Nicole Carpenter | The Verge

Indie games are turning the act of looking into an art

2026-03-05T16:06:07-05:00

Adriaan de Jongh and Sylvain Tegroeg did not necessarily set out to create a new genre. But, in some ways, that’s exactly what the duo did when they released Hidden Folks in 2017. Hidden object games have been around for decades — they’ve existed well before computers, when people searched for objects in paintings and printed drawings — but Hidden Folks was a distinct step forward. De Jongh calls Hidden Folks a “searching” game; objects are certainly hidden, but the game is more than just spotting objects.

“We wanted to make a very playful, interactive game where our focus was invoking this curiosity for these little worlds and the little stories that unfolded,” de Jongh, who intends to expand the Hidden Folks universe in a new collaboration with Tegroeg, told The Verge. “That was always the vision for the game, and all design decisions we made tried to cater to that sense of exploration.”

In the years that followed the game’s release, dozens of Hidden Folks-likes were created. Some of them are clones that copy the art style and even assets in a way that makes de Jongh uncomfortable. Many of those games may scratch the itch of wanting to find things, but they lack the delight of a game like Hidden Folks. The searching genre has also emerged as a way for developers to inject story and, again, curiosity into hidden object games. It’s easy to draw a line from Hidden Folks to the likes of “interactive city discovery game” Small Life, mystery game Wind Peaks, history discovery game Hidden Through Time, and, now, the adventure hidden object game Lost and Found Co.

The concept of Hidden Folks is simple: Search through pen-and-ink artist Tegroeg’s expressive, detailed worlds for a list of items displayed on the bottom of the screen. You are not to click and move along, but search — click on things to see what happens, what developer-made “mouth sound” you hear. Maybe you’ll uncover what you were looking for. Maybe you won’t. Every little detail in Hidden Folks is charming, crafted from hours of intense playtesting, de Jongh said.

Lost and Found Co., created by Thailand-based studio Bit Egg, is a delight that feels similar to Hidden Folks. It’s about finding lost objects while working for a dragon goddess. It’s set in colorful, magical worlds that are filled with thousands of different objects and characters. Little stories are everywhere, and poking around the different spaces is sure to uncover secrets. It is clearly inspired by Hidden Folks, and Bit Egg cofounder and CEO Richmond Lee said as much in an interview with The Verge. The hint system, a defining factor of Hidden Folks-likes, is an homage to de Jongh and Tegroeg’s game, but also the way in which Bit Egg is trying to elevate the hidden object genre behind static images.

Lost and Found Co.’s worlds — an antique store stuffed to the brim with haunted items, a chaotic family home in the midst of their morning routine, or a lush vacation spot where tourists get silly on smoothies — are elaborately built to tell stories. There’s the overarching story and little ones playing out in every corner or nook. Bit Egg has put lots of little references to pop culture in Lost and Found Co.; one of my favorites that I’d uncovered is a haunted doll that’s a reference to the real-life one that inspired the Annabelle horror movie, and which is locked up in an occult museum near my hometown.

“When we looked at a lot of the hidden object games that are out there, they’re very gameplay-focused,” Lee said. “They have a theme, they give you a lot of content, but there’s not much in the way of characters and story. That’s something we wanted to push.”

Lost and Found Co.’s characters, the dragon goddess Mei and her startup intern Ducky (who she turns into a human from an actual duckling), lead players through its story. A mysterious figure is stealing from the townspeople, and the duo’s ability to find things is restoring the people’s faith in the goddess, who’d fallen out of favor in modern times. That’s the story that pulls together the separate levels; everywhere, in all parts of town, people need help finding their stuff. Sometimes, it’s ingredients to make a smoothie, other times it’s personal items moved around an apartment complex. There are always extras, too — the little bits that reward a player for being curious. I found a submerged submarine, for instance, after I clicked four disparate lampposts into the correct spot, triggering the sub to come up for air.

What makes a good hidden object game, both de Jongh and Lee agree, is playtesting. You can have a great art style, clever sounds, and a nice story, but if the game doesn’t work well, it won’t click with players. “It took us years, and it was just trial and error,” Lee said. “Someone who makes a level has a very hard time understanding how difficult or easy it might be for someone else. You just have to keep workshopping and testing.” Playtesting is what made Hidden Folks so satisfying to play. De Jongh said it’s core to what he does as a game developer. “You put it in front of someone and you will learn a million things,” he said. “I think I’ve watched over 200 to 300 hours of players playing the game and changing little things based off what I saw players do.”

There’s an art to placing the hidden objects in the environments, to be sure: Lee said Bit Egg designs a level first with concept art before remaking it as an isometric level, then putting it into the game engine. “We basically draw everything three times,” he said. It’s a different process than how de Jongh and Tegroeg built Hidden Folks, starting with Togreog’s ink drawings on paper, which are put on one big page and scanned into the computer, then assembled in the game engine.

“He draws everything, we scan it in, and throw it into the game engine,” de Jongh said. “There, he, one by one, drags everything into the right position.” It’s a task that’s time consuming and exceptionally precise; Hidden Folks’ massive factory level is a testament to that. It features hundreds of little boxes of different kinds. Animations come later, replacing certain static pieces.

All of that effort goes toward something that feels very inherently human: the act of looking. Lee said one could even consider old Chinese and Japanese paintings as hidden object games. You might not be searching for anything specific, but the elaborate, detailed nature of these paintings often lead to little discoveries the further you look. “There’s a really long history of people being captivated by these neat little scenes,” he said.

Consume Me is a raw and funny memoir in video game form

2025-10-03T12:20:27-04:00

There’s a lot of math in diet culture. It’s all numbers — calories in, calories burned — and a constant tally running in one’s head. In some ways, disordered eating can be considered a disturbed sort of strategy game, which is precisely why Jenny Jiao Hsia and AP Thomson’s Consume Me works so well. The autobiographical game detailing Hsia’s teenage years is a darkly funny, honest peek into the desire to shape one’s life and body through food.

Food in Consume Me — tomatoes, kale, and pasta rendered as Tetris blocks — are assigned “bites,” a stand-in for calories. Jenny’s (the character, not the developer, who we’ll refer to using her last name, Hsia) lunch ritual is organizing these blocks on a plate, carefully selecting the pieces, and arranging them to both keep her full but stay under her self-imposed bite limit. It’s the sort of math that’s familiar in video games, but flipped upside down by the influence of controlled, disordered eating. This is no glossy-egged, open-faced croque madame from Final Fantasy XV, a dish that is as beautiful as it is powerful.

In most video games, food means strength: Final Fantasy XV’s croque madame awards a bonus that increases attack damage. A cabbage in Skyrim restores a single health point. When Link eats a mushroom skewer in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, his hearts are restored. Consume Me uses the familiar language of video game stats to cleverly flip the expectations. Reduced back down simply to numbers, food is no longer a source of power. It’s something to control, to fear. Hsia introduces Jenny’s diet — her teenage diet, because this is a memoir, after all — as the first of many all-consuming goals that will, supposedly, add up to the perfect life.

It begins simply, with Jenny’s mother criticizing her weight. The solution there, of course, is to diet, which is represented in Consume Me as a Tetris-esque minigame. The diet, which eventually is made clear as disordered eating, acts as an anchor throughout several years of Jenny’s life, spanning dating, friendships, and getting into college. Consume Me works so brilliantly because dieting and the other minigames aren’t just simple interactive elements, but are designed in service of the story. Dieting forces the player into the mindset of eating disorder math. And it’s not only the calculations of bites, but how those bites influence the rest of Jenny’s life — if Jenny has too many bites at lunch, she’ll need to exercise during her free time, which means she’ll have to choose between neglecting her schoolwork or her boyfriend. (Eat too little, though, and Jenny will end up bingeing on hot chips before bed, often undoing any bite deficit.)

It’s the impossible reality of being a teenage girl. Expectations are a Tetris board in which the bricks never stop coming. When you’ve cleared a row — being pretty and smart — another shape is inevitably right behind. Consume Me takes place over the days that make up weeks of Jenny’s life, in which the player must min-max her decisions by playing through different minigames, each of which ups Jenny’s skills or knocks something off a checklist but takes away precious, limited time. And every decision, even simply staying up late, feels dire, because in this reality, it is.

Reading, for example, is a minigame in which the player has to keep Jenny’s eyes on the book as her head spins, dodging rogue thoughts of her pup, boyfriend, or body. Exercising is the practice of corralling Jenny’s flailing arms into the correct positions. They’re all chaotic in the same ways WarioWare microgames are, matching the air of anxiety that lingers around Jenny’s life. Failing any of Jenny’s main goals means having to start over, either redoing a day or an entire week. It’s not necessarily hard to complete Jenny’s goals, but it does require anxious strategy, which is the point. Consume Me nails the mindset of its teenage protagonist.

Years pass in Consume Me, and Jenny’s goals shift and change slightly; those goals are dictated to her through a dysmorphic version of herself she talks to in the mirror. But diet remains non-negotiable throughout the entirety of the playable parts of the game. And that makes sense: disordered eating is so rarely just about food and image. It can also be about the illusion of control of one’s life through one’s body. Even as Jenny’s priorities change, bites always remain. Until, suddenly, they don’t.

Consume Me ends with a jump forward 10 years, skipping over any sort of resolution to her eating disorder. But it’s clear that something’s happened in that decade — maybe partially related to the jarring religious awakening that hits toward the end of the game — because food is no longer a running tally in Jenny’s life. A sausage is no longer three blocks long, a visualization of its 200 or so bites. It’s just a sausage. She thinks about food, image, and diet still, but it’s no longer the undercurrent of her life.

There’s a risk in having Consume Me end without some distinct resolution, but it’s just another example of why the game works: it’s a confident memoir that doesn’t shy away from the messy bits.

_{Consume Me is available now on Steam.}

The Nintendo Switch was an indie game haven, until it was overrun with slop

2025-05-28T11:24:46-04:00

The first several months after Nintendo released the Switch in 2017 have been described as a “gold rush” for independent game developers. The Switch’s eShop wasn’t exactly barren, but early on there was a lot of room for new releases. To put it into perspective, Nintendo announced in 2018 that around 1,000 games were added to the platform in its first year or so. The number of games released each year just adds to the number of games available on the eShop; in 2024, GameDiscoverCo reported that 50 games were added per week, leading to more than 2,300 new games in 2024 by November.

What started as a gold rush for indie developers slowly spoiled, and eventually the eShop became overrun with slop. This pushed some developers to the margins, while platform degradation soured the experience as a whole.

Coming out of the so-called indiepocalypse, the period after the indie golden age from 2008 to 2015 — think Fez, Braid, and Super Meat Boy — developers were reeling from the massive influx of competition and a decline in discoverability. The eShop, for some time, was a reprieve to that. Nintendo itself seemed poised to support that period of growth; days ahead of the Switch’s launch date, the company announced that it had already locked in more than 60 “quality indie games” for 2017.

PC Gamer reported in October 2017 that “almost every indie release on Switch” had sold better on Switch than on other platforms. Enter the Gungeon sold more than 75,000 copies in just two weeks, developer Dodge Roll Games said, while Team Meat posted in January 2018 that Super Meat Boy’s first day on Switch had “shockingly close” numbers to its Xbox 360 debut. SteamWorld Dig 2, one of the titles Nintendo was boasting about, sold between five to 10 times more copies on Switch than it did on Steam, per a PC Gamer report.

Rodrigue Duperron of Spiritfarer developer Thunder Lotus says that the studio “missed the gold rush” when it published Jotun on the Switch in April 2018, but was still “quite pleased” with its performance. (It was published on Wii U in 2016.) “I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that monthly releases to the eShop still numbered in ‘mere’ dozens in early 2018,” he says. Thunder Lotus expected its next game, Sundered, to sell better, but Duperron said the team was “mildly disappointed” — and pointed to the massive increase of games released monthly. “It didn’t feel at the time that shovelware or bargain basement titles were yet flooding the platform, but this was more of a low simmer which would come to a boil over the next few years,” he says.

2020’s Spiritfarer saw increased success outside of the “indie boom” for several reasons, one of which was that Nintendo included it in its featured section. “More visibility led to more sales, led to being included in the Best Sellers section,” Duperron says. Abhi Swaminathan, founder of Venba developer Visai Games, echoes this sentiment. The game, which was released in 2023, was featured in two Nintendo Indie Directs, which he partly attributes to success on the platform. (Sales remain “almost neck-to-neck with Steam sales,” he says.)

Over the eight years since the Switch launched, the platform became crowded. It began looking a lot more like Steam, which is blasted daily with new games. The Switch, clearly, is not immune from the low-effort games that muck up the market. In recent years, they’ve gotten a name: eShop slop. As IGN put it in February, slop games are distinct from the otherwise “unremarkable games” that get released every day. They’re rarely what they’re advertised as, are based on popular or trending concepts, and are rife with technical issues. It’s not really that the eShop has started to rust, just that it wasn’t “particularly sophisticated from a discovery point of view to start with,” GameDiscoverCo author and industry analyst Simon Carless tells The Verge.

“I don’t know if any store is free from the eventual onslaught of ‘slop games.’”

Among Us studio Innersloth CEO Forest Willard tells The Verge that the process of getting games onto the eShop is more specific and time-consuming than with other platforms, like Steam. “Many games on the eShop are ones that have gamed the system and streamlined their processes to churn out content (slop), while developers who go through the process with care and intent aren’t necessarily rewarded by the algorithm,” he says.

But it’s not an easy fix — nor is it a problem unique to Nintendo. “I don’t know if any store is free from the eventual onslaught of ‘slop games’ unless they’re highly curated or gatekeep-y, which would present its own problems,” Innersloth communications director Victoria Tran adds.

Nintendo has made tweaks to its system over the years, but its biggest one happened recently, likely in anticipation of the Switch 2. Nintendo updated how it ranks games in its top-sellers category, changing the ranking from number of sales to highest sales. Carless said this is a shift from three-day revenue to 14-day downloads, a way of pushing out highly discounted games that sell a lot. (Nintendo declined to comment.) James Barnard of Let’s Build a Zoo developer Springloaded says this system “could help to reduce certain titles climbing the charts solely through continued deep discounts.”

But he warns that it’s not a total fix. “The new system still isn’t perfect, as it seems that the charts instead favor games with higher price points,” he says. “This means we would potentially need to sell three times as many copies as a AAA game to feature as highly in the listings.”

Game developers The Verge spoke to agree that there are improvements Nintendo can make to help indies shine on its new eShop. Duperron suggests user reviews, while Barnard and Willard would both like to see better performance overall — load times, curation, and search functionality can be an issue. “It’s fine to know exactly what you want to play, but there’s no ‘You might like’ that would get me from Hollow Knight (easily found on the best seller lists) to Unsighted or Iconoclasts (incredible and similar games, but not evergreen sellers),” Willard says.

Nintendo is trying something like this with its “Game finds for you” feature so that players don’t have to “search every nook and cranny” of the eShop, Switch 2 producer Kouichi Kawamoto said in an Ask the Developer interview from April. In that interview, Nintendo senior director Takuhiro Dohta addressed performance on the eShop, too, stating that it will run more smoothly even with a huge amount of games. He added that the act of finding a game to play is an important part of the Nintendo Switch 2 experience.

Nintendo is clearly thinking about the problems of the past, and has implemented some fixes to support the eShop on its new hardware. The key detail, however, will be how it continues to tweak the platform — developers and analysts hope Nintendo won’t simply set the shop then forget it.

“Nintendo has made some much-needed changes to both Switch and Switch 2 eShop ahead of launching the Switch 2, but we’d like to see iterations more often than ‘once per platform cycle,’” Carless said.

No women competed at the Fortnite World Cup, but top players want to change that

2019-08-02T11:17:24-04:00

Tina Perez, Madison Mann, Carlee Gress, and Hannah Reyes — known online as TINARAES, maddiesuun, Carlee, and Hannah — had never been to New York City before. Three of them live in Los Angeles and train in Fortnite at Gen.G’s North American headquarters. Hannah, who’s 17, is still in high school and lives at home. The women of Gen.G’s Fortnite team were in New York City for the Fortnite World Cup Finals, the highly anticipated $30 million event that was held at Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens, a 23,000-seat tennis stadium best known as the home of the US Open.

None of Gen.G’s players were at the event to compete. Out of the nearly 200 players that participated in the Fortnite World Cup’s solo and duos events — 100 players in each, though some qualified for both competitions — no female players qualified to play in the main event. (Multiple female players competed in the Celebrity Pro-Am, including Soleil “Ewok” Wheeler, a 13-year-old player who announced her signing to top e-sports team Faze Clan during the event.) Though the women from Gen.G, who play together in two separate duos teams, didn’t compete at the event, it was important for them to be there. “I never had [a female role model] growing up in the e-sports scene,” Perez said. “I want to be the role model that I never had for these people.”

Fortnite, like colorful first-person shooter Overwatch, has one of the more diverse fan bases in the industry. The Fortnite World Cup was a testament to that: Arthur Ashe Stadium was filled with men and women, with families, with people young and old. In March, developer Epic Games told Engadget that its female player base at the time was estimated at “roughly 35 percent.” Women are playing the game — and not just casually: women are competing in Fortnite at its highest levels. But despite that, women weren’t competing in the solos and duos events at the Fortnite World Cup. The reasons are complex and entrenched.

Tina “TINARAES” Perez, Madison “maddiesuun” Mann, Carlee “Carlee” Gress, and Hannah “Hannah” Reyes at the Fortnite World Cup Finals in New York. | Photo: Gen.G" data-portal-copyright="Photo: Gen.G" />

Fans want to support women competing at the highest level, like Gen.G, and to see themselves in top Fortnite players. In New York, a fan called out to the Gen.G Fortnite team while they were walking into the YouTube Creator Lounge, an area set up amid the theme park-like atmosphere at the Fortnite World Cup. Over the noise of the crowd, Perez, Mann, and Gress did not hear the fan — but Reyes did. Most of the team was already in the lounge when Reyes noticed, but she gathered the group and took them on a mission: to find the young woman who was calling out to them for a picture. “We literally chased her down as a squad and had a conversation with her and thanked her for supporting us,” Perez said.

Like the Gen.G players, Wheeler wants to be a role model for the women who play the game. “I hope to see more girl gamers play Fortnite,” she told The Verge. “There are already pro girl gamers in Fortnite, and big girl streamers of Fortnite who play well. I hope that by me joining Faze, they will take their grind more seriously and believe in themselves.”

“I want as many girls to compete as possible.”

The reasons why there were no women in the main event of the Fortnite World Cup are multipronged. The Fortnite World Cup’s qualifying process was open to anyone above the age of 13, with rounds happening for 10 weeks before the main event. It was meant to bring meritocracy to the game: “If you can climb to the top, you’ll unlock access to the Fortnite World Cup Online Open tournaments,” Epic wrote in its announcement post. Players could grind in the Arena Mode to qualify for the Online Open semi-finals. Those who made it past the semis would enter the $1 million Online Open finals. The highest-ranked players from there were invited to the Fortnite World Cup.

Epic said that 40 million players participated in the online qualifiers for the event. A gender breakdown of the participants hasn’t been made available, but The Verge has reached out to Epic for more information. Perez estimated that the pool of women that participated was very low, with barriers like harassment or fear keeping women from competing.

“That’s something I want to change,” Perez said. “I want as many girls to compete as possible. We’re all given the same opportunity for this, and I want everyone to capitalize on it. Part of the reason they don’t is that women are afraid that they’ll do bad, or don’t feel like they’re skilled enough, or that they’ll be harassed. That’s what we want to change.”

It all goes back to an industry that’s historically been uninviting to women, and though that’s changing, it’s been a slow process. We’re seeing more women playing video games than ever before, but there’s still a gap. And that gap feels especially wide when you look at the top levels of the competitive scene. There’s a smaller pool of women trying to compete in Fortnite, and so it makes sense that there’s a smaller pool of women at the elite level. It doesn’t mean that women aren’t as good as men or can’t play at that level, though. Many of Gen.G’s players have, in fact, played at the highest level and won a lot of money doing it. In October 2018, Perez placed fourth in the North American Fortnite Fall Skirmish and won $25,000 with her teammate. “Getting fourth place was super rewarding because not only did we win $25,000, but it was cool to see myself — a woman — in the top 50 teams.”

Soleil “Ewok” Wheeler. | Photo: Epic Games" data-portal-copyright="Photo: Epic Games" />

When a woman is competing, she’s usually faced with the added pressure of being the only woman. Women in the scene don’t have the luxury of just being another player. “Before joining the Faze Clan, I was kind of well-known as the deaf girl gamer who got hosted by [Timothy “TimtheTatman” Betar],” Wheeler said. “After joining Faze Clan, it was like a validation of me being a Fortnite pro. I got a lot more followers, which is great to see. I hope to inspire many more.”

Most women in e-sports want to be treated like any other player, but plenty are embracing their roles as role models for women in the industry. “Right now, it feels good. There’s motivation from the World Cup,” Mann said. “But the past few months have been on and off with emotions, a little more pressure because you want to qualify and be a figure for people. It’s hard, I’ll be honest.” Perez said that the team members get criticized a lot more than the average male player because they’re women signed under Gen.G, a tier-one organization. “Day-to-day, we get tweets, clips, or people talk about us on stream very negatively when we kill them [in Fortnite],” she added. “It’s just our average day, pretty much.”

It’s something that other women in e-sports, Fortnite included, experience. During the event, Perez tweeted directly at her fellow women playing Fortnite: “I want to see you girls grind your heart out for the Fortnite Champion Series coming out!” she wrote. “Let’s break the stereotypes and show we can compete too. Gaming is for everyone. Anyone’s name can be on the big screen next year. Let’s do this.”

Her message resonated with plenty of her fans, but the response was mixed. In the replies, there was a lot of support, but some people were saying the very same things that Perez believes discourage women from competing. “I want to break the stereotype where women can’t compete,” Perez said. “People are out here saying that there’s a reason they didn’t qualify and it’s because they suck. No, it’s because many of them are afraid to play.”

Among the comments, some women spoke out about the harassment they, like the Gen.G team, face simply for being a woman. Sometimes, it’s bad enough to drive women to not compete. “One of the main reasons I don’t stream / even try to compete is because how much shit I get for being a girl,” one person wrote.

”We’re trying our hardest to open these doors.”

The support that Gen.G’s Fortnite team gets from its organization, which fields e-sports teams in Overwatch, Apex Legends, and League of Legends, among others, is essential in their success. Mann told The Verge that the organization treats them the same as any other player group. The women practice at the same high-tech facility that the other teams do, living nearby in Los Angeles. They’ve got the best computers and the highest-quality internet to use. There are coaches, support staff, and streaming facilities. But the help goes beyond just playing the game. Gen.G is especially interested in helping its players deal with the stresses of pro play, and that means therapy and sports psychologists.

Perez said that a lot of professional gamers struggle with their mental health due to the pressure of competing at the highest level and in front of large audiences. Gen.G pays for mental health support, like therapy, which Perez said she has each week. “If you’re not OK, it’s going to show in your gameplay,” she said. That support is necessary to create an infrastructure where everyone can succeed at Fortnite and other e-sports.

“We’re trying our hardest to open these doors for them, potentially get other women signed to other teams or even under Gen.G as well,” Perez said. “That’s just our biggest goal right now.”

This infamous Counter-Strike team helped pave the way for women in e-sports

2019-07-24T13:26:25-04:00

Les Seules means “the outsiders.” Sofi Byström, a founding member of the e-sports team who went by “Sophie” online, said as much in an interview with The Associated Press in 2004. “We all knew each other online,” Byström said. “There was a big competition coming up. We were kind of the leftovers, so we just sort of came together.”

Five Swedish and two Danish players — Byström, Anna “aNNa” Nordlander, Malin “Malla” Ohman, Emily “Vixen” Clewett, Sofie “zeleNa” Sandager, Thelma “Queen” Lundin, and Louise “AurorA” Thomsen — officially started playing under the Les Seules name in 2004 for a tournament called the Electronic Sports World Cup. In Paris, the team placed fourth after losing to Chinese team EIBO in the third-place match. Only the first three teams in the women’s event in Paris won a piece of the $18,000 prize pool: $10,000 for first place, $6,000 for second, and $2,000 for third. There was no prize for fourth.

Despite those humble beginnings, the team went on to become something of a mainstream phenomenon that helped shape the competitive gaming scene. Today, women continue to make strides in e-sports. In 2018, StarCraft II pro player Sasha “Scarlett” Hostyn won the Intel Extreme Masters event in Pyeongchang, South Korea, making her the first woman to win a major StarCraft II event. Days later, Kim “Geguri” Se-yeon was signed to the Overwatch League’s Shanghai Dragons as the league’s first female player. Each of these moments in e-sports history have been important milestones, and that’s notable in itself.

Decades have passed since Les Seules’ breakthrough into mainstream media. In 2004, things were different, but the team’s place in e-sports history was no less important.

Les Seules was one of the first women’s Counter-Strike teams — actually one of the first Counter-Strike teams at all — to get noticed outside of the gaming world. But they were not the greatest Counter-Strike team of all time. Lundin told The Verge that they were underdogs, a team that didn’t have the history or experience together that some other squads had. Les Seules did not win money for their surprising performance at the Electronic Sports World Cup. Instead, they found themselves in mainstream media’s spotlight, which was a small, awkward, and sometimes problematic step in creating an infrastructure for women competing in e-sports.

Nordlander told The Verge that Les Seules was her first opportunity with a team that eventually had a sponsor: Nvidia. “That, of course, came with obligations in doing interviews [and] photo shoots, things I had not really been used to in other teams,” Nordlander said. “It was pretty much the same for [the] other girls I was playing with.”

“It was only one time a year that you could look up to somebody and say, ‘that’s something I could do, too.’”

The Electronic Sports World Cup’s first event was in 2003, and only four teams participated. By 2004, that number grew to 16. That quick growth was a testament to the largely untapped desire for women competing in e-sports. But there hasn’t always been the infrastructure that supports women’s growth in the industry. Counter-Strike is unique in that way. It’s one of the only e-sports that has fostered that interest in the game by hosting women’s events — though they’re often few and far between. For years, the Electronic Sports World Cup was the only major women’s event, but it still laid the groundwork for women’s rich influence in the industry. It gave interested players opportunities to see new faces in Counter-Strike and inspire more women to get involved, like Norwegian player Amanda “rain” Smith, who plays on Team Dignitas.

”I mostly only heard about the male teams,” Smith told The Verge. “But I did find out about the ESWC female tournament. It was only one time a year that you could look up to somebody and say, ‘That’s something I could do, too.’ [The infrequency of the events was] almost a little discouraging. But at the same time, you just have to persevere, and it made me really want to do that and compete. That was a turning point for me.”

On a press tour in New York, Les Seules was interviewed by ABC, CNN, and SYNC Magazine, a publication with the tagline “stuff for a man’s life.” The media latched on to the idea of women playing video games and made it a spectacle. SYNC put Les Seules on the cover of its October / November 2004 issue, calling them “The sexy game girls of Sweden” alongside headlines like “Your dream job: Fix chicks’ computers for sex!” and “Bribery! Buy all the stuff you want and keep her happy.” In a multipage spread, the women of Les Seules pushed back on the stereotypes that ran alongside their images. Thomsen, the team’s captain, spoke about using an alias to shield herself from degrading comments about female gamers; Sandager said she was bugged by men who trash talk women online; and a few spoke on not being taken seriously by their male competitors.

”I remember clearly that I was extremely uncomfortable when doing the shooting for SYNC Magazine,” Lundin said. “The hair and the short dress is nothing I usually wear, but yeah — we just went with it anyway. Can’t really explain it.” She added that the editorial became a conflict within the team itself. “We knew that more media time means more sponsors, more sponsors means more tournaments,” she said. “That was the ultimate goal.”

Women’s events had always been contentious in Counter-Strike, and they continued to be into the next era of the game: Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The argument against exclusive tournaments for women is that there’s little physiological barrier to entry for e-sports. Gender separation may be necessary in basketball or soccer, but it’s not when you’re competing behind a computer. But e-sports, and gaming as a whole, has been male-dominated since its inception. Women haven’t been explicitly barred from entry, but there have always been sociological barriers that discouraged them from playing. Among other reasons are the pressures of being a token representative for your gender and a boy’s club mentality.

Only a small number of aspiring e-sports professionals are going to make it to the top of the field. Men make up a large part of that already small pool of players that are good enough to compete at an elite level because of the social barriers to entry. (For instance, League of Legends’ e-sports has been around for a decade. Of the hundreds of players that have competed, you can count the number of high-level female players on your fingers.) Women’s events are a step toward evening out that pool and creating an infrastructure that encourages women to take the very hard steps necessary to play competitively for a living. “The recognition of gaming in mainstream media was good for the industry and helped it grow,” Nordlander, who left Les Seules before the TV show, said. “And hopefully also got more women into gaming.”

“They seemed so good at what they were doing and I wanted to be part of that ‘sisterhood.’”

Mayra “IpSa” Perez, a Swedish Counter-Strike: GO player and caster who would eventually join Les Seules in 2008, said that back in 2005, when she started playing Counter-Strike, it was rare to encounter another woman playing the game online. Then she saw Les Seules and another women’s team, Eyeballers, play at DreamHack 2005 in Sweden. “They seemed so good at what they were doing and I wanted to be part of that ‘sisterhood,’” Perez said. “Those female teams [and] players gave me a goal and purpose to why I wanted to keep playing and improve myself within the game.”

Les Seules signed on with Swedish production company Bringiton to create a TV show, PlayUs, in 2006. The team of women would travel the world for 10 episodes in 10 different cities: New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Berlin, Paris, and London. In a production deck created after the series was filmed, Bringiton described it like this: “PlayUs follows Les Seules: five Swedish girls who are e-sports stars of Counter-Strike, the ludicrously popular online first person shooter that has rocked the world. Now they’re about to go commando on a ‘gaming tour’ that’s pacy, sexy, and oozes cool.” Guiding the team on this journey was a Counter-Strike player called Miguel Bonnet. After all, “the girls need a firm hand to control them,” the production company wrote. The series was eventually broadcast on MTV.

”[A Swedish production company] had this idea to do a TV show about a female clan trying to make their way into the male scene,” Lundin said. “We were thinking of all the sponsors we could get and all the tournaments we would be able to participate in.” British voiceover artist Lizzie Knight was brought on after filming to write the voice-over script. “The series focused on making the girls ‘look right’ (i.e., hot) as well as honing their gaming skills,” Knight told The Verge. “There was a lot of dressing up in glamorous locations. Bringiton were banking on the fact that more women were getting into gaming, but the series didn’t exactly present Les Seules as role models. It seems to appeal more to teenage boys.”

Lundin said she realized “rather quickly” that the show had little to do with Counter-Strike. The team played the game against top teams around the world, but they were not able to actually train during the trip, nor did they have their gear. Instead, they “trained” by doing things like shooting a music video and learning to box. “We thought we were there to train and play, but instead got to parachute and walk the red carpet,” Lundin said. “We had no idea what we were doing there, but at the same time, it was lots of exciting and fun things to experience. It was a very confusing trip for all of us with different kinds of feelings. Some girls were more upset about the non-playing part than others and that sometimes tore the team a little bit apart instead of making us stronger [like] the show was supposed to be about.”

“We thought we were there to train and play, but instead got to parachute and walk the red carpet.”

Lundin added that she thought the show portrayed the team as “complete idiots.” Knight says, “It didn’t lead to another series, which I thought was a shame — we could have broadened PlayUs out a lot and dispelled some stereotypes.” A lot of women in gaming, Les Seules included, aren’t interested in the spectacle of being just that. The nature of the industry can often force women into that role. There are plenty of women in Counter-Strike who don’t want to be female pro players; they just want to be pro players. “We are women who game and compete, but we just want to be recognized as gamers,” Dignitas captain and e-sports veteran Emmalee “EMUHLEET” Garrido told The Verge last month.

Les Seules took an opportunity that would propel themselves (and e-sports) further into mainstream consciousness, even if it meant playing within a sexist system that wanted to make a spectacle out of their existence. But despite that, Les Seules did reach plenty of women in e-sports and empowered women to compete — including Perez, the e-sports hopeful turned pro player who saw Les Seules play in 2005 and joined them in 2008. In her first tournament with the team, the Electronic Sports World Cup Masters of Paris, she won $7,500. “We played versus SK.female,” Perez said. “I remember the crowd… feeling nervous and shaky. We only needed one round left to win. I’d never experienced this before in my life. It was the first time for everything — first big win, first huge stage, huge crowd, a lot of noise, and people cheering for us.”

The industry has come a long way since Les Seules took fourth place in the ESWC in 2004. Pew research from 2017 found that 49 percent of women aged 18 to 29 said they played video games. And in early July, DreamHack held its first women’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive event, DreamHack Showdown. DreamHack is one of the largest e-sports event organizers, with multiple events and plenty of money passed out each year. For many e-sports games, it’s the largest stage with lots of prestige. Eight teams participated in the event, all vying for a spot for their share of the $100,000 prize pool — the largest prize pool for a women’s event yet. European organization Beşiktaş Esports took first place in the event and earned $50,000 in prize money. But they’ve also qualified for DreamHack Open Rotterdam where they’ll compete against seven other invited and qualified CS: GO teams.

Though there certainly has been growth in the industry, gender parity is still a long way away. That’s evidenced by the response to DreamHack Showdown. It was announced a few months ago to the usual mixed reactions on social media: a lot of people were happy to see DreamHack supporting a women’s e-sports scene with such a rich history, and others don’t think there needs to be a distinction at all. There will always be people who don’t think events like this need to exist and people who don’t want to recognize the importance of women’s success as women in the industry. But given the history, it’s clear they’re doing something important for the community.

”Counter-Strike has the most organized female scene in any competitive e-sports,” competitive Counter-Strike player and Dignitas’ vice president of marketing Heather Garozzo said. “A lot of it is because these women’s events exist.”

Overcrowd forces you to think about transit design in a different way

2019-06-07T10:21:41-04:00

In 2015, a massive snowstorm — or, more precisely, a series of massive snowstorms — stranded nearly 50 commuters on a broken train in Boston. Plenty of others were stuck at knotted-up stations since many of the system’s old trains aren’t built to handle heavy snow. So when the storm hit, and kept hitting, the system broke. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) shut down the city’s trains for more than a day, with no real estimate on when full service would be resumed. To say the least, it was a problem.

Train stations are liminal spaces, places that serve as a transition between what was and what comes next. We may spend a lot of time there, but it’s always impermanent. There is always a departing train, a next stop, and somewhere else to be. But when something shifts — like a snowstorm indefinitely shutting down the system, stranding passengers — what was once liminal can start to feel different. You settle into the uncertainty. You’re forced to shift the perception of place from transition to destination, at least for now. It’s not often that this shift happens intentionally. Typically, it’s forced into perspective by something gone wrong. SquarePlay Games’ Overcrowd: A Commute ‘Em Up lets its players make the choice to linger in this space, seeing the station from a new view.

Overcrowd is a simulation-style management game, which launched on June 6th on PC, from designer and coder Alastair McQueen and artist Sarah Testori operating under the name SquarePlay Games. The gameplay will be familiar to anyone who has played something like SimCity or Zoo Tycoon. But instead of creating a city or a zoo, you’re creating the transit system for a London-like city called Lubdon. The idea came to McQueen while riding on the very system it’s inspired by: the Tube. Whereas a game like Dinosaur Polo Club’s Mini Metro uses transit design — or, rather, a transit map’s design — to create a minimal, slower experience, Overcrowd is a more faithful reimagining of realities of public transit.

“Playing Overcrowd is a bit like having an ant farm that you can tinker with,” McQueen tells The Verge, “with little ant trains.”

In the game, players must build out their transit systems within an isometric 3D space. Each space is slightly different; there are certain obstacles that need to be accounted for, but otherwise, players can create whatever they want using a sculpting tool to dig into the cube landscape. Money is always a problem. You’ll have to work around the cost constraints. You can always make your commuters miserable — hello, Boston T system — but the more constructive way to play, at least if you want to win and earn lots of money, is to keep your commuters happy. Once the station is up and running, players take on the station’s menial tasks, like tossing out garbage or fixing ticket machines, to keep the station running. But the challenge is in balancing all of those tasks as they start to stack, managing a small staff to mitigate some of the duties.

“You’re doing quite mundane things.”

“You’re doing quite mundane things like emptying bins or refueling generators or calling trains, but it elicits a kind of idle satisfaction that draws you in,” McQueen says. “I like to think it has a fair amount of freedom to experiment. Perhaps because the player knows how challenging real-life commuting is, it’s more pleasurable seeing it from afar and not being in that crowd yourself.”

The game’s commuters are always finding things to be upset about, like garbage that’s making them sick or rats overrunning the platform. Another common complaint: commuters in Overcrowd don’t like to be overcrowded. They like to be herded along by employees with megaphones, keeping them informed and on their way to work or wherever else they’re going.

“There’s something really satisfying about planning your design, slowly expanding your station, and making little tweaks to make everything run as smoothly as you can,” Testori says. “Having said that, Overcrowd is probably more hands-on and fast-paced than a lot of traditional management sims. You can’t sit back and expect things not to go terribly wrong — you’ll end up losing, with a station full of puke and bodies.”

And that’s why SquarePlay hesitates to call it a “pure” management simulator. Overcrowd also has puzzle-like elements and a real-time strategy feel. Managing the station and its patrons is part of that gameplay. But there are elements of Overcrowd that give the game a sense of frenetic energy, not unlike the feelings that games like Cuphead or StarCraft II evoke: the panic of fast-paced decision-making and dodging problems by dispatching solutions. And that plays into the game’s name. “The name Commute ‘Em Up was kind of just a punny title, which I thought of almost seven years ago,” McQueen says. “But it is also deliberately there to show it’s not a straight-up management sim.”

There are also some fantastical elements of the game that you won’t find in any transit system. Overcrowd’s method for controlling the rat population is rather barbaric; basically, you skewer them with a device called the “rat prod.” Some of the machinery used to run the stations is entirely made up, too, McQueen says. “The ‘signal relays’ you build, which automate train calling, look like huge mainframes, which Sarah based on images of nuclear power station control panels,” he tells The Verge.

“The name ‘Commute ‘Em Up’ was kind of just a punny title.”

It’s these details, both fantastical or based in reality, that we risk missing when operating in a transitional space, like a train station. We see the space for its function rather than the nuanced details that make it unique. Writing about airports in a research study called “Airports as liminal space,” published in Elsevier’s Annals of Tourism Research in 2018, Wei-Jue Huang, Honggen Xiao, and Sha Wang write that “the first and foremost function of airports is to transport passengers.” Train stations also serve this primary function. But within the study, Huang, Xiao, and Wang found that the transitory aspect of these spaces has a complexity that’s understood differently as perception shifts.

Though the commuters of Overcrowd are facing the threshold of the station’s liminal nature, the player is encouraged to linger, to think about design. Overcrowd’s gameplay can feel fast-paced and chaotic, but there’s always the option to press pause and adjust without the high stakes of time. This allows the player to contemplate the details typically passed by and to consider how these spaces make us feel — and why.

“Transport networks around the world have long provided inspiration for creativity, whether that’s iconic architecture and design to music and art and now games exploring the mechanics of keeping a city moving,” London Transport Museum documentary curator Ellie Miles told The Verge. “How transport shapes contemporary culture is something we are interested in understanding and preserving.”

SquarePlay Games’ Overcrowd is a unique meditation on a space that is ubiquitous for many people, yet can often feel uncomfortable or unfamiliar. Because of this, the London Transport Museum is looking to preserve the game “in perpetuity,” according to a late-May press release.

The London Transport Museum is just one space dedicated to interrogating the liminal spaces in transportation — another reframing of transition to destination. The London Underground, the spark of Overcrowd’s idea, is the world’s oldest transit system; it’s been up and running since 1863. The system’s drastically changed since the first trains started running, and the city’s changed with it. As it evolves, the way we think about and interact with it, and spaces like it, will, too. The things we notice, appreciate, or get annoyed by will shift. Overcrowd is one part of that process.

Typing games are having a moment

2019-04-18T11:20:06-04:00

Nanotale.

The typing game genre was born of necessity. These games were designed to teach a new generation of computer users how to type on a keyboard. Software Toolworks’ Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing! and Sega’s Typing of the Dead, released in 1987 and 1999, respectively, used the novelty of the keyboard as a game mechanic to keep people playing, despite the rote mechanics necessary in learning. Though Typing of the Dead may not have been installed on the rows of machines in your middle school computer lab, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing certainly was. There were others, too, like Knowledge Adventure’s JumpStart Typing and PopCap Games’ Typer Shark, among many more.

“Keyboarding was a new skill and computers were driving home the need for everybody [to learn to type],” Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing developer Mike Duffy tells The Verge. “And then suddenly, everybody had to do it and do it reasonably well. People had an interest on their own, but it was also parents thinking of their kids. It was driven by people wanting to use their computers effectively.”

But things are different now.

More than 73 percent of Americans have a computer, according to the Pew Research Center. Kids aren’t being introduced to computers and keyboards when they’re old enough; they’re growing up alongside them. Typing classes — now called keyboarding — are still taught in schools, but it’s no longer a mandatory part of the curriculum. By the time students get to these classes, they already know how to type at a physical keyboard and on a smartphone. Educational typing games have naturally fallen out of fashion. In their absence, a new wave of typing games — among them, The Textorcist: The Story of Ray Bibbia, Nanotale, Keyboard Sports, and Type Knight — is innovating in the space, fighting the notion that the genre has to teach you something.

In fact, Textorcist designer Diego Sacchetti doesn’t want you to call his game a typing game at all. “It’s a ‘type-’em-up.’ A shoot-’em-up when you fight by typing,” Sacchetti says. “It’s not an educational game.”

The Textortcist." data-portal-copyright="" />

Putting players in the role of an exorcist called Ray Bibbia, The Textorcist combines typing mechanics with bullet hell–style gameplay. And it’s hard. To beat the bosses, you’ll need to nail the ability to dodge bullets and type out commands to exorcise the game’s demons. The control scheme is set up in a way that encourages players to type with one hand and use the other to dodge bullets. (At the request of typing enthusiasts, the game now also features an option that lets players keep both hands in a standard typing position.)

When The Textorcist was released in February 2019, Sacchetti says that 90 percent of the game’s coverage made comparisons to Mavis Beacon Teaches Teaching. It was frustrating for him. “It’s quite sad because it means so many people still frame typing as an educational-only mechanic,” Sacchetti says.

“It’s not an educational game.”

Keyboard Sports: Saving QWERTY developer Triband is also encouraging players to look at the keyboard as a controller, and not just a typing device. Originally released in 2016 as a mini-game for Humble Bundle, Keyboard Sports is getting a full release this year. Unlike The Textorcist, Keyboard Sports doesn’t require players to type words. Instead, players use the buttons on the keyboard to control how the character on-screen, QWERTY, moves. “We continuously have to remind ourselves when working on [Keyboard Sports] that it’s not a keyboard. It’s a magical weird device with 100 buttons,” Triband director Tim Garbos says.

For the game to be successful, Keyboard Sports must keep reminding the player of that, too. Experienced typists often struggle the most; it’s the players that abandon their expectations of a typing game that take to Keyboard Sports’ innovative gameplay faster. “We keep surprising the player by introducing new ways to interact,” Garbos says. “First, you use one key at a time. Then you learn to hold the key down. Later, you have to use four keys at the same time. It’s a constant fight against [the player’s] habits.” He adds: “It’s extremely hard to get a player to press ALT + F4, even though it’s totally safe to do in this game.”

It’s all part of the humor of the game. ALT + F4, for the uninitiated, is a PC command that closes an open window. There’s an old prank in multiplayer PC games, which is to tell anyone who asks how to do something that the answer is pushing ALT + F4. They won’t accomplish whatever they’re trying to do, and instead will be forced to quit the game.

Keyboard Sports: Saving QWERTY." data-portal-copyright="" />

Early typing games like Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing were purposeful in their approach to teaching players how to type. But this year’s wave of typing games is resolute in using the mechanics as gameplay elements. That could mean a new control scheme, a la Keyboard Sports, or a way to mechanically push a story forward, like in The Textorcist, which has players type out the “prayers” used for exorcising demons, or Fishing Cactus’ Nanotale. Of course, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing does have game-like elements designed so players can have fun while learning, but the core game requires players to type out a story.

“Part of [the development] was just having a story, so there was some reason to be typing these letters,” Duffy says. “One of the things we did was to make it fun to read as you were typing. It’s not just ‘The red fox jumps over the lazy brown dog,’ stuff, but excerpts [of original stories]. We hired a writer to create original content for the game.”

“It’s a magical weird device with 100 buttons.”

In Nanotale, a top-down role-playing game to be released this year, magic is used as an explanation for the typing mechanic. Much like in Diablo, players are exploring a fantasy world and fighting enemies. But instead of tapping a single button to cast a spell, you’re typing out the incantation, as if you’re speaking it yourself. There are puzzles, magic management, and things to collect, making it a much more involved experienced than something like Typing of the Dead, which also requires typing words to defeat enemies. And most of these elements, from talking to non-playable characters and picking up items, are done through typing.

“We’re trying to use a typing mechanic in a meaningful way so that it makes sense,” Nanotale game designer David Bailly says. “You’re typing this word because the character is writing something down or casting a spell. Words have meaning and magic is carried through incantations.” It’s a slightly different approach to the typing mechanic in Fishing Cactus’ Epistory. (Nanotale is described by the developer as a spiritual successor to Epistory.) In Epistory, a story is written through the actions of the game. It’s literally the power of words that unfold the story in its papercraft world.

Neither game aims to teach a player to type; Bailly explicitly says it’s not an educational game. But the team did employ a design rule that made sure Epistory (and, later, Nanotale) didn’t help a player develop bad habits. Likewise, both games do track how fast you’re typing, but it’s actually to adapt the difficulty to skill. “The game is supposed to calculate how fast you’re typing to adapt metrics of speed of enemies and your skill to make the game interesting to everyone,” Bailly says.

Epistory." data-portal-copyright="" />

It’s the reason why the game works, but a varying level of keyboard familiarity could also explain why now is the time when typing and keyboard-controlled games are having their moment. Most of us know how to type, often pretty well. And most of us probably don’t even think about it; we just do it, even if we’re not the most skilled typists. That familiarity allows us to think about the device in newer, more interesting ways. The need to learn to type on a keyboard feels a bit more archaic, and that distance from the likes of Typing of the Dead and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing allows typing games to be more than educational tools. We already use keyboards to play video games — WASD to move, specifically — so why not build a whole game around it?

Keyboard Sports director Garbos has a different explanation, though, which is perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek. “Let’s face it, the keyboard is dying,” Garbos says. “Today, more emails are written on phones than on actual keyboards. More games are played with controllers, and that’s just the beginning. You can now interface with your computer through speech, virtual reality, or even by just looking it at.

“It’s too late to save the keyboard, so Keyboard Sports: Saving QWERTY is our final tribute to the wonderful keyboard.”

A Tetris pro helped me survive Tetris 99’s first big tournament

2019-03-12T10:13:21-04:00

Over the weekend, Nintendo held its first competitive tournament for the surprise battle royale hit Tetris 99. The Tetris 99 Maximus Cup ran from March 8th until March 10th, and participants were tasked with playing — and winning — as many games as possible over that short span. Points were awarded only for first-place wins, but there’s no singular winner for the event. Instead, 999 winners will each get 999 My Nintendo Gold Points, which is equivalent to $10.

I have a group of friends who are all playing Tetris 99. We pile into a Discord server and ignore each other while we’re wrapped up in the intense moments of battle. Among the group, I’m the top player. Unfortunately, this has given me a false sense of confidence and the thought that I could actually land somewhere in the top 999 Tetris 99 players in the world. And so, I spent my weekend doing little other than playing Tetris 99.

But unlike everyone else vying for those Nintendo points, I had the help of a champion as my guide.

Prior to Tetris 99, I played Tetris casually; I pulled out the classic version on my phone or Puyo Puyo Tetris on the Switch to kill time. Those aren’t exactly the qualifications of a tournament winner. So to give me an edge up heading into the Tetris 99 Maximus cup, I asked seven-time Classic Tetris World Championship player Jonas Neubauer to coach me in brick-dropping.

Neubauer won the Classic Tetris World Championship from 2010 to 2013, and then from 2015 to 2017. (He was unseated as champion by Harry Hong in 2014 and teenage Tetris player Joseph Saelee in 2018.) That event is played on the 1989 version of Tetris, using the NES and CRT TVs. Neubauer told me it’s a very different game than Tetris 99, despite the similar looks. While you can — and many do — play Tetris 99 without any of the extra doo-dads that give the game its battle royale elements, that typically won’t get you lots of wins. Certainly not enough to be within the top 999 Tetris 99 players in the world.

“You can absolutely play your own game and just keep very safe and low,” Neubauer says. “[But] it’s about strategy to go deep in the game if you’re tired of being knocked out in the first 20 [players].”

“The strategy I employ most is pretending like you’re in trouble.”

Before talking to Neubauer, I’d racked up around 50 hours playing Tetris 99. During that time, I won… a total of two games. As you can see, my confidence in my place in the top 999 was slightly unfounded. But I can typically make it to the top 10 in most games by employing two different strategies: slipping under the radar by not attacking anyone and doing anything to keep my stack low. As it turns out, both strategies are bad.

Keeping your stack low by constantly clearing single or double lines means that you’re never throwing a ton of garbage — the gray stuff that’s added to the screen — at other players. It’s too easy for other players to get rid of individual lines of garbage, so you’ll never be able to really knock out other players, which is how you get badges. Badges are a sign of prowess in Tetris 99, awarded to players for knocking out others. The more badges you have, the more garbage you send to other players. “Badges amplify the damage you send,” Neubauer says. “If you have four badges, you send eight lines of garbage [for a Tetris], which is the equivalent of two Tetrises.”

Badges work defensively by helping to mitigate the garbage sent to you by other players. That’s why it’s so important in the end game: you need to make sure you can defend against players aggressively attacking you.

Neubauer says that it’s critical to focus on knocking other people out while consistently amassing badges. To do that, you’ve got to be tricky. “The strategy I employ most is pretending like you’re in trouble by building super high and having a couple of Tetrises cued up,” he said. When your screen goes red, it tells the system that you’re near a knockout, which is one of Tetris’ four attack modes. (The others are random, attackers, and badges.) That’ll send a lot of attackers your way. “Then you target the attackers,” Neubauer said. “If 10 people are attacking you, and you target attackers, you can send garbage to 10 people simultaneously. You become this insane supernova of attacks.” He laughs, adding: “If you’ve ever seen your screen fill up with yellow fireworks of action, you may have accidentally stumbled on our strategy.”

“You become this insane supernova of attacks.”

Unfortunately, employing this strategy is a risk for players who panic — like me. But it is a strategy that works, especially in the early game. Neubauer also says that Tetris 99 doesn’t have as brutal of RNG (random number generation) as classic Tetris; you can be sure that you’re going to get certain bricks at consistent intervals. “There’s not this incredible drought of lines,” he says. “It’s a favorable and standardized piece generator.”

But you won’t always be able to get straight-up Tetrises with the four-piece line brick. You will make mistakes. I sure did. Neubauer says that one way to feel comfortable fixing mistakes is learning how to T-spin. And once you’ve learned that, you can even set up builds that look like mistakes to send extra damage to your opponents. (A T-spin is when you use the purple T-piece and maneuver it into a spot that’s otherwise inaccessible. You can spin other pieces, too, but only T-spins give extra damage to other players.)

The best way to learn how to T-spin is to watch others. “I’ve learned my T-spin just by watching great modern Tetris players and emulating their stacks,” Neubauer says. He adds that playing a different Tetris game, like Puyo Puyo Tetris in marathon mode, will help you practice without the pressure of being knocked out by an enemy.

Of course, I didn’t have time to play any other Tetris beyond Tetris 99 during the event, so I T-spin practiced my way to a ton of my own early knockouts. Visualizing how to set up a T-spin doesn’t feel as natural as aligning blocks for a straight Tetris, and I struggled. I found that instead of intentionally setting up T-spins, the way I was able to use the practice during the event was to fill accidental holes whenever they happened.

I’d been feeling pretty confident throughout the entire weekend. I had six wins over around 15 hours and a Tetris champion as a coach. On Sunday, I realized this feeling was based, largely, on ignorance. Part of the Tetris 99 Maximus Cup experience is that there’s no leaderboard, no way to tell if you’re winning. The only information telegraphed to the player is how many wins they have.

While there are no official ways to keep up with the competition, some players are broadcasting their tournament runs on Twitch or other social media. I decided to check Twitch on Sunday to see if other players were streaming Tetris 99. (And as Neubauer suggested, I also wanted to watch their T-spin setups.) Plenty were, and many players had not only double my total, but triple. The highest I saw was 79 wins during the event, hours before the endpoint. It was shocking to find out that I’m not actually that great at Tetris 99. Despite falling asleep before the 3AM end time, I continued playing into the night, without any more wins to show for it.

There’s no real chance I’ve actually made it into the top 999

Given the numbers stacked up by my foes, there’s no real chance that I’ve actually made it into the top 999. Unfortunately, I won’t know for certain for a while. In Nintendo’s official rules for the event, the company said it won’t be until March 24th when winners are notified. The lack of a leaderboard and community integration is what I both loved and hated about the Tetris 99 Maximus Cup. Not knowing where I stood in the competition kept me playing when I thought I was doing great, but it also meant the event lacked the community feel that makes grassroots e-sports tournaments so engaging. If you wanted to engage in the event with others, you’ve got to seek it out yourself.

Nintendo hasn’t said if there will be more Tetris 99 events like this, but the wording of the announcement does suggest that this won’t be the last. The company called the event the “first.” So, for me, it’s onto the next one. Surely, by then, I’ll be a champion.

How Devotion, Twitch’s hottest horror game, builds on the genre’s legacy

2019-02-22T12:50:18-05:00

Often in horror, the home is as important a character as anything else. We want our homes to represent safety and to be spaces where we’re protected from fear. But that’s often an idealized vision of reality. Homes are private spaces, and even the most everyday home has its secrets. Facing those familial secrets can be the greatest horror of all, and Red Candle Games’ Devotion forces players to face that trauma head-on.

Devotion is the second horror game from Detention developer Red Candle, a studio based in Taipei, Taiwan. Whereas Detention takes place within a school in 1960s Taiwan, Devotion is set entirely in a 1980s Taiwanese apartment complex. Using a looping system similar to the mechanics of Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro’s P.T., Devotion revisits a family’s empty apartment over the years. Pulling inspiration from the games that came before it, Devotion builds upon the legacy of the first-person horror mystery.

Playing almost entirely as the family’s father, we experience how the atmosphere changes over time — unpacked boxes, layout shifts, clutter piling up over the years. There are unwashed dishes, leftover birthday balloons, photo albums, stacked books. The apartment is unmistakably a home. Familiar even in its peculiarities, Devotion uses its nostalgic setting to create unsettling tension in the first-person atmospheric horror game. Devotion is, ultimately, a family story that uses Taiwanese folklore and religion to build out a full, rich world. It’s an especially stunning accomplishment in a game that’s set almost entirely in one apartment over a span of three or so hours.

The architectural drama of Devotion’s apartment sets up the framework for the inner workings of the game’s family, each of which has experienced a kind of trauma. The mother, an actress, leaves her work for a quiet life with her new child and screenwriter husband. The family struggles when the father’s scripts don’t sell; all are exasperated by their child’s mystery illness. You can almost liken it to the psychological horror of Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House where family drama blurs with supernatural elements, and it’s hard to tell what’s real or imagined.

“We expect our home to be a place of safety and security.”

“While the home is the place where the family gathered and spent time together, it’s also the one place to hide any hideous secrets that may not be observed by outsiders,” Red Candle’s PR director Tiff Liu tells The Verge. “And the dark history of any house, created by its residents along with the things that they’ve done, in my opinion, is what makes a home truly terrifying.”

Margee Kerr, a sociologist and author of Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear, tells The Verge that the expectations of what a home should be play into the fear that’s generated from a game set in those spaces. “Part of fear can be measured by a difference between expectations and what we actually experience,” Kerr says. “We expect our home to be a place of safety and security, where we can be vulnerable and expose our true selves. When you turn that into a place of the total opposite, it’s completely betraying our expectations.”

Because of that setting and its themes, Devotion is drawing natural comparisons to first-person exploration games like Fullbright’s 2013 game Gone Home and, of course, P.T., a 2014 playable teaser for a now-canceled Silent Hills game. (Fullbright co-founder Steve Gaynor corroborated this comparison, tweeting that Devotion feels like “P.T. meets Gone Home in 1980s Taiwan.”) “It’s fair to say that we were blown away by the craftsmanship of P.T. when it came out,” Liu says. “The atmosphere and the pace of the game were executed flawlessly. As both gamers and developers, it really motivated us to recreate something similar in the horror genre.”

Action in Devotion is subtle. Instead of monsters, the horror is embedded into the empty spaces. Within the gameplay loop, Red Candle builds up expectations for the apartment and then bucks them. Photos nailed to the wall feel familiar, then they’re changed. A door remains locked until it’s suddenly opened. As the game moves forward and its mysteries unravel, the atmospheric elements of Devotion, heavy on Taiwanese influence, shift as reality steadily blurs — whether it’s an ‘80s variety show playing on TV, specific brands of sauce in the cupboard, or a traditional fish dish laid out on the table. Red Candle plays with cultural and spiritual symbols, like the lucky red Arowana fish, to build out an atmosphere that’s supported by devotion and beliefs.

Liu also pointed to other atmospheric games, like What Remains of Edith Finch and Layers of Fear, as inspiration for Devotion, but the developers wanted the game to feel familiar to Taiwanese players. “Taiwan is a country that rarely gets displayed and showcased in games, which in a way, plays to our advantage,” Liu says.

Like Gone Home and P.T., Devotion uses the assumption of the home as a safe space as an entrance into horror. Expectations of the horror genre play into the experience — that in this everyday home, there’s something to be scared of. So even in the quiet moments, the anticipation is feeding our fears.

In this everyday home, there’s something to be scared of

In a 2015 Kill Screen piece by Gareth Damian Martin, “The Corridor and the Corner,” Martin likened P.T.’s hallways to classic ghost-storytelling features, the “and then.” There’s an expectation when following a long corridor in a horror game that the story will turn at the physical corner of the L-shaped hallway. Sometimes it’s a large, shocking change, like a drastic color shift to red lighting and all of the paintings turning to eyeballs. But other times, it’s subtle. “If the corridor hasn’t changed, then something else has,” Martin wrote.

Devotion has hallways, but Red Candle uses doors as the “and then.” Moving from room to room, tiny details change, often seen first through a door frame. A light flickers. A doll, once laying on a creaky bed, disappears. The next time a corner is turned, what was once a string of Christmas lights is now a string of eyeballs. (A reference, perhaps, to P.T.?) Each corner turn starts to establish a pattern, however inconsistent. It encourages players to seek out the game’s next change, to continue exploring even after finding something horrifying.

It’s why Devotion’s had success on Twitch since its debut on February 19th where tens of thousands of viewers are watching streamers play through the first-person horror game. “People who watch game streams often feel rewarded when they see streamers have emotional reactions toward the games they play,” Liu says. “And due to the fact that fear is one of the strongest emotions a person can display, I think [a] horror game in its nature is very attractive for both the streamers and its audience.”

Twitch streamers’ approach to Devotion varies. Some brute-force through the game’s psychological mysteries, unflinching at the intermittent jump-scares and creepy notes. Others peak around every corner, turning back time and again to work up the courage to move forward.

Kerr says that by watching someone play a horror game, we’re forcing ourselves to feel a similar fear or anxiety by re-creating it. “It’s even more immersive when it’s a live stream [over a movie] because it’s happening in that moment,” she said. “There’s a sense of urgency. The removal of that protective frame.” With a movie, the cast has moved on. But in a live-streamed video game, you’re watching a person’s reactions as they happen.

Human response to fear, whatever the approach, is relatable. It’s entertaining. By viewing another person play a horror game, there’s the experience of the fear itself, but there’s also a safe distance. We can imagine how we might react, outsourcing some of the control — or lack thereof — that games use to scare us. Do we take the approaching corridor head-on? Or do we hesitate? Whatever approach, in Devotion, the horror of the home is inescapable.

Devotion is available on PC now.