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michaelandy101-blog · 3 years

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How HubSpot's Clients Are Shaping the Subsequent Regular

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How HubSpot's Clients Are Shaping the Subsequent Regular

This week marked an essential milestone for HubSpot. The corporate Dharmesh and I based over 14 years in the past welcomed its 100,000th buyer and handed $1 billion in annual recurring income.

We have come a good distance since we started banging the drum about inbound marketing, and but, it looks like HubSpot is simply getting began.

In some ways, it feels just like the entire world is simply getting began … or re-started.

The occasions of the previous yr have remodeled total industries, upended the way in which we work, and re-shaped human habits en masse. The applied sciences we embraced and new habits we fashioned in the course of the pandemic is not going to retreat when the coronavirus finally does. Quite, they are going to come to outline “the next normal.”

This represents some of the profound outcomes of those occasions: that by no means earlier than have firms, and the services and products they supply, had a better capability to affect human habits.

When gyms re-open, individuals will nonetheless exercise from house, facilitated by health apps. When places of work re-open, individuals will nonetheless make money working from home, facilitated by work productiveness and communications instruments. When theatres re-open, individuals will nonetheless watch stay live shows and new motion pictures from house, facilitated by streaming providers.

With out these services and products, lots of which have gone from being novel to crucial previously yr, life in the course of the pandemic would look very completely different. And it will be more likely to snap again to the way in which it was in 2019.

As an alternative, we have witnessed numerous firms urgently pivoting their plans to fulfill new buyer wants. They’ve innovated, they’ve tailored, and so they’ve re-shaped their merchandise.

I have been impressed to see lots of HubSpot’s 100,000 prospects adapt and innovate within the face of uncertainty, and in doing so, play an instrumental function in defining the brand new methods through which we stay, journey, work, and construct a greater future.

Mindfulness for the Plenty

Take mindfulness apps, for instance. One unequivocally optimistic final result of those turbulent occasions has been the elevated significance all of us place on our psychological wellness. Over the previous yr, HubSpot prospects like Calm, Talkspace, and Headspace have gone from being useful instruments for individuals trying to observe mindfulness to very important providers that hundreds of thousands of individuals use of their each day lives.

When Headspace was based in 2010 — at a time when meditation was nonetheless largely the protect of non secular and non secular organizations — the important thing query its founders asked was: “How do we put Headspace in places you wouldn’t expect to find it?” Now, 10 years later, it’s a multi-media group with a podcast division, a partnership with Sesame Road, and a lately introduced Netflix sequence.

This progress wouldn’t have been attainable with out the extent of scale the corporate has been in a position to obtain previously 12 months. On the eve of the pandemic in February 2020, the app reached two million paid subscribers, and since then, its fee of downloads has elevated by 20%. And if you take a look at information from the primary few weeks of U.S. lockdowns, downloads elevated by 100% towards pre-pandemic ranges.

Headspace was rising steadily previous to the pandemic, however when society was plunged right into a interval of unprecedented uncertainty, the necessity for its providers surged. Because of a deep-rooted ardour to serve its prospects, the corporate was in a position to scale by means of 2020 and usher in a brand new period through which mindfulness is practiced by the lots.

New Instruments for a New Manner of Working

Because the intertwined relationship between work and site continues to unravel, online productiveness instruments have gone from being a helpful complement to conventional workstyles to an indispensable a part of the distant employee’s toolkit.

Quite a few HubSpot prospects have performed an important function in facilitating this shift: Trello has helped parents to handle their youngsters’ homeschooling schedules, SurveyMonkey has supported nearly a quarter of a million surveys in regards to the coronavirus, and G2 has helped companies discover new software program options, seeing a 1,100% improve in searches for digital classroom instruments and a 550% improve in searches for webinar software program within the weeks following the coronavirus outbreak.

One other HubSpot buyer, Monday.com, had been rising quickly within the years previous to the pandemic, asserting $120m in annual recurring revenue in February 2020 as its software program helped 1000’s of scaling firms to collaborate extra successfully. After which, as the power to collaborate remotely grew to become a crucial want for all firms, the corporate changed its product roadmap to fulfill the sudden change in buyer wants.

Among the many new releases it prioritized have been embedded Zoom calls, online whiteboards, and picture annotations — all of which might add rapid worth to prospects. The influence of those adjustments was important. Not solely did Monday.com speed up its hiring, increasing its headcount by 27% between April and June 2020, it additionally announced a new valuation of $2.7bn. Monday.com was even singled out for praise by Fast Company for its remarkably clean transition to distant work.

The way in which we work has modified ceaselessly, and the influence of this modification continues to be reverberating throughout a number of industries, affecting industrial actual property costs, triggering mass migrations, and lowering carbon footprints as commute occasions plummet.

On the coronary heart of those main societal adjustments are firms like Monday.com, which initially sought to assist scaling firms collaborate extra successfully, and now finds itself offering a necessary software that’s accelerating a once-in-a-generation shift in human habits.

Vacation spot: Anyplace

Whereas the pandemic has compelled total populations to remain in a single place, it has additionally dramatically modified the methods through which we transfer on the earth. One HubSpot buyer on the forefront of this shift is Airstream.

For many years, Airstream has been constructing its much-loved state-of-the-art journey trailers, and in doing so, has change into some of the iconic manufacturers in america. Because the pandemic unfolded, the corporate was fast to supply new, related assets about every little thing from how to exercise in small spaces, to the best way to learn and work remotely. As Airstream CEO Bob Wheeler put it, “these virtual products looked very different than the vehicles we’re used to producing.” But it surely was by means of this revolutionary adaptation to the brand new habits and pursuits of its prospects that Airstream achieved a 45% year-on-year increase in sales in May, and a 100% improve in June.

The pandemic has made work much less location-dependent and leisure much less time-dependent. It’s now attainable for a lot of to journey whereas working and journey with out taking massive quantities of break day work. By recognizing this new dynamic and shortly adjusting its technique, Airstream has gone from offering a method of journey between locations to offering the vacation spot itself.

Even after the pandemic has been introduced below management, ongoing financial uncertainty and fears of a resurgent virus are prone to lead to a continued reluctance to journey internationally. In consequence, staycationing and home location-hopping are set to stay fashionable decisions for years to come back. By re-positioning its worth proposition to go well with the brand new habits of its prospects, Airstream has additional accelerated the shifts triggered by the pandemic, whereas additionally persevering with to scale as a worldwide enterprise.

Scaling Higher for Society

Because the pandemic despatched individuals indoors, racial injustice introduced many out onto the streets to protest long-standing inequality in our society. Over the previous yr, prospects have more and more come to count on the businesses they spend money with to be a pressure for good on the earth.

Lemonade, the insurance coverage supplier and HubSpot buyer, is an instance of how firms can have the kind of optimistic societal influence that now prospects demand, whereas additionally scaling quickly within the course of.

Lemonade is an authorized B-corp that gives all of its unclaimed premiums to non-profit organizations chosen by its prospects. As the corporate’s web site says, “Social good is baked into the core of our business model.”

When the pandemic hit, Lemonade allowed prospects experiencing monetary hardship to defer funds (and even in additional regular occasions, it permits prospects to cancel their coverage at any time and obtain a full refund). It additionally gave its prospects the chance to change their non-profit-of-choice to a corporation immediately concerned in preventing the coronavirus outbreak — and tens of thousands of them took them up on the supply. And late final yr, the corporate’s CEO, Daniel Schreiber, called on companies to encourage their workers to get vaccinated.

Whereas utilizing its affect to assist in the battle towards the coronavirus, Lemonade additionally confirmed its help for artists dealing with monetary hardship in the course of the pandemic by launching an Instagram campaign to spotlight artworks it commissioned.

The insurance coverage trade has not been proof against the downward financial pressures triggered by the pandemic, and but, Lemonade was considered one of 2020’s most spectacular development tales. In December, after simply four-and-a-half years in enterprise, the corporate introduced that it had passed 1 million clients. And just some weeks after that, its inventory hit an all-time excessive. The corporate achieved this stage of scale whereas additionally racking up $1.1million to donate to nonprofits, together with ACLU, March For Our Lives, and 350.org.

In keeping with Edelman’s 2021 trust barometer, enterprise is now probably the most trusted establishment when in comparison with authorities, media, and NGOs. As Lemonade scales its enterprise whereas concurrently having a optimistic influence on the world, it represents the newly outlined function firms are anticipated to play in society — the place they’re each for revenue and for good.

This new expectation of firms and their CEOs creates a duty and a chance for companies to play an energetic function in constructing a greater future for all within the subsequent regular.

Making ready for the Subsequent Regular

I’ve witnessed extra change previously 12 months than I did within the earlier 12 years. However now, on the event of HubSpot welcoming its 100,000th buyer and passing $1 billion, I am not trying again as a lot as I am trying ahead.

The following regular will not look something like 2019, and it will not look similar to 2020 both. It is going to be an period distinctive within the traits it ushers in and the alternatives it presents. At HubSpot, will probably be our job to assist our future and present prospects benefit from these alternatives, whereas additionally persevering with to help the likes of Headspace, Monday.com, Airstream, and Lemonade as they scale and form the behaviors that can outline the following regular.

We plan on doing that initially by listening to our prospects, and by then utilizing their suggestions to supply a world-class CRM platform as distinctive because the occasions through which we stay and able to empowering scaling firms to thrive for years to come back.

I wish to thank each buyer, associate, and worker for serving to us get to the place we’re right now. With out their ardour, advocacy, belief, and suggestions, the previous 15 years wouldn’t have been as thrilling, and the following 15 wouldn’t look as promising.

Our mission is to assist hundreds of thousands of organizations develop higher. This week, we reached an essential milestone on that journey. However, simply as the following regular is getting began, so too is HubSpot.

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flauntpage · 7 years

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Kobe Bryant Is Still Obsessed

The puppet is really freaking out now, and Kobe Bryant is not trying very hard to calm it down. It is wriggling and shrieking in a strange child's voice, something about what it wants and what it will do to get it. Bryant stands in front of a soft forum-blue backdrop, handsome and poised and deeply in character as himself; he introduces some basic concepts behind his bespoke binary worldview, and tells the long-necked child-puppet that if it is "looking to find its inner beast, it's most likely living inside of a dark muse." This sets up a song about learning to harness the power of rage and hate, so as to better destroy the competition. The music sounds a little bit like the iconic film scores Ennio Morricone composed for Sergio Leone's westerns; the distended shadows and silhouettes in the accompanying animation evoke F.W. Murnau's expressionist compositions.

In the animation, a train climbs a mountain while being tormented by a hairy, bestial monster-god; the train is damaged, injured, but nevertheless achieves the summit while lightning bolts flash with the word "hate." Here are some of the lyrics to the song playing over all this:

This is the face of a man with a dark musecage Darkness is the light in his eyes he runs with rage There's nothing you can do There's nothing you can say Hatred is the love in his heart he plays with hate

The word "hate" is repeated a few more times, and that's the end of it. The next time Bryant and his puppet partner, whose name is Lil' Mamba, are back on-screen, the puppet is giddily chanting "destroy, dominate, destroy, dominate." Kobe chills his little buddy out by explaining the (lesser) power of "light musings." This gives way to a sequence in which Paige O'Hara, the voice of Belle in the 1991 Disney classic Beauty and the Beast, explains in coachly detail the difficulty of defending Russell Westbrook in Oklahoma City's screen-and-roll action.

Read More: No Peers, No Heirs: Kobe Bryant At The End Of The Road

You are now in Kobe Bryant's Musecage, a neologism of Bryant's own coinage and a key concept behind his first major project since retiring from the NBA last year: creating, writing, and directing a six-part series called Canvas for ESPN. A Musecage, as ESPN's Baxter Holmes put it in a story introducing the series, is "a personal cage filled with everything that drives anyone, good and bad—light and dark muses, as [Bryant] calls them." Lil' Mamba is not always in these videos, of which there are presently five, but every one of them is distinctly and decidedly a product of Bryant's Musecage. A disclaimer on Bryant's recent video tributes to Kawhi Leonard and Isaiah Thomas reads "WARNING: This video contains explicit DARK MUSING CONTENT. May not be suitable for casual musing." Bryant's autograph curls below, a big K and a looping B and some assertive supporting squiggles.

You probably have some questions.

In a statement released before the second installment of the series debuted on ABC's NBA Countdown in late March, Bryant explained it like this: " Canvas City: Musecage helps others better their best by delivering complex basketball insights in a light-hearted, easy-to-digest way.… The show helps others understand the game at a higher level and offers a new voice to sports storytelling that will hopefully captivate the whole family." A staff of 15 full-time employees work for Bryant on this project, out of an office in Newport Beach, and their job is to translate Bryant's sprawling and fairly grandiose and strange and singular vision of storytelling into, well, whatever what Canvas is.

It's worth taking a moment to look at what the word "storytelling" is doing here. Storytelling is one of those words in the Success Studies community—the tranche of elites and aspiring elites who create and consume the burgeoning literary genre dedicated to reverse-engineering how and why successful people are so successful. What most people understand this word to mean—spinning out a narrative from beginning to end, or emotively reading a large thin book to an audience of rapt toddlers at a public library—is not quite the definition Kobe is going for here, or what Storytelling means in the stories that Success Studies tells and sells.

The definition that obtains among our current economy's ruling superclass—the chill California billionaires who lend each other money and spend their days in endless informational interviews and periodically bequeath disruptions to those of us below—has little to do with actually telling a story, and much more to do with the metastatic grandiosity of how that community explains its success to itself. Successful entrepreneurs are now not just rich people; they are that, of course, but that is no longer enough. And so they are shamans and visionaries and outlaws and, yes, storytellers. The economy that spins around them is predicated upon selling their attributes as things that can be acquired by less successful people through sufficiently attentive consumption.

It's all aspirational, which is to say that it's all blue sky. The works limning and strip-mining Seven Essential Habits from the lives of our secular saints just sprawl farther and farther out from the original source, and then at some point we are reading about how Steve Jobs, who was a monomaniacal genius and an otherwise impossible obsessive, was actually a brilliant storyteller. You start with the belief that the successful person deserves their success, and then use their caricatured attributes to reverse-engineer an explanation for that success. Storytelling's stories are more accurately didactic fables, arguments leading to or from a specific solution for the purpose of demonstrating the correctness of that solution. The story that Bryant wants to tell is broadly about Kobe Bryant, and his vision of the obsessions that made him.

"If you look around, with all the people that have created great things, those great things all came from dark places, generally," Bryant told Holmes in the ESPN story. "Whether it be Michael Jordan, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Oprah—all these experiences come from dark places that they then used those dark experiences to create light." As with any proposition grounded in faith, a sufficient hunger to believe is enough. Bryant begins with the inarguable brilliance and objective accomplishment of his career, and then just works backwards to explain how the madness behind it actually makes sense.

This is not to say that Bryant doesn't really want to tell stories; he unmistakably comes alive when the topic of motivation is raised, and when he held forth on it at the Tribeca Film Festival in April his responses were stilted and a little manic but also clearly deeply felt. He really does want to be a storyteller, but he only really wants to tell one story, and he is the protagonist of it, and the story exists primarily as a way to show others how to be more like him. Of course the words he uses are a strange proprietary amalgam of sharky business-speak and pure free-jazz neologism. If Kobe's storytelling exists primarily to make Kobe-ism easier to understand, it makes a perverse sort of sense that the story can only be told through words that only Kobe fully understands, using jargon that he made up himself, in a strange and seething universe that he is pulling from his imagination.

When the concept is fairly abstruse. Photo by Gary A. Vasquez-USA TODAY Sports

The Canvas project has its own cast of characters and impacted internal logic—the color purple represents curiosity, green represents personal growth—but it is fundamentally grounded in Bryant's Musecage concept, an idea he apparently has been playing with for years. It is, as things generally are with Bryant, grounded in a punitive and monomaniacal vision of obsession, and an idea of competitiveness that shades into a sort of blithe psychosis. In the episode dedicated to Kawhi Leonard, a bit of Bryant-scripted narration lays it out plainly: "Truly competitive people care obsessively about the process...obsessive competitors want it all...they want to humiliate you in front of your loved ones." That narration is read by a child.

That Bryant's lessons are expressed through what outwardly appears to be a deeply dark-sided children's programming—imagine a roiling and haunted basketball-obsessed version of Sesame Street, focused exclusively on a bloody binary vision of competition—with much puppet-human interaction and some didactic songs, is something Kobe has described as a question of necessity. His vision was capacious and wide-ranging enough that it required this sort of sprawling weirdness. Sesame Street is just a street; Kobe needed a city, nothing less.

"If I had a show that my kids could watch and learn how to better their best, what would that show entail?" Bryant told Holmes, circling back to one of the phrases that he has repeatedly used to explain the series' goals. "It would entail songs. It would entail animation, puppetry, comedy, and a lot of visual representations of things they should be learning."

Approaching Canvas in this way does not quite make it make sense, but it does explain some of its more obvious elisions. There's nothing in the Musecage tribute to Kawhi Leonard about how Leonard does what he does, nothing of much substance on either the preparation or the work. There is only the assertion that Leonard does all this because he is obsessed with doing it. That is, the video simply retcons some Kobe onto him, or over him; it shows you that Kawhi Leonard is brilliant, and then tells you that he is brilliant because he has embraced and embodies Bryant's way of being.

"What's interesting about Lil' Mamba is that, unlike most Muppets, he would seemingly appear to be a stand-in for a younger Kobe, not a young child in general," says Graydon Gordian, who went from writing about the San Antonio Spurs at the late ESPN blog 48 Minutes of Hell to working as a staff writer for Sesame Workshop, the production company behind Sesame Street, until 2014. Today he's the director of content at FortyFour, an Atlanta-based digital agency. "His name and drive to be good at basketball suggest this pretty strongly. This is interesting on two levels, [because] it reconfirms our current impression that Kobe is in the most extreme sense all about Kobe, and (b) it undermines the idea that Lil' Mamba is really a vessel for education, or a character a child could readily empathize with. Because, again, it is not a kid. [It's] a juvenile Kobe."

In the more explicitly educational episodes and the ones that are paeans to specific players, Bryant's every lesson resolves, in the end, to an assertion and celebration of Kobe Bryant. Not Kobe the storytelling auteur or Kobe the smiling straight-man to a hyperactive mauve puppet, but Kobe as he was and imagined himself to be during his basketball career, both as a champion and then, toward the end, as the vengeful ghost that haunted his team. This is not a theoretical thing. We know what this is. It is Kobe the competitor, Kobe the merciless and unrepentant and unrelenting, cold-blooded Kobe the vengeful and devouring and obsessed.

Again, this all seems deeply felt and authentic enough, but it is also a locked groove. Bryant told the Tribeca Film Festival audience that Michael Jackson was "what I call the 'seed of muse' for me," which translates from Kobespeak into something like "my biggest inspiration." What seemed like it could be an interesting story—Bryant says that Jackson cold-called him at a time when the basketball star was "getting criticized for being too obsessed"—wound up right where all these stories do. The King of Pop told Kobe to study harder, work harder, keep doing just what he was doing.

"My mind started to wander," Bryant said at the Tribeca Film Festival event when someone asked him when he knew it was time to go. The screening room at the Borough of Manhattan Community College was full; the man sitting behind me wore one of those five-name T-shirts that just read "Kobe & Kobe & Kobe & Kobe & Kobe." Bryant was there for a screening of Dear Basketball, a short animated film that sets in motion the poem he wrote for The Players Tribune on the occasion of his retirement. Kobe was joined on stage by Glen Keane—son of Bil, creator of the world-historically corny Family Circus comic, and himself the artist behind Disney's Aladdin and The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast—and moderator Michael Strahan.

Bryant went on to explain that, once he stopped focusing quite so maniacally on the game, his mind naturally drifted "in the direction of narrative." On the night of his last NBA game, when he scored 60 points—"should have had 90," he said, "considering all the easy ones I missed"—Bryant says that he forgot that he even had a game that night. "I was at the office," he said, "polishing off some stories."

Do you believe this? Belief matters where storytelling is concerned, and belief is complicated when it comes to Kobe Bryant the Storyteller. The earnestness of Dear Basketball is unmistakable, but so, too, is the fact that it's the story Bryant wants to tell—that he gave himself utterly to a game he loved, gave and gave until he wrecked himself in the pursuit, then left grateful and still very much in love. As with Canvas, it looks expensive and is technically utterly state of the art; in addition to Keane, who is a legend in his field, the short features the work of John Williams, who wrote the musical score. Also as with Canvas, there is something about Dear Basketball that beggars belief. It's not that it isn't artful or deeply felt; it's just that it's not anything like an attempt to tell a complete story.

If there's anything that rises above bizarre to become actually objectionable where Bryant's storytelling is concerned, it's that—the way that his stories all loop recursively and blindly to the author and the one story he wants to tell, an advertisement for himself and his personal suite of ghosts.

"Sesame is willing to wrestle with difficult things about childhood," Gordian told me. "Loneliness, alienation, even the death of significant figures in a child's life. While at Sesame Street, I worked on a project that dealt with the emotional life of children with an incarcerated parent. Sesame is not afraid to tackle tough shit. So the Musecage video's willingness to address injury, doubt, or other obstacles is not necessarily Kobe touching a third rail."

The strange part is how Bryant puts that dark material to use. "Sesame's socio-emotional content orients kids towards a much more balanced, self-confident, accepting and, I'd argue, healthier internal life," Gordian says. The story that Bryant tells and sells—about obsession and pursuit, a competitiveness that shades into some vengeful and predatory places—is the opposite of that. It advocates a real and willful and even proud unhealthiness, and the weaponization and deployment of that unhealthiness to reach various discrete goals. But this is presuming that Canvas or the branded obsessiveness of the Musecage is intended for kids, or that its intended audience will use it as intended.

Toward the end of the audience Q&A at the Tribeca screening, after a man told Bryant that he was "a big fan of purpose" and a second distressingly voluble man told him that he'd dreamed of Bryant's wife and children the night before—"Welcome to New York City," Strahan half-apologized—a man in his 20s stood up. "The idea of the Mamba Mentality got me through medical school," he said.

"I've always looked up to him simply for how hard he worked and how committed he was to perfecting his craft," the questioner, whose name is J.J., told me later. He's about to graduate from medical school. "Up at 4 AM while others are sleeping. That's exactly how I approached school." He is not looking to destroy or dominate his peers, he told me; the challenge is the work, the tests, making the right diagnosis. Bryant's mentality, as J.J. understands it, "is about that dedication and commitment to your task, no matter what obstacle or doubt comes your way." It is something he hopes to bring with him to a career in internal medicine, or maybe pediatrics.

There are more generous and inclusive and open forms of storytelling than Bryant's, and certainly fuller and more humane stories to tell than his one tale of obsession. But stories fully belong to their authors only during their telling. After that, they belong to the people who receive and believe them; they are theirs to keep, to use however they need.

Bryant seems happy to tell the same story that he has always told about himself; it is easy to imagine him spending the rest of his life telling it, taking ever more scenic routes out into the wild before returning to the strange and familiar comforts of home. It's his story, and telling it is his right. But in doing so, he gives it away, as all storytellers do, and that is always where things get more interesting. Bryant knows this, whether he understands it or not. You are in control when the ball is in your hands, and he has lived his life that way, but the game is played by letting it go.

Kobe Bryant Is Still Obsessed published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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symbianosgames · 7 years

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PAX East’s indie offerings sometimes have unexpected themes emerge from the potpourri; a couple of years ago it was young women as detectives. This year, a subtle current among the games on offer was exploring life in cults from the inside.

The Church in the Darkness offers a Wolfenstein-influenced experience of infiltrating a Jonestown-esque cult in the 1970s, throwing narrative choice into the mix as well as offering a choice between peaceful and violent interaction.

There’s a lot to be said for the influence of subjects and settings on the mechanics of a game, structuring the meaning of your actions as a player and influencing how you approach the game world.

The Church in the Darkness dwells in a new, unexplored place: exploring why people might join a cult. Scientology has been taken on by both The Secret World and Knee Deep, but both were very much outside-looking-in perspectives rather than all consuming investigations of what a cult’s way of life means to the people most deeply enmeshed in it.

Church is taking a different route, with implications for understanding contemporary political dynamics as well.

The Church in the Darkness

Another game that dwells in darkness so deep it lacks color altogether is Kitfox Games’ latest venture The Shrouded Isle, which takes a somewhat more fantastical approach to the idea. Here you play in a Lovecraftian world as the High Priestess of a seaside village cut off from the rest of civilization.

You are but five years away from the return of the tentacular Chernobog, the object of your devotion, and you must keep the increasingly restive familial houses of your village in line. Oh, and you have to pick a human sacrifice once every season to feed your Old God the human blood he thirsts for.

The version I played was essentially pre-alpha and thus I only got to play through two seasons--Spring and Summer--to get a very basic sense of the game’s flow. But while I rarely complete game demos at conventions, either due to constraints of time or lack of interest, I made it all the way through Shrouded Isle’s.

The interface puts one in the mind of resource management sims and some visual novels like Hanako Games’ Long Live the Queen where you’re trying desperately to balance wildly competing stats. Here, you’re trying to manage your village’s adherence to Chernobog’s five virtues: Ignorance, Fervor, Discipline, Penitence, and Obedience.

You do this by assigning representatives from up to three of the five great houses to act as your enforcers throughout the season, but each has a vice that will lower another virtue. The trick seems to be finding a way to investigate as many people as you can--which consumes in-game resources--so you can better predict what their impacts will be on the village’s disposition.

Discovering vice is vital because it helps you decide who will make the best sacrifice. What I love about the game is that it shows how secular politics persists, even in a cultic community where fundamentalist dogma pervades all aspects of life.

The great houses vie for influence, or may even reach a point where they are contemptuous or rebellious towards your rule as High Priestess. Your selection of a sacrifice is not infallible--it has political fallout. Whichever house was culled this season will likely resent you for it; doubly so if you’ve uncovered no proof of a serious vice.

What’s intriguing about this is how it shows the persistence of humanity in an inhumane environment. Even in those social groupings that specifically exist to grind individuality, freedom, and personal expression into an indistinct mulch, that messiness persists.

It’s a critical lesson for developers who want to set their games in some morally perverse environment; evil is never so absolute as to bring everyone in line. This lends a precious insight for those looking to make games set in totalitarian regimes, say.

It’s also smart from a mechanical perspective. The politics of Shrouded Isle provides the frisson of challenge. The game would be far less interesting from the player’s perspective if everyone was so absolutely devoted to Chernobog and your rule as his representative on Earth that they gleefully went under your sacrificial dagger. Keeping personal, secular politics in this realm richly populates the world with mechanical challenges that entice the player.

The Shrouded Isle does have a ways to go. One of the problems in its current state is the opacity of investigation mechanics--and perhaps a paucity of them, as well. You need to find ways of investigating villagers to uncover whose vices are so terrible as to ensure everyone will be satisfied with their execution, but there’s little direction on this from game, and not much in the way of instruments to aid you.

It left me essentially stumbling around, all but committing to getting one house really angry at me because I needed to kill someone. That may be the point: forcing the player to start the game in a desperate deficit of goodwill that they will have to fight to overcome.

Thrashing to keep your head above water seems appropriate for a High Priestess of an old god. But if that’s a deliberate theme, there’ll have to be some more elegant finessing to get it to stick the landing without frustrating players.

Either way, Shrouded Isle is taking us to a dark place. These are certainly desperate--and perhaps dangerous--times to be exploring why cults and cultic thinking tickle the fancy of so many. The Church of Darkness explores a cult with a strong left wing bend, the Collective Justice Mission. Is that relevant as anything other than nostalgia in an age of far right, even fascistic resurgence? Perhaps.

Honest, immersive gameplay about the allure of extremism, of any sort, could be instructive in our current moment. Even more fantastical offerings teach us something about humanity’s endurance in the most colorless of worlds.

Right now, that’s oddly hopeful.

Katherine Cross is a Ph.D student in sociology who researches anti-social behavior online, and a gaming critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications.

#IFTTT #Blogger

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