Razer’s THX purchase means cinema-approved VR and laptops

Longtime cinephiles might be disappointed by the following news: THX will now operate as an “independent startup” under the Razer banner. Yep, the gaming PC and peripherals company. The cinema certification outfit founded by George Lucas will keep its management and employees (phew) and will continue to operate as it has for the past 33 years just under a new owner, according to a prepared statement. “With their focus on quality, design and innovation, Razer supports our vision to optimize and deliver the best audiovisual experiences to audiences worldwide,” THX CEO Ty Ahmad-Taylor said in a canned press release quote.

We’re excited to announce that @THX has joined the Razer family.

Find out how THX is evolving https://t.co/PcOoKRLDiP pic.twitter.com/mfq3Wgmcgr

— RΛZΞR (@Razer) October 17, 2016

How much this deal cost Razer isn’t clear, nor is how the company will leverage its new purchase. What we do know, however, is what Razer plans to do with the company. THX explicitly said that it’s working to expand its approval stamp to headphones, augmented reality and virtual reality, “and their enabling devices.” So, THX-approved PCs are going to be a thing too, in addition to things like speakers, laptops and maybe even monitors from Razer.

Source: THX, Ty Ahmad-Taylor, CEO of THX (Medium)

Rockstar is teasing a new ‘Red Dead’ game

The rumors of a new Red Read game appear to be true. Over the weekend, developer Rockstar posted some less than subtle studio logos with the series’ iconic red and black color scheme. Now, we have our first piece of art — seven silhouetted individuals, walking forward with a bright sunset (or sunrise?) in the background. Has the studio been working on a prequel? A sequel? The group could be a reference to the gang John Marston rolled with before the events of Red Dead Redemption. Or maybe the Magnificent Seven, an iconic Western (inspired by Seven Samurai) recently remade with Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt and Vincent D’Onofrio, among others.

There’s little we can say with any degree of certainty. But one thing is clear: Rockstar is building towards an announcement. It won’t be long before we know what the developer has been working on behind closed doors.

pic.twitter.com/iuwxwyL2cX

— Rockstar Games (@RockstarGames) October 17, 2016

Source: Rockstar (Twitter)

VR helped me grasp the life of a transgender wheelchair user

Playing The Circle is quite literally a transformative experience. Designed by Manos Agianniotakis, a student at the National Film and Television School (NFTS) in Buckinghamshire, England, it’s a game that uses the Oculus Rift and Touch controllers to put you in the body of a wheelchair user suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

In The Circle, you play as a Alex, a transgender woman who is attacked and ends up in a wheelchair. The game picks up Alex’s story around a month after the incident. She’s out of hospital, but traumatized and unable to leave her apartment. Isolated and withdrawn, her relationships with friends and family, many of whom are unaware of the transphobic nature of the attack, are strained. She begins reading her father’s diaries, and becomes obsessed a subject he was fascinated with toward the end of his life: Toynbee Tiles, mysterious plaques that are placed around North America.

Almost all of the game takes place in Alex’s apartment, viewed from a first-person perspective. You’ll spend much of your time at her desk, where you can interact with all the surrounding objects — chief among them a computer. You use this computer to investigate the aforementioned tiles, digging into the conspiracy theories that surround them. But it’s around the fringes of this “central” plot that the real meat of this game lies; where you’ll be able to dig into Alex’s condition, and rebuild relationships with Alex’s loved ones.

What you do with your time inside Alex’s body is up to you. Agianniotakis describes The Circle as “the smallest narrative sandbox.” The game runs the course of a year, during which the narrative unfolds organically. Alex is a fully shaped character, so you can’t exactly dictate what she does, but many interactions are optional. You can’t decide, for example, how exactly to respond to an email from Alex’s mother, but you can choose whether or not to respond to it — or even whether you want to read the email in the first place.

How you choose to spend your time in the game will dictate how well you understand Alex, and her troubles. You can pursue the Toynbee Tile mystery resolutely, ignoring the realities of PTSD and hiding from your family as best you can; you can reach out to your concerned loved ones and try to repair those broken bonds; or anything in between.

As interesting as the narrative sandbox is, it isn’t what made the game special for me. Instead, it’s the way Agianniotakis uses VR’s strengths and weaknesses to help you embody Alex, and understand her frustrations and feelings. One example in the demo I played at the EGX game show was a phone call Alex received.

Or rather, didn’t receive. You play the game seated, and at one point a phone begins to ring. Using 3D audio effects, it’s easy to locate the phone: on the floor, just to your right. Retrieving the handset is impossible, though. It’s carefully positioned to be just out of your grasp, no matter how hard you try to lean and reach, and the call goes to voicemail. Alex’s mother’s voice plays. She’s worried.

Another, more subtle tactic employs one of VR’s long-perceived weaknesses: inducing motion sickness. The game is punctuated by dream sequences, panic attacks and memories, in which Alex moves on a guided path through abstract vignettes related to her trauma. One such scene tackles her ongoing gender dysphoria. Shown from a third-person perspective, it sees Alex walk past silhouettes in a public bathroom — often a fraught place for a trans person to be.

During the sequence, I felt lightheaded, and a little uneasy. It wasn’t just from the challenging narrative, Agianniotakis explained: “I’m using the discomfort that virtual reality can cause with movement to force the player to almost feel a discomfort with their own body,” he said. The scene isn’t noticeably jerky, it’s just… different. And the choice is deliberate. “It doesn’t make you sick, but I want people to have a slight physical side effect when they play through it, without making it extremely uncomfortable of course, to create the notion that you’re almost not part of your own body,” he added.

I’ve felt sick during VR sessions before — especially in the early days of bootstrapped development kits — and this wasn’t that. At no point did I feel compelled to take off the headset, nor did I actually worry about vomiting. Whether it was playing at a different framerate, or something to do with movement speed, it led to a gentle feeling of disquiet that made for a more poignant experience.

Agianniotakis is clearly working hard to build The Circle as a carefully considered, almost educational experience. But he has no first-hand knowledge of being either transgender or a wheelchair user. Instead, he, writer Jess O’Kane and producer Ser En Low have relied on extensive research, both passively through reading studies and other material, and actively by getting feedback from trans people and people living with disability.

“The trans people I’ve been able to speak to are not gamers, and have difficulty giving feedback about it as a game,” Agianniotakis explained, “but they were able to speak to the representation as a whole and explain some of the feelings that come with gender dysphoria.”

Through one of the game’s public showings, he met a small group of trans people from Manchester, England, who are ardent gamers. He hopes to convene with them again to further develop and hone the experience. The response from wheelchair users has also been positive, Agianniotakis said, but one of the strongest reactions actually came from the adolescent sibling of a wheelchair user, who found it enlightening to experience life, however briefly, from something closer to his brother’s perspective.

I usually get inspiration for my projects from real-life, and mental health is an everyday, often misrepresented, reality for way too many people to be ignored.

Manos Agianniotakis

Exploring mental health is not a new topic for Agianniotakis. He previously produced the interactive story An Interview, a reimagining of the play Fake It ‘Til You Make It, which focuses on male clinical depression. “My father suffered from depression and anxiety throughout his life,” he explained. “Investigating certain conditions helped me understand better the world he lived in … Mental health is an everyday, often misrepresented, reality for way too many people to be ignored.” Currently taking priority over game development is Agianniotakis’ MA dissertation at NFTS on the depiction of mental health in video games.

The 15-minute slice of The Circle I played was powerful, and left me wanting more. I felt hints of transference (in this context, the feeling that you are someone else). I’ve experienced transference before through VR, but that was through a psychological experiment that essentially tricked multiple senses in a way that you just can’t do with a regular Oculus Rift or HTC Vive setup. I can see myself, in a quiet room at home, enthralled for the hour or so it’ll take to play through one of its many paths.

That’s why The Circle excites me. Its primary goal is to make you lose yourself; to help you understand what it feels like to be wheelchair bound, to be traumatized or to suffer with gender dysphoria. And even in a busy, noisy demo area, full of shouting gamers and announcements, even with just 15 minutes, I started to understand, and to empathize. There can be no stronger praise.

Agianniotakis hopes The Circle will be ready by fall 2017, but will be demoing the game at various game shows in the meantime. The next public event scheduled is Develop:VR on November 24th in London.

The game that makes drone warfare personal

Killbox is a game that creates humans out of brightly colored 3D shapes, only to slaughter them in the most dehumanizing way: a drone strike. And not just any drone strike — the game is based on the first real-life UAV mission ever carried out in an unofficial warzone.

Killbox has a heavy-handed message delivered in a direct, uncompromising fashion. It’s a two-player game; one person embodies a sphere in an simplistic yet idyllic farming landscape. This player cruises along pathways to collect tiny white motes that emit a pleasant sound whenever the 3D ball rolls over them. There are no instructions, but the objective is clear: Collect as many motes as possible. The sphere rolls along the flat green grass and down pathways lined with balls of soft white light, passing other bright beings that appear to be frolicking, playing and dancing around each other. Larger pear-shaped creatures wander around the area, changing colors with an adorable sound every time the player’s tiny sphere runs into them.

And then, without warning, an ominous buzzing sound fills the air. Boom. A large, black plume of smoke rises from a crater directly in front of the decimated house, blobs of color lying prone among the wreckage. The air turns a deadly shade of purple.

Zoom out. The player is transported miles above the carnage, viewing the town just before it’s bombed. The second player is now on the ground, happily rolling around the town. Static and the chatter of supporting UAV pilots fills the headphones as a black panel on the right side of the screen prompts the player to test out the controls, moving a reticle around the area where the bomb will undoubtedly fall. Below, the spheres and pears bounce around happily as the player adjusts the hit box and eventually initiates the launch command. Boom.

By the end of the game, there’s no question about the creators’ feelings regarding remote-controlled warfare. A black screen overtakes the game, stark white text offering a simple summary of the United State’s real-life, first-ever bombing campaign outside of a warzone in North Pakistan in 2004. Four people were killed, including two children.

“We were looking into all these different stories, like the psychology of the drone pilot, all the crazy, messed-up stuff that surrounds it,” says Killbox programmer Albert Elwin on the IndieCade show floor in Los Angeles. “It’s all really dark and depressing — it’s absolutely in some ways a difficult project to work on because you get kind of consumed by the reality of it.”

Since 2004, the US has conducted more than 400 drone strikes across Pakistan alone that have killed up to 4,000 people, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. Hard statistics don’t exist in the world of UAV warfare, but the Bureau estimates between 423 and 965 civilians have been killed in unmanned strikes on Pakistan, including as many as 207 children.

Before starting work on Killbox about one and a half years ago, Elwin hadn’t thought much about UAVs or drone strikes. He knew they existed, that the United States was bombing areas in the Middle East using remote-controlled devices, but it wasn’t a pressing matter to him.

And then American artist and anti-drone warfare activist Joseph DeLappe approached Elwin and his friends in Scotland, where they were starting a game developer group called Biome Collective. DeLappe wanted to create a video game about the dehumanizing horror of drone strikes, and Elwin’s team dove in, researching the ins and outs of UAV operations and figuring out the best way to tell that story.

“I was kind of aware [of UAV strikes] but I didn’t know what the reality was, so working on this project I’ve learned and discovered the horrific things that have gone on and are going on today,” Elwin says. “In some ways it’s getting worse, as well.”

Killbox plays with the dehumanizing aspect of drone warfare in a literal way. The characters aren’t human at all, even when players are controlling the happy, frolicking balls on the ground. However, using spheres and pears as protagonists forces the player project human characteristics onto the geometric shapes. The adorable sounds and playful setting further drive home the human-like innocence of the spheres and the feeling of loss when it all explodes in a thick black cloud. This point is solidified when the player acting as the UAV operator realizes that there was actually another player on the other side of the screen, rolling around the village, collecting white motes.

In Killbox, players create the human connection to these shapes, right before actively, knowingly destroying everything with the press of a button from a sterile, static-filled void. It’s shockingly effective.

“People are starting to realize that you can use games for more than entertainment,” Elwin says.

‘Friday the 13th’ game delayed to 2017

Friday the 13th: The Game will miss its 2016 release window, and is now scheduled for early 2017. The developer of the crowdfunded title announced the delay to Kickstarter backers, but softened the blow with some added features. A “single-player experience” — originally a missed stretch goal — is being worked on, along with AI bots for offline multiplayer. Prior to the recent announcement, Friday the 13th was set to be a online-only affair, and that mode will still be the main focus of the game.

The broad pitch for Friday the 13th: The Game is that one player controls the antagonist Jason Vorhees, while seven others are counsellors at Camp Crystal Lake (aka Camp Blood), attempting to evade the serial killer’s deadly advances. Jason is obviously overpowered, and can dispatch his victims in various creative ways, while other player-controlled characters need to rely on stealth and strategy to survive. Precise details on what exactly the single-player mode will encompass — or even if you’ll embody killer or kill-ee — aren’t forthcoming, but we’ll undoubtably hear more in the coming months.

“The first thing people are going to read here is ‘delay,’” the game’s co-creator Wes Keltner said, “… coming to our decision to delay was no easy matter, but we believe that the positives far outweigh the negatives.” Although the release is most definitely delayed, backers and pre-orderers alike will still have something to look forward to this year.

A beta release will arrive in “late 2016,” and everyone that’s purchased the game will be given four additional (beta-only) keys to hand out to friends. That’ll be followed by the full multiplayer release in early 2017, with the single-player mode and AI bots arriving in the summer. Everyone that’s backed or pre-ordered will get the additions free of charge, but the digital price of the game has increased from $30 to $40 for newcomers. (The physical edition will remain at $60).

Although the game is scheduled to launch on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the beta will only be available on PC. “It sucks that there’s a delay,” Keltner added, “but the wait won’t be too long and it’s going to offer more for fans in the long-run!”

Source: Kickstarter