Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Indie horror games

Here's a handy list of independent horror games for PC and Mac.

I haven't played any of them, so can't vouch for 'em, but also means there's more for me to explore.

(thanks to Todd Bryant)

A haunted game

"Kill Screen" (Chris Carter, 2011) is a short story about a scary computer game. Nice tale.

But it's that podcast we recommend.  It's not a reading so much as audio theater.  Multiple voices, sound effects, and especially a cruel, nostalgic soundtrack make for a fine experience.

The gnawing, labyrinthine hunger out of time

What horrors lurk within Pacman? "It's like Kafka wrote a Lovecraft story", broods Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.  

It begins: "Pacman is the story of a man who wakes up one day to find he is nothing but a mouth."  Do read the whole thing.

Infocult does indeed want him to speak to Centipede.

(via Grant Potter on Twitter)

Looking back through Amnesia

The designers of Amnesia look back on its two-year career.  Good thoughts on piracy, planning, and audience.

Escape the real room

After years of playing escape the room games, someone finally built a live-action gameroom.  For a fee you can spend an hour in the Takagism Club, trying to get back out again.

Using a one-room apartment spanning 50 square meters, the 10 different games the club has developed have different scenarios, including one based on American horror movie Saw [!!] that requires two chained men to escape a bathroom. At 50 yuan ($7.90) per person for an one-hour game, it requires two to six participants. Huang offers real-life gamers a simple explanation of the rules and outlines their task. Groups who successfully solve the puzzles are rewarded with either cash or gifts.

(via MetaFilter)

WoW made him do it

World of Warcraft surfaced as a kind of character witness for the Anders Breivik trial.  More to the point, playing WoW served to dun the shooter's character.

Breivik, 33, already known to have a long history with the online role-playing game, was particularly absorbed by it between November 2010 and February 2011, when he played for an average of 6 hours and 50 minutes per day, according to prosecutors.

Why would this matter?  First, there's a semiotic reading about handles, which could indicate politics.

According to prosecutors, Breivik played Warcraft under the aliases "Andersnordic" and "Conservatism."

Nordic and conservative: you connect the dots.

Next is the classic games-warp-minds argument:

Norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen, who was brought in as an expert witness for Breivik's defense earlier this year, said in an interview with the British network ITN that Breivik was apparently unable to separate games from reality. "He does not seem to be very successful at distinguishing between the virtual reality of 'World of Warcraft' and other video games and reality," Eriksen said.

Let's see if these reasons hold up in court, and/or appear in other instances.

Death by gaming

Another East Asian man dies while playing computer games.

Besides the games-are-scary theme, there's a leftover corpse horror level:

A 23-year old League of Legends player named Chen Rong-yu was found dead, sitting upright in his chair, in an Internet cafe in Taiwan. According to the report from Sky News, the young man could have been dead for up to 9 hours before anyone took notice.

MSNBC brings these two levels together very neatly, in mordant Gothic fashion:

Chen Rong-yu, 23, checked into a cafe on Tuesday night, where he would spend the rest of his life.

Apparently the poor man died from heart failure, or blood clots, either caused by... sitting around too much.  I will wait for the next campaign against things-which-make-us-sit-down-too-long.

(thanks to Todd Bryant; image via League of Legends Wiki)

Video games and vandalism

Playing zombie-themed computer games led some youth to attack churches, according to one account.

Crimes included:

 throwing a brick through a stained glass window of the Haven of Grace Fellowship church on Highway 123 in Daleville.

[One police offer] said a note was also found attached to the brick, which read “Ow cn u kil the dead.” He said the note was signed “Zomby.” Police also found the word “Zomby” spray painted on two of the church’s doors.

Note the way the game fear builds on another:

“At first we thought it might be a gang because most gangs mark their territory with spray paint,” Williamson said. “But when the notes started coming out we thought it might be something else. They had been playing a video game that had a zombie in it.” [emphasis added]

(thanks to Ted Major)

Google polices the creepy streets

A company released a first-person shooter based on Google Streetview.  It was called Google Shoot View.

No one goes down, there’s no blood, no ones running for cover, but it’s you and your M4A1 picking off people, cars, even the homeless guy waiting for a hand out...

We spent a lot of time on Broadway even went down to Wall Street but couldn’t find any OWS protesters. 

Apparently the Poolers described the resulting map as

"immense, enormous, gigantic, tremendous, humongous, super-colossal, really really really f***ing big" 

But Google quickly yanked the disturbing thing.

Pool Online Creative Director Erwin Kleinjan told Business Insider Google had blocked the game's access to Google Maps data Monday evening, citing terms of service which include a clause prohibiting content that "promote(s) physical harm or injury against any group or individual."

StreetView has had an unsavory aura from the start.  Interesting to see someone consider that a platform upon which to build.

(thanks to Todd "Eagle-eye" Bryant)

Haunted Streetview

Haunted Streetview, the commercial? Mercedes-Benz has produced an interesting short game/video, Escape the Map, where you help a mysterious woman escape something that looks a lot like Google Earth.  

That world is scary in multiple ways.  Mapping systems come to life, blotting out the sky, even attacking you as you drive across a bridge.

Your ally's face, like those of others, is sometimes blurred out, a la Streetview.  Helpfully, she'll peel it off later.

The city is in flux.  It reorganizes around you, rezzing and derezzing:

One character has been... disaggregated, so a mini-minigame involves putting him back together:

Marie tells you that people see their earlier Streetview'd images, as doppelgangers.

Lots of recent cinema here: the Matrix, Inception.

(thanks to Todd Bryant!)