAlES COBOS | flICKr.COM/PhOtOS/SAIlOrGAnyMEDE

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stark lovelinesslike no console game you have hitherto encountered. Three characters stand in the mansion foyer. There is Barry, a husky, ursine, ginger-bearded man; Wesker, enjoying the sunglasses and slicked-back hair of a coke fiend; and Jill, your character, a trim brunette in a beret. A brief conversation ensues about the necessity of finding Chris, your fellow Alpha Team member,

been trained by video games to work. It as though you, the gamer, are an invisible, purposefully compromised presence within the gameworld. The rooms only sound is a metronomically ticking grandfather clock. You step forward, experimenting with your controllers (seventeen!) buttons and noting the responsiveness of the controls, which lend Jills movement a precision

like all parables, zombies are both widely evocative and impossible to pin down. Part of the reason you had purchased this game was because you were curious to see what the Japanese imagination had made of the zombie.
who has somehow managed to go AWOL in the time it took to step across the threshold of the mansions entryway. Soon enough, a gunshot sounds from the next room. You and Barry are dispatched by Wesker to investigate. The dialogue, bad enough as written (Wow. What a mansion!), is mesmerizing in performance. It is as though the actors have been encouraged to place emphasis on the least apposite word in every spoken line. Barrys Hes our old partner, you know, to provide but one example, could have been read in any number of more or less appropriate ways, from Hes our old partner, you know to Hes our old partner, you know to Hes our old partner, you know. Hes our old partner, you know is the line reading of autistic miscalculation Resident Evil goes with. Upon entry into the new room, you are finally granted control of Jill, but how the game has chosen to frame the mise en scne is a little strange. You are not looking through Jills eyes, and movement does not result in a scrolling, follow-along screen. Instead, Jill stands in what appears to be a dining room, the in-game camera angled upon her in a way that annuls any wider field of vision. Plenty of games have given you spaces around which to wander but they always took care to provide you with a maximal vantage point. This is not a maximal angle; this is not at all how your eye has
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that is both impressive and a little creepy. Holding down one button allows Jill to run, for instance, and this is nicely animated. A pair of trigger buttons lay beneath each of your index fingers. Squeeze the left trigger and Jill lifts her pistol into firing position. Squeeze the right trigger and Jill fires, loudly, her pistol kicking up in response. All of thisfrom the preparatory pre-firing mechanic to the unfamiliar sensation of consequence your single shot has been givenfeels new to you. Every video-game gun you have previously fired did so at the push of a single button, the resultant physics no more palpable or significant than jumping or moving or any other in-game movement. Video-game armaments have always seemed to you a kind of voodoo. If you wanted some digital effigy to die, you simply lined it up and pushed in the requisite photonic pin. Here, however, there is no crosshair or reticule. You fire several more shots to verify this. How on earth do you aim? As you explore the dining room something even more bizarre begins to occur. The in-game camera is changing angles. Depending on where you go, the camera sometimes frames your character in relative close up and, other times, leaps back, reducing Jill to an apparent foreground afterthought. And yet no matter the angle from which you view Jill, the directional control schema,
OUR RESIDENCE EVIL

the precision of which you moments ago admired, remains the same. What this means is that, with every camera shift, your brain is forced to make a slight but bothersome spatial adjustment. The awkwardness of this baffles you. When you wanted Link or Mario to go left, you pushed left. That the character you controlled moved in accordance to his on-screen positioning, which in turn corresponded to your joystick or directional pad, was an accepted convention of the form. Yes, you have experienced mode shifts in games before that too is a conventionbut never so inexplicably or so totally. So far, the game provides no compelling explanation as to why it has sundered every convention it comes across. You glance at the box in which this game came packaged. Resident Evil. What the hell does that even mean? You know this game is intended to be scary. You also know that zombies are somehow involved; the box art promises that much. The notion of a scary game is striking you as increasingly laughable. While nothing is more terrifying to you than zombies, calling a zombie-based game Resident Evil was a solecism probably borne of failing to fully understand the zombie. Part of what makes zombies so frightening is that they are not evil. The zombie, a Caribbean borrowing, is in its North American guise a modern parable for well, there you go. Like all parables, zombies are both widely evocative and impossible to pin down. Part of the reason you had purchased this game was because you were curious to see what the Japanese imagination had made of the zombie. This was a culture, after all, that had transformed its twentieth-centurys resident evil into a giant bipedal dinosaur. On screen, Barry calls Jill over, where he kneels next to a pool of blood. (I hope its not Chriss blood.) He orders you to press on looking around while he completes his investigation. You are no criminologist, but gleaning the available information from a small, freestanding blood puddle would seem to you an undertaking of no more than three or four seconds. Barry, though, continues to ponder the hell out of that blood. You have two options. Leave the dining room to go back and explore the foyer, where Wesker presumably awaits your report, or go through a nearby side door. You take the side door. Any time you go through a door in this game you are presented with a load screen of daunting literalness: the point of view reverts to an implied first-person, the door grows closer, the knob turns,

the door opens, which is followed by the noise of it closing behind you. Considerable investment has been placed in a dramatic reproduction of this process: the knobs sound as though they were last oiled in the Cleveland Administration and the doors themselves slam shut as though they weigh five hundred pounds. The load screen complete, Jill now stands in a long narrow hallway. The camera looks down upon her from an angle of perhaps seventy degrees, which leaves you unable to see either ahead of or behind her. You turn her left, instinctively, only to hear something further down the hall. You hear chewing? No. It is worse than that. It is a wet, slushy sound, more like feasting than chewing. The camera has shifted yet again, allowing you to look down the hall but not around the corner, whence this gluttonous feasting sound originates. There is no music, no cues at all. The gameworld is silent but for your footsteps and the sound you now realize you have been set upon this path to encounter. You panic and run down to the other end of the hall, the feasting sound growing fainter, only to find two locked doors. No choice, then. You walk (not run) back toward the hallway corner, then stop and go to a subscreen to check your inventory. Your pistols ammunition reserves are paltry, and you curse yourself for having shot off so many bullets in the dining room. You also have a knife. You toggle back and forth between pistol and knife, equipping and unequipping. You eventually go with the pistol and leave the inventory screen. Jill stands inches before the hallway corner but it suddenly feels as though it is you standing before the hellmouth itself. Your body has become a hatchery from which spiderlings of dread erupt and skitter. Part of this is merely expectation, for you know that a zombie is around that corner and you are fairly certain it is eating Chris. Another part is you are not sure you can name it. It is not quite the control-and-release tension of the horror film and it is not quite actual terror. It is something else, a fear you can control, to a point, but to which you are also helplessly subjecta fear whose electricity becomes pleasure. You raise your pistoland this is interesting: you cannot move while your pistol is raised. You had not noticed this before. You should be able to move with your pistol raised and certainly you should be able to shoot while moving. That is another convention of the form. In video games, you can shoot your sluggish bullets while running,
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the camera switches in such a way as to leave you unaware of the zombies exact location, though you can still hear its awful, blood-freezing moan, which, disembodied, sounds not only terrifying but sad.

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OUR RESIDENCE EVIL

PhOtO: CArMElO SPEltInO | flICKr.COM/PhOtOS/PIGlIAPOSt

jumping, falling off a cliff, swimming underwater. On top of this you have exactly five rounds. Zombies are dispatched with headshots. You know that much. But how do you shoot for the head when the game provides you with no crosshair? A scary game seems a far less laughable notion than it did only a few moments ago. You turn the corner to yet another camera change. You have only a second or two to make out the particularsa tiny room, a downed figure, another figure bent over himbefore what is called a cut scene kicks in. The camera closes on a bald humanoid, now turning, noticing you, white head lividly veiny, mouth bloody, eyes flat and empty and purgatorial. There the brief cut scene ends. The zombie, now approaching, groans in thoughtless zombie misery, a half-eaten corpse behind it. You fire but nothing happens. In your panic you have forgotten the left trigger, which raises your weapon. This blunder has cost you. The zombie falls upon you with a groan and bites you avidly, your torso transforming into a blood fountain. You mash all seventeen of your controllers buttons before finally breaking free. The zombie staggers back a few steps and you manage to fire. Still no crosshair or reticule. Your shot misses, though by how much you have no idea. The zombie is upon you again. After pushing it awayand there is something date-rapeishly unwholesome about the way it assaults youyou stagger back into the hallway to give yourself more room to maneuver, but the camera switches in such a way as to leave you unaware of the zombies exact location, though you can still hear its awful, blood-freezing moan, which, disembodied, sounds not only terrifying but sad. You fire blindly down the hall, toward the moaning, with no guarantee that your shots are hitting the zombie or coming anywhere close to it. Soon pulling the trigger produces only spent clicks. You go to the inventory screen and equip your knife. When you return to gameplay the zombie appears within frame and lurches forward. You slash at it, successfully, blood geysering everywhere, but not before it manages to grab you yet again. After another chewy struggle, you back up further, the camera finally providing you with a vantage point that is not actively frustrating, and you lure the zombie toward you, lunging when it staggers into stabbing range. At last the creature drops. You approach its doubly lifeless husk, not quite believing what is happening when it grabs your leg and begins, quite naturally by this point, to bite you. You stab at this specimen

of undead indestructibility until, with a final anguished moan, a copious amount of blood pools beneath it. What new devilry is this? None of it has made sense. Not the absurd paucity of your ammunition stores, not the handicapping camera system, not the amount of effort it took to defeat a single foe, not that foes ability to play dead. You know a few things about video-game enemies. When they are attacked they either die instantly or lose health, and for foes as tough as this one you are typically able to track this process by way of an on-screen health bar. This zombie, however, had no health bar. (Neither do you, properly speaking. What you do have is an electrocardiographic waveform that is green when you are at full health, orange when you are hurt, and red when you are severely hurt. Not only is this EKG stashed away in the inventory subscreen, it provides only an approximate state of health. Right now your health is red. But how red? You have no idea. This game is rationing not only resources but information.) When video game characters die, furthermore, they disappear, like Raptured Christians or Jedi. Your assailant has not disappeared and instead remains facedown in a red pool of useless zombie plasma. This is a game in which every bullet, evidently, will count. This is also a game in which everything you kill will remain where it falls, at least until you leave the room. You stab it again. Revenge! You flee the hallway and return to Barry. Before you can tell him what has happened, the door behind you opens. The zombie whose deadness was a heliocentric certainty has followed you. You (not Jill: you) cry out in delighted shock. Your worried stepfather, a few rooms away, calls your name, his voice emanating from a world that, for the last half hour, has been as enclosing but indistinct as an amnion. After calling back that you are okay, you are newly conscious of the darkness around you, the lateness of the hour. For the first time in your life, a video game has done something more than entertain or distract you. It has bypassed your limbic system and gone straight for the spinal canal. You lean back, cautiously. You are twenty-three years old. You have played a lot of games. Right now, all those games, all the irrecoverable eons you have invested in them, seem to you, suddenly, like nothing more than a collective prologue.

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PAUSE

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PAUSE

Logan Walters / website13156.com

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AIR TRAFFIC
A million minds, a million miles

By MAtthEW ShAEr

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ot so long ago, a former musician named Dave Mark had an idea for a video game. This was back near the turn of the millennium, when the industry blood lust for phantasmagoric spectacle and point-and-click carnage had not yet arrived. Demanding games like Black & White were a hit with critics; the supremely realistic Operation Flashpoint, was scooped up by the US military for use in training recruits. Marks idea was to take the things that made these games goodthat gave them complexity, strategy, and intricacyand tweak the artificial intelligence to such a degree that they became great. Mark, who is fond of saying a good AI designer must also be a good psychologist, was primarily interested in how he could best replicate human behavior. AI in games is generally too limited, and because of that, it is too predictable, Mark told me recently. In most cases, even in highly advanced games, a player either knows exactly whats coming, or knows how the enemy or ally is going to respond. If this, then that. If that, then this. AI has gotten better over time, but there is still a point in many titles when the game play starts to look really very stupid. When we first spoke, I had just finished Resident Evil IV on the Nintendo Wii, and I told Mark that the enemies in that game generally came in about four varieties, each of which acted in predictable ways: the evil farmers threw their axes, the evil bugs climbed up the wall and dropped onto your head, and so on. Even the largest of bosses fought under a transparent rubric. In one way, of course, this is what made the Resident Evil franchise such a success. Many gamers just want somewhere to point their Wiimotethe sooner they shoot the zombies head clear off his slimy shoulders, the better. There is catharsis in a predictable game. It validates a players sense of his own intelligence; frustration is replaced by release. But there is another audience that craves a deeper gaming experience. They want to be immersed; they want to stay up until four in the morning until their eyes turn rheumy; they want to slam down Crunk!!! Juice and burrow away from the real world. These were the gamers Mark wanted to write for. How does a character proceed in the world? That should be the real question driving a good game, and its not, Mark said. The game Mark had in mind, it should be said, could never be a mass market sensation. He knew this when he set to work in 2001, and hes proud to say it now. There are no zombies in this

game; no monsters, no riddles, no motion-sensing technology. There are planes, but they dont have guns, and there is animation, but it sure isnt pretty, even by the pixilated standards of yesteryear. What Airline Traffic Manager does have is math. Hard calculus. Equations by the hundreds of thousands. In fact, the name of Marks consulting and development company is Intrinsic Algorithm; its motto is Reducing the World to Mathematical Equations! In many ways, the concept of Airline Traffic Manager is similar to Railroad Tycoon: the player manages the operations of a major airline, juggling flight paths, travel schedules, pilots and planes. The variables are manifold, and include bad weather, malfunctioning avionics, and potholed runways. What sets Marks game apart is the staggering scale of the model. His canvas is 400 airfields in 300 metropolitan cities; his cast is 1 million opinionated Americans. The task of the player is to juggle the needs of those passengers, who must be fitted into 60 different types of aircraftand 100 different cabin configurationsbefore they are shuttled off to some destination on the other side of the country. Each character arrives with his or her own prejudices, fears, and anxieties. Some folks will demand first class; some will order vegetarian food; some will expect their in-flight entertainment system to work. There are big passengers, and there are small passengers. There are passengers who travel with vomiting babies on their laps; there are passengers who will need extra-large seats to accommodate their extra-large bottoms. The player is in charge of it all, and must become a maestro of this seething horde. In a YouTube video created in 2004, Mark demonstrates the simulation from the origin pointin other words, from the world a first-time player of Airline Traffic Manager would step into. At the moment, Mark says in a voice over, and this is right after starting the game, we have one million passengers in the game, of which, at the moment, 44,000 have already booked itineraries. Every time the simulation enters a new 24-hour periodthe game can be played in real timethe customer list generates anew. So assuming you played Airline Traffic Manager for one week, youd be dealing with 7 million passengers. Play for a month, and youd have 31 million on your hands. And you thought tending to one railroad line was difficult. At the 2009 Game Developers Conference, Mark
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was a featured speaker on a panel about the future of AI. He spoke after Richard Evans, a Senior AI Engineer at Electronic Arts, and before Phil Carlisle, a Lecturer at the University of Bolton. Carlisle talked about Descartes and the difficulties of mapping facial emotion; Evans talked about social modeling in Sims 3, a mainstream game which went on to sell millions of copies. Mark spoke about Airline Traffic Manager. In the first few minutes of his lecture, he showed a photograph of a puppy, and asked the audience whether they wanted to kick, run screaming from, or meet the animal. The majority wanted to meet the puppy. Then Mark showed a photograph of a snarling dog, and asked the same question. The majority now wanted to run screaming from the dog. Still, as Mark later told me, there were gradations to each reactionsome folks would have kicked the snarling dog, rather than run away, and some would have been annoyed by the cute puppy. What everyone should take away from the exercise, Mark explained, was that different people have different reactions, and those reactions are modeled on a regularly changing set of variables,

including personality, history, and mood. This should all be pretty obvious. But if you take a look at the best-selling games from the past few years, youll notice that the overwhelming majority dont bother mapping the gradations in behavior. Either a bad guy is dead or he isnt; either the princess is saved or shes eaten by a dragon; either you hit or you miss. Correspondingly, games currently elicit a narrow range of emotions from human players: I am either scared, frustrated, or happy. In real life, I am often scared, frustrated, and angry, but I am also sometimes tentatively happy, miserably sad, somewhat queasy, or totally confused. Human experience has gradations, in other words, and so should games. Using a collection of colored charts and graphs Mark went on to explain all this to the audience; he also demonstrated a bit of how Airline Traffic Manager might work. The old method, he concluded, which relies on identical units, clearly wasnt working. It made for shallow, repetitive game play, and unrealistic interaction. But by sampling a wide range of situations, and inserting a large cast of characters into each of those

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AIR TRAFFIC

As Mark hinted at the GDC, not a single of those 1 million asses acts in the same way as the other 999,999 asses.
situationsas well as amping up the number of variablesa developer would eventually create far more choices. A good game, he said, is a series of interesting choices. And Airline Traffic Manager is nothing but choices. The game comes equipped with a handful of point A to point B challenges players, for instance, can compete to become the most-respected carrier, or the most profitable. The gameplay in these scenarios is restricted chronologically and laterally; once you win or lose or run out of time, the game ends. But the real achievement of Airline Traffic Manager is a free market option, where the model sprawls, in real time, over days, weeks, months. In that mode, the challenge is not just to entertain the complaints of a million passengers, but to do it better than your competition. After all, airline carriers dont operate in a vacuum. They must constantly scramble to match their prices to the latest offerings on Travelocity, and cope with the fluctuating costs of fuel, maintenance, and labor. The series of interesting choices extends towards infinity: players must keep one eye on the pulse of their customers, and the other on aircraft load factors and the general condition of their fleet. Theyll need to purchase land and airport space from ailing competitors; unload unprofitable property; and manage the layout of each gate, from the garages to the check-in desks. Theyll need to stuff 1 million asses into 1 million seats every day, and then wake up and do it all again. As Mark hinted at the GDC, not a single of those 1 million asses acts in the same way as the other 999,999 asses. The world of Airline Traffic Manager is not the world of Resident Evil, where the same three zombies march resolutely towards the camera, pitchforks held overhead. Here, the player encounters passengers who are mildly content, if a little hungry, and passengers who are in a rush. Frustration, disappointment, fearall these emotions factor into the equation. Broken planes; planes that are about to break; pilots who could use a vacation; pilots who are fresh and rested. Its mind-bogglingly arcane stuffa world stripped down to integers. But for the right player, the prospect of a game like Airline Traffic Manager is tremendously appealing. It envisions a world that

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really is reduced to mathematical equationsa world where everything is not only possible, but everything is happening at once, all the time, and occasionally, twice on the hour. On a purely technological level, artificial intelligenceand thus the emotional resonance of the best gameshas improved mightily over the past few years. Although the major studios are concentrated mostly on low-brainpower, highaction fare, games like Fable II and Sims 3 prove there is still a market for character-first titles. Still, many developers feel there is a considerable distance between what is possible and what is actually being brought to market. I suppose the simplest problem with AI in mainstream gaming today is that most games dont think of AI broadly enoughas something that extends beyond pathfinding and other forms of planning, Ian Bogost, a professor at Georgia Tech and a founding partner at Persuasive Games, told me. There are exceptions character AI in the Sims 3; drama management in Far Cry 2and it shouldnt come as a surprise that those titles are driven by design leaders who understand AI much more broadly. Damian Isla, who was until recently the lead AI programmer at Bungie Studios, said the issue was one of risk aversion. I think youve got a lot of set designs out there that we know work, Isla said. And youve got an industry thats become big-budget driven, with hundreds of millions of dollars. No one right now is too interested in the experimental. Its the same thing weve seen with Hollywood: its a natural reaction when so much money is at stake. The studios will say, Were not sure these games are going to work, so were not going to back them. Mark, for his part, is not particularly interested in studio backing, or an angel investor. His commitment to Airline Traffic Manager has everything to do with the fervor of a career innovator. He wants to prove that AI isnt just a matter of shooting zombie brains out of the
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backside of zombie skulls. He wants to prove, per Bogost, that AI can be more than the backbone of a game: that it can become the game itself. Mark first conceptualized Airline Traffic Manager sometime in 2001, and planned to start work in earnest the next spring. Then life caught up with him. There were medical problems; there was a lock down on funding; at some point, he realized that he was going to go broke if he pursued the game full-time. Just as Id get my feet wet, Id have to duck out again, he said. Fits and startsthat was the only way I could make it work. With a game like this, I didnt think thered ever be an angel investor. So in the meantime, Mark set about building a successful consulting and programming business. He helped found the AI Game Programmers Guild, and last year, he published his first book, Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI. Its not an easy thing getting a new business off the ground, and Mark found he had less and less time to work on Airline Traffic Manager. In 2004, he managed to crank out a video demo of the game, which is now available for free online. He circulated the video, and expected his friends to be daunted by the complexity of the game, or to nod and smile politely. After all, who wants to juggle dietary preferences for a mob of disgruntled passengers, when they could be stabbing vampires with a stake-firing machine gun? Who wants to scrutinize seat plans in a 747, when they could knee a drug dealer in the face in a Chinatown alley? But the response to Marks creation was one of awe. Several acquaintances told Mark that the scale of Airline Traffic Manager was unprecedented, as was the subtlety with which he mapped the responses of each passenger. As strange as it sounds to say, Mark says, there are a lot of techniques here that could apply to [mainstream] games. Consider, for instance, a shooter like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. When Infinity Ward developed the game, they built in a good deal of squad-based warfarethe player must rely on, rescue, and fight organized groups of computer-controlled soldiers.
AIR TRAFFIC

And yet there are times when a character seems to be operating in only one dimensionhe charges forward, no matter what the risk, no matter how many fellow soldiers have fallen dead behind him. Without realistic characterizations, the game often feels robotic. Mark, theoretically, has built a model with the capacity to juggle millions of behaviorally unique characters. His passengers dont operate in one dimension; they are not merely brave or strong. They have preferences that must be met, yes, but their responses are gradated, depending on a flood of variables. How would one million of those characters interact if they were smashed together in one of the biggest corporate clusterfucks in the world? Well, theyd behave in 1 million different ways. This kind of intricacy is a Holy Grail of sorts for AI developers, who view character mapping as paramount to graphical wizardry. A few years ago, I interviewed Peter Molyneux, who was then working on Fable II. We could have made a game which had more horrific moments or more action moments than any other game, Molyneux said. But we decided that making you feel you are loved, by the wife you have chosen, by the children

you have sired, by the community you have helpedand the simple unconditional love of your companion dog would be a much more satisfying gaming experience. A satisfying gaming experienceone cobbled together out of a flood of integers and equations remains Marks goal. Still, as of this summer, he had not yet managed to stow away enough time to finish Airline Traffic Manager. His services are in high demand, and he remains happily, and frantically, busy. On the afternoon we spoke, Mark had just returned from a consulting gig; the next week, he had agreed to meet with the directors of a prominent game studio, who were interested in having him look at some of their games. He was in Texas with his in-laws, and told me he could give me just a few minutes before his next scheduled mandatory food-based event, but once he started talking about Airline Traffic Manager, the few minutes turned into an hour. I work full time, and Ive already got ideas for three other games, Mark said. This thing though, this first game, remains my goal. I want to get it done, he said, and then paused. I will get it done.

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AUTUMN SOCIETY

01.
24 | KIll SCrEEn AUTUMN SOCIETY

Inspired by the annual I Am 8-Bit show in los Angeles, graphic designer Joseph Chogrin Game wanted to put together his own East Coast equivalent. In August, his art collective, the Autumn Society, had their first show, 8 Bit and Beyond. Comprised of many of his classmates from university of Arts in Philadelphia, the show was a real world test for the blog that Chogrin had been running. the point of the show was to connect the games of his childhood to the world of his younger siblings. My little brother plays Halo and Gears of War. nazi zombies too. All the shoot-em-ups. these new games are kill, kill, kill. you can see more of their work at theAutumnSociety.com.

02.

03.
01. Anthony Pedro / anthonypedro.com 02. Jude Buffum / judebuffum.com 03. Glen Brogan / albinoraven7.blogspot.com 25 | WIntEr 2010

NAMING RIGHTS
By rOB DuBBIn

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NAMING RIGHTS

From: Jamin Brophy-Warren (jamin@killscreenmagazine.com) To: Bart Anderson (bart@spawn.ly) Subject: Game magazine Bart, pleasure to make your acquantaince. A friend of mine suggested you might be able to assist us as were still looking for a name for our projecta magazine for the thinking gamer. Please let me know if you would be interested. Something funny and pithy really. Best, Jamin From: Bart Anderson IV (bart@spawn.ly) To: Jamin Brophy-Warren (jamin@killscreenmagazine.com) Subject: Re: Game magazine Jamin First, Bart Anderson is my great-grandfather's name. Please, call me Bart Anderson IV. Second, thank you for inquiring about Spawn Group's Brand Consulting services. I don't know about funny names but we have a stellar reputation for generating AAA, blockbuster, outof-the-box identities for our clients. Do you know Pepsi Amp? We created the Amp Lamp, a table lamp whose base has a nozzle and a storage tank (for Pepsi Amp). Now everyone at the Brooklyn Cyclones game where we gave them out associates the kick-ass taste of Pepsi Amp with the kick-ass activity of reading at night. So yeah, I think we know a thing or two about building really sharp brands that get people talking.

Speaking of talking, let's do that about your magazine. Or should I say, let's do that about COMMODORE 65. Duke Nukem Forever, Bart Anderson IV President, Spawn Group PS - Our rate is two thousand dollars per every time you say wow, so I'm guessing right now you owe us about four thousand dollars. From: Jamin Brophy-Warren (jamin@killscreenmagazine.com) To: Bart Anderson (bart@spawn.ly) Subject: Anything else? Bart, thanks for those, but were aiming for something a little more modern. Yours, J From: Bart Anderson IV (bart@spawn.ly) To: Jamin Brophy-Warren (jamin@killscreenmagazine.com) Subject: Re: Anything else? Jamin Bart here. Thanks for the email, and your hilarious impersonation of someone who hasn't been hit by gaming's retro craze. Which I assure you is still alive and well, judging by the working TRS-80 belt buckle one of our graphics guys wore to last year's kickball tournament.

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I write this still confident you are going with Commodore 65, a name with no flaws. But to play along with your pretend (and otherwise incredibly hurtful) skepticism, here are four equally rockin' backup ideas: - Chain Gun - SuperScopez - Another Castle - Wiii Jamin, I'm reminded of the motto from Anderson Shoes, the footwear business built by three generations of Andersons before I spun it down into a marketing firm: We don't sell shoes, we sell your feet. We here at Spawn stand ready to sell your feet. Bart Anderson IV President, Spawn Group From: Jamin Brophy-Warren (jamin@killscreenmagazine.com) To: Bart Anderson (bart@spawn.ly) Subject: Re: Anything else? Bart, thank you for the heartfelt suggestions. We're taking them into consideration but still looking for a home run. Keep me posted, Jamin From: Jenny Klondike (jenny@spawn.ly) To: Jamin Brophy Warren (jamin@killscreenmagazine.com) Subject: Re: Anything else? Jamin, This is Jenny Klondike, Bart Anderson IV's assistant here at Spawn Group. I want to apologize for the delayin the two weeks following your last email, Bart didn't leave his isolation tank. That's usually a very good sign.

He asked me to send you the options he came up with: - Ecco Chamber - Crate Fancy - Miyamotor Trend - Ludocris I was also asked to relay the message that Bart will resume direct correspondence when Jamin Brophy-Warren wakes the hell up. I hope this is helpful. Sincerely, Jenny Klondike Assistant to the President, Spawn Group From: Jamin Brophy-Warren (jamin@killscreenmagazine.com) To: Bart Anderson (bart@spawn.ly) Cc: Jenny Klondike (jenny@spawn.ly) Subject: Re: Anything else? Bart, Jenny, and everyone else at Spawn, Appreciate the effort you're all putting into this. Still not hitting the mark though, and we go to press in a week. Let me know if I can send some of the writers over to help. Best, Jamin From: Bart Anderson IV (bart@spawn.ly) To: Jamin Brophy Warren (jamin@killscreenmagazine.com) Cc: Jenny Klondike (jenny@spawn.ly) Subject: Re: Anything else? Jamin, Bart here, writing in hopes that I might figure out just what in the fuck is wrong with you.

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NAMING RIGHTS

In your messages so far I detect a strong subtext, that you think maybe we here at Spawn are somehow fucking around. Almost like you didn't notice our Libyan top-level domain, which as you know cannot be purchased from resellers, and must be wrested from the hands of Qaddafi himself. Do you know what we came up with today? Not even for you, but for Xbox or Playstation or wherever you forward this when you wake up after fainting from how brilliant it is? PSYCHOLUDICS games you play with your MIND. I'll explain while you pick up your jaw off the floor. NES was fine, right? But you played it with your HANDS, like a fucking neanderthal. Sorry, now that's your BRAIN'S job. Sure, there's still a controller, of course there's a controller, but get thiswe don't call it a controller anymore. We call it a conduit. That sound you hear is the future, straining to change course and give us both a giant h-job. But you want more magazine names. Fine. Ignore the gold I've panned from the zeitgeist and mailed to you in a diamond-studded package tied with John Carmack's hair. Here are three more ideas I came up with just while writing this: - Save Point - Cartridge Quarterly (even if it's not quarterly) - The Village Voxel See you at the launch party, Bart Anderson IV President, Spawn Group From: Jamin Brophy-Warren (jamin@killscreenmagazine.com) To: Bart Anderson (bart@spawn.ly) Cc: Jenny Klondike (jenny@spawn.ly) Subject: Re: Anything else? Bart, I think were going to take this project in another direction. Thanks. Jamin

From: Bart Anderson IV (bart@spawn.ly) To: Jamin Brophy Warren (jamin@ killscreenmagazine.com) Cc: Jenny Klondike (jenny@spawn.ly) Subject: Re: Anything else? Jamin This is all so fucked. Email is so fucked, I feel like it's 1840. This email collaboration has been doomed from the beginning. Fuck it, I'm calling Larry. I have one favor with Google and I'm calling it in. Jamin, I am getting you on Google Wave. Bart Bart: Now we're talking. Collaboration time! Bart: Hey look! I'm up here! Bart: WAAAAAAAVE Bart: Let's do this Bart: Where you at, Jamin? Bart: I'll start it off: Wumpus Bart: Did the invite go through? Bart: I think we're really cooking here Bart: Type type type type type type Bart: waaaaaaave Jenny: How about Kill Screen? Bart: Not a goddamn chance Bart: Jenny, you are fired

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CONTROLLERS CONTROLLEd
Our experiences of videogames are unwittingly shaped by what we hold in our hands. The contours, the button placements, the size, and even the colors of the controllers shape our gameplay, no less than the stitches on a football beget its spiral or the texture of a tennis ball affects its rotation. We asked three scholars to kindly reflect on videogame controllers.

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CONTROLLERS, CONTROLLED

e tend to forget that the body is part of the interface, and that essentially the screen is a membrane between the world of your vision and the universe of the chip. Part of the dynamic is machines built around the human body, but its also about retaining the human body as well. Whats interesting is that there are cultural differences in the way people organize their bodies. People of different generations and backgrounds tend to have different interfaces for themselves, which is part of why the Wii when it was first introduced was considered so revolutionary. Its not just that movement became more kinesthetic, but it was a subtle shift in the population that the machine was hailing. The Wii was about hailing casual gamers and female gamers. I was speaking to a colleague who went to E3 and saw the Wii demo. She said that it was the most female interface shed seen. Digital media is about trying to bring the dynamism and flexibility of digital information into context with the pleasures of real world play. Early theorist of games Roger Callois said there were four elements of gameplay and one of them is the pleasure of motion. Thats a large part of what you find in all games, but the more recent innovations have allowed players to capitalize

[on it]. Its more pleasurable to play boxing in Wii Sports than to play Fight Night on Xbox. I remember Punch-Out as a kid. There was a joystick with a little button and you had to build up to the big button. Each of us had a different dance when we hit that red button. We pounced on it. We hollered and hooted. There were a million ways to hit that button. The simplicity of Punch-Out meant more choice for the players, but even with the Wii, you as the player have less power. Youre forced to conform to the expectations of the machine. It requires a greater degree of physical discipline, particularly in terms of submitting to authority. Theres a form of authority in all physical things. Chairs are different everywhere, because [of the way] people use their bodies in different parts of the world. To me, the Wii will always be like sitting up straight. Youve got to swing that golf club just so and part of whats lost is the improvisational inventory. The most valuable art forms are those that critique and engage the interface. The delivery mechanism and the medium serve to puncture the illusion between art world and real world. Thats what the innovations from cubism to abstract expressionism were trying to remind peoplethat youre looking at the canvas and not the world. The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was

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CONTROLLERS, CONTROLLED

Videogame controllers are a projection of how the companies want to be viewed. Starting with the Wii or DS, those are really a sign to me that nintendo wants to be perceived as a serious business.

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about reminding people they werent a live band. Game developers should be the same way. They are trying to get players to challenge the assumptions they bring to the table. Aram Sinnreich, former director, OMD Ignition factory, formerly professor of media, culture and communication at nyu

Videogame controllers are a projection of how the companies want to be viewed. Starting with the Wii or DS, those are really a sign to me that Nintendo wants to be perceived as a serious business. I live in Geneva with lots of bankers and its always funny for me to see them playing their DS. They dont want a colorful device they want to look serious. My favorite in terms of balancing the need for the hardcore and casual was the Super Famicom controller. It was the right shape with the four buttons and two shoulder buttons. To me, thats one of the most perfect devices ever made and its easy to get a grip on. nicolas nova, user research/ design ethnographer for lIftlab

I was immediately thinking about an instrument like the piano which is complex, but we do teach it to children. Music has really strong patterns that allow us to learn. The scale is replicated on that board right there, for example. You dont have to re-learn the controls every time you move to another part of the piano. There was a great article about how games are like opera in that they have this arcane language, so people who appreciate games learn all the nuances and appreciate it deeply. To outsiders, its more and more complex and looks almost baroque. If you understand the complex control schemes then theres an incentive to spend time learning. To the outside, it looks like a fools effort. The first time you used a fork you were bad at it too. tracy fullerton, Director of the EA Game Innovation lab and Associate Professor at uSC

Are game controllers too complicated? Its not so much diminishing returns as it is diminishing audience. Youre basically taking a whole segment of the public and saying you will not learn this. The more complex the product, the more dedication it takes to use, so, by natural market forces, itll be a smaller group. One of the problems with your standard game pad is that it has no natural mapping to things in the real world. If you look at Guitar Hero, the buttons are mapped to something thats very natural. With controllers, there are the thumb sticks that give us some orientation, but what are the A and B buttons? Theres nothing natural that maps to that so we have to match abstract concepts.

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CONTROLLERS, CONTROLLED

Reinier van der Ende, a 32-year-old X-ray technician at the largest hospital in the northern Netherlands, began scanning his collection of videogame equipment (11 consoles and counting) last autumn to post on a Dutch gaming forum. He called it X-Ray Monday.

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PhOtO: ryAn KuO | ESPErMAnSIOn.COM

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US VS. THEM

US vS. THEM
For the sake of the medium
By lEIGh AlExAnDEr

he past several years have given rise to a wonderful community online for games. In this ever-growing network of friends, rivals, bloggers, Twitter followers and forum buddies, theres a home for our Call of Duty 5 martial philosophy and our BioShock moral agony; theres a place where people really get why we have a problem with the divide between Shadow Complexs gameplay and its narrative.

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And its utterly hearteningnot only are video games cresting noble heights on their path to a brave new frontier, but we as audiences are ready for this depth. Were prepared, cries the blogosphere, to embrace this new art form with grace and dignity. If only we were living in the real world. In the real world, no matter how many DS sales numbers we read, the only time we see one is in the hands of some small kid whos blankly tapping away at the years nine-millionth pet simulator. And should we see another adult with a DS, say, on the subway commute, its all we can do not to crane our necks desperately for whatre you playing?! , not to pull out our own DS with big, obvious motions. We become rabidIs that a Scribblenauts hat? Oh, nope, just a normal hat, okay. Desperate for recognition, we make with the T-shirts, the pins; anybody sporting Mario iconography becomes a possible kindred. We bite down on the urge to intrude on overheard conversations, we shout at the television during Holiday gift demonstrations of video game consoles because the anchors with their cheerful, simplistic questions just dont understand, and Lord help the innocent cocktail-hour lamb who, lash-batting, dares arent those things awful violent? Oh, shes going to get ita frothing 45-minute spiel on ludology.

recognized and heard. We are sticking out like sore thumbs bringing Portal cake to the office. This is our brave new frontier? All right; we understand that things take time, and that in the meanwhile its not so bad to be part of an elite audience ahead of the curve in understanding that video games are not toys. And should we wish to feel at home (in the real world, not on the computer), surely theres no better hub for the like-minded than the biggest game retail chain in America, right? I mean, of course therell be the meatheads who just go to GameStop to buy Madden, but its also easy to visualize a sincere coven cross-legged among the Oblivion strategy guides, heads together in discussion. How strange to find that in GameStop, people are simply shopping, the way they would at Crate & Barrel or somewhere like that. A disheveled child is parked vacantly at a kiosk, endlessly getting nowhere with Ratchet & Clank; his mother is waiting patiently in line to ask for assistance with something, right behind the guy whos buying a used copy of NHL 2K10, or 2Ks NHL 2010 or whatever its called, some sports game. Whats this one? a girl of about nine or ten asks her friend, as she fishes through the deepdiscount bin, and pulls out Xenogears. You are

Final Fantasy earrings urgently needing to be

Were standing in the cocktail hour wearing

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US VS. THEM

Why would they seek employment at GameStop unless they were like us, as passionate as we are?
gripped by a car crash of emotionsmy god, she doesnt know what Xenogears is; and suddenly you feel old, and look at that precious title in that unknowing little hand, and what is Xenogears doing in the discount bin, anyway? Who mislaid it? Dunno, says the friend, it looks weird. The girls discard it, disinterestedly, and wander on, and you are left standing there lock-kneed and taut-jawedand youd been about to spring your machinegun enthusiasm on the shopping kids, pounce on them like a wolf out of The Path, and probably youre feeling a little alienated by now when you realize nobody in here even knows what The Path is. I mean, surely the employees? Why would they seek employment at GameStop unless they were like us, as passionate as we are? Come to find out, the GameStop staff is as routine-numbed and catatonic as the employees of the mall pretzel station next door. You ask them release date questions to which you already know the answers in the hopes of starting spirited conversation, and theyre not sure, theyve got to look it up. They like to trash-talk Lair, even though no one remembers why. Poor Lair. And like your common internet denizen, they have overly aggressive and slightly misinformed console preferences. They like to talk about screen resolution, but thats as far as you getthey do not recognize you, and you dont recognize them. We go back to our bubbles and our blogospheres where were understood. And we hope, with every passionate post, with every comment keystroke, that we are doing good, like generating some Mana pool that will someday bleed out into The Real World and change ityou know, for the sake of the medium.

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PLAY IN ISOLATION: Where Is My heart?

A walk through the woods
By ryAn KuO

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heres a forest going right through the middle of the city. I didnt really go there a lot. It was just there, always. When Bernhard Schulenberg speaks, he does so carefully and deliberately, searching his memory like carefully labeled files in a cabinet. He describes setting up shop with a fellow game designer in Copenhagen, making a trip to the Philippines with his girlfriend, going on jogs, sketching new rules for his game Where Is My Heart?. Most importantly, his childhood home in Germany.

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Bernhard wants Heart to be like a home, a space in which the player can feel comfortable. But for him, comfort goes hand-in-hand with discomfort.

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WHERE IS MY HEART?

Bernhard showed an early build of his game during the Experimental Gameplay Sessions at the 2009 Game Developers Conference. It wasnt the most mind-bending (that would be the fourdimensional Miegakure) nor the most moving (that would be Today I Die, which collapsed its own beginning, middle and end into a single screen swimming with latent possibility). It was, to me, the most distinctly personal. Because you couldnt quite follow what was going on. There was a world at dusk. A big scowling tree. Three tiny characters chasing after each other, hopping and maneuvering to reach platforms above or falling into the depths. Little hearts everywhere. The screen split the scene into a jumble of fragments, like broken glass. Except Bernhard says hes extending, not shattering, the world, a technique he learned from drawing comics. If you walk out of this one you end up at a completely different place. Bernhards fractured screen asks the player to put the landscape togetherto make sense of the background. It isnt the only mystery to the game, which seems to have grown from a shifting foundation of esoteric rules like a knotted, unlikely tree. But it is the games hallmark, and arguably the strongest symbol at the Experimental Gameplay Sessions of independent gamings increasingly visible adoption of modernist principles. I told Bernhard that the interlocking rectangles of Heart reminded me of Piet Mondrians abstract,

geometric compositions, whose blocks of solid color call attention to the painted surface rather than providing a window into a scene. But the similarities between Mondrian and Schulenberg are only superficial. Whats more fundamental is the self-reflexive examination, and reinvention, of the mediums accepted conventions. This attitude dominated painting in the latter half of the 20th century, and it now manifests in gaming. Independent developers in particular have reached a point at which the established rules, or their memories of vintage platformers, shooters and sims, are raw materials to be cut up, mixed together, and stitched into new forms. Each game at this years Experimental Gameplay Sessions evinced a deliberate, rational process of turning some old convention on its head. The Unfinished Swan took form as a first-person shooter, but made the player blind without the aid of a gun that would splatter paint on its worlds surfaces. Shadow Physics mixed two- and threedimensional worlds, testing the players spatial reasoning before their reflexes. Closure made light and shadows physical, rather than graphical, elements of the landscape. In Archon, opposing players send armies back through time, challenging them to picture the outcome of battles before they had begun. Every game brought undiscovered possibilities to light, filling gaps in history and creating new spaces for gameplay. In most games they use the full screen as a

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coherent image I think its just one way of using the screen. And maybe there are other things you can do with the screen that I havent thought of yet. Bernhards game, with its density of images, perspectives and rules, was among the hardest to grasp in the panel. But it caught a Sony reps eye, and Bernhard is now working on a PSP version of the game. Style may have been a factor. Like a number of indies (think Cave Story or the upcoming Fez), Bernhards game fetishizes the 16-bit aesthetic of adventures like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. And the build he demoed at GDC was underscored by a maddeningly catchy blip-loop by Swedish chiptune artist Random. We have this rich tradition of these little platform games, Japanese role-playing games its just starting [to be used] in an interesting wayto meto convey some meaning, he says. Maybe, at a later stage, well look at these games and see theyre so kitschy right now it feels okay to do that. To use these clichs to take it a little further. For him, a designer working independently of a game studio, inspiration has come hand-in-hand with isolation. Bernhards hometown of Bielefeld is a small town with a forest running through the middle and no real game studio to speak of. When hes there, he works in his fathers house, in a small office that hes set up. For him, this can be a charged space. Most of Bernhards inspirations derive from where he is, or what hes seen. What he remembers. On the GDC show floor, he explained that Where Is My Heart?a hiking gameis about an experience getting lost in the woods with his parents. We got into an

argument, and walked alongside each other in this warring silence. There were so many weird things going on between usnot just because of the hike, but a lot of other stuff that happened before. Clearly in the game there are woods, a family of three, a series of pitfalls, and a need for the three protagonists to work together tofind their way. Yet its impossible to completely unravel the symbolism beneath its twisted art and twisted rules. Heart has a particular aura, like that of a work of art rather than an iteration of a design. Yes, Schulenberg values clarity of mind as much as any other designer. But a sense of mystery pervades his game. Theres a strong aesthetic underpinning the hearts and trees that points to the creators subjectivity. Though the games creative success as a game will start and end with its rule set, its full resonance will have as much to do with the questions you find yourself asking: Who are they? Where are they? Why? The title Where Is My Heart? has an autobiographical ring. Bernhard remembers growing up near the forest, but never really going in. And he remembers his parents always being in arguments and hating each other. It took a long time until I really understood why and its because they cheated on each other. It wasnt really open, and it was there, and you could feel it. Bernhard loves inventing and populating worlds, trying to create a mythology. He knows that the specifics of his game will likely be lost on most. Hed like for just a fraction of them to get through. A game is a fitting medium for allowing Schulenberg and his audience to explore the vagaries of the world together. For both, the

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WHERE IS MY HEART?

challenges faced by the avatars will be the same. The same actions will bring about the same outcomes. In the process, though, they may trigger different associations and memories. Bernhard wants Heart to be like a home, a space in which the player can feel comfortable. But for him, comfort goes hand-in-hand with discomfort: Like whats behind this treetheres something twisted, something you cant quite grasp, and youre trying to find out what it is. In other words, you never feel at home unless you embrace the unknown. Its been written by theoreticians from Baudrillard to Ballard that the spectacular mediascape that birthed television and videogames has caused the death of individual psychology. The ubiquitous screen predicts and projects our own thoughts and desires. And any notions of the artist as a living, thinking individual are irrelevant. Games like Heart, Miegakure and Today I Die pick up where modernists as diverse as Joyce, Pollock and Mir left off. They undermine what weve come to expect from the screen; they push the limits of our tolerance and comprehension, rather than simply fulfilling our wishes. In doing so, they preserve the subject and privilege the creativity of the individualand all of its unique mysteries and failings and vulnerability.

A game is a fitting medium, for allowing Schulenberg and his audience to explore the vagaries of the world together.

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IMAGE: KIM hErBSt | KIMhErBSt.COM

CHILdISH AMBITIONS
The journey to maturity and back

By l. B. JEffrIES

ut of all the Zelda games, Ocarina of Time comes closest to making Link a dynamic character. He goes from youth to adulthood and then, at the very end, is sent back to his childhood form. Our guide Shiek comments about Links development, A childish mind will turn to noble ambition, young love will become deep affection, the clear waters surface reflects growth. The player is drawn into that transformation through clever game design and a narrative that creates a tangible sense of growing up and becoming an adult. When Ocarina of Time starts, Link is having a nightmare. A drawbridge opens and a horse races past him carrying a frightened girl. An enormous dark horse closely follows, carrying a much larger man with a frightening grin on his face. Link, jaw open, is helpless to do anything. From the start the game plays on Links small size and his inability to stop the larger forces at work.

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A light dose of sexual tension also fleshes out this maturing process. the Zora Princess is the first woman to flirt with us as young link, making us promise to marry her when shes of age.
Other essays on Ocarina of Time inevitably rely on Joseph Campbells monomyth cycle from The Hero with a Thousand Faces 1. Although Campbell provides a useful framework for any male empowerment fantasy, most essays that take this route focus on content rather than game design. The wise old man, the journey to the afterlife, and the maiden in distress are all present here, but that only covers the games story. The game design has a lot more in common with a coming of age story. The game is about the contrasting experiences of being Young Link and Adult Link. Miyamoto himself has admitted in interviews that he had considered making the game an FPS but abandoned this idea because it was important for the player to see the physical change in Link 2. Although Campbells map of the heroic transformation is certainly applicable, the themes of youth and adulthood play a much larger part in terms of what the player is actually doing. Young Links immaturity is emphasized at the beginning through his life with the Kokiri, a race of eternal children. Their leader, Mido, is abrasive and juvenile, and so are most of the other Kokiri. Rather than letting us dive right into adventuring, the game makes us dig through grass and pots for money to pay for a shield, and explore until we find our first sword. Combined with our low health, these menial tasks convey a sense of weakness. Link finally acquires his own fairy, a sign of being accepted into the Kokiri tribe, and is instructed by the great Deku Tree to help the Land of Hyrule.
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Subsequent quests and puzzles play on Links youth. When Link comes to Hyrule Castle to see Zelda, the guards wont let him in because hes just a kid so the player must sneak past them. Zelda herself cannot get anyone to take Ganondorf s machinations seriously because she is also young. The two of you agree to collect all of the Spiritual Stones to gain access to the Temple of Time and stop Ganondorfthe older male he saw in his nightmarefrom using the Triforce and gaining great power. The stones are being held by two other tribes, the Gorons and Zoras, and just as Mido was unable to handle the problems that plague the Kokiri, these other authority figures are also incompetent. The Goron leader Darunia cannot feed his tribe because Ganondorf blocked off their mine. The Zora King has lost his only daughter and has no clue where she may be. The adults are in trouble, and it is up to a child to save them. The games aesthetics and design mirror Links juvenile state in several ways. While night time is relatively safe for Adult Link, Young Link hears menacing music, and comes up against a never-ending stream of zombies attacks. We feel threatened by darkness just as a child would. Links small size is also emphasized with the Hylian Shield. Traditionally meant for an Adult, the shield is almost as big as Young Link. Instead of holding it up, Link blocks with it by hiding under it like a turtle. Young Links items feel equally juvenile, with a slingshot instead of a bow & arrow, and boomerang instead of a hookshot. Even the Ocarina songs we learn as

1.One of the better ones, www.helium.com/ items/416189video-gameanalysis-thecampbellian-hero-in-the-legendof-zelda-ocarinaof-time 2. www.gamesradar.com/wii/ the-legend-ofzelda-ocarinaof-time-virtualconsole/news/ miyamotosuggested-firstperson-ocarina 3. www.cruiseelroy.net/2008/04/ ocarina-music-3

CHILDISH AMBITIONS

Young Link are simpler and easier to play than the Adult ones. In his essays on the games music, Dan Bruno comments, All of the child songs feature a six-note motive, and each of those motives is made up of a three-note idea, repeated twice. By contrast, the adult songs trigger motives that vary in length from five to eight notes. 3 The fact that Adult Link can no longer use the Young Link items reinforces this theme even more. We must eventually put away childish things in the game and play the world as an Adult. After collecting all of the Spiritual Stones we return to Hyrule Castle, only to realize that were too late: Zelda flees while Ganondorf is in pursuit and Link is unable to help. Compared to Young Link, Ganondorf is enormous and much more intimidating. Despite the huge monsters weve already defeated, as Young Link we do not pose any kind of a threat to him. He cripples us with a wave of his hand and refers to us as little kid. Representing both the threat to Hyrule and the primary adult figure with whom were competing, Ganondorfs manhood is put into constant competition with our own. His power and dominance is the measuring stick which Link and the player constantly seek to surpass. And in this initial encounter, he is clearly superior. Locked inside the Temple of Time is the Master Sword, the only weapon that can hurt Ganondorf. Yet when Link accesses the Temple and pulls the sword from the stone, it wraps us in a time bubble, transporting Link seven years into the future and aging him the same amount. The Sage Rauru explains that Link is an Adult now and that seven years have gone by in the land of Hyrule. He must find five other Sages before he can defeat Ganondorf s reign. The changes adulthood brings are immediate for the player. The Master Sword is much bigger and more dangerous than the Kokiri Sword we use as Young Link. We can now use the Hylian shield properly. Even the pacing of the items emphasizes a sense of change for the player. The first item we get as Adult Link is the hookshot,

which dramatically increases the players mobility. Rooftops, trees, and chests can now be latched onto and accessed, creating a greater sense of freedom and authority. Items that were previously labeled as Adult Only, such as the Fire and Water tunics, can now be used. Finally, instead of starting in our home in the forest, we now begin at the Temple of Time whenever the game is reset. Ganondorf s destruction of Hyrule and the collapse of the castle constantly remind us of the new state of the world. We begin to perceive things as an Adult. Despite Links physical transformation, the game continues to mock his relative youth and immaturity. When trying to recover the horse Epona, you have to race against the owner Ingo. If you lose, he mocks you for being just a kid. When you encounter Ganondorf s shade in the Forest Temple he again refers to you as kid. In contrast, your achievements begin to mark you as an adult. Characters who ask for your help will validate your adulthood after you aid them. Darunia will compliment you on how well youve grown up after you rescue the Gorons, and the Zora Princess will comment on how handsome youve become. Other characters who recognize you from seven years ago will often echo the same sentiment as you continue to fulfill your duty to Hyrule. The games reward for progressing through dungeons is not just items and heart containers, it is the affirmation of adulthood and maturity. A light dose of sexual tension also fleshes out this maturing process. The Zora Princess is the first woman to flirt with us as Young Link, making us promise to marry her when shes of age. Links attractiveness comes up again at the Gerudo fortress. Ganondorf is the only male in his exotic tribe of otherwise female thieves. The player must sneak around the fortress and release a group of Carpenters who were suckered into trying to join the tribe. Each carpenter warns how scary these women are, yet Link is able to impress the thieves with his sneaking skills. The head boss implies that you are the only male besides Ganondorf
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to prove yourself to the Gerudo. This comes up again when you encounter Naboru, a Gerudo who does not trust Ganondorf, and who must be rescued. After seeing both Young Link and Adult Link she comments on how much youve grown, as well as how handsome Link has become. Ganondorf s women are attracted to us, acting as a kind of masculine validation against the person who has dominated us in the past. As Link matures, the game also introduces a sense of nostalgia for his youth. Our guide throughout the Adult world, Sheik, often talks about the past. She comments, A thing that doesnt change with time is a memory of younger days. The game fleshes out this narrative message of longing by constantly creating reminders of things you wish you had done as Young Link: Magic beans to plant, items to collect, abilities from your youth you wish you could still use. Youth is not seen as an inferior state, but rather, as something you miss because of the things you wish you had done. This is made most clear in the next to last dungeon, the Spirit Temple, where Link must go back to being Young Link by using the Time Temple. The creatures now seem enormous, and Links tiny sword can barely put a dent in most of them. The boss, an enormous knight in armor, takes massive amounts of damage and is easily one of the hardest in the game. Yet after hours of relying on our Adult items, the player is able to beat this foe using childish tools like the slingshot and boomerang. After Link beats this section of the Spirit Temple, the old owl that has offered advice throughout the game appears and announces that you are now a fully matured Adult. Maturity is not just about being older and bigger, and only by learning to appreciate being Young Link, to appreciate your past and your youth, do you finally attain this status. The final fight with Ganondorf, after you transform back into an Adult, is the culmination of the rivalry between the

two males. You encounter Ganondorf, still referring to Link as kid, playing a large organ and making complex music, a knock on the Ocarina the player has been using with its simple five-note scale. The battle plays out, and Ganondorf, the weaker male, is defeated. Even Zelda confirms that Link is indeed an Adult, giving the final validation of the players coming of age. Ganondorf s subsequent transformation into Ganon is an expression of his own juvenile descent, the once proud male now little better than an animal. To beat him, the player rolls through his legs and hits him in the tail. If youve been waiting for the Freudian reference, it is hard not to notice that the last battle boils down to hitting Ganons phallus symbol until he dies. The final showdown between these two men is thus a symbolic showdown between their masculine strengths. The measuring stick for our power, Ganon, has been surpassed. In the end Zelda decides to return us to being Young Link seven years in the past. She reminisces that she was too young to understand what would happen once Link went into the Temple of Time. Holding your hand for a brief moment, she declares, Now go home where you are supposed to be, the way you are supposed to be. Regrets about the past, like ones you see throughout the game, are driven home by having the player be sent back permanently. The final scene of the game shows Young Link approaching Zelda just as he did earlier, before they agreed to collect all of the Spiritual Stones. Doing so was what let Ganondorf break into the Temple in the first place. Knowing how the future will turn out if you do so, you know that this time it could be different. The game ends on that possibility, affirming what it did at the very beginning when you start out as Young Link: you are never fully an Adult. We are all still growing up.

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CHILDISH AMBITIONS

JOSEPh GAME | ChOGrIn.COM

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PAUSE

PItfAll

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PAUSE

Brock Davis / itistheworldthatmadeyousmall.com

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A CONvERSATION WITH PETER MOLYNEUx

Designing a dog that doesnt annoy

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PETER MOLYNEUX

he long story of the dog started way back. As a designer, you always look to yourself and your experiences for inspiration. I used to play a game in the 80s called NetHack. It was drawn with ASCII on mainframe computers. In NetHack, your hero was the letter H and you got a dog which was a lower case d. I was emotionally connected and I found it interesting to ask what it was I was connected with. Theres something magical there. Your imagination will fill in the gaps. We were thinking about what the sequel to Fable should be, and we did a long list such as bigger weapons and more levels, and we got to the end of that list and theres nothing unique there. Theres nothing that surprises people, and one of the things we were talking about was how action games are all about killing and shooting. But is there something else? Why does it have to be about that stuff? We remembered our Black & White days, when we made this game with a thing called a creature. We asked [what would happen] if we had something like that which was less abstract, so we thought about doing a human, and then we settled on a dog. People have emotional connections with dogs. Ive always owned a dog and its funny enough that the dog is called Kenny. Its a little Jack Russell. Most of my emotion involved silencing Kenny. Now we live in the countryside and I love him, but we used to live under a flight path and hed bark at every plane. When you live ten miles from the busiest airport in the world, thats a problem. We did a bunch of prototypes with the dogs bark. The dog needed a set of rules to govern his behavior, and its kind of like Asimovs laws about robots that he wrote in the early days of sci-fi. We must not annoy the player. What we found was if the dog got too obsessive about things, he barked too much, and you hate someone with a barky dog. The first thing youd want to do is kill a barky dog. Everyone got super distressed when you had to slap the dog (to quiet it) so we discounted that. We decided on a breed thats not definable. Hes a mongrela bit retriever and Alsatian as well. There was a certain size where if he got smaller, he became vulnerable, and you didnt want to have a Chihuahua that couldnt tend for himself. But he didnt want to get too big, because then hed be a super dog. The dog must not have abilities that a normal dog doesnt have. There was a threshold. The dog was rewritten from scratch three times. The way that you develop something like this

youre constantly tweaking his lines. There was a special dog animator, artists, dog programmer, a simulator, and even a dog strike team. The dog created a load of unique problems and he accounted for over 1,000 bugs, so you needed a strike team to sort them out. While we were playing it, depending on how we manipulated him, he could go from the most obsessive-compulsive dog to the most placid mutt. There were many, many iterations. Humans are very good at spotting whats wrong. The closer we get as an industry to producing something that looks like reality, the harder it is to convince you. With a dog, we can still get away with stuff. It doesnt have a human faceits got a big waggy tail and his tongue. Were doing a human now called Milo. Were using a new interface, [Microsofts] Natal, to create a sim of a human being, because we feel that we can do it and thats exponentially becoming more possible. Weve made some amazing steps forward. The things the human can do are called microexpressions. Its the ability to do submillimeter twitches and thats what we need to do to create a bond. Thats tough to do from a mechanical perspective. Theres very little tech thats gone into capturing those microexpressions, because all the [motion capture] stuff doesnt go to that level. Weve highly developed the ability to recognize human emotions. Tomorrow morning when you get up and you look at someones face, your mind will make an instant judgment about what mood theyre in. Youre going to be right 95% of the time. Its not something theyve said. Thats your mind working and thats what we need to simulate. Its a lot easier with non-human characters, but the emotional gap between you and something non-human will always be there. Theres only a certain amount of empathy you can give a robot and this is the pot of goldthat you have that human-like character. With Natal, Milo can actually see you. He can see some emotions on your face and that really brings that bond. Its a bucket full of problemsits narrative and dialogue and seeing vulnerability in characters. Final Fantasy is great about this. Its mixing all of the drama youd get from cinema and having acting talent with amazing writing along with the technical stuff. Its pretty much the hardest problem you could give yourself. If any of those tenets is off, it just doesnt work.

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PLAYER ONE, PLAYER TWO

Chainsaws make the heart grow fonder
PhOtO: SEAn | flICKr.COM/PhOtOS/22280677@n07

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PLAYER ONE, PLAYER TWO

By JASOn KIllInGSWOrth

ix months after starting college at the University of Florida, I joined a secret society. The Greek-letter social fraternity in question was originally founded in the mid1800s by a tight-knit group of men, with the aim of promoting leadership, friendship, strength of character and even literary achievement. These same ideals were espoused in the fraternitys creed when I arrived. However, during private weekly chapter gatherings, you were far more likely to hear someone recount a lurid sexual encounter than ask for feedback on the early draft of a novel or poetry collection. Even if the grueling exercise of fraternity pledgeship too frequently offered a case study in men behaving badly, I still treasure the experience. There were a good number of fraternity members who took the organizations founding ideals seriously. And one of those men happened to be my older brother, Trey. There are a host of fraternity rituals you experience on the path to initiation many of them spiritually meaningful, kept strictly in confidence between sworn fraternity members and that world of knowledge and experience is something that Trey and I share to this day. On the day of my initiation, he was the brother who pinned on my fraternity badge. It was a rich, connective moment for us. But this piece isnt about my friendship with Trey. I had a younger brother as well. And this story describes a different fraternal orderone that we constructed ourselves, built around an abiding, mutually-held passion for videogames. We had the good fortune of being able to create our own rituals. The founders of Greek-letter fraternities and other secret societies believed that people who share a very particular experiencepledgeship trials, rituals, initiation, even secret handshakeswill be bound together in custodianship of that rarified mutual knowledge. Just because videogames are inclusive by commercial imperative doesnt mean that our experience of them proves equally universal. We create our own worlds as we play, and our own language to describe the experience. And we build communities and meaningful friendships throughout that process. Videogame consoles now reward us with virtual trophies and achievements, as if the spoils of gaming ever needed quantifying. How many gamerscore points is a sibling relationship worth?

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My little brother Josh and I grew up in the same house, but our friendship developed slowly. There were four of us kids at the time and we unconsciously paired off like recess dodgeball teams. I gravitated toward Trey, my older brother. Josh found a companion in our younger sister, Trinity. It shouldve been obvious to me at the time that Josh desperately wanted to hang out with his two older brothers, but for years I paid him little attention. One of my earliest overtures of friendship to Josh was a handwritten invitation to something I called Metroid School. I was maybe 10 years old when it occurred to me that Josh might benefit from some expert instruction in my favorite game at the time. So I took a large blue note card and scribbled a message on the front letting him know what time class would be taking place on Saturday morning. I even included a preview lesson by drawing my best approximation of a screenshot from the game. In the scene Id penciled a few circular Metroid bombs. His first assignment was to locate all the bombs hidden in the drawing, a la Wheres Waldo. Metroid School was short-lived, only convening for a single session before getting trash-heaped like so many other half-baked good ideas. I doubt that fact bothered Josh very much, considering my handwritten class voucher merely entitled him to sit in the room and watch me play. I doubt he learned much about how to defeat Mother Brain, but hopefully he learned something more meaningful that I enjoyed having him around. During this same period I got hooked on the seminal Japanese RPG Dragon Warrior. Id never heard the phrase gold farmAsian sweatshops where players sit in front of computer workstations for ungodly stretches of time repeating the same mundane actions in order to collect in-game currency for online resalebut it seemed like a good idea to have Josh leveling my character while I played outside with friends. He was grateful for any chance to get his hands on the controller. Even if it meant tediously walking my character in circles all afternoon battling Goldmen and
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My older brother and I cemented our bond through fraternal initiation; my littler brother and I, joint evisceration.

Wolflords, scooping up the gold and experience they left behind. And my character was always richer and more powerful when I returned to the game. Win-win! The contemporary notion of co-op gameplay didnt arrive until Doom hit the PC in 1993. But even in our admittedly inequitable Dragon Warrior arrangement, Josh and I naturally formed our own cooperative method of playing videogames together. To quote the old maxim, nothing unites like a common enemy. In our case, that enemy just so happened to be the nefarious Dragonlord whod stolen the Ball of Light and plunged the land into darkness and chaos. To defeat him, Josh and I both had a role to play. Videogames became the connective tissue in our blossoming friendship. We simply held our respective controllers and the cords found a common hub in that old NES console. And the funno, something deeper the joy of those shared moments forged links of common history. If games have anything to offer the people who play them, its a series of indelible experiences. And shared experiences dont merely strengthen a relational bond; they become the very fabric of the relationship itself. During the brief time we lived together during college, Josh and I formed something of a Tetris fraternity. Wed salvaged an old NES console and spent almost every free evening in our bedroom manipulating falling blocks for hours and hours. Over time we even developed our own game type: The Gauntlet. Wed start on Level 9-Height 5 on Type B, which required you to complete 25 lines before beating the current level. Wed pass the controller back and forth, taking turns attempting to finish the level and proceed to the next one. The Gauntlet stretched from Level 9-Height 5 to Level 15-Height 5. When one of us completed the final level, wed go right back to the beginning and start over. The more time we spent running the Gauntlet, the more Tetris jargon began to accumulate. If you used an L-shaped block to complete two non-consecutive lines, we called that a splitlevel fishmonger. A line that is kept from being
PLAYER ONE, PLAYER TWO

Jason and Josh Killingsworth in jammies, simpler times

completed by a single pesky empty square was a googie. If the game kept feeding you blocks that didnt neatly lock into the structure you were building, that was explained away as a wave of cold pieces. At one point we recorded all the terms and there were at least 30 different entries in our Tetris lexicon, each one having a number of variants depending on the circumstance. These nights spent in front of the TV playing Tetris overflowed with lively conversation. Wed catch up on each others lives. Wed tell stupid jokes. Wed discuss things that were going on with our parents and fellow siblings. Wed talk about school. We began making up characters and bringing them to life with ridiculous voices. Wed talk about our respective restaurant jobs. The videogames facilitated our conversation, filling natural gaps in the conversation as seamlessly as a straight-line block sliding down the edge of the screen and completing four consecutive rows cha-ching. A few months ago, my wife and I moved to Dublin, Ireland. My little brother is married himself and lives an ocean away in Maryland,

but still we meet up regularly over Xbox Live to play Gears of War 2. (Horde Mode bears uncanny similarities to the Gauntlet of our college days, nearly a decade behind us now.) Were not sitting in the same room anymore but the conversation is just as rich. The jokes are just as stupid and hilarious. The life discussions over our silly wraparound headset mics are equally poignant. The shared experiences keep piling up, solidifying the bond between us. Videogame designers keep building incredible new worlds for Josh and me to explore together. It brings me great joy to see Joshs avatar playing side by side onscreen with my own. Occasionally well trigger our chainsaw bayonets at the same critical moment, giggling while our exhaust-sputtering blades chew through a fiendish Locust Drone from two sides at once. Dont forget: Josh and I arent just friends; were brothers. Weve always shared blood. My older brother and I cemented our bond through fraternal initiation; my littler brother and I, joint evisceration. Both styles of play unlocked the same coveted achievement.

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The little man must bounce

Rom Title: Fun With Bouncing

W ALK THROUGH FOR A MAdE-UP GAME

By ZACK hAnDlEn IlluStrAtIOn By EIn BurKE

Real Title: Uncertain. Only twelve copies of the game existed long enough for a full play-through in the original format, and none of those cartridges, designed to run on a standard Atari 2600 system, had any recognizable language printed on them. Instead, the gouges and scratches suggested obscenities so primal they could only be implied. Gaming critic Chris Dahlen has argued that even the assumption that the cartridges were actually intended for use on the Atari is a faulty one, suggesting instead that dumb luck and sheer geek stubbornness are the only reason anyone wouldve thought to stick one in the machine and press the On switch.

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WALK THROUGH FOR A MADE-UP GAME

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the longest recorded play session started in 1986 and is still going on. there is debate as to whether or not the session is continuous, as two players have died midgame.

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WALK THROUGH FOR A MADE-UP GAME

Controls Atari 2600: Moving the joystick moves the little man. Pressing the button makes him bounce. PC: U: moves the little man up D: moves the little man down L: moves the little man left R: moves the little man right NE: moves the little man northeast NW: moves the little man northwest (note: north and all other compass directions are based on the position of the gamer, not the position of the little man relative to the screen.) H: the little man removes his hat Y: the little man questions his existence >: your shift key sticks C: the little man drowns {: your dog will whine for the next three hours. If you do not press the } key before the three hours are up, your dog will die. (If you do not own a dog, a cat will suffice. If you do not own a cat, DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME.) B: the little man bounces Gameplay (The rom version of this game, which is freely and easily downloadable across the web, like a piece of viral marketing so successful it cant possibly be intended to sell anything, mimics the original version precisely. It is not to be trusted. It is not safe.) Once the game has been activated, the screen will be blank for ten seconds. A note will sound, generally the D# an octave below middle C. A succession of colors flash across the screen RED, RED, WHITE, YELLOW, TURQUOISE. The screen will take on a ghastly hue of rotten, festering peach. Your mother will call; talk with her politely for ten minutes, even though shes been dead for five years now. When you get back to the computer or television, the little man will be waiting for you. He stands in the middle of your field of vision, an inch and a half high. He waits for you to move him, as he cannot move on his own. Move him left, then right, then left. He will be tired and sit down. Maybe you should eat something now. Its already midnight, did you even realize? You keep such odd hours lately. The phone rings again, but this time, do not answer it. Theres no one calling that you want to talk to.

Eventually, the little man will appear sad. The graphics are primitive, pale blocks on rectangles, a jagged circle head, an inverted brown T for a hat. But he will be sad, and you will know he is sad. That is the purpose of the game. You have to make him not so sad anymore. Press the button (or B). The little man will bounce. He is then happy. Press the button again, and he will bounce again. And he will still be happy. While he is happy, he moves faster, and it is possible to change his environment. You can make the little man construct a house. (There is no specific movement/button combination to make this happen. Somehow, it just does.) Sometimes, a woman or man joins him on screen, and then smaller figures. Sometimes, the woman or man leaves, and takes the smaller figures. There are other changes. Some players have reported grand symphonies issuing forth from tinny, over-stressed computer speakers. Others will show you murky screenshots of strange shapes and landscapes, and they will swear to you that it is art. But through this all, the little man must bounce. Hours and hours of this. The longest recorded play session started in 1986 and is still going on there is debate as to whether or not the session is continuous, as two players have died mid-game, but the system is still running, and someone is always watching. But this is just you, in your living room, the first light of dawn coming in the window, scratching your eyes, your nose stuffed thick with the reek of drying sweat. You need to leave. Its a stupid game, theres no way to win, there is no score, and theres no clear sense of lasting accomplishment. It will not end. You reach for the off switch. But the little man must bounce. You cant bear the thought of it if you were to leave him, where would he go? Would he be left to wander the empty darkness behind your television screen, sobbing pixelated tears? God, it must be so lonely in there. His wife is gone, his kids have left him. Press the button. (Or B.) The little man is then happy. And, for a moment, so are you.

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KILL SCREEN NEEDS YOU.
Well, needs sounds a bit desperate, and weve learned from past relationships that getting too clingy is a real turn-off. Ok let me try again.

KILL SCREEN DESIRES YOU.

Is that better? No, no. That wont do. Too Danielle Steel/ Harlequin and again, we shouldnt come on quite so strong. But were worried that you dont know how much we care and its been so lonely all this time while youre on the road. We have needs after all.

KILL SCREEN REQUIRES YOU

Slightly collegial, but in a good way. Like on an invitation. Ok, I think we can do this.

KILL SCREEN HANKERS FOR YOU

Too folksy.

KILL SCREEN HUNGERS FOR YOU

Um.

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