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Just making things and being alive about it: The queer games scene

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Just making things and being alive about it: The queer games scene

By Brendan Keogh on May 24, 2013 at 12:01p

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How a growing group of independent developers is using video games to share the reality of their lives.

Lim is a simple game. It only takes a few minutes to play. You navigate a square through a minimal world. You have not been told what to do, so you just move through the maze. When you are alone in the corridors, you flash with all the colors of the rainbow. But before long, you start to encounter squares of different colors. They don’t like you. They ram you. They make progress near impossible. The screen shakes; the white noise is violently nauseating. Your only hope is to hold down Z to “blend in.” You turn brown near the brown squares; you turn blue near the blue squares.

But it is an imperfect solution. As you try to blend in, your movement is dramatically slowed, and the camera begins to zoom in. Keep blending and the entire game starts to shake and bang. It’s just like when you were being attacked by the other squares, except now the violence is coming from within you. Trying to blend in is just as exhausting, just as draining, as being excluded. Sometimes there are blue and brown squares in the same room, so no matter what you do, someone is going to attack you. But you try to blend in anyway. You continue to attack yourself even as you are attacked by others.

You should, eventually, be able to reach the maze’s end. But life doesn’t always go as planned. Sometimes the other squares block you in a narrow corridor, making progress impossible. Sometimes their aggression is so violent that they push you right through the walls of the maze, trapping you on the outside. The bittersweet irony is that here, on the outside, you are free to be yourself. No longer a brown or a blue square, you flash with all the colors of the rainbow. Excluded, you can be yourself.

Lim is the work of Merritt Kopas, a queer woman who, among other talents, is a game designer, writer and photographer. Kopas spent two months creating Lim in the program Construct 2. “It was my second game,” she explains. “But my first game was much smaller. Lim was the first big thing I really put a lot into.”

Kopas doesn’t have a professional background in game design. A graduate with a Master of Arts in sociology from the University in Washington, she has long dabbled with whatever tools were available to her growing up, but she only started making games seriously last summer. Yet, despite a lack of experience or programming knowhow, Kopas was able to craft a deeply powerful and evocative video game in Lim, one that has been recognized by critics at Rock Paper Shotgun, 1UP and even The Guardian.

“I was sort of hoping a few people would see it and it would speak to them in some way,” she explains. “But I didn’t expect the circulation it got. That blew me away.”

The bittersweet irony is that here, on the outside, you are free to be yourself.

While Lim might lack advanced visuals or perfect programming, it is carried far by Kopas’ motivation to convey something that is personal and meaningful to her. “The summer that I made Lim was also the first summer that I was moving through the world as a queer woman,” she explains. “There was really just a lot on my mind about perception and how public space is experienced, and I wanted to translate that into an experience that other people could get.”

Lim and Kopas are exemplary of what is gradually emerging as a vibrant scene of queer game developers — a varied community of DIY creators who are making their own space to craft innovative and unique video games on the periphery of both indie communities and the mainstream industry. It is a movement of creators that prioritize the personal over the perfect. It is a movement that is beginning to turn heads and challenge the mainstream industry to reconsider just what a video game can be.

Yet, just like the rainbow square pushed through Lim’s wall, these creators and their games are still often trapped on the outside. Despite being beautiful works, their games are often dismissed as being too short, too simple, too straightforward or simply not even games at all. But something is starting to change. Although they lack the access to funding channels and technological knowhow that have long been presumed to be prerequisites for game design, these queer developers — as different from each other as they are similar — are becoming impossible to ignore as they create video games that are unlike anything players have ever seen before, video games that are capturing the attention of an ever broadening audience.

Human Angle: Queer Games

HUman Angle: Queer Games

The rise of a queer games scene

The rise of a queer games scene

“Queer people have always been creating culture from the margins,” insists Anna Anthropy, game developer and author. “Like, queer people popularized jeans. It was queer soldiers who started wearing jeans outside of the military, and then that became popular. You have to have an outsider perspective to create something that is meaningful, fashionable, intelligent. Then that is gradually adopted by the mainstream.”

Indeed, video games themselves emerged from such an outsider perspective. When MIT students in the early ’60s repurposed the PDP-1 supercomputer to run Spacewar!, they were exploring uses for computers that their seasoned professors never even considered. However, in the decades since their birth, video games have struggled to represent experiences and identities beyond that historical core of computer-savvy, student-aged males. As Anthropy succinctly writes in her book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: “Games are designed by a small, male-dominated culture and marketed to a small, male-dominated culture, which, in turn, produces the next small, male-dominated generation of game designers.”

But even as the mainstream industry might still be dominated by a single demographic, there is a huge diversity of people on the outside, on the margins, that have been creating their own video games for years, beyond the focus of mainstream gaming culture.

Anthropy is perhaps the most well-known of these alternative voices. Her numerous critically acclaimed games — such as Mighty Jill Off, Calamity Annie, Lesbian Spider Queens of Mars and, more recently, the autobiographical Dys4ia — often repurpose traditional game mechanics in unique and provocative ways. “I’m really good at luring gamer nerds in, then surprising them with a discussion about gender,” she says with a sly smile. “I think making things that look like video games and play like video games and are very ‘video gamey’ video games is a really good way to trick people into becoming more enlightened, educated human beings.”

“I’m really good at luring gamer nerds in, then surprising them with a discussion about gender,” Anthropy says.

But for Anthropy, having games tackle a broader spectrum of themes is just an inevitable outcome of having a more diverse community of game creators: “I’m not sure if all my games are about being queer, but my queer identity is always visible in them. I think representation is important … making people aware that queerness exists and representing queerness in games. And also reaching out to other queer people who otherwise feel very alienated in games.”

The exception to the rule, Anthropy has received regular media attention since at least 2008, when she released Mighty Jill Off. But that attention often feels tokenistic, like people are more interested in her as a novelty than a person. “There have always been queer developers,” she stresses. “But, I dunno, I felt for a long time like a voice shouting in the wilderness. To a large extent, none of the other outsiders who were making games have gotten the level of press, the level of media saturation that I have.”

Over the last 18 months, something has started to change. Numerous queer developers have started to coalesce into what people — both from within and from outside the community — are starting to notice as something of a scene, as a movement. Even as each creator’s work remains emphatically individualistic, a still-forming network of support and allegiance can be traced, amplifying each creator’s own, unique voice. Known voices like Anthropy’s are being seen in a new light, while countless others are being heard for the first time.

A growing chorus of voices

A growing chorus of voices

“Video games are different from what they were a year ago,” Anthropy says. “It feels a lot less like the focus is exclusively on me now. It feels like the amazing stuff my friends are doing is starting to be recognized by people. There’s this discussion that is happening about queer games, of this kind of personal game. There’s a discussion now, whereas before it was just me being a novelty.”

Game critic, academic and developer Mattie Brice agrees: “I would say that queer games have always been happening, but not [necessarily] in a community. It has definitely coalesced. It has definitely come to one place. While these people were always doing things on their own, there is now this good intersection of people getting together and actually maybe having something like a path. … As an identity, as a movement, that is definitely a new thing within the last year-and-a-half or so.”

Liz Ryerson is a musician, game developer and writer who composed the music for Anthropy’s Dys4ia and, more recently, Triad. She highlights the needs for queer — and in particular transgender — people to create their own space in video games: “A lot of trans women grow up with games being socially acceptable, because they’re raised as male. Then when they transition, they have to confront the fact that they are not part of this ‘gamer’ culture anymore. There’s no space for them there, so now we have to create that space.”

People who are cut off from traditional game design can still make something.

But why now? Despite Anthropy’s reluctance to be seen as any kind of leader of the queer games scene, it is hard to overstate her significance as a banner for new creators to rally under, both as a public figure in the gaming press and as the author of her book. Released in 2012, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters is a manifesto, a call to arms for people (not just queer people) to create small, imperfect games in order to express themselves. It counters the normative idea that you must learn to program code before you make games, that you need access to expensive tools, that a good game must be technologically advanced. It urges people to take advantage of cheap and accessible tools like GameMaker and RPG Maker, or interactive fiction editor Twine, to “sketch” video games, to create and distribute video games like someone might write and distribute a zine.

In doing so, it encourages a far more diverse group of people to create games than ever before, and it prepares an audience to start taking those games seriously. People who are cut off from traditional game design, people who can’t afford restrictively expensive software or educations, can still make something. It creates a level playing field with the inevitable repercussion that we will begin to see games being made by people who have never before made games — and the games they make will be unlike any game we’ve before seen.

It’s a significant step in the maturing of video games as a medium, a step that has historical precedents in other mediums. “As photography became more accessible it became usable for a broader range of purposes, and I think that is starting to happen in games,” says Kopas. “My hope is that the lasting legacy of the queer game scene will be breaking down that barrier of, ‘This needs to be a crucial part of your identity. You need to be a game developer to make games.’ I mean, people don’t need to be photographers to take photos.”

Mattie Brice made the game Mainichi, about her day-to-day life being queer.

Kopas notes, however, that the catalyst has not been Anthropy’s book alone, but also the growing ubiquity of social media — especially Twitter. More people are gaining the confidence to make something, and they can more easily connect with others to share these games than ever before. “It is sort of this snowballing process,” says Kopas. “Whenever someone who is on the fence of, ‘Can I make a game?’ sees something like that [it] builds this confidence that, yeah, that is something I can do.”

For Brice, Videogame Zinesters hasn’t formed the community of queer game developers so much as it has helped to expose the work of that community to others. “I would say that Anna’s book has really showed what is [already] being done. That you can [make games] too. It opens up the doors to a larger audience, to people who didn’t know they could make games. … It has definitely helped [queer games] to go from being insular to something that can be proliferated out of just this little island.”

Another queer developer making tracks over the past year is Porpentine, who has emerged as a leading voice of the Twine gaming scene. From general obscurity in the interactive fiction scene, Porpentine has now spoken on stage at the Game Developer’s Conference, and curates the website Free Indie Games alongside indie developer Terry Cavanagh. Porpentine, too, holds Anthropy largely responsible for her interest in using games to express herself: “I was always interested in games, but I think meeting Anna really helped define that. [She helped me realize that] games can be sexy, and games [can] be by women, and queer women especially. Sometimes all you need is to see that somebody else is doing it to do it.”

Unsurprisingly, Anthropy is modest about the significance of her role in the scene’s emergence and recent momentum. “I prefer to just think of myself as another voice. So what has been really gratifying for me has been feeling sort of irrelevant!” she says with a laugh. “Like, I’m not so special anymore. I like that a lot. I compare it a lot to waking up one morning and realizing that your kid has gotten smarter than you. It’s a really amazing feeling, to have that burden off my shoulders alone.”

Systems of oppression

Systems of oppression

Mainichi is the Japanese word for “everyday.” It is also the title of Brice’s autobiographical game about her day-to-day life living as a queer, multiracial woman. Made in RPG Maker VX over the course of a week, it puts the player in the role of a small, 16-bit Mattie Brice as she wakes up and prepares to meet a friend at a nearby cafe. Between your house and the cafe, you must walk Brice down the street. A seemingly effortless task becomes peppered with interruptions as you have to deal with people staring at you, people catcalling you, people misgendering you. The clunky, stop-start pacing of the Japanese role-playing game genre is used to show just how much effort it takes Brice to move through her daily life.

The game loops endlessly like a Groundhog Day JRPG. You can make a variety of choices throughout the game, such as whether or not to spend time putting on makeup or playing video games before you leave the house. At the cafe, you can choose whether you want to pay with cash or by credit card. Eventually, you learn how to avoid different scenarios. Maybe you cross and walk on the far side of the road just to avoid the woman that stares at you every day. At the cafe, maybe you pay with cash instead of credit so the cashier isn’t confused by the male name on your card. Ultimately, you have to change the way you live your life just to avoid harassment.

“I wanted her to understand something about my life that I couldn’t communicate with words.”

At the end of each day, once you finally sit down with your friend at the cafe, she complains that you always look so sad. “Don’t worry about what other people think of you!” she suggests unhelpfully. “You have your friends and that’s all that matters!”

Brice made Mainichi for a real-life friend, to explain to her what she has to deal with in her day-to-day life and why it wasn’t helpful to tell her to just ignore people. “I wanted her to understand something about my life that I couldn’t communicate with words,” Brice explains. “It was about communicating certain things through a system to my friend.”

Much like Lim, Mainichi is able to convey an experience to the player that words could never do justice. Through its systems, it is able to communicate to a player how socially marginalized people are often forced to alter their identity just to do something as seemingly simple as walk down a street. “I think games and play are inherently about systems,” says Brice. “I don’t think that games are exceptional in that they are the only interactive art, but I think they stress our interaction with systems.”

While most video games traditionally have the player attempt to beat or “game” its systems, systems are also particularly powerful in communicating how real-world systems function. It’s something that has been mobilized by a range of personalized games over the last year to evoke empathetic reactions in players, to give players the chance to walk in someone else’s shoes. For instance, Richard Hofmeier’s multi-award winning Cart Life explores the socioeconomic struggles of street vendors, while Zoë Quinn’s Depression Quest demonstrates the poisonous apathy and downward spiral that is living with depression. Both of these games allow the player to experience what such scenarios are like by having them engage with systems. “Games are very aptly suited to being sensory filter plugins for the brain,” explains Porpentine. “You plug this in and you will have an imperfect but useful understanding of what it is like to have certain constraints.”

In Lim, your are only yourself when you are alone.

This highlights a common trend in personal games generally and queer games in particular: they are frequently less concerned with being beaten or mastered, and more concerned with being participated with in order to communicate an idea. It’s a way to use games that many mainstream developers rarely consider — a way that they rarely have to consider: “Most people who are making games are completely entrenched in game culture,” argues Anthropy. “They only consume games and only experience games and have this way more tenuous connection to all the other art that exists in the sphere of human culture.”

For Ryerson, it is her experiences as a queer woman that have ensured her view of games is less insular: “Let’s say I never had to ‘accept’ that I’m a trans person and therefore never became exposed to this incredible dissonance between what is actually happening in gamer culture and what my identity is. If I didn’t have to confront that and try to extract something meaningful from that experience … I would probably just be really into BioShock or whatever.”

Brice feels more indebted to her academic background for her critical approach to systems, but the experiences she communicates through Mainichi are still heavily influenced by her real-world experiences as a queer woman. “I always feel like a part of me is other people’s constructions of me,” Brice explains. “Someone else will make up my identity for me unless I take control of that through my appearance. I think that a lot of other people don’t realize that we are all constructing each other’s identities in various ways, but it is so much more explicit for me.”

The marginalized and dissonant position that many queer developers hold makes them particularly well-adapted to critique and understanding the social systems of the real world, and able to depict those systems through game design. “We see the system,” says Porpentine. “While, for a lot of other people, that system is just invisible.”

“We are forced to encounter oppressive systems in our daily lives,” agrees Kopas. “So it seems to me that, now that Twine and accessible tools are becoming available, people are making things that are really powerful and telling really compelling stories about their experiences, and the only reason that that hasn’t happened before is that those same groups that have those experiences are the ones that are kept out of accessing programming and such skills.”

Exclusive look at the next episode of Human Angle, only for IE 10 users.

The Twine revolution

The Twine revolution

Of all the accessible and free game design tools that are helping to enable queer and other marginalized developers, none have been picked up quite so readily as Twine. “It is exactly the kind of thing I envisioned in [Rise of the Videogame Zinesters], that I was hoping and waiting for,” says Anthropy. “The way that people have adopted Twine and have made it a platform for queer games really amazes me.” Twine was never meant to be used for video games. Interactive fiction writer Chris Klimas created it in 2009 as a tool for writers of hypertext fiction. While much interactive fiction uses a text parser to have the reader type in commands that the program recognizes and responds to, Twine allows the creation of hyperlinks for the reader to click through to different screens of text. Over the last year, however, Twine has been reappropriated by DIY game creators to create a new genre of video games that have come to be known as Twine games. Free and open-source, to create a Twine game, you just need to be able to write basic HTML and CSS. To play a Twine game, all you need is a web browser.

“Twine is really easy for spreading,” says Porpentine. “You don’t need a console. You don’t need a high-end PC. You don’t need to spend money. The browser is the lower common denominator thing, and that is what Twine is on.”

Porpentine is at the forefront of an influx of Twine game creators in what is increasingly becoming known as the Twine Revolution. Although she has previously worked with both GameMaker and parser-based interactive fiction editors, it is with Twine that she feels like she came into her own. “I was able to make games even if I was really depressed or having other troubles in my life. … It kind of drives home that having tools like this in place will let people like me who are super poor or suffering from other problems actually make games.”

“You don’t need a console. You don’t need a high-end PC. You don’t need to spend money. The browser is the lower common denominator thing, and that is what Twine is on.”

Her games combine a cyberpunk/trash aesthetic of language with surreal fictions and a subversion of the very form of Twine itself. In her best known work, Howling Dogs, the player is trapped in some kind of asylum, living out memories or fantasies through a holodeck-like “activity room” in a complex layering of virtual realities. ALL I WANT IS FOR ALL MY FRIENDS TO BECOME INSANELY POWERFUL, meanwhile, leads the player down a rabbit hole of warping colors and morphing paragraphs to a tweet on fellow game developer J Chastain’s Twitter feed. Perhaps most surreal of all is Cry$tal Warrior Ke$ha, which puts the player in charge of pop idol Ke$ha, trying to escape a sci-fi concert that has exploded in crystals and glitter, all while Ke$ha’s song “Warrior” plays on a loop in the background.

Merritt Kopas created Lim, her second game

Porpentine’s work demonstrates that there is far more to Twine games than simply clicking through paragraphs. “Twine lets you paint with words,” she insists. “It lets you use them expressively; it lets you use them like music. A lot of my recent stuff is extremely minimal. A few sentences or words per page or whatever and you can just dance across the screen, or make real-time text games with real-time elements. It’s … sexier and colorful. It’s more emotional. It’s not just staring through a tiny peephole into a black-and-white text dump.”

More than an artist in her own right, Porpentine, along with Anthropy, has been fundamental in supporting other people who want to create games in Twine. She posts tutorials on her website to explain how to achieve different visual aesthetics in Twine, and has been fundamental in helping to spread the word about the countless number of games that people have produced in recent months.

Besides its incredibly low barrier to entry, what has attracted so many people to Twine, Porpentine argues, is that it is perfectly suited to deal with interiority and introspection, as opposed to the external forces of violence and physical action of most games. Twine developers can create games that explore emotions, thoughts, opinions. “It is good for processing and articulating feelings that have never been expressed,” says Erin Stephens-North, Porpentine’s partner and Twine artist in her own right. “It allows you to find people who have common experiences and to carve out spaces for identities that haven’t even been talked about at all.”

“I have played Twine games that are talking about things that nobody else is talking about,” says Porpentine. “There is so much stuff about life and bodies and humans, and I’m really excited that video games are a place where you can find that acknowledged, that video games are talking about that.”

Living games for living people

Living games for living people

Dys4ia takes the player through Anthropy’s own experience as a transgendered woman undergoing hormone replacement therapy. Through a series of WarioWare-esque minigames, the player moves through Anthropy’s own insecurities, frustrations, anger and, finally, hope. It’s an emotional and vulnerable narrative, greatly helped by Ryerson’s harrowing soundtrack.

For Ryerson, Dys4ia is an important work because of what it is able to say to other queer people going through the same hurdles. “It lets people know that there is some precedent for them as a person. They are not a total freak. Someone else who is more visible is also dealing with this. I think that has encouraged a lot of people.”

In a blog post written in July 2012, renowned game developer Raph Koster said of Dys4ia: “I like Anna Anthropy’s work, but I also try to be clear-eyed about the fact that a lot of Dys4ia could be built in PowerPoint and isn’t a game.”

“The people who are refusing to call them games are clinging to the side of a sinking ship.”

“Not a game” is an accusation that has befallen many a queer game, whether it is because they lack graphics like Twine games, because they are too short or linear like Lim or Dys4ia, because they are more concerned in communicating a message through a system than allowing it to be mastered like Mainichi or because they are simply of a much lower fidelity than what gamers, growing up playing blockbuster triple-A games, have become accustomed to. Many commentators, be they well-meaning or intentionally malicious, have worked to further exclude many of the creations of the queer games scene from mainstream video game culture by labeling them “notgames,” “ungames” or “interactive art.”

The creators spoken to for this article have mixed feelings on how much energy is worth sacrificing just to have mainstream games culture accept them. “I mean, the people who are refusing to call them games are clinging to the side of a sinking ship,” says Anthropy, somewhat nonchalantly. “They are going to continue to call them not games and we’ll continue making them, and we’ll continue changing what video games are, and they’ll continue drowning.” But then: “It’s worth acknowledging that they’re wrong! People, even well-meaning, might think of Dys4ia more as a piece of interactive art and I’m like, ‘No! It’s a game!’ I think it is more important that instead of inventing other categories for things to be marginalized into, we focus on expanding the definition of ‘game’ to fit all this new stuff.”

“The whole conversation can be really exhausting,” says Kopas. “When we call something a nongame, we are basically saying, ‘We don’t really need to talk about it.’ And game critics then don’t need to engage with them seriously, or other people in the scene don’t need to engage with them seriously.”

By being isolated from the mainstream game culture and industry, queer game developers are unable to access many of the support structures in place for creators of more traditional games. Explains Brice: “If that institution [the games industry] doesn’t understand that games like ours are games, they won’t throw funding at them. They won’t accept them to industry events or awards. While I don’t think those are necessarily good things, I do feel they open important conduits.”

However, as part of the creative process of making games, Brice stresses that trying to make “a game” is not only unimportant, but potentially damaging: “I have spoken to game developers and educators who say it is good to have this foundation of telling a student what a game ‘is,’ but I think that is very harmful. The more specifically you define a game, the worse it is. I think in that sense, being a game is very unimportant to the creative process.”

As a creator, Kopas is equally ambivalent about making sure that what she is making fits into a pre-determined notion of “game”: “To be honest, I am much more interested in taking things that are characteristic of games, such as the ability to convey an experience, and sort of introduce that to other audiences, like people who think of games in very narrow ways because of how games are presented to culture.”

The growing queer games scene is focused more on communicating ideas than making traditional games.

And that is where the paradox facing queer games and their creators lies. On the one hand, by not forcing their creations into any pre-determined notion of what a game should be, creators are free to explore what a game could be. They are able to create experiences unlike any video games we have ever seen, because mainstream developers have never thought to do what this recent influx of alternative creators think to do. But, consequentially, their works are sidelined by a core audience of critics and players unsure how to approach such new creations.

“It is weird that these games are so far in the periphery [of mainstream game culture], right?” says Anthropy. “These are the games that are about the broader human experience. The bulk of video games, the ones that are the most visible, are the ones that are all about the same thing: violence and hero fantasies and shooting dudes in the face, which is such a small part of the human experience … so it is really bizarre that there are all these games that are outliers that have so much to give, that allow people to connect to real human beings.”

The creators spoken to for this article share a concern that an obsession with making “gamey games” has created an incestuous industry devoid of innovation. It’s a concern shared by much of the mainstream games media, too, if the reaction to EA’s recently announced Battlefield 4 is anything to go by. The most telling example is one that Brice shares, of how Mainichi was received by different university classes. The students of gender studies courses — consisting of people who don’t regularly engage with games — were able to engage with the themes that Mainichi’s systems were communicating. However, when it was shown to game design students, they couldn’t get past its lack of traditional elements and, mostly, its poor graphics.

“I think it just shows this terrible, inbred nature we have,” says Brice. “We are so over-familiar. We have this narrow, incestuous view. We are the British monarchy in the way we do games, and we definitely have some Henry VIIIs in our industry!”

Yet, while the mainstream industry hopes that a new generation of console hardware will reinvigorate innovation, Porpentine insists it is the culture that has to change. “The technology for people to simply make games is there. It’s just that no one values it. They’re all, ‘Oh, photorealism, let’s piss more money into that big ass fucking trash bloodbucket.’” The solution? “It’s just not having any definitions. Just not even neutralizing our time, energy on debating semantics. I would rather just put my head down and make games. Weighing in strategically, but definitely just spend more time gushing, just making things.”

“We are the British monarchy in the way we do games, and we definitely have some Henry VIIIs in our industry!”

“Just making things” is possibly the key to the ever-increasing proliferation and critical success that queer creators are experiencing. Just as the MIT professors of the early ’60s could never conceive of using a supercomputer to program a game in the first place, the developers entrenched in the mainstream games industry struggle to think outside of the box they’ve always been inside. The creators of the queer games scene, however, are pushing and maturing the art of games in new directions by just making things and not caring how “gamey” those things are — and that is something anyone can do.

“There are plenty of non-queer game designers I hugely respect,” stresses Porpentine. “I do refer to it as a queer gaming scene but, overall, I am interested in anyone who is making indie games who is alive about it.”

And maybe that will be the legacy of the queer games scene: a realization that you don’t have to think outside the box of “games” to create something new, but that “games” was never a box of dead wood in the first place. What the ever increasing number of creators of the queer games scene are showing the rest of us is that “games” is a living tree, and as more and more people start making games that are important to them, the branches of that tree will start to grow in all kinds of new and exciting directions.

Editing: Russ Pitts, Matt Leone, Charlie Hall Design: Warren Schultheis
Video: Jimmy Shelton, Tom Connors, Pat McGowan
Music: Robot Science

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News - Opinion: Xbox One is a desperate prayer to stop time

gamasutra.com

May 21, 2013   |   By Leigh Alexander
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Gamasutra editor-at-large Leigh Alexander wasn’t particularly impressed with today’s “groundbreaking” Xbox One unveiling.

At the opening of Microsoft’s Xbox One reveal, my first thought was that I feel old: An amped movie trailer soundtrack accompanies the pan-out on the big Reveal Tent on the company’s campus, and I couldn’t be gladder not to be there: No wristband, no ambling in line for logo lanyards and pounding sizzle reel, no obligatory applause for yet another annual lime green laser light show. Other people are excited about this, probably. I’m not. I’m become the jaded cynic, destroyer of dreams.

Yet by the end of the console event, I sat disoriented, feeling like I’d seen one of the Big Three take a hard left into a past decade, a fictional privileged nation where everyone owns a giant television they want to talk to, where they entertain themselves with high-end fictional simulations of football season and futuristic, nebulous wars abroad. Where we supposedly want whole-body play. Where the fantasy is that all our living rooms are big enough for that.

The beginning salvo of the theoretical “You” at the center of the living room experience took me back to 2006, where we all giggled a little when Time Magazine’s person of the year was “You,” complete with mirror on the front of the print magazine. That wasn’t long after the Xbox 360’s late 2005 launch. The world has changed a lot since then, but you wouldn’t know it to look at the presentation.

I didn’t have to attend the reveal event to watch it; I streamed it on a PC and took notes on a netbook. I talked to a friend about it on an iPhone. I participated in, processed and ultimately covered the announcements across three different screened devices, none of which was a television. Yet in Microsoft’s world, the TV is still the core of the theoretical home for people who want “immersive worlds and epic battles”.

My parents and their Boomer friends have those theoretical American homes, the kind with the spacious sofa and the dominant television altar, where they mainly watch on-demand recordings of cable shows. They don’t want a game console. They don’t want to talk to their television either. I’ve got friends who love immersive worlds and epic battles, sure. They have thousands of dollars in student debt and tiny, impermanent living spaces; their generation isn’t exactly about to broadly become the next generation of home owners. We play games on consoles and we watch shows on television and we Skype and Tweet from laptops, netbooks, iPads, PCs.

We have compensated for the diminishing ideal of “the living room” by multitasking. We’re an ever-widening generation of multitaskers, of distractionware-devourers. With the Xbox One, which looks remarkably like a 1980s VCR, Microsoft seems to have acknowledged this somewhat, recognizing the disadvantage of accessing a walled garden anything less than instantaneously.

“The Entertainment Altar”

Its “Snap Mode” promises to let you interact among multiple programs simultaneously without exiting them, like lots of us have been doing on tablet devices and in browsers for the last few years, now. Yeah, we’re accustomed to using multiple social and entertainment applications simultaneously — but it’s funny Microsoft thinks we want to do this on a television screen. There’s Skype, they say. Has anyone ever wanted to use Skype on their TV, instead of at their office workstation, on a tablet passed around a party, on a laptop nestled in bed? Do they want to? During a… video game, during a television program?

Let’s say you did want to do all of this: you kind of need a huge TV. You need an Entertainment Altar where instant voice command is a cool-future status item, where everyone is wont to sit As A Family in the thrall of the Entertainment Altar. You need to live in a fantasy of the privileged that is diminishing amid an economic and technological disruption where it’s hard to believe this kind of device is going to be broadly relevant.

It needs nothing less than broad relevance, after all. Microsoft likes to say phrases like “more [something] than ever before” — what about more money than ever before required to make games for high-end technology? Is there any overlap between the sort of NFL-loving, status-chasing American home that would lavish upon a living room Entertainment Altar and the sort that would desire yet another hyper-real fantasy of war-play, ever more hyper-real, so that now you can see the fine hairs on a man’s forearm and the capillaries of his eyes before you shoot him for points? In a multitasking culture, is this the way to make the TV broadly relevant?

I mean, if I wanted to be on the forefront of the video game industry, given the current shift in the way our demographics earn income and use devices, and given the current fatigue with arguments about what, exactly, our role in influencing entertainment culture and in pioneering the medium of creative play ought to be, I might want to tone it down on the whole “more fetishistically real weapons of war than ever” thing. But that’s just me.

The thing is, developers will have to want to spend a lot of money making games in order for consoles to matter to gamers, who now have endless less expensive, more open, more accessible platforms on which to play and socialize. And in order for that expense to seem logical, a device like the Xbox One will have to appeal to a much more revolutionary audience than the exact same one that moved the Xbox 360 at the beginning of the current generation.

The company said “groundbreaking,” “immersive” and “connected” more times than I could count during this presentation, yet this is a rich boy’s black box for playing Call of Duty and Halo on — and even that assumes fans of those franchises can and will continue to invest in the living room fantasy, will continue to invest in the same game mechanics, the same brands, the same ideas but with better graphics. This is what our advancements have bought us? This is all?

“A movie-soundtracked prayer to stop time”

They’ll show us more games at E3, they say. Yes, we are always being promised more in future. We are tired of buying consumerist fantasies. This isn’t revolutionary. This is arrested development, the last gasp of the console generation, dropping names and making obeisances to live actors and television and film personalities as if this were still a prior age’s clutch backward for creative legitimacy. It is a movie-soundtracked prayer to stop time.

Not only am I unmoved by this “groundbreaking” reveal, but I can’t imagine who reasonably would care — except for the most high-end, most traditional niche “adult gamer” fan who does not represent a broad enough cross-section of the market to stay viable, who never will.

So maybe what I feel isn’t old. Maybe what I feel is moved on. I’d like to see the console industry move on too, but judging by Microsoft’s performance, it doesn’t look good.

gamasutra.com

Xbox 360’s Kinect causes trouble for users during next-gen livestream reveal

polygon.com

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Xbox 360’s Kinect causes trouble for users during next-gen livestream reveal

By Megan Farokhmanesh on May 21, 2013 at 6:00p @Megan_Nicolett

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Xbox 360 Kinect owners had some trouble today watching Microsoft’s Xbox One reveal due to device’s response to “Xbox” commands spoken during the livestream.

Several users took to Twitter to document their problems, which included pausing, opening Xbox Live or quitting the stream entirely. Polygon’s own reviews editor Arthur Gies experienced similar problems with his Kinect while watching the stream.

Microsoft unveiled its next-gen console, Xbox One today during a one-hour presentation. The Xbox One will require a Kinect-connection at all times to properly run. According to Microsoft, the Kinect is “an essential and integrated part of the platform” and will enable users to switch between games, apps, TV and more. You can view all our coverage on Xbox One right here.

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polygon.com

Kein Zurück - NES is dead

nes-is-dead.de

Von Pascal Simon, am 23.05.2013

Kein Zurück

Langsam schleiche ich durch den vermoderten Gang. Alleine den Eingang zur Gruft zu finden war eine Qual und erst Recht, so tief in sie einzudringen. Horden von Untoten durchstreifen das alte Gemäuer, das riesig ist, viel größer, als es für ein simples Grab nötig wäre. Das hier wurde nicht gebaut, damit Tote ihre Ruhe finden – es wurde gebaut, damit die Toten ihre Reichtümer verteidigen können. Tief unten soll es schlummern, das Amulett, für das ich den ganzen Weg auf mich genommen habe. Mein Schwert sendet fades Licht zu den nassen Wänden, die es unheimlich reflektieren und die riesigen Steinbögen, welche die Decke stützen, unheimlich tanzende Schatten werden lassen. Dieses Schwert zu beschaffen war ein ganz anderes Abenteuer, eines, das mich damals fast das Leben gekostet hätte. Plötzlich überrascht mich ein lebendes Skelett völlig unvorbereitet in meinen Gedanken versunken! Sein rostiges Schwert prallt von meiner Schulterrüstung ab, der stumpfe Schlag trifft mich trotzdem hart und lässt mich zur Seite taumeln. Kaum habe ich mich wieder gefasst holt es schon erneut zum Schlag aus, doch ich bin schneller und pariere.

Der Rüstung nach zu urteilen gehörte das Skelett einst in den Körper einer Palastwache oder einem Dieb, der die Rüstung nicht ehrlich verdient hatte. Ich schleudere des Schwert des Skelettes kräftig zur Seite und schlage jetzt selbst zu. Schildarm und schon löst sich der Oberarm in Staub auf und der kleine Buckler fällt zu Boden. Mit dem verbleibenden Arm holt das Skelett wieder aus – besonders klug sind die meisten Untoten nicht – und während ich die an meinem Gürtel hängende Axt hervorhole, um ihm den Schädel zu zertrümmern where ich sein Hieb ab und … mein kostbares Schwert zerbricht, sein Licht erlöscht sofort. In dem Wissen, wo das Skelett zuletzt war, schlage ich mit der Axt in die Dunkelheit und dem Knacken und der folgenden Stille entnehme ich, dass es ein Treffer war. Aber mein Schwert ist wohl für immer dahin. Kurz stapfe ich durch die Dunkelheit, grob in die Richtung, aus der ich gekommen bin, um den Ausgang wieder zu finden, dann wird es mir zu blöd und ich lade das letzte Savegame.

Gewagte Anfangsthese: Savegames sind Stimmungskiller Nummer eins

Manchmal werde ich sogar mitleidig angeschaut, wenn ich sage, dass ich in Rollenspielen immer nur ein Savegame habe. Meistens ist es nur Unverständnis, aber in seltenen Grenzfällen schleicht sich ein Anflug von “Ach Junge, weißt du denn gar nichts über das Leben und Videospiele?” ein. Es scheint allgemein als Standard angenommen zu werden, dass man, gerade in Open-World- und Rollenspielen, mindestens die letzten fünf Spielstände, besser noch eine historische Sammlung aller Spielstände seit Aufrichtung unserer Wirbelsäulen, zu behalten. Aber ich bin nicht so. Ich gönne jeder sauber abgrenzbaren Spieleinheit wie Charakteren exakt einen Spielstand, den ich immer wieder mit dem neuen überschreibe. In allen Spielen. Okay, ich gebe zu: Manchmal, nach ungefähr 50 Stunden, wenn es wirklich schade wäre, die investierte Zeit zu verlieren, lege ich ein zweites Savegame an, das ich jeweils im Wechsel überschreibe, aber nur, falls es wirklich technische Probleme gibt und ich war bis heute so willensstark, diese Sicherungen nie einzusetzen, um meinen Spielstand zurückzusetzen.

Ich genieße die Finalität meines Voranschreitens. Alle reden immer davon, dass Spiele doch interessante Entscheidungen bieten sollen und wir wollen immer Einfluss auf den Spielverlauf nehmen und wenn es geht doch bitte 387 verschiedene Enden, je nach dem, wie lange wir zu Beginn des Spiels ein Plakat angesehen haben. Aber die meisten fürchten sich für den Konsequenzen ihrer Entscheidungen. Ihr versteckt euch immer hinter euren Savegames, denn euch könnte ja etwas unerwartetes passieren, dass so nicht in euren Masterplan passt. Kein Platz für Überraschungen. Ich möchte das nicht. Ich möchte auf ein Abenteuer zurückblicken, das ich so erlebt habe und nicht auf ein Abenteuer, das ich optimiert habe.

Ich baue in Spielen ziemlich oft Scheiße. Ich zerstöre Questitems, ich töte versehentlich mit einem Flächenzauber Freunde, die mir später helfen könnten, ich vergesse, in welchem Schrank in Rivet City ich 90% meiner Munition gebunkert hatte. Und ich lebe mit den Konsequenzen meiner Fehler. Wäre es nicht langweilig den Enkeln am Kaminfeuer davon zu berichten, wie man durch das größte Abenteuer seines Lebens einfach durchgerutscht ist, ohne, dass etwas schief gegangen ist und ohne, dass man vor wirkliche Probleme gestellt wurde? Die Enkel würden vermutlich sogar von ihrer Playstation ablassen, weil daneben die doofe Oma daneben sitzt, die immer so langweilige Geschichten erzählt und stattdessen Lehren als Bankkauffrauen und Immobilienmakler beginnen. Würde ich ein Buch darüber schreiben trüge es den reißerischen Titel “Mehr Abenteuer wagen – Mehr Abenteuer erleben”.

Versucht es doch einmal selbst. Am Anfang werdet ihr eine gewissen Angst verspüren, etwas falsch zu machen. Das ist normal und geht nie wieder weg, aber irgendwann fängt man an, es als normales Spielerlebnis wahrzunehmen. Weil man wirklich etwas erlebt.

Text von vorne beginnen

nes-is-dead.de

Maturity, Challenge, Art and Games

makegames.tumblr.com

Some recent online discussions have prompted me to write something short on the above ideas. The first discussion erupted when a Kotaku writer called George Kamitani a “14-year-old boy” for including hypersexualized women in the character line-up for Dragon’s Crown. The second discussion had to do with a video I did with Anthony Carboni and Doug Wilsson where we played Spelunky and talked about games a little bit in general. Perhaps “discussion” is too strong a word for a few YouTube comments about maturity and challenging games, but nonetheless, it made me want to develop and clarify my feelings on the topic further.

First of all, I personally separate theme from craft to a degree when evaluating art - one has to do that in order to understand how a “children’s movie” like The Incredibles is also a sophisticated piece of storytelling and cartooning. There’s a reason why Pixar attracts some of the most talented animators in the world. There’s a reason why, at least in Asia and Europe, even 2d cartoons are treated with seriousness when it comes to the continuing evolution of cinema. Whereas a gritty, realistic drama about race, sexuality, and politics can easily be a hackneyed piece of trash unfit for either adults or children because it is poorly made.

It seems many people have trouble separating theme from craft in the game industry. One of the most obvious examples of this is the internet’s ongoing debate with Roger Ebert about games and art. Time and time again, I notice a few specific games are brought up as an example of games “as art”: Braid, Journey, and Shadow of the Colossus. Don’t get me wrong - I think these are all wonderful and artistic games. But I would feel better if alongside these examples there were more shouts of, say, Metal Slug or Doom 2 - immersive and ground-breaking games of terrific craftsmanship ostensibly left out of the discussion because of their cartoony, masculine themes and gun-violence. The tendency of the games as art argument to veer toward certain types of games highlights our prejudice toward theme over craft when evaluating artistic merit and maturity. And not just theme, but certain kinds of themes. In the end, there was never really any hope of convincing Ebert, who once said “A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it” [1]. When it comes to art, today’s video game community seems to care entirely too much about the “what” and not the “how”.

What I was trying to touch on in the video with Doug and Anthony is that many games that try to tackle more mature themes and storytelling are nevertheless extremely immature video games that condescend players by constantly nagging them and directing them about like overprotective parents. It’s not that these titles aren’t challenging enough, it’s that they are just challenging enough to be recognized as a game - an FPS or something - and that’s it; the playing of them often feels like a distraction as opposed to the vehicle for immersion. These games are like Easter egg hunts themed after a great novel - they lack both the sophistication of the novel and the wild, abandoned fun of a simple Easter egg hunt. It’d be better if they dropped one pretense or the other, in my opinion, whether that meant creating better challenges or removing them altogether.

Peruse Roger Ebert’s reviews and you will find that he loved many different kinds of movies: Spirited Away and Superman and Pulp Fiction are rated as highly as Metropolis or Fitzcarraldo. That one was an animated cartoon and another starred a superhero in spandex tights did nothing to embarrass him or otherwise diminish his understanding (through watching a great many movies) that all of them were exceptional films that did what they set out to do well and treated their audiences with respect. He challenged us on our understanding of our own hobby and by and large we failed. It was probably the best thing he could have done for us.

[1] Full quote, from his review of Freeway: “Occasionally an unsuspecting innocent will stumble into a movie like this and send me an anguished postcard, asking how I could possibly give a favorable review to such trash. My stock response is Ebert’s Law, which reads: A movie is not about what it is about. It is about how it is about it.”

makegames.tumblr.com

Mom Plays Manhunt

unwinnable.com

The following is a transcript of an exchange between Gus Mastrapa and his mother that originally appeared on Robotstreetgang. We are reprinting it on Unwinnable to celebrate the release of Manhunt on PSN this week. To preserve the integrity and gritty realism of the dialogue, no edits have been made.

G.M.: Mom, we need to talk.

Mom: Is it about your father again? I told you, I thought you two were wrestling all those years. Honest I did.

G.M.: No. Jesus, Mom. It’s not about that. I just want you to play a videogame.

Mom: Oh, that’s a relief.

G.M.: So, you’ll play?

Mom: You know I don’t like playing your games.

Yes, Mom. It’s a real Glock 9-millimeter pistol and it’s loaded.

G.M.: I know, Mom. That’s why I need you to play it.

Mom: Oh. I don’t know.

G.M.: I need your help. I’m going to write a story about it.

Mom: Can’t you get someone else to do it?

G.M.: No, Mom. It has to be you.

Mom: I don’t think so, Honey. How about I just watch?

G.M.: Okay, Mom. Maybe this will make you change your mind.

Mom: Oh my! Is that real?

G.M.: Yes, Mom. It’s a real Glock 9-millimeter pistol and it’s loaded.

Mom: Why are you pointing it at me?

G.M.: Because I need you to play this game. It’s called Manhunt and it’s by Rockstar, the same people who made Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

Mom: (silence)

G.M.: You’ve heard of Grand Theft Auto, right?

Mom: You know me. I don’t keep up with all the things on the T.V.

G.M.: Perfect.

Mom: I thought I raised you better than this.

G.M.: You did, Mom. But in order to write a story about what may be one of the most gritty, realistic and violent videogames ever made, I have to do something that will grab people’s attention.

Mom: I see…

G.M.: Mom?

Mom: How about I make you a nice costume or something?

G.M.: That’s not good enough.

Mom: You looked so cute as Ms. Pac Man that Halloween.

G.M.: Mom. No. Please just play along and nobody will get hurt. Okay?

Mom: All right.

G.M.: Here’s the controller.

Mom: What are all these buttons for.

G.M.: Don’t worry about that yet. Just watch the game.

Mom: Watch? Aren’t I supposed to be doing something?

G.M.: Not, yet. Just watch.

Mom: Am I that lady?

G.M.: She’s a newscaster. You’re the guy being executed.

Mom: Oh. Is the game over already?

G.M.: No, you’re not dead. A secret organization has faked your death. They’re going to film you fighting for your life and sell the footage as snuff films.

Mom: Okay….What’s snuff?

G.M.: It’s tape or film of people being murdered.

Mom: You see! I would have rather lived my entire life not knowing that snuffies existed.

G.M.: Snuff.

Mom: Yeah. That’s why I don’t go to see movies anymore. They should make more movies about nice things. Like that Secondhand Tigers movie. Now, that was nice.

G.M.: Yes, Mom. Are you finished?

Mom: Yes. What now?

G.M.: You missed the whole explanation. There was a guy talking to you. He’s the ringmaster of this whole thing. Run forward by pushing the R1. This button right here.

Mom: Okay. I’m running.

G.M.: Go pick up that plastic bag.

Mom: I’m supposed to clean up litter?

G.M.: No, the bag is going to be a weapon.

Mom: Tsk. What’s that circle at the bottom for?

G.M.: That’s your radar. It tells you where your enemies are and which way they’re facing.

Mom: The little man has a radar?

G.M.: Well, sort of.

Mom: Couldn’t I just hit the bad guys over the head with my radar machine?

G.M.: You don’t have a radar machine. Your guy just knows where the enemies are and which way they’re facing.

Mom: Oh. So my man is psychic or something?

G.M.: No, mom! He’s not psychic! He just knows. It’s the game designer’s way of making up for the fact that you’re not really in the game.

Mom: Hmm. It’s not really very realistic then. Is it?

G.M.: I guess not, Mom. Let’s just move on.

Mom: Honey?

G.M.: Yeah?

Mom: Your gun is pointing towards the ground.

G.M.: Oh. Thanks.

Mom: If you sat up straight the gun wouldn’t drift down like that.

G.M.: I know, Mom. Jeez. Can you just focus on the game?

Mom: Don’t get snippy with me, young man. I’ve been cooperative, haven’t I? I mean, I do my best to do things for you and your sister and sometimes I get the idea that you two take me for granted. Things haven’t been easy for me, you know. Sometimes a little respect is all…Honey! Don’t point that thing at your head! Point it back towards me. That’s better. I’m sorry, Gus. Don’t cry.

G.M.: Mom…(sniff) can we please just play the game so (sniff) so I can write my article.

Mom: Sure, honey. What do you want me to do?

G.M.: Walk towards that man.

Mom: Okay. Did he just say the “S” word?

G.M.: Yeah, he did.

Mom: You know how I feel about that kind of language.

G.M.: I know, Mom. That’s why I want you to kill him with your plastic bag.

Mom: You want me to kill the foul-mouthed man?

G.M.: Would you do it for me, Mom?

Mom: Sure, Honey. You know I’d do anything for you. Oh. It says the “F” word on the wall next to him.

G.M.: Yeah, Mom. It’s written in blood. Gross, huh?

Mom: Yeah. Did I ever tell you the story about how your father almost passed out at the hospital when he saw you getting stitches?

G.M.: About a million times.

Mom: Oh. He said “prick” this time.

G.M.: The only way for you to stop the cursing is to kill him.

Mom: Okay, I’m going to do it.

G.M.: Hit the button!

Mom: Oh, he’s hitting me.

G.M.: Fight back, Mom. Hit the “X” button.

Mom: Okay. I hit it.

G.M.: No. You have to hit it a bunch of times.

Mom: It says scene failed.

G.M.: Yeah, he killed you. Let’s try it again. Give me the controller.

(extended silence)

G.M.: Okay. Take the controller. Sneak up on him and hit the “X” button.

Mom: I’m killing him!

G.M.: Yeah, Mom. You sure are.

Mom: Who’s filming me?

G.M.: Hidden cameras.

Mom: But how about that close-up? That camera was really close to me and at knee level.

G.M.: So?

Mom: You expect me to believe that there’s a camera hidden in the air right in front of me? You keep saying that this game is so realistic, but who was shooting that footage? It had static and those numbers on it like it was real video, but there’s no cameramen around to shoot the footage.

G.M.: I give up. This isn’t working. You’re supposed to be shocked and outraged, not so…so…critical.

Mom: Come back, Honey!

G.M.: No, Mom. You always do this.

Mom: You forgot your gun!

(footsteps and a door slamming)

Mom: Well…shit.

———

This writing is a work of fiction. No similarities to mothers living or otherwise are intended. All imaginary gunplay was executed by professionals. Do not attempt this scenario at home. No mothers were hurt during the writing of this post. Please do not sue me. Pretension +1 is a weekly column about the intersections of life, culture and videogames. Follow Gus Mastrapa on Twitter @Triphibian.

unwinnable.com

A Silent Hill Queer-y

gaygamer.net

May 24
2013

by Mitch Alexander

What would a queer Silent Hill look like?

It’s probably a pretty odd question, but it’s one I kept brushing up against while I was brushing up on my Francis Bacon know-how for a previous article on Silent Hill right here on GayGamer.Net. Bacon had a massive influence on the artistic direction of Silent Hill, and his work often contained themes of sexuality and/or violence. As a gay man, however, most of the paintings that were explicitly sexual in Bacon’s work were focused on the male form – but as a whole, the Silent Hill series is very much a negative heterosexual male perspective on sexuality (particularly female sexuality).

This may not necessarily be as oppressive as it might sound, given that the narrative of Silent Hill goes to great pains to demonstrate that its protagonists have very problematic, negative ideas about sexuality. In fact, the narrative makes it pretty clear that any representation of human life the player comes up against (from sexuality to family, from guilt to being teased at school) are by definition the protagonist’s own profoundly negative ideas.

That doesn’t change the fact that most of Silent Hill‘s representations of sexuality come from straight male characters and their attitudes to female sexuality, whose perspectives can pretty much be summed up with “women’s bodies are mysterious and foreign and sexy and scary.”

[Trigger warnings for discussion of sexual abuse from here on out, and spoiler warnings for the main themes of Silent Hill 3, as well as bosses in Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill: Homecoming].

Given that this attitude is already prevalent in both the real world (exemplified by white Republicans’ misinformed ideas about rape, pregnancy and abortion) as well as across fiction (the Abort Gigyas theory of Mother, the revelation about Darkspawn Broodmothers in Dragon Age, the male gaze that’s encoded in scores of games from Dead or Alive to Mass Effect 2), the most horrific element may be that games are still going on about how weirdly “Other” women are, as though men are the default, standard sex, and any deviation from such is so rife with horror that it will be incorporated into the game’s monsters, environment, or heck, it might even become the entire premise of the game.

There is such a focus on the alienness of female anatomy, of exclusively female body horror, but the fact is, male-assigned sexual organs (both primary and secondary) are equally weird. Testes are literally wee egg things suspended in a fleshy bag suspended from someone’s groin! Semen is a sticky goo that’s one-half of a magic baby-making formula! The prostate is a magic pleasure button hidden up the backside! There’s even a wee skin-hood that some folk like to cut off for various medical or religious reasons! These elements are so absent from games that it becomes dubious and suspect to even bring them up, but it’s apparently banal to the point of unremarable that we play games with monsters that have glowing, techno-organic nipples (noticeably absent from their male counterparts), formerly dual-breasted folk growing rows of swollen breasts, or even have a boss battle taking place in what’s rumoured to be a cosmic uterus.

When the “monstrous feminine” is included in Silent Hill, they are almost invariably reduced to two things: tits and vag. The nurses are buxom; the Mannekins are bare, slender legs; Asphyxia and Scarlett have prominent breasts (despite the humans they’re based on both being at the younger side of adolescence); Closers have vaginal openings on three of their appendages; Amnion is a heavily pregnant woman; Needler is heavily suggestive of childbirth; Siam’s female side is on her back with her legs spread and flailing in the air, the Doll is a woman with half her face missing dressed in a very short, low-cut dress…

Not that any of these things may be problematic in and of themselves – in fact, including monstrous femininity (or female-ness) in a game that heavily implies its characters are sexually repressed or frustrated makes sense. It’s just that it must be acknowledged that Silent Hill’s focus on sexuality is explicitly male heterosexuality, and that its representation of women comes almost exclusively from the position of “women’s bodies are mysterious and foreign and sexy and scary”, regardless of whether the narrative justifies this by saying it’s the protagonist’s own repressed ideas of sex.

Even Heather – the only female protagonist of the main Silent Hill series – comes up against this in Silent Hill 3, which could be summed up, if reductively and simplistically, as the Mystical Pregnancy trope embodied in a game. Her nightmarish otherworld is filled with manifestations of her (and Alessa’s) fears about pregnancy: Valtiel is her midwife; the nurses represent pregnancy; the Closer represents abuse and pregnancy, the Pendulum may stand for the pain of birth… Silent Hill‘s only female protagonist – a teenage girl, no less – apparently has no overtly sexual frustrations, only those of the biological process of birth held by her “dark half”, Alessa. Heather’s nightmare world is neutered and reduced to the final outcome of sex – maternity and birth, the woman as a vessel for something else – rather than sex itself. Again, it’s justified in the narrative since Heather is slated to be the vessel for God, hence the game’s core theme is all about pregnancy and maternity, but again, women’s bodies are reduced to the biological function of pregnancy, whereas the visibly male monsters can represent just about anything else.

There’s one massive exception to the rule of female = sex, male = anything else in the Silent Hill series, and its our old friend, that Red Pyramid Thing; Pyramid Head is overtly masculine, and even partially symbolises male sexuality – but the sexuality linked with Pyramid Head is not anything to do with his inherent maleness, but the fact that he suggestively wrangles with a pair of overtly feminine Mannekins. His sexuality is derived from what he does to the women and female monsters in the game, rather than what he is. In contrast, the sexual symbolism of the Mannekins is due to their innate, inherent femaleness (slender female legs kicking and flailing about, often sexualised through male gaze), the symbolism of the Nurses is their inherent femaleness (miniskirts and exposed, pushed-up cleavage, again, sexualised by male onlookers) rather than anything they explicitly do. This is echoed in Silent Hill 0rigin’s Butcher, who similarly seems to delight in eviscerating female monsters.

A quick aside to mention one potentially glaring omission in the form of Silent Hill 2‘s Abstract Daddy, Angela’s monstrous incarnation of her father’s sexual abuse. There’re very little overtly male/masculine traits to Abstract Daddy, but this makes a great deal of sense: rape is sexual violence after all, and having Angela’s rapist take on overtly sexual characteristics would occlude the fact that sexual violence is violence first and foremost.

So, were Silent Hill to take a new direction, what would it look like?

Queering Silent Hill

Let’s first consider how Silent Hill would be altered if the only thing we changed was the character’s sexuality, from hetero to homo. Instantly we can write off the buxom nurses, vaginal passageways, and themes of maternity: the “fear of the feminine” is a preoccupation of straight men, not gay men, and it’s an archaic misconception that men “go gay” because of some unresolved discomfort around vaginas. It’s the other way around. That’s not to say that gay men are absolved of sexist or misogynist attitudes, however, which we’ll talk about later.

Maleness will be likely overt and apparent: male physique, male anatomy, all the way down to the plumbing. Would the sight of swinging appendages and dangly bits make gaming’s most privileged and catered-to demographic – young white men – feel uncomfortable? We can only hope. In all likelihood, though, that discomfort would be mitigated with dick jokes and angry internet commenters starting sentences with “I’m fine with gays, but…” Well, too bad. If they don’t like even vaguely suggestions of male sexuality, they’ll find something else to play, like the remarkably heterosexual Gears of War series, or even the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series, well-known for having an exclusively male cast of main characters. (I like those odds.)

The protagonists of Silent Hill often bring their sexual hangups with them, and there’s a vast slew that can be drawn upon within the well-documented history of gay male identity to create new monsters based on sexual anxiety. Anonymous gloryhole monsters hiding in musty, secluded bathrooms. Indistinct, writhing forms occluded by clouds of steam in the sauna, punctuated by the far-off squeal of rusted valves turning. A virus that hangs overhead, casting a shadow over bugchasers and giftgivers. Discreet glimpses of shuddering flesh in the ex-gay ministry.

The non-sexual aspects of gay male identity are themselves fraught with potential for people to become negatively obsessed over them – hellhouses in particular would be apropos for the Silent Hill setting, as would the very real fear of gay-bashing.

Maleness may well be overt and explicit, especially considering how many gay men have to come to terms with where they fit in a culture that’s often dominated by oppressive, patriarchal attitudes towards manliness, machismo and masculinity. In a culture where anything “feminine” is seen as anything from inferior to downright weak, “effeminate” men are often targeted for abuse by other men; this has lead to the glorification of being “straight-acting” and the demonisation of being camp or effeminate among gay men, a kind of subcultural internalised homophobia (and, in a sense, a kind of misdirected misogyny – hating the things associated with female-ness). This brings with it yet more fodder for the repressed, oppressive monsters living inside the gay psyche.

With a gay male protagonist, perhaps we would finally be more comfortable with tackling something that is rarely addressed in games: male sexual abuse. This isn’t a gay issue, or even a queer issue – male-on-male sexual abuse is neither exclusively perpetrated by gay men, or suffered by gay men, and it’s a dangerous fallacy to assume that the rape of men by other men is predicated on gay identity. To wit, it’s interesting that Silent Hill Downpour‘s Murphy Pendleton, who has apparently spent time inside a violent prison, has to fend off against monsters that represent the physical violence he witnessed (and perhaps took part in) while in the prison system, and even has to fight one creature that symbolises the sexual frustration he felt while in prison; and yet, he doesn’t seem to experience any anxieties regarding sexual coercion, abuse and rape, which is frighteningly prevalent in the U.S. prison system – a study of Midwestern prisons suggests that 1 in 5 inmates experience some form of sexual coercion or abuse in prisons.

That isn’t at all to suggest that the inclusion of male sexual assault or rape in the Silent Hill series would make the series “better” – as it stands, male rape (especially prison rape) is often glossed over, joked about and otherwise ignored, effectively silencing survivors of male sexual abuse from talking about their experiences and finding the help they need to overcome the issues that the abuse may have created. There are a million and one very good reasons not to include “rape as backstory” – but the fact that it wasn’t included despite the series unflinchingly including other motifs of female sexual abuse from its inception is proof-positive of the game’s heteronormativity; and, for those men who may be horrified at the idea of a game alluding to male rape, consider that Silent Hill franchise is a horror game (with horrific elements being par for the course), and that female players are already having to adjust to the fact that the game includes heavy allusions to women being sexually objectified, abused, or raped – Alessa’s “incubus”, the mannikins, Angela Orosco’s entire backstory, the nurses…

As a gay cis man, I can only really speak about how Silent Hill and gay cisgender male identity could intersect – but having had to come to terms with my own queer identity means I can at least briefly suggest how I think other non-male, non-het and non-cis identities could be tackled by the series.

What was previously said about the straight male perspective on female sexuality brings up an interesting point once we consider what a non-male, non-heterosexual Silent Hill would look like; would a lesbian protagonist in Silent Hill create similarly sexualised female creatures? Odds are, they probably would – and that would make for a very interesting discussion point. As mentiond before, the focus on the “monstrous feminine” can be problematic because women are inappropriately sexualised, demonised and objectified by male onlookers, but there’s a struggle that women who are attracted to women have to go through, especially living in a culture that encourages people to objectify women, facing the dichotomy of feeling passionately that women should not be sexually objectified, but still being fed narratives that say “It’s okay, all men do it, you can do it too, why shouldn’t you be allowed a turn?” Silent Hill could well end up making this psychological battle manifest in the form of overtly sexual female monsters in keeping with the series monster designs to date, but with a far more knowing, challenging concept behind them – sexual objectification of women by women. Although it’s also pertinent to mention that there hasn’t historically been widespread systematic and institutional sexual oppression of women by women across vast swathes of societies and cultures on every continent at all points in history, so, really, perhaps these things aren’t quite as comparable as they may seem.

Again though, we can raise the issue of aggressors – both male and female – when it comes to sexual abuse. Women the world over have to adopt defense mechanisms because they cannot be certain that a given man won’t sexually assault them; but how do you talk about female sexual abuse in a misogynist, queerphobic culture that can easily latch onto someone’s experience of female sexual abuse by a female aggressor and turn it into a story about locking up your daughters for fear of predatory lesbians?

Coming to terms with trans* identity in modern society also brings with it the possibility that a trans* protagonist would manifest their fears and anxieties in the form of monsters. The worry of conforming to the gender binary to be accepted by society could result in monsters that span the gender spectrum. The dichotomy of a body that is physically one sex, but with a psychology that is wholly another. There are also anxieties that come with sex reassignment surgery – when is flesh “male enough” or “female enough?” Does it even need to be either of those things? And what about intersex or genderqueer protagonists? All too often, identities that fit under the trans* umbrella have to be read into characters, rather than having their identities explicitly stated.

There’s a wealth of other non-heteronormative sexual and gender identities not even covered here, such as asexuality, third-gender (in its myriad forms around the world – Two-Spirit people would be especially a propos, considering Silent Hill’s connections to North-Eastern Native American peoples settling in the area).

Were a queer character to take their first steps onto the foggy streets of Silent Hill, it would likely give the series the edge that it seems to have lost recently; after all, the series’ hallmark is the fear of the unknown, and the territory that the series has covered from Silent Hill: The Room onwards is known territory. We already know our protagonist will be most likely be white, male, heterosexual, cisgender, and has probably done something heinous in their murky past that they think they need punished for. For many people, gender and sexual identity is a massive unknown, purely because they’ve never had to think about it for very long; perhaps it’s about time we had a foray into Silent Hill through the eyes of a character who is not like the previous protagonists – not white, not young, not male, not heterosexual, not cisgender and hell, maybe not guilty, despite living in a society that blames them for everything that happens to them. Maybe that glimpse into the terrifying and threatening territory of navigating your own identity in an environment that’s hostile to you may clear the foggy misconception that anything that isn’t white, male, heterosexual and cisgender is to be feared.

About Mitch Alexander

(Writer) Mitch Alexander is a Game Design student from Glasgow, Scotland. who usually talks about things you get into deep discussions about at 3am, like Silent Hill, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, The Mothman Prophecies, The Invisibles, or how creepy monkeys are. They’re so, so creepy.

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gaygamer.net

Anamanaguchi: The Ninja Turtles of Rock

polygon.com

PRESENTED BY

By Sam Machkovech @samred
on May 22, 2013 at 12:01p

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The chiptune quartet gets ready to unleash its Endless Fantasy.

Peter Berkman has returned to Williamsburg Pizza for the fourth time in the past 24 hours. The shop hasn’t even been open a year, but the 24-year-old New York state native already knows everybody in the tiny, delicious-smelling kitchen on a first-name basis — and they know him, certainly.

“I’m probably putting one of their kids through school right now,” Berkman jokes. This time, he just grabs a soda, but he cops to eating one to two meals a day at the shop. It’s a stone’s throw from the constant rattle of the nearby elevated J train, which can also be heard from his own apartment a few blocks away.

Could be that he’s filling up because he has a big tour on the horizon. Berkman is the founding member of Anamanaguchi, a chiptune rock band he started as a teenage solo project in which he combined guitar, bass and drums with melodies programmed directly to an Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge. Now a quartet, the band has since exploded as the world’s premier Nintendo-laced musical concern. Anamanaguchi’s 8-bit melodies and pop-rock bombast have stormed all corners of geek culture, from Penny Arcade Expo performances to The Nerdist Podcast’s theme song to the soundtrack for the 2010 Scott Pilgrim video game.

Which leads the band to its biggest venture yet: Endless Fantasy, a double-LP album three years in the making, and the resulting world tour; Mexico City, Amsterdam, Utrecht, most of the U.S. and Canada, even South Korea. It’s enough to make anybody homesick, let alone somebody who liberally imbibes New “Yawk” pizza.

But that’s not really why Berkman’s back at Williamsburg Pizza. Nor is it because he’s a freak about the food (though his childhood friends do joke that Berkman “still eats off the kids’ menu”). If you spend enough time with the guy, you’ll learn the true meaning of “eternal teenager.” Forget Andrew W.K. Peter Berkman is a party-loving, D&D-playing, meme-memorizing, video-game-obsessing, music-cataloging, “stoked” and “dude” and “swag” kind of guy.

He’s no outcast or sore thumb compared to his bandmates, either. With pizza in one hand and an album full of catchy, gaming-inspired rock epics in the other, Berkman and his self-proclaimed “band of bros” are set to storm the world as rock’s veritable Ninja Turtles. No Shredder or Krang stand in their way, however. Just that nagging feeling that they might soon have to grow out of their teenaged shells.

Human Angle: Future Nostalgia

Human Angle: Future Nostalgia

Oil slick rainbow GIF

Oil slick rainbow GIF

One day prior, Berkman isn’t feeling nearly so cool. He stands in his Williamsburg apartment and stares out a window at the J train, growling while popping a giant roll of Bubble Wrap.

The lanky guitarist/programmer, dressed in purple flannel, nondescript jeans and a pair of silver Adidas Sambas, has been out of his comfort zone the whole day, thanks to the pressure of Endless Fantasy’s impending launch and everything that comes with it. It has turned his apartment into a laptop farm; two longtime Anamanaguchi friends sit in the living room, burying their noses in screens and joining the un-fun.

Berkman starts to rattle off the to-do list: a nationwide tour that kicks off in mid-May, just days after the album comes out; an unfinished music video, slated to launch day-and-date with the album on May 14.

“We still need to do merch,” comes a voice from couch. That’s Léia Jopse, a freelance photographer who lives in Astoria, N.Y., and a longtime friend who has taken up stopgap management duties because the band’s longtime manager quit managing bands altogether a few months ago. So they need to design and order merchandise from scratch — everything from shirts to MP3-loaded USB drives.

Drummer and programmer Luke Silas looks up from his laptop on the couch: “We also have a music video coming out in the summer …”

Berkman shakes his head. “That, I’m not even thinking about. And I should be thinking about it, because the [video’s] artists are accountable for me to talk to.” He sighs. “It’s really fucking hard. And the other problem is, we have, like, no money because we’re doing all this stuff with no record out and no merch out. There’s no way for people to give us money right now.”

There’s more to the pressure cooker — distributor dealings, contracts, international travel — yet all Berkman can focus on is a single animated GIF.

The band has uploaded a promotional image for its just-announced national tour on Tumblr, but something’s wrong. It’s not animating.

“It still looks cool,” Jopse offers, but Berkman is visibly annoyed. The GIF is supposed to blossom with a distinctive, almost-rainbow pattern that he obsesses over; he likens it to the “oil spill rainbow” you might see in a street puddle, with lots of blues and purples but no harsh reds. (Eternal Fantasy’s cover shares the same palette, and everything from the on-stage lighting to the vinyl to the MP3 drives will have the same look.) Over the next few hours, he repeatedly peeks at his Tumblr and asks friends and fans to help format the thing correctly; its file name, up until the eventual fix, is fuckyoutumblr.gif.

Rather than focus his remaining nervous energy on the band’s to-do list — which Silas and Jopse chip away at while juggling day-job tasks — Berkman elects to keep adding things to it. He starts dreaming aloud about his vision for Endless Fantasy.

“We don’t think the album’s done,” he says, and he rattles off a few ideas for a “living record.” More videos. More web sites. More remixes and collaborations. More hardware — this is the point where he stops himself, plops on a couch with a wireless keyboard and furiously picks through his Gmail history on a giant high-definition TV.

“I’m gonna show you something real quick,” Berkman says, finally smiling again. “This is very secret. We’re going to launch a pizza into space.”

DeVito and Berkman on the set of their Kickstarter video.

Like Jabba the Hutt

Like Jabba the Hutt

Berkman loads a 30-second test clip of the band’s next music video, for the album’s title track, in which a young woman sits in a bedroom with a giant, glowing cube — just like the one drawn on the album’s cover. He plays the song over the clip; even though it’s not synced up, the song’s twinkling, rave-pop melodies match this iridescent cube, glowing in animated, oil-slick rainbow colors.

“All of that stuff you see in this shot right now, it didn’t exist until the day that we shot it,” Berkman says. The box, and all of the other otherworldly lighting in the shot, were designed from scratch by bassist James DeVito. He’s not around today because of work ramping up at his day job.

A couple of days later, the 25-year-old DeVito opens up his Brooklyn apartment to show off the whole rig. The box sits in the middle of a dusty, debris-ridden basement, next to giant poles, a field hockey goal and other machinist gear. The giant box is made of radiant acrylic, he explains, and its edges are lined with programmable LED lights. Two of its sides have been treated with a “rear-projection fill,” DeVito says, which means he can project images on them without the light shining straight through. Could make for a cool addition to the band’s live show, he admits. (There’s also a giant drone-looking device down here, equipped with a slice of pizza and a GoPro camera, but more on that later.)

Anamanaguchi’s genesis story goes down a few twisting paths of childhood buddies and random encounters, but while DeVito admits he contributes the least to the band’s songwriting, Anamanaguchi wouldn’t be the same without him. The son of longtime Columbia Records producer Don DeVito, James grew up surrounded by music and video games — really, all of the band members did. His house had games going as far back as the original home version of Pong and a Space Invaders cocktail table.

“When you’re in the music industry, you get gifted stuff by artists,” DeVito says. “I don’t think [my parents] ever really played them.”

By 4 years old, he was playing piano, and a teenage love affair with dance-punk and ska led him to the bass guitar. Outside of rocking and gaming, however, was the weird time he spent in a friend’s basement: “My friend built battlebots down there,” DeVito says. “It’s insane. His parents let him have a welding machine in middle school.” DeVito watched and tinkered alongside that friend, and he eventually found online instructions to build his own things; he was in bands by this point, so homemade guitar pedals seemed particularly appealing. “I could buy fuzz pedals for $200 or build my own for $30,” he says, and it led to the self-taught tinkering he’s been doing ever since.

When Anamanaguchi eventually took shape, DeVito built the band’s live NES rig, which combined two consoles, portable PlayStation 1 screens and a mixing board. This was the next step for Berkman’s vision.

The world might’ve wound up with Peter Berkman, sports phenom, if his older brother Dan hadn’t intruded. In second grade, Peter played a bunch of sports and was a shortstop for a local Little League Baseball World Series contender; by eighth, he was faking having asthma to get out of basketball practice. Dan’s influence of pushing punk and rock records had done the trick. Though their dad was a basketball coach, he was also a guitarist and played at Irish folk festivals, and he’s the one who bought Peter his first guitar at the age of 11.

From there, a 13-year-old Berkman joined a pop-punk band as its youngest member. (At lunch one day, Berkman fondly recalls one of the band’s worst songs, “Pop Punk Sucks.”) One of the band’s other members, a high schooler, had a propensity for rattling off gibberish that sounded like Jabba the Hutt. “Anamanaguuuuchi,” the guy would randomly say, as Berkman remembered.

Two years later, Berkman found out about a high school friend’s 8-bit music project, called Approxim8. (This friend, Kurt Feldman, went on to start renowned electro-shoegaze band The Depreciation Guild.) “It sounded like [Sega Genesis game] Zombies Ate My Neighbors,” Berkman says. “I was like, whoa, what’s doing this?” After conducting some chiptune research, he downloaded a freeware program, Nerdtracker 2, to take his own stab at music made for the NES’s sound chip.

Eventually, his love of rock bands and game soundtracks — particularly PS1 games Legend of Legaia and Vib-Ribbon — collided, and he set up a four-track in his bedroom to record rock instrumentation atop Nintendo beats, all by himself. What to call this project? Why not Anamanaguchi? “It sounded like fake Japanese, and I was doing this on a Japanese platform,” Berkman says.

By this time, Berkman and DeVito had bonded through playing gigs and having mutual friends. They were a year apart at the same high school, and they started hanging out to play video games and make music. Heck, they even worked at the same pizza delivery shop. In 2006, DeVito began helping Berkman as a bassist and live rig technician to make Anamanaguchi a real-deal live outfit. (The band’s other first live member, George Brower, actually lives with DeVito to this day and is half of the electronic group George & Jonathan.)

When DeVito combined his two biggest passions to enroll at New York University’s music technology program, Berkman felt compelled to do the same the following year. Around this time, DeVito’s other band fizzled, while Anamanaguchi’s first EP, 2006’s Power Supply, began picking up steam among chiptune enthusiasts. And for good reason — already at this point, nobody was approaching Berkman’s style of combining guitars and 8-bit melodies to create tooth-rottingly sweet sounds. In the summer of 2007, a few of those fans wanted to fly the band out to LA for a couple of gigs, but only Berkman and Luke were on board. Could anybody else fill in?

Hey, we could ask that one cool guy at the NYU music tech program who’s from LA, with the really weird hair. Maybe he could put us up, and even play.

The worst punk band ever

The worst punk band ever

“Hey, there’s Ary!” Berkman points at a guy whizzing past on a skateboard, heading towards a Williamsburg coffee shop, but the pointing is unnecessary. Bright, yellow hair pours out of a baseball cap. A gaudy, yellow smiley-face backpack covers a camouflage jacket. His green fish-scale tights are covered by black-and-yellow shorts and shiny, silver sneakers. A wallet made entirely of Capri Sun labels sticks out of his pants pocket.

Meet Ary Warnaar, Anamanaguchi’s other primary songwriter and guitarist. The 24-year-old Los Angeles native, who lives mere blocks away from Berkman, has finally arisen from a couple of days working on Anamanaguchi CD release issues to meet for coffee, and it’s hard to miss him. Funny thing, though: When he sits down with an iced latte — his favorite, the band jokes — his hair’s roots show through his hat. It’s been a while since he’s had his hair dyed, and the perfect coif of dirty-blonde hair that is showing brings out his baby face.

Warnaar met Berkman and DeVito at NYU’s music tech program, bonding in particular during “listening sessions.” Students would show up to present their latest private music experiments. The Anamanaguchi guys each remember the others bringing in silly, wacky sounds, as opposed to haughty, super-serious material, and they bonded from there.

Before that, Warnaar grew up with a music-supportive family that rivaled DeVito’s. His father, Brad Warnaar, has film score credits dating back to 1973. He played French horn and other instruments for orchestras such as John Williams’. Warnaar’s mother, on the other hand, once played orchestral violin. “She stopped when she had me, which is still a weird thing,” Warnaar says. That meant plenty of musical encouragement as a kid, and even access to his father’s studio recording rig at the age of 13 — by which point he had become obsessed with dance and rave music, unlike his pop-punk bandmates at the time. He blames a babysitter for turning him on to Daft Punk at the age of 9.

Unlike the other Anamanaguchi band members, Warnaar had trouble convincing his parents that video games were worth his time; his father wasn’t swayed until Warnaar outraced his dad at a high-speed go-kart track at the age of 13. To answer his father’s confusion, he stated simply, “I just follow the green line.” Around this time, Warnaar began experimenting with MIDI composition, then circuit-bending and other experimental electronic sounds, not to mention the hacked Game Boy music composition tool Little Sound Dj. When he shipped off to NYU’s music technology program, he discovered and fell in love with the young men behind Anamanaguchi, and their friendship slowly blossomed while attending school together.

Warnaar convinced his film composer father of the value of video games by beating him at go-kart racing.

Serendipitous, then, that Warnaar was in LA when Berkman and DeVito were looking to fly out for a couple of summer concerts. He picked them up from the airport in a camouflage-green Hummer, driving them away at 90 mph.

Warnaar fondly recalls the weird reason he was leasing a Hummer: “I used to have a sick Jeep that I destroyed while chasing aliens in the desert one night. I was in high school, and it was a school night. We drove five hours into the desert in California. We definitely saw aliens, but we ended up in a sand pit. Our friend Buck was sleeping in the back.”

Warnaar had one day to learn Anamanaguchi’s material, and he pulled off the two-concert series with no issues. Attending both of those shows was Luke Silas, an LA native who played in Warnaar’s high-school-band circle much the same way Berkman played in bands before meeting DeVito. Silas also had parents who played music for a living and encouraged him at a young age, starting with violin and cello but soon turning to the drums.

By the age of 12, Silas had started “the worst punk band ever,” and soon after that, he began obsessing over video game soundtracks. “Because I paid so much attention to the music in video games — any fuckin’ chiptune musician will tell you the same thing — it’s gonna be something I wanna do,” Silas says. “Particularly the sound palette that’s embedded in my brain.” From there, he began attending electronic-music classes at the Hamilton Academy of Music while training on drums, and he fell in love with an LA solo chiptune artist known as 8-Bit Weapon, who performed using a Commodore 64 as a musical instrument.

Silas soon started a band with his friend Zack Robinson called Dracula Mountain, which sounded like “18-year-olds playing Dragon Force.” One day in 2007, the duo stumbled upon Anamanaguchi’s debut EP. Robinson immediately wanted to fly the band out to play some shows in LA. Silas introduced himself at the two shows — his incredibly proficient drumming skills were the opening act.

“Zack probably formed Anamanaguchi,” Berkman admits.

Exclusive look at the next episode of Human Angle, only for IE 10 users.

John Hughes meets Kevin Smith

John Hughes meets Kevin Smith

Within a year, all four members of the current lineup — Berkman, Silas, DeVito and Warnaar — had relocated to New York City, and they’d racked up even more fans, including CollegeHumor co-founder Jake Lodwick, who helped the band release its 2009 follow-up EP Dawn Metropolis and book more concerts.

At this point, every member had dabbled in NES and Game Boy music composition, but only Berkman had driven the band’s songwriting (with the exception of “1 1/2” songs from Warnaar on Dawn Metropolis).

A vague cold-call email Berkman received in late 2008 changed all of that: “Wanna make a video game soundtrack?”

The email didn’t indicate much else; all Berkman could go with was the Ubisoft domain on the address. Berkman said yes and then heard nothing for about a year. While on tour in 2009, Berkman discovered the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels while crashing in Lexington, Ky. The next morning, the same Ubisoft rep who’d emailed in 2008 called Pete on his cell phone: “The game in question is based on Scott Pilgrim. Still interested?”

“This was the same universe I want to build in my emotion of good music,” Berkman says. “It’s John Hughes meets Kevin Smith meets video game culture meets music culture meets Edgar Wright style of surrealism. That’s exactly where I was at with my life. This hit me on such a deep level. [I said] I’d love to do the music.”

Due to a nondisclosure agreement, Anamanaguchi can’t answer exactly what happened next, but after a period of waiting and limbo, the band got a late go-ahead to make the soundtrack. Members had about four months to complete a whopping 44 tracks.

“In order to get it done on time, and meet the standards each song called for, we had to split [songwriting] up between Ary, Luke and me,” Berkman says. “Daft Punk-style theme? That’s Ary. Weezer shit? That’s me. Bossa nova shop music? That’s definitely Luke.”

For Anamanaguchi, work and play are often hard to tell apart.

Anamanaguchi’s members admit that Berkman has sometimes floundered as a leader. In the early days, he was likely to wait until the day of a concert to tell his bandmates there would be a concert, for example. But the down-to-the-wire schedule for the soundtrack brought out the best of him — and from the sound of it, the best of every other band member. Riding the Scott Pilgrim momentum, the band pressed forward with another tight-schedule project: a series of singles throughout summer 2010. Each written and recorded within two weeks, the singles saw the band continue riding its creative high.

Other opportunities soon popped up: a request from The Nerdist Podcast to use a song as its theme song (obviously!), and an offer to compose music for Pendleton “Adventure Time” Ward’s next animated series, The Bravest Warriors (Berkman and childhood friend Jon Baken contributed a few tracks, including the show’s theme). All well and good, but band members had a bigger mission on their minds: to make their version of The Smashing Pumpkins’ Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness — essentially, their own stuffed-to-the-gills double LP.

“I feel like an asshole every time I bring this up,” Silas says before describing a recent review of the 1995 Smashing Pumpkins re-release. “People could see the album as an arrogant, pompous prog move that nobody does anymore, to release a double record. The truth of it was, it was the only way [the Pumpkins] could effectively show the amazing streak of songwriting that Billy Corgan and his band were doing for that whole stretch. That’s what this is. Pete and Ary have been writing more incredible things than our band ever had.”

The start bro

The start bro

“‘Prom Night’ has 42 tracks in it,” Berkman says while loading the Eternal Fantasy single’s raw, multitrack audio onto his computer’s Pro Tools mixing program. When I point out that the number of separate instrument tracks on the screen is larger than 42, he corrects himself: “That [number]’s not including vocals.”

He demonstrates how the song sounds with its separate chunks isolated, from a disco-ready guitar lick to a sampled kick drum to an NES tone — and a weird one at that, thanks to a rare NES expansion chip called VRC6 (known for augmenting the audio on Japanese Castlevania cartridges). It’s easy to lose the sense of what’s 8-bit and what isn’t when the song plays all at once.

The band’s goofiness and seriousness do converge on one point: pizza.

Berkman smiles. “When I’m writing music, I’m trying to write what I want to hear, and arrange it in a way that’s perfect. It doesn’t matter what the limit is, whether it’s a Nintendo or a Game Boy.” Then he queues up another song, “Japan Air,” to prove his point: “We’re not limited by the Nintendo anymore with this record. This is 16-bit right now. We’re upping the bits, basically.”

Sure enough, the Warnaar-written, rave-ready “Japan Air,” along with much of Eternal Fantasy, eschews the band’s NES restriction of old — a fact you’d be forgiven for not noticing. Anamanaguchi’s trademark blending of analog rock and digital nostalgia remains, only this time, the band employs new tricks for its old dogs. Bit-shifted vocal samples. Pedal-affected bloops that recall more recent games, like the N64 curio Snowboard Kids.

As Berkman splices and picks through the raw, unfinished tracks, his teenaged nonchalance melts away just enough to reveal a confident artist at his peak.

“[In the past], we were limiting ourselves with the Nintendo, and that was a very conscious choice,” Berkman says. “We only did that so we could get good at micromanaging. Now we have the big picture, and we can micromanage huge shit. I understand every principle about this sound now. Instead of saying, ‘I can’t do that because it’s not a Nintendo,’ it’s saying, ‘I can’t do that because I don’t want to, or because it doesn’t fit the style of the song.’ That’s a much more natural and organic way of limiting yourself. That helps me focus on the things in the song that do matter.”

As if to dispel the fear that Berkman and company have gotten way too serious about their craft, pretty much every 15 minutes, someone in the band — usually Berkman — interrupts with some of the most ridiculous nonsense imaginable.

Right when the band is about to sound like creative gods about the Scott Pilgrim sessions, they tell stories about “icing a bro” — a weird ritual in which the band would hide bottles of Smirnoff Ice around the studio, which were required to be chugged upon sight. After a long day of working out merch and tour logistics, Berkman and Silas chill with childhood friends for an hours-long session of D&D, complete with goofy voices, carefully drawn character portraits and intentional mayhem (not to mention Silas loading an epic video game soundtrack playlist to rock out to during the virtual journey). There’s an embarrassing story or a dubstep-laden game remix video or a cat GIF or a nostalgic tour story around every almost-serious corner.

Even when Berkman picks his songs apart to describe their emotional weight, he finds folders full of goofy teenaged experiments (including a surprisingly good chiptune cover of A-ha’s “Take On Me”), not to mention the story of lead single “Meow“‘s accidental genesis. Its titular meows came when Warnaar jokingly made meow sounds while describing the song. Berkman called his bluff and recorded himself meowing along; the result is an infectious, nonsensical “Louie, Louie” for the chiptune generation.

The band’s goofiness and seriousness do converge on one point, however. Recall a certain slice of pizza attached to a certain piece of drone-like aircraft.

Everything about the drone is high-tech; DeVito even designed and built a safety measure that would trigger at a certain altitude during the test-run, to ensure the craft didn’t run afoul of Federal Aviation Administration restrictions. The test run worked perfectly; even the GoPro camera survived.

Berkman queues the album’s title song again, describing the video’s forthcoming pizza scene beat-by-beat: “This is when the launch happens. Rising footage, mixed with high-frame-rate footage of [the video’s star] doing last-minute checks on her shit; she has this whole apparatus. Then [the pizza’s] rising up into the sky. During the fill, she’s gonna text the pizza emoji and then the space emoji, to contacts: everyone. Then she’ll hit send.

“Then we’ll see the pizza in space, mixed with footage of the best party ever. This will be cut with footage of this falling back into earth. It’s a lot more ambitious than a lot of other music videos. If we wanted to make an easy music video, this would not be it.”

Anamanaguchi’s dream of financing a slew of post-album content suffered a setback when a distribution deal with Yep Roc Records fell through at the last minute, leaving the band not only manager-less but also investment-less. It’s led to lengthy discussions between bandmates and close friends about whether to turn to their fans by way of Kickstarter (as of press time, the band has launched such a campaign.).

All that’s left is to answer the obvious question: If Anamanaguchi are living, breathing Ninja Turtles, then which turtles are they?

Berkman obviously wants to be Michelangelo. The party dude. He looks like a human cartoon — even more so with a guitar slung over his shoulder, bouncing around while his mop of curly hair swivels to and fro. But he doles out Michelangelo duty to Silas, pointing to his quickness to compliment and feel positive about anything in the band. Warnaar, reserved and sometimes a little too-cool-for-school when not in his comfort zone, is a dead ringer for Raphael, while only one Anamanaguchi member could claim the “Donatello does machines” line.

Which leaves Berkman as Leonardo. The leader. “I’m the start bro,” he says with unabashed excitement. “The ‘let’s do this’ dude.”

Next up for the start bro, then: to unleash his Endless Fantasy on fans. To move beyond the artificial barrier of Nintendo-only music so as to share his vision of positive, fun tunes with everyone, gaming fans or no. And, whether by Kickstarter or surprise record deal or sheer willpower, to execute on the giant message from his pizza music video’s storyboard notes, currently large and in bold type on the HDTV in his Williamsburg living room: “Party scene. I can’t fucking wait for this.”

Video: Tom Connors, Regina Dellea, Jimmy Shelton
Images: Polygon, Anamanaguchi
Editing: Russ Pitts, Charlie Hall
Design / Layout: Warren Schultheis

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An Interview with the Creators of Starseed Pilgrim

htmlgiant.com

May 20th, 2013 / 8:16 am
I Like __ A Lot & Massive People

Mike Meginnis

Yesterday, after my lunch but before theirs, I interviewed Droqen (i.e., Alexander Martin) and Ryan Roth, the developer and sound designer of Starseed Pilgrim, a beautiful, mysterious game about “tending a symphonic garden, exploring space, and embracing fate.” It’s six dollars and I am extremely confident your computer can run it. I was kind of awkward and shy, predictably, but the two of them did great. We did it as a video because that was expedient, but if I were you I would treat it like a podcast — listen to the audio; don’t feel like you’ve got to watch. We talked mostly about video games – Starseed Pilgrim, Droqen’s other games, stuff we had all played and enjoyed, and things we didn’t like so much. But I don’t think you have to like video games very much to find a lot of what they said interesting. I made some annotations (indexed by time code) to provide context and further information for the things we discussed; click past the fold to see them.

00:01:21 - Steam is the premiere online digital video game retailer, as well as the name of the platform through which you can access and manage games purchased at the Steam store. For indie game developers, placement on Steam represents an important milestone, as the store’s contents are curated — in other words, they won’t sell just anything.

00:12:10 - Here I’m referring to this lecture, Designing the Universe, by Jonathan Bow and Marc Ten Bosch. (I apologize to Marc Ten Bosch for blanking on his name!) It’s a really fascinating lecture.

00:13:00 - So Jonathan Blow is the main guy behind Braid, a puzzle platformer about time manipulation, one of the first real indie hits. Jon Blow is also one of Starseed Pilgrim‘s big boosters, and probably responsible for much of the game’s recent success.

00:20:22 – Here’s the page for Asphyx.

00:21:59 - You can learn more about Analog Defender here.

00:25:15 - So I think that here Droqen and I are talking about the same thing — I couldn’t remember the name, but he’s right, it’s called Desperate Gods, and you can see more about it here.

00:29:14 - Here’s the page for Probability 0. I haven’t played it, but it looks fun!

00:34:05 - System Shock 2 is a predecessor to Ken Levine’s BioShock games. I never played it, so I can’t say much more than that! But it was pretty important to a lot of people.

00:38:06 - Here’s the Tim Rogers review of BioShock Infinite.

00:45:24 – This seems to be the video to which Droqen is referring.

00:48:00 - If you’re not familiar with the term “roguelike,” here’s an essay I wrote about this kind of game.

01:03:22 - You can see the sequence Droqen describes here, (and then the next couple hours of the game!), here.

If you watched and/or listened to this, thanks very much! And again, check out Starseed Pilgrim.

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