Rinalee is a cute 18-year-old student we’ve snapped several times before. She is wearing a pastel outfit with pink dip-dye hair.
Rinalee’s Pegasus bomber jacket is from Milk, worn with a lace top from Forever 21 and a Katie dress. Her heart-shaped bag is also from Milk, and her rocking horse shoes with studded ankle straps (worn with striped over the knee socks) are from Body Line. She is also wearing hair bows, heart-shaped facial stickers and a heart-shaped choker from Claire’s.
Rinalee told us that she likes the Japanese kawaii brand Katie most of all, and that she’s a NEWS fan. Find out more about her style from her Twitter.
This snap was originally posted on Vogue.com during Japan Fashion Week.
I've been playing and loving this when I'm not stuck in Marvel Puzzle Quest event hell (and it runs great on a 4S)
Oh, you lovable orcs. Have you ever not had *that* accent?
The trick to Wayward Souls is that it offsets the poor, poor player’s inevitable failure with modest pinches of refined badassery. You will cleave through waves of sentient jelly monsters, nimbly dodge the thrown pickaxes of zombie miners, and conjure up columns of flame to drive back floating magical hardcovers pinging mana bolts at you in an enchanted library.
And undoubtedly these moments will be far, far outnumbered by those when you, say, accidentally detonate a barrel of dynamite in your own face with an errant spell, or fatally misjudge an evil knight’s attack pattern and sync yourself into—not away from–a series of mace blows, or simply when you’re rushed-down by a pack of bads and dispatched with all the ceremony of someone taking out the trash on a Thursday.
And, undoubtedly, you’ll give these moments roughly equal time in the spotlight when you’re relating gaming tales to a savvy pal. Fair enough.
What’s most surprising about Wayward Souls, though, is how seemingly played-out its foundation is, and how far it goes to give its generic 16-bit fantasy trappings some freshness. Our heroes each have their own motives for exploring the mines, abandoned mansion wings, and other sundry locales which comprise the randomly assembled maps of Wayward Souls. These are quick, unique bits of back-story woven into the overarching tale of restless ghosts and a long-abandoned magical nexus, related to the player through short cutscenes between dungeon floors and individual story segments which crop up through play (usually as preface to a big ol’ fight). Naturally our starting characters are your warrior, mage, and rogue, filling the game roles of melee-focused tank, ranged DPS, and nimble backstabber, as well as the story roles of avenging brother, curious scholar, and money-loving cutthroat.
The rogue kicks people and then stabs them while they’re still seeing stars. Great with kids and pets, though.
And, what do you know, they all feel good. Really good. Souls’ control scheme is the touch-screen standard of moving with the left thumb-zone, and attacking with the right, a set-up we’ve all learned to, well, tolerate. But by the grace of the gods (or some evil arcane devilry—I’m not complaining either way), it works. Movement is just sensitive enough where you feel confident navigating around foes’ attacks (at least those you’re quick enough to notice in time), but not finicky, and certainly not the too-common sluggish sort where your thumb needs to travel halfway across the screen every time your avatar walks through a room.
Enemies are fairly obvious when it comes to telegraphing their attacks, whether it be through the sound of a mage’s lightning blast charging or the visual cue of a giant bronze automaton raising its arms to crush you. The problem isn’t figuring out when an enemy is going to attack, it’s in remembering how it attacks, and in deciding where you should position yourself to both avoid damage and launch a successful counter-strike.
Most characters have ammo-burning defensive and offensive maneuvers (activated by swiping down or up on the right of the screen—the least slick component of Souls’ controls), such as the mage’s combination of wind magic to blow foes away with fire magic to deal damage over time, or the warrior’s infinitely less interesting shield(!) and throwing axes(!!!) kit. Attacks can be charged with energy (also used to power the mage’s main attack, and the rogue’s dodge) for extra damage, and enemies’ attack frames can be interrupted by successful blows on your part, which is just endlessly satisfying. Overall, the combat is satisfyingly chunky, with weight behind every attack—even the mage’s. And when you go on a roll in Wayward Souls, you’re quite literally untouchable.
And untouchable really is the way to go. Even for the beefy warrior, damage can pile up quickly, with Wayward Souls being fantastically stingy when it comes to handing out health potions. (Maybe two per several-floor stage.) More reliable is the small heal you get when you head to the next part of a stage—assuming, of course, that you can keep your damage received to a minimum. Screwing up a little bit, consistently, is just as lethal as screwing up huge, once. More so than in its semi-permanent deaths and ever-changing levels, Wayward Souls betrays a roguelike-ness in this deadly attrition, which is constantly gnawing at the player and filling them with doubt during even the simplest fights.
It helps if your bling is named as though it were a Robot Master power-up in a Megaman game.
Similarly, Wayward Souls’ main upgrade system presents players with a different sort of famine. In any one stage, you might be able to find a few magical forges, each of which offer an upgrade to either a character’s weapon or one of their secondary skills. Rather than being simple damage boosts, these forges can fundamentally change the way a class works.
The rogue, for example, might have to choose between a cloak which makes invisibility potions last longer, or one which has a chance to automatically poison foes which attack her. The mage’s basic mana blast can be turned into a speedy ice lance that, when charged, slows enemies, or a shorter-ranged fire blast which passes through multiple foes. It’s not quite complicated enough, or consistent enough in the doling out of items, where you could really aim for certain “builds,” but it’s more than possible to create a somewhat rogue-esque warrior, or a close-range killer of a mage.
Of course, you can only get a few upgrades per stage, and always a choice between one of two boosts for the same ability. Oh, and upgrades don’t carry over between stages, of course. (It’s actually revealed that the forges can only make replicas of real legendary items. Effective, but cheap, magical knock-offs—a clever touch of lore to explain away the fact that you can lose and reacquire the same “unique” weapon in one playthrough.)
These temporary upgrades are far better than the game’s permanent ones, bought with gold collected in dungeon runs and applied to specific classes. These latter boosts mostly involve passive percentage upgrades (and small ones, at that) to things like critical hit chance, health, energy regeneration, and so on—with nothing stopping you from acquiring all of them, in time. Useful, but dull as all hell when I can equip my warrior with a stained glass sword capable of deflecting magic.
Minor gripes aside, though, Wayward Souls is damn fine. It’s an action RPG which simply feels great on iOS, not “you know, great… for iOS, I guess.” I imagine some will confuse its weighty, deliberate combat for clunkiness, and, eh, I suppose I can’t blame them for being once bitten, twice shy when it comes to the faux-gamepad control scheme on touch-screen. But there’s just too much here to ignore, including the three additional classes—adventurer, spellsword, and cultist—unlockable through play. (You can also find silly hats for characters to wear). Having spent some time with the former, I can say that he doesn’t quite play like the warrior, mage, or rogue—more a combination of the three.
That’s Wayward Souls all over: excellence by way of A) getting the basics right, B) making choices important, and C) not stopping until you’ve done something just a touch weird. Also, D) DEATH. Or… D) DIE. D) KILLS LOTS. Game’s hard as a diamond, okay?
Wayward Souls was played on a 3rd generation iPad for this review.
“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to stop the man touching the equipment.” –Warren Bennis
Base-building-slash-tower-defense games have a problem. Why build a base? To defend. To defend what, exactly? An arbitrary headquarters, or power cores, or abstract hit points. The problem is this: you don’t ever feel invested in the thing you’re defending.
Factorio solves that problem. Part Minecraft, part SimCity, part SpaceChem; it’s got nearly as many parts as the factories that form the heart of the game. It’s set on a freshly colonized planet. Here you build not just any old base, but an enormous factory complex comprised of hundreds of intertwined components. Then you get to defend it from all the pissed-off fauna who resent your facility’s ecological damage.
Imagine designing an intricate, elegant production system in SpaceChem, but with an additional combat layer. That’s the kind of base you want to defend, because you’ve invested so much thought into its construction and operation.
The game’s been in alpha since February, and you can buy it now for $13. There’s also a free demo, but you’ll want to fork over cash as soon as you see the new trailer below. It’s the best one I’ve seen in months, maybe years: the kind of production that just can’t be automated. Yet.
We met this group of stylish dancers during Japan Fashion Week. We snapped them as part of a project for Vogue.com. Their names are Aya Sato, Bambi, and Kotoha. You might recognize Aya & Bambi from the BOA “Shout It Out” music video, or other projects they’ve worked on together.
The girl pictured to the right has an asymmetric haircut, red make-up and round sunglasses. She is wearing a long t-shirt with leggings and a trench coat. Her accessories include earrings and piercings, a cross necklace, a double brooch with chains, a key ring and other silver rings. Her boots feature heels and platforms.
The girl in the middle is wearing jeans with a quilted jacket and a lace top. She is wearing geometric earrings, round oversized sunglasses and boots.
Finally, the girl to the left is wearing a sweatshirt with a mini skirt and long biker jacket. She accessorized with round sunglasses, a heart choker, a cross tote bag and patent wedges. She is also wearing red make-up.
That zero-perspective bowl in the last one is KILLING ME
The “X-Mans” show is in just three weeks! But who or what are the X-Mans? I’ve brought together a group of highly-gifted individuals to transform, reinterpret, and expand upon some of the most iconic images in X-Men history…
… by which I mean, a coloring book I found in a dollar store ten years ago. Artists onboard include favorites like Jeff Ramirez, John Larriva, Ellen Schinderman, Erin Pearce, Julia Vickerman and Lacy McCune, plus a bunch of new recruits. The show will be on display in Nucleus‘ upper gallery from May 17 through 20 with a special Sunday afternoon reception May 18th. They’re more than X-Men. They’re X-Mans.
The rest I was going to have to figure out on my own.
As a child, I was always more comfortable in the company of girls. In those early years when identity is at its most fluid, I felt more relaxed in with the opposite sex than I did with my own.
I suppose two things drove me to that point:
1) A fair amount of bullying from other boys.
2) A lack of judgment when hanging out with girls and older women.
It wasn’t until I really got into video games in elementary school that I began to find other boys like me, the outliers.
One of my problems in relating to damn near anyone has always been my attraction to complicated ideas.
Even though I am often struck by starkness and elegance, my mind tends to get lost in the larger picture of things. I would say this has granted me the ability to see very tenuous links between objects or ideas.
In a family of engineers, this has done me no favors.
Games, though, that was a shared narrative. Myself and anyone else in that group could talk about them without the fear of being misunderstood (a big frustration of mine to this day).
So that was my company as a child: Gamers and girls…and girl gamers.
Some of the best afternoons I had living in southern California in the 90′s was playing Double Dragon on the NES with my friend Nadine while talking about Salt-n-Pepa.
I discovered Kirby’s Dreamland while attending one of her swimming competitions.
Hello.
One of the things that we lose as we grow older is that fluidity of identity and culture that leaks across gender lines.
It was never considered weird or abnormal to see girls on the playground with Gameboys, plugging away at Metroid.
It was never considered out-of-place for a boy to play made-up imagined games with a girl.
But something changes somewhere and the Gameboys are stowed, the imagination falters and things get serious for a while, I suppose somewhere around the time when romantic love becomes a thing.
The outliers remain, but they are not as abundant. From sixth grade on, games become overwhelmingly male-dominated.
This is where things get strange.
After spending the entirety of my childhood gaming and reading, I had absorbed the hero’s narrative. I decided at some point that I could be the savior to all the women that I met. It was almost as if I wanted to repay an imagined debt from my youth, that I owed women something for making the fringes in my life a little more comfortable.
Everytime I became involved with a girl to any degree, my foremost thought was “I have to protect her.” It was such a deep part of me that it felt like instinct.
In my childhood I had seen girls as my peers, I treated them the same as I treated my male friends, but things changed.
The fundamental problem of the hero’s narrative (especially in that dawn of modern games) is that you store the morals of the narrative without realizing it in those formative years. Much like fairytales are told to children to teach them morality and gender roles, games operated in a similar way then and operate that way today.
I was always uncomfortable with the assertive male dominance of Lebanese culture. Assertiveness in general is a strange feeling for me because I see the world as a stark and fluid place with little room for certainty.
In spite of this, I became patronizing. I became a ‘White Knight’.
The problem centers around not viewing women as fully formed people, but rather as stereotypes that either need saving or protection. By the fact of their gender, they cannot function well without a male around.
I’m not putting the blame solely on games for this, that would be ridiculous. Societies and cultures all over the world are coded with this message and I was simply the latest sponge to absorb it.
I didn’t used to understand the problem with my approach towards women, I genuinely thought that I was one of the good guys, a real feminist.
I read Sylvia Plath.
I read Nawal El-Saadawi’s novel ‘Woman At Point Zero’ and rather than really analyze what was going on, I leaned on the idealistic crux that ‘men are jerks, women got it rough!’, missing the deeper points and nuance of a story about a woman choosing to die as a final act of freedom after being pushed around by circumstance and difficulty in patriarchal Arab society.
Fundamentally, being a ‘White Knight’ is really not so different from being outright dismissive of them.
You’re never really listening to them, you’re simply waiting for them to say something where you can jump in and help or ‘correct’ them.
You’re erasing women as people.
Narrative games propagate this. To this day, the narratives simply have not expanded. There are some interesting things being done by the likes of Bioware and Bethesda in the mainstream, but for a vast majority of games, it’s the typical male hero narrative/power fantasy.
I recall a young woman released a game a few years ago that dealt with some of the darker issues of her life (can’t remember the name). It had gained some attention online and I read about it on some gaming sites. Despite what she was trying to do, there was so much hate directed at her mostly coming from male gamers.
They kept deriding her for making some garbage game that talked about ‘girls’ emotions. Some of them went so far as to question the experiences she lived through. They attacked and marginalized her without even giving her a chance.
The darker extension of the ‘White Knight’: Women can’t have a voice, especially not in games.
Expansion.
In college, I was fairly lonely. No place to fit in.
I took literary and poetry classes where I felt everyone’s writing was bloated, over-reaching garbage. The new attempts at intelligentsia.
I tried taking mathematics and programming to try to strengthen my weakest fields, only to feel alienated.
I attended philosophy and political theory courses where I was most comfortable with the professors, but the students either didn’t care or didn’t think enough about the world.
I wrote for a newspaper, but people really didn’t like what I had to say.
I saw the Dalai Llama speak. That was fulfilling, but unsustatining in the face of the blank confusion lurking in the corners of my life.
It wasn’t until I wandered into a Gamestop in Downtown Madison on a dark, rainy day looking for something to play on my PSP.
I saw the box art for Guilty Gear and I thought: “Hey! Yeah! I remember that game!”
I used to hang out in arcades a lot in my youth, spending a lot of time on STGs and fighting games. While I understood at that time the nuance of scrolling shooters (one-cc, high score, multipliers, etc.), I hadn’t really thought too much about fighting games then.
I bought Guilty and that became a haven for me. I sat outside my classes just practicing all the motions on the awful PSP nub.
Eventually, I bought all the fighting games I could for the PS2.
My first stick was an X-Arcade.
Around this time I met a girl from France: Elise. She had come to UW-Madison to study law for six months.
She was very sharp. She wouldn’t let me get away with my usual bullshit. When I tried to ‘White Knight’ her, she would deflect until she got to my real face.
She made me deal with her on mutual terms, as equals.
Along with that association, I had discovered a professor on campus: Dr. Moneera Al-Ghadeer, a prominent middle eastern feminist and academic with a mind sharper and clearer than many of the Zen masters I read today.
Moneera forced me to come to terms with my identity. She forced me to find my own voice instead of reciting narratives that I had digested. She forced me to synthesize my own views.
While I was still uncomfortable being outwardly assertive, I decided I needed to dig into myself and see what’s in there.
I began to see all the mistakes I had made with myself.
In high school, after 9/11, some other kids would call me ‘Bin Laden.’ Some classmates started making terrorist jokes.
My closest friends didn’t though.
Still, for some, I was the token brown kid.
As if it wasn’t enough that I was a different race, I was also just a weird kid reading Lovecraft and Nietzsche, playing Neo-Geo Pocket at school.
I should have made the connection sooner between my marginalization and the way I had been acting with women.
I don’t know why it took me so long.
So, there I was, learning fighting games and digging into myself all at once.
The greatest beauty in fighting games is the telling. You can tell so much about the player based on how they play and what character they pick.
Fighting games provide a window into a person’s mind. They showed me something I was beginning to become aware of: I lived on autopilot. I accepted information without any critique or analysis.
I had been a sponge for as long as I had been alive.
Grip.
As I dug further into the FGC (Fighting Game Community), I began to see a place that accepts all kinds.
I began to see a place full of talented, devoted people from a whole host of backgrounds. I was a brown kid among other brown kids, I wasn’t on the margins anymore.
Fighting games, by the nature of their design, also touch on the fluidity across the sexes that all of us experienced when we were young. You have males, females, different races, different ages.
However, the most interesting thing is after awhile, you no longer see them that way. You see the characters as sets of tools, you judge them based on what they do, not where they come from or look like.
You try to find a character that is mechanically and aesthetically an expression of yourself.
While the FGC might be the most inclusive community in gaming, it still has a sexism problem which has reared its head on more than a few occasions in the last few years.
Star female players like Kayane have to work so much harder at getting respect in the FGC, often being viewed as either a novelty or being judged by appearance.
Here again we find the dark extension of the narratives that marginalize women, even in a place driven by multi-racial communities.
My life since college has been a slow, agonizing process of deconstruction.
Deconstructing language, deconstructing beliefs, deconstructing myself, and deconstructing my view of women.
There are times when you can’t start something on your own, but at some point, you are in charge of your own momentum: Fighting games and some insightful, brave women were my trigger.
Its amazing to me how much effort it takes to unclog the mind, to remove all the passive garbage that society and culture dump on you.
I am married now and still looking for that fluidity of my youth. I see the small changes being made by the games industry, I hear the discussions taking place in the fighting game communities, I wish they would grow faster.
I wish people would stop being so damn defensive when confronted with another perspective.
There are some things a person just does not have the tools to understand.
Ever since I stopped my own awkward and dangerous thinking on women, I have become more open to the world as a whole. Things are less rigid for me and through my wife, I am able to gain even more insight into my own interactions with women.
It’s impossible to say that a person can ever understand someone else completely. Language does a mediocre job simply because it is colored by experience.
I think the first step towards growth is the willingness to march alone into the darkness of the self.
Will the games industry as a whole be willing to do that? Are people in general even willing to do that?
The news broke as a dozen of us at the EMP Pop Conference relaxed at the museum bar after a day of panels and excellent discussion. Listening to him on the plane was like walking out of a party attended by old friends and coming home to learn one of them has died.
When I was young, I had the opportunity to spend most of my summers in Lebanon. I am Lebanese. My parents would take my brother and I back to Lebanon to get to know the country they left and to develop closer ties with my family half a world away.
Most of my family live in a village in the mountains near the mid-south called Kfarhatta, about 20 minutes outside of Saida. My maternal grandmother lives in a house that overlooks the main road. On the other side of that road was a steep decline, and there was a soccer field at the bottom. It wasn’t actually a soccer field though, it was just dirt. It was a plot of land that a local man used to grow some plants occasionally, but when he wasn’t, it was our soccer field.
Surrounding the field was a thicket of trees. The field wasn’t large by any standard, but it was enough for the village children and I to play soccer.
During one particular game one summer (I was 9 or 10), I kicked the ball into the thicket and ran out to get it. Near where the ball had landed I found an unexploded grenade. I brought it back to the field with the ball.
I showed my friends what it was. I was really excited that I had found a relic of the war that plagued Lebanon for nearly 30 years. I wanted to keep it until an older village kid told me it was dangerous and could explode at anytime. He took the grenade and threw it into the valley below.
We continued our game.
#2)
Most summers when my parents weren’t able to stay in Lebanon as long as my brother and I, we would stay with one of my paternal aunts.
My uncle designed and built his house himself with the help of his four sons. He was a master electrician with a penchant for language and history. In his youth he had been an exceptional bodybuilder.
On the final day of our stay in Lebanon on this particular summer (I don’t remember how old I must have been), I was sitting with my aunt in the rear bedroom where my cousins and I all slept, helping my aunt pack my suitcase. I was mid-sentence in saying something when a sudden explosion went off.
It wasn’t really something you heard so much as something you felt in your stomach. Your insides shake as the ground shakes, it feels like you’ve been thrown into a jet engine.
We ran outside. I moved purely on instinct, I had no control.
Outside we ran to the side of the house. An artillery shell landed through the back wall of the house down the road. They were distant relatives of mine as well.
We continued to the side entrance of the above ground basement my uncle built into his house. We waited and listened in the dark. A second artillery shell slammed down further down the road, landing just behind the third house on our stretch of street.
I was angry and I knew I couldn’t do anything. The oldest of my four cousins was in the police force, he was with us in the basement, he had to tell me to shut up so that he could listen for an all-clear before heading out to a car that was picking us up.
When the car came we ran outside and I stubbed my toe on a cinderblock (I was barefoot) and when I looked down, the floor was covered with shrapnel. We made our escape to another house in the village.
At the second house, there were rumors of attack helicopters coming in, you could also here the fighters in the sky.
The sound of jet engines is the most horrifying noise in war.
On the way back to my aunt’s house (by car) to get our things and leave for Beirut we found one of our neighbor’s children just roaming the street far from the house and sobbing, confused. We pulled him into the car and asked him what happened. His mother had been pinned underneath the rubble of the rear wall that had collapsed on her. He had tried to pull the rubble off of her, but she just screamed at him to get out, so he did, he ran.
We got back to the house, checked it for physical damage. My brother and I got our things, my father showed up and we dashed for Beirut.
#3)
I stayed with my grandmother a lot when I was very young. I would go to sleep with the sound of machinegun fire in the distance. My grandmother would come in and try to explain that these were guerilla fighters attacking occupation forces. That never made me feel better.
There was always retaliation.
#4)
The way I understand it, my paternal uncle M. was something of a hero in my village.
My father (Then working as a vice detective in Beirut) bought him a .38 revolver (long barrel). M. loved that gun.
My uncle was tall, athletic, and generally respected. He had the reputation of being a tough guy.
Once there was a rabid dog that was attacking livestock in the village. It was savage and, even in its madness, an excellent hunter. It was hard to track.
After some time, some men in the village managed to track it to an unkempt field with long grass. They called my uncle.
He showed up with his .38. It was in the afternoon. He stepped into the field and slowly tried finding the dog. After sometime the dog came after him. He killed it with one shot.
M. was political (it was impossible not to be at that time), he was involved in the civil war that centered mainly in and around Beirut.
He was gunned down. Ambushed in the night, at a checkpoint just outside of Beirut. I’ve heard it told that he took down six of the people who ambushed him before dying.
This was the greatest tragedy in my father’s family.
#5)
In 2006, I went to Lebanon in the summer. One morning in July, there was a news report that certain guerillas had crossed the border into a neighboring country and taken two soldiers on patrol near the border hostage. The details were in dispute, but retaliation was quick.
That afternoon, I had gone with my cousins (who had just arrived in Lebanon the previous day) to eat at a restaurant 15 minutes outside of the village. The place was empty, we sat down and ordered our food. Before the food had come I was getting phone calls that things were getting serious. I ignored them.
I sat there until that sound came back, the engines. I looked up and saw a fighter dropping flares. One of the flares landed just below the restaurant on the mountainside. A fire started. We drove back to the village.
That night we stood on the balcony of my maternal aunt’s house, her home was elevated above other ones in the village. We watched the refugees in the nearby city firing red and green tracers at the planes flying overhead. They lit up the sky like Christmas.
My mother built a home in the village a few years earlier, it stood on the top of a mountain, isolated and exposed, we thought it was dangerous to stay there so we went and stayed with my grandmother in the village itself. As the days wore on, my brother was growing more anxious. The psychological impact of the engines was weighing on us all: Where would the bombs drop?
The airport was the first target, they bombed the runways and fuel storage tanks, the fuel leaked into the ocean. The act was condemned internationally. We couldn’t get out.
The decision was made after the guerillas managed to score an attack on an opposing battleship sitting in the Mediterranean to leave for Beirut and get out of the country.
We had to take a back road to the capital because they had bombed nearly every bridge and main road in the country. The only beautiful thing to come out of the trip was seeing where the Druze lived. Their land was high in the mountains, covered with a thick fog, streetlights glowing softly, it was a whole other world.
We made it to Beirut and stayed in a hotel for a few days. We were interviewed by someone from ABC News. I was frustrated. The American government had taken no action up to this point. Other nations had evacuated their citizens prior, in the first days. We felt abandoned.
The bombing in South Beirut (the guerillas stronghold) was ceaseless. You could hear it all the time from the hotel. I found irony in the fact that the opposing army was bombing Lebanon with munitions supplied by the United States.
This is what it is to be from two worlds. There I am the American. Here I am the Arab. There I was bombed on all the same. Here I am searched in airports most of the time.
War has a dumb, brutal logic that tears at any and all of a person’s identities.
Once it became evident that nothing was going to change, that the embassy was dragging its feet. We hired cabs and just headed for Syria. Eventually landing in Damascus. Two weeks later we bought our own tickets and flew back to the U.S.
The final irony being the inversion in circumstance: Now Lebanon is swarming with Syrian refugees escaping the nightmares of their own country.
A few days after I landed in the U.S., I heard a plane flying overhead. I was scared.
Crooked.
One of the major problems of realistic war games today, is the total inability to capture any of the fear, isolation, anxiety of actually being in an environment that is in the process of descending into total loss.
I recall reading an article once that discussed the devs behind Battlefield 3 and their reasoning for not having any civilians in any of the maps or city levels in their multiplayer. Their reasoning was that the player was to assume that the civilians had been evacuated and that had they included civilians (and in particular children) that people would do awful things to them.
I can understand the challenges (both financially and mechanically) of having a game with two opposing sides that players control try to navigate around a level with NPC civilians fleeing or hiding from the fighting. I could also understand the PR hell that would occur when mainstream media got hold of some footage on YouTube of a player only targeting civilians for a good laugh and hits to his YouTube channel.
Despite this, the image of war that is often depicted in games is too clean, too brazen, and gives players and consumers a hyper-sanitzed vision of what happens.
Jean Baudrillard once wrote a book titled ‘The Gulf War Did Not Take Place‘. In it, Baudrillard argued that in terms of the West, the Gulf War was not really a war, it was a massacre. Few casualties were reported on the coalition side, they avoided engaging the Iraqi army directly, and very little attention was payed to the Iraqi losses, both civilian and military. This asymmetrical, overbearing show of force was increasingly sanitized to present a clean, stoic narrative through the media to the American public. So while violence did take place, none of it was felt, none of it was presented.
Modern video games on war can be seen as an extension of this philosophy. The presentation of an ultra-slick, concise narrative (Call of Duty) with empty urban environments devoid of any civilian life (Battlefield) can be seen as an extension of the track that was firmly established in Gulf War 1.: Keep the audience engaged without showing them the costs.
It is also odd to me how games about war today often involve the opposing forces of nations that are viewed negatively in American and western media. Russia, China, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, various Arab states have all been depicted as simply being ‘the enemy’. While I understand that a narrative requires an opposing force, an antagonist, the lack of creativity at play is evident.
It would be fine if this was simply a question of laziness and/or of what is financially feasible, however the danger behind not only removing civilians from the question of conflict and using modern states only in the context of ‘the enemy’ is the subtle propulsion of racism through the mind. The cementing of hostility.
Having played (and enjoyed!) most modern war games, it feels odd sometimes when I am tasked with killing people that I have a shared culture, language, and appearance with. This is the trouble of being caught in two worlds. Here I am the Arab. In games I am the American fighting for American dominance or the total other extreme of my shared identity: The terrorist.
In playing multiplayer, players are required to fill up the opposing roster on a team. However, does that really change anything? You aren’t given any insight or understanding into why you’re doing what you’re doing, you’re just fighting, period. You’re digitally cosplaying as the enemy, nothing more. A virtual Marionette.
Churn.
A few weeks ago, I saw this. A new kind of war game. A game that is trying to show the rest of the world what being in a conflict is actually like.
‘This War of Mine‘ is a dark survival game being developed by 11 bit Studios where you play as a group of civilians trying to stay alive in a city stumbling through the violence and misery of conflict. In this case, the opposing factions are in the background, they are the parameters, the fringes that can (and will) kill you.
While other games pushed out by large publishers like EA and Activision justify their lack of civilians as the removal of a financial, cultural, or mechanical burden, ‘This War of Mine’ allows room for both the conflict and the civilians.
Having lived (in parts and pieces) through war, I can attest to the realism of 11 bit’s approach. Being stuck in a large-scale conflict, you are not only full of dread and anxiety, but after a certain point you don’t care anymore who is right or wrong. You stop caring what side is winning or losing. None of it matters, you just want to try and live.
I watched this game being played at PAX East 2014. I watched someone having to make decisions about what to send out with survivors. Basically, since in the game you have to gather supplies to make sure everyone can stay alive, you need to choose to send certain people from your group out into the city to try to find some way of getting supplies to aid the group back at the home base. Sometimes people just don’t come back. Sometimes people are just gunned down.
While the game is mechanically interesting, it has a very strong aesthetic. The colors are dark, the survivors and their environments are broken.
There is no flourishing here either aesthetically or mechanically.
Some might be turned off by a game as dark as this, especially in the U.S. where we have become so used to winning (however you can define that) in the post-Vietnam era.
But this game is necessary.
It is necessary to an industry that has become an extension of the ‘America wins’ narrative and to all the gaming communities the world over to understand the horrible loss of identity and the shouldering of a dread that slowly consumes the heart. War is the excruciating process of being broken.
‘This War of Mine’ will hopefully get other devs to think of what’s possible, about the kinds of experience that people need to feel to understand.
Thanks to Golan Levin’s “atypical, anti-disciplinary and inter-institutional” FRSCI lab, the CMU Computer Club, and ROM hacking bit-boy Cory Archangel, several instances of previously unknown visual artwork, done by Andy Warhol on the Amiga 1000 in 1985, have been recovered.
Warhol’s use of this classic multimedia system is but one of the many surprising, rich aspects of Amiga history that are carefully detailed by Jimmy Maher in The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga. An early topic is the launch of the first Amiga computer at the Lincoln Center, with Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry in attendance and with Warhol producing a portrait of her on the machine during the festivities. Maher also writes about how Warhol’s attitude toward the computer was actually a bit retrograde in some ways: Rather than thinking of the screen as a first-class medium for visual art, he wanted better printers that could produce work in a more conventional medium. The discussion of Warhol’s involvement is but one chapter (actually, less than one chapter) in a book that covers the Amiga’s hardware development, technical advances, relationship to image editing and video processing work, and lively demos — from the early, famous “Boing Ball” demo to the productions of the demoscene. The Future Was Here is the latest book in the Platform Studies series, which I edit with Ian Bogost.
With these images surfacing now, after almost 30 years, the age-old question “soup or art?” is awakened in us once again. Do we need to print these out to enjoy them? To sell them for cash? Did Warhol invent what is now thought of as the “MS Paint” style, back on the Amiga 1000 in 1985?
Momoko is a friendly 20-year-old girl who we met on the famous Cat Street in Harajuku. Her bright red hair and multiple piercings – ear spike, stretched ear, eyebrow piercing, tongue piercings, labret, and belly button piercings – are what first caught our attention.
Momoko is wearing layered tops from Glad News and Dog Osaka with a HellcatPunks skirt and Jeremy Scott x Adidas winged platform sneakers. Accessories – some of which came from Monomania – include headphones, studded bracelets, a leather arm cuff by Devilish, a large ring, a gold finger tip (looks like Fangophilia), and an Iron Fist zombie backpack (decorated with a Galaxxxy dino charm).
This past Saturday evening, Jack Russell’s Great White (not to be confused with Great White or Great White without Jack Russell) were booked to perform a post-game concert after a monumental clash between the Columbus Lions and the host Trenton Freedom of the Professional Indoor Football League (essentially a less glamorous version of the Arena Football League).
Platform: Flash —
You're stuck in a completely plain white room with completely featureless furniture... or ARE you? This little room with no name isn't everything it appears to be! Look inside shelves and desks, and uncover the colors that lie hidden within the No Name Room to escape. Tagged as: browser, escape, flash, free, game, linux, mac, pointandclick, puzzle, rating-g, windows, yonashi
Kina is a friendly 17-year-old high school student who caught our eye on Meiji Dori in Harajuku.
Kina is wearing a sailor sweater from Bubbles Harajuku with a transparent American Apparel PVC skirt over polka dot pants and white Jeffrey Campbell shoes. Accessories include a holographic Bubbles Harajuku backpack, a bow choker, and a barbed wire necklace.
Kina’s favorite band is Def Tech. Her favorite shops include Bubbles Harajuku and Topshop. Find her on Twitter for more pics and information.
Kanata is an 18-year-old fashion student who we sometimes see around Harajuku.
In addition to his colorful hair and cute nail art, Kanata is wearing a resale “Orlando” sports jersey with Galaxxxy pizza print shorts and Buffalo platform boots. Accessories include a Banal Chic Bizarre cap, a retro Game Boy Color (check the closeup, he paused his game for street snaps), a ring, lots of ear piercings, colorful socks from The Circus Harajuku, and Jansport backpack.
Kanata’s favorite shop is The Circus Harajuku and he enjoys the music of Creephyp. Find Kanata on Twitter for more info and pictures.
Love Triangle was originally published in The Nib on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Akane is an 18-year-old student who we often see around Harajuku. Her hairstyle always changes, but it’s always cute.
In addition to her pink double bun hairstyle with a “New York” headband, Akane is wearing a blue cardigan over a striped top, denim overalls, and boots. Her accessories – some of which came from Marie Claire – include a Vivienne Westwood necklace, a tiny wrench earrings and a FILA bag.
Maybe we could build a fire, sing a couple of songs, huh?
Over the weekend Firaxis announced to much acclaim the next entry in the Civilization series. Set not on Earth but on an alien world, it’s much closer in tone to an Alpha Centauri 2 than a Civilization 6. However you cast it, Sid Meier’s Civilization Beyond Earth is by its very existence the most important strategy game in years.
In previews with PC Gamer and Gamespot, Firaxis reps strive to emphasize differences from Alpha Centauri. They mention new features like satellites, a non-linear tech tree, and an affinity system that represents your faction’s values. As lead producer Dennis Shirk told Gamespot, “We think a lot of the comparisons between this game and Alpha Centauri will be left behind as people see all the things that are coming into play that makes this a completely new experience.”
Thus the early PR push is all about marketing Civilization Beyond Earth as its own game not beholden to its 15-year-old predecessor. But in the words of Academician Prokhor Zakharov, “it is in reaching to our beginnings that we begin to learn who we truly are.”
“Eternity lies ahead of us, and behind. Have you drunk your fill?” –Lady Deirdre Skye, “Conversations With Planet”, Epilogue
Many of the reasons Alpha Centauri is so revered have nothing to do with its gameplay systems. The writing, setting, and characters are what distinguish it not just from Civ, but from every forgettable would-be imitator that’s come after it. The factions are so vivid, their ideologies not just well described but also reflected in gameplay, that at times Alpha Centauri turns round on itself and feels more like Civ than Civ does.
What I mean is this: from its inception, Civilization has always engendered a long-view perspective on the human race. It makes you feel both wizened and romantic, alternately cynical and hopeful, about the origins and the destiny of humanity. It’s a heady, evocative brew of tribes and empires, wars and governments, misery and celebration.
Alpha Centauri is all that but more so. It holds even more tightly to one of Civ’s central conceits: the idea that ideas themselves are important. Marxism, capitalism, pacifism, militarism, scientism, mysticism, and dogmatism are not just pretty -isms to be scooped up like so many berries along a path. Instead they’re treated as central tenets with both immediate and lasting ramifications.
It couldn’t have been *friendly* fauna, just this once?
As a result, Alpha Centauri is a richer playground for the mind than Civilization. Although Civ begins in the stone age and encompasses all of human endeavor, SMAC speaks more powerfully (if indirectly) to our history and its consequences. Civ is like a Dickens novel, patiently exploring how the complex conditions of childhood affect the adult. SMAC is comparatively post-modern; it starts by showing us the wreckage of adulthood and makes us inquire into the situation that produced it.
I worry that as Firaxis strives to differentiate new from old, it may forget what made Alpha Centauri worth imitating in the first place. Bullet lists of features–even if they turn out to be good features–don’t really assuage my fears. The tone I’m after doesn’t show up well on paper; it emerges through the subtle interaction of gameplay, art, text and sound. But the very suggestion (as per Shirk above) that new features should abolish Alpha Centauri from my mind indicates he is not attuned to that subtlety–nor indeed to our own shared history.
You're stuck in a completely plain white room with completely featureless furniture... or ARE you? This little room with no name isn't everything it appears to be! Look inside shelves and desks, and uncover the colors that lie hidden within the No Name Room to escape. Tagged as: browser, escape, flash, free, game, linux, mac, pointandclick, puzzle, rating-g, windows, yonashi
