The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 42

os Angeles itnes world report Page 3 GAME CHANGERS A new generation of designers re-imagine video games with realistic stories and sophisticated choices. By Todd Martens I i II I rHI IRFANKHAN Los Angeles Times MIGUEL OLIVEIRA is developing "Thralled," in which players will help a runaway slave in 18th century Brazil. assassin, but at no other time in gaming history has there been such a robust alternative to what's stacked at the end of the Best Buy aisles. Partly that's because the cost of producing content has dwindled. In the mid-'90s, software alone could run tens of thousands of dollars.

Today one can design a game for free and sell it, sans intermediaries, via download outlets. From 2009 to 2012, the percentage of digitally accessed or downloaded video games including games for smartphones, tablet computers and home consoles doubled. Discs and cartridges, which once accounted for 80 of sales, are now closer to 60 of the market, according to the NPD Group. An estimated 1 billion people worldwide buy games, and the fastest-growing sector of the industry is (like the music business) downloadable content. Chance-taking is rare in the mainstream game industry.

Big-budget games typically cost somewhere between $50 million and $100 million and three to five years to develop. With that kind of investment, companies expect outsize returns. Smaller indie games can be made for thousands of dollars or less. Hofmeier created "Cart Life" with free software, so his main expense was his time. "Gone Home," created by the four-person team at the Fullbright was completed for less than $200,000, included living expenses the team rented a house where it lived and worked.

In half a year, "Gone Home" sold more than 250,000 copies. Lucas Pope designed "Papers, Please" by himself, hoping to sell 20,000 copies. He sold more than 400,000. Broadening appeal But despite these successes, there's still an in-crowd, exclusionary nature to the medium. Video games typically require certain skills, such as mastering a controller with a dozen-plus buttons or attaining the quick thumb reflexes needed to blast enemy soldiers.

Most also require a big investment of time, and not everyone can afford games and game consoles. That said, the generations who are growing up using smart-phones and tablet computers in grade school will benefit from the ease of touch screens and won't need mom and dad to buy an expensive game console, making it easier for game designers to reach them. That puts the onus on the storytellers. There's an audience out there looking for video games that aren't about fantasy worlds, military action or sports. Make these games available, the thinking goes, and the audience will be there.

"We've been creating content for ourselves for a long time," said Ruben Farrus, designer of the "Papo Yo" addiction game. "We've been creating content for gamers, for game developers. When there was an explosion of casual games, it was a seen as a market that wasn't for real gamers. But I think we have a duty to reach everyone." "Otherwise," he said, games are doomed to "stay in a cultural ghetto." LOS ANGELES Miguel Oliveira is developing a video game in a tiny apartment, worlds away from the high-tech studios of Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo. He works on a laptop surrounded by folding chairs and red plastic cups.

The spare surroundings belie his ambition: to design a game that changes the way we play. In Oliveira's game "Thralled," set in 18th century Brazil, players explore jungles and ships to help a runaway slave reconnect with the life that was stolen from her. The Portugal native grew up on games where guns played the starring role. Now, he wants something more to create work that has the same cultural resonance as the best in film, literature and music. "What's blocking interactive media from being considered art is that most video games focus on primitive feelings of aggressiveness and competitiveness," said Oliveira, 23, a lifelong gamer who graduated from interactive media program last spring at the Unive-risty of Southern California.

"Art is introspective. It makes you see the stuff that makes us human." "I want to believe I'm in the business of making people better." Oliveira is among a new generation of designers who are re-imagining the role of video games, injecting a dose of realism from everyday moral dilemmas and economic struggles into a medium that's generally relied on two extremes: save the princess or save the world. "Papo Yo" follows a young boy who must tread softly around an abusive monster, a metaphorical father who is struggling with addiction. "Prison Architect" calls on players to build and manage detention facilities while navigating issues such as race and capital punishment. "Gone Home" spins a tale out of the feelings of loneliness and banishment that consume a teenage lesbian.

"Papers, Please" asks players to imagine life as an underpaid, over-stressed immigration officer in an Eastern Bloc country. "Games don't have to be a happy, fun thing," said "Papers, Please" designer Lucas Pope, a 36-year-old American now living in Japan. "Our generation grew up with games, and we express ourselves through games. Games once had to be entertaining, but now games are another way to talk to people." Most of these character-driven games are being developed on shoestring budgets by independent designers. But big video game companies are seeing the potential in tapping a demographic beyond the GameStop crowd.

Ubisoft Montreal, best known for blockbuster brands such as "Assassin's Creed," will release a game later this year called "Watch Dogs." Set in a crime-ridden Chicago, the game deals with government and corporate surveillance, with players grappling with the balance between personal privacy Cheryl A. GUERRERO Los Angeles Times ADAM LEVY, left, Justice Daniels and Elise Inferrera try out "Gone Home," about a teen lesbian, at IndieCade in October. also seen as a way for the industry to keep players buying games long after they've grown tired of narratives built around men with guns. Nearly two-thirds of video game players are under age 35, and 55 of players are male, according to the Entertainment Software Assn. The trade group defines video games broadly; it counts avid consumers of more casual titles played on handheld and mobile devices.

Sales data for the most popular games points more forcefully to a younger male demographic. Seven of the top 10 selling video games in 2013 were combat, sports or action titles, according to the NPD Group. "Grand Theft Auto and "Call of Duty: Ghosts" claimed the top two spots. Video games have yet to win broad appeal across age, gender lines in the same way that blockbuster films or top-rated TV shows have. "The game industry likes to say we make more money than Hollywood, but more people saw 'Toy Story 3' on opening weekend than have played a 'Call of Duty' game," said game designer Warren Spec-tor, whose credits include "Deus Ex," a sci-fi combat game with complex narratives and political overtones.

"The movie industry isn't charging $60 to see its product. We sell a lot of copies, but there are probably 2 million core gamers really into this stuff." Sophisticated play Screenwriter Scott Elder, 44, sits in his family room near San Diego and pulls up the Web page for RedBox. The service offers online games for rent, but nearly half the games listed for adults are violent action titles. Scrolling through the page, Elder is bored. "More guys.

More guys. Killing more people. It's not interesting anymore," Elder said. "I want games to mean more." Elder has been playing video games most of his life, including the moody and violent "Grand Theft Auto" and "Silent Hill" series. He's still playing, but he said these days he's looking for games that challenge him intellectually.

Elder is a big fan of "Papers, Please," the game that puts players in the shoes of an Eastern Bloc border control officer who must decide who gets to cross, and who doesn't. It's tense and requires quick thinking, but Elder calls it "fascinating and engrossing." Characters will beg, lie and throw a fit at the border inspector. "I like the direction games are going," Elder said. "I'd like to see more games focus on internal character conflicts. I'm hoping that's the next stage.

I'm hoping indie games continue to do that and I hope larger games realize they can make money from this." That's largely unexplored terrain. Portia Sabin, 42, said she was once an avid player but lost interest amid more grown-up concerns. Sabin, who runs the Portland, independent record label Kill Rock Stars, recently tookthe video game "Gone Home" for a spin after one of the bands she works with licensed a song for the game. She was pleasantly surprised to find that it addressed feminist issues and homosexuality. "This is heavier and more important than a lot of video games," she said.

"This makes me excited for the future of video games." And there was this bonus: It could be completed in just a few hours, a godsend for an often-ignored demographic in the video game world: working parents. Lower design costs Like summer blockbusters, games will always have a place for high seas adventures with a pirate and urban safety. Designer Jonathan Morin said his goal is "to bring a shade of gray to the gaming world." Realistic challenges David Cage of Quantic Dream, a Paris-based company, is making games that turn seemingly small moments losing track of a child at a mall or feeling uncomfortable at your first high school party into grand, anxiety-filled set-pieces. "You can do more with this medium than make toys," he said. Richard Hofmeier's independently produced "Cart Life" offers a snapshot of what it's like to be poor in America.

"Cart Life," which has been downloaded more than 3 million times, puts players in control of various street vendors, such as a Ukrainian immigrant trying to sell newspapers or a single mom who hopes to start a coffee stand. "Cart Life," with its crude block-style art and blip-and-bloop sound effects, looks straight out of the 1980s. Its thematic maturity, however, is very much of the mo- ment. What the game lacks in technological prowess, it makes up for in character depth. Melanie Emberley, the game's struggling entrepreneur, is getting divorced and battling for custody of her daughter.

Here's a puzzle players are forced to confront: Can Emberley spare the time, financially, to converse with her child? One doesn't necessarily win "Cart Life," since a character such as Emberley is never really out of debt. It's not just indie games that are getting existential. Sony's 2013 zombie-themed hit "The Last of Us" included a realistic underlying theme: coping with the loss of family members. "We're in a place where it's OK to fiddle with people's emotions," said Adam Boyes, a vice president at Sony Computer Entertainment. "Video games were always a way out, but nowadays we can have deeper conversations, whether it's around the NSA or our relationships with our parents." Expanding the game genre is Whale graveyard mystery is solved Dozens of fossilized sea creatures probably washed into what is now Chilean desert.

By Geoffrey Mohan todd.martenslatimes.com -I 4 cientists have uncloaked the mystery of an ancient fossilized graveyard of dozens of whales lying side by side with bizarre, walrus-faced dolphins and swimming sloths. against each other for millions of years, pushing up the Andes Mountains. The whale skeletons, all from the rorqual super-family that includes modern blue whales, were largely intact, with few signs of scavenging other than the marks of crab claws, Pyenson said. "South America did not have polar bears or any large terrestrial carnivores that would scavenge and disarticulate the skeletons," he said. "Crabs must have had a field day out there." One set of fossils, dubbed "la familia," or "the family," included two adults and a calf.

While the so-called whale graveyard has attracted the most attention since the find during road widening from 2010 to 2012, the smaller species at the site are also of interest to paleontologists. "We have ancient seals; we have ancient bill fishes there are swordfish and marlin remnants," Pyenson said. "And then there are the totally extinct exotic things: aquatic sloths and walrus whales." The swimming sloth and walrus whale remains are found only in South America, and no walrus whale had ever been found outside neighboring Peru. "It's amazing to me. In 240 meters of road cut you collect all the major players for the fossil marine mammal world in South America," Pyenson said.

It took about three years to piece together the evidence to offer the most plausible explanation for the density of fossils. The steady accumulation of sediment, undisturbed by major waves, suggested a tidal environment, according to the study. All the animals were belly up, suggesting they were dead when they floated in. The lack of any trauma marks on their bones, the varied ages of the dead and the array of species led researchers to suspect some broadly potent toxin killed them. Nearby, orange-colored blotches contained tiny spherical fossils of the same size as dinoflagellate cysts algae.

Iron oxide was abundant in the sediments as well and iron is an important driver of algal blooms. The Humboldt current was probably in place all of the major continents were roughly in modern form at the time. The most likely explanation that encompasses all of that evidence would be an upwelling of ocean water, fed by iron-rich runoff from the nascent Andes, which fed massive algal blooms that poisoned the mammals by direct ingestion or inhalation or through the prey they ate, the study suggested. Museo Paleontologico de Caldera A PALEONTOLOGIST works at the site where the remains of dozens of whales, walrus-faced dolphins and swimming sloths were found. The fossils, unearthed about three years ago during a road-widening project in Chile's Atacama Desert, probably record a series of mass strandings about 6 million to 9 million years ago that were caused by blooms of algae fed by the iron-rich sediments of the Andes Mountains, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The international team of researchers believes about four waves of carcasses washed into what once was a placid tidal basin within a period of weeks, then were buried in sediments that accumulated over 10,000 to 16,000 years, said the study's lead author, Nicholas D. Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution. How the fossils came to rest 130 feet above sea level is less a mystery than it may seem: The Nazca, Antarctic and South American plates have been grinding four times." Researchers created a three-dimensional digital record of the fossils, which were removed and held at two sites in nearby Caldera and the capital, Santiago. "Nothing ever left Chile. That's something that we're proud of," Pyenson said.

"There's a digital legacy online. But the patrimony was preserved." Researchers noted a modern stranding of 14 humpback whales that occurred in a five-week period off Cape Cod in 1987 and 1988. Necropsies revealed high concentrations of neurotoxins in the tissue of the mackerel found in their digestive tracts. "This is largely an ecological story in the past," Pyenson said. "It's a naturally occurring thing, and the conditions were right.

Clearly the conditions were right geoffrey.mohanlatimes.com.