This revolution makes good business sense. The tabletop space has exploded in popularity over the last 20 years, and major publishers have rightly identified the natural crossover appeal between analog and digital gamers. After all, who wants to trade their umpteenth bundle of hay in Catan, when they could instead be shipping out mana crystals in Azeroth? Or leading a battalion of robots in Runeterra?
“The tolerance for the hobby board game industry has gone up overall,” explains Fischer. “A really crunchy, deeper, board game that takes a lot of effort to get into is going to find more traction today than 15 or 20 years ago.”
Some of those adaptations are pretty straightforward. There is no debate about what the core praxis of a Doom board game should be. The mechanics reveal themselves as soon as you start writing the rulebook. (Space marines are going to unload payloads of shrapnel into the forces of Hell, ideally culminating in a showdown with the Icon of Sin.) But Cole Medeiros didn’t have it nearly so easily. He’s one of the two designers behind the Stardew Valley board game, which is based on a video game that stridently refuses any conception of victory. Anyone who’s logged time into its verdant pastures can attest to how tranquil, passive, and nonconfrontational Stardew can be. You can ditch the farm entirely to drink with your buddies in town, and watch the mellow seasons slowly molt away if that is where your happiness lies. This was one of the biggest stumbling blocks for Medeiros when he cracked into the design; how on earth can someone possibly lose Stardew Valley?
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“The video game is so open-ended. There’s nothing you have to do,” says Medeiros. “Any win condition you assign has the risk of restricting the player and forcing them to tell a specific story. We wanted to make the board game in such a way, where the win condition asks you to engage in the valley as much as possible, to touch as many different parts of it. It’s really challenging to take a sandbox game and say, ‘Here’s how you win!'”
Medeiros eventually settled on a cooperative design, where players are working together to complete a to-do list left behind by their grandfather. The patriarch might want you to save some money, or dredge up some sealife from the river, or most charmingly, make some lasting friendships with the townsfolk. (That can be accomplished by hanging out at the community center, and offering a gift to the first person you see.) That variety was another sticking point for Medeiros; the sensations of mining an ore vein or casting a fishing line are unique and bespoke in a video game, but he needed to make sure that they didn’t overlap too much on the board. In other words, fishing needed to feel different from farming, which also needed to feel different from boring through the quarry. Like the game it’s based on, Stardew Valley is an intricate series of mini-games that, as Medeiros emphasizes, is not so complex that they each require their own thick rulebooks.
“You have a whole game, with all these moving pieces,” he says. “The one mechanic that saw the most revision was the mine. How do you summarize exploring, fighting monsters, getting materials, and descending down levels without adding a ton of complexity?”
One thing is clear. Medeiros struck when the iron was hot. In less than 24 hours after the announcement, the Stardew Valley board game sold out. The singularity between tabletop and digital gamers has never been tighter, and ideally, the fascinating design complications that come from that convergence will only grow more esoteric. Could you imagine, for instance, if Nintendo decided to publish a Mario board game? Or if Valve put Counter-Strike in a box? Could the greatest minds in board gaming design ever generate the systems to make, say, jumping on a Goomba’s head work with pawns, counters, and wooden cubes? Who knows, but as the tabletop renaissance continues, we’ll certainly enjoy watching them try.
When Deathloop dropped its first trailer at the 2019 Bethesda Showcase, the presence of two Black leads was really exciting.
Now it feels necessary.
When the reality of racism reared its ugly head yet again in the summer of 2020, Jason Bennett, who voices the protagonist Colt in the game, was aware of the conversation about the future of Cleveland Brown, the Black Virginian from Seth MacFarlane’s animated series Family Guy and The Cleveland Show. White actor Mike Henry, who created Cleveland and voiced him for more than 20 years, voluntarily stepped down from the role.
“We,” Bennett said, meaning Black people generally, “are not asking you to do this.” He was discussing the situation with his friend J. Lee, who’s worked with MacFarlane for years, and actor Ahmed Best, best known for his portrayal of Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars franchise. The trio of Black actors frequently hang out together. So when MacFarlane cast Arif Zahir for the role of Cleveland Brown, Bennett was excited.
“He’s amazing. He’s talented,” Bennett says of Zahir. “When you cast a Black person in a role for a Black character, we get to bring everything we inherently know about being in the culture,” Bennett told me. “We get to bring all that to the character.”
The casting decision was a huge step in an entertainment industry dominated by white people, particularly straight white men. The history of Black actors in video games is highlighted by games where instead of being thrust into the story of a Black protagonist, you get to choose to be a white or Black character at best, and where whiteness is the assumed default any other time.
In games like Deathloop, everyone will have to play as one of two main characters who are Black. When Bethesda narrative director Bennett Smith was brought to the Deathloop team, the novel idea of having two Black protagonists was the first thing he thought of.
“You don’t see a lot of people of color in lead roles,” Smith says. “So that was obviously pretty exciting to get to be a part of, and I think the end product is going to be a lot of fun for people.”
Deathloop smashes Groundhog Day and Looper into a first-person shooter on a mysterious island called Blackreef. In single-player mode, Colt discovers the only way to break the time loop and escape is to assassinate the island’s leaders. Unfortunately, Colt’s primary target, Julianna, is determined to kill him before he can escape.
Arkane Games’ penchant for diverse characters is something the company is known for, so it may not be surprising this wasn’t an intentional choice. The creative team realized what they were doing was rare, but that wasn’t the initial focus. They were too concerned with the crux of the game: how to effectively incorporate time loops.
But when Black Americans were shown on TV and in national media being killed by police in 2020 and the subsequent protests grew around the world, the game took on a different significance. The creative team were more sensitive about Black representation in their game. They recognized the video game industry’s idea of a dashing hero is too often a white male.
Game director Dinka Bakaba was discussing the game’s cover with the team and thought the main character should be Black, if the cover was going to have a lot of characters with one primary character in the center. Bakaba is of African and French descent and is intimately familiar with racism, particularly in Europe where Arkane is based.
“In the end, this game is about a Black man with a gun,” Bakaba said while holding a copy of a Playstation UK magazine with Colt on the cover. And that man’s goal is to kill a Black woman over and over again. It’s an idea that might provoke controversy, but the studio’s fan base is here for the experiment, and pushes back against the idea that it can’t be done well.
This past March, poet and critic Yanyi was very busy. Between teaching at Dartmouth, editing a literary journal, preparing a forthcoming book, and running a creative advice newsletter called “The Reading,” his schedule was stuffed. Still, he decided to add one more task: pull “The Reading” off of Substack by the end of the month. “It was right before the Trans Day of Visibility,” he says, “and I thought it was important for me to make the switch that day.”
Yanyi had agonized over the decision to leave the newsletter publishing startup. Substack’s platform was easy to use, and he’d been granted an advance as part of the company’s fellowship program, allowing him to grow a healthy, engaged audience. But he was too unhappy with Substack’s moderation to stay. The platform had permitted content from writer Graham Linehan that Yanyi saw as anti-trans and in violation of Substack’s policy. He wasn’t the only unhappy one; other high-profile Substackers announced their decisions to leave for this reason around the same time. Many in the exodus had a similar destination: Ghost, a nonprofit publishing platform that bills itself as “the independent Substack alternative.”
Frankly, this designation is a bit odd. Even though Ghost has been openly courting defectors—the company has a concierge service to entice writers looking to switch—it’s not exactly a one-to-one Substack substitute. Newsletters are Substack’s core product. Not so for Ghost, which was originally envisioned as a snazzier version of WordPress when it was funded through a Kickstarter campaign in 2013. Unlike the VC-fueled Substack, Ghost is a bootstrapped affair, with a lean staff of two dozen scattered around the globe.
The business models of Substack and Ghost are also completely different. Rather than take a cut of subscriber revenue like Substack, Ghost’s paid hosting service, Ghost Pro, takes a fee, starting at $9 a month. (The figure varies depending on how many readers a publication has.) Its free-spirited CEO and cofounder John O’Nolan, who uploaded videos of his nomadic lifestyle to YouTube for many years, is currently camped out in Florida. With no investors, he feels no pressure to scale up quickly. Ghost has definitely grown since 2013—its paying customers include Tinder and OkCupid, so there’s a chance you could get ghosted on a dating app that uses Ghost, and its software has been installed more than 2.5 million times—but the nonprofit simply isn’t trying to operate with the same never-stop-scaling! mindset that guides so many digital-media startups flush with Silicon Valley cash.
Also, Ghost is open source, which means anyone, anywhere can use it how they see fit, provided they know how to host their own website. While Ghost Pro does have a content-moderation policy (basic stuff—no porn or phishing schemes allowed), the vast majority of Ghost users go the free route, leaving them thoroughly unmoderated. Basically, Ghost could be home to the exact same content driving people off Substack. Or worse. “We have absolutely no ability to control how Ghost is used,” O’Nolan says.
Why, then, did Ghost become the go-to for people looking to abandon Substack? When asked, writers who made the switch had a few answers for why no-moderation Ghost is seen as more virtuous than light-moderation Substack. For starters, Ghost’s nonprofit status gives its reputation a squeaky-clean shine. But more important, Ghost knows what it is and what it is not—and it’s not a publication.
One of the main reasons Substack has received so much blowback is because of Substack Pro, its program that pays well-known writers eye-popping sums to create newsletters. To be clear, Linehan is not one of these writers. Still, the existence of this program suggests to many critics that Substack, whether it will admit it or not, is a publisher as well as a platform. Paying writers is, after all, an editorial choice. “Substack has staked out a stance on moderation,” says progressive political consultant Aaron Huertas, who recently moved his writing from Medium to Ghost. “If you’re going to have a policy, you should actually enforce it.” (Asked to comment, a Substack spokesperson said, “Advances have nothing to do with particular viewpoints or moderation decisions. We’re strong supporters of a free press and the open exchange of ideas, so we don’t influence anyone’s writing and we take a light touch with moderation.”)
Early in his testimony for Epic Games v. Apple on Friday, Apple CEO Tim Cook described his company’s mission: “To make the best products in the world that really enrich people’s lives.” For the rest of the day, Epic’s lawyers sought to demonstrate that what Apple most wanted to enrich was itself, at the expense of consumers.
What does greed prove? For the past three weeks, Epic has doubled down on its allegations of Apple’s monopoly power over the iOS ecosystem. The Fortnite publisher is desperate to show that Apple’s core is rotten and that its business practices are too.
Apple is worth over $2 trillion today, and one reason is the structure of that ecosystem: It manufactures and owns Apple devices, the iOS operating system, the Apple App Store, and the payment system consumers use for those apps. In defending itself from Epic’s lawsuit, Apple insists that its iron grip on the iOS market isn’t a simple play for massive profits; rather, it’s all in the service of keeping its customers safe, its user experience simple, and its developers happy. As Apple’s highest ambassador, Cook had a big job ahead of him.
Cook spent today on the defensive, fielding pointed questions both from Epic’s lawyers and US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers. A key issue in the case has been the commission Apple collects from the App Store, up to 30 percent on in-app digital purchases. In its lawsuit, Epic is framing that 30 percent commission as a “monopoly tax.” Just before Cook took the stand, Judge Rogers said, “The lack of competition on the 30 percent is something that is troubling.”
Digital marketplaces have taken 30 percent commissions for decades. Cable companies charged it for pay-per-view movies in the 1990s. In the mid-2000s, Apple convinced record labels that it deserved a 30 percent commission from song sales on the iTunes Store. The labels, desperate to cut down on rampant online music piracy, went along. Today, Apple makes a similar argument for its App Store commission—only instead of fighting off Napster, it’s iOS’s relatively low rate of malware infection.
The commission is standard in games too. Now that the lion’s share of video game sales have migrated online, digital game marketplaces like Steam, the Nintendo Online Store, the Microsoft Store on Xbox, and the PlayStation Store all charge 30 percent on game sales.
Epic has been crusading against the 30 percent commission for years, part of its long quest to paint itself as gaming’s good guy. In 2018, it launched the Epic Games Store, which took just a 12 percent cut from game sales, leaving developers with a bigger piece of the pie. Microsoft followed suit this year, but just with its PC app. “We want to make sure that we’re competitive in the market,” said Microsoft vice president Sarah Bond at the time.
Epic argues that game companies like Sony and Nintendo are different from Apple, even though they’re also reaping the benefits of total hardware, software, and marketplace synergy.
“There’s a rationale for this on console where there’s enormous investment in hardware, often sold below cost, and marketing campaigns in broad partnership with publishers,” Epic CEO Tim Sweeney said in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. During the Epic Games v. Apple trial, Xbox business development vice president Lori Wright testified that Microsoft sells its Xbox consoles at a loss. And if it did not charge a commission on the Xbox store, it would lose money on Xbox systems. Sony sells its PlayStations at a loss too. Epic has also revealed that its Epic Games Store is not profitable, in part because it is new and in part because the company has paid massive sums to game developers for licenses to offer free games.
All hail the headset. Or, alternatively, all ignore the headset, because it’s gonna be a dismal failure anyway.
That’s pretty much the conversation around virtual reality (VR), a technology by which computer-aided stimuli create the immersive illusion of being somewhere else—and a topic on which middle ground is about as scarce as affordable housing in Silicon Valley.
VR is either going to upend our lives in a way nothing has since the smartphone, or it’s the technological equivalent of trying to make “fetch” happen. The poles of that debate were established in 2012, when VR first reemerged from obscurity at a videogame trade show; they’ve persisted through Facebook’s $3 billion acquisition of headset maker Oculus in 2014, through years of refinement and improvement, and well into the first and a half generation of consumer hardware.
The truth is likely somewhere in between. But either way, virtual reality represents an extraordinary shift in the way humans experience the digital realm. Computing has always been a mediated experience: People pass information back and forth through screens and keyboards. VR promises to do away with that pesky middle layer altogether. As does VR’s cousin augmented reality (AR), which is sometimes called mixed reality (MR)—not to mention that VR, AR, and MR can all be lumped into the umbrella term XR, for “extended reality.”
VR depends on headsets, while AR is (for now, at least) more commonly experienced through your phone. Got all that? Don’t worry, we’re generally just going to stick with VR for the purposes of this guide. By enveloping you in an artificial world, or bringing virtual objects into your real-world environment, “spatial computing” allows you to interact more intuitively with those objects and information.
Now VR is finally beginning to come of age, having survived the troublesome stages of the famous “hype cycle”—the Peak of Inflated Expectation, even the so-called Trough of Disillusionment. But it’s doing so at a time when people are warier about technology than they’ve ever been. Privacy breaches, internet addiction, toxic online behavior: These ills are all at the forefront of the cultural conversation, and they all have the potential to be amplified many times over by VR and AR. As with the technology itself, “potential” is only one road of many. But, since VR and AR are poised to make significant leaps in the next two years (for real this time!), there’s no better time to engage with their promise and their pitfalls.
The History of VR
The current life cycle of virtual reality may have begun when the earliest prototypes of the Oculus Rift showed up at the E3 videogame trade show in 2012, but it’s been licking at the edges of our collective consciousness for more than a century. The idea of immersing ourselves in 3D environments dates all the way back to the stereoscopes that captivated people’s imaginations in the 19th century. If you present an almost identical image to each eye, your brain will combine them and find depth in their discrepancies; it’s the same mechanism View-Masters used to become a childhood staple.
When actual VR took root in our minds as an all-encompassing simulacrum is a little fuzzier. As with most technological breakthroughs, the vision likely began with science fiction—specifically Stanley G. Weinbaum’s 1935 short story “Pygmalion’s Spectacles,” in which a scientist devises a pair of glasses that can “make it so that you are in the story, you speak to the shadows, and the shadows reply, and instead of being on a screen, the story is all about you, and you are in it.”
Moving beyond stereoscopes and toward those magical glasses took a little more time, however. In the late 1960s, a University of Utah computer science professor named Ivan Sutherland—who had invented Sketchpad, the predecessor of the first graphic computer interface, as an MIT student—created a contraption called the Sword of Damocles.
The name was fitting: The Sword of Damocles was so large it had to be suspended from the ceiling. Nonetheless, it was the first “head-mounted display”; users who had its twin screens attached to their head could look around the room and see a virtual 3D cube hovering in midair. (Because you could also see your real-world surroundings, this was more like AR than VR, but it remains the inspiration for both technologies.)
Sutherland and his colleague David Evans eventually joined the private sector, adapting their work to flight simulator products. The Air Force and NASA were both actively researching head-mounted displays as well, leading to massive helmets that could envelop pilots and astronauts in the illusion of 360-degree space. Inside the helmets, pilots could see a digital simulation of the world outside their plane, with their instruments superimposed in 3D over the display; when they moved their heads the display would shift, reflecting whatever part of the world they were “looking” at.
None of this technology had a true name, though—at least not until the 1980s, when a twenty-something college dropout named Jaron Lanier dubbed it “virtual reality.” (The phrase was first used by French playwright Antonio Artaud in a 1933 essay.) The company Lanier cofounded, VPL Research, created the first official products that could deliver VR: the EyePhone (yup), the DataGlove, and the DataSuit. They delivered a compelling, if graphically primitive, experience, but they were slow, uncomfortable, and—at more than $350,000 for a full setup for two people, including the computer to run it all—prohibitively expensive.
Yet, led by VPL’s promise and fueled by sci-fi writers, VR captured the popular imagination in the first half of the 1990s. If you didn’t read Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, you may have seen the movie Lawnmower Man that same year—a divine piece of schlock that featured VPL’s gear (and was so far removed from the Stephen King short story it purported to adapt that King sued to have his name removed from the poster). It wasn’t just colonizing genre movies or speculative fiction: VR figured prominently in syndicated live-action kiddie fare like VR Troopers, and even popped up in episodes of Murder She Wrote and Mad About You.
