Author: Nicole Carpenter

Nicole is a freelance writer and reporter from Massachusetts. She has a cat named Puppy.
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Winter’s pretty low-poly world hides a dark story

Each person in Winter‘s world is given a choice right before the moment they’re to die—life or death. Time is frozen in the one second before the outcome. Winter creator Happy Volcano calls this place The One Second World. It’s where the game takes place, across a series of beautiful dioramas. More specifically, in Winter, players will look into a spot where a teenage girl is supposed to die (or not die). But it’s not exactly that spot. It’s recreation of what the girl remembers. It’s more of a shell. A really pretty shell. Dark stuff for the vibrant popup book–styled world The world is set on tiles, each…
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Architecture fans will want to watch out for Pavilion next week

Fourth-person puzzle game Pavilion will be released in two parts, the first of which comes to Windows, Mac, and Linux on September 22 through Steam and the Humble Store. The game will debut, however, on the NVIDIA Shield on September 15. Forgot what the fourth-person perspective was? That’s okay, I did, too. In 2014, Visiontrick Media’s Henrick Flink said on the PlayStation blog that it’s used to describe the way the player interacts with the main character; the player isn’t playing as the main character, and is not in control of him, either. “Indirect control” is used to influence, guide,…
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A new game asks: What is machine intelligence?

In March, Microsoft introduced Tay—a chat bot that was programmed to imitate the voice of a teen girl—to the world. The idea in creating her was to demonstrate machine learning through human influence, and in some ways, Microsoft succeeded. Tay had all the makings of A Real Teenager; she used lots of emojis, said things like swag and internets, and talked about puppies (maybe that last one was just me?). Much of her learning was through repetition—she picked up on phrases that lots of folks tweeted at her. And that’s where Microsoft went wrong. In less than 24 hours, Tay…
Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor
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Time to take in the trash: Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor is out this week

After nearly two years in the works, Sundae Month’s lo-res sci-fi adventure Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor has a release date; it’s September 16th, and will be available on Steam and itch.io. Yes, there’s about to be a new trash person in town. As an Alaensee woman with a municipally-subsidized trash collecting job, you’ll take in the trash. Incinerate it. Take in the trash. Incinerate it. Routine is at the heart of Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor, as per the job. But maybe—just maybe—you’ll be able to get off Xabran’s Rock, the place that treats you so terribly, with a little…
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You can play a videogame on Snapchat now. Yes, really

Serena Williams’ Match Point is Snapchat’s first attempt at a multiple-level videogame embedded into the social platform. (It’s also a glorified 8-bit Gatorade ad.) It’s actually pretty fun—and an impressively detailed look at Serena Williams’s history in tennis. If you didn’t know, Serena Williams is one of the greatest tennis players of all time; she holds 38 major titles, 22 of which are in singles tennis. Each level of Serena Williams’ Match Point is a representation of one of Williams’s Grand Slam singles titles—if she wins the U.S. Open this year on September 10, Snapchat will add the 23rd level. Williams won her…
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Carl Burton’s gorgeous GIFs are being turned into a videogame

Shopping malls. Airport bookstores. Hotel lobbies. Carl Burton—the artist and animator behind Serial‘s second season GIFs—is creating a videogame that exploits the “boringness” of these liminal, corporate spaces. Using the foggy, surrealist art style of his GIFs, ISLANDS is a videogame you experience, rather than play. Anthropologist Marc Augé calls these spaces non-places—”If a place can be defined as relational, historical, and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place,” Augé wrote in Non-Places: An Introduction to Anthropology of Supermodernity (1992). A parking lot is a non-place, too. It’s a…
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The wordless beauty of Pan-Pan

There are no words in Pan-Pan—just bubbling variations of boops and beeps. After crash landing on Pan-Pan’s colorful low-poly world, you’ll be introduced to a bunch of little dudes with bushy ‘staches. They’ve come to your aid after the crash, and despite there being a language barrier, they’re trying to fix your ship. But you’ll have to help. Scattered through Pan-Pan’s knotted puzzles are the pieces needed to fuel your ship and head home. Curiosity is the language in Pan-Pan. It’s a curiosity powered by the world’s design. Developer Spelkraft uses a visual language to express its intentions; it’s not always…
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A videogame for anyone who’s felt uncomfortable on the dance floor

Team Lazerbeam, the folks behind Snow Cones and Wrestling With Emotions, started their latest game Dress To Express Dancing Success—a dancing and dating simulator—with the intention of creating their least sensible and least complicated game. And they kind of failed. “Before that we’d been on a pretty bad run of jamming, being really excited, getting super carried away, and having only random bits of our game done by the time the jam was over,” Team Lazerbeam’s Ben Rausch told me. “This disturbing trend started with Snow Cones.” Snow Cones took months rather than the allotted days. Wrestling With Emotions took…
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The domestic horror of Allison Road isn’t dead after all

In early June, first-person survival horror game Allison Road was cancelled. Today, it’s alive and kicking. Allison Road‘s creator, Christian Kesler, announced this week that he’ll continue working on the game—which some call a “spiritual successor” to the Silent Hills playable teaser P.T. (2014)—on his own, under the label of Far From Home. “After the set back, I took a bit of a break from working on it and re-evaluated all the work that had been so far—the whole journey, so to speak,” Kesler told IGN. “I started making a few necessary changes,  in my opinion, to the story and the flow, little bits…