Third-person camera makes this Vive game a giddy experience Last week, following a GDC demo for The Gallery, I wrote about the weirdness of vertigo in Virtual Reality. A few days later, I experienced an even more intense sensation of height-fright while playing Marble Mountain.
Like most early VR experiences, The Gallery is a first-person game, Marble Mountain makes use of a third-person camera. It’s a Marble Madness-style platform game in which the player rolls a ball across landscapes and through obstacles, taking care not to lose control and plunge over cliff faces.
I played it on Vive with a regular controller. Against the advice of the developers, I played standing up. The giddy sensation I had felt with The Gallery was even more pronounced during Marble Mountain. The camera swings through space in arcs that are predetermined, and which follow the Marble’s moves from a variety of directions. It’s these arcs of movement that really unsettle the player’s sense of balance.
I was swaying like a drunk, especially during sequences when the camera is behind the Marble, careening down a steep slope. It was clear from my conversations with the developers that this is a perfectly normal reaction. You can avoid it by sitting. And yet, I didn’t want to sit. The physical sense of place is a big part of what makes VR so fun.
You can get some small sense of how this works from the trailer (above) which features a few shots which take the player high above the action. If anything, the lack of detail on some of the lower parts of the crevice structures diminish the effect of vertigo. Developer Shannon Pickles said that he had cut out some details for that exact reason, smoothing the lower reaches of the world to a fog.
Marble Mountain is a launch title for Vive on April 5, and will also be available Oculus Rift as well as non-VR platforms Linux, Mac and Windows PC via Steam.

Series debut introduces the primate scientist Blizzard debuted a new animated short film based on the world of Overwatch, its upcoming character-based shooter, exclusively through the Xbox YouTube channel. “Recall" is the first in a new series of CGI videos produced by the company that will air ahead of the game’s launch.
Overwatch will hit stores May 24 on PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One. Blizzard first announced the game with an animated teaser featuring a similar, Pixar-esque style to the video above. While that short gave players a glimpse at Overwatch’s cast of character, this new series of films will go in-depth with heroes like Winston, the genetically engineered gorilla who stars in "Recall."
Overwatch is currently in closed beta, with an open test period running May 5-9. Xbox One players can access the multiplayer game early; the open beta will be available May 3.

It’s a setback for EA, and for anybody hoping for this legal issue to be settled The U.S. Supreme Court won’t consider a lawsuit regarding Electronic Arts’ use of the likenesses of retired NFL players in its Madden NFL series, the court announced today.
EA had asked the Supreme Court to hear the case, Electronic Arts v. Davis, after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the publisher’s request to dismiss the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds in January 2015. The Supreme Court’s denial leaves that 9th Circuit ruling in place, meaning that the retired players’ case will continue in the federal appeals court.
Thousands of retired NFL athletes originally filed suit against EA in 2010, alleging that the publisher violated their state-law right to publicity by using their likenesses on historic teams in Madden titles from 2001-2009. Like the collegiate athletes who received $60 million in the settlement of a similar case, the NFL players in question did not appear in the Madden games under their real names. However, all other identifying traits — height, weight, ethnicity and the like — were true to life, and the virtual athletes were rated to perform like their real-world counterparts.

Must Read

Retired NFL players’ lawsuit against EA’s Madden series can go forward, court says (update)

EA did not compensate these players for the use of their likenesses. Since 1994, the publisher has paid licensing fees to the NFL Players Association for the rights to use active NFL athletes’ names and likenesses. Retired players currently appear in Madden’s Ultimate Team mode, and are paid for it.
In the Davis lawsuit, EA argued that the use of the retired athletes’ likenesses was covered under the First Amendment as “incidental" to the creation of the Madden games in question. The 9th Circuit disagreed, ruling last January that "EA’s use of the former players’ likenesses is not incidental because it is central to EA’s main commercial purpose — to create a realistic virtual simulation of football games involving current and former NFL teams."
By deciding not to hear EA v. Davis, the Supreme Court is leaving unanswered an important legal question about how to weigh the First Amendment against claims like trademark infringement and the right to publicity, said J. Michael Keyes, an intellectual property partner at the law firm Dorsey & Whitney.
"The lower courts still have little guidance as to what the proper standard is on how the First Amendment interacts with state law claims," said Keyes. He added that the Davis case "would have been a perfect vehicle for the Court to provide much needed guidance" in this area, because right now "there are multiple different tests used by lower federal courts."
A representative for EA declined comment to Polygon on the Supreme Court’s decision. We’ve asked the attorneys for Davis for comment, and will update this article with any information we receive.

Four renowned developers create touching games meant for a lifetime of play To mark the 30th anniversary of the Game Developers Conference last week, organizers brought back the game design challenge panel, hosted by NYU professor and GameLab co-founder Eric Zimmerman. Four well-known game designers were given the difficult task of creating a game that takes 30 years to play. The result was an hour-long presentation that was equal parts thought provoking, heart warming and laugh-out-loud funny.
Here’s a summary of the game pitches that came out of the panel, and a few links where you can experience them for yourself.
Nina Freeman’s virtual soap opera
Nina Freeman, level designer at Fullbright and independent developer of the game Cibele, looked to television for inspiration in creating her game. There are few genres in TV that have lifespans as long as soap operas, Freeman reasoned, so her solution blended soaps with interactive fiction.
“What’s so special about soaps is that they’re driven by real, human characters," Freeman said. "They’re about the conflicts these characters face and that any one of us might face in our daily lives. Soap viewers dive into the daily dramas of these people’s lives for decades, every day of the week, exploring their vulnerabilities, their love, their strengths and their challenges.

"This draws viewers in and helps them feel connected to these stories, like they’re checking in with a friend about what they’re up to every day. Soap operas make long-time viewers feel like it’s real and they make viewers feel like part of the family."
Players would receive daily updates to Freeman’s game, each with a collection of scenes revolving around the show’s main characters in the form of text and still images. Players would have the opportunity to interact with these images, in a manner similar to otome-style games. They could click on a given character’s cell phone to read their conversations, or hunt around on their computers or read their diaries. Then, at the end of the day’s scenes, players would be able to provide input as to their understanding of how the main characters were feeling in the form of emoji.
This player feedback would go directly to the game’s writers, and help them steer the narrative arc in a way to surprise and delight committed fans.
"It’s also inspired by reality TV," Freeman said, "In this game the writers are relationship DMs, or drama managers. Players would also be able to see an aggregated version of this relationship interpretation data as well. This is important because the players are reacting to the scenarios, not writing them. They’re not making decisions for the characters, or making decisions about plot points. But they can see how their personal interpretation factored into how the story is moving forward."
Zach Gage’s Generation Lamp
For game designer Zach Gage (Ridiculous Fishing, Tharsis) the problem of the 30-year game was particularly difficult. To illustrate his point, he used poker as an analogy.
"If I play poker with my friends sometimes," Gage said, "that’s a great game. But if I play poker with my friends one night a year, with a $100 buy-in, and we continue that ritual for 30 years, it’s going to turn it into a brilliant game and probably be one of the most meaningful play experiences of our lives.
"To a player, these two games are vastly different, and the 30 year rule is an incredibly substantial change. And yet, paradoxically, as the designer, despite having added the key rule of 30 years, I feel like I haven’t really made a meaningful contribution. It’s still just poker."
What Gage did was rapidly prototype as many games as he could in the weeks leading up to the presentation, several of which he shared with the audience.

First came Duel, a one-on-one game where players race to be the first one to type "bang" into a text box in 30 years’ time. But, Gage said, it "didn’t feel quite weighty enough." So he supplemented his presentation with The Password Game, which he describes in the video below.

With these two tongue-in-cheek games out of the way, Gage finally shared his true solution to the game design challenge, an idle game called Generation Lamp.
"You get three 30-year blocks in life, at best," Gage said. "Being able to look back over 30 years as a human is fairly astonishing. 30 years ago I was less than a year old. There was no internet. There were barely computers. I was basically not even a person yet. In 30 more years who knows where we’ll be, who even knows how many of us will still be around when we get there.
"To be totally honest, I’m not sure there’s anything more meaningful to the actual person playing my game than just betting that they’ll still be here, and winning that bet."
To play Generation Lamp you take an old smartphone or tablet, log in to Gage’s website, turn the brightness to high, turn off the auto-lock, and plug it in. After that, your smart device will become an constant companion, slowly changing through more than 16 million possible colors at the rate of one per minute for the next 32 years.

"It’s about celebrating and marking your time," Gage said. "When you start, you’ll see a lot of whites and blues, then eventually more yellows, then greens and onward. And because it’s living on a server, you don’t have to worry about losing it. As you live, as you move, as your devices presenting it die out, you can plug in new devices and point them to the same link and continue living with your lamp until you — or it — dies."
Anna Kipnis’ Drawing Conclusions
Double Fine senior gameplay programmer Anna Kipnis’ game took a decidedly philosophical bent. For inspiration, she initially looked to a quote from the French philosopher Albert Camus.

At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures — be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.

She wanted her response to the 30-year game challenge to be a vehicle for self-reflection, but she also wanted it to be engaging. For that she invoked a few other inspirations, including party games like Telestrations, a version of the folk-game Would You Rather and the work of renowned neurologist and author Oliver Sacks.
The result was Drawing Conclusions, a game about sharing and interpreting abstract thoughts through Crayola drawings.
"The curator draws a picture in the form of a question," Kipnis explained. "Basically, just a drawing that needs a response. To make the question clear you put a question mark somewhere in the drawing. Then you hand this question to the player.
"They answer your question by modifying the drawing you made, preferably in a different color so you can still tell what the original question was. And then step three the player hands back the drawing to the curator. The curator looks at the answer and tries to come up with some analysis based on the player’s answer."
Those interpretations can be as long or as short as the curator wants, but the idea is to think hard about how the player answered and return to them some insight on themselves.
"The important thing is that you save the drawings, either the physical copies or some electronic version so that you can look back at them later in time and reflect on yourself."

It was Kipnis’ game which would go on to win the challenge, based solely on audience applause.
Chris Crawford’s design process
Designer and author Chris Crawford, the co-founder of the Game Developers Conference, finished off the panel with not so much a game as a series of amusing and poignant thought experiments.
Crawford posited that just about any interactive experience that players engaged with for 30 years was, more likely than not, going to be incredibly boring. To keep players engaged, designers had to constantly feed them information over 30 years — a nearly impossible task.
So he searched for experiences that already existed in the real world, that took place over a long period of time and sought to determine what made them special. Then, he cleverly made a go at comparing them to games.
What followed was more of a heart-warming series of jokes than a real game pitch, and perhaps the best goof came at the expense of organized religion.
"If we think in the terms of the divine," Crawford said, "there’s a game that’s been running around for thousands of years. It’s called religion, and the game designers are called priests.

"The basic idea of this game is that you get points by doing good, and you lose points by doing bad. In the Hindu religion those points are called karma, in the Christian religion they’re called grace. In the Hindu religion your goal, the victory condition is to attain nirvana. In the Christian religion it is to get to heaven. … As we all know it’s a good idea to give players multiple lives, and in fact the Hindu religion is very generous about this. You get an infinite number of lives. You just keep playing until you win. That’s a very positive, constructive attitude towards it. The designers of the Christian religion on the other hand are not so generous. You get just one life to win or lose the game."
In the end, Crawford said, he decided to narrow his design goals somewhat. Instead of tackling all of being and morality, he elected for something a bit more finite. He called it The Marriage Game.
"The idea of this game is to get married and to be happy for at least 30 years," Crawford said, showing a slideshow of pictures from his own life and marriage throughout.
"It’s all very enjoyable," he said. "You work together. You play together. You share in each other’s triumphs, as well as your tribulations. And I can assure you, if you play this game with determination and serious effort that you are going to win this goddamn game no matter what. This is the best game in the world."

Virtual Reality was the major topic of last week’s Game Developers Conference with roughly 100 games and “experiences" on show for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR.
But the one I found most compelling was the most mundane creation for Vive: The SteamVR Desktop Theater Mode.
Slip on the black plastic headset and instead of dropping into a fantastical world of mouthy orbs, atop a mountain with a robot dog or inside a game, I found myself sitting in a chair in a fairly non-descript room facing a big television screen.
To be specific, in this case big means about 19 feet.
To give me a sense of what the early beta of what SteamVR Desktop Theater Mode can do, a Valve employee loaded up a copy of Broforce from the Steam library.
Despite the (virtual) size of the screen, the game looked amazing, just like it does on my home computer running a GTX 980 TI. Because I was in a virtual room sitting in a virtual chair staring at a virtual screen, I could behave as if I was playing on a massive screen. That meant looking around, focusing on whatever I wanted, even moving my chair back a bit if I felt too close.
My time playing a game within an experience was limited, but I quickly forgot I wasn’t in an empty room playing on a giant television. The floor, which seemed to be highly polished, lit up with a light reflection of the game playing on the television. It was surreal.
The concept behind the mode is to allow users to play non-VR games within VR systems like the upcoming HTC Vive. While the room is fairly generic right now, I was told that it’s very likely that new takes on the room could be released. The system will support "most" games I was told.
While visiting Valve’s booth at the show, I also got a chance to check out the company’s latest version of The Lab. The Lab starts you off in a big room filled with all sorts of momentos. Imagine a museum created by a game developer. Each of the dozen displays feature floating globules of water. By picking one up, you can gaze into it and if you like what you saw you just dunk your head in and you are there.

My first visit took me to an experience that Valve refers to as a postcard.
This postcard was created by a Valve employee that took a bunch of pictures from the top of Washington State’s Vesper Peak. The team used photogrammetry to recreate the mountain top in VR. I was able to teleport short distances to different spots on the peak and look around at my surroundings. It was stunning. The devs also dropped a little robot dog into the setting, giving me something to play with if I was up for tossing the sticks scattered around the peak.
In the next experience, I tried out a game called Slingshot, which placed me inside some secret factory in Portal calibrating robot personality cores. The cores, it turns out, are all ball shaped and calibrating them involved launching them with a giant slingshot across the mammoth factory and into teetering towers of explosive barrels and stacks of crates. Each core also has a personality and chatters on a bit as you set about finding a target. The variety of bots and dialogue absolutely made the game. My favorite of the personality cores was the spider core which promised to release spiders upon activation. I shot that one pretty quickly.
Next was a game called Longbow, which had me fending off an army of flat enemies from the walls of a castle with a boy. Despite being fairly straightforward, the sensation of nocking an arrow, drawing and loosing it on an enemy felt so physical that I found this one of my favorite experiences.

Finally, I tried a 3D shoot-em-up called Xortex. The game has you holding a spaceship in your hand and moving it around to avoid the increasingly thick cloud of fire coming at you from basically everywhere. The entire game takes place inside a sort of big virtual sphere. You fire by pulling the controller’s trigger. Because Xortex is played in a 3D space, I found myself spinning around and swooping up, down, forward and back as I played the game. Initially, without even thinking about it, I was actually trying to avoid the incoming fire with the ship and my body. But after realizing that wasn’t necessary (and how stupid I must look), I focused on maneuvering the ship.
Xortex has the sort of pick-up-and-play, hard-to-put-down feel of Geometry Wars or, really, any good SHMUP.
With just a third of the dozen experiences sampled, I’m sure that this freebie for the Vive is going to be one of the system’s first early hits. Paired up with a program that gives you access to most of your purchased Steam games on an unusually large television screen, these certainly aren’t programs that will drive sales, but they could make dropping $800 on a computer peripheral a bit easier to excuse.
VALVE AND HTC’S VIVE STAND AT THE PRECIPICE OF VR’S FUTURE, BUT THEY MAY HAVE A LONG WAIT