[GayGamer] A Silent Hill Queer-y

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 over 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 warningsfor the main themes of Silent Hill 3, as well as bosses in Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill: Homecoming]. You can read the rest of the article at its original home at GayGamer.net, or by clicking "Read More" below!

[GayGamer] Fear for the Flesh: Francis Bacon's Influence on Silent Hill

(As of recently I've become a writer over at GayGamer.net! My inaugural article is a piece reflecting on the painter Francis Bacon and his influence on the Silent Hill series).

The Silent Hill series draws upon a vast range of artists and media for the inspiration behind its macabre setting, its disturbing and suggestive monsters, and its unsettling stories; the work of David Lynch (especially Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive), Adrian Lyne’s Jacob’s Ladder, Stephen King’s “The Mist”, and many more. Of particular importance is Francis Bacon (1909 – 1992), a gay Irish/English figurative painter whose artwork frequently explores themes of dread, violence, sexuality and the human condition – there are strong parallels between Francis Bacon’s work and the monsters, environments and themes of Silent Hill – violence, punishment, redemption, sexuality, death and humanity.

Of course, that’s not to say that the art team behind Silent Hill deliberately and systematically created the world of Silent Hill in deference to Bacon; only that both creators explored similar themes using similar approaches. Takayoshi Sato, the CGI director and character artist for Silent Hill and Silent Hill 2, has stated in an interview with IGN that his team looked at Bacon’s body of work for inspiration for the game, and Masahiro Ito, background and creature designer and later creative director, allegedly counts Francis Bacon as his favourite artist – and it definitely shows.

(Click here to read the rest of the feature over at GayGamer.net, or click "Read more" below to read it right here!)

[SquareGo] Cognition Episode 1: The Hangman

Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller, is a game split into four “episodes”, and this review covers Episode 1: The Hangman, which introduces us to the main character of the series, Erica Reed.

Read the rest of the review over at SquareGo, or click below! >>

Erica is an FBI investigator living in Boston, gifted with what she calls “intuition”, a psychic power that allows her to gain clues by touching objects or people and seeing flashes of the past in her mind's eye. Using Erica's intuition, along with the traditional adventure-game mechanic of accumulating handy items and using them to solve puzzles in the environment, gives the player a wealth of tools to investigate a strange murder case. A number of plot threads aren't entirely resolved by the end of the game – giving space for the following three episodes to tie them together.

The game is fairly linear, taking Erica from one area of Boston to another, acquiring clues and solving puzzles. The game's puzzle system will be familiar to anyone who's played adventure games before, and there are a number of handy features to make the game more accessible, including the option to highlight objects you can interact with, and a tips system for each stage of the game.

At times, the puzzles can be utterly infuriating; several involve large leaps of logic that are difficult to reason or intuit, or require the player to get Erica to do things that, in the context of the gritty-real-world-crime-drama that is set up, seem out of character. Some of the puzzles are so difficult to intuit that, short of taking every object in the inventory and rubbing them against every object in every environment on the map until something works, it's inordinately difficult to work out. It can also take a lot of time just to get from one place to another, to tab through dialogue, and there are a number of occasions where the player will need to backtrack.

Erica herself is a fun character to play as; most of Cognition's other characters are either unremarkable or trope-laden; for example, Erica's partner in the FBI is an overweight man in a beige trenchcoat and a creased shirt – with no tie – whose maniacal love for donuts even factors into one of the game's puzzles at one point.

Cognition uses a lot of cel-shaded 3D models alongside painted backgrounds, and many of the game's cutscenes also use painted still images, which, accompanied by the stylized subtitle/dialogue balloons, lend a comic-book feel to the whole story.

The game's audio is great, with music that's very fitting, memorable, and gives the game a brooding, sombre tone - and a fast-paced, high-octane thrill during the notable and not-infrequent action sequences in the game. The voice acting is good as a whole; however, Erica seems to slip in and out of her Boston accent, which can be a little jarring at times. Rose, the Antique Shop owner, says the word “dear” so many times that it draws attention to how forced and artificial the dialogue that was written for her sounds when spoken.

Overall, Cognition is a decent adventure game that provides between six and eight hours worth of play: players of other point-and-click adventures will find something to enjoy in Cognition, and those new to the genre may find it a good jumping-on point, especially if they enjoy police-procedural drama mixed with supernatural elements.

[SquareGo] The Adventures of Rubberkid - Hands On

It can be difficult to create a game for children that successfully balances fun with education, and from what we've seen of The Adventures of Rubberkid, its creator Charles Jackson has made a great attempt.

The game stars our eponymous hero, Rubberkid, who decides to take a stand against bullies by creating a special suit made out of rubber-bands that he uses to bounce any insults thrown by bullies right back at them.

Read the rest of the review over at SquareGo, or hit 'Read More' below!

[myGameDev] Hypnagogue

Hypnagogue is a short interactive fiction game I made using Twine. In Hypnagogue, you awake to find that your bedroom has been transmogrified in the night, and you must venture through the "sleeping architecture" to find out more...

I made Hypnagogue with the intention of getting more familiar with Twine, HTML and CSS, and I discovered that it's a great way to make games quickly and requiring little to no specialist know-how - knowing HTML/CSS is a bonus, but it's not necessary in the least! And, best of all, it's completely free!

There's a lot of great resources for making games with Twine on the web, including Anna Anthropy's handy Twine tutorial, a Ashton Raze's guide to CSS in Twine, and of course the official Twine documentation.

If you'd like to see how I made Hypnagogue, you can download the source files here!

I Confess

There's been a lot of talk on the Interwebbosphere (as it's known) regarding the current state of games writing, and in particular of confessional games writing - a method of journalism where the author of the piece focuses on their own reaction to a particular game, how it may parallel or affect their life, and its influence on society at large. Some have questioned what (if anything) confessional games writing can actually bring to the table and what contribution it makes (if any) to our understanding of games.

From personal experience, I can state (confess?) that reading confessional writing pieces is enormously helpful in understanding the place and form videogames take in people's lives.

I've found reading confessional pieces great for considering new ideas that I either hadn't thought of before, or which I may well have dismissed out of hand had I read them in their own context. For example, Mattie Brice's article 'Would You Kindly' posits a lot of interesting points about the type of violence that's being shown in games like Spec Ops versus the systemic violence faced by minority groups; I hadn't even considered that for many people in the West, the violence of war is something that can seem like a "fantasy" because of how far separated we are from it - hell, I've never even physically seen a gun outside of movies and Youtube clips. And I managed to take this on board all from the fact that Mattie was speaking in terms of games - a language I understood.

When I was writing Gaymers and Gaymercon Counterarguments, I considered how important that "meta-lingual" glossolalia of games could be to opening folk up to something they may not have engaged with before, because it was not part of their daily experience; human sexual orientation/identity and the hobby of playing videogames may not be essentially linked, but using one zone (sexual orientation/identity) to establish meaningful common ground so you can also discuss the other zone (videogames) is a great way to forge connections between people - and it also invites the possibility for each zone to inform the other as well. I find it far easier to consider and take on board new concepts when folk are speaking in terms I already understand rather than introducing an entirely new lexicon and expecting me to be able to completely integrate it into my working knowledge by the end of the article. These allegories and analogies between games and other parts of people's lives - such as identity and quality of life - make it that much easier to find common ground and say, "You know, I may not have been where you have, but I understand it a little more."

There is, obviously, a danger to this, and it's a danger brought up in Joel Goodwin's "The Ethics of Selling Children" on ElectronDance - that confessional writing may be a way of commodifying and repackaging people's (often sensitive, sometimes traumatic) personal experiences into a product to be consumed. After all, I, a white cis man, have just consumed something by a trans* woman of colour, then went on to advocate her writing more, saying, "Confess, and I will listen."

"Prepare a Eucharist from your own flesh, and I will eat it."

But what has actually happened? I've read an article and understood a whole new perspective that was otherwise unknown to me beforehand, an illumination I may not have had, had the language of games not been used. Perhaps this is a good thing - it's one more insight that I can use to help understand the oppression and injustice people face. Perhaps this is a bad thing - I'm just some white guy using someone else's struggle to feed my own worldview. Perhaps it's both - my increased understanding may be offset by the problematic nature of my being a white cis ally saying "I support what you did!". Is the Eucharist wafer bread, or someone's flesh?

It's not about me, though. I am not the only person to have felt the benefit of what was written - hundreds, possibly thousands of others have also had a chance to understand something brand new that they may not have beforehand. The understanding we may have gotten about Spec Ops: The Line may only be marginal (if you want details, try a review? there's more than one type of games writing), but that is offset by a new understanding into the lived experiences of another human being. Confessional games writing does give us an insight into games - rather than focusing on the game, the "I", essence and entity of the game itself, it allows us to see the effects it has on our culture and on other people. Each confession is a little flickering God particle, allowing us to indirectly analyse an ephemeral, transitory thing by seeing how it affects its environment.

We should never, ever deny the importance of self-expression. I may not find a particular article all that helpful for me, but that in no way suggests that the article wasn't helpful for anyone. And, in the end, there is always one person who (hopefully) finds the article helpful - the writer themselves. Like the idea of God incarnating themselves as human to better understand their divine nature, confessional games writing can be a really useful way for writers to understand themselves more - and why should we denigrate that? It could be argued that it's putting the writer before the reader - I'd argue that we're all sitting in the same pew. You chose to come here for the sermon - bow your head and listen for two minutes, or get out of the church entirely.

Lastly, there's the oft-repeated mantra that confessional writing should not be confused with criticism - the confessional article focuses on the player, whereas criticism focuses on the game. That's fair enough. However, there does not need to be a false dichotomy where we have to pick confessional writing over critical analysis or vice versa - both forms of writing can co-exist together, both with their own merits and weaknesses.

I believe there is a place for confessional games writing. Writing is not a limited resource whereby we should always ensure that everyone identifying as a writer is working to the same manifesto, nor is writing a zero-sum game, where we have to ensure the "right" side wins the war. There is enough time and enough space for everyone to have their say, and given that the things that marginalised people want to say are drowned out by outdated sermons we're so tired of hearing, in oppressive churches we no longer want to attend, why would you not want to promote these other voices using a system that's so much more accessible - the confessional of confessional games writing?

Further reading:
The Ethics of Selling Children, by Joel Goodwin
After the Dust Settles: Ethics Revisited, by Joel Goodwin
Would You Kindly, by Mattie Brice
Would You Kindly Not, by Jonas Kyratzes
Can We Kindly?, by Samantha Allen
Decolonize Me, by Mattie Brice
Why We Talk About Ourselves, by Ella Guro
Snow Cats, by Leigh Alexander

[SquareGo] Review: Disaster Response Unit

Disaster Response Unit focuses on the work of the Technisches Hilfswerk, a German humanitarian relief agency. The THW provide assistance during emergency situations and disasters, and throughout the game, the player will have to deal with such varied missions as rescuing flood survivors in a speedboat, setting up building supports in the aftermath of a gas explosion, clearing highways of debris after a cyclone.

It's not really as dramatic as it sounds, though.

Read the full review over at SquareGo, or click below!

[SquareGo] Review: Bridge Project

Bridge Project is part of Excalibur Publishing's vast simulator series, and in this game, the player plays through 4 stages – Rural, Cities, Canyon, and Varied – each of which has 12 levels - to build a bridge, predictably enough.

Read the rest of the review over at SquareGo, or click below to read more!

[myGameDev] Shoogle!

Just a little heads-up - as part of a university project, I'm working with a team of designers, programmers, artists and audio students, on a game to raise awareness of the stresses students can face when entering college and university! Our team, Shoogle, needs your help!

Please take a moment to check out our Facebook page, Twitter account and Wordpress blog! We'll be updating regularly with sneaky peeks into the game, including interviews with team members, concept art and other goodies, so make sure to Follow us for more stuff!

[SquareGo] First Impressions: Pokémon X & Y

Nintendo recently teased that they'd be releasing some big news related to the popular Pokémon series on January 8th – speculation was tossed hither and thither that it may be anything from a console adaptation of the game for the Wii U, a remake of Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire, and even a possible iOS Pokémon game. January 8th arrived..

...and with it came the announcement of Pokémon X & Y, a brand new sixth generation of Pokémon games, exclusively for the 3DS.

Read the rest of the review over at SquareGo, or click below to read more!

myEXP: Dear Esther

I recently finished Dear Esther by thechineseroom after much deliberation and critical analysis (read: watching the first five minutes of a Youtube "Let's Play" and instantly signing on to Steam to buy it) and, over the course of about an hour and a half, finished it. And, since the narrator of the game saw fit to share his experience in a letter to his dear Esther, I thought it'd be good to share my own experience of this indie title.

Full discussion of Dear Esther is underneath the cut - but be warned, you might want to avoid reading if you aren't okay with seeing mild spoilers for:

• the series of levels in the game
• interesting scenes/scenery/models that can be found in the levels
• slight hints of the story as delivered by the narrator

[SquareGo] Feature: Easter Egg Apocrypha

Myths – in either religious or urban flavours - tend to conform to a particular structure. If the myth requires the person to undertake any “ritual actions”, these actions will often either be particularly difficult to perform (“It only works on a night where there's a second full moon in the same month....”), or it will be next to impossible to verify it the actions were even performed correctly (“If you draw the symbols even slightly wrong, it won't work at all...”)

Video game cheats follow a similar pattern, often requiring the player to perform a series of button-presses, finding secret codes (either written in levels themselves or worked out, usually through trial and error) or hunting down hidden objects, or even single pixels.

Read the rest of the feature over at SquareGo, or click below to read more!

[myGameDev] Apartmental: Stigmatised Property

Back in Summer, I wrote a post about a game I was working on called Apartmental - a horror/adventure game featuring a protagonist fighting against bizarre, surreal entities that were infesting their apartment, and trying to escape a nightmarish labyrinth that has manifested around their home. I also mentioned that there might be a playable prototype by the end of 2012.

Well, it's the start of 2013, so... what gives?

There's a real-estate term, "stigmatised property", that describes houses, homes and buildings that have some kind of unsavoury aspect to them: this can include things like being the scene of a murder, having been a doss-house or squat, or even being rumoured to be haunted. The legal status of stigmatised properties and whether elements of their history must be disclosed is a messy affair, but it ultimately comes down to the fact that the property has been marred in some physical, emotional or spiritual way.

For me, Apartmental is a stigmatised property.

I've mentioned elsewhere that, while I designed Apartmental so that it could be played as a straight supernatural-horror adventure game, there was also a hidden undercurrent to it: the game could also be perceived as though the protagonist was suffering from depression. All of the "enemies" in the game - the 'Infestation Entities' - were aspects of depression. Shattered Face, an entity that manifested in a smashed mirror, represents the shattering of the self-image, the inability to conceive of oneself as whole. Otherworld Window, a entity manifesting as a stained glass window replacing one of the walls of the apartment, represents religion and the hope (or fear) of an afterlife that overhangs suicide. Similarly, all of the Infestation Entities were split into five types, depending on the "zone" of the Disquiet Hallways they manifested in - Body, Sleep, Mood, Self and Death. These five zones correspond to five areas that depression significantly alters in one's life - and, by extension, how my life was affected when I was suffering from depression.

My depression reached a peak (or, well, a pit) after I had dropped out of university and started claiming Jobseeker's Allowance. There had been signs for a long time, even during university itself - the most blatant of which was feeling very uncomfortable during a Psychology tutorial where I had to give a five-minute presentation on the topic of DEPRESSION, but somehow I managed to not pick up on that painfully-obvious sign. It wasn't until I started hiding in my bedroom in my flat, out of university, out of work, out of a relationship, out of friends and out of my mind with focusing on what dire straits I was in but felt totally incapable of changing the course of my life to realise that actually, maybe, possibly, I might be a little bit completely depressed.

I did eventually manage to get a handle on all of it, but the experience stayed with me. The memory of the misery I felt remained, inactive and asleep, except in those times where I'd encounter people who didn't believe in depression, who thought that it was an excuse, a symptom, a punishment - whatever - and then the Black Dog woke up. Bit me hard enough to bring the pain back. There really were people who believed these things, all because they hadn't experienced it for themselves, they hadn't felt the crushing claustrophobia  or the abyssal loneliness that came with depression. So, I thought, why not do something about it? Why not express that feeling? Great artists have used their pain to fuel intense works of art, partially to give them reprieve and partially to reprieve others who may be suffering the same thing. I could do the same thing: I could banish the lingering spirits of my depression through an elaborate exorcism in videogame form.

The problem with that is that dealing with spirits opens you back up to their influence. The only times I could really work on Apartmental was during the summer, where I didn't have three other projects on the go for my current university course. However, for the past few summers in a row, I've ended up having an awful, awful time - combinations of money issues, work issues, health issues or just general issues in some form. In whatever way, I'm not in a safe, secure place - and you really need to be, if you're focusing so heavily on something so heavy as depression. I couldn't give the game the treatment it deserved, I couldn't focus on it, and I certainly couldn't keep a handle on how I felt about it: I love everything about the game, but dealing with the topic was causing me some amount of distress. Every summer, those spirits got summoned back into my life, and it began to feel like I was sinking back into the black hole of depression all over again.

So, after a lot of deliberation, after much consideration and weighing of pros-and-cons, I've decided to stop work on Apartmental for now. It's not out of a dislike of the game (I think it's a winner), and it's not out of neglect ('cause I've put some amount of work into that game) - it's out of a need for my own peace-of-mind.

There are spirits in that apartment, and sometimes the only way to deal with them is to lock the door and walk away. Unfinished business remains, but perhaps some way down the line, I'll see that locked door, then sneak in to wake up the spirits inside and set them free. Hopefully when that day comes, all of you will be there with me, like the crew of Most Haunted jumping at shadows and freaking out at orbs. 'Til then, Apartmental is stigmatised property - Apartmental has been condemned.

[SquareGo] First Impressions: Among the Sleep

Among the Sleep is an intriguing new survival horror game on its way in 2013 from Krillbite Studio. In it, the player plays as a two-year-old child exploring their home during the night, where strange events are taking place…

Read the full preview over at SquareGo, or click below to read more!

[SquareGo] Review: Tiny & Big: Grandpa's Leftovers

In Tiny & Big: Grandpa’s Leftovers, the player takes on the role of Tiny, an odd-looking chap with a wide range of gadgets, who’s hunting down Big, another odd-looking chap, who’s made off with a family heirloom passed down by Tiny’s grandfather – a pair of pants.

Fair enough.

Read the rest of the review over at SquareGo, or click below to read more!

[SquareGo] Review: Depth Hunter

If you're into the tranquility and mystery of being under the sea – either in real life or the “underwater levels” that are a mainstay of platformers the world over – Biart Company's Depth Hunter is for you.

Read the rest of the review over at SquareGo! >>

[SquareGo] Review: DeadEnd Cerebral Vortex

DeadEnd Cerebral Vortex is a first-person labyrinth exploration game by Membranos that tasks the player with venturing into the illusory world of their subconscious mind in order to recover fragments of their soul.

The player wanders through twenty levels, picking up “Soul Cubes” that represent part of their soul. Gathering enough Soul Cubes in one area and making it to the Exit unlocks the next level, and this is the player’s sole objective; there are no enemies to fight, no sidequests to undertake, just the maze to explore.

Read the rest of the review over at SquareGo! >>

[SquareGo] Review: SCP-087-B

SCP-087-B follows a recent trend of short indie horror games that are so focused on their primary goal – TERROR – that they easily rival titles from big-name studios trying to elicit the same reaction. SCP-087-B is no exception.

Read the full review over at SquareGo or click below to read more!

[SquareGo] Review: Slender: the Eight Pages

The unknown and the unexpected are the bread and butter of the horror genre – and an indie PC game quietly released in June 2012 fits the bill, coming as it did from the relatively unknown developer Mark J. Hadley of Parsec Productions, and unexpectedly becoming one of the most terrifying games of the year.

Read the rest of the review over at SquareGo or click below to read more!

Minecraft Monday #7: New Platform, New County!

Minecraft Monday is a feature on Hyp/Arc that documents playthroughs of the hit indie game Minecraft, as well as discussing news and updates regarding the game and the cult phenomenon surrounding it.

Previously on Minecraft Monday, we left behind the Little Town of Remedy in Alexander County and went on a summer hiatus. Now, Minecraft Monday is back - I'm here to show you guys around Kentigern County, my Minecraft world for the Xbox 360 platform!

Since May this year - when Mojang and 4J Studios released a version of the hit indie game Minecraft onto the Xbox 360 platform - I've been building a new Minecraft world called Kentigern County. Since it's on the console version of Minecraft rather than the PC, Kentigern County is a lot smaller than Alexander County, and it's lacking a lot of features since the Xbox 360 version is a fair few builds behind the PC version. One of the things I've been missing most is villages - as you might expect, given that my previous playthrough of Minecraft focused exclusively on my escapades building and living in a village called Remedy.

I adore the villages in Minecraft - any kind of structure, in fact, such as the abandoned mineshafts, strongholds, Nether Fortresses, Desert Temples and Jungle Temples that have been added into the recent PC updates. I play on single player a lot of the time, so for me, stumbling across a village in the middle of nowhere, or spotting the wooden arches of an abandoned mineshaft from the top of a ravine are little hints of a greater narrative - they suggest that I'm not the first person to have explored, and built, and destroyed, that there were people (if not whole societies, whole civilisations) before I appeared in the now-empty world. It infuses the world with so much more significance and storytelling potential when you're crafting your very first wood-and-earth hut on top of a vast underground network of railways, or when you're traversing a vast desert plateau and spot the silhouette of a temple offering shelter just before nightfall.

Of course, the idea that there were people before us in the Minecraft world isn't true: all of the structures in the game are pre-generated by the game itself. It doesn't need to be true, though: that's the beauty of fiction. We need only act like the stories we're telling are true, and a world of significance opens up to us. Narrative magick.

As I mentioned, villages don't appear in the Xbox version as of yet. However, since the appearance of villages is due in the next Minecraft update, I figured it was high time to show off my alternative before it was rendered obsolete:

Welcome to Western Rise, the first village of Kentigern County.