Ten years ago, at All Tomorrow’s Parties, a now-defunct music festival held occasionally in the rain-harangued British seaside town of Camber Sands, I attended a show by Lightning Bolt, a noise-rock duo from Providence, Rhode Island. They had set up in the center of a grubby hall at Pontins, England’s second-best-known budget holiday park. At the band’s request, security had allowed only thirty or so festival-goers into a venue that could comfortably have accommodated a thousand, leaving plenty of room on the beery carpet for dancing, or possibly rioting. We clustered in the round as Brian Gibson began to flay his bass and Brian Chippendale, wearing a wrestler’s mask, assaulted his drum kit, his voice blaring primally through a microphone taped to his cheek. The performance was disorienting, both intimate and savage, like the first moments after an accident, before time resumes its normal speed and the damage can be measured.
A few weeks ago, Gibson launched Thumper, a virtual-reality-enabled video game that captures all of the menace of that live show. (Gibson and his co-creator, Marc Flury, have coined a fresh classification to describe its texture: a “rhythm violence game.”) Thumper invites you, the player, to wear a mask of your own, in the form of the PlayStation VR headset, which also débuted earlier this month. You inhabit the body of what can only be described as a space beetle—a glowing insect with pincers and a chromed-out carapace—which careers into the screen along an undulating track, accompanied by a thudding bass drum and the occasional euphoric chord. Thumper is a kind of weaponized Guitar Hero, a game of musical Simon Says in which each level ends with a face-off against an alien boss, which must be defeated not with arms but with rhythm.
As the beetle sweeps along curves and down slopes, the game provides onscreen musical prompts. These appear on the horizon as distant dots, then swiftly grow in size and brilliance, as if you’d started reeling in a fish only to find you’d hooked a nebula. Each dot corresponds to an audio sample, which you activate by hitting a button with your thumb. Strike it in time and the sample plays in perfect tempo, earning you a haptic buzz of the controller and, when you’re squaring off against that alien, firing a blast of light into its gullet. Miss the dot and your beetle’s shell cracks. Miss a second time and it’s game over. As you progress, the dots come more quickly, and in more complicated variations. It’s as if the musical staff were not a channel on the page for written notation but a toboggan run, with speed measured in beats per minute rather than miles per hour.
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One other PSVR game shares its artistic lingo with Thumper and Rez Infinite. SuperHyperCube was inspired by Nōkabe (“Brain Wall”), a recurring segment on a Japanese TV game show in which contestants must twist their bodies into increasingly unnatural shapes in order to fit through cut-outs in a series of rapidly advancing Styrofoam walls. The show’s pratfall humor, which has been exported to the U.K., the U.S., and Australia as “Hole in the Wall,” is traded here for a clean, Kubrickian, retro-futuristic chic. Using the controller, you twist a mass of cubes, rather than a body, into shape; each time you squeeze through a snug gap successfully, a new cube is added to the cluster. An early version of the game, created in 2008, employed anaglyphic stereoscopy, a kind of 3-D effect triggered by wearing those paper glasses with the red-and-blue lenses that became popular in the nineteen-fifties. But, as with Mizuguchi’s Rez, it wasn’t until the reëmergence of V.R. that the concept blossomed into its ideal form. While SuperHyperCube is, at heart, a puzzle game, demanding the thoughtfulness of a Rubik’s solver rather than a sportsman’s physical instincts, the ever-approaching walls ground the abstract with bodily peril.
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Source: Newyorker