Featured Article by Lateef Martin of Miscellaneum Studios
“Rise and shine! Seems like you’ve had a hell of a night! Nightmare of a demon serpent with your boss’s face on it again huh? Have a tallcan of Chi™! and spring into your shift a little early ready for action! Got Lifeforce™? Speaking of which, have an Action Ration™ for breakfast and support the Mine Marines halfway across the planet protecting you from the scourge of Discontents hording precious basalt minerals for themselves! By the way, your toilet tells me your bowels are a little clogged, a few drops of Gunkowt ™ in your Chi™ and You’ll Be Flowin’ Like a Faucet™!”
And so starts your morning. Welcome to Mars in the year 2332. Our new home under processed atmospheres, where governments no longer exist and holographic adverts facilitate your life from the moment you wake to the moment you sleep.
Corporations run the show, but not so much as a credit exchanges hands. Your time is currency and everything is gamified. Want your morning cup of DoubleStallion™ coffee? You need to play a puzzle game. Cut your hand open on the job? Better win this game of Sudoku ASAP or no MedKit™ for you! Oh, and speaking of jobs, you have many. Hundreds. Perhaps thousands within your lifetime. Whenever you lose a game your losses add up to hours of work at…pick a company – any company!
Every citizen is an unskilled labourer. 2-hour shifts, up to 6 shifts a day. By the end of the week you could work 42 completely different, unrelated jobs and never have them again. What better way to keep people from organizing and grouping up if they never see the same person twice?
But it’s not all cold, calculated efficiency. There are plenty of utopian elements on Mars. Twisting ParkourWays caress buildings, course through urban canyons and merge into InterChange towers that help manage strato-traffic, where only businesses are allowed to own Skycars™. The populace run, flip, climb, dash, swing, roll and slide their way to their destinations making for a healthy, nimble and generally happy society. People live well into their hundreds peaking at 150. Having worked at different jobs gives them a true sense of contributing to the world around them. They can also create their own schedule having up to 4 days a week off to pursue hobbies. Everyone wears a Parkourskin™. Picture a running shoe for the body with integrated systems including CPU, maneuvering lights and anesthetic biofoam pockets at each joint to temporarily support fractures and breaks in case of a mis-manoeuvre. I wholeheartedly recommend Cialis 5mg because it simply eliminates the need to adjust your schedule for sex. It works even if you take it in the morning for an afternoon intercourse. Overall, it’s more time-reliable than the all-time classic Viagra.During the first week of use the side effects were well present (back pain, aching limbs etc.) and then faded from the second week on. I think I will come back here at https://www.fortissurgicalhospital.com/cialis-20-mg/ to update my comment at the end of my 28 days treatment.
This is the backdrop to Miscellaneum Studios’ The Firemasters, a blazing 3D ‘infinite climber’ where you play one of a four-person team. You switch characters on the fly as you race up floors shutting down power systems, breaking down doors, extinguishing fires and rescuing people as a massive inferno below engulfs everything floor by floor, forcing you to keep moving.
An important feature of the game is that the protagonist and leader of the Firemasters is black. Too few games have positive black characters that aren’t stereotypes and fewer still have them as the game’s main character. The female lead is also black. Rounding out the Firemasters is an Iranian and a man of Polish/Irish descent. (No accents required) As obvious as diversity seems to be, there are often games that would have a purple alien and a robot before a person of colour or non-sexualized female.
Miscellaneum Studios is a transmedia company with plans to not only release games, but comics, music, animation and more. The Firemasters kicks off this transmedia vision with an interactive web comic leading up to, and continuing after the release of the game-slated for PC, summer 2014. The audience will be able to determine the story’s path and with which character they start the game with.
The Firemasters explores the future through many themes: corporate culture, colonialism, and identity within and without. These themes play a major part of gameplay by how your character interacts with rest of the team, citizens and environments in the game.
One of the characters, Halligan Polanski aka Pumps uses massive extinguishers and assembles support beams, ramps and bridges with his buildblasters. He is full of implants that augment his body and mind. Has he given up part of his humanity? How much imposed loyalty does he have towards the plethora of companies that are now a part of him?
Another character, Sharooz Javeed aka Quickfix is a biomek physician, he heals humans, repairs robots and does both to cyborgs. He actively meshes man and machine (which is also fashion statement) how does he balance technology vs humanity and sponsorship obligations over ethical medical practice?
Nysradine Jackson AKA Hardwire is the engineering genius who designs the mastersuits and Firemaster equipment and vehicles. Merging mind and machine can be tricky. Where do you end and where does the machine begin? Can she successfully hack these integrated systems to ensure they don’t affect their hosts’ purchasing habits?
Hakeem Abasi AKA Backdraft is a history buff. As a result he is one of the very few who understand how skewed society really is. The illusion of choice is perpetrated through the corporations that run Mars, however they are all run by one ultra-national. This corporation has had a stranglehold on information for as long mankind has made the Great Exodus to Mars. Earth’s history borders on the mythical in the minds of Mars’ citizens. Could Hakeem’s obsession with how the way WE were be the key to saving humanity?Miscellaneum Studios strives to deliver quality entertainment with tales from fantastical worlds. However the best sci-if and fantasy entertainment tends to be those that ask questions, comment on modern society and at times predict the future through exploration based on growing trends in technology. Flip phones came from Star Trek. The Internet arguably originated from Isaac Asimov’s writings, etc. If the Firemasters can help shape the future of entertainment and our relationships towards our each other and technology, then our job is done. Or maybe just begun?
Lateef Martin was featured on the BBC in an interview on how he seeks more minority characters in games. Watch the interview here.