firehose

The first time I played Fract, I thought the sound was broken.

I was wandering around a strange, neon-lit landscape — think the world of Myst with a Tron makeover — filled with hard angles and imposing towers lingering in the background. But the game itself was completely silent. It wasn't until I started interacting with the world that it slowly started to fill with sound. Eventually I was solving spatial puzzles that helped create the game's ethereal electronic soundtrack — I wasn't just exploring an alien world, I was making a song. "We're essentially tricking you into writing music," says designer Richard Flanagan.

Playing Fract is a slow and methodical experience. You're given very little information on what to do or how to do it — at first I found myself simply walking around, inspecting the strange and colorful alien architecture. Eventually you'll be working through puzzles made of buttons and movable objects that have to be solved in order to progress and open up new areas to explore.

"Anyone can experiment and twist knobs and have fun."

These puzzles prove to be surprisingly intuitive, despite the lack of instructions and the abstract visuals. I had no musical background whatsoever, but managed to find solutions to problems that involved rhythm and timing; I just needed to do a bit of experimentation. Essentially the game becomes a musical toy, and progress is based on learning to use that toy properly. Eventually you're even given access to a virtual studio environment where you can put what you learned into practice, and actually compose your own music that can be exported out of the game. If you’re new to musical theory, you might even learn what things like pitch and voice mean.

The idea for the game formed years ago, when Flanagan built the earliest version of Fract while still a student at the University of Montreal. He continued to work on it in his spare time, before eventually submitting the game to the Independent Games Festival and ultimately winning the best student game award in 2011. That award encouraged him to flesh out the experience into a commercial release, enlisting the help of his wife Quynh Nguyen, who served as a producer and designer, as well as programmer Henk Boom and musician Alex Taam.

In some ways, Fract mirrors Flanagan's own experience with music. He has no proper musical training, but learned to make his own electronic tracks by playing around with different software. "I draw a lot of inspiration from tools," he explains. Early on, the team had bigger ambitions when it came to teaching players about music, hoping to really get into the nitty gritty of synthesizers and how they work. But it turned out that didn't really make for a great game. "So we readjusted our goals and got back to the root of what inspired the game — the idea that music making can be playful," explains Nguyen. "You don't necessarily have to have a musical background or be a musician, anyone can experiment and twist knobs and have fun."

One of the reasons the game works so well is that it doesn't actually feel like you're learning — it's not the kind of educational game that drills concepts into you through repetition. Even if you have no interest in music, Fract is still a fantastic game. Exploring a strange, forgotten place and uncovering its secrets, solving puzzles to literally transform the world around you is an engaging proposition in its own right. And the trippy, otherworldly visual design and constantly shifting and evolving soundtrack just make the experience better. You could probably play the entire game without even realizing it's trying to teach you these musical concepts — and that's kind of the point. "You can learn without explicitly being aware of learning something," says Nguyen.

"A fine line between empowerment and bewilderment."

Fract blends together two seemingly disparate types of games. There are exploration elements that let you venture through a large open world with plenty of freedom to do things at your own pace. But there's also the more guided process of learning musical tools and interfaces. In some ways these two elements are at odds: if players are able to wander around aimlessly, how do you ensure they're learning what they need to in order to progress? Fract gets around this in a few ways, perhaps most importantly through its visual language. When there's a towering spire in the background, chances are you're going to head in that direction to investigate. It’s as if the world itself is subtly guiding you where you need to be.

Getting this process to work as smoothly as it does in Fract proved challenging. "Since we are trying to introduce people to certain ideas, there is a progression that is ’better’ suited to picking up on things," explains Nguyen. "But at the same time, we wanted to keep the openness of the experience — so the two aspects were at times difficult to reconcile."

The result is a game that's difficult to explain. It's a mysterious exploration game where you're uncovering secrets and solving puzzles, but it's also a musical toy that has you experimenting with tools and sounds to help better understand how music is made. You may go in expecting one or the other, but either way you'll find a wholly unique experience in Fract. The game isn't particularly interested in telling you what it is, either: it just wants to show you.

"Fract often walks a fine line between empowerment and bewilderment," says Nguyen.

Fract is available today on Windows and Mac.

Of all the alternative and privately funded spaceflight experiments to crop up in recent years, Mars One has arguably been among the most visible. Which is, of course, exactly what Bas Lansdorp wanted. After all, the Dutch entrepreneur modeled his endeavor, a mission to send regular folks to Mars, after the reality TV show Big Brother, going so far as to meet with the series' producer for guidance. “We’re talking about creating a major media spectacle,” Lansdorp told the New York Times near the project’s launch a little over a year ago. “Much bigger than the moon landing or the Olympics.”

But despite Mars One’s unconventional business plan — which involves funding the colonization effort through crowdfunding, corporate sponsorship, and what it hopes will be massive ad revenues — Lansdorp’s group isn’t exactly rewriting the playbook. Spats with NASA notwithstanding, the Mars One website still borrows the agency’s most famous slogan: “The next giant leap,” it reads, “starts right here on Earth.”

Which comes as no surprise to David Meerman Scott and Richard Jurek. The two marketing professionals — one of whom has been collecting moon memorabilia for two decades — recently compiled over 200 advertisements, TV stills, and photographs from their private collections to illustrate the massive effort required to garner public support for the Apollo program.

A screenshot from Mars One's website.

In their recent book, Marketing the Moon (MIT Press, 2014), Scott and Jurek trace the Apollo-era collaboration between private industy and NASA’s internal public affairs office. They contend that the massive campaigns launched then were some of the first deployments of what we’d call brand journalism and "real-time marketing" today. In fact, what Mars One is doing, with reality TV, brand partnerships, and an upcoming book called Mars One: The Human Factor, says Scott, is largely "the same as Apollo — but updated for today."

Lansdorp would be lucky to recreate that success: in July of 1969, 94 percent of American televisions were tuned to the Apollo 11’s moon landing. And such widespread enthusiasm for the event was the culmination of a decade-long campaign to educate the public. At NASA’s inception in 1958, the agency hired public affairs staff "not as pitchmen, but as reporters," according to the authors, a move largely at odds with the rise of a glamorous, oily advertising industry like the one portrayed in Mad Men.

NASA’s PR staff were broadcast- and print-media veterans, and they served up copy like a newsroom. The team grilled engineers for stories, churned out bylined articles, and sent press releases meant to be copied verbatim by news outlets. They produced pre-packaged broadcast segments that often made it straight to the airwaves. In the early days the office largely strove to introduce and explain complex technologies, tech that had previously been used mostly by soldiers and military men, to both the press and the public.

It was a task that, for over a decade, private companies involved in spaceflight were eager to augment. As a government agency coordinating with the military and Congress, NASA ultimately dealt in the release of information and facts — the agency’s first press director, Walter Bonney, described it as "cleaning the windows of NASA." But private companies who earned NASA contracts often employed more glamorous tactics, including colorful press kits and advertisements for the watches astronauts wore, the Tang they slurped from packets, the cameras they used, and the companies like IBM that helped build their spaceships.

NASA worked "to carefully craft the image of the astronauts"

NASA did, however, enforce some restrictions. The agency’s photos were taxpayer-funded, so private companies could use them in advertisements without paying to license them — as long as NASA’s public affairs office approved how they were used. But NASA found itself blindsided by what would become its most in-demand asset: the astronauts themselves.

In an effort to maintain control over the astronauts' public profiles, the agency signed a deal with Life magazine, essentially granting the publication exclusive rights to the astronauts’ lives. Until the contract ended in 1962, the magazine ran cover stories featuring the astronauts and their families ("Making of a Brave Man," "Astronauts’ Wives") and spun off a handful of books as well, including a collection of first-person space tales. As Scott and Jurek write, "The astronauts and NASA worked with Life … to carefully craft the image of the astronauts, not as military men, but as middle-class average family men thrust into service for the good of their country."

Which sounds a little like a scaled-down version of Mars One’s most striking feature. Since the campaign’s inception, the reality TV hook has been central to Lansdorp’s plan to raise the billions he’ll need to colonize Mars; he’s fond of citing the Olympics, in particular, for raking in $1 billion of revenue per week in advertising. But his project has also drawn significant criticism, perhaps most brutally on Reddit, for employing such a raft of PR people and graphic designers. As one writer pointed out early in Mars One’s Kickstarter project, the nonprofit is essentially just a marketing company — "and a good one at that."

As Jurek tells it, NASA, as a civilian government agency, packaged and communicated the space program’s activities in their most easily digestible forms. The agency’s goal wasn’t to invent or manage the need for a product, the way most commercial projects do. Lansdorp’s venture has done a fantastic job at that management, largely by tapping into the more wistful emotions associated with NASA’s golden age. Screencaps of the moonwalk appear in many of Mars One’s YouTube videos, and the website compares the Mars One candidates with "the Vikings and famed explorers of Old World Europe." Which isn’t to mention the kind of real-time brand-building that would have been incomprehensible to anyone glued to the TV as Apollo 11 landed on the moon (#space #cake, anyone?)

But now, it looks like Mars One is trying to ape aspects of NASA’s dual-pronged strategy. Next spring, the company is publishing a book titled Mars One: The Human Factor, edited by its chief medical officer, Norbert Kraft, an expert on the psychological effects of long-term spaceflight. "There are many tough, philosophical, and scientific questions that need to be answered about our upcoming selection of the four heroic individuals that will lead us on our mission to Mars," says Kraft in the book’s press release. "We’re pleased to be able to provide a real-time look at many of these issues."

It’s a far cry from the acetate diagrams given to journalists in the 1960s, designed to help them understand the complicated machinery NASA used to send American heroes to space. But it is a sign that Mars One is attempting to communicate something more concrete than the general sense of wonder it’s employed so far.

Browsing through the material collected by Scott and Janek, it’s clear that NASA selling spaceflight to a less technically literate public involved making cold, military technology more human and required selling space exploration as an American pursuit not just feasible, but glamorous.

So far, Mars One has used tactics on the other side of the spectrum, going for the human interest stories first, focusing on the flight's applicant pool and capturing the public's imagination using artist renderings of its proposed colony. Now it has the challenge of proving it's not just a marketing agency armed with an inflated sense of wonder, but a company with practical goals. Projects like its upcoming publication could read as an attempt to mimic NASA's internal press room. But after pumping out jaunty catch phrases ("Let’s go to Mars!") for more than a year, it would take quite the marketing campaign to make Mars One look more like a spaceflight company than a TV production house.