Innehållsförteckning för May 2016 från Edge

We’ve known for a long time about the unusual effects VR hardware can have on some of us – disorientation, nausea, and so on – but it also seems to have the power to inspire strange behaviours among the people driving these technologies. Take Jeff Stafford, senior staff software engineer at Sony Computer Entertainment America, for example. As one of the key people behind the forthcoming PlayStation VR, Stafford shares responsibility for building hype around Sony’s hardware in the face of fearsome competitors. And yet he was happy to admit recently that the product his team will ship in October is suboptimal. “[In the future] we’re going to try and improve every aspect of it,” he said. “Get it lighter, smaller form factor, easier to use. Of course people want…

The legendary shoot ’em up R-Type has reached beyond its arcade origins to land on everything from Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum to Nintendo’s Game Boy, but Irem’s game has never been realised in animation form before. Paul Johnson tells us why, and how, he’s doing it. Your R-Type animation has attracted a lot of attention as a ‘fan project’, but you’re an animator by trade, right? I guess I am now. I studied Japanese at Sheffield University, and when I graduated I thought that speaking Japanese meant I could become a translator of Japanese. I did a few games and novels, but unless you want to largely take on 50,000-page contracts for patents for new battery chargers, there’s really not much work in that space. It was looking like I was…

“I didn’t know how to react to it. It’s an incredible honour, and then it’s like, ‘OK, am I supposed to be done? Is that it?’” Bethesda Game Studios director and executive producer Todd Howard, 45, prepares for a slow walk to the glue factory after receiving DICE’s lifetime achievement award “We should all applaud when a team does something special. Those who hope for teams to fail due to platform aren’t real gamers.” After praising the PS4-bound Uncharted 4, Xbox chief Phil Spencer shuts down agitators on Twitter “I spent a seven-month period as a board member just falling in love with Zynga… We have all the ingredients for a successful turnaround.” And all the ingredients for a massive payoff when it all goes horribly wrong, new Zynga CEO…

HASHTAG #いらすとやさんでゲームパッケ ージを再現する www.bit.ly/irasutoya One small corner of Twitter has been brightened with a selection of particularly joyful recreations of videogame box art. The idea of replacing existing covers with clip art or other simplistic alternatives is nothing new, but in appropriating the royalty-free work of illustrator Takashi Mifune’s from irasutoya.com, these efforts transform even the most po-faced, explosionheavy covers into something that wouldn’t look out of place in Keita Takahashi’s colourful back catalogue. While not every contribution holds up to scrutiny, revisions of F1 2015, Just Cause 3 and Battlefield 1942 are significantly better than the originals. And, as if to underscore the Takahashi evocation, a redo of Katamari Damacy’s cheery cover is all but indistinguishable in its Irasutoya form. VIDEO Videogaiden www.bit.ly/vgaiden Rab Florence and Ryan Macleod were…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar What makes a good eSports host, apart from not talking about wanking over a wheelchair? Despite the fact that I pilfered the name for this page from Steam’s sofafriendly user interface, it is not a column about Valve, though I accept it may feel like it sometimes. The reason I borrowed the name Big Picture Mode was that I wanted this page to offer a zoomed-out look at a particular issue within the game industry, using the breathing room of print to give a rounded perspective on complex matters rather than a hot take within the hour. So it’s no surprise that I’ve written about Valve more than any other company, and almost as much as I have about Street Fighter and fatherhood. Gabe Newell’s company does an…

You’ve become something of a celebrity – are you finding that difficult? I would question whether that’s real. I think I could easily disappear in six months’ time, and that’ll be fine. How I imagine my life is that I’ll be living in a trailer on some weird trailer park filled with No Man’s Sky advertising materials and T-shirts, and I’ll be that weird old guy who’s trying to entice the kids in, saying, “Oh, you like videogames? Let me show you videogames. This is what we used to play when I was a kid!” You’ve highlighted the fact that No Man’s Sky can’t be spoilt by guides or people who stream the game. Is that a personal bugbear of yours? I’m like that with some things, but then with…

Developer Dontnod Entertainment Publisher Focus Home Interactive Format PC, PS4, Xbox One Origin France Release 2017 Swapping sunny Oregon for shadowy London, horror RPG Vampyr marks a dark departure for Life Is Strange developer Dontnod. It’s the Paris studio’s attempt to strip the vampire myth of its accumulated Hammer Horror clichés and present a more classic portrayal of cultural touchstone spectres who crawled from the darkest recess of Eastern Europe. 1918 London makes a suitably vile location. Not only has the Great War ravaged the population, but the Spanish Flu now picks the bones. This pandemic killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide, and its parallels to vampirism, a spread-by-bite affliction sparking paranoid fear of contagion, are intentional. In a city bruised and bloodied by a physical foe and…

Anna Sweet started in the game industry at Microsoft, designing user-research and testing tools for Microsoft Games Studio titles before spending six years working on Steam at Valve. As Oculus head of developer strategy, she now looks after thirdparty studios working with Rift. Given the requirements of VR, how do you approach working with studios? We’re not very prescriptive. We generally think these developers are amazing and way smarter than us. They come to us with an idea, and we’re like, ‘OK, let’s enable you with hardware.’ We have a really great team of engineers who can help them solve their problems with performance issues. We’re happy to help them at any point that they need, but we generally let them do their awesome, amazing, creative, inventive things, and then…

When the announcement of a peripheral that, at £349, costs significantly more than the hardware on which it runs and yet could be considered to be something of a bargain, you know we’re living in unusual times. But then PlayStation VR’s rivals cost hundreds of pounds more than Sony’s hardware, and that’s before you even factor in the cost of the high-end PCs that are required to make them work properly. In that context, PSVR’s pricepoint, announced at a press event held in San Francisco alongside the Game Developers Conference, feels almost miraculous – especially when you consider that Sony claims it will make money on each unit sold. Andrew House, CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, who strode onto a small stage in front of a packed room to reveal…

Does the procedural tech ever throw up unfortunate scenarios where players really can’t reach something? In the early days, right at the start of the game you could get yourself trapped. It was generating levels where you could drop down into a room, but until you got the double-jump boots you couldn’t get out again. I took it out, and it immediately killed a really exciting sensation when you’re playing it. Because you’re basically naked in those first levels. You’ve got no special tools, and there’s something really nice about studying your environment and making sure before you get into a room that you can definitely get out of it. You’re supposed to be a thief and be intelligent about the way you approach things. In the end, I left…

There’s a certain tension between the person that creates a game and the one that plays it. Game designers are, like all creatives, restless: in an ideal world they would be prolific, certainly, but would never do the same thing twice. Yet the videogame business has been built on a foundation of incessant sequel-making. We players say we want innovation, but if there’s none to be found we’ll happily take more of the same. As such it’s with some sympathy for Hidetaka Miyazaki that we sit down with Dark Souls III (p104). FromSoftware has released an entire trilogy of games in a shade over four-and-a-half years, and given that it’s also delivered Bloodborne in the same time, you’d understand if the studio had finally run out of steam. The final…

Developer Ubisoft Massive Publisher Ubisoft Format PC, PS4 (version tested), Xbox One Release Out now It’s asking you to hunt gear with no tangible reward in terms of what you can do, how you do it, or what you look like doing it The Division is two things. It’s a thirdperson, open-world action game that tasks you with ridding a city of foes, district by district. It’s also an online RPG with heavy cooperative leanings, this initial release representing the vanguard of a promised run of updates and expansions. The setting is New York in the aftermath of a man-made viral outbreak. Your character, who you create, is a sleeper operative for The Division – a secret government agency whose members are seeded among the civilian population to be ‘activated’…

“I hope if you’re in it for the story it’s going to be good enough that you want to go back and check what happens” The episodic structure Hitman was intended to launch with proved controversial, and when Io announced it was splitting Hitman’s introductory three-episode package into still-smaller chunks, a vocal component of the community turned feral. But creative director Christian Elverdam anticipated it, and it didn’t dampen Io’s enthusiasm to face the challenges of a live studio. Here, Elverdam explains what Io means when it invites us to enter ‘a world of assassination’. How have you felt about the public reaction to Hitman adopting an episodic model? We were expecting people to be sceptical up front – there’s this old quote: ‘Everyone loves progress, but no one really…

Developer Bandai Namco Publisher Nintendo, The Pokémon Company Format Wii U Release Out now Even old hands will need a gentle leg-up for what is, even by genre standards, a thoroughly unusual game This, Capcom, is how it should be done. Just weeks after Street Fighter V launched, promising to welcome new players before slamming the door shut in their face, Pokkén Tournament is a shining, timely example of how to explain to a beginner the complexities of one of the most impenetrable genres in gaming. The tutorial is gentle, light-hearted stuff, split into sections by difficulty so that even if you can’t handle the high-level techniques, there’s still a ‘cleared’ badge or two on the menu screen. A tab on the pause menu suggests a few handy combos and…

As a band of knights approach Camelot in Monty Python And The Holy Grail, we see their leader change his mind. “On second thought,” King Arthur says, “let’s not go to Camelot. ’Tis a silly place.” It’s a description that fits many of the older UK studios. You know the ones I mean: the Frontiers, the Rebellions, the Codemasterses. They are silly places, amusing places, inspiring and occasionally aggravating places. They’re places caught between the past and the future, places whose signature games we remember fondly and whose transgressions we often forgive. Why? Because they’re the places with spirit in a modern industry that often lacks it. Modern studios are factories, measuring every interaction and mathematically tuning their games like a Vegas casino might. Many have forgotten (or never learned)…

1965–2016 Much-loved Britsoft pioneer Fergus McGovern – pictured here as immortalised via the ‘Fergality’ in the Mega Drive version of Mortal Kombat 2 – passed away in February, aged 50. Often branded as a ‘whizzkid’ in the emergence of the UK game development scene, McGovern’s legacy includes co-founding Probe Software in 1984, which thrived bringing coin-ops and film tie-ins to 8bit and 16bit platforms. Later known as Probe Entertainment, the business was sold to Acclaim for $40m in 1995. McGovern later embraced numerous roles, co-creating the plug-andplay specialist HotGen, becoming an associate director of Crystal Palace FC, and pouring his time into charity work. “Like so many of us of a certain age in the games business, we grew up together and built our careers together,” says Stuart Dinsey, chairman…

Game Killer Queen Manufacturer Raw Thrills Josh Debonis and Nik Mikros’s Killer Queen started life as a physical field game, which was played with foam swords, balls and plastic crowns, but graduated to a fully fledged arcade cabinet thanks to a collaboration with Wisconsin-based Fun Company. The machine became a familiar sight at indie and corporate game events, and found its way into a handful of arcades across North America. Now its creators have signed a deal with Raw Thrills in a rare example of a homegrown arcade project getting picked up by a mainstream manufacturer. Played on a pair of giant cabinets, two teams of five – each led by a flying, powerful queen – compete to retrieve a giant snail god, fill their hive with nectar, or take…

Issue 291 Stay positive I’m ecstatic at the gentle shifting of norms in gaming. Simultaneously, I’m frustrated that some things are shifting too slowly. With the releases of The Witness, Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, Oxenfree and Firewatch, among others, it seems that games that explore more nuanced, grown-up themes are comfortably slipping into the mainstream consciousness and scoring some significant media coverage. This is very positive, in contrast to less consumer-friendly trends like publishers getting bolder about releasing full-price, feature-light games (Destiny, Hitman and Street Fighter V), punishing early adopting fans with little save a clumsily PR’ed content roadmap to placate them. Some things aren’t changing fast enough. Representation and diversity in blockbuster titles is still woeful, and homogenisation of gameplay among big titles is becoming wearisome. Supposedly this…

In this issue’s Collected Works (p86), game development veteran Warren Spector says that interactions with videogame characters haven’t evolved since 1989. It’s a sobering statement, especially when a quick sift through our memories reveals little in the way of counterarguments. But while few NPCs effectively mask the branching, often binary dialogue trees they represent, many developers are finding ways to ensure that the process of interaction is at least less predictable. Take No Man’s Sky (p36). Conversing with its alien populace still involves little more than selecting from a list of responses, but by building those interactions around a language system that requires you to piece together what’s being said by learning foreign words, it introduces an additional layer of risk and reward. You might reduce your standing with a…

Developer/ publisher Capcom Format PC, PS4 Origin Japan Release May The concept of Umbrella Corps has proven hard for Resident Evil fans to swallow: survival horror has somehow given way to a 3v3 competitive shooter. Trailers are hammered with downvotes on ‘principle’ and the comments read even more like Nostradamus than usual. But really, given the series’ penchant for strange tie-ins like the Gun Survivor series and Operation Raccoon City, and the still more absurd films, this side-step isn’t wholly out of character. What is peculiar given the risk in associating the famous Resi brand with an unproven concept is the noncommittal way in which it draws on the franchise’s 20-year history. It wants you to jump into the fray, hose down your enemies, bask and reset The headline mode,…

After several years of enthusiastic, if professionally detached, experiences with virtual reality, it has finally happened. We’re sat behind a desk in a plush winter lodge having just managed to foil a poison-gas attack. An elk’s head sits mounted above the roaring fireplace, and we recline to light a celebratory cigar. In the process, an intriguing panel catches our eye. It’s just out of reach so we attempt to steady ourselves on the desk in order to reach across, and nearly fall face first into the floor as our arm passes through the decidedly unsupportive polygons. Later, as we remove the second-generation Touch controllers from our hands, we also try to take off a virtual hat – snagged a little earlier from a hatstand while pondering a puzzle – before…

Palmer Luckey is disarmingly confident for his age. And with good reason: the 23-year-old Oculus VR founder has spent the past five years working up to this moment, from building a prototype in his parents’ garage to being the head of a company that was acquired by Facebook for $2bn, and which now employs star industry names such as John Carmack. How does it feel to have reached this point? I don’t want to be flippant, but it mostly feels exactly the same right now. We’re still getting there. When we launched the preorders, a lot of people said, “Wow, what a weight off your shoulders this must be!” And I’m like, “We haven’t even launched – this isn’t a weight off my shoulders.” It’s the final commitment, it’s a…

There’s rarely a dull moment at Sumo Digital, but the Sheffield-based developer is perhaps busier now than it’s ever been. Having recently appointed Ian Livingstone CBE as its non-executive chairman, it’s in the process of opening a new studio in Nottingham. It’s planning to hire 50 additional staff for the new venture, as well as an additional 50 for its remote office in Pune, India. There is, too, the small matter of developing Crackdown 3; running an internal game jam; producing downloadable content and post-launch support for LittleBigPlanet 3; and continuing its work with the Disney Infinity series. And there’s more. Upon our arrival, we learn, with Yager having been relieved of its duties, that Sumo will now be making Dead Island 2. It’s a studio in exceptional health and…

Developer FromSoftware Publisher Bandai Namco Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now (JPN), April 12 (EU/US) There is a point, one a little too long in coming, when you realise Miyazaki has been playing with you once again There are times, especially early on, when it all feels a little too familiar. From the moment you first set foot in Firelink Shrine, Dark Souls III feels like a work of fan service, and the feeling simply intensifies as you push deeper and deeper into Lothric. Almost everything in the opening third of the game is a contrivance, a reminder of something from another FromSoftware game you already know inside out. The run-up to one particular boss fight has enemies with origins in New Londo Ruins and Hemwick Charnel…

Developer/publisher Superhot Team Format PC (tested), Xbox One Release Out now It’s a victory for style over substance, in which style smashes substance’s head into a million pieces THE GIFT OF GIFS At the end of each level you have the opportunity to edit a replay and upload it to an official database, or capture and publish it using your own means. The plot encourages sharing with a code phrase that creates a rapport among fellow players while encouraging them to market the game. It helps that the gifs look so good, and show off some unconventional tactics. One player decided to play the bar level by vaulting the counter and throwing every single bottle of wine on the wall at attackers. Another player who was stuck in a long…

Developer/publisher Sorath Format PC Release Out now CUTTY RANKS Leaderboards let you compare your times against players globally and across your friends list. Any run can be downloaded and watched, which is the only way, for a while, that you’re likely to see advanced enemies such as the demon monolith that explodes from the centre of the stage after a set amount of time. In the upper echelons, players have managed to survive ten minutes, but a reassuring number are still cracking two minutes. It’s a long, hard climb to the top. Devil Daggers is an unusual creature: part twitchy firstperson score-attack shooter, part horror game. It’s compulsive and repulsive at the same time, working both as an expertly designed test of skill, but also a test of nerve set…

You’d be forgiven for thinking you know Ubisoft inside out. This, after all, is a company with a reputation for announcing its games early and then doing its best to make it impossible for you to forget about them. Those that it does intend to keep under wraps, meanwhile, still find their way into the news through leaks. And there is such obvious connective tissue linking its games (particularly open-world ones) that after a while everything about Ubisoft begins to feel a little too familiar. But we don’t know it all, a fact made clear when we’re told shortly after walking through the doors of Ubisoft Montreal that 80 per cent of projects in development at its flagship studio are yet to be announced. It’s made even clearer by the…

AKA Baths, Will Wiesenfeld is a classically trained musician who layers samples of household noises with falsetto vocals, electronics and synths. Signed to experimental LA-based label Anticon, Baths’ music is intimate, often introspective, and always otherworldly – an aesthetic he looks for in games, too. You tweeted that you had trouble with The Witness – how’s that going? Yes! I’m not any more. I had a great time playing it, and I completed it on my own – I’m proud to say I only had to write down four puzzles. I pride myself on being able to stare at something for long enough and try to visualise it, then make it happen. I should have [made more notes] – it would have made playing the game much faster – but…

Illustration kaeru.com.ar It feels as though Lara is too potentially valuable to abandon, yet no one seems quite sure who she should be How do you solve a problem like Lara? As I belatedly play through Tomb Raider, the 2013 reboot, it feels as though she is a piece of character IP which is too potentially valuable — and with too much historical goodwill — to abandon. And yet no one seems quite sure who she should be, even in 2016, 20 years after her first appearance. In 2013’s game, Lara Croft is reimagined as a young, scared, vulnerable woman — until, of course, she settles into her role as heroine of a mass-murder simulator, blowing up hundreds of men and taking especial delight in sticking arrows in their knees,…

Developer/publisher Hello Games Format PC, PS4 Origin UK Release June 24 Sean Murray has a problem. It’s the last presentation in a long day of press demonstrations and he’s just discovered, on taking to the stage, that his bottle of water is sparkling. “I might burp,” he warns, “which is also embargoed.” But while a public bout of wind might be on the cards, No Man’s Sky lead Murray is uncomfortable for another reason entirely: despite his excitement at working on a game in which so many have taken a strong interest, the rigmarole of publicising it – and nurturing that public enthusiasm – from behind a necessary veil of secrecy is taking its toll on a man who just wants to code. “We’ve never done something quite to this…

Developer/publisher KeokeN Interactive Format PC Origin The Netherlands Release August Koen Deetman is part of a generation of developers that is increasingly looking upwards for inspiration. Yet Deliver Us The Moon isn’t focused so much on cosmic concerns as real-world disquietude, the search for a new home a pressing worry in light of global warming, the depletion of natural resources, and escalating societal unrest. Set 50 years hence, it centres on the fallout of a mission to find humanity a new home. It’s a survival game of sorts, but at its heart is a very different driving force: yes, it’s about keeping one astronaut alive, but only so that they might be able to perpetuate existence for the rest of us. Its story posits the notion that in the near…

Developer/ publisher Capcom Format 3DS Origin Japan Release Out now (JP), summer (EU/US) We can’t quite credit that anyone in Japan hasn’t yet encountered Monster Hunter, but evidently Capcom still believes it can cast its net a little wider. Admittedly, this may be with an eye to winning over the western players that, despite the best efforts of Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, still find the series to be abstruse or esoteric. Capcom’s solution is something of a charm offensive, this time offering the irresistible opportunity not only to be joined on a hunt by Felyne allies, but also to play as one. An early difference you’ll notice is that their health bar can be depleted three times before they faint, meaning that, yes, only when they’ve expended all nine of…

Having made his mark on videogames as the creator of Crash Bandicoot and co-founder of Naughty Dog, Jason Rubin dabbled in social games with Monkey Gods before taking over as president of then-ailing publisher THQ. Today, he heads up Oculus Worldwide Studios. How does Oculus Studios’ focus differ from the company’s thirdparty relations? So, there’s actually a lot of grey area. Every developer has a different story, and different needs, and we basically do whatever it takes to get those games to come out. AirMech, for example, started as a thirdparty group that was making a game but wanted some financial and production help. And so they went from our thirdparty group to my group and became an internally funded and helped title. How about firstparty projects? I came in…

Well, if you thought clearing off the coffee table for a Wii Sports session was an inconvenience, or that 20 minutes of pre-party Rock Band kit setup was too much like hard work, you’re in for a heck of a shock. The problem with HTC Vive’s ambitious, often brilliant room-scale VR is that, as the term implies, it needs an entire room. Rarely has the phrase ‘disruptive technology’ been meant so literally. You’re not clearing the coffee table, but picking it up and taking it out of the room; every piece of furniture and potential obstruction must be pushed right up against the perimeter of your chosen play space, or removed from it entirely. Vive requires full floor-to-ceiling coverage, too, so any location featuring fancy light fittings is a no-go.…

Street Fighter V PS4 By the time you read this, Capcom will have added some of the features that should’ve been made available at launch. Hopefully it’ll also have found a solution for the ragequit problem, which lets players duck out of a loss with their ranking points and win streaks intact. A month after release, the lingering sense is that SFV will be wonderful when it’s finally finished. Lego Dimensions PS4 It was only a matter of time before Lego moved on the toys-to-life genre, and the results were twofold. Building things and watching them spring to life onscreen is an unremitting delight, but the game itself, adopting the same old jump-and-thwack routine that TT Games has been pumping out a couple of times a year for a decade…

If, as they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, staff must walk From’s halls with permanently flushed cheeks Hidetaka Miyazaki comes across as surprised – even a little embarrassed – at the success of the Souls games. If you’re the type to generalise, you might think that’s just an expression of the kind of humility for which his countrymen are renowned. Were he a westerner, meanwhile, we might suspect false modesty, a media-training sheen designed to keep the customer base sweet. But in his case, it can only be genuine. He cannot possibly have known, when he was sat sketching out Demon Souls’ Tower Of Latria or dreaming up its World Tendency system, that his game would become a cult hit around the world. That it would lead…

Developer Io Interactive Publisher Square Enix Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now Showstopper is a location that feels more like the setting for a real highstakes hit than anything Io has done before AIDING AND ABETTING Hitman’s Opportunities, which guide you to perform signature kills such as bringing down a lighting rig, concerned Hitman veterans who wanted to assemble the pieces without assistance; the same is true of Instinct, which reveals target positions through walls. In the beta, toggles were already in place to limit these hints, but Io realised it would need to signpost the system in Hitman’s tutorial before launch. This is the sort of flexibility Io hopes will distinguish its ‘live’ game from Hitmans of yore. To appease the purists, however, Elusive Targets will…

Developer PopCap Games Publisher Electronic Arts Format PC, PS4 (tested), Xbox One Release Out now Garden Warfare 2 offers an alternative, lighthearted take on a genre that can often feel po-faced PopCap’s second foray into arena shooters fulfils many of the requirements that a dutiful sequel should. It’s certainly bigger, introducing new modes, characters and an open-world hub area. And it’s discernibly louder, too, with an expanded arsenal of organic and undead ordnance. But like creeping knotweed stubbornly resisting treatment, many of the original Garden Warfare’s problems remain. But problems aren’t the only thing to be carried over. The first game’s penchant for gorgeous visuals and its easy charm are very much intact. And you can also import all of the character variants that took so long to earn the…

Developer/publisher Kitfox Games Format PC Release Out now MYTHING IN ACTION Four characters are available from the start, with another two unlocking later. The Ritualist is a standard mage, chipping away with projectile spells or drawing foes in with dark vortices, though the Witch is anything but archetypal, as a melee warrior who shoots streams of blood. The shape-shifting Druid’s special attack sees him transform into a wolf, while the Spellblade relies on his speed and evasiveness. Yet even with four players, combat feels scrappy and simplistic. How embarrassing. The Sun Cult have burned all of the forests, and we’ve been preparing to fight their leader, King Mardokh. But having already seen two warriors vanquished, we didn’t really fancy our chances in battle, and so opted to charm rather than…

Illustration box-kite-curve.com Turning the computer setting to fog of war is like telling a human chess opponent to pretend he can’t see my rooks If you can keep your head and focus on your short-term goals when all about you are losing theirs; if you can retain a sense of the overall direction in which you wish to travel while doing the above, it doesn’t automatically make you a man, my son, but it does mean you’re capable of telescoping. Telescoping is when you solve immediate problems in order to progress to a defined goal. Pretty much every game does it, and apparently it’s a skill which the youth of today have mastered because they all play games. I’ve done my fair share of work on education software, and although…