BACK TO SCHOOL

Issue 2, Volume 1 — 1
 FROM THE PRESIDENT
My father used to work for IBM, so my family was always a little
bit ahead of the curve in terms of technology. Since he worked in SPECIAL THANKS
sales, every year or so we’d have a new machine tucked neatly in the
front-right corner of our dining room between the armoire and the Michael J Dragone
radiator. He was always thinking about how his kids were going to Chris McMahon
be using technology, and so when the first fleet of educational games Andrew Thaler
started hitting the shelves of Circuit City, he leapt at the opportunity Pete Muller
to teach us something “useful” with this brand-new medium. Cary Williams
Ironically, console videogames had no place at the Warren household Jonathan Dennis Deesing
after a particularly disastrous outing with Contra at a friend’s house Ruth Jurgensen
in Chicago (a story for another time). Theo Priestley
And so my weekends were filled with learning. The Oregon Kurt Cartensen
Trail, Math Blaster, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, and Corey Wade
The Incredible Machine became my first real interactions with the Leith El-Hassan
world of games. My father was forward-thinking, but like many in Chris Heldman
his generation, he believed the connection between learning and Copenhagen Game Collective
games had to be explicit. If you weren’t learning grammar or math Eskil Steenberg
or science directly, if these videogames weren’t going to polish your Farrah Bostic
report card, if clacking away for hours on the keyboard wasn’t going Lee Drucker
to be a passport to the higher-ed institution of your choosing, then Gavin Becker
games were nothing but amusements to be consumed when the rest Yancey Strickler
of your “real” work was done.
Of course, this is wrong.
Three years ago at Harvard Business School, Scot Osterweil, the director of MIT’s
Education Arcade, delivered a talk called “The Four Freedoms of Play.” A pioneer in
learning and games, he laid out the four things that good games provide their players
that are invaluable in education: freedom to experiment, freedom to fail, freedom to try
on identities, and freedom of effort. But the emblematic example he provided wasn’t a
title from my childhood. It was Grand Theft Auto III. Osterweil argued that in spite of
its violent content, it did what many “edutainment” games could not: It taught well.
Enough about school, though. If our reader survey says anything, it’s that all of you
girls and boys haven’t thought about taking a test in a long time. Nonetheless, that
question of what games teach is at the heart of the Back to School issue. These digital
objects that we spend so much time with—what wisdom do they impart? If, as Jesse
Schell says, “the future is a high-resolution game,” then someone or something should
be holding our hand to guide us. So grab a pencil, take a seat, and open your textbooks.
Class is in session.

Best,
Jamin
 KILL SCREEN
President Contributors Artists/Photographers
Jamin Brophy-Warren Ben Abraham David Boni
Ryan Bradley Eóin Burke
Managing Editor Patrick Cassels Dennis Chow
Chris Dahlen Simon Ferrari Tim Denee
Ed Fries Nicholas Felton
Lead Designer Ben Fritz Folkert Gorter
David Boni Brendan Keogh Sean Haas
davidboni.net Mitu Khandaker Thomas Haywood
Laura Michet Ian Higginbotham
Editor Emily Short Sarah Jacoby
Ryan Kuo Kent Sutherland James Kochalka
Brian Taylor Zach Kugler
Contributing Editors David Wolinsky Daniel Purvis
Rob Dubbin Rob Zacny Justin Russo
Zack Handlen
Jason Killingsworth Web Developer Hero
Nora Nahid Khan Tom Clancy John Portman

Back Office About the Cover — We asked Emanuele Sferruzza Moszkowicz to

Sarah Elmaleh devise a cover for us. He did. It is awesome. Many thanks to Ruth
Jurgensen and the students of Little Red School House & Elisabeth
Founder Emeritus Irwin High School for lending us their blackboard. The drawing was
Anthony Smyrski shot by Kaitlin Dale and edited by Alan Lugo.
smyrskicreative.com

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1
 CONTRIBUTORS
Ben Abraham spends his days as a full-time
PhD  student and on the weekends assembles a
roundup of the best games criticism of the week for
Critical Distance and the Gamasutra network. He
achieved one-time internet fame with a machinima
novel based around playing a single life in Far Cry 2
and counts the night he got drunk with Clint Hock-
ing at GDC as the high-water mark in his life.  blog, Critical Damage or on Twitter at @BRKeogh.
Ryan Bradley has written for The Atlantic, Bloom-
berg, Businessweek, GOOD, Slate, and National Geo-
graphic Adventure. He is the managing editor of the
World Policy Journal.    Laura Michet is a student and a writer from somewhere
Patrick Cassels is a staff writer at CollegeHumor
and co-host (with Jeff Rubin) of the online vid-
eogame talk show “Bleep Bloop.” He has written
for Slate, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Nerve,
and the humor collection Mountain Man Dance
Moves. He lives in Brooklyn and edits a blog,
10YearOldMovies.com.
Rob Dubbin is a writer for The Colbert Report and
a proud member of Zipcar. His text adventure Earl
Grey, co-written with Adam Parrish, won the 2009
XYZZY Award for “Best Puzzles,” and his author bio
for this issue won the staff award for “Least Punctual.”
Simon Ferrari is an academic and designer at the
Georgia Institute of Technology. His first book, co-
authored with Ian Bogost and Bobby Schweizer, is
Newsgames: Journalism at Play (MIT Press, 2010).
Ed Fries is a former vice president of game publish-
ing at Microsoft, and the developer of Halo 2600.
Ben Fritz is a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times,
covering the entertainment industry. He previously
ran Variety’s videogame blog “The Cut Scene” and
co-wrote the book All the President’s Spin.  the monument to vanity that is RobZacny.com.
2 — Kill Screen Magazine
Zack Handlen is a freelance writer whose work can
be seen regularly at The Onion A.V. Club.
Brendan Keogh is a Film and Media Studies stu-
dent at the University of Queensland, Australia. He
has been known to write the occasional Kotaku or
Gamasutra article but is usually found at his we-
Mitu Khandaker is a PhD candidate at the University of
Portsmouth with the Creative Technologies department.
near Hartford, Connecticut. She enjoys writing about
games more than she enjoys writing about anything else.
Emily Short is currently a freelance writer and nar-
rative designer for the game industry. She spent most
of the last decade in academia, as a grad student and
then a visiting assistant professor of classics.
Kent Sutherland splits his time between Hong
Kong and New Hampshire. He writes about games
at Second Person Shooter, and one time he dug a
snow cave and slept in it.
Brian Taylor is a freelance librarian, writer, and
photographer. You can find him in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania or on Twitter as @brianmtaylor. He
really likes maps.
David Wolinsky is a freelance writer based in
Chicago (not the suburbs). He’s written for Adult
Swim, Comedy Central, 1up.com, EGM, and the
family newsletter.
Rob Zacny is a freelance writer living in Cambridge.
He writes at places like The Escapist, GamePro, Game-
SetWatch, and Gamers With Jobs. He also maintains
 CONTENT
04 10 18
Capture the School One Small Step Red Dead Redemption
Brendan Keogh Laura Michet Progress Chart
Nicholas Felton

20 24 28
Trade-offs The Young and the Scoreless Be, Move, and Do!
Rob Dubbin Ryan Bradley James Kochalka

30 38 40
Carol Ann Has Dysentery Kellee Santiago Dream Portrait Rough Riders
Jamin Brophy-Warren Emanuele S. Moszkowicz Ben Abraham
& Kent Sutherland

44 48 54
Renaissance Man Breaking the News Boxed Out
David Wolinsky Simon Ferrari Patrick Cassels

58 62 68
Trading Spaces Educated Guests Toppling the Ivory Tower
Brian Taylor Emily Short Mitu Khandaker

72 78 84
Breaking Pangea The Eye of the Beholder Mazed and Confused
Rob Zacny Ed Fries Chris Dahlen

88 92
The Shadow and the Sorrow The Help Line
Ben Fritz Zack Handlen

3
 by BRENDAN KEOGH
photography by SEAN HAAS

CAPTURE THE SCHOOL

SET GAME RULES
ASSAULT: NO (You must capture the enemy’s flag and return it to your own base.)
SINGLE FLAG: OFF (Each team will have its own individual flag.)
FLAG MUST RESET: NO (You must return your flag to your own base manually.)
FLAG AT HOME TO SCORE: YES (In order to score, your team’s flag must be in its home location.)
CAPTURES TO WIN: 1 (The first team to capture the flag wins.)

The summer breeze stings like ice. The dew on the
grass seeps through my T-shirt and even the denim
of my jeans. An ant may be crawling up my leg, but
I could be imagining it. I swallow a sneeze before it
gives away my position and, not for the first time this
night, question my loyalty to Blue Team. This cold,
moonless night is a far cry from the scorched grass
and red dirt of Blood Gulch; this is well beyond my
call of duty. Is victory really worth the flu?
The streetlight pushes back the night just
enough to render silhouettes of Red Team’s two
defenders leaning against opposite rugby goalposts.
Meanwhile, the subtle incline between where I lie
and the highway beyond the chain-link fence is
enough to hide me in shadow. The orange glow of
a cigarette flickers like a pinprick in my vision. That
would be Ryan—defending out of apathy, not loyalty.
The shadow flapping lazily between them is my
target: the red flag.
I’m sure Ryan, too, would rather be back at Blood
Gulch, crouched beside the teleporter, shotgun ready
for another cheap kill; or parked up the mountain
behind Red Base in the Scorpion tank, raining
ordnance hell on our base from across the map.
Earlier this night, we were all discharged from the
Blood Gulch conflict with an abrupt black screen.
When the power left my parents’ house, our Halo
system-link party went with it. The Capture the
Flag match was in its fifth hour and tied 2-2—next
capture would have won. We were eight teenage
boys full of caffeine and sugar, no electricity, and no
clear winner. Across the road stood our high school,
St. Joseph’s College, abandoned and insignificant for
the summer months. Open fields, mazes of corridors,
patchworks of architecture, ditches, and hills—the
ultimate multiplayer map. The battle was not yet over.
We agreed on a set of rules, modeled as closely
on the Blood Gulch conflict as the real world would
allow. We scavenged the laundry for some torches,
a broom, a mop, and two beach towels (Snoopy’s
kennel for the red flag; Soundwave the Decepticon
for the blue). We crept out the back door, dashed
across the street, scaled the chain-link fence, and
went back to school to finish the fight.

4 — Kill Screen Magazine

Issue 2, Volume 1 — 5
 SET PLAYER RULES
NUMBER OF LIVES: INFINITE (You will respawn indefinitely.)
MAXIMUM HEALTH: 1 (One hit from a torch will kill you.)
RESPAWN TIME: WALK TO THE FLAGPOLE AND BACK TO BASE (You must walk to the flagpole in the
centre of the quadrangle and back to your base before you can return to the game.)
SUICIDE PENALTY: KILLER DIES (Every time you hit a teammate with a torch, you must respawn yourself.)

On my belly like a hardened commando, I crawl
out from the line of trees that defines the boundaries
of our school by day and our battlefield by night. I
would look ridiculous if anyone could see me—any
teacher would be demanding I stand up and, coun-
terintuitively, stop acting like a child. But tonight this
is not our school; school rules do not apply here. I
pause a good 10 meters from Red Base. I’m close
enough to smell Ryan’s cigarette, close enough to be
spotted, but too far away to do anything useful.
St. Joseph’s is the only place where the eight of us
spend more time together than Blood Gulch. The
school is less symmetrical than Blood Gulch, but
just as exploitable. The eastern half is grassy sports
fields. To the west, the two-story buildings muster
around the bitumen quadrangle like eighth-grade
kids around a Game Boy. At the southern end of the
quadrangle a life-size, ceramic Jesus nailed to a life-
size, ceramic cross looms over a tunnel. Blue Base
is just beyond, wedged on the retaining wall beside
the wheelchair ramp that leads down to the science
labs and drama hall, both sitting at the bottom of the
school with the unpopular kids. Red Base is more ex-
posed, situated on the far side of the sporting fields.

6 — Kill Screen Magazine

 At least, that is how we justified the placements
when we set up the map. But now “more exposed”
just seems to mean “more secure.” It’s impossible to
approach head-on; I have spent half an hour stalking
under the trees that line the school’s perimeter to get
to my current position behind Red Base. This side of
the school is where the footballers spend the lunch
hour throwing each other to the ground while the
girls gossip and smuggle their mobile phones out of
their bags. Flat on my stomach, trying not to shiver, I
realize why they sit over here. No teacher could hope
to sneak up to this location—perhaps neither can
any Blue Team attacker.
Complaining is futile. We all agreed to the rules,
and we all must play by them. I caress the switch of
my Eveready torch. The torch can only be flicked on
once every three seconds—these are fictional guns,
not lightsabers. My chances of taking out both guards
are slim, but there is nothing else for it. I need to get
that flag. I lift my shoulders and aim the torch at the
guard that is not Ryan. If I am lucky, Ryan won’t have
his torch in his hand and I will have time to fire a
second shot before he knows what is happening.
I am about to fire when the other half of Red Team
marches up to the base. I drop; a single blade of grass
juts into my ear.
“No luck?” asks the guard I nearly shot, now obvi-
ously Mark.
“No.”
Sean’s voice. I don’t dare move, but I strain my eyes
to look past my forehead as Sean taps the red flag
casually to complete his respawn. “They got three
guards. Ben, Adam, and Michael.”
“Three guards?” says Ryan. “That’s bullshit.”
“Well, we just need three attackers,” says John,
snatching Ryan’s cigarette and taking a deliberate,
adolescent drag. “Remember where I used to climb
up onto the office to get the hacky sack down? I
should be able to get across to the science labs from
there. I could snipe them while two of you run in.”
“Are you allowed up there?” Sean asks.
John snorts. “Who’s going to stop me? Mrs. Barton
ain’t here to yell at me now.”
“Have fun explaining that to the security guards,”
says Ryan. “I’ll stay here.”
“Whatever. Come on, you guys.”
Ryan takes his cigarette back, and John leads Mark
and Sean back into the darkness. I count to 100 be-
fore I flash the torch across Ryan’s face and jump to
my feet.
“Got you, Ryan!”
He hardly looks alarmed. I wonder if I am tak-
ing this too seriously. No. John is the one scaling the
school office. Victory is at stake here.
“Whatever,” he says, and flicks the cigarette butt
toward me before walking off to respawn.
I untie the flag from the broom handle and dash
without thinking down the ditch toward the tennis
courts. I’m going too fast and smash into the chain-
link fence at the bottom. It rattles like a thousand
dropped coins.
The glow from the streetlights passes over this side
of the ditch, leaving my feet in darkness but light-
ing the courts beyond the fence. I can make out the
multicolor tangle of painted lines—white tennis lines
over red basketball lines over green netball lines.
Three sets of rules for three separate games occupy-
ing one space. One lunch hour, 15 of us took over the
court with a fourth game: Pac-Man Tag. It’s just like
normal tag, but you must stick to the lines and can’t
move around other players. School is nothing if not
spaces waiting to be reappropriated.
I walk with a hand brushing the mesh, stomping
like a soldier to avoid falling on my face. This was a
stupid way to go. The only buildings between the ten-
nis courts and Blue Base are the school office and sci-
ence labs—exactly where Red Team will be prepar-
ing its assault. There are concrete stairs further ahead
that lead out of the ditch, back up to the fields. I need
to double back to the quadrangle and approach the
base from the north, through Jesus Tunnel.
I feel the padlock of the tennis-court gate under-
hand and pavement underfoot. Light flashes. The
torch is perfectly aimed at my face and leaves green
and pink circles dancing in the darkness. I don’t have
time to consider that I am caught before Ben swears.
“Shit, Brendan. I thought you were Red.”
Friendly fire. Now Ben has to respawn. I cannot
see his face between the night and the motes of color
still dancing in my vision, but I know we are consid-
ering the same thing; we could cheat, pretend this
never happened. Who would know?
“Have you seen Red Team?” I ask.
“No. I’ve been down here for ages.” He looks down
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 7
at my hand, points with his torch. “Is that … ?”
I hold up the red flag. “Yeah. Look, John, Mark, and
Sean are about to hit our base hard. Go respawn then
defend with the others. I’m going to sneak back up
around the assembly hall and down through the tunnel.”
He nods and walks off without another word. The
only friendly face I have seen since leaving Blue Base
is gone. We are both heading to the quadrangle, but
Ben will take the swifter route. By going past the of-
fice, it will be only a matter of minutes for him to get
to the flagpole, respawn, and head back to base. But
Ben is dead, a ghost in spectator mode; such a path is
too risky for a living flag bearer.
As I hurry back north (past the staff room, past
the groundsmen’s shed, and past the chapel) hypoth-
eses run through my mind. What if Ben respawns
quick enough to warn the others and foil Red Team’s
ambush? What if they blast John right off the roof?
Right now Red Team could be all sulking back
to their flagless base. Right now could be my only
chance to make a dash for it before Red Team re-
group for another attack. I quicken my pace.
I take a single step east into the quadrangle. The
solid bitumen underfoot and the close proximity of
walls are comforting, but I hesitate. Orange lights
pepper the walls at even intervals, throwing shadows
deep and plentiful among the buildings, warping the
familiar shapes and outlines of my school beyond
recognition.
What if the ambush has already swept through?
What if Red Team is lurking in the quadrangle, wait-
ing for me to run out and hand them the game? My
Ceramic Jesus looms overhead, looking down at me in
the low light like some omniscient referee. I would not
be surprised if he opened his sad mouth and shouted,
“RED TEAM HAVE TAKEN THE FLAG!”
8 — Kill Screen Magazine
hand clenches the ragged flag. The entire game hangs
on me getting across the quadrangle, but I am too
scared to take another step.
Then I realize that I am thinking about this all
wrong. The area before me is not the quadrangle, and
this is not our school; it is somewhere new. We have
captured and recreated it for our own use. I think of
John scaling the office and realize I am going about
this the wrong way. I am playing tennis while Red
Team plays Pac-Man Tag. A narrow path rings the
outside of the quadrangle buildings, squeezed in
beside the tall, soundproof walls; the groundsmen
use it to wash the classroom windows. It is out-of-
bounds during the day, but school rules do not apply
here. Our new rules have changed everything.
I run up the alley beside the assembly hall and onto
the foreign dirt path behind the northern wing. I dash
under the black windows of Mr. Reece’s math classroom
where we discovered the RNDM function on our Casio
calculators and spent entire lessons using RNDM 6 to
duel our Warhammer characters. I turn south around
the computer labs where we unearthed the flight simu-
lator hidden among Excel 97’s spreadsheets.
There is not a path against the back of the west
wing, so I tread through the bushes. I am noisy but
unconcerned; Red Team will be nowhere nearby. I
pass under Sensei’s Japanese classroom. It was Final
Fantasy VII that convinced me to stick with Japa-
nese. I wanted to understand the hiragana scattered
throughout Midgar’s slums.
Past the graphics workshop where, instead of
learning a new CAD program, I would go home and
build verandas and bits of furniture in Valve’s World-
craft—a program I could not have hoped to under-
stand without the orthographic techniques learned
on the other side of this wall.
Between the workshop and Mrs. Hooper’s Eng-
lish classroom, I sneak back into the quadrangle. I
sneak to the very edge of the tunnel and peep around
the corner. Ceramic Jesus looms overhead, looking
down at me in the low light like some omniscient
referee. I would not be surprised if he opened his sad
mouth and shouted, “RED TEAM HAVE TAKEN
THE FLAG!” The path seems clear and I step into the
tunnel, but leap back as I hear shouts and footfalls.
I flatten myself against the wall as Mark and Sean
sprint into the quadrangle, laughing and shouting
expletives over their shoulders. Mark is clutching a
torch in his right hand and a beach towel in the left.
They dash unafraid through the quadrangle and dis-
appear toward the football fields.
I enter the tunnel again as Adam and Michael
walk in from the other end.
“Respawning?”
Both nod.
I hold up the Snoopy beach towel. “Don’t worry,
they can’t score.”
“Neither can we,” says Michael.
I leave them to their respawning and walk on to
our base. I stare up at the surrounding gutters ner-
vously, but Ben steps out from behind a tree and
waves me closer.
“John was on the science roof, but I got him. You
got their flag still?”
I hold it forward. “Yeah. Little use it does us now.”
Ben ties it to the mop and stabs the handle back
into the soil, as though claiming the entire school in
the name of Snoopy. For the first time, I notice the
blue sky behind the red kennel.
“We should have set a time limit for this thing,” Ben
says.
I shrug. “Rules are rules.We know now for next time.”
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 9
10 — Kill Screen Magazine
 by LAURA MICHET
illustration by DAVID BONI
ONE SMALL STEP
Breathing in Moonbase Alpha
As a huge space nerd, I spent my childhood unhap-
pily watching space become a place for robots and
not humans.
My own lifespan has neatly encapsulated the pro-
cess. The Space Shuttle Challenger blew up in 1986,
three years before I was born. In 1998, a monument
for those dead sat directly outside the window of
my third-grade classroom. Pathfinder, the first of
the Mars rovers, occupied much of my waking at-
tention in 1997. When I was 10, I actually attended
Space Camp—the best birthday present I have ever
received. Space Camp in 1999 was a blissfully op-
timistic reeducation facility, and I came away be-
lieving in a glorious future where Americans and
Russians skip across Mars arm-in-arm, scattering
baskets of daffodils on Olympus Mons. I thought of
myself as an approved proto-astronaut. At the right
age, I’d step up and claim my pass to outer space.
It didn’t work out that way. Support for human
space exploration has been waning in America, and
the long, slow switch to unmanned programs may
have ended earlier this year with the cancellation of
the Constellation moon program. It’s not particu-
larly surprising: The program was over-budget, and
going back to our moon is probably not the best tar-
get for research dollars or the human spirit. But it
was disappointing nonetheless. For now, the future
of our human space exploration is still ambiguous.
I feel as though I’ve been anticipating this for a
long time. One morning in 2003, my friends and I
found ourselves in a deserted school hallway, mut-
tering to one another about the Columbia disaster.
We were hypnotized and baffled, and we grew con-
scious of a strange generational disadvantage: after
beating the living daylights out of Hitler, our grand-
parents sent actual men to the actual moon. But we
were stuck here on Earth, sending robots to Mars
and helplessly watching our spaceships explode on
television.
The space nerd I was would have adored Moon-
base Alpha, a PC game released for free last summer
by NASA’s Learning Technologies team and Virtual
Heroes, the developer behind America’s Army. Built
in the Unreal engine, it’s a multiplayer game that’s
part puzzle, part kart racer, and part low-gravity-
movement sim. It’s set in the near future, on a sur-
prisingly realistic moon: The earth hangs in the sky,
buggies and robots kick up thick plumes of lunar
soil, and astronauts bound and drift across the map.
A meteorite impact has disabled the life-support
system of a NASA lunar station, and players must
repair this system as quickly as possible, prioritiz-
ing a complicated list of fetch-and-carry tasks with
different durations and difficulty levels.
Unfortunately, the mechanics of the game proper
are not entertaining. Players fix elements of the
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 11
Without peril, I’d been robbed of any sense of
achievement. These astronauts were scrubbed
of the romanticization I’d given them to over
the years. They weren’t the astronauts I’d
grown up admiring. They weren’t the Right
Stuff. They were a bunch of cheats.
broken oxygen system by completing mini-games
like robot-driving or “welding,” an unusually frus-
trating maze-tracing puzzle. At times, these mini-
games are absurdly difficult, and they all control
badly. When playing by yourself, they get dull
pretty quickly.
The real fun lies in playing Moonbase Alpha with
friends: leaping around in spacesuits and mess-
ing with the oddly adorable robots on this dusty
moon. Incredibly, the setting’s strong atmosphere
holds up even in multiplayer. Playing the game feels
like reenacting the famous videos of Armstrong’s
lunar strolls. The slow, swinging steps of the play-
ers’ astronauts have a convincing heft and effort,
each footfall leaves a perfect print in the regolith,
and each awkward, jerky hop sends the astronaut
coasting forward over the dirt. Whether watching
friends struggling around over the surface or doing
it yourself, it simply feels real.
The future of robust human space exploration
depicted in this game no longer exists, and for a
long-time space nerd like me, that’s a pretty bitter
realization. Moonbase Alpha was designed before
the Constellation program was cancelled, and the
structures are based on real NASA lunar technol-
ogy—things that would have been built on the real
moon 20 years from now if Constellation had gone
as planned. For reasons beyond its developers’ con-
trol, Moonbase’s optimism is empty: The game re-
minds me more of what manned space exploration
has lost than of what lies ahead. For all its realistic
roots, Moonbase’s scenario is a fantasy.
Strangely enough, however, Moonbase Alpha also
12 — Kill Screen Magazine
seems to defy the kind of heroic fantasies we tradi-
tionally associate with space exploration. When the
game began, I knew the astronauts trapped in the
Moonbase would suffocate without my assistance.
I assumed that death was part of the scenario. It
had to be. Astronauts are action scientists. They’re
champion researchers. Like samurai and knights,
they’re remote, clean, and heroic; wearing armor
and risking death every moment of the day. As a
child, I would have loved astronauts less if their job
were less perilous. We know that space is dangerous
and unforgiving, and acknowledging this in our fic-
tions helps us to process that disturbing truth.
But the astronauts in Moonbase Alpha don’t die.
If you fail to save them, they pop back on the radio,
chirping that they’ve merely “lost a day of produc-
tivity” due to the trouble—then suggest that you
try again. I was almost more upset with the game
for not killing them than I was at myself for fail-
ing to save them. Without peril, I’d been robbed of
any sense of achievement. These astronauts were
scrubbed of the romanticization I’d given them
to over the years. They weren’t the astronauts I’d
grown up admiring. They weren’t the Right Stuff.
They were a bunch of cheats.
Moonbase Alpha is not, however, NASA’s final
word on games. It is actually a proof-of-concept for
another game currently in the works. Astronaut:
Moon, Mars, and Beyond is an educational MMO
which, according to NASA Learning Technologies
lead Daniel Laughlin, aims to revolutionize the way
people think about educational games.
“I was as poisoned as everyone else by edutain-
ment games,” Laughlin told me, referencing the
late-’80s and ’90s glut of boring educational PC
titles. “Many of them weren’t actually very good
educational games, but most of them were just not
good games.”
Laughlin initially found it difficult to convince
NASA executives, some of whom hadn’t played a
game since Pong, that NASA should develop an ed-
ucational MMO. “The academic side is still saying,
‘OK, we need to do a lot more research, and dissect
games down to the smallest molecule.’ They’ll still
be working on their research project for 20 years,
while people are moving out with games,” he said. “I
used the analogy … that we were essentially build-
ing the educational game equivalent of a supercol-
lider. That we were building something that didn’t
exist, that would let us do research that couldn’t
possibly be done until it was built.”
Laughlin hopes that a NASA MMO can pres-
ent science, engineering, and math skills to young
people as tickets to fascinating careers. The prob-
lem, he said, is that school disconnects science and
math skills from real-world applications. “I don’t
want somebody in seventh, eighth, and ninth grade
to end up saying, ‘Oh, I played a game and now I’m
going to be a planetary geologist,’ ” he said. “But I do
want them to say that there’s a possible future in this.”
The need to keep learning relevant is also why
NASA has chosen to make an MMO. “We can keep
updating it and engaging them and evolving the ex-
perience,” Laughlin said. “Ideally, you could start
playing it in seventh grade—and you may not play
it every day, but when you get to college, you could
still have your original Moonbase and your original
avatar … you could take video and turn it in as a
homework assignment in a physics class.”
What they’ve built so far is flawed but impressive.
Hopefully, the strongest part of Moonbase Alpha,
the atmosphere, will carry over into the final MMO.
“That seems to be the biggest thing that people are
applauding, that sense of immersion: that they get
to be on the moon,” Laughlin said. “I hear all the
time: ‘I’ll never get there in real life, but it felt like
I was there.’ ”
When NASA began this project, they vowed to
make a game that was “science fiction, not science
fantasy”—a game which presented a truly possible
future, compromised only when the medium of the
game itself made it absolutely necessary. The kind
of future, in other words, that holds up in a phys-
ics class assignment. Though Moonbase Alpha is
certainly as “hard” as hard science fiction gets—it’s
entirely scientifically possible—it occupies an un-
comfortable position between the fulfillment and
denial of several fantasies. While it provides the
ultimate space nerd fantasy of a real live honest-to-
god moonwalk, it strips the space program of the
daredevil heroism I’d always associated with it, and
dedicates itself to perpetuating a particular fiction
about human space exploration which I can’t help
but regard as an ironic fantasy. Its world is politi-
cally and financially impossible. But it’s a fantasy all
the more enticing for having once been real.
When I heard that NASA was making a game,
I thought to myself: Well, this had better be good.
What I meant, of course, was that it had better be
a good game—but also that it had better embody
what the space program meant to me, everything
from the hope and fright of my childhood to the
anxieties and controversies whirling around it
as Constellation neared its final days, the whole
gamut of human emotion surrounding our great-
est achievements and discoveries. It couldn’t have
done all that, of course. And it wasn’t meant to. It
isn’t trying to be a summation of everything we’ve
ever loved or imagined or debated about NASA and
human space exploration. It’s a proof of concept for
a larger game.
That larger game, however, will ask its players to
live as space explorers—to embody alternate, heroic
fantasies of themselves. To be action scientists and
hero researchers! To whip off to Saturn in the space
of a loading screen and use their brains for great
justice among the stars! If I’m going to play that
game, I’m going to want to be a hero, even if that’s
not entirely realistic, and I’m going to want to be
playing in a NASA that’s as heroic as I imagined it
as a child—even if it isn’t, and even if it never was. If
NASA’s MMO includes heroism and tragedy, it will
have the emotional punch to hook its students and
to place what they’ve learned on a grander scale.
Perhaps they’ll be inspired to dedicate themselves
to bigger, more-challenging futures—to take their
fantasies and make them real.
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 13
shop.killscreenmagazine.com
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 15
16 — Kill Screen Magazine
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 17
 m y p r o g r e ss r e p o rt

RED DEAD REDEMPTION

fA m e r A n k H o n o r L e v e L p e r c e n t co m p L e t e d

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pause
 yo u r p r o g r e ss r e p o rt

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b A N d i to s

t o tA L t o tA L t o tA L

nicholas felton
 by ROB DUBBIN
illustration by DAVID BONI
TRADE-OFFS
Meet Karim Hakimzadeh, financial analyst & StarCraft master
The best StarCraft II players are handfuls among
handfuls, chimerical blends of tactical genius,
preternatural reaction time, and the virtuosic
ability to work the game’s complex interface like a
saxophone. Replays of their matches, overlaid with
commentary by enthusiastic amateurs, rack up
hundreds of thousands of views online, and their
wildly original strategies proliferate, Zerg-like,
through the ravenous corridors of Battle.net. If
Kim Jong-il ever does invade South Korea, and his
military units so much as resemble Siege Tanks, the
Great Leader is in for one swift ass-kicking.
Karim Hakimzadeh, ranked at the top of his
highest-tier Diamond League ladder and in the top
0.3 percent of players in the world, is not a known
quantity in the StarCraft II community—but then,
StarCraft isn’t his full-time job, either. Karim is an
20 — Kill Screen Magazine
analyst at a London hedge fund, a young member
of an ultra-competitive industry that prizes chess
prodigies and poker sharks as recruits. Certainly
both of his pursuits require an analytical mind, but
how far do the similarities go?
Tell me a little bit about what you do for a living.
Most recently, I worked as an equity analyst at a
fund in London called Zan Partners.
Can you give me a ballpark figure on the size?
Of the fund? I’d better not.
Fair. Is there a range in the size of the trades
you’ve made over the course of your career so far?
I shouldn’t really answer that, either, because you can
infer the size of a fund from the size of typical trades.
I’ll consider myself outflanked on that one. What
was your first real-time strategy game?
That was StarCraft—actually, no, I played
Warcraft II before that. I must have been 9 or 10. I
was too young to really take it that seriously. Then,
when StarCraft came out, I bought that, and I got
pretty hooked. At that age I had all the time in the
world to kill. I spent a lot of time playing that, and
I got pretty good.
Online?
Yeah, I played StarCraft and Warcraft III pretty
much exclusively online. I don’t really enjoy single-
player or playing against computers, because what
I really enjoy is the competitive, strategic element. I
never play the single-player.
Did you have a consistent handle? I ask so that I
might stalk your career as efficiently as possible.
When I played [the original] StarCraft I used lots
of names. Now I play under the name Romanticist,
which I got from a time when my brother was in a
final at Harvard, and a crazy person burst into the
exam hall. He said he was a Romanticist, and I was
like, “Yes, I like that.”
It conveys a certain take-no-prisoners attitude.  of tell by how crazy it is that this is him. And
I think it’s like any sport, to be honest. Anyone
with a competitive nature likes trying to be the
best at something, and I guess that’s just my nature.
Whenever I’d run into opposition that was too
tough for me at the time, it was just my personality
that I would try to figure out a way to improve my
game or beat them.  their personality through their work that
It’s problem solving, to a degree. You try to
analyze the walls you run into, when you come up
against top opposition, and figure out why you’re
losing, and then it’s a problem to see how you can
improve on that.
That sounds like it could also apply to finance.  focus on either stock investments, or bonds, or
Well with trading it’s problem solving of a
different nature, but it’s still problem solving. You’re
trying to put together a more complex puzzle
because the economic system that every investment
falls within the framework of is a more complex
beast than a videogame. But you’re also trying to
outsmart other people in that every investment you
make, there’s someone else taking the other side of
it. And one of you is right and one of you is wrong. 
In any strategy game you’re trying to develop
insights that give you an edge—your own unique
strategy, you know, something that differentiates you
from others. If you have better micromanagement
in StarCraft, for example, or you’re more adaptable,
then over time you’ll win more often than you’ll
lose. It’s the same when you’re making trades. Just
like no one can win every game of chess, no one
is always successful in making investments—even
Warren Buffett has made many investments that
have lost money. The idea is that you just develop a
small edge, that you’re right six times out of 10. So
I guess there are a lot of parallels between the two.
And it’s definitely helped me. 
You see that in the top StarCraft players—
like thelittleone, Dario Wünsch, the popular
German player. There’s an aspect to the way
that he plays where it’s almost defined by
unorthodoxy. He’ll just go, “This game I’m
only building Ghosts,” or “Why not scout with
my Barracks,” something crazy like that; and
finds a way to make it work. And you can kind
I’m wondering if, as you observe the other
people in the trading ecosystem, whether
there’s the same ability to look at activity in
the market, and sort of see, “Oh, it’s that guy.
It’s the guy who always trades like this, who
tends to make this kind of move.” If people tip
same way.
Yeah, investors definitely have their own
trademarks. First of all, lots of investors have
different areas of expertise. I’d say most investors
aren’t generalists—they focus on a specific asset
class. So most broadly, an investor’s likely to
commodities, or FOREX. But then, a lot of really
successful investors have been even more niche
in their focus. For example, I don’t know if you
read any of the Michael Lewis books, like The Big
Short, but he talks about the guys who made a lot
of money by shorting subprime leading up to the
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 21
financial crisis. In that case, everyone knew who it
was that was behind these trades, because they were
very sort of niche, very specific trades that these
people were making, and they were some of the
only people out there looking to make that trade.
So they were very identifiable.
Over at The Atlantic, my friends Joe Flood and
Alexis Madrigal have done some great writing
about the ultra-high-speed trading robots, the
algorithmic trading systems that a lot of these
investment banks have started using to execute
these intricate strategies very quickly. And you
see these weird fingerprints of these bots basically
buying something at x price, and then x-1, and
then x-2, and then x-3, and then x-4, and it all
takes place over the course of a second. All these
little points are milliseconds. How do you feel
about that aspect of trading, about the increasing
mechanization of it?
Well, I don’t really have any programming
background, so I’ve never really done that myself.
It’s obvious that it’s a viable method of trading,
because there are some really big houses that use
computers and algorithms to do all their work for
them. I think Renaissance is the biggest one. And
that’s a very successful fund, so clearly—they’ve
hit on something that really actually works. It’s
not 100 percent; they have periods in which they
outperform the market and periods in which
they underperform the market. But if you hit on
an algorithm that’s consistently always up on the
market, that’s quite the moneymaking machine
you’ve got there.
Something about it strikes me as gaming the
system—after all, in games like StarCraft, bots
are considered cheating and can get you banned.
Here, someone executes strategies that they
maybe understand on a conceptual level, but
I doubt there’s a human sitting there sifting
through every millisecond of trading that these
robots do.
Yeah, I’m sure they don’t. But I don’t see anything
wrong with it. It’s not like it’s a sport, with rules
that you have to abide by, to make sure everyone’s
playing on the same field. I guess part of the point
22 — Kill Screen Magazine
of markets and investing is that if you manage to
get yourself an edge, as long as it’s not through
illegal means, insider information or something,
then the idea is that you should be incentivized to
do that, and then you should be rewarded for it.
These people are putting what must be an immense
amount of hard work to create and maintain one
of these successful computer trading programs;
so I suppose that if they made one that works,
why not?
Well I’m interested in that line. With finance, you
would expect it to be about economics, about
abstract, “buy low, sell high”-type principles. But
in practice, there’s some degree of gamesmanship,
of warfare there. There’s predatory behavior
that’s not, as you said, illegal, but as you also
said, there are two sides to every trade—like that
thing where Porsche cornered the market on
Volkswagen shares a couple of years ago; do you
remember that?
Yeah.
They just pulled off this gambit and totally
pantsed a couple of hedge funds, who bit pretty
hard on what turned out to be a play—so a few
billion in cash changed hands and everyone was
like, “Wow, the stock market’s a crazy place.”
Yeah. I see what you’re saying, and obviously
whenever people are making money like that there
are other people who are getting burned, but—I
mean, you enter the stock market, you should be
aware that you’re taking these risks, and I think
it’s your own fault if you’re on the wrong side of
something. It’s really your own fault. Not to sound
unsympathetic, but the idea is that before you
invest you’re supposed to do your due diligence.
And oftentimes even pretty savvy investors are
taken in—I’m sure there are a lot of smart people
who had invested their money with Madoff. But
that’s just part of the risk. The reward is potentially
significant if you’re investing, and so you have to
accept the risks too. 
A lot of things that you’re saying about due
diligence and things like that, remind me again
of StarCraft, where you can build up a really
impressive army, and you’ve got this great
offensive strategy, and you forget to guard the part
of your base where you’re harvesting minerals,
or whatever, and then a guy comes in your back
door with a couple of cloaked Banshees, and then
you’re screwed.
Yeah. There are definitely similarities.
Now that you’ve started playing StarCraft II, do
you have a place in mind that you want to get to,
as far as your level of play?
Well, I mean yeah, ideally I guess it’d be fun to
contend with the top players, but I don’t know
if I have the time to get to that level. And I don’t
know how, at the moment, with this matchmaking
system—the opposition I get pitted against, it seems
that it’s mostly mediocre players. None of them
seem particularly good. So right now I’m at number
three in one of the Diamond League divisions, and
then it’s just a couple more wins and I’ll be number
one, and then with this new system I don’t really
know where it goes from there. Apparently there’s
an invite-only pro league, but I have no idea how I’d
be invited to that. That’d be fun to play in.
You mention not having the time. What makes that
last mile to the very top level so time-consuming?
What’s most difficult to master is probably
being able to multitask effectively. So that you’re
micromanaging your units and also producing
new units constantly—even while your attention is
elsewhere, monitoring all the different points on the
map and making sure that everywhere is defended.
Often good players will attack several locations at
the same time.
Losing valuable seconds here and there can often
make quite a big difference. So you have to kind of
refine your micro-speed, and that just takes—it’s
really a matter of practice, and that takes a lot of
playing time. I was always shocked when I read
about the lifestyles of the Korean pro gamers,
how much they would play every day. They would
literally practice for 12 hours a day. 
I simply don’t have the kind of freedom I did
when I was a teenager in high school playing the
original—given that work isn’t optional, it more or
less comes down to making a compromise between
actually seeing daylight in my free time and being a
respectable, but not untouchable, player.
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 23
 by RYAN BRADLEY
illustration by SARAH JACOBY

THE YOUNG AND

THE SCORELESS
Toddlers step out into the world of consoles

We enter this world a wondrous bundle, 100 bil-
lion neurons strong and bearing more synapses—
those flashpoints of memory and sensation—than
the adults we will become. As we grow older, get
responsible, go to the supermarket, learn to drive,
get a job, pay taxes, get married, and maybe even
have kids of our own, we kill off these synapses. By
this measure, when we are born we are more con-
scious of our world than we will ever be. This is why
neuroscientists who study babies call their subjects
“little Buddhas.”
We’re born blindingly conscious but grasping,
handling more raw data than we’ll ever deal with
again. Our pre-frontal lobes aren’t yet fully formed,
and they’re what sorts everything around us, focus-
ing our senses. Maturing, then, is just a way of fig-
uring out how to block external stimuli—but our
lobes aren’t finished growing and aren’t in full use
until we’re 20. When we’re very young we don’t
know thought, can’t connect the dots. One way to
approach the mind in its early development isn’t
as a singular thing, but a series of islands. In other

24 — Kill Screen Magazine

words the brain isn’t a mind yet, it’s just a brain. But
when we are born we’re more aware and learning
faster than we ever will again. Researchers, compar-
ing the brain scans of babies to adults, have found
that the only grown-up experience that even ap-
proaches this awe-inspiring awareness that we feel
as infants is when we watch a really, really good
movie or play certain videogames. Only then is the
back of our mind lit up like a child’s. Only then are
we so fully immersed in a world that isn’t really real.
So, if playing a videogame is a glimpse into our own
infancy, what is it like for an infant to game?
In the last 10 years we—and by “we” I mean sci-
entists and academics—have made a fundamental
shift in how we think about babies. Parents have
known for a while that infants lead inner lives so
mysterious that we can only guess at their complex-
ity. But back in what psychology professor Alison
Gopnik calls “the bad old days,” the assumption
“that newborn babies were crying carrots, vegeta-
bles with few reflexes” was the norm. In the past
10 years, Gopnik continues, “we’ve not only dis-
covered that children have these imaginative pow-
ers—we’ve actually begun to understand how these
powers are possible. We are developing a science of
the imagination.”
As psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers,
and the rest of academe were changing their ap-
proach to young kids, the kids who had grown up
with videogames hit their late 20s and early 30s.
Some got jobs as game designers, and some had
kids of their own. Some of these designers began
building games for their kids. Eric Jorgensen is one.
Jorgensen, the lead developer for Microsoft Win-
dows AdCenter, is a father of six. Almost 15 years
ago, when his two oldest sons still liked climbing
onto his lap while he worked, Jorgensen created a
videogame for them. “It was entertaining, that was
the main goal,” he says. “Really it was a keyboard
banger.”   Takahashi, too, is concerned with the roots of
The program was called Flabbergasted! and it
was a drawing platform—kind of. Some pictures
moved, and some of the keys launched fireworks.
Punch other keys and a swarm of bees would move
across the screen, hit more, and everything would
melt into psychedelia. There weren’t points, goals,
or any definitive end. It was, like a lot of games for
the very young, fairly difficult to describe. In its
colorful randomness, Flabbergasted! predicted the
shape of things to come.
Keita Takahashi is holding a scarf aloft, triumphant-
ly. “This is Boy,” he declares. Cameras flash. A quiet
murmur descends. Takahashi pauses for effect. He’s
introducing his latest project, Noby Noby Boy, at the
Game Developers Conference, the industry’s an-
nual prom held in San Francisco. It’s 2009 and the
skinny 30-year-old developer, with his mop top and
puffy, oversized jacket, looks childlike in this room-
ful of murmuring adults and flashing cameras. He
grins, puts the scarf down, and explains.
In games, he says, there are carrots and sticks,
rules and scores. Even in his last strange creation—
the Katamari Damacy series—there were goals and
a time limit. “I wasn’t happy,” he says of Katamari.
“It felt like a formula, and I felt betrayed.” Then
Takahashi perks up. “I wanted to throw these rules
off and start from scratch, start from the beginning.
I wanted to find out what games should mean.”
Games mean play, and when we are young that’s
pretty much all we concern ourselves with. It’s a
strange thing, evolutionarily. Play, Melvin Konner
writes, combines “great energy expenditure and
risk with apparent pointlessness.” Konner is an an-
thropologist and neuroscientist at Emory and the
author of The Evolution of Childhood, a mammoth
text that compiles decades’ worth of research on the
very young mind. Play is all kids do besides sleep
and eat. All the hunting and gathering, all that nas-
ty business of actually surviving, is being done for
them by their worried parents (or worried village).
Even though play may appear pointless, Konner be-
lieves that it is vital. When we play, we sharpen our
motor skills, take risks, and try things we wouldn’t
otherwise. In many ways, how we play is what
makes us human.
play. At GDC he describes watching children ab-
sorbed in their handheld games on the subway in
Japan. “They aren’t really playing, just consuming,”
he says. Takahashi hates to see these kids sitting
there, not talking to their parents, just as he hates
the word for people who buy his work: user. Games,
he says, are meant to be played—what does it say
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 25
about us if we’re just using them? It says that game
developers are not doing their job, and that games
need to be better. Near the end of his presentation
Takahashi gets to the heart of what he wishes to
create—a return to a child-like, exploratory mind.
A return to pure play. “It feels like everything is
so controlled by systems. It feels like something is
tying me up. The word nobynoby means to not be
constrained, to be mentally and emotionally lib-
erated.” His new game, he says, will do just that.
From where I’m sitting, Jackson Milott does not
seem to like Noby Noby Boy at all. Jackson is three
years old and really into fish right now. He’s star-
ing into an iPad, his face contorted in what I can
only guess might be concentration, or maybe frus-
tration. He’s clutching a plastic clownfish, and I do
not see him let go of it once. Jackson looks up at
me, then back at the screen, and then slams his free
hand down on it, flat. Underneath his palm is Taka-
hashi’s creation, the boy who looks a lot like a scarf.
Noby Noby Boy is, as promised, lacking in car-
rots and sticks. The scarf-boy gets flung around
with the flick of a finger, wrapped or bounced off
strange objects (windmills, giant robots) that fall or
sometimes drift into place from off-screen. That’s
about it. Oh, the scarf-boy can grow longer, too.
This growth is, actually, a bit of a carrot—but the
complexity of growing one’s boy and unlocking
worlds and linking those worlds to the worlds of
other players through the internet, and in doing
so expanding the Noby universe, well, it’s beyond
my ken and definitely beyond Jackson’s. What’s
immediately important for Takahashi and Konner
and Gopnik and me is that Noby Noby Boy is failing
to capture the imagination of this three-year-old.
This, then, may be why Noby Noby Boy failed for Jackson—there’s
too much of Takahashi’s fertile mind in it. Maybe this is why Jackson
looked so frustrated: he was peering into a world that wasn’t his, while
he’s still figuring out the world around him.
26 — Kill Screen Magazine
Jackson actually wants to go back to something a
lot less abstract, something that would disappoint
all the researchers and game developers who have
spent a lot of time trying to parse the infant mind.
He wants to play Monkey Lunchbox, a game that
rewards, literally, with carrots. By Takahashi and
Konner’s standards, it’s a game that isn’t really play
at all.
So we go to Monkey Lunchbox, because Jackson
is the boss. I watch him match pieces of fruit and
giggle when he gets it right and giggle more when
the monkey does a little monkey dance when his
lunchbox is full. His father, Jon, tells me that Jack-
son already knows this game—that he’s played it be-
fore, in fact, on Jon’s phone. It’s the familiarity, Jon
thinks, that Jackson likes. He knows he can do the
things to get the monkey to do the dance. But this
only lasts a short while.
We move on to something that has a bit of Jor-
genson’s Flabbergasted! in it. Something that is, like
any successful game for the very young an empty
vessel: no carrots, no sticks. What KidArt has, be-
yond finger-paint and a blank slate, are stickers—of
fish! There’s even one like the clownfish Jackson is
still clutching. He’s into it.
Play can be serious business, and Jackson goes
quiet for awhile, adding schools of clownfish to his
finger painting. When we are young and our brain
is a series of islands, minds adrift in the sea of our
skull, we play to make sense of the world. Some-
times, when we figure things out and unlock this
new world’s secrets, we go back and repeat, just to
make sure. This is probably why Jackson picked
Monkey Lunchbox—he’s familiar with its rules.
Gopnik takes this idea one powerful step further:
We play to imagine what could be, to create rules

It’s play that allowed us to walk
out of the Great Rift Valley and
conquer the world and then some.
No play, no imagination, no rocket
to the moon.
and terms for the future. We play, in other words,
to imagine and to invent. It’s play that allowed us to
walk out of the Great Rift Valley and conquer the
world and then some. No play, no imagination, no
rocket to the moon. Because children don’t have to
worry about day-to-day survival, Gopnik explains
in her book, The Philosophical Baby, they “don’t
choose to explore only the possibilities that might
be useful—they explore all the possibilities.” Because
of play, “we can consider different ways the world
might be, not just the ways the world actually is.” How
it is for Jackson right now is very, very fishy.
But that’s just right now. What’s important, Jor-
gensen likes to point out, is that the child is the cre-
ator, that the world is his own. This, then, may be
why Noby Noby Boy failed for Jackson—there’s too
much of Takahashi’s fertile mind in it. Maybe this
is why Jackson looked so frustrated: he was peering
into a world that wasn’t his, while he’s still figuring
out the world around him. I’d slam my hand down
upon this impostor’s imagined world, too. But I’m
being a little unfair to Takahashi. His game wasn’t
really created with a three-year-old in mind, and
Monkey Lunchbox was. Besides, Noby Noby Boy is
a hit with adults, in its own strange and cultish way.
Takahashi’s creation may be a valiant attempt at
returning adult gamers to a childlike mind, but this
is a nearly impossible thing. Scientists and academ-
ics who study small children, who know better than
anyone the intricate mysteries of the very young, of-
ten talk about how much they would give to experi-
ence the world as their subjects do. Some say they’d
give back all the awards and accolades they’ve ever
received to be able to be three years old for just one
hour. By attempting to construct a world of pure,
childlike play, Takahashi was unknowingly setting
out to build a sort of baby-gamer Tower of Babel.
“The more we seek out neat ideas, the worse we
are at finding them,” Jorgensen says. “The classic
example is taking your kids to the store and buying
a cool toy, and when you bring it home, they spend
all their time playing with the box it came in.” Be-
hind Jackson, dominating the Milotts’ living room,
is a refrigerator box. It’s turned on its side and cut
open in places. It’s a fort, or a castle, or a house, or
an empty box. “We thought he’d get sick of it even-
tually,” Jon tells me. “That was five months ago.”
Takahashi has, for now, given up on videogames. “I
find the idea of working in the physical world far
more exciting than working in a virtual one,” he re-
cently told the BBC. “I feel like having something
physical makes it easier for me to communicate
what I think is fun to people.” So he’s designing a
playground in Nottingham, England. “I’ve had to
return to my six-year-old way of thinking,” he said.
Jorgensen, too, is moving on, but in a different
sense. As a parent, “there’s still something that
doesn’t quite sit right when I watch my kids staring
at the screen for too long.” What excites him is the
possibility of creating videogames without screens
or buttons for kids to play in. Microsoft is working
on its Kinect console, a controller-less environment
where body and voice rule. Jorg Neumann, Kinect’s
studio head, studied the gestures of three-, four-
, and five-year-olds to come up with a universal
language of motion for the system. In Kinectimals,
Kinect’s flagship game for kids, Neumann (who has
a nine-year-old) says that “as you move around a
playroom in the game, the room changes with you.
There’s no time limit, you can’t fail. Most games are
so static, but this is pure physicality.” What really
excites Jorgensen about Kinect, though, is that it
can create soundscapes, so suddenly a living room
is an instrument, the couch and the coffee table its
valves and keys. Jogensen believes developers can
do better, work harder, to keep up with the young
mind. That it’s the kids who are the real artists, the
real creators, standing in the living room conduct-
ing invisible orchestras, wide awake and dreaming.
It’s us, the adults, who need to just try to keep up.
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 27
 by JAMIN BROPHY-WARREN
and KENT SUTHERLAND
illustration by JUSTIN RUSSO
CAROL ANN HAS
DYSENTERY
Living, learning, and dying on the steps of
The Oregon Trail
The tale of The Oregon Trail is a bundle of odd
circumstances and lucky breaks. Developed in 1971
by three college students for the Minnesota public
school system, the game became one of the most
influential pieces of pop culture in the last half-
century. The Oregon Trail was partly responsible
for Apple’s dominance in the ’80s in the education
space, but the game’s creators never made a dime.
Even its creation was nearly thwarted. If it were not
for a decision that Don Rawitsch made during the
Vietnam War, the game may have never existed—at
least in the form that millions of children experienced.
Now the principal in a consulting firm bearing
his name, Rawitsch was the linchpin for The
Oregon Trail. It was his idea to focus on that piece
of American history, and he served as the spirit
guide for his partners Bill Heinemann and Paul
Dillenberger as they set out to make a title for
the classroom that eventually changed the face of
computer games. That’s where our story starts—
with three college students with a single idea.
So where does this all begin?
In the fall of 1971, several of us who were going
to college at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn.
were in a program to prepare us for getting licensed
as teachers.
30 — Kill Screen Magazine
This was of course about seven or eight years be-
fore personal computers arrived. In order to pro-
vide computer access to classrooms, the school dis-
trict had to run a central computer system, which
you could call by telephone from a classroom, and
make a connection so that you could access the
computer on a terminal. In those days, the comput-
er terminals were typically teletype machines. You
know, like the ones you see in the old movies and
newspaper offices that were clacking away. They
had no screen, it was all on paper, and it was slow,
but you could [still program].
Somewhere along this period, my buddies Bill
Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger were teaching
math, and I was teaching social studies. This was
junior high. The other two guys had access to a
computer. They had learned a little bit about how
to program the computer, which you could do in
the original form of the BASIC computer language.
Since I was teaching social studies, we were do-
ing the unit on the westward movement. As we
talked in the evening about what we were up to,
it dawned on us that maybe there was something
we could do with the computer in a social studies
classroom—that it wasn’t confined to mathematics.
One evening, the other two borrowed a teletype
machine from the school, which was no small feat,
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 31
because those things were big and heavy. They
brought it home to our apartment and we were able
to make a connection to a computer system in the
Minneapolis district.
In those days, the terminal was not direct-wired
to the phone line. What you had on the terminal
was a modem—and we’re all familiar with mo-
dems—but the modem was a box the size of a shoe-
box, and it had two rubber-ringed cups. You would
pick up the phone, dial the phone, dial the number
into the computer and wait for a tone to occur, and
then you would take the handset of the phone and
slam it down into the two cups of the modem—
what we called a coupler. And that’s how you would
make the connection.
Most of the initial work to get what we might’ve
called a prototype was done over one weekend,
when we worked for many hours and thought
through what the trip West in a wagon train would
entail, and then how that could be translated into a
computer program. My job was to know the history,
and their job was to know the programming. Out of
that emerged the first version of the Oregon Trail
program which, again, was not on a personal com-
puter, but on what was known as a timeshare system,
because you had many people sharing the computer. It
was first used in a classroom on Dec. 3, 1971.
What was this apartment like?
The phone, as I recall, was in the kitchen, so
that’s where we put the teletype. Paul and Bill had
to come up with what we wanted the program to
do next, and then they would have to type code on
this teletype through the phone connection into the
computer and save the code. Then you could get the
computer to execute the code.
Doing this on a teletype, with no screen and no
graphics, meant that there were some things about
the program that you would probably not be famil-
iar with. I presume the program that you probably
used in school was run on an Apple computer or an
IBM PC or something. Would that be correct?
Yeah, I used it on an Apple II. It was a green-and-
white screen, and then later on we played it in
color.
Much about the simulation was as you experi-
32 — Kill Screen Magazine
enced it. You started out making some decisions.
You were given a certain amount of money. You
spent that money on certain things up front and
saved some for the trip. The trip was taken in two-
week increments and you picked the date you want-
ed to start your trip, which had some implications
on the weather, since it was a six-month trip. Then,
in every two-week “turn,” so to speak, you would make
some decisions, and the computer would tell you the
results of those decisions and also what had randomly
happened to you as the pioneer traveling along.
Now, when it came to hunting, on an Apple II,
you probably had control of a little guy with the
gun or something. You could shoot buffalo, or deer
or squirrels and so on, on the screen. But we didn’t
have a screen.
So the mechanism worked like this: When it was
time to use your gun—because you were prepared
for it, because you were hunting, or because maybe
you were attacked by thieves, and you had to re-
spond quickly—the computer would ask you to
type in a word, like “BANG” or “POW,” the sound
that the gun would make. And then, you would
have to type that word as fast as you could, and of
course accurately, and the computer had a function
in it that could time how long it was between the
computer saying “Type BANG” and you complet-
ing the typing. The computer knew how fast you
were, and the computer knew whether you spelled
it right. You didn’t want to be so fast that you made
a typo. The computer then, through a mathemati-
cal function, would determine how many pounds
of buffalo you got, or deer or whatever, based on
your speed and accuracy. I always thought that was
a pretty clever thing.
There were other uses of mathematics in the
programming so that the results from the com-
puter would bear some resemblance to reality. For
example, in the earlier parts of the trip, where you
were crossing the plain, there were many rivers.
There was a fairly high probability that you would
run into a situation where you had to cross a riv-
er, which could swamp your wagon if you weren’t
careful. However, once the computer saw that your
mileage was such that you were now into the moun-
tains, the probability of crossing a river would di-
minish quite a bit.
 We all used this initial version in our classes, and
[the students] were fascinated by a game that was
probably a little more sophisticated and meaningful
than other things that were available to them on the
computer then. Because you didn’t have a computer
lab—you just had one device in the classroom—you
typically would have the kids go through the trip in
small groups. You would get like five kids around
this teletype and they would go through it.
The kids were remarkably adaptable. Initially,
when a decision had been made, they would start
shouting: “Let’s do this, let’s do that, let’s go this way,
let’s buy this.” They found that it was a pretty in-
efficient way to make decisions, until they started
to think—what’s this thing called democracy that
we’re always talking about in class? Why don’t we
vote on what to do? They kind of invented that
mechanism for themselves.
When it came time to do the shooting, initially,
everyone would kind of try to grab for the keyboard
and type in a word, and of course they would fail.
They wouldn’t type correctly or they would be too
slow, so they finally figured, “Well, let’s do some
specialization here. Who’s the best typer?” “OK,
well it’s Ellen.” So when it came time to type, every-
one would clear away and give Ellen the keyboard
so that she could do her thing, and they learned
about the differentiation of tasks. Someone would Minnesota called MECC, the Minnesota Educa-
be tracking the budget; someone would be track- tional Computing Consortium. This was a very for-
ing the progress on a map. Someone would be the ward-thinking move by the state of Minnesota to
shooter, somebody the vote counter. There was re- create an agency that was set up and funded to help
ally some stuff going on that wasn’t straight history, all of the school districts in the state learn about
or learning about computers. It was learning about using computers, and it brought some standardiza-
what you do when you’re challenged. When you have tion to the kind of computers that would be used,
to make decisions. When you’re given limited re- and the way that certain things about computers
sources, and you have to reach a goal. I always thought would be taught. Whereas in other states, if you
that was a really powerful aspect of using the game. were a teacher that learned about computers and
It got used for like a year or two, and pretty soon you wanted to make something happen, you were
it was time for us to complete our student teaching on your own. In Minnesota, there was this agen-
and get back to college. And so at that point, I think cy and we had a team of seven trainers that went
the program … we probably removed it from the around the state.
school district’s computer system, but not before we It was MECC’s job to run a timeshare system that
printed out a listing of the code. I don’t remember didn’t just serve one school district, but served 400
why, but somehow I ended up with a roll of paper school districts out of the Twin Cities. We had to
that had the BASIC language code on it, which I stock that computer system with as much instruc-
held onto for a couple of years. tional material as we could obtain. It wasn’t like
In 1974, I went to work for an organization in today; there weren’t stores that sold software. You

Issue 2, Volume 1 — 33
had to beg, steal, borrow, or buy things that peo-
ple had created in K-12 schools or from colleges,
where people were trying to be creative, and see if
we could get permission to load a new program that
had instructional value into the statewide system.
When I arrived at MECC in the fall of 1974, I
asked if they were looking for new things for the
library and they were. So I said, “Well, I’ve got this
program that we invented in college.”
I had this—you know, it was like the sacred Dead
Sea scrolls. It was this rolled-up thing of paper with
the printout of the code. I felt a lot better about be-
ing able to type it into a computer again, instead of
me just hanging onto it.
One weekend I took home a terminal. By now,
we had progressed from teletypes to something that
looked like a big typewriter, and the two little cups
for the coupler were actually part of this typewriter
device. I took that device home one weekend, and
typed and typed and typed, and put all of that code
into a program that we stored in the library.
How long did that take—typing out all that code?
A weekend. Actually, I think it was Thanksgiving
weekend that I took down all of that code. So I had
four days.
Haha, OK.
Because it was now available to all of the schools
in the state, it became popular within Minnesota
very quickly. Other than an early version of an
email program that we ran on that timeshare sys-
tem, The Oregon Trail was probably the most-used
program on the system.
That was all kind of interesting, and Oregon Trail
became well known in Minnesota, but of course,
people outside of Minnesota could not access this
timeshare system. That’s the way things sat from
1974 to about 1979. But in that period, I, having
taken graduate classes in simulation design, decid-
34 — Kill Screen Magazine
ed that the program needed to be more historically
accurate, because some of the stuff that was in there
we had just guessed, sitting in our apartment.
I found some books in the Minnesota library that
had reprints of diaries, or at least printed texts from
diaries that people had written while crossing the
trail. I started taking notes on how often certain
things happened: What percentage of the days in
the diaries was there bad weather? What percent-
age of the time did they mention somebody getting
sick? That kind of thing.
After I went through several of those diaries,
I compiled a table of percentages. I used those
percentages to alter the program so that the
probabilities would be more in alignment with the
historical record. I did some research into what
things cost in the 19th century, and changed the
dollar amounts for buying food and ox yolks and
wagon wheels. I checked the mileage for the places
you could stop along the way, like the forts, and the
crossing of rivers and so forth.
One of the issues we had to deal with was, among
the calamities that befell the people traveling the
trail, the wagon trains got attacked. But who at-
tacked them? In the old movies from the ’30s and
’40s, it would be the rampaging Indians. But in the
research that I did, it turned out that more often
than not, when the settlers met Indians, the Indians
would help them—help them learn how to grow
food out on the prairie, help them learn how to find
the buffalo—and when the wagon trains were at-
tacked, and things were stolen from them, it was
typically non-Indians. They were just robbers. We
made sure that the message in the program didn’t
say, “Comanche attack—you’ve lost half of your
food,” because that would be holding on to a stereo-
type that wasn’t really the case.
Were there any other misconceptions that people
had about life traveling West during that time
that the game was able to address accurately?
When you kill the buffalo, the buffalo might
weigh 1,000 lbs, but there was no way that you
could put 1,000 lbs of meat in your wagon. The
wagon would break and the meat would spoil. The
program would only let you take back 200 lbs of
meat, because that’s all you can carry. So, there was
that thing about food, and what were the pioneers
going to do without refrigerators and other meth-
ods of storage.
One other interesting thing: Historical record
says that during the first years that the trail was be-
ing used, the mortality rate traveling to Oregon was
about 50 percent. What happened was that those
who survived and made it to the West Coast would
then attempt to get mail back to their relatives in
the East. And they would say, “You need to come
and join us out here. There’s all kinds of land and
it’s beautiful,” and so forth. “And if you come on the
trail, here’s what you need to do: Don’t replicate the
mistakes that we made. Here’s what to bring, here’s
what not to bring, here’s what to do with your mon-
ey,” and so forth.
Well, when I started doing teacher workshops
that included The Oregon Trail, I noticed that when
the teachers—the first time they’d go through it,
half of them would die. And I thought, well, the
model’s working pretty good here!
And then, of course, what would happen is they
would play it again and again. Especially if they talked
to each other, they’d get better and better at surviv-
ing. Just like the pioneers who sent the information
back home. As a matter of fact, there were instances of
pamphlets that you could buy on the East Coast about
how to survive the Oregon Trail trip. Ten cents.
When we talk about games in general, and espe-
cially computer games, and how you get better as
you play them over and over again—well that was
the same mechanism that was used by the pioneers.
The more information they accumulated from peo-
ple that had gone before them, the better the odds
were that they would survive.
One of the challenges that game designers have
is that people often play their games in ways that
the game designers themselves did not intend.
I think that as a child, and certainly continuing
through as an adult, I tended to be one of those
people. When I was a kid, we would often deliber-
ately not buy very much for our trip. We wanted
to see how far we could make it into the Oregon
Trail without, you know, doing much playing
at all. I was wondering what you thought about
that, certainly as an educator, and how do you
deal with that? How would you respond to me as
a student if I decided to play the game that way?
Well, I think initially, if you were my student I
would hope to have some conversation with you
about what you learned historically about traveling.
But look, that’s the whole purpose of education.
You come across something and you try it the way
it was intended, and then you start getting curious
about, what if I do this? Or what if I do that? So I
think that’s great.
That also means that you’re investigating the
model. It would be interesting to take a group of
kids who have played it many times and say, can
you diagram a model for me? Can you make a guess
at the probabilities that are used here? Because now
you’re really thinking about the experiences you’ve
had, and it’s not like watching a TV program. It’s
you trying to get into it.
Once we start to learn something about the mod-
el, how does that compare to reality? What is real?
What is the truth about the experience of traveling
to Oregon in a wagon? Let’s play the game again a
few times, and then let’s watch a John Wayne movie.
And then let’s read a book, Little House on the Prai-
rie. Let’s find a newspaper reprint from the 1840s,
and compare the images that they bring to mind.
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 35
They are probably going to be different, and how do Did you own any of The Oregon Trail, since you
we know which one is reliable? wrote the original code, and it was a product that
you developed outside of your work at MECC?
When you transferred the game from the text-on- Ha, yeah, that brings us to another excellent point.
ly version that you guys originally programmed, When I got to MECC in the early ’70s, there was
and it started looking more like the one that I no such thing as creating software as a business.
grew up with, did you feel that anything was lost Well I shouldn’t—certainly there were companies
in the experience of playing the game? that were businesses creating business software. But
When we decided that it was time to convert if you created something for the computer that was
these programs to the Apple, I was not a person used in schools, the satisfaction that you got was
who was involved in that. I was not a programmer. great. I’m helping kids, and it’s kind of cute.
But we did have a programming team, and the aver- When I got to MECC, I had this code for The Or-
age age of the people on the team was probably 17 egon Trail. I never thought twice about just typing it
years old. Certainly they were managed by adults, in and donating it to the state of Minnesota.
but there were kids in the local high schools and Now, of course, I used MECC’s equipment. I
colleges who knew more than practically anybody used MECC’s computer system. I used MECC’s
else did about the new technology. That’s probably time to do the research. That all seemed fair to me.
still the case today. But the point of it is that none of the three of us who
It was a team of people from MECC that cre- invented the game ever earned a penny.
ated the Apple and ultimately the other versions When MECC reached the point, in the personal
of Oregon Trail that you would be familiar with. I computer era, when you could put software in a box
would say that the early Apple versions were still a and sell it, The Oregon Trail was one of, if not the
good reflection of the initial program that we pre- most, popular pieces of software. MECC brought in
sented. MECC went on to create maybe as many as a lot of dollars, but we did not share in that, because
10 upgrades to Oregon Trail over the ’80s and on. MECC was the owner of the program.
They made, or should I say we made, the program
more and more sophisticated—more graphics,
more sound. We added a logbook, where you could
read about the Oregon Trail. You ran into people
on the trail that would talk to you. It got pretty cool
from a realism standpoint, but I also thought that
maybe it got a little complicated as well. You now
had more information and more decisions to make,
which perhaps was more accurate, but I think the
thing that I liked about the earlier versions was that
it seemed like it was the right amount of challenge for
something that you would use in the classroom for a
week or so.
Over time the production value of the game im-
proved immensely, but maybe it became more suit-
ed for something that you might do at home, where
you could spend weeks and months if you wanted
to, getting into all of the finer points. Which is
just to say when you’re creating computer applica-
tions, and especially games, it’s not necessarily true
that more is more. Sometimes the most intriguing
games are also the most efficient.

36 — Kill Screen Magazine

 I think that the three of us kind of looked at it
like we made a contribution and got recognition for
that. And that’s how we were rewarded.
Sure. I guess that for educators, that’s a mighty
reward—to shape the way that kids encounter an
important piece of American history.
I can tell you that it’s amazing to me that you got
a hold of me. This is almost 40 years after we in-
vented Oregon Trail. Oregon Trail is still in my life
because of things like this.
I have a T-shirt that says “I died of dysentery”
with a picture of a covered wagon on it. I was on
a morning talk show for 15 minutes out in Port-
land, Ore., because the DJ found out that everyone
on his staff knew about The Oregon Trail and liked
to reminisce about it. I gave a talk at MIT, where
it turns out, there was a MySpace special interest
group of Oregon Trail lovers. My son was in a col-
lege in Boston, not at MIT, and he looked them up
and they said, “Yeah, next time your dad comes up
to visit, bring him over and we’ll have him give a
talk.” And I did.
So there have been a lot of rewarding experienc-
es, even without the money.
Why didn’t you become a teacher? That seems
like a good career for someone who’s created a
game like this.
It all came down to a lottery.
When I was in college from 1968 to ’72, there
was this thing going on across the ocean called the
Vietnam War. Eventually, a draft was issued. The
way that the military draft works is that every year,
the government sets up a lottery in a cage with 365
ping pong balls in it—or whatever they used—and
they draw them out, and match up the number that
comes out of the basket with a date on the calendar.
A birth date.
The first lottery for the Vietnam draft was held in
1970, and some people, their birthday was matched
to the number 360 or something, which meant that
they probably would not get drafted. The military
did not need all of the eligible young males that
were available, but would start taking them in the
order of their birth date by lottery. My birthday was
assigned number 10.
I said, well, I’m not going, but I have some pretty
strong beliefs about this, and I have an option that
the government recognizes—and that is to apply for
conscientious objector status. To do that, you have
to convince your draft board through things that
you write, and letters of reference that you get from
other people, that you are somebody who tells the
truth when you say you cannot participate in armed
conflict. I was fortunate. I made that application to
my draft board, and they accepted it. I felt like the
conscious objector route was the most appropriate
for me. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go—you become
a conscious objector over the course of your life.
Two years after I graduated, and no longer had stu-
dent exemption, I had to work at a job that was ac-
ceptable to the selective service system. I couldn’t be
a teacher. I guess they figured that was too easy, or
something. I know that a lot of guys worked in hos-
pitals, cleaning sheets and bedpans. That sort of thing.
I was fortunate that I found a job in the Minne-
apolis school district—a research job that paid next
to nothing—that was accepted when I put it forward.
When I was accepted for the job, I then had to
go submit an application to the selective service of-
fice in Minneapolis to see if it would be approved.
And who do you think was working in the selective
service office? Well, it was another conscientious
objector whose job was to work there. Luckily for
me, he was probably a little more sympathetic than
some 50-year-old businessman would have been.
So I got approved.
When I got out of that, it was 1974, and now the
economy was not so good, and teaching jobs were
very hard to come by, especially in social studies. If
you were math, you had a fair shot, but there were
just too many social studies teachers out there.
There I was, unemployed, and applying to school
districts and getting rejected. MECC was just start-
ing at the time. The guy who was my boss in the job
in the research job moved on to MECC and when
my service was up, he hired me. That’s how I got
into MECC.
Do you think that if you hadn’t been drafted,
you would have had a better shot at becoming a
teacher?
Yes, I probably would be a teacher today.
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 37
38 — Kill Screen Magazine
pause / emanuele sferruzza moszkowicz
Freud said that “dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.”
So Emanuele took a peek into the subconscious of Kellee Santiago, president of
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 39
thatgamecompany. Here’s what he found (with her blessing, of course).
 by BEN ABRAHAM
photography by DANIEL PURVIS

ROUGH RIDERS

Australia looks different from the driver’s seat

There was a particular hill that I came across in Fuel,
in an area that was covered with a tall field of crack-
ling brown and straw-colored grasses. The battered
remnants of a series of wind turbines crowned the
rise. I stopped my quadbike and gazed around at
the horizon, stretching away as far as 40 km. Trees
bunched together in small, ragged clumps that fol-
lowed the contours of the mottled greenish-gray
and brown landscape. The hill reminded me of
hot summer holidays spent at my grandmother’s
farm in rural New South Wales, of riding around
on bikes and quads in grass that came up to the
knee, grasshoppers spastically jumping onto chests,
hands, and faces. The vista brought up memories
of the property near the town of Wyangla (famous
only for its dam, with a capacity three times that of
Sydney harbour, which has been drought-stricken
to a pathetic three percent of its capacity for the
past five years).
The Australian environment is unique among the
world. An island fortress in evolutionary terms, the
entirety of the landscape—the dirt, grasses, rocks,
trees, and shrubs—all bear the distinctive stamp
of antipodean separateness. While the Australian
bush has often been captured in film and moving
image, painted, drawn, and even sculpted, until

40 — Kill Screen Magazine

Fuel, there was nothing close to a digital version in
a videogame.
With the attention of the Australian development
community locked firmly overseas for funding, in-
vestment, and (dare I say) inspiration—and only a
handful of studios big enough to handle the sprawl-
ing nature of “AAA”-style productions—the result
is a resource on the Aussie doorstep that remains
entirely untapped. While tourism is a cornerstone
of the Australian economy, people do not visit our
shores to see Movie World. Instead, they spend thou-
sands of dollars to see the remarkable beauty of the
wild and untamed Australian bush. Yet aside from
Fuel, no one has had the enterprising thought to make
it virtual—and not even Fuel, an open-world racing
game released in 2009, did it intentionally.
Somehow, through a magical osmosis of influ-
ences—from the movie Mad Max to fears about
severe global warming—the French developer,
Asobo Studio, ended up creating a topography that
in places mimics the features and aesthetics of the
Australian bush. That it’s taken a French studio to
make an Australian landscape may seem an odd
enough observation, but it speaks volumes.
The importance of this dearth of a virtual Aus-
tralia must be understood in the context of the
Australian identity. Australians have always pos-
sessed a close relationship with the bush, going
all the way back to its first inhabitants. Before the
continent even saw its first pair of English boots,
indigenous Australians had inhabited it for 30,000
years and developed their own deep appreciation
of the land—a land whose scrubby brushlands and
forests without cultivation were the entire means
of their subsistence. The centrality of the bush in
Australian aboriginal culture is reflected in its art,
spirituality, and regional languages, of which there
were between some 350 and 700, developed as a re-
sult of long-established tribal territories, of which
the inhabitants considered themselves merely cus-
todians. The sense of a bond between people and
land was passed down through the stories from
“the Dreaming”—the orally transmitted, colorful
creation myths.
For the first British arrivals, Australia was a
lonely, hostile, and often terrifying place. In his
exceptional history of the formative years of Aus-
tralia, The Fatal Shore, the historian Robert Hughes
(whose own relationship with Australia is a story in
itself) wrote that “until about 1830 the transportation
ballads and broadsides present the bush as sterile and
hostile, its fauna (except for the kangaroo, which no
one could dislike) as eerie when not disgusting.”
That view would change dramatically as the
colony grew and encroached on the formerly im-
penetrable bush. The interior would eventually take
on the role of a place to flee from the tyranny of
convictry, aided by the figure of the bushranger and
the absconder who, as Hughes notes, “by making
the bush his new home, renamed it with the sign
of freedom. On its blankness, he could inscribe
what could not be read in spaces already colonized
and subject to the laws and penal imagery of Eng-
land.” In fact, Hughes goes on to state that, with re-
spect to the bushranger, “popular sentiment would
praise him for this transvaluation of the landscape
(though at a safe distance, of course) for another
hundred and fifty years.”
In Australian literature and print of the 1930s and
’40s, a resurgent interest in nationalism in connec-
tion with the land arose as a result of the efforts of
writers and journalists, as well as public intellectu-
als, and established a link between the nature of the
Australian identity and the Australian landscape. In
a three-part essay from 1935 on “The Foundations
of Culture in Australia,” P.R. Stevenson, considering
the case for an Australian identity (as separate from
that of a British subject), advocates one informed
by the environment itself. He suggests that “as the
culture of every nation is an intellectual and emo-
tional expression of the genius loci, our Australian
culture will diverge from the purely local color of
the British Islands to the precise extent that our
environment differs from that of Britain. A hemi-
sphere separates us from ‘home’—we are Antipode-
ans; a gumtree is not a branch of an oak; our Aus-
tralian culture will evolve distinctively.”
That distinctiveness in Fuel begins with the color
palette. Fuel is an oddly colorful game, given its
post-apocalyptic setting. Drive through a densely
wooded forest of almost-eucalyptus and the sun-
light turns the same yellow-white color that often
shows up in anything filmed in Australia. Travel
junkies will tell you that the sunlight is not the
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 41
same around the world, and the Australian light has
a distinctive piercing characteristic, reproduced in
Fuel. Similarly, purple night skies stretch out over
the land like a blanket as night descends and the
gray tarmac is illuminated by the glow thrown out
by yellow headlights. The largely deserted roads are
not unlike the rural back ways that we travelled to
get to my grandmother’s farm when I was younger,
the only other travelers on both being the trucks
rumbling through on the midnight express. Yellow-
on-black warning signs and dun-colored railings at
the side of the road flash past, making me forget
I’m playing a game and not driving down the Great
Western Highway. Signs warning that I’m entering
a “restricted area” are reminiscent of some of the
great tracts of outback that have been used as army
test ranges—like a section of the Woomera Prohib-
ited Area, itself roughly the size of England, that
was used for nuclear testing by the British.
That hill where I stopped is covered with textures
resembling the golden grasses in Arthur Streeton’s
Golden Summer, Eaglemont—colors that may ap-
pear washed-out in comparison to verdant Euro-
pean landscapes. The visual arts in Australia fol-
42 — Kill Screen Magazine
lowed a trajectory that appears to be playing out
once again in games; the first colonial artists were
faced with trees growing in strange new shapes and
had to adopt a color palette that Robert Hughes
says took decades to get right. But once represent-
ing the Australian landscape ceased being an issue
of ability and became one of taste, it still took years
for Australian artists to acclimatize to representing
the bush as-is, and for the public to acquire an ap-
preciation for its distinctiveness. Clara Southern’s
An Old Bee Farm may seem queerly infused with
the bluish tinge of a decade-old VHS tape losing its
magnetism, but it is not at all inaccurate; and vast
tracts of the land in Fuel are similarly tinged with
this distinctively Australian smoky-blue haze.
Tsunami Reef in the northwestern corner of
the map resembles so much the outback areas of
Western Australia and the top end of the continent,
where the deserts meet the ocean. In the same area,
dilapidated outback homesteads squat with low
corrugated roofs and the occasional rusty windmill
out back. My imagination works to fill in some of
the blanks—a large freestanding propane cylinder
becomes a fat corrugated-iron rainwater tank in-
stead. Sunsets turn the sky a deep, abiding orange
and bring out the red color of the sand—the same
color exuded by the iron-rich soils of central Aus-
tralia, regardless of the time of day. Tumble-down
farmyard buildings resemble long-abandoned rem-
nants of early attempts at habitation. Elsewhere,
large areas of smoldering bush imitate the after-
math of notoriously ferocious Australian bushfires,
like the February 2009 fires that tragically claimed
200 lives.
Furthermore, with Fuel’s majestically sprawling
map of 14,400 km², there is simply so much of the
land—and monotony on such an unprecedented
scale, save perhaps for the legendary mini-game
“Desert Bus”—that it captures the Australian land-
scape aesthetic in a very concrete way. (For an Aus-
tralian corollary, there is a stretch of highway that
crosses the Nullarbor desert and does not deviate
from a straight line for 144 km.) It is also a great
irony that, in the game’s flawless execution of such
magnanimous scope, its very monotony and over-
weening size became one of its greatest criticisms.
Matthew Burns wrote that, while fascinated with
the size of the game’s map, his fascination gave way
to horror at the realization that it was “vast on a
soul-deadening, terrible scale.”
Yet Immanuel Kant found beauty in that terrify-
ing overwhelmed-ness he called “the sublime.” Ex-
posure to the sublime has clearly had an effect on
the Australian psyche, or at least my own. I would
be disingenuous if I didn’t confess to taking some
pleasure in Fuel’s relative inaccessibility to others,
like Burns. Taking pride in hardship and difficulty,
while not a uniquely Australian trait, is perhaps a
central one; and it feels connected to the unique af-
fects of Australian bush aesthetics and the historic
struggle to overcome such inhospitable terrain.
I consulted an article on GameFAQs about
speeding up the tedious process of unlocking new
zones, as the racing itself does not warrant more
than a cursory engagement. I found a kindred spirit
in the author, known only as “Xeigrich,” whose
preface elegantly and comprehensively sums up the
game’s unique attraction:
Fuel has one thing that other open-world
games with vehicles don’t have, and that’s the
peace of mind that you don’t have anything
to worry about while you’re not racing. No
health bar, no continues, no annoying NPC
friends calling you to go bowling (Niko, cous-
in!!), and hardly even any AI traffic to get in
your way! You can just sit back and drive, and
drive, and drive. And I think that’s awesome.
I think so too.
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 43
 by DAVID WOLINSKY
illustration by DAVID BONI
RENAISSANCE MAN
Assassin’s Creed II’s resident historian Marcello
Simonetta on why accuracy is overrated
Italian historian Marcello Simonetta came to Yale
in 1995 to earn a PhD and wound up solving one of
Italy’s oldest and bloodiest mysteries—the Floren-
tine Pazzi family’s conspiracy to overthrow the de’
Medici—after poring over literally millions of doc-
uments in a university microfilm collection with a
trusty family-heirloom decoder.
That research caught the eye of the Assassin’s
Creed II team as it was deciding when and where to
set the historical fantasy game. Simonetta eventu-
ally landed a job with Ubisoft as a historian-con-
sultant to assure ACII’s historical accuracy. But, as
he says, getting all the facts right doesn’t necessarily
make a better game.
How did you come to be involved with Assassin’s
Creed II?
One of the reasons was I wrote a book: The Mon-
tefeltro Conspiracy. It’s about two main conspiracies
of the 15th century—one is the killing of the Duke
of Milan in 1476 that opens a whole new political
scenario where there is a disappearance of a power-
ful young man. There is a huge power struggle that
involves the pope and other characters against the
Medici in Florence.
This part of the story was illustrated in the Assas-
sin’s Creed: Lineage movie. That I can say was freely
inspired by my book. A friend of mine passed the
job on to me; I came in kind of late. I’m a historian,
you probably know.
Right. And you’re also the descendent of an Ital-
ian diplomat as well?
Yes, it is true. I am a descendent of a chancellor of
the Duke of Milan, who in fact took over after the
killing of the Duke of Milan.
He himself got in some trouble and ended up be-
ing beheaded. This was only because he had been
loyal to the cause he had worked for. Mind you, be-
ing beheaded was a sign of respect! Ezio’s family [in
Assassin’s Creed II], as you remember, got hanged in
the Palazzo della Signoria—and being hanged is a
sign of treason. It’s a humiliation. I’m not saying it’s
preferred treatment to be [executed], but between
the two, to be beheaded is a good sign.
How did you come to know the material specifi-
cally for Assassin’s Creed II?
I went to Yale to do my PhD, and I met a pro-
fessor with an amazing archive of microfilms from
original Italian archives. Just imagine that you
downloaded secret messages between the White
House, the Pentagon, and the Kremlin. All these
little powers in Italy were against each other, and
they had these very intense diplomatic exchanges.
My ancestor Cicco Simonetta wrote a little tract
on how to break the codes of an enemy dispatch
that’s intercepted. I used that very same system to
decode the letters that I found in the private ar-
chives. If you go and read dispatches from Rome
to Florence and Florence to Venice and Venice to
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 45
Milan and so on, you get a full picture. Each of
these is spying on each other because they’re afraid
they’re going to come and get them. It’s an incred-
ibly violent and competitive setting where diplo-
macy plays a key role. I started studying this almost
as a hobby at first, and then it turned out to be my
first book and then my second book because there’s
so much rich material.
There was an amazing flow of correspondence
between the courts, the spies, the ambassadors, and
the agents, secret or not. And we still have a large
amount of these documents, and they describe ev-
erything: the behavior and decisions of the Dukes
and the kings and the popes. These are very reliable
sources that could give you endless details.
Then, of course, there are the histories. Machia-
velli’s Florentine Histories, for instance, gives you
the rundown of all the major events happening
during those years. Machiavelli himself was born in
1469, so technically he would be younger than he
was in the game. But his history is actually a pretty
pleasant read, even today. There are many others—
later historians that were not there as eyewitnesses,
but would use sources. And of course you have the
art, and the lavish Florentine court life.
And again, all the sources used smartly only
enrich the games. As a historian I can put all my
knowledge to work for a purpose not just in col-
lecting data but also telling a great story, fiction and
otherwise. I do think there is a general underesti-
mation about people’s curiosity.
That doesn’t take away the killing. The killing is
there because it’s historically there. [Laughs] It’s nec-
essary and more unpredictable than even the wild-
est game writer could think of. Picture the pope
organizing a conspiracy against the ruling family
of Florence and attacking them during Mass while
the priest is raising the host. Would you have been
able to come up with such a craziness? I wouldn’t
have. But that’s history. That’s true. So having those
elements together and shaking them up makes the
recipe for a great game.
You mentioned the art of the era also informing
the recreation of these cities. You can buy some
of those paintings in ACII. How accurate are the
prices for the time?
46 — Kill Screen Magazine
The price of art at the time would be not, say,
Sotheby’s prices. Some of the paintings in Ezio’s
collection were actually made a little bit later by an
artist like, say, Titian. Those are minor mistakes.
The prices for those artworks wouldn’t be very high,
because you’d have the artists around the block and
you would ask, “OK, can you please make a portrait
of me with Saint Bart? I’ll give you 50 florins.”
There was a tradeoff between historical accu-
racy and the functioning of the whole economic
system [in the game]. If you were to go to Mon-
teriggioni today, all you would see is the walls of
the Monteriggioni castle. There is nothing inside. It
was literally only a castle—so the idea to create a little
community is a brilliant idea, but it is a fictional idea.
Talking about the game’s economic system, when
you’re pick-pocketing people, it seems that the
guards always have the least amount of florins,
and the richest people of all were out at Carni-
vale. Is that accurate?
In general, yes. I mean, the word “soldier” in Ital-
ian comes from “soldo,” which means “coin.” It’s lit-
erally the job you get paid for by the day, if you sur-
vive it. It’s not surprising that trying to rob a guard
won’t bring you millions.
They chose very well the setting of the game.
Both Florence and Venice were very rich cities. The
difference being that in Florence you have more
bankers, and in Venice you have more merchants.
There were, of course, both kinds in both places,
but Venice was very much about the commerce
toward the east and Florence was more about fi-
nancial operations. So it’s not surprising that in the
carnival scene, people were loaded.
What were the biggest historical stretches in the
game?
The story, of course. We understand that the
game is fictional in the sense that the main charac-
ters like Ezio and Ezio’s family are invented. They’re
potentially real characters in the sense that there
could have been a noble family like that in Florence
that would have certain dealings with the Medici,
and so forth. But all the other characters are histori-
cal characters, or most of them are. So the chronol-
ogy of the game is absolutely accurate. In 1476 you
have the killing of the Duke of Milan. In 1478 you
have the killing of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s brother, the
so-called Pazzi Conspiracy that my book’s about. In
the game, the main villain, of course, is already Borgia.
Borgia at the time was only a cardinal, not yet a pope.
What other compromises had to be made?
In Florence, in front of the Duomo, there is a
very major building which is a baptistery. You can’t
miss it. It’s a huge octagonal building in front of
the church. That was removed from the game for
memory limits. There was so much going on in that
area of the game, including the scene where they
attack Giuliano de’ Medici. The attack I described
before in fact happened inside of the church during
a Mass, just as the killing of the Duke of Milan hap-
pened inside of a church. There is a reason for that:
People like the Duke of Milan or the Medici would
walk around fairly defended by bodyguards. It was
actually almost impossible to kill them, say, in the
streets or in a domestic setting. But in church, dur-
ing the Mass, people are in a public space, and they
generally are not thinking that they might be killed.
So in the game, it turned out, interiors are much
more complicated than exteriors. I was amazed, for
instance how well they recreated the Sistine Chapel
with the frescos. That was a beauty to watch. But
they had the attack on Giuliano outside the church,
more or less in the area that the baptistery would
have been. So they had to compromise in that they
could not include that building. That doesn’t really
take anything away from the accuracy. It’s just sort
of a declared omission. But for instance, if you look
at a façade of the Duomo, it’s not finished. That’s a
very accurate detail because at the time, the Duomo
was not finished. So it’s a tradeoff. I think in gen-
eral, they tried to recreate things accurately.
They tried to convince the writers to insert the
Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David, and they resist-
ed very heroically against that. The Mona Lisa was
a personal painting that Leonardo sort of carried
around all his life. It would have made no sense for
The killing is there because it’s
historically there.
Ezio to own it. And Michelangelo’s David was creat-
ed in 1504, after the actual chronology of the game.
That was a good thing not to include, although of
course everyone who has been to Florence has seen
Michelangelo’s David and anyone who’s been to the
Louvre knows Mona Lisa. In that sense, I admire
the writers who resisted the facile temptations to
include elements that everybody knows.
The other thing: courtesans. They’re perfectly ac-
curate. They could have been even racier because
at some point in Venice—it would’ve been later in
the game—but what happened was that since there
were so many courtesans, the beautiful women of
Venice that were not courtesans requested that cour-
tesans walk around with their tits out so they would be
immediately recognizable. Otherwise people would
assume that any woman walking in Venice would be a
courtesan. If you could imagine: Your wife is walking
along; “Would you like to—mmm!”
About midway through the game, there’s a cut
scene where Leonardo DaVinci introduces Ezio
to coffee. Is any of that true—coffee being in Re-
naissance-era Italy, and Leonardo drinking it?
[Laughs] There were a lot of spices coming in. I’m
not 100-percent sure about the arrival. The main
coffee trade started a century later, maybe, 17th
century with the Dutch. I think there are some lines
that are concessions—nobody can conceive of an
Italian not drinking coffee.
Wasn’t that a few centuries ahead of his time?
Yeah, but he was in many ways. So you could
argue that he had such foresight that he could also
have seen coffee. All those nights he spent writing
in his crooked, upside-down script and so on, he
had to have some coffee. How could he have had
done it otherwise? [Laughs] I think that might be
sort of an inside joke.
Who cares if it’s not historically accurate, in the
sense that it’s accurate to the mood of the writers in
that moment. That makes the whole process much
more human and enjoyable and real. It references
real life. They make games like Grand Theft Auto
great—having these little details about the city, or
the habits, whatever it is that makes the process of
becoming that character in the game.
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 47
 by SIMON FERRARI
illustration by IAN HIGGINBOTHAM

BREAKING THE NEWS

Can videogames save journalism?

“We’re sitting with people, reporters, and they’re telling us almost

with tears in their eyes that if we did celebrity gossip, like a Britney
Spears mini-game, that would make money. They would tell us some-
thing like, you know, it’s very hard for me to sell advertisements on
the Middle East. It’s very easy for me to sell advertising on gossip, on
celebrities.”
Last summer, Ian Bogost and I sat down with Asi Burak and Eric
Brown of Impact Games to discuss an experiment in interactive jour-
nalism called Play the News. Burak and Brown formed their company
after graduating from Carnegie Mellon’s Masters of Entertainment
Technology program. They set out to make entertaining games about

48 — Kill Screen Magazine

Issue 2, Volume 1 — 49
current events, where learning doesn’t come from
hand-feeding information but from boiling an issue
down to its stakeholders and their actions.
The first Impact game, 2006’s PeaceMaker, pres-
ents a multifaceted simulation of the contemporary
political situation in Israel and Palestine. Burak
was born in Israel and served in the Israeli Defense
Force, giving him an intimate knowledge of the
issue. But the game isn’t skewed to be pro-Israel.
Rather, it encompasses all of the significant voices in
the conflict. A player takes the role of either the Pales-
tinian or Israeli head of state navigating murky politi-
Making a game that abstracts
history is one thing, but making
the news playable is another
problem altogether.
50 — Kill Screen Magazine
cal waters in an attempt to form a peace agreement.
And the game is hard. It instantly reveals the na-
ïveté of the two-state conflict depicted in most Eng-
lish-speaking media. PeaceMaker overwhelms even
its most politically savvy players with the num-
ber of contradictory forces at play in the region,
where satisfying the desires of one group throws
three other relationships out of balance. And un-
like the designers of most geopolitical sims, Burak
and Brown didn’t have the benefit of hindsight on
their side. Making a game that abstracts history is
one thing, but making the news playable is another
problem altogether.
Gonzalo Frasca, an influential designer and
theorist, dubbed these kinds of interactive expe-
riences, simply, “newsgames.” Frasca created the
genre in late 2003 with September 12, a game about
the futility of the war on terror. Players attempt to
kill terrorists with “precision” missile strikes. The
delay between firing and impact leads to civilian
casualties, which, in Frasca’s simulation, causes the
conversion of more terrorists. Many scholars see
games like September 12 as a kind of playable edito-
rial cartoon that quickly conveys a political opinion
through rules rather than images and text.
It’s no simple task to make a game about a current
event. Writing a well-crafted story about a complex
issue in the space of a day is hard enough for a vet-
eran journalist, but making a game overnight is al-
most unheard of outside game jams and monthly
indie contests. News becomes old quickly on the
Internet, reaching saturation within 36 hours. A
current event game has to convince non-gamers of
its own value for presenting the news, while being
engaging enough to pull regular gamers away from
more popular genres. Finally, it needs a distribu-
tion method that will allow it to reach both of these
groups, something that developers of newsgames
are still struggling to establish.
Despite these difficulties, Impact Games found
itself in a unique position to experiment with the
design and distribution of current event games.
PeaceMaker had sold well, and profits from the
game bankrolled Impact’s next project, giving Im-
pact the leverage it needed to depart from the es-
tablished form of the political simulator and ven-
ture into entirely new territory.
“We instituted our own process. It was like a news-
room—what we’d like a deeper newsroom to be. We
would have our morning pitch, if we hadn’t already
seen something in the news that we all wanted to
do. We listed out some of the major events that
happened, then asked: ‘What’s the event, what’s the
larger issue that this represents, who are the par-
ties involved, and can we predict a few things that
might happen next?’”
Impact Games had three goals for its next proj-
ect: to extend the rigor of PeaceMaker to subjects
other than the Middle East, to expand into the
multiplayer arena, and to react to headlines within
the course of a day. So instead of making a prod-
uct, Impact made a platform: Play the News, a tool
for generating short interactive experiences within
the framework of a prediction game. Burak and
Brown solved the problem of timeliness by focus-
ing on ongoing issues. If you try to make a game
about breaking news, development will often take
too long. But if you make a game about an ongoing
issue, you have a chance to make an impact before
the issue is resolved.
Impact Games covered stories pulled from world
news, local legislation issues, celebrity gossip, and
the TV digest. Play the News took in a variety of
multimedia—from text and audio, to photography
and video—and created an interactive timeline of
sorts. The timeline displayed the most recent event
in a chain, with data nodes depicting the events that
led up to it. Across the bottom were icons for all
the stakeholders. Clicking on these would provide
information on the involvement and likely opinions
of each, pulled from quotes wherever possible.
After clicking through the interactive time-
line, players got to make two decisions: what they
thought would happen, and what they thought
should happen. Players who successfully predicted
what “would happen” scored points once the event
resolved. Since players could delay their decision
until the moment of resolution, they debated with
each other in the forums over the likelihood of ei-
ther choice. The “should happen” data, on the other
hand, could be used as a kind of poll. Assuming
enough bias had been reduced from the interactive,
it would be useful for news organizations and pur-
chasers of polling data.
One challenge in the field of newsgames is fig-
uring out how to do game-based reportage rather
than game-based editorial. Most newsgames we see
today are openly biased. Making an “objective” or
socially realistic game is a nontrivial task. The very
nature of constructing a model through rules or
code privileges a certain way of framing informa-
tion. Impact Games achieved a degree of objectivity
through the stakeholder system, which allowed it to
show as many viewpoints on the issue as possible.
Of course, the act of selecting these stakeholders
and enforcing a choice between a set of outcomes
introduces bias, but this is the same issue that jour-
nalists face every day when they select sources for
a story.
Journalism is supposed to function as a forum
for discourse, and Play the News literalized this re-
ality with its cultivation of a lively Internet forum.
Discussions on the forums both fleshed out issues
in focus and suggested changes to the development
process. Players aired concerns about the relevance
of some issues while showing clear preferences for
others. Different kinds of players mirrored varia-
tions in news readership and taste. Impact Games
used this information to refine production and tai-
lor games to its player base.
“Did you find it was the case that, three months
later, you would call to find that your contact had
been let go?”
“Yeah, we had a lot of that.”
Instead of developing their own destination site
for Play the News, Burak and Brown opted for a
business model built around licensing. They would
make their tool highly usable, train journalists to
operate it, and share in the ad revenue the sys-
tem generated. After a year of its beta test, Impact
Games had honed the system to the point that all
an interactive feature would require was a reporter
to write the copy and a layout person to select the
graphics. Over that time, Impact produced 127
games. But this wasn’t enough for the media compa-
nies to whom Impact attempted to license the project.
“They didn’t want to do anything that involved
creation; they wanted to get a solution, almost like
working with a freelance reporter. They probably
would have been willing to supervise the process,
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 51
but that’s it. A solution from start to finish, and they
would just approve it.”
Brown explained that Impact Games was look-
ing for partnerships in a crumbling market. As ad
revenues continued to shrink, most outlets couldn’t
even afford to assign an editor to the task. When-
ever Impact began to make headway—at one point
it had as many as six licensing deals in the works—
the contract would get stuck somewhere in the dis-
solving bureaucracy. Those ambitious young suits
who had been hired to take their papers into “the
future of media” were the first to go when staffing
cuts began. No contract ever went through, and
production on Play the News finally ceased in Janu-
ary of 2009.
But Burak sympathizes, reflecting on the difficul-
ties faced by all parties involved: “I think some of
those people are probably sweating, and not only
doing their job but also thinking about how to
survive. To me it’s more about changing an orga-
nization that’s used to thinking a certain way. They
almost didn’t trust themselves to understand what
they’re doing with new media.”
Brown and Burak don’t entirely blame media com-
panies for the stagnation of the project. Looking
back on their period of beta testing; both had ideas
about how they would have undertaken the proj-
ect differently. A major problem was the tool’s la-
bor intensity. No paper could afford to commit a
reporter and a layout artist to make a single inter-
active feature per day. One of the system’s greatest
strengths—that it fit within the framework of an
ongoing leaderboard and discussion group—also
meant that it would require a community manager.
“I think there was too much content, because
even though it’s interesting to put in all the actors
and points of interest, it was too much for people
for five minutes. They had to read a lot. But to cover
that, the balance should have been less content,
more gameplay.”
Here Burak highlights a common problem, the
divide between play and story that continues to
plague games about the news. Issues that require a
significant amount of exposition to understand are
difficult to cover with a game. The literacy needed
to grasp how one would communicate a current
52 — Kill Screen Magazine
As time goes on, fewer and fewer
people want to spend the time to
sit down with a newspaper and
read it front-to-back. Many people
just want to be told the news,
preferably by their friends over
a social networking site. And the
last thing anyone wants to do is
actually pay for the news.
event through a game has proven challenging to
teach and develop—the job demands a “procedural
literacy,” the knowledge of how to read, write, and
critique systems of rules. Most aspects of game de-
sign have to be honed through practice, and current
economic conditions aren’t favorable for encourag-
ing the consistent, focused creation of newsgames.
“To be successful on the Internet these days, don’t
go to the publishers. I would say do something on
social networks, build something, iterate all the
time. Don’t put too much time and effort into it.”
Burak’s final suggestion has already been taken
to heart by a number of developers in the past year.
Small developers like Area/Code and Persuasive
Games continue to experiment with alternative dis-
tribution methods on the web—from Facebook, to
the iPhone App Store, to independent destination
sites. When Borut Pfeifer, a lead AI programmer
at EA, left the mainstream industry to strike out
as an indie, he immediately started a Kickstarter
project to fund a newsgame about Iran called The
Unconcerned. His goal is to capture the tumult and
motivations behind the 2009 Tehran election pro-
tests from the viewpoint of two parents scouring
the crowds for a lost child. Although the project
fell short of its funding goals, Pfeifer continues to
develop The Unconcerned while working on a more
traditional turn-based strategy game.
As time goes on, fewer and fewer people want to
spend the time to sit down with a newspaper and
read it front-to-back. Many people just want to be
told the news, preferably by their friends over a
social networking site. And the last thing anyone
wants to do is actually pay for the news.
But the death of journalism has been greatly ex-
aggerated. It’s much better understood as a phas-
ing out of “product journalism” in favor of what
Jeff Jarvis calls “process journalism,” the kind of re-
portage that most often happens on blogs. Process
journalism is like making a wiki entry for a news
story. You post a stub as soon as first word of an
event comes in, and you update the story as it de-
velops. Even in cases when a full story is posted,
process journalists have the ability to push updates
and fixes whenever conflicting information arises
or readers report errors.
Just as in the world of Facebook games—where
an MVP (“minimally viable product”) or open beta
phase marks a game’s initial release with the under-
standing that it will be developed as a service over
time—sometimes the results work, and sometimes
they don’t. There’s no way to make an absolute value
judgment between process and product journalism.
The important thing to remember is that news con-
sumers wouldn’t ever want a return to a situation
where they only had one, and not the other.
Play the News will always stand as the first ex-
periment in game-based process journalism. Burak
has left Impact Games, recently filling the role of
co-president of the Games for Change initiative.
Even if nothing comes of Impact’s most ambitious
project, its example is illuminating. When some-
body finally figures out how to make the news both
playable and profitable, it will surely be by creating
a platform for daily content, making it social, and
keeping the journalistic principles of verification,
objectivity, and transparency in mind.

Issue 2, Volume 1 — 53
 by PATRICK CASSELS
BOXED OUT
The strange and exotic world of cover art
As any aging gamer of the FuncoLand era who
once tossed good money at a bad game can at-
test, the artwork of early videogame boxes was
rooted in deception. Or, if not quite “deception,”
then certainly a drastic, drastic embellishment of
what the rudimentary gameplay itself was actually
like. “In the absence of truly engaging in-game art,
manufacturers tried to capture gamers' imagina-
tions via auxiliary aesthetics,” wrote critic Josh
Jenisch in his book, The Art of the Video Game.
Videogames are not the first medium to utilize
sensational and misleading ancillary art. In the
early 20th century, busty femme fatales and sinis-
ter serial killers leered out at potential readers from
fiction-magazine covers. “Artists,” writes Pulp
Culture author Frank Robinson, “were as prized
for their ability to depict action and strange or
horrifying scenes as were the writers of the stories
for their unique talents.” Later, in the 1950s, the
studios behind B-movies were eager to tap into the
fantastical base desires of teenagers. “The shock-
ing, thrilling elements were emphasized to pull in
the crowds and the posters often promised more
than the films delivered,” note commercial-art
historians Tony Nourmand and Graham Marsh.
In fact, studios would often design the posters be-
fore a film was produced. “[Only] then, if it still
looked good, would they go ahead with a script.”
For the earliest home computer games, little em-
bellishment was needed. The technology itself was
the draw. Computers! Microchips! Robots (prob-
ably)! What more did you need to empty the pock-
ets of 13-year-olds fresh out of a matinee showing
of The Empire Strikes Back? The idea of having to
make “sexy” the modern miracle of videogames
seemed as necessary as putting an air freshener
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 55
Clockwise from top: Phantasy
Star III, Streets of Rage, ESWAT.
Previous page: Golden Axe II.
Genesis-era game cover art
courtesy of Sega.
in a flying car. Even the titles of the Atari 2600’s
games needn’t be anything more sensational than
a droll, single-word description: Combat, Base-
ball, Dragster, Sorcerer, Blackjack. The artwork on
their covers often felt like an afterthought, as well.
Activision’s 2600 titles, for example, normally fea-
tured a basic (albeit colorful and funky) sketch of
a car or helicopter or dragon on the box. The car-
tridges themselves simply showed a screencap of
actual gameplay.
But by the late 1980s, videogames had grown
ubiquitous, and the novelty of the technology was
wearing off. The vector graphics and basic colors
offered by even new consoles like the Nintendo
Entertainment System, which boasted a meager
5.37 MHz of picture-processing power, did not
make for the sexiest screencaps.
Game publishers, no longer able to rely on
gameplay alone, turned to traditional artists to
sensationalize and embellish their videogame
boxes—and inadvertently gave birth to a library
of Bush, Sr.-era pulp masterpieces. “Some of the
great fantasy artists of the day were hired by gam-
ing companies to create ancillary art,” notes Jen-
isch. From the suspenseful tableau of Harry claw-
ing his way up a dark, snake-infested cavern on
the cover of Activision’s Super Pitfall (1987), to the
joyously ostentatious fantasy-scape of Vic Tokai’s
Clash at Demonhead (1989), videogame box art of-
fered vivid glimpses at remarkable worlds that the
NES hardware could only hint at.
“I think what worked best in those days was
it gave kids, or whoever was playing the game,
something to imagine,” recalled UK artist Bob
Wakelin, in an interview with the BBC, about his
box artwork. Wakelin, who worked with game
publishers like Ocean Software throughout the
1980s and ’90s, is responsible for some of the most
memorable pieces of gaming box art.
Take, for example, his illustration for the 1988
NES release of Konami’s Contra: Two commandos
in the foreground engage with an unseen crea-
ture’s brittle, crustaceous legs; in the background,
a second creature hisses at them from the center
of the frame. The artwork is as memorable as the
game itself, burned into the nightmares of the
poor young souls who dared to take on Red Fal-
con. The creature doesn’t really resemble anything
in the game. (In fact, a close look reveals that the
illustration is rather reminiscent of H.R. Giger’s
titular creature from the 1979 film Alien.) How-
ever, this isn’t false advertising so much as a noble
attempt to build a brief visual narrative in a digital
medium that, at the time, was not known for its
in-depth writing.
Box art of the era attempted to reflect the
sensibility of the game—what the player was sup-
posed to feel, rather than a direct interpretation
of the game’s minimal narrative. As author Tom
Bissell notes in his book Extra Lives: Why Video
Games Matter, games often “are more about the
world in which the game takes place than the story
constructed to govern one’s progress through it.”
Just as the games’ rough graphics led to an embel-
lished art style, their rough stories led to embel-
lished compositions. Therefore it is not surprising
that Sega commissioned noted fantasy artist Boris
Vallejo, creator of Frazetta-like canvases in which
muscular barbarians, buxom princesses, and
domesticated dragons stand in glorious portrait,
but do little else. The box for Golden Axe II (1991),
one of Vallejo’s best videogame works (and argu-
ably the most gorgeous box in console history), is
as beautiful as it is ambiguous.
Golden Axe marked the zenith of videogame
boxes’ golden age. The craft would see its heyday
pass in 1995 with the North American arrival of
the Sony PlayStation. This new console’s unprec-
edented processing power allowed landscapes to
be rendered in 360 degrees and characters draft-
ed in millions of multicolored sides. Once again,
technology was the main aesthetic draw for video-
games. Although the caverns and temples of 1996’s
Tomb Raider strongly echoed the Super Pitfall box
from a decade earlier, its cover displayed protago-
nist Lara Croft rendered in 1.5 million polygons,
not in oils or pastels. And following in Lady Croft’s
footsteps, today’s biggest games—from the gritty
BioShock 2 to the majestic Final Fantasy XIII—fea-
ture cover art that no longer strives to embellish
the games inside, but simply to mimic them. If it
were still around, today’s FuncoLand would be a
much more honest store—but also a much more
boring one.
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 57
 by BRIAN TAYLOR
illustration by ZACH KUGLER
TRADING SPACES
What navigating digital worlds can
teach us about our own
I’ve just left the Smithsonian Museum of American
History in Washington, D.C. The air is stagnant and
humid, and my friend and I are looking for a metro
station. “There’s one by the National Archives,” I
say. “I think it’s up here on our left.”
The National Archives are situated north of
the Mall, about halfway between the Washington
Monument and the Capitol Building. I know this
because I once had to go there to steal the Declara-
tion of Independence from a robot who believed he
was one of its original signers.
Then, D.C. was a post-nuclear wasteland, fairly
unrecognizable except for a few surviving land-
marks. It was also virtual, housed in Bethesda Soft-
works’ Fallout 3. Now, I’m in the actual city for the
annual conference of the American Library Associ-
ation—but my friend and I are still using the Fallout
3 map to find this metro entrance.
Why would I rely on the videogame map rath-
er than an atlas of the street? The visuals are not
the same. The distances are not the same. Walking
down the street in D.C. in mid-June is nothing like
sitting on my couch in my Pittsburgh apartment in
mid-November.
So I started researching the relationship between
virtual space and physical space—and how the
58 — Kill Screen Magazine
space inside your head figures into it all.
And it starts, as most quests do, with rats.
In the July 1948 issue of The Psychological Review,
Edward C. Tolman published “Cognitive Maps in
Rats and Men.” The paper detailed a series of ex-
periments designed to study how rats learn their
way through mazes.
The basis was simple: Take a hungry rat, put it
in a maze with food at the end, and with enough
repetition, it will become more and more efficient
at running through that maze to the food. What
interested Tolman was why. One school of thought
suggested that paths were learned passively, as a re-
sult of moment-to-moment stimuli. Think of it as
the rodent equivalent of pattern recognition: “Turn
right, turn right, turn left, turn right.” Another
school claimed that the relationship between turns
was crucial, and that this relationship was actively
constructed in the mind of the rat.
Tolman and his team placed rats in a maze
where one path led off of a circular area and made a
90-degree turn to the food. After a number of runs,
the setup was changed. The circular area and the
location of the food remained the same, but there
were now several paths branching out. The original
There is an inside to every building. I don’t know what is inside, but I
know that it exists. I could construct it in my mind, and imagine the
stories occurring within, but I don’t. If I did, I would go insane. So I
simplify, like the designers of Grand Theft Auto.
path was blocked, while one of the other spokes led
straight to the food.
A statistically significant number of rats, after
finding the original path blocked, selected the new
one and found their goal. The rats, Tolman sur-
mised, were forming a cognitive map of their envi-
ronment: a set of mental relationships that allowed
them to conceive of the food’s location relative to
their own, even though it was out of sight. He de-
scribed these maps as “broad”; that is, they were not
limited to the “narrow” path the rat had traveled,
but took into account the area as a whole, coherent
space.
This seems pretty straightforward, but it was a
big deal for understanding spatial cognition. Tol-
man was the first person to show that rats had a
sense of “over there” which could be demonstrated
as long as the environment was built to allow it.
This is the most interesting part of Tolman’s find-
ings—that environmental factors can aid in the cre-
ation of these cognitive maps.
“Imageability” is a term used by Kevin Lynch in his
1967 book The Image of the City to describe “that
quality in a physical object which gives it a high
probability of evoking a strong image in any given
observer,” or how easily a space can be constructed
in the mind. In Tolman’s terms, high imageability
results in a broad cognitive map.
Lynch proposed that a strong mental map was
significant to feeling comfortable in a space. People
in general do not like to be lost. I’m talking really
lost—not “Hey, let’s go for a drive and see where we
end up,” but the kind where you can’t begin to ori-
ent yourself. Being lost isn’t not knowing where you
are. It’s not knowing where (or what) anything else
is in relation to you.
In Lynch’s work, a person’s cognitive map of their
60 — Kill Screen Magazine
city is made up of five mental elements. Paths are
linear spaces through which one can move. Edges
are linear spaces through which one cannot. Dis-
tricts are larger areas that have a consistent charac-
ter. Nodes are points that a person enters, such as
intersections and plazas. And landmarks are points
not entered but used for orientation—anything
from a tall building to a mailbox to a pothole.
But in a person’s cognitive map, the distinctions
are fuzzy and often shift depending on the indi-
vidual’s perception. A landmark like a tall building,
for example, becomes a node if you cut through its
lobby to reach a street on the other side. And the
cognitive map is simpler than reality.
We select parts of our observations, simplify
them to these elements, and relate them to one an-
other in our minds. If Lynch’s model is right (and
plenty of spatial cognition research suggests that,
while it may be simplified, it is not inaccurate), then
a virtual space designed around it should be easier
to understand as a consistent whole.
I found, when navigating Tallon IV several
months after completing Metroid Prime, that I was
still able to find certain locations with little effort.
The Tallon Overworld, Magmoor Caverns, and
Phazon Mines acted as districts, unified by coher-
ent art styles. But because they were designed to
be separate spaces, their boundaries were stronger
than those of districts in the real world. I didn’t just
think of the edges as impenetrable: They actually
were. Color-coded doors and glowing items out of
reach, like an ice beam or missile upgrade, served
as landmarks. And the elevators connecting the dif-
ferent areas became key nodes in my mental map;
if I couldn’t remember what the path to an elevator
looked like, I still had a pretty solid idea of where it
was located—even without using the in-game map.
This kind of design is incredibly useful in a
game like Metroid Prime that requires a lot of travel
through the same spaces. By reducing the amount
of thinking (and map-checking) required to orient
yourself, it adds a sense of easy travel and makes
backtracking feel like less of a chore.
Games aren’t reality. They’re not tied to an actual
physical space, and they don’t have to follow the
laws of physics. Like any other art, their relation-
ship to reality is representative. A game can only
provide suggestions to the entire space—but the
suggestions it provides and how it provides them
is vital to making you fill in the gaps. A game can
evoke a real space, one that appears to follow the
laws of the real world, but we as players are always
going to have to meet it halfway. And that’s impor-
tant to how the game world feels.
When Harry Beck designed the iconic London tube
map in the 1950s, he transformed the complicated
London Underground into an easily understood
diagram. Rather than recreating every turn of the
lines and the actual distance between each sta-
tion, Beck simplified and abstracted them, drawing
straight lines for the tracks and equidistant marks for
the stations.
The typical tube rider experiences the space
more or less as a straight line between landmarks.
Barring some emergency, they won’t leave the train
between those stations. They don’t need to know
where they are in relation to the London topogra-
phy—they just need to know their destination.
Videogame spaces fall somewhere between
Beck’s map and the transit system it depicts. They’re
a map with no physical analogue; “Ceci n’est pas une
pipe” indeed. Because it’s a map through which we
move, it’s easy to forget that it is still a map. And
so we look for the bathrooms, and wonder where
people sleep. But maybe instead of thinking of the
game map as a recreation of a coherent physical
space, we can think of it as an interpretation—one
that has been simplified by the designers, like our
mental maps.
As I walk down a city street in real life, the edges of
the path can be transgressed; landmarks can become
nodes. There is an inside to every building. I don’t
know what is inside, but I know that it exists. I could
construct it in my mind, and imagine the stories oc-
curring within, but I don’t. If I did, I would go insane.
So I simplify, like the designers of Grand Theft Auto.
Plenty of games give you landmarks that suggest
the limited space through which you move is relat-
ed to a larger one. You can see out the windows of
Rapture in BioShock. In Mass Effect and Mass Effect
2, you often move along a limited path with views
of distant landmarks that you cannot reach. Look-
ing up in the middle of the Citadel, you can see the
extent of the space station; the sense of scale is pal-
pable. But you can’t go there.
When games let you go there—when they let
landmarks shift to nodes, as they so often do in our
cognitive maps—they can create a powerful sense
of expansive, connected space. This is true even in
the most linear games.
Consider another Citadel, from Valve’s Half-Life
2. During your journey through City 17, the Citadel
looms over the landscape. You always know where
you are in relation to it. When you finally enter it
late in the game, you have a sense of what surrounds
it. The relationship between “here” and “there” pro-
vides an easy framework of progression and lever-
ages spatial relationships to build narrative tension.
All roads lead to the Citadel, literally. The only
roads that actually exist in City 17 are the ones you
travel along. But your brain is used to constructing
spaces out of just that information, and so it’s less
work for you to imagine the spaces in between the
paths and the landmarks.
Once you’ve broadened your map of City 17,
there’s enough empty space for your imagination to
run wild. The best game spaces don’t just tell you
a story: They tell a story with you. They create a
frame on which you can drape your own meanings;
they are a conversation between you and the envi-
ronment. It’s a story that creates a world that is more
than the actions you’ve taken in it. It’s about the spaces
you’ve traveled, but also the spaces you haven’t.
The blank space on a map is a powerful trigger for
the imagination. When a game space understands
this, you become more involved in that space. The
map is essential to the stories that occur within it.
And as Lynch observed when he cautioned against
over-designing environments: “A landscape whose
every rock tells a different story may make difficult
the creation of fresh stories.”
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 61
 by EMILY SHORT
illustration by TIM DENEE
EDUCATED GUESTS
Videogame design makes an appearance in the classroom
The best game designers are superb teachers. They
introduce complicated systems gradually and ac-
cessibly. They use images, sound, and layout to help
the player retain a wealth of information about the
game world. They require the player to make ac-
tive use of knowledge gained, build on it to arrive
at new conclusions and strategies, and perhaps col-
laborate with other players.
So why are so many educational games so bad?
A Google search for educational games turns up
depressing results: remaindered copies of the ad-
venture games Chemicus and Physicus; a dumbed-
down version of the venerable Oregon Trail, now
available on the iPhone; the old lemonade-stand
game, creakily re-implemented in Flash; a very
large number of rudimentary flashcard games for
arithmetic and the letters of the alphabet.
Even more recent work on more challenging sub-
ject matter tends to disappoint. As part of an ongo-
ing outreach program by the Nobel Foundation,
Nobelprize.org offers games about prize-winning
subjects as diverse as the discovery of blood typing
and the symbolism of The Lord of the Flies. Most
are nothing more than thinly disguised quizzes on
reading material presented elsewhere on the site.
That’s a flaw common to educational games at
many levels and in many subjects. Often the design-
62 — Kill Screen Magazine
ers have been hired by educators or grant-giving
foundations whose chief purpose is (to quote the
Nobel site) “to present information… in a way that
is ‘fun’ and attractive.” If a game is conceived only as
a way to candy-coat traditional tests, then “‘fun’” is
indeed the most we can hope for.
As a teacher and a game designer, I’m naturally
inclined to say that what we need are more game-
savvy teachers: people who can direct grant money,
when it comes along, to games that use their me-
dium to the best educational effect.
The real challenge lies in promoting a culture
of gaming literacy. Just as students learning from
books need to be taught to question the authority of
the printed word, so do students need to learn how
simulation and interactive narrative can be biased.
And teachers who hope to use games in the class-
room need a more comprehensive grasp of what
these tools can and cannot do.
Sometimes the very features that make for good
gaming—framing narrative, humor, gradual intro-
duction of gameplay challenges, freedom to experi-
ment with outcomes—are the features that make
teachers wary.
CellCraft is a real-time strategy game about cel-
lular biology developed by Anthony Pecorella and
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 63
Even a science simulation can draw complaints
about bias; how much more problematic to write
a game with a score and win conditions when the
subject matter it covers is inherently subjective?

Lars Doucet and supported by a HASTAC/MacAr-

thur Foundation grant. Your task is to harvest glu-
cose, use the organelles of a single-celled organism
to generate energy and build units (defensive en-
zymes), and defend yourself against waves of invad-
ing viruses.
It’s a design with proven play value. The player
has to learn what organelles do, not for the sake of
memorization, but as a means to running the cell
efficiently. Deeper understandings come out of the
process of play as well: What happens when a cell
is starved for glucose? For light? How does it re-
pair itself? How much damage can it survive from
viruses and still come back? What combinations of
environmental factors are the most disastrous?
These are things that would be hard to grasp in-
tuitively just by reading a textbook, and a student
who has learned them in play knows a lot more
than a student who is merely able to parrot back the
definition of “lysosome.”
CellCraft accomplishes all this first and foremost
by being a good game. It introduces the different
organelles over the course of a prolonged tutorial.
Subsequent levels challenge the player with new
and more powerful attackers representing differ-
ent types of viruses. Environmental factors such as
extreme cold introduce time limits on some levels,
while on others, players try to survive without suffi-
cient light or glucose. The project was spearheaded
by experienced game designers, and it shows.
CellCraft enjoyed debut scores of 4.40 and 4.28

64 — Kill Screen Magazine

on Newgrounds and Kongregate, demonstrating a
strong appeal even to players who aren’t cramming
for an exam in biology. But it has been the subject
of considerable controversy.
The two biology advisors for the game are college
professors, but also avowed creationists. The game’s
narrative framework describes a cell that is con-
structed by alien cellular biologists, which many
detractors have seen as a veiled representation of
Intelligent Design. The reaction has been extremely
heated, especially in the form of third-party com-
menters warning teachers and parents against the
game (most notably PZ Myers, a biology professor
at the University of Minnesota and an activist who
blogs about Intelligent Design propaganda).
Would the story framework have been a problem
if no one had known who the science advisors were?
I’m not sure. There’s no mention of God. Evolution
is outside the scope of what the game purports
to teach, and reasonably so. Creationist William
Dembski did promote the game as demonstrating
the “irreducible complexity” of cells, but makes no
comment about the story, and might have found
the same “merit” in any cell-related game that did
not explicitly lay out an evolutionary explanation
for its contents.
The game’s designers have been vehement in
their defense of CellCraft, pointing out the extensive
educational resources included in the game and the
accuracy of the organelle behavior they describe. By
their own account, Doucet and Pecorella knew that
the professors who volunteered to help them were
intelligent design proponents, but expected that
these beliefs would not prevent them from provid-
ing valid guidance on a game about basic cell me-
chanics. To my mind, their defense is credible, but
they also made a serious political miscalculation in
accepting the help of these particular professors.
No doubt a book or film on the same subject, with
the same advisors, would have raised eyebrows, but
CellCraft is especially vulnerable to misreading be-
cause of its form. Games are an unknown quantity
to many teachers, and in the case of CellCraft, they
had to look to the authority that produced the game
as proof that what it teaches is scientifically valid.
For teachers who do not feel confident evaluating
the game on its own merits, the presence of some
creationists on staff is a problem.
Teachers may also fail to understand the gram-
mar of games. Myers’ critique focuses chiefly on the
frame story and the beliefs of the contributors, but
he also offers the criticism that the game doesn’t
model the cell’s ability to regulate itself. He claims
that by leaving this task to the player, CellCraft in-
vites a misinterpretation of the role of intelligence
in biological operations.
It’s a complaint that seems almost willfully ob-
tuse about the nature of simulation in games. Stu-
dents who have grown up with Civilization don’t
conclude that each world culture is in fact guided
by a different immortal presiding genius, and
they’re equally unlikely to misinterpret the mean-
ing of the interactivity in CellCraft. This is simply
not something that the game is likely to communi-
cate to anyone familiar with the genre.
Getting teachers to understand the possibilities of
games, and developing some best practices for teach-
er-designer collaboration, is only part of the battle.
Games do have limitations that affect how suit-
able they are for teaching certain subject matter.
Even a science simulation can draw complaints
about bias; how much more problematic to write
a game with a score and win conditions when the
subject matter it covers is inherently subjective?
Voices of Spoon River is a text game designed
by graduate students at the Creative Learning En-
vironments Lab at Utah State University. It is in-
tended to help students explore Edgar Lee Masters’
Spoon River Anthology. Unlike CellCraft, it is not
framed as something that might be interesting to
traditional gamers. It is showcased on USU’s web-
site, together with lesson plans, teachers’ guidance,
and assessment surveys.
The gameplay consists of a series of adventure
game-style puzzles to solve. This might not work
very well for most books, but it is apropos given the
puzzle-like nature of the original work: dozens and
dozens of epitaphs for the various inhabitants of
Spoon River, which when read together reveal dif-
ferent people’s perspectives on the same problems.
A husband and a wife reflect on their marriage, and
see it very differently. A son is proud of his lineage,
but his parents know he is illegitimate, adopted
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 65
 Games are no more dangerous than
textbooks, and when designed well,
they are just as powerful.
from a mother he never knew.
Voices of Spoon River allows the student to read
the related epitaphs, draw connections between
them, and put the town’s ghosts “at peace” by re-
solving the various problems that grieved them
in life. Confronted with the epitaphs of the proud
son and his unknown mother, the player solves the
puzzle of the mother’s unhappiness by swapping
out photographs on the son’s family tree.
This works best when the gameplay recapitulates
the readerly process of understanding how char-
acters relate. Where a woman’s epitaph speaks in
veiled, metaphorical language about a lost fetus,
and her husband refers to her infidelity, the player
has to decipher what is not quite being said, then
search for a grave in the area identified by a third
epitaph as the place where abortions are hidden.
Unfortunately, the effect is incomplete. The puz-
zles are not always very well clued. Some rely on
arbitrary realizations about the physical game envi-
ronment, rather than about the poetry; for instance,
one puzzle involves shooting doors with a shotgun
in order to get them open, a challenge apparently
included for the sake of the game genre and not be-
cause it reflects anything about the poems.
Moreover, as some reviewers have observed, the
66 — Kill Screen Magazine
framing of the game as something to solve suggests
that the tragedies of Spoon River can be set right
with a little diligence. By contrast, the tragedies of
the original feel strongly inevitable. Unhappy end-
ings are a part of human existence in large part be-
cause we don’t understand one another very well.
An implicit goal of reading Spoon River Anthology
carefully is to understand about the characters
things that they did not understand about them-
selves, or one another; but as non-interactive read-
ers, we can’t affect the characters by understanding
them. In the game, we can.
Could Voices of Spoon River do better, and en-
gage more deeply with the themes? I think maybe it
could, but at the risk of losing its status as a teach-
ing aid and even as a game. Both games and quiz-
zes tend to look for right answers they can reward,
whereas the study of literature is about joining a
conversation, not about the ability to extract facts
from a text.
Take, as a point of contrast, Tale of Tales’ Fatale.
The work is a reflection on Salome, Oscar Wilde’s
eerie and unsettling play about the death of John
the Baptist.
Like Voices of Spoon River, Fatale includes pas-
sages of the original text, provides a virtual world
that re-envisions the textual space, and encour-
ages the player to draw new conclusions about the
text. It is, arguably, more deeply reflective about
the themes of its original (female sexuality, deca-
dence, religious austerity) than Voices of Spoon
River is about the themes of Spoon River Anthology.
It might well make an interesting comparison piece
for readers studying the original play.
But Fatale is a game only in medium, not in
genre. It is interactive, but not precisely winnable. It
rejects gaming conventions in a way that can con-
found experienced gamers. It is also unmistakably
an artwork in its own right, with its own things to
say; it is less didactic, more mysterious, demanding
interpretation itself. It doesn’t tell the player what to
think. It asks more questions, and its symbolism is
in many ways more elusive than the original’s.
Fatale has much to teach about Salome, but it
does so by being a text, not a teaching aid—and by
jettisoning the genre expectations that clash with
what it has to say.
If I were using Voices in the classroom, I would
want to make sure my students and I compared
the upbeat ending of the game with the less-happy
themes of the original. But if the genre constraints
and relative novelty of games make them challeng-
ing to use in the classroom, the same features make
them a powerful seed of discussion.
As an exercise in an honors myth class, I have
sometimes asked students in small groups to work
up a detailed proposal for how they would present
a given myth in some medium other than the origi-
nal. I’ve occasionally gotten a pitch for a movie or a
novel, but by far the majority of these groups come
up with videogame pitches. The medium is the one
they understand most intimately. Many play games
for longer—and with much more thought—than
they watch television or movies.
And for that reason, the games provide a superb
entrée to discussions of genre and medium. I ask
students how their imagined mythological game
differs from the original story. I ask what they left
out, and why; what they added, and why. We talk
about the combat features of Odysseus’ bow and the
number of enemies he would face.
Some of Odysseus’ characteristics, like strength
and endurance, are easy to express in game format.
We might gradually separate him from his compan-
ions, so that he has to fight more and more difficult
stages alone.
Others, such as cleverness, are harder to get
across well. We could make the Cyclops into a level
boss who has to be killed by solving a puzzle—but
can it be the same puzzle that Odysseus solved in
the original? Is it the same thing for a modern gam-
er to play out the old stick-in-the-eye trick as it is
for Homer’s audience to listen to Odysseus coming
up with the idea in the first place? What about Pe-
nelope, and Odysseus’ long conversations with her?
Will players sit still for those, or do we need to lose
them from the game entirely?
This exercise tends to break down the students’
initial expectations about what it means for a work
to be original or derivative. It also challenges a
common assumption that ancient and modern
works are fundamentally different in kind. Many
students find ancient works hard to relate to, and
blame this on the artificiality of the literary forms,
arguing that products of modern culture are more
“realistic” or “natural.” The exercise of trying to tell
a story through a game reveals how much we still
rely on shared conventions to communicate.
Through that conversation, we sneak back
around to Virgil and Ovid, and to the expectations
of genre and form that affected their poetry. Our
digression into action games helps them to see, say,
an epic battle narrative as an impressive bit of po-
etic virtuosity intended to highlight the importance
of what is happening, rather than a bit of pointlessly
violent bombast. A lengthy descriptive passage or
ecphrasis yields a pleasure like that of exploring a
virtual environment.
Games are no more dangerous than textbooks, and
when designed well, they are just as powerful.
We teach students to read critically by teaching
them to write subtly. A writer who knows how to
arrange an argument—how to select examples that
support a message, how to play on emotion—is also
the most likely to recognize those techniques as a
reader. The same holds true for games.
In other words, we shouldn’t just be teaching
with games. We should be teaching game design.
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 67
 by MITU KHANDAKER
illustration by JUSTIN RUSSO

TOPPLING THE
IVORY TOWER
Are videogame academics irrelevant?

68 — Kill Screen Magazine

Hi. I’m a videogame PhD researcher. Furthermore,
I’ve been having a bit of a career crisis.
Perhaps this is not unusual. The writer Alain de
Botton, in his 2009 TED Talk, suggests that “we
live in an age where our lives are regularly punctu-
ated by career crises; by moments when what we
thought we knew about our lives and our careers
comes into contact with a threatening sort of real-
ity.” The threatening reality in my case seems to be
this single question: Is games academia irrelevant?
To explain, I need to go back to the start. The very start.
1947 was a good year for videogames. This was
the year that Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle
Ray Mann filed a patent for a “Cathode-Ray Tube
Amusement Device,” an analog system using eight
vacuum tubes to simulate a missile being fired at
a target. The same year, in the halls of King’s Col-
lege in Cambridge, Alan Turing devised a “paper
machine”: an algorithm by which a computer could
play chess against a human. In 1950, Claude Shan-
non, Turing’s associate from the days of wartime
cipher cracking, actually brought a chess-playing
game to fruition. Games had previously been stuck
with dice and cards, but now—as Jesper Juul points
out in Half-Real—the personal computer was to be-
come their Guttenberg press.
Indeed, throughout the 1940s and ’50s, scientists
and engineers eagerly converted board games to
electronic format. These ranged from Nim in 1951,
to Noughts and Crosses on an ESDAC in 1952, to
Tennis for Two in 1958, a two-player tennis game
displayed on an oscilloscope. In 1961 MIT students
Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen
created SpaceWar!. Programmed on a PDP-1, a
$120,000 “mini-computer” the size of a small car, the
game featured two spaceships dueling around a gravi-
ty well. SpaceWar! was a huge success among the com-
puting elite, and it spread widely to other universities.
In 1971—another very good year for videogames—
Games academia is in stark danger of being regarded as
irrelevant by many developers. How, then, can academic
games research become pertinent to the industry once
again? How can it blaze the trail?
the first coin-operated game, Galaxy Game (in-
spired by SpaceWar!) was borne out of Stanford
University. Just two months after its installation,
another SpaceWar!-inspired project, Computer
Space by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, was re-
leased. This was the first videogame widely avail-
able to the public.
Then, some 17 years later, my four-year-old self
began illicitly playing on a relative’s Commodore
64 (mostly Paperboy and an unidentified Breakout
clone). It was then that I fell in love with videogames.
Fast-forwarding another 19 years, I graduated
with a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering
and received an offer to undertake a PhD at the
University of Portsmouth in the nascent Advanced
Games Research Group in the School of Creative
Technologies. I began my doctorate, heart filled
with that delusion of grandeur that befalls all PhD
students, irrespective of their field: My thesis is go-
ing to change the world.
The next couple of years were a blur of finding
my feet, internships, ideas, and false starts. I’m told
that this is normal. My research has snaked and for-
ayed into haptic technology and into questions of
embodiment and of designing for novel controller
technologies. However, I cannot ever shrug off the
question: Is what I am doing important enough?
The truth is that PhDs rarely do change the
world; I’ve heard it said that such endeavors are
usually best left for later in one’s career. After all,
even Einstein’s doctoral thesis was a small, sensible
contribution to Brownian motion. Instead, the doc-
toral process is about proving oneself as a compe-
tent researcher. Curiously, though, with videogame
scholarship there seems to be an additional pres-
sure: proving the value of the scholarship itself to
the videogame industry.
I asked Ian Bogost, videogame researcher and
Associate Professor at Georgia Institute of Technol-
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 69
We as academics have the ability to pursue research opportunities
and take risks that the industry, including indies, cannot easily afford.
Although game development is no longer for the elite, only academia
has the unparalleled freedom to “scout ahead” in the future of games.
ogy, whether academia needs, or should even as-
pire, to do things which are valuable to the industry.
“It can do,” he says, “but need not, and it should not
do exclusively, and it should not be worried about
doing so always. Academia is good for unpredict-
able usefulness.”
Given that the history of videogames, both tech-
nical and spiritual, is rooted partly in academia,
unpredictable usefulness seems accurate. However,
since those very early days, there seems to have
been a divergence; it’s as if after having given birth
to the medium, academia is now struggling to play
catch-up, and to provide the insights and innova-
tions that seem so necessary to pushing forward the
boundaries of gaming.
“Many developers are extremely well read and
exceptionally intelligent,” says Dan Pinchbeck, my
fellow member of the University of Portsmouth
Advanced Games Research Group. Dan is noted for
his critically acclaimed experimental Source mods,
Dear Esther and Korsakovia. “[Developers] know
what’s going on in games research, and if they don’t
value it, it’s because they think it doesn’t have value;
they don’t have to write academic papers critiquing it.”
Of course, the notion of “games academia” is
itself problematic; the medium of videogames is
inherently interdisciplinary, and the same can be
said of games academia. Not all academia is about
making things. Pinchbeck notes that “traditionally,
games studies comes out of cultural studies and me-
dia studies, and in those fields, academia has usu-
ally occupied a position of analysis; it doesn’t inno-
vate, it doesn’t drive. It just considers. Early games
studies really suffered from that, and a big chunk of
games studies still does; it’s so cerebral and discon-
nected. It doesn’t have any value for industry at all.”
Developer Jonathan Blow, best known for his in-
dependent release Braid, agrees. “As someone in the
industry, I just don’t pay attention to the output of
70 — Kill Screen Magazine
games academia—none of it is relevant to me. Who
is this stuff supposed to be relevant to? Or is games
academia basically just about writing stuff, and who
cares if nobody ever reads it?”
His position manifests that familiar threatening
reality: “In general, my opinion of games academia
is highly negative. Academia should be thought-
leaders, advanced thinkers, etc. Instead, it seems
to me, it is mostly a bunch of people wasting time
(and by extension their lives). Even in cases where
researchers are on an interesting subject, they are
usually only doing mildly interesting things, and
doing them very slowly at a low level of quality.”
I’m startled. It’s blunt, perhaps, but hauntingly
accurate: We need more academic rigor. “The is-
sue is just whether peoples’ ideas are actually
tested,” Blow says. He notes that in much of early
20th-century physics, discoveries were made by
bright young minds whose peers would constant-
ly challenge their ideas. There was a real sense of
competition, and the stakes and pressure were high.
Games academia is nowhere near as established of a
field as theoretical physics, of course, but Blow and
Pinchbeck both suggest that it’s in danger of falling
into comfortable habits. “In academia,” says Blow,
“the most common test is ‘Did I get published?’
Having been on papers committees and seen what
the standards are (even for supposedly highly re-
spectable publications), I have to say that it is a very
poor test that drives people to do poor work.”
Games academia is in stark danger of being re-
garded as irrelevant, if not already written off by
many developers. How, then, can academic games
research become pertinent to the industry once
again? How can it blaze the trail?
It is worth observing that even though SpaceWar!
was born in MIT’s historic Building 20, Graetz,
Russell, and Wiitanen’s work was not academic in
nature. No, this was frontier geekery. It was subver-
sive; it arose from the hacker spirit. Nowadays, such
experimentation comes mostly from the indie de-
velopment scene, rather than from academia. Mak-
ing games no longer requires the resources of a uni-
versity; every would-be game developer has access
to a plethora of tools and support via the Internet.
As Pinchbeck notes, this poses an additional
threat to games academia: “Academia needs to
make sure it hasn’t missed the boat. I worry that,
just as we’re getting wise to the idea that we can
build and release games and play with ideas, there
are a lot of people doing the same thing now, and
they don’t do it to say ‘I’m an academic, look what
I’ve done.’ ”
Bogost suggests that “one of the functions of
the academy is to inject indies into the profession;
people who think about things differently, whether
in film, in games, in business, or in biomedical en-
gineering. In that respect, there’s long been a natu-
ral connection between art and the academy.” Bo-
gost goes on to point out that this is not the whole
picture. “Your question assumes that just making
games is the goal. Academics do other things, pre-
sumably like trying to figure out what games are
good for, or how people use them, or what they
mean in culture, or how they operate, or their his-
torical purpose and influence.”
There is then, in games academia, this dichoto-
my of making things versus analyzing things. Of
course, while one doesn’t necessarily preclude the
other, historically, it has been making things that has
led the way for the games industry in the past. Even
now, in that birthplace of the modern videogame,
MIT, this is a sentiment shared by the Singapore-
MIT Gambit Game Labs, whose directive is to cre-
ate game prototypes to demonstrate its research,
alongside traditional academic publishing. Lab di-
rector Philip Tan says that game researchers need not
necessarily specialize in technical skills, but “should be
comfortable working in a technical environment.”
Pinchbeck concurs. “If you really want to un-
derstand games, you have to build them. The com-
promises you have to make as a developer will tell
you more about games than any kind of aspirations
about what games could be.” Indeed, Pinchbeck
refers to himself as a “developer” these days rather
than “an academic who makes games.” He suggests,
“When you put things out, you just say, ‘this is a
game’, and you don’t have to say whether it’s a re-
search project or not. The research should stand on
its own.”
When I ask Dan whether he had considered
completing his own projects outside of academia,
his reply is simple. “No, because I couldn’t have
paid for it.”
Although it sounds trivial, he has a point. “It’s a
design vacuum, and someone’s got to go in there,
and it costs money to go in there. Academia can go
in there; it doesn’t matter if it’s a barren wasteland as
long as they have an interesting journey.”
Blow also offers that the situation can be present-
ed in more aspirational terms. “We are all familiar
with this rhetoric that we are witnessing the dawn-
ing of a new medium, that there is so much poten-
tial, etc. And I think all that is true. Yet we don’t rise
to the opportunity—we just drop the ball.” He de-
scribes a rant he gave at the academic Foundations
of Digital Games Conference, in which he posed
the following question by R.W. Hamming: “What’s
the best thing you could be working on, and why
aren’t you?”
This is a good question. We should check our-
selves to ensure that all of us, academics and other-
wise, are always working on the best thing we could
be working on. We as academics have the ability to
pursue research opportunities and take risks that
the industry, including indies, cannot easily afford.
Although game development is no longer for the
elite, only academia has the unparalleled freedom to
“scout ahead” in the future of games. We should har-
ness this to carve out brave new paths for the industry.
Writing this article precipitated my career cri-
sis. It gave me reason to pause and reevaluate; to
entirely rethink my research and how it should be
approached. If academia gives me the ability to take
risks, then I should be taking those risks—to be
spending more time creating games which could
be unpredictably useful. Perhaps what we need are
constant career crises. To always compete with our
peers. To feel the pressure to be at the edge of hu-
man knowledge. To make sure we are not falling
into easy habits. To ensure our only measure of suc-
cess is not, “Did my paper get published?”
Perhaps academics can still change the world.
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 71
 by ROB ZACNY
photography by THOMAS HAYWOOD

BREAKING PANGEA
Jia Xie and Yang Yang wanted to teach the
world Chinese through an MMO.
But the world wasn’t ready.

“The classroom is probably the worst setting for
learning a language,” Jia Xie explained. “A class-
room setting is very cold, very dead. You don’t see
a sense to it. Even if you’re motivated to learn the
language … it doesn’t stick with you.”
This discontent fueled Xie, his partner Yang Yang,
and the rest of their small team as they worked on
Pangea Online, an independent MMO for Chinese
language learners. Their plan was to create a fun,
browser-based multiplayer game where Chinese
learners and speakers could gradually improve
their skills.
They would discover they had underestimated
the complications involved in designing a language
game. They were among the first in a market that
barely exists, with no institutional or publisher sup-
port, nor the hope of finding any. Before putting
their company Techtonic on hold, Xie and Yang
even found themselves on the cusp of making the
kind of classroom exercise programs they had al-
ways hated.
But, of course, they never saw any of that com-
ing. Xie and Yang both said that Pangea began as
their dream project. The two have been friends and
collaborators since high school, with matching am-
bition and no concern for money. Nearing the end
of another project, Xie found himself imagining a
game that would spark passion for language and
culture, just as the strategy games he grew up with
had turned history and economics into addictive fun.
“The main factor for me was games like Civiliza-
tion and Capitalism. I learned so much history from
them,” he explained. “I teach Chinese and I teach
English on a regular basis. I used to do it in China.
And I realized, why don’t we have anything like this
for languages?”
Xie and Yang were fascinated by the possibility of
using online gaming to reproduce the best condi-
tions for learning a new language. “For a long time,
people have known that the best way to acquire a
language is to just move to a foreign country and
immerse yourself in the foreign culture,” Yang said.
“Because one, it forces you to learn the language to
survive. And second, you have access to all this cul-
ture around you that really informs language. Lan-
guage isn’t something you learn in a vacuum. So we
noticed the parallels between playing MMOs and
traveling abroad … and we tried to see if we could
find some sort of synergy between the two.”
Yang described Pangea as China: The MMO.
The central conceit is that the player is doing a
term of study in China, and many of the game’s
early lessons come in the guise of other characters
helping a new arrival get situated. With its bright,
cartoonish graphics, Pangea looks a bit like a
children’s adventure. Lemon-head avatars, speaking

72 — Kill Screen Magazine

in a mixture of English and Chinese, offer everyday
quests—like collecting a homework assignment for
a sick roommate—and conversations on subjects
like cooking and school. Against this backdrop of
exchange-student life, players would also practice
conversation in the text chat using the Chinese they
had learned.
It was an ambitious and unconventional project,
but that is what appealed to Yang. He had just grad-
uated from MIT and, already a veteran of EA’s Ti-
buron studio and Harmonix, had his pick of several

Issue 2, Volume 1 — 73
job offers in the game industry. But he was drawn
to the idea of having creative ownership of an inter-
esting project. Ambitious and original, Pangea was
just the kind of challenge that Yang wanted.
Yang and Xie invested several thousand dollars
apiece to work full-time on the game. They used
open-source solutions wherever possible; for in-
stance, both their Chinese-English dictionary and
pinyin-to-Chinese text converter were open-source
assets. This let Yang and Xie focus on knottier is-
sues, like teaching pronunciation and tone—the
changes in pitch that differentiate between other-
wise identical Chinese words.
“We actually had Jia record all the syllables of
Chinese, all 400 or whatever, in this program. That
was sort of our speech generator,” said Yang. “So
when an NPC says a string of text to you, or even if
the player types something in Chinese, you can actu-
ally have the program pronounce it pretty well. And it
marks all the tones, and it says it aloud for you.”
However, toward the end of the project Yang
grew unhappy with the program’s ability to teach
learners how to say the tones. He started a side
project to explore other ways that Pangea could
promote tone mastery. “It would record your voice
speaking the tones, and it would draw a plot of
your tone. Pitch over time,” he explained. “It would
match what you’ve spoken, visually, to what the ref-
erence pronunciation is.” Although he never had
the time to integrate it with the rest of the game, the
feature showed promise. “That’s a nice thing about
interactive media: We can give a tighter feedback
loop between the student and technology.”
At all costs, he and Xie wanted to avoid exercise-
style drilling on vocabulary and grammar, and in-
stead present gamers with a contiguous, Chinese-
speaking world. Pangea assumed mastery of basic
Chinese, making the game less accessible to novice
learners. But as Yang explained, it was never in-
tended to replace Chinese courses. They envisioned
Pangea as a place where students with a semester or
two of introductory Chinese could get the experi-
ences that classrooms can’t provide.
Ravi Purushotma, a researcher and game designer
at MIT and member of the Learning Games Initia-
tive, is critical of how language games are usually
74 — Kill Screen Magazine
designed and used, but optimistic about how they
can improve language education. As a teacher and
researcher, he has come to understand the limits of
what a formal language class can accomplish.
In a typical classroom, one teacher and perhaps
dozens of students receive a grocery list of subject
matter—grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, con-
versation, etc.—and a short time to master it. Stu-
dents will struggle and excel with different aspects
of a language, and it is impossible for a teacher to
respond effectively to all their individual needs.
Most importantly, the only way to ensure that stu-
dents retain what they learn in class is through
practice, on their own time. For Purushotma, the
Holy Grail is a language game that holds up as a
game, not just educational software: the sort of
thing that a student would play after class even if
it weren’t assigned. With such games available,
students would not have to endure awkward and
sometimes humiliating practice sessions in front
of the class, and teachers would not have to burn
classroom minutes trying to help a single student
master a tricky pronunciation.
When that day arrives, Purushotma said, “The
best thing will be a classroom that focuses on what
a classroom does well … while the game focuses on
things that one teacher would be overwhelmed do-
ing for 30 students.”
Xie thinks one of the most critical shortcomings
of a classroom is its inability to provide a setting for
casual conversation in a second language. That is a
crucial element in the learning of any language, and
it’s not something a teacher can provide to a room
full of students.
“You want to be making mistakes with other
people. You want to be comfortable making mis-
takes with other people,” he said. “And it needs to
be un-stressful. It needs to be very casual, like with
friends. For example, imagine having two or three
friends together with a tutor who gave you some
materials, and then you guys just chatted about it.”
Yang saw that potential in the way players spend time
in World of Warcraft, chatting while going on quests or
traveling around Azeroth. However, there was a prob-
lem with building a similar game for a community of
Chinese learners: Everyone was speaking broken Chi-
nese, except for the broken-record NPCs. To succeed
as an immersive learning tool, someone needed to be
able to play the role of the tutor.
A few years ago, Todd Bryant did exactly that by
playing World of Warcraft with German students at
Dickinson College. As the college’s technology liai-
son, he was responsible for finding new ways to use
technology in teaching.
He gave his students a choice: They could have
conversations with a German speaker over Skype,
or they could join him on a German World of War-
craft server. No English would be permitted in ei-
ther text or voice chat. A number of his more intro-
verted students, who got stage fright at the thought
of having live conversations with a German strang-
er, opted to play WoW.
“The first adventure was a disaster. We got
slaughtered!” Bryant explained. “No one knew how
to play. And I only let them speak in German, so
they couldn’t organize themselves at all. So [after
that], one kid wrote up 50 phrases they all needed
to know. And the first one was, ‘RUN!’ ”
Once they mastered the basics of survival, Bry-
ant’s group found themselves surrounded by hun-
dreds of willing, fluent German tutors. Bryant
would send German players private messages in the
game explaining what he and his group were doing.
Most of the time, the Germans responded with en-
thusiasm, switching to a basic vocabulary, avoiding
common German abbreviations, and explaining
slang unique to German WoW players.
One concern with using games as a language-
learning tool, Purushotma warned me, is that learn-
ers can become too task-driven. If players can slide
by on the imperative form of a few choice verbs and
a handful of nouns, they are mastering a phrase-
book, not a language. Bryant addressed this in his
group by engaging them in small talk that had little
He gave his students a choice: They could have
conversations with a German speaker over Skype, or they
could join him on a German World of Warcraft server.
or nothing to do with the game.
Bryant explained, “Most of the conversation in
WoW is kind of normal, when you look through
it all. They want to talk about what they did with
their day, as we were walking through the forest.
And by the end, they were exhausted. Usually, in
class, it’s an hour. But you’re not logged in for that
whole hour. You’re kind of flipping through the
book, and maybe getting ready for the activity. But
when you’re playing a game, and you’re on that
audio channel with only five other kids, and it’s all
in German?”
Unfortunately, logistical problems got in the way
of using World of Warcraft for educational purposes.
Bryant and his students can no longer play their
U.S. editions of World of Warcraft on German
servers due to region restrictions. “I remember
contacting [World of WarCraft developer Blizzard
in the beginning to say, ‘You know, I’m [at] an
education institution and … all I need is a way to
connect my students to European servers,’ ” Bryant
recalls. “And they didn’t even know how to answer
me. They didn’t know what their own rules were
for, say, installing the software in a lab. Could I have
a license per machine, or is it per student? They
had no idea what to do with me. They hadn’t even
considered the idea.”
Nor is language gaming an easy thing to integrate
into the syllabus. As Bryant discussed his work with
the language professors at Dickinson, he realized
that the textbook and exam-driven processes they
were using in their classes did not mesh with the
kind of learning his students were doing online.
The original point of all this German practice
was to improve the students’ skills, which it did. But
Bryant’s WoW group did not improve its skills in a
way that quizzes and exams could measure. These
students were taking courses that were structured
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 75
 around units: one week on progressive verb tenses,
the next on vocabulary relating to travel. They were
tested on their mastery of the concept of the week.
Through WoW, they were learning a great deal of
German, but they were not practicing what they
were learning in class. They became much stronger
German speakers, but weaker test-takers.
Problems like this make Purushotma doubt that
classrooms will adopt language games anytime
soon. “I feel like it’s really difficult for teachers to do
that under their standard job constraints,” he said.

76 — Kill Screen Magazine

“And the textbook publishing industry is not sup-
porting them in any way.”
He explained that two parallel tracks could lead
to games becoming a standard part of language
education, and he’s often conflicted about which
one to follow. The first is developing and marketing
games directly to teachers and educational institu-
tions—but Bryant’s experience shows how difficult
this can be. The other path, and the one Purusho-
tma suspects is more promising, is innovation from
the ground up: designers producing games for the
learners themselves, whose support for those games
will help bring them into the classroom.
This is roughly what Xie and Yang were attempt-
ing to create. But, as Purushotma is quick to admit
and they were slow to discover, it’s even harder than
it sounds.
“The business model [for Pangea] was sort of a na-
ïve, ‘Build it and they will come,’” Yang explained.
“One of the mistakes we made early on was to as-
sume that the demographic of people who are
learning Chinese and the demographic of people
who are interested in playing a game have a signifi-
cant intersection.”
Yang and Xie had to choose from a host of differ-
ent constituencies scattered along a wide spectrum.
At one end, players were primarily interested in a
more traditional classroom experience; and at the
other, people wanted good games with some lan-
guage education mixed in.
“What we really needed to do was just decide
what type of person really needed the product and
just execute it,” Yang said.
Xie and Yang knew the design was in some trou-
ble, but they had no idea how much until they got
their big break last March: a spot on the show floor
at PAX East 2010 in Boston.
“We had a pretty large marketing campaign at
PAX, and we had a very good physical turnout. We
had a couple hundred people both talking to us and
joining the site shortly after. And the biggest wake-
up call was the retention rate,” Xie explained. “We
thought people would be interested in just hanging
out and talking in Chinese. And that really wasn’t
the case. They really expected more content.”
Before PAX East, Xie and Yang had had some
serious discussions about the future of the project
and their company. Techtonic could not continue
work on Pangea unless it received some outside
funding, so Xie tried to find some. “We switched
to more institutional markets where we thought we
could get funds for a larger product, by doing con-
sulting projects. But the institutions had very rigid
requirements,” Xie said.
An offer from Boston University finally forced
their hand. “They wanted us to do the consulting
to implement the web portion of their Chinese-
learning program. But the problem was, they want-
ed us to follow their curriculum exactly. You know,
15-minute exercises after school where all the stu-
dents can get together.”
For weeks, Xie remembers, he and members of
the team argued over whether the company was
worth saving if they had to start working on typical
education software.
“Some people had the thought that, ‘No, this is
not core to our values.’ What we wanted to do was
make a community of Chinese-language learners,
not a rigid learning tool. What we wanted was a
place for hobbyists and for people who just liked
the culture and the language to get together. And
that was our goal. And if we do this, we’re kind of
selling out.” Pangea was put on indefinite hold.
The problem is not just that designing good
education games is difficult, but that the potential
audience is fragmented and hard to reach. The chal-
lenges that Xie and Yang faced are familiar and sur-
mountable given enough resources, but “the fund-
ing question is just difficult and confusing,” Puru-
shotma admitted. “Game publishers don’t want to
deal with you, and education people don’t know
how to deal with you. So, a bigger challenge than
design is often just figuring out how to work in an
ecosystem that [provides] no support.”
“It’s something that keeps me up at night, and it’s
something I want to go back to,” Xie explained. “I
think it’s the same with Yang. When we were put-
ting this project on hiatus, we agreed that both of us
will be thinking about the project—and should one
of us start the project, we will both start it together.”
In the meantime, Xie has immersed himself in
business and finance: two languages he wants to
know before he returns to Pangea.
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 77
 by ED FRIES
ascii art by JUSTIN RUSSO

THE EYE OF
THE BEHOLDER
The creator of Halo 2600
finds beauty in constraint
78 — Kill Screen Magazine
As a programmer I’ve always felt there is a connection between po-
etry and programming. Both try to express an idea concisely within
a constrained environment. Consider the humble haiku. If I said to
you, “I played Donkey Kong,” you’d probably say, “So what?” But if
I say it within the constrained system of the haiku, you might get
something like this:

Monkey throws barrels

He has taken Princess Peach
For love, I must climb

The meaning is the same, and yet the act of expressing that meaning
within the five/seven/five-syllable constraint creates an interest—or,
dare I say, a beauty—that didn’t exist in the unconstrained statement.
Why is that?
Other poetic forms add further constraint. Consider one of
Shakespeare’s favorite forms: the sonnet. Now we have limits on
the number of syllables, the meter (the beats in the words), and the
rhyme! A classic sonnet is three sets of four lines in iambic pentam-
eter (every other syllable must be a beat, and there are five beats per
line). The first and third lines in each set rhyme, as do the second
and fourth. The sonnet ends with two final lines that rhyme. Here’s
an example that follows most of these constraints:

“That Lake”
What secrets does that lake contain
Beneath its dark and murky waves?
What ancient warriors wracked in pain
Still twist in sunken muddy graves?

Within its depths what creatures swim

Unaltered since the early days?
Upon its floor what scuttling grim
Crustaceans wend their drunken ways?

Your eyes, like placid pools of ink

Disguise the fires burning deep.
Arise! Come to the surface. Drink
The air and put the past to sleep.

What secrets does that lake contain

Beneath the ripples of your brain?

The author has to pick words that approximate the intended meaning
while still conforming to the rules of the form. But by working with-
in that constraint, the solution to the puzzle has at least the potential
to be more than a simple expression of an idea. First, it takes a certain

Issue 2, Volume 1 — 79
cleverness to meet the constraints of the system,
and that is appreciated by the audience. But the
constraints can also force the author to leave space
for interpretation that might not otherwise exist.
What was that poem about, anyway? A lake? A girl?
Evolution? Consciousness?
Sometimes, just by looking for solutions to the
rules (such as finding matching rhymes or proper
meter), the author is led down paths they did not
expect, and the poem takes on a life of its own.
Sometimes the poet may feel that they are not the
creator at all, but just along for the ride!
Likewise, all programming involves expressing
ideas within a system of rigorous constraints. The
programming language dictates a syntax that must
be followed. With poetry, I can bend the rules a bit;
perhaps fudge the meter to use a word I like, or use
a half-rhyme—but not with a program. It either
compiles and executes, or it does not. In addition,
the programmer must live within the constraints of
the machine. There is only so much memory; only
so much time before the next frame must be drawn
on the screen.
So the programmer finds themselves in a similar
situation as the poet, trying to live within the con-
straints of the system while trying to accomplish
something with their art. And, like the poet, the very
act of living within the constraints may lead program-
When working within such an incredibly
constrained system, elegance is no longer
optional. It is required.
80 — Kill Screen Magazine
mers to places they did not anticipate or intend.
The Atari 2600, released in 1977, was the first
mass-market videogame console. The machine
gives the programmer a mere 128 bytes of random
access memory; by comparison, an Xbox 360 has
4 million times more memory. The entire screen is
drawn using only five bytes: two-and-a-half for the
playfield, two for the two sprites, and a few miscel-
laneous bits for the missiles and “ball.” The program
must fit in 4,096 bytes of read-only memory on a
cartridge. (A 360 disk holds 2 million times more).
Yet the screen has an effective resolution of
40x192 for the playfield and 160x192 for the sprites.
How? By demanding that the programmer draw
the screen one horizontal scan line at a time. By
changing the values of the five bytes that represent
various forms of pixels (as well as a few others that
control properties such as color), on a line-by-line ba-
sis, any number of interesting displays can be created.
Which is not to say that it is easy. The Atari 2600
has a very slow microprocessor. In the time that it
takes for the electron beam to draw one horizontal
scan line and return to the beginning of the next
line, there is only time for 76 machine cycles on the
Atari processor. The simplest instructions take a
minimum of two cycles, and advanced commands
can take five or more. So, in the end, the program-
mer can only do about 20 things, such as loading
 a value from memory, or storing a value into one of the display reg-
isters, per line. Think of it as the programming equivalent of iambic
pentameter.
Given all of that, you hopefully are beginning to realize that to do
anything at all interesting on the Atari 2600 requires some incredible
programming magic. The kernels (or core display drawing routines)
of any of the Atari 2600 games you’ve ever played are only possible
through the use of some outrageous feats of coding.
Take the original Combat cartridge that shipped with the 2600.
The programmers, Joe Decuir and Larry Wagner, were trying to
live within their allocated 76 cycles per line, but they had a lot
of work to do. They had to draw the maze that the tanks navigate
through. They had to draw the sprites for both of the tanks. By the
time they had done those things, they had very few cycles left, and
yet they had still more work to do. They had to draw a bullet for
each of the tanks. A reasonable piece of 6502 assembly code for that
would look something like this:

LDA #0 ; 2 this number is the cycle count for this

instruction

CPY yPosBullet1 ; 3 compare the current scan line (held in the

Y register) to the y position of the bullet

BNE NoM0 ; 2(3) branch takes 2 or 3 cycles depending on

whether the values matched or not

LDA #2 ; 2 need to set second bit to turn on bullet

NoM0

STA ENAM0 ; 3 turn on (or off) the bullet

LDA #0 ; 2 now repeat for the second bullet

CPY yPosBullet2 ; 3
BNE NoM1 ; 2(3)
LDA #2 ; 2
NoM1
STA ENAM1 ; 3 turn on (or off) the bullet

That’s a total of 24 to 26 cycles, depending on the situation, and 20

bytes of code. But the programmers didn’t have 26 cycles. That would
use up a third of all the time they get to do all the work on the line.
So they did something crazy:

Issue 2, Volume 1 — 81
LDX #ENAM1 ; 2 load X with the address of the ENAM1
control register

TXS ; 2 point the stack at ENAM1 (?!)

CPY yPosBullet2 ; 3 CPY will set or clear the Z flag

PHP ; 3 Push the processor flags onto the stack. The

Z flag is the second bit. (!)

CPY yPosBullet1 ; 3 Stack is now pointing at ENAM0 so just

repeat
PHP ; 3

On the 6502, the stack lives in the first

256 bytes of memory. It typically starts
at the top (memory location 255) and grows
down toward zero. But in kernels there is
rarely time to use the stack at all. Just
to call and then immediately return from
a subroutine would use up twelve precious
cycles. So the programmer behind this code
thought to use the stack for something
else. The registers that control the state
of the missiles also live in the first 256
bytes of memory. He pointed the stack at
the second of those registers (that’s the
first two instructions above). Then he does
a CPY instruction that compares the Y
register (which is holding the current scan
line) to the y position of the missile. If
they match, the Z flag (which stands for
“zero,” or in this case “equal”) in the
processor will be set.
Now, the final bit of magic: He uses the
PHP (PusH Processor flags) instruction.
This instruction is meant as a way to save
and load all the flags of the processor—for
example, to preserve them when handling an
interrupt. But this programmer knows that
the Z flag is the second bit of the flag word
that will be pushed on the stack, and that
just happens to be the bit we need to set
to turn on (or off) the first missile. As
an added benefit, since this is not just a
simple store to the location but also a
push onto the stack, the stack pointer will
be decremented and will now point to a new
memory location: the register that controls
the other missile. So we can simply compare
and push again to turn on or off the second
missile.
82 — Kill Screen Magazine
The solution used only 16 cycles and nine bytes of code! This does
the same thing, but in much less space and time. It also always takes
the same amount of time to execute (16 cycles), which can be impor-
tant when you’re trying to keep track of the electron beam.
(If you are a programmer, see the sidebar for a short explanation
of what’s going on.)
In writing my own game for the 2600, I find myself bombarded by
beautiful code such as this every day, much more than in the regular
programming I do. When working within such an incredibly con-
strained system, elegance is no longer optional. It is required.
But what is elegance? Maybe constraint creates the possibility for
perfection; and as humans, we perceive perfection as a form of beau-
ty? The solution I gave above for drawing bullets on the 2600 screen
is not just a good solution; it is the best possible solution. I guarantee
it. There is no smaller and faster way to do it.
Does this underlying beauty show through in some way to the end
user? I don’t know. But I do know that constraint can lead the author
in unexpected directions, resulting in solutions that even the creator
did not expect. If you could somehow measure the variety in the first
100 games published on the Atari 2600, and compare it to the same
measure of the most recent 100 games published for modern con-
soles, the 2600 would win, hands down.
Perhaps the “sameness” that we feel from games today derives, at
least in some small part, directly from the power, ease, and freedom
we enjoy?
Modern consoles are wonderful things, but without constraints,
perhaps some of the poetry is lost.

Issue 2, Volume 1 — 83
 by CHRIS DAHLEN
illustration by DENNIS CHOW

MAZED AND
CONFUSED
The art of the puzzle

Here’s the first thing you learn about a really great
puzzle: You can’t solve it with brute force.
Sure, you’ll try. Let’s say you’re playing a classic
adventure by Infocom, or LucasArts. You try every
verb, click on every pixel. If the game gives you ob-
jects to carry, you take them out one-by-one and
use them on everything in sight, hoping that the
process of elimination will get you the answer to
whatever problem you’re facing—a door that won’t
open, a river you can’t cross, a monster who’s just
standing in your way.
And then suddenly you think of an answer. The
answer is clever. It makes sense, but it’s not logical,
and it entails doing something you’ve never done
in the game before; that’s why you didn’t think of it
sooner. But you make a creative leap and try your
idea, and wow, damn, it works!
You have to be smart to play adventure games,

84 — Kill Screen Magazine

the brainteaser-based interactive stories that began
with Willie Crowther and Don Woods’ Colossal
Cave Adventure, the early works of Scott Adams,
and the Infocom all-text classics; moved into full-
color graphics at Sierra Online and LucasArts;
and still come back once in a while via studios like
Wadjet Eye Games or Amanita Design. It’s easy to
see why the genre took a backseat to shooters and
hack-and-slashers: When you’re stuck on a puzzle,
there’s almost nothing else you can do in the game
except sit there and sweat out the answer, or cheat
and get it from a website. But they’re satisfying in a
way that few games are, because finding those solu-
tions gives you such a pure, epiphanic braingasm.
And so it’s tempting to ask whether these are
educational games. After all, the holy grail of learn-
ing games is a game that can teach, not with drills
and exercises, but through the gameplay itself. Do
puzzle games count?
That depends on what you think they teach. Set
aside the fact that text adventures promote literacy,
tough puzzles teach problem-solving and persever-
ance, and using your brain is better than neglect-
ing it. While puzzles and riddles have long been a
yardstick of one’s mental chops, they are also ab-
surd, obtuse, and wracked with the eccentricities
of whoever made them. At their worst, they’re just
a pastime for the kind of people who join Mensa.
And yet a really good puzzle offers such a unique
exercise, and such a pure intellectual reward, that
you have to believe it has value—that if more kids
played Zork or the Monkey Island titles, they would
laugh their way past their friends who play shoot-
ers, maybe all the way to MIT.
Puzzles are popular across all genres of games.
Even God of War, where you study the mythologi-
cal monsters by ripping them apart, stands out for
its puzzle design. But not all puzzles are the same.
Take Sudoku: Every square on the grid will have
a number from one to nine, and you just need to
place them. A computer could do it for you, in sec-
onds. The puzzles in action games and platformers
are also fairly logical, from the levers and switches
of Zelda, to experimental puzzle-platformers like
Braid. While the games are clever, their puzzles are
dictated by what you can do with a joystick or a
mouse. Says game designer, teacher, and Infocom
vet Brian Moriarty, “When you’re dealing with me-
chanical, user-interface problems, things like World
of Goo or Braid, those are mechanical hand-eye
coordination puzzles, and there’s only so much you
can do with that. You’re limited visually and spa-
tially to the UI.”
Adventure-game puzzles aren’t so simple: You
can’t see the edge of the solution space. You’re ex-
pected to bring some knowledge to a situation that
will help you solve it. Maybe it’s a knowledge of the
properties of metal—for example, that if you freeze
a lock, it becomes brittle and easy to break. If you
see a gloomy boatman on a river and you have even
a comic-book-level knowledge of mythology, you’ll
know you should give him a coin. The puzzles in
alternate reality games count on mobs of players
working together, and so they demand research and
esoteric knowledge. In all these cases, you have to
know something about the real world in order to
find the answer.
The puzzles in adventure games have plenty of
antecedents—mystery novels, math puzzles, lat-
eral-thinking puzzles. In his study of interactive
fiction, Twisty Little Passages, Nick Montfort com-
pares them to the riddle, a word that “comes from
the Anglo-Saxon ‘raedan’—to advise, guide, or ex-
plain; hence, a riddle serves to teach by offering a
new way of seeing.” Their history makes them rich-
er. Moriarty cites a maxim from Chris Crawford:
“Interesting people make interesting games. And
if all you know is video games, you’re not very in-
teresting. The Infocom people were very well-read.
… These guys were deeply immersed in all kinds of
popular and classic culture, and it came through in
the games.”
That’s how you get a game like Moriarty’s mas-
terpiece, the text adventure Trinity, which relives
the story of the nuclear age by taking the player to
the Trinity test site, the Bikini Atoll, and Nagasaki,
Japan, minutes before the bomb drops. But between
these events, you also wander through a Lewis Car-
roll-esque fantasy world where myths, riddles, and
mathematical concepts come to life.
Published in 1986, Trinity is a masterpiece of the
genre. It’s rational yet insane, surreal yet logical. In
some of the puzzles, you’re using tools to operate
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 85
machines; in others, you’re sailing across a lawn in
a pram with an umbrella as a sail. It takes creative
thinking and it expects you to know U.S. history—
and if you don’t, you could always crack a book and
read up on it.
To make a puzzle about the world at large, you have
to make assumptions about who your players are
and what they know. Hugh Stephenson, the cross-
word editor of the Guardian, related a story to me.
“I was talking quite a long time ago to one of our
leading setters, and I said, ‘What do you regard as
the rules?’ ‘There aren’t any rules; it’s just, do you
think that your audience is likely to understand
what you’re talking about.’”
The Guardian is famous for its cryptic cross-
words, a variant that’s popular mostly in Britain.
In a cryptic, every clue includes a word puzzle—an
anagram, a reversal, a homophone, and so on. The
clue “I’m one involved with cost (9)” tells you to
combine “I’m one” with “cost,” and if you rearrange
the letters you get “economist.” In the classic clue,
“We’ll get excited with Ring seat (10),” the capital-
ized “Ring” tips you off to think about Wagner, and
the rest of the clue may lead you to combine “We”
with the “Ring seat” to form a 10-letter anagram:
“WAGNERITES.”
Certain words signal what you’re supposed to do
to solve the puzzle. For example, the word “hides”
implies that one word contains another. The Cham-
bers Crossword Dictionary has pages of indicator
words to watch out for, but the lists will never be
complete. While cryptic crosswords have conven-
tions, they don’t have a strict set of rules—and every
time anyone’s tried to draft some, they haven’t stuck.
Cryptic crosswords also include literary or geo-
graphical references that you’re most likely to get if
you’re, well, the sort of person who reads the Guard-
ian. “The UK, middle-class, upmarket newspaper
reading class is much more homogeneous than it
would be in the States,” says Stephenson. “[The set-
How many golf balls would
fit in a school bus?
86 — Kill Screen Magazine
ters] know that people solving crosswords in the
Guardian will not have the same mental images in
their minds as people who are solving cryptic cross-
words in a tabloid newspaper. The setters then play
with the notions which a word will conjure up in
their known audience’s mind. If you use the word
‘mercury’ in a clue, to a Guardian reader that could
be a quicksilver metal, or it could be a Greek god,
or it could be a messenger of the gods, or it could be
the symbol for the medical profession. Just by using
the word ‘mercury’ the setter knows that he’s play-
ing with all these ideas that are likely to come up …
and then he can mislead them by taking them off
down the wrong track or the right track.”
Like adventure games, cryptic crosswords trust
you to survive without black-and-white guide-
lines. You may be stumped because you just don’t
know the name of some tiny English village, or you
haven’t skimmed the Old Testament in a while, or
simply because your brain couldn’t twist itself in the
shape the setter expected. But you also get a chance
to adapt, and to surprise yourself.
Can you learn anything by solving the cryptic?
I put it to Stephenson, and he suggests, “It helps
you deconstruct language. Whether in a way that’s
helpful in any other subsequent field, I don’t know.”
He also adds, dryly, that “doing mind games of this
sort and smoking cigarettes both keep Alzheimer’s
at bay.”
It’s easy, several hours into clawing at your temples
over a really hard puzzle, to wonder if you’ll ever
solve it. Your faith in yourself is on the line: Do you
really believe you can figure this out? Will 10 more
hours make a difference? Or do you decide you’ll
never get it—that your brain just doesn’t do this
kind of leap, that you missed the wrong day of class,
and you’re just never going to get it, so you might as
well hit GameFAQs and get the answer?
This is also when you start to feel the boot-on-
the-neck power the game maker holds over you.
In the real world, you could solve almost any of
these problems with a trip to Home Depot, a hun-
dred bucks, or a shotgun. But you’re not in the real
world: You’re in an adventure game, and the creator
wants you to do something very specific that you
can’t figure out.
Moriarty describes Trinity as a conversation be-
tween himself and the player. (The disembodied
voice that talks to you in the game? That’s him, egg-
ing you on.) As the creator, he uses his power to see
how far he can push you—for example, in a puzzle
where you’re forced to kill a helpless creature. “At
the time I was very interested in seeing what I could
make people do,” recalls Moriarty. “The skink prob-
lem is often cited in this regard, the puzzle where
you have to crush the skink in your hand. Can we
make people do unpleasant things in order to win a
puzzle? And how does that make you feel?”
You could argue that this puzzle pits you against
a hostile mind. But that’s better than an infuriating
one. As Erik Wolpaw of Old Man Murray wrote in
his essay, “Death of Adventure Games,” the genre
fell off the radar at the turn of the century because it
resorted to more and more ridiculous puzzles. And
when I read his classic takedown of Gabriel Knight
3, I’m not struck by his hate for the game as much as
his anger at creator Jane Jensen and her crazy ideas
about making a fake moustache out of cat fur and
syrup. He’s not struggling with a puzzle; he’s raging
at a live human being who abused her power.
Take another example: the legendary interview
questions that consultancies and major tech firms
ask as a way to test how you think. You’re in your
best interview clothes, maybe in your senior year
of college, and you’re sitting in front of someone
who holds the keys to your career. And the person
conducting the interview, the one you’re here to
wow, leans forward and asks: “How many golf balls
would fit in a school bus?”
Here’s the answer you want to give: whatever
they want to hear. They have the power over you,
and they don’t even owe you an answer. (Usually,
like in the school-bus problem, there isn’t one.) In
his How Would You Move Mt. Fuji?: Microsoft’s Cult
of the Puzzle, William Poundstone says that the
puzzle interview came into vogue as a way to test
someone’s intelligence without using the problem-
atic IQ test. But to many, it came off as a “fraternity
initiation” or a hazing rite that had nothing to do
with how you’d do your job.
The people who create puzzles have power over
you. You can get angry about it, but say you de-
cide to play along—and then suddenly you figure
out the solution. And then you start to see how the
relationship works: You’re the student, the creator
of the game is the teacher, and with your teacher’s
help, you’ve proven yourself. You’re in the club. You
get it. And “getting it”—learning to adapt, to suss
out what’s expected of you, and never to give up un-
til you’re done—is one of the most important les-
sons you can learn.
This spring, my kid and I went to the Museum of
Science in Boston—a place that’s probably more
brain-expanding than any game that I could put in
front of him, although the hours we spent beating
Amanita’s Machinarium were a good bonding expe-
rience. We walked through the Museum’s butterfly
garden, letting rare specimens land on our clothes.
A Blue Morpho was hiding in the trees, but we were
patient, and we found it.
On our way through the garden, we noticed there
were ant traps at the bottom of the moth cages. In
the next room, we checked out some amphibians.
We found a poisonous frog from the Amazon, and
I read off the placard that they make their poison
using chemicals digested from ants.
“That’s why they have ant traps in the other
room,” my kid suggested. “Because they don’t want
the frog to eat any ants and make any poison.”
Hey, that makes sense! The traps and the frogs
are related; they both deal with ants. If you want
to keep the frog from being poisonous, you lay out
the ant traps. And if you ever needed a poisonous
frog—and hey, who knows—you could just hide the
traps and let the ants stream into the frog cage, to
their doom. I can picture it now, a little animation
running between the hotspots on the screen.
Except, wait: This is something you would never
do. This is adventure-game thinking. It’s an esoteric
solution to a problem that will never come up. It
won’t help my kid survive the Amazon. It might not
even get him a gig at Google. There’s only one place
this could lead: He’s learning to make puzzles.
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 87
 by BEN FRITZ
photography by FOLKERT GORTER
THE SHADOW AND
THE SORROW
Finishing Shadow of the Colossus teaches
us why we should never have started
Videogames have mastered letting us experience
evil, but not the tragedy borne from it.
Grand Theft Auto III defined the open world
genre in part by giving players free reign to cause
total mayhem, and every RPG worth its experience
points lets players live their virtual lives on the far
end of the morality scale as a Han-Solo-without-
the-heart-of-gold lout. But as much as the backs
of boxes insist to us that these expansive options
and sophisticated morality systems matter, they
never fundamentally alter the character and narra-
tive arcs. Townsfolk may recoil in fear at the sight
of Red Dead Redemption’s John Marston if he kills
more strangers than he helps, but his wife and son
love him all the same when they’re reunited. Simi-
larly selfish behavior in titles made by RPG master
BioWare gets you some different missions, team-
mate loyalties, and cutscenes. But out of technical
necessity if nothing else, the main story points and
thus the thematic underpinnings remain constant.
The beauty of a story that’s written with an evil
protagonist in mind is that it allows for a fitting
conclusion. Playing a typical free-choice game as a
badass is akin to stopping Scarface after the second
act. What about the third act? The moment of trag-
edy—captured in everything from Icarus (not the
Kid) to Richard III to Lolita to Goodfellas, when the
glory turns to disaster, self-deception is no longer
tenable, and immoral actions lead to long-delayed
88 — Kill Screen Magazine
consequences—is missing. The only way for a char-
acter to reap what he or she has sown is if it’s built
into the narrative from the beginning. In other
words, if there’s no choice at all.
Tragedy is ultimately about humility, the realiza-
tion that because people have limits, and actions
have repercussions, not all achievements are worth
getting. If videogames share a common ideology,
it’s the opposite of humility: hubris. Ultimately
you can, you should, and you must strive for ev-
ery achievement or trophy. No matter how much
choice is built into a videogames, the narrative
always rewards players for reaching an end state,
however they got there.
Only one videogames that I have played com-
pletely rejects that notion: Shadow of the Colossus.
The 2005 cult favorite (soon to be re-released for
the PlayStation 3) from a Fumito Ueda-led Sony
Japan team is one long drive toward the realization
that every action you have taken since pressing start
has led to your downfall.
As in any great tragedy, protagonist Wander
starts off with great hope, achieves ever-escalating
moments of phony glory, and then sees his entire
world crash around him due to the consequences
of his actions. Once I finished the game, it was so
clear: What kind of fool would believe a disembod-
ied voice’s promise that if you engage in wanton acts
of assassination, your true love will come back to
life without a catch or further price to pay?
Me, of course, and probably many others. In
hindsight, the first clue that all is not as it should be
comes the moment that young protagonist Wander
leaves the castle hub to start his first mission. This
land is eerily silent. And empty. There are no under-
powered anonymous enemies on which to practice
my skills with the sword and crossbow. No land-
marks to guide me on my way. There was no music
and virtually no sound save for the wind rushing
by and the galloping hoofs of Wander’s steed Agro.
I immediately sense that this world is desolate
and Wander doesn’t belong in it, a feeling enhanced
by the way Shadow evokes its desolate rural land-
scape. It’s not photorealistic or hyperstylized. It’s
impressionistic, as if the PlayStation 2 is render-
ing its pixels in broad brushstrokes. Like a Monet
painting, Shadow conveys mood instead of details.
The overwhelming feeling within the first few min-
utes is that of loneliness, and sadness. The muted
brushstrokes of grass, sand, trees, and aging struc-
tures make clear that if there was ever happiness in
this land, it was eons ago.
That experience of silent contemplation is bro-
ken only by the colossi: Majestic but lethal creatures
made of stone that tower as high as hundreds of feet
above Wander and can crush him with a stomp of
the foot or a swing of the club. Kow Otani’s score
swells at the sight of them, whether they stand on
two feet or four, fly, swim, or slither through the
sand. The experience of climbing the fur and rocks on
their torsos to reach a vulnerable point is truly thrill-
ing, a feeling enhanced by the rush of wind or water as
the creature struggles to throw Wander off. I slay one
colossus after another and enjoy that greatest of video-
games emotions: Empowerment. Wander is small and
they are large, and yet I am victorious.
But something is off. The colossi don’t come
after Wander or even attack him on sight. To get
their attention in most cases, he must harass them
with an arrow or at least a whistle. And the process
of killing them is neither as clean as your typical
hack-and-slash nor as realistic as a military shooter.
When Wander reaches a weak point on the colos-
sus, the camera zooms in as Wander stabs! stabs!
stabs! and blood spurts everywhere, as if from a
slashed carotid artery. That doesn’t make me feel
90 — Kill Screen Magazine
like a hero; it makes me feel like a murderer.
Once they die, the colossi fall to the ground in
slow motion. While I want to celebrate a victory,
I’m confronted with music that doesn’t fit a trium-
phant mood. The bombastic score suddenly be-
comes somber, fast-paced violins and trumpets are
replaced by an organ, a chanting choir, and sorrow-
ful strings as if … well … as if at a funeral.
Some of these creatures are violent once pro-
voked, but understandably so. From their perspec-
tive, Wander is a young punk looking for trouble,
a serial killer, or maybe even a deluded sociopath
who believes he’s carrying out the will of a God.
But despite Wander’s unprovoked violence,
many colossi are graceful pacifists whose only de-
fensive posture is to try to shake off the creature
that attacked it. Like the enormous eel that Wander
has to grab onto and methodically climb up as it
dives from surface to depths and back again in a
desperate attempt to shake him off. When it dies, it
sinks to the bottom of the water, as limp as a corpse
thrown overboard. Then there’s the enormous crea-
ture that inflates itself and flies over a desert to a
lush string theme. To bring it down, Wander shoots
his arrow to deflate it so that he can climb on its
back and stab the life out of it, until it pathetically
sinks like a deflated hot air balloon.
As one colossus after another falls, it’s like a sym-
phony of torture and pain. After each death, a black
spirit invades Wander’s body, infecting him with
the evil, or maybe the sorrow, of what he has done.
Morally speaking, redemption seems further
away with each victory. I have caused much death
and gotten none of the usual power-ups games
throw our way to show us we’re on the right path
and enhance the challenge. In fact, before he takes
on the final colossus, Wander watches his horse
Agro, his only friend in the otherwise bitter world,
plummet to her presumed death. This isn’t a game
that rewards you for progress; it makes you sacrifice
in order to continue.
By daring to punish the player through no fault
of his or her own—by continuing to embed trag-
edy in the narrative, in other words—Ueda was also
able to create a mood of melancholy for the battle
against the final colossus, a stationary giant whose
body Wander must charge and then scale, as if it’s a
hilltop in Call of Duty. The mood is ominous as grey
clouds linger overhead and music that would befit
a death march plays. The process of bringing down
the final boss in a climactic moment of misery can
easily take half an hour—not because it requires
pitch perfect skills and reflexes, but simply because
it’s a methodical puzzle. By the end, my thought
wasn’t so much “Wow, I won!” as “It’s finally over.”
But once the final deed is done, Shadow doesn’t
give the player the reward that I still believed, how-
ever irrationally, that I deserved. Instead, the game
confronts the player: You have done wrong and
now you must pay. The punishment is what every
grieving loved one has wished on a murderer: to
experience the pain he caused.
In a moment that only interactive media could
render so effectively, the player becomes a colossus.
We don’t merely see the world from the giant crea-
ture’s perspective, but feel what it’s like to engage in
a futile battle against humans who, for their own
purposes, want it dead. If hell is feeling the pain of
those you’ve mistreated, then the worst fate for a
videogames player is to be incapable of winning.
I try to stop my tormenters with slow but power-
ful strikes of my fists and feet, but it’s ultimately no
use. All the game lets the player-as-colossus do is
fruitlessly fight—to experience, from the other end,
each and every battle that Wander has “won.”
I should have known; I must have known that
this was not only what I deserved, but where I
was inevitably heading. But just as all evil figures
convince themselves that their cause is noble and
their means are justified, I thought that “winning” the
game would somehow make right all that I had done.
It’s a humbling moment when you accept that the
path you felt you had to follow led to shame and
disaster. But life has a way of doing that. Some-
times, actions have no good consequences. Starting
with the best of intentions doesn’t necessarily make
your actions noble. As hard of a lesson as it is for
a videogames player to accept, sometimes winning
isn’t worth it.
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 91
 by ZACK HANDLEN
illustration by EÓIN BURKE
THE HELP LINE
A boy, a phone, a problem
When I make the call, I’m in my parents’ bed-
room. This isn’t a conscious choice on my part; it’s
not like I’m trying some form of rebellion, even
though I know I’ll get in trouble if they catch me.
I make the call in their bedroom because it’s the
only place in the house I’m ensured at least a few
moments of privacy. Dad’s at work. Mom’s in the
garden outside. It’s mid-summer, sometime late
July, and she wants me to mow the lawn later be-
cause there’s supposed to be rain that weekend.
I’ll get to it eventually, swear to God, but there are
more important matters to be dealt with first.
Also, my parents have a television in their room,
and that’s where we keep the Nintendo. I make
the call with the Nintendo paused, the pixilated
form of Judge Doom leering out at me from the
TV screen. My heart is racing, now. It’s a rotary
phone, and I’ve got the Nintendo Power magazine
open to the back. The pages are slick, the control-
ler in my head is caked with sweat, the dial on the
phone, which is pale-cream and heavy like betray-
al ought to be, slips under my fingers. Somebody
shouts outside—the dog; Mom’s calling the dog.
It’s too hot.
There are some things you need to understand
here. First is, I never, ever break the rules. Ever.
I’m the kind of kid who’s home on time, who does
his homework, gets good grades, and goes where
he’s supposed to. If there’s a line, I don’t toe it,
because toeing it requires you to be within foot-
reach; thank you all the same, but I’d rather give
myself the spare yard’s distance, just to be on the
safe side. I take no pride in this. In fact, I’m a little
ashamed of it. I read a lot, and in all the books I
read, nobody ever has a hero whose gift is for al-
ways remembering to turn the lights off, put down
the toilet seat, and keep it quiet after 10 o’clock
because hey, some people are trying to sleep some-
where. I don’t obey because I believe. I obey be-
cause I’m a coward. I obey for the same reason I
read instruction books: because there are rules
and they hold the world together, and if you stick
with the rules, you’ll win out in the end.
The other thing you need to know—as I push
down on the phone’s hang-up button, having di-
aled 6 when I meant 3 for the fourth time in a
row—is that this game is driving me insane. I love
my Nintendo. It was hard-won (there were discus-
sions involved, Christmas presents sacrificed),
but I’ve never regretted it, not even when I get a
bad game. And trust me, I’ve gotten bad games.
I snagged LJN’s The Uncanny X-Men because it
had comic-book characters in it, and I wanted to
chuck the cartridge out a window after five min-
utes. I put down money for Fester’s Quest, because
my beloved Nintendo Power said it was a classic
in the making, and I never had the patience to get
past the first boss. It didn’t matter. I accepted that
bad games were just part of the cost of the system.
It was worth it for the good ones, right? For the
Marios and the Zeldas and the Tetrises and the Fi-
nal Fantasies and so on.
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 93
 “Hello, my name is Todd, Nintendo Power
Captain Level Three, how can I help you?”
But this game, it had gotten to a point where I
had no idea if it was good or bad, and I didn’t even
care. I just wanted it to be over. It was another LJN
game, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and OK, it was
probably terrible. I realize that now, looking back.
Licensed games almost always suck; and, y’know,
LJN. But Who Framed Roger Rabbit was clever in
its suckage, with a weird adventure flavor, puzzles,
and you could punch passers-by and they’d stop
talking to you. I liked that level of interactivity.
Besides, I’d made it to the last boss. Which is the
last thing you need to know: I hardly ever beat
games. I was an okay player, but I had zero self-
confidence, and I got distracted easily. But whatev-
er the reason, be it my love for the movie or some
heretofore undiscovered stubborn streak, I had
decided I was going to beat this game. This game, I
would finish. So, after God only knows how many
hours, how many scribbled passwords, how much
swearing, I was at the end. The two-fisted hero Ed-
die Valiant was ready to save Roger and his lady
love from the villainous Judge Doom. And I just.
Couldn’t. Win.
I finally get the number right. It’s a 900 num-
ber, which is probably why I’m still shaking at this
point. Remember what this was like? Remember
before the Internet, before FAQs—when if you
couldn’t figure out how to get the next body piece
in Castlevania II, you had to plunk down for a
game guide; or else you were stuck like I was stuck,
dialing a number I wasn’t supposed to call to beg
help from some stranger?
“Hello, Nintendo Power Game Assistance Hotline.
Thanks for calling! Are you ready for more power?”
“Yeah, I—”
94 — Kill Screen Magazine
“All our operators are currently busy. Please
stay on the line.”
I do. I listen to the Mario theme, and I stare
at the ad in the magazine. $2.00 the first minute,
$0.99 each additional minute. Was this how it
worked? Were they just going to leave me here in
limbo, paused, waiting, stuck, a sinkhole of debt
forming under my feet that would inevitably drive
my parents to first sell my beloved NES, then sell
my books, then start checking the markets for the
sell-through value of an 11-year-old lung? Just
hang up, you moron. Hang up, it’s not too late,
you can go confess everything and face the pun-
ishment like a man and not risk everything over
some stupid game that you’re never going to beat
anyway. Now I was hearing an ad about Video
Camp Awesome and the words didn’t make any
sense. I was gonna hang up. I was gonna do it, any
second now.
“Hello, my name is Todd, Nintendo Power Cap-
tain Level Three, how can I help you?”
Oh God, oh thank God thank God, they gave
me somebody with military experience. “Hi!”
Which comes out halfway between chipper and
the sound my friend Steve made when he belched
and said “FUCK” at the same time. So, I do a sec-
ond take. “Hi,” I mutter, hoping to convey my des-
perate need for help, my deep shame at betraying
everyone I’ve ever known and loved, and my not
really caring what happens, because hey, ’it’s just a
game and stuff. “I’m … ” Do I really want this guy
to know my name? Maybe they keep tabs. Maybe
they’re tracing the call even now. “Yeah.”
“Oookay,” Todd says. “What’s up?”
“Well,” I say. “I’m playing a game.”
 “Mm-hmm?”
“And it’s pretty tough.”
“Right. What’s it called?” (Thinking back now,
I wonder what it was like, being Todd, spend-
ing whole work days shuffling through cracking,
hushed voices, parceling out codes and twists to
desperate ears, coaxing information out of mouths
crushed by failure and vaguely pubescent self-
loathing. There must’ve been hundreds, thousands
like me. Did he have a script? Did he like his job?
Maybe he dreamed of the day that someone would
dial a wrong number and order a pizza, or ask him
what he was wearing.)
“whoframedrogerabbit.”
“What?”
“Who. Framed. Roger.” And then the last word,
like a spy revealing the final piece of the code
name that will get his partner killed. “Rabbit.”
“Right, gotcha, I’ll look it up.” Fingers typ-
ing, pages turned, maybe there’s an elf involved.
“Okay, so, where are you?”
“The end. The last boss.”
“Riiiiight.” More shuffling, typing. Swear to God,
the elf snickers. “That’s the Gloom guy, right?”
“No! It’s the Judge!”
“Right, Judge Gloom.”
“Doom.” I’m not yelling, I’m just whispering
with the hours of misery, frustration, and Game
Over screens I’ve accrued in the last week. Sure-
ly he hears it in my voice. I’m barely sane at this
point. I’ve lost so many times, retraced my steps,
worked out every mystery, strategized, consid-
ered, debated. I’ve gotten Doom’s health bar so
low I can hear victory music off in the distance,
tinny and unsatisfying but waiting. And then he’ll
punch once too often, and down I’ll go, and the
whole thing will start again. Seven times this has
happened. It takes about a half-hour or more each
time. At first I was wildly optimistic, then cau-
tiously upbeat, then clinging to some small hope,
because they wouldn’t make it impossible, right?
They wouldn’t go to all this trouble to make this
whole game and then have it be unbeatable. I was
just missing some piece. I just needed somebody to
tell me what to do next.
“Sure. Doom, that’s cool. Yeah, well … ” Did
he yawn? Surely he didn’t yawn. I’m practically
crying right now; doesn’t this guy realize that the
fates of a detective, his animated talking rabbit
friend, and that rabbit’s pneumatic wife, are all on
the line? “He’s tough, he really is.”
“Yeah. I’ve tried a bunch of times.”
“Did you get the custard pies?”
“Uh-huh.” I breathe easier. We’re getting to de-
tails now.
“Exploding cigars?”
“Full up.”
“Crowbars?”
“Yeah.” I’m slightly insulted now. What does he
think I am, some kind of a naïf? I put the time in. I
don’t screw around. Did he think I’d do this with-
out making sure all other options were exhausted?
“Yeah, I got all of it.”
“Good, good.” A chair creaks. “What you’re go-
ing to want to do, then, is to use everything you
got, and knock Doom out. It’ll take a while. He’s
really tough, and you have to be patient, but if you
stick with it, eventually he goes down. And then,
when he’s down, you go grab the Dip Cannon, and
you shoot him with it, and that’s it.”
But. “Isn’t there—”
“You’ll make it, kid, trust me. Just hang in there!”
“I already did that! I did that, I definitely did
that, I mean, I didn’t get to that point, but isn’t
there something? Isn’t there some trick I’m miss-
ing, some secret weapon that I haven’t found? Be-
cause it’s driving me crazy, and I just want to sleep
easy like I used to, I’m sick of this crummy game
and the crummy graphics and I all want to do is
bury it in the woods someplace but I’m so sure it’d
come back because I can’t beat it, I can’t beat it, I’m
trying hard as I can and I just can’t.”
I swear, that’s not crying I’m doing then. It’s this
elaborate sneeze, because I have a semi-serious al-
lergy to being a total goddamn loser.
“Whoa, kid. Wow. Calm down. It’s just … it’s
just a game, y’know?”
“No, it isn’t. It isn’t.” And maybe he’s right, but
I’m right, too. You have to win sometimes. When
you try this much and you work this hard, they’re
supposed to let you win, because it’s just a game.
That’s what games are for.
“All right, whatever. Just chill out, OK?”
“ … OK.”
Issue 2, Volume 1 — 95
 “Cool. Cool. Now, you keep at it. You’ll get there eventually. Just be patient.
OK?”
“ … OK.”
“Good, that’s what we like to hear. Nintendo Power is all about making
winners, and you’re a winner, right?”
“right”
“C’mon, I can barely hear you!”
“RIGHT.”
“Good, good.” I think I hear him wincing, and I’m glad. “That’s all I got,
kid. You have any more questions?”
I had plenty more questions, because this wasn’t what I wanted at all. But
I heard my mom saying something to a neighbor outside, and I checked
the clock on the nightstand and five minutes were already gone. I’d wasted
millions already. “No.”
“Would you like to renew your subscription to Nintendo Power?”
I’d like to burn every copy in the world and then dance on the ashes and
then force you to choke on them you stupid smug creep. “… No.”
“Thanks for calling the Nintendo Power Game Assistance Hotline. Have a
nice day.”
Click. Buzzzzzzzzz.
I put the phone back on the hook, like you put down a grenade you’re pretty
sure isn’t going to explode. I stare at the TV screen for a while. Eventually, I
un-pause the game, and I play the boss fight. And I die again. And again. And
again. I do everything Captain Creepazoid had suggested, and it doesn’t help,
but that’s not a surprise, because here’s what’s killing me: I’d already been do-
ing all of that. I knew you were supposed to knock him out; I knew about the
cannon; I’d risked everything and I’d gone behind the backs of the people who
clothed and fed and loved me, and what did I get? What I already knew.
Mom found out about the call a couple weeks later. I got yelled at some, but
that wasn’t the big deal. The big deal was, there were supposed to be people,
somewhere, and when you got in touch with those people, when you risked
everything just to get a few minutes of their time,
these were the people who could tell you what
Doesn’t this guy realize that the you’d been doing wrong. So what did it mean
when I put myself on the line—and there was
fates of a detective, his animated no answer? I mean, this isn’t some deep, linger-
talking rabbit friend, and that ing existential dread I’m getting at. Eventually, I
moved on with my life. But it’s just one of those
rabbit’s pneumatic wife, are all things you learn from videogames better than
on the line? from anyplace else: There can be a system and
there can be rules, and the challenge can be clear-
ly defined. And you can still fail.
I still haven’t beaten that game. I’d like to tell
you it’s because I grew up, moved on. But really,
it’s because I got tired of losing, and because I lost
the connectors for my NES. Also, Todd is a dick.
But you already knew that.

96 — Kill Screen Magazine

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