Some good news for once: After a two-week hiatus, the MoviePass unlimited subscription—the one that lets you see a movie a day, every day, in theaters, for $10 a month—is back. And MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe says the company is "absolutely committed" to keeping it around.

That wasn’t always a given. Just last week at industry conference CinemaCon, Lowe said “I don’t know” in response to a question about the unlimited plan’s return. And given some of MoviePass' previous experimentation with its offerings—be it temporarily removing subscriber access to select AMC theaters in major cities, or to specific movies—it perhaps wouldn’t have been surprising if the offer that attracted millions of subscribers in a few short months really was too good to be true.

As of today, though, you can get back on the unlimited plan that MoviePass launched last August. You can also go with a variation on the plan the company temporarily replaced unlimited with: three movies a month, plus three free months of iHeartRadio All-Access music streaming, for eight bucks. One of the best deals around has returned—along with a seemingly renewed commitment from MoviePass not to keep its subscribers’ heads spinning.

After all, even that unlimited plan has changed its stripes a few times since launch. In addition to the aforementioned blackouts, MoviePass began limiting certain films to one viewing only. Those regularly introduced limits to unlimited—along with shaky customer service—have stretched subscriber patience thin.

"It’s fine-tuning this model," says Lowe. "Everybody wants a consistent offer. Believe me, I want a consistent offer."

To that end, Lowe says MoviePass is at least through experimenting with AMC theaters. "I can assure you that we are not contemplating or even thinking about removing any AMC theaters," he says. "We found out what we needed to find out, and decided that we want to be good partners and provide a good service to our subscribers, and our subscribers love AMC theaters."

Other recently introduced annoyances may remain, though, as MoviePass combats what Lowe says are the “hundreds of thousands” of subscribers who misuse their membership, using their MoviePass-issued debit cards to make purchases outside the scope of their arrangement. That can range from purchasing a more expensive 3-D ticket—MoviePass draws the line at 2-D screenings—to purchasing multiple tickets for a single viewing, so that, say, a small group can all attend the same Avengers: Infinity War showtime at MoviePass prices. Lowe says some people even accumulate multiple MoviePass cards, and resell the tickets for popular screenings for a profit.

MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe

That explains why repeat viewings for popular flicks have become verboten, as well as a so-called beta program that asks certain members to upload a photo of tickets purchased with their MoviePass card, to confirm that they’re using their subscription as intended. Fail to do so more than once? The account gets cancelled.

A cynic might say that the system seems like a pretty good way to discourage high-volume users, the kind that cost MoviePass the most money each month. But Lowe says that frequency of use isn’t one of its triggers; the company looks instead for a “pattern of behavior,” primarily focusing on accounts that frequently switch devices. That helps limit fraud, but also creates collateral headaches.

But MoviePass has given itself no margin for error. It needs to bring in enough subscribers, quickly enough, that movie theaters and studios will have no choice but to cut revenue-sharing and marketing deals with it. And it needs those deals to be large enough to keep it from hemorrhaging cash. It literally can’t afford fraud, even if culling it dings honest subscribers in the process.

"Our goal is to be sustainable and offer the service to subscribers," says Lowe. "In order to do that, we have to have a business model that works. You cannot have a small percentage of people eating up a big percentage of your usage, and therefore no one gets the service."

That MoviePass puts the onus on subscribers, rather than building more protections into its app and card to prevent fraud in the first place, may rankle some users. But with any luck, the return of the unlimited plan—along with the commitment to its future, and the détente with AMC—shows that the company has moved past the rockiest stage of experimentation. And in fact, it's about to make some positive moves; Lowe says that by the end of May MoviePass will introduce plans that include more expensive screenings, like 3-D and IMAX, as well as plans to accommodate families and friends.

In the meantime, while a MoviePass subscription may yet come with unexpected hassles—especially if you’re falsely flagged for fraud—at least its core premise remains intact: a movie a day, every day, for $10 a month. It might not be perfect, but for most people it’s still worth the price of admission.

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Last decade, the technology was questionable; this decade, the content. But today the greatest challenge for VR—as both an industry and medium—is no longer the tech or the content but the problem of time and attention. How, exactly, will or does VR fit into the collective human schedule? When and where will large numbers of people “do” VR, in a time when nearly every second of week is contested territory?

Today, I think only the deeply jaded would deny that VR has the goods, or is at least pretty close. The goggles could get better, but they work. Every year the creators of VR films and games produce a handful of stunning, memorable pieces (even if they haven’t always quite figured out the stubborn tension between narrative and interaction). Sundance is an important annual showcase—last year’s Asteroids, Miyubi and Chocolate were unforgettable—and this year brought new wonders like Spheres and Wolves in the Walls, among others. Sure, there could be more of it, and not all VR content is great, but something as simple as a VR tour of the Obama White House can be a memorable, affecting trip.
 
But when or where will people actually spend the time to see this stuff? That’s the hard question, and one that has really burned VR over the last few years. Media history makes it clear that a commercial medium can only survive if it finds itself a reliable, repeatable place in the national schedule for significant numbers of people. (Those that don’t, like the 90s Web-TV efforts Pseudo.com and MSN 2.0, simply die after burning through lots of money).

Looking back, every successful medium has either “killed” a predecessor (in the manner that television displaced radio in the home, or that streaming video is chipping away at cable) or “colonized” time and attention that was unused or used for something else. However, that was somewhat easier when people actually had free time. Today, we live in a media environment where billions of dollars are spent fighting for the time spent “waiting at the bus stop."

Making matters even more challenging: unlike other newish forms of media, VR demands not just passing attention but the absolutely highest quality of devotion. Other media can target brains that are doing something else as well. That helps explain the success of podcasting, which has plundered the driving hours, or social media, which thrives on what Jonah Peretti of Buzzfeed memorably called the “Bored at Work Network". Yet no one waiting for a bus pulls out VR goggles (at least not yet), and you still can’t turn to VR if you get bored at a meeting. Meanwhile, VR units face incredibly tough competition inside what we call our homes but are really more like media studios, festooned as they are with television, videogame consoles, computers, and phones, not to mention old-school interactive units like roommates or family.

All this points to an unexpected near-term future for VR. It wasn’t unreasonable to bet that VR would take over home prime-time hours, but that hasn’t worked out as planned—television and traditional gaming are just too tough as competitors. But the time that is open is the time people spend outside of the home, looking for something to do, alone or with friends. As Pete Billington, director of the critically acclaimed Wolves in the Walls, points out, good VR film experiences really aren’t that dissimilar from live, immersive theatre productions like Sleep No More or, especially, Then She Fell, both of which attract giant lines in New York City.

The solution, then, would be to focus on scaling up immersive theatre to the masses (perhaps focusing on character-driven VR, as Edward Saatchi, a co-founder of Oculus Story Studios, argues). It is the colonization of whatever time people might otherwise spend outside the home, one way or another—at theaters, movies, museums, art galleries, or even just bars—that holds the most promise for VR.

In fact, that’s basically what’s going on in places like New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and across Asia, where VR palaces and arcades are springing up across town like so many bowling alleys or discos in the 1970s. In New York alone there’s the Cinépolis Chelsea, which charges $10 to watch any of four VR films; an IMAX VR center that offers a mix of multiplayer games and movie-based ancillary experiences at up to $15 a pop; and VR World, which bills itself as the largest VR center in the Western Hemisphere, with $39 buying a customer two hours to try out different experiences. (It sells cocktails and plays dance music.)

VR producers could also take a shot at the time many people think they devote to health, whether mental or physical. If people feel some need to spend time relaxing—and if some forms of VR, with their influence over the emotions, can leave one in a blissful and composed mental state after a mere 12-minute experience—perhaps some VR experiences may earn their way into our schedules that way. This also might help solve the problem of making people come back more than once, with exercise-driven VR starting to compete with, say, yoga.

It all suggests that VR, despite what everyone once thought, needs to succeed outside the home before it can succeed inside. It needs to be of value out there before people are convinced they need it in here. Hence, as unlikely as it may sound, a technology that once seemed destined to produce a new generation of shut-ins might play a part in getting people out of their houses.

Early last winter, while browsing Manhattan’s Strand bookstore, roommates Carina Hsieh and Claudia Arisso came upon a keychain featuring a tiny version of the totemic, subway-friendly Strand tote bag. “Claudia said, ‘I wish there was a ‘Commuter Barbie’ who came with a Strand bag,’" Hsieh recently recalled. “And I was like, "Oh my God—we have to do that.”

The two women had never written together before, but they quickly devised a script for a “Commuter Barbie” sketch. Hsieh and Arisso, a packaging designer, created an array of Barbie-sized accessories, including a beanie—made out of a black-dyed baby sock—and gave Commuter Barbie a tiny pair of pink headphones (to help “tune out the creeps when you’re stuck in the middle seat”). After recruiting a pair of young actors, and hiring a jingle writer, Hsieh and Arisso used their Brooklyn living room to shoot the video, for which they spent around $1,600 of their own money. “The production value was a really big concern for us,” says Arisso, 24. “We wanted to make sure people kept watching after three seconds.” After a few weeks of editing, Hsieh and Arisso had a sharp, spot-on three-minute commercial parody ready to go.

Now, they just had to figure out how to get people to watch it.

Only a few years ago, the solution would have been obvious: Throw “Commuter Barbie” on YouTube, and watch it go viral. That’s the way it had worked since “the halcyon days of sketch video,” says Hsieh, 24, who’s also an editor at Cosmopolitan.com. “You'd get a link from a friend, and it would already have three million views.”

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The site’s arrival in 2005 had led to a boom in viral comedy videos, allowing D.I.Y. digital sketches like “Chad Vader” or “Bird Poops in Mouth” to dominate the web for weeks or months, eventually earning millions of views. But that era, Hsieh knew, was long gone: YouTube was so now overstuffed, it was near-impossible for a sketch to randomly break out, and they worried Facebook’s unpredictable algorithms made it tough to know how a video would be seen (or by whom). At one point, Hsieh and Arisso could have uploaded the sketch to Funny or Die to see if it could get some votes—but that site was hardly the hit-maker it once had been.

With no other options, the two women decided to push “Commuter Barbie” via Facebook and Twitter last April, to see how it would play. (They also put the clip on YouTube, but mostly as an afterthought: “That site was just a dead zone to us,” says Arisso). As it turned out, the “Commuter Barbie” creators had more than just a great sketch; they also had excellent timing. The video debuted just as behavioral problems with the New York subway—and the men who ride it—were becoming a city-wide concern, and within 24 hours, “Barbie” had earned write-ups in Gothamist, BuzzFeed, and the The Washington Post’s website (which declared it a “parody masterpiece”). It wound up getting nearly 900,000 views, more than half from Facebook—a hit by modern standards—and the attention helped land Hsieh a manager. Even the official Barbie Instagram account gave its seal of approval.

“We got lucky,” Hsieh says. “It was the ideal version of going viral–even if the numbers don’t necessarily tell that story.” But only a year later, she says, the rules for what works and what doesn’t online have totally changed. “I don’t even know how I’d release future videos,” she says. “It just feels like a weird new landscape.” And even Commuter Barbie doesn’t know how to navigate it.

It’s a common comedy-world dilemma now: In an era of niche audiences, social-feed upheaval, and an overcrowded/underfunded competitive space, the future of the scripted digital-comedy bit—once a staple of online culture—is looking appropriately sketchy. “It seems like a dead scene to me, man,” says comedy writer, performer, and director Matt Klinman, who’s worked with such outlets as Adult Swim and the Onion. In a Twitter thread last month, and in a subsequent interview with Splitsider, Klinman put the blame on Facebook, which he says has harmed publishers with its shifting algorithms and generally closed-off-feeling ecosystem (a common complaint among media executives).

But that’s just one of several factors that have made online sketch-comedy increasingly difficult to pursue. “I know a lot of people who just want to make something for fun and for free, and we have no idea where to put it,” Klinman says. “Where can you put a sketch where people would even see it?”

A good online sketch still has the chance to thrive in 2018: Performers like Jimmy Tatro and Dylan Marron regularly command big numbers on their videos, and as do established outlets like Smosh and College Humor. The recently revived Super Deluxe, meanwhile, has found success with a series of smart, strange, Facebook-friendly bits (including the work of Vic Berger, the best political sketch-artist of the digital era). And the medium itself can still produce the kind of must-watch sketch that comes out of nowhere, as with last month’s hilarious Stranger Things send-up “Joyce Byers’ Master Class.”

But the golden era of online sketch, when the goofiest idea could hit eight-figure views, is clearly over. Earlier this year, Funny or Die—which recently announced it was migrating its original website to Vox—announced a round of layoffs that included several short-form writers. Last summer, NBC Universal shut down Seeso, an all-comedy digital platform that had commissioned a handful of sketch shows. Seriously.TV, a Facebook-heavy, millennial-aimed comedy platform launched with support from Verizon, hasn’t released a new video on its social feeds since last fall. And with the exception of Saturday Night Live segments—always popular, especially if they involve Trump—it’s rare for a short-form web sketch to even approach the million-view mark anymore. To put it in Monty Python terms, online sketch is the parrot at the bottom of a cage: It’s hard to tell if it’s deceased, or simply stunned. But it’s definitely flat on its back.

Low Risk, High Reward

The modern web-sketch boom began, appropriately enough, on a lazy Sunday: In the early hours of December 18th, 2005, someone uploaded a ripped version of SNL’s “Lazy Sunday” digital short to YouTube, which was then just a few months old. The bit earned millions of views, as well as the wrath of NBC Universal, which had it pulled down a few months later. But the real measure of the sketch’s success was the numerous parodies it inspired, many of which went straight to YouTube. “Lazy Monday,” and “Lazy Muncie” were low-budget and star-free, yet they earned hundreds of thousands of views.

Suddenly, you didn’t have to be on SNL to get your crazy-delicious sketches in front of viewers audience. And while sites like College Humor had been increasing its comedy-video output for years, the sudden rush of sketches onto YouTube was proof that sketch comedy—a long-running artform that had already proved adaptable to stage, radio, and TV—was finally ready to spill on to the web. Soon enough, YouTube was a comedy Narnia, birthing dozens of hit clips, from the “Literal Video” of a-ha’s “Take on Me” to “Sexy Pool Party” to the music-spoof “Potter Puppet Pals”.

The platform’s egalitarian ethos and gatekeeper-free structure made it possible for young, unknown comedians to get millions of views, launching several careers along the way: Broad City began as a series of YouTube clips, while Insecure creator Issa Rae’s breakthrough came via her web series “The Misadventures of AWKWARD Black Girl.” “It was like, ‘Oh, wow—with a little bit of production value, and a funny idea, you can be huge on YouTube,” says Nate Dern, a comedy writer and former artistic director at New York’s Upright Citizens Brigade, or UCB. “At the time, that felt like a realistic way to like make it in comedy.”

One advantage of YouTube was they way it offered high visibility at a low budget. “Drive Recklessly,” by the sketch troupe The Midnight Show, starred Heather Anne Campbell as a car-crashing driver who suddenly finds herself staring down Hitler (approximately 43,147 sketches have been performed about Hitler in the last decade; “Drive Recklessly” is one of the few funny ones). The video was shot on a single weekend afternoon, and cost about five bucks. “I think we broke a CD jewel case and threw it in my face for the broken-glass effect,” says Campbell, who wrote the sketch. It went on to earn more than 4 million views, and landed Campbell, already an established writer, some high-profile meetings.

In the years following YouTube’s launch, these kind of cheap digital sketches functioned as the web-culture equivalent of a pop single: Three-minute blasts of distracting fun that were best enjoyed in the company of others. And they were everywhere. Comedy troupes with names like Olde English and Waverly Films were regularly knocking out cult-hit videos, and UCB eventually launched its own short-video arm (its biggest hit, “BP Spills Coffee,” earned 13 million views).

It didn’t take long for investors to show up. In early 2007, Anheuser-Busch teamed with a raft of comedy writers for original-sketch depot bud.TV. A few months later saw the arrival of Funnyordie.com, which enjoyed instant infamy via Adam McKay and Will Ferrell’s potty-mouthed “The Landlord,” which wedded the frills-free look of early YouTube clips with Ferrell’s Blades of Glory-era star power. Funny or Die attracted big names and sizable venture capital, thanks in part to its somewhat stumbled-upon formula for success: Tailor a sketch around a famous person willing to perform “undercover karaoke,” and you’ll get the web’s attention—as well as the attention of other celebs, who will want to get in on the act.

“That’s why those videos went so big: ‘Oh my God, Marion Cotillard put boobs on her face,’” says former Funny or Die writer and director Alex Fernie, who went on to such shows as Childrens Hospital and Do You Want to See a Dead Body? “It was shocking that we could get people to do these things.”

Peak Sketch

Between 2012 and 2013, sketch comedy reached its cultural zenith. Not only was it still possible to pull in several million views for a cheaply made short—often with the help of social media—but sketch was dominating TV for the first time since the mid-’90s, when In Living Color, MAD TV, The Kids in the Hall, and Mr. Show were all challenging the sagging SNL. Fifteen years later, Comedy Central had Key & Peele, Kroll Show, and Inside Amy Schumer, while IFC had Comedy Bang! Bang! and the Peabody-winning Portlandia (which itself had gotten its start as a series of short online videos, under the name ThunderAnt).

The demand for sketch, in every format, was so widespread that Funny or Die released what might be its finest, most self-lacerating bit yet: “Gungan Style,” about a comedy writer whose Star Wars spoof forces him to confront his own existential anxieties. (It’s the ultimate “make sure you watch all the way through” clip.)

“Gungan Style” may have been the first warning of the burnout that was yet to come, among both audiences and performers. “It expresses the exhaustion of being a sketch comedy creator,” says Heather Anne Campbell. “There’s this moment of self-actualization, of wondering, ‘What is this going to mean to people when I'm dead?" Online sketch comedy may have started as venue for realizing low-fi, almost throwaway ideas, but it had become a 24-hour industry that constantly required new material—especially now that Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel had adopted Funny or Die’s celebrity-participation model.

Meanwhile, YouTube was so overstuffed that amateur comedians were no longer competing for views with the sketch team down the block; they were competing with segments from The Colbert Report and SNL itself.

“All the homegrown stuff that was big in the birth of YouTube doesn’t exist anymore, because you have the glossier, fancier version of it online,” says Sachi Ezura, a producer on The Rundown with Robin Thede who has worked in development at such outlets as IFC. “So why would you watch something that looks like it was made in someone’s basement for 100 dollars?”

In the last few years, as view-counts started dropping and fewer comedy sketches seemed to be bubbling into mainstream awareness, even the most optimistic writers and performers were starting to wonder: How much web comedy could audiences stand? When will the bubble burst? And how was anyone making money off this? “I was getting paid to do whatever sketches I thought were funny,” Fernie says of the 2010-2013 golden age. “But if you’d asked me then, I would have said, ‘In no way is this sustainable.’”

Live By the Feed, Die By the Feed

In November 2016, Klinman released a short he’d written, called “Geologist’s Nightmare,” to UCB’s Facebook page. In the bit—which he produced with his sketch team, Whale Thief—Klinman plays a rock-lover haunted by the thought of some people being unable to spot a schist. By that point in his career, Klinman had worked for numerous comedy outlets, had a pretty good idea of what would work online (the Funny or Die video “10 Hours of Walking in NYC as a Man”, which he’d co-written with Dern and some others, had earned more than 7 million views). But the geologist sketch racked up just over half a million views on Facebook. “It did really well among geologists, which was awesome,” he says. “But there was no conversation around it. Before, if you did a big sketch, blogs and media would pick it up too. That just doesn't happen anymore.”

“Geologist’s Nightmare” was released not long after Facebook began pushing publishers toward native video—a move that would convince dozens of outlets to place their trust in the power of the feed. In recent months, a few companies have retreated from the strategy, notably Vox, which recently laid off several native-video employees. Klinman thinks online comedians would do well to back off from Facebook, too. “If you talk to the people who are doing the best stuff online right now, they’re all struggling,” he says.

Klinman claims Facebook’s discouragement of outbound links, as well as its opaque algorithms, has made comedy videos difficult to distribute, not to mention monetize. “It's completely out of your hands how your work gets out to people,” he says. “And if you make something ambitious, there’s no guarantee it won't get swallowed up by some algorithmic change that you have no control over.”

“We are committed to better supporting publishers and creators as they connect with and build their community on Facebook, and while we don’t always get it right, we think we are making progress,” Facebook responded through a spokesperson, name-checking comedy shows on the company’s Watch platform like "Charlene's World" and All Def Digital's "Dad Jokes." “News Feed still remains important for partners as a discovery surface, where people can find and engage around content that matters to them.”

Another Facebook hurdle, says Ezura, is that the platform tends to favor videos that are quickly digested and visually vibrant, and that can be viewed with captions on—not exactly the elements of a self-produced, three-minute comedy sketch. The site’s glut of clickbaity content, Ezura notes, can be demoralizing for those who got into comedy to make smarter, more daring material.

For anyone working in digital media in 2018, that complaint surely sounds familiar. But digital comedy—which rewards viewers who are willing to take risks on unknown, unconventional performers and ideas—has taken some significant hits in the last year. The recent Funny or Die layoffs, as well as the SeeSo shutdown, are a troubling sign that even the most resourceful comedy outlets are having trouble figuring out an increasingly iffy media landscape (though Funny or Die has had significant success in TV, producing such hits as American Vandal and Billy on the Street, and recently launched a new interview-focused web series with IMDb). Unless you’re making sketches for SNL, or for an outlet with a long-established audiences, the odds of reaching even a few hundred thousand people are slim.

Less Premise, More Person

But while many of Klinman’s peers agree that Facebook hasn’t been great for sketch comedy, they also point to a confluence of factors, from audience fragmentation to larger, web-wrought changes in comedy itself. The early ‘00s was a good time to be part of a smart troupe with a dumb name, but in the social-media era audiences prefer stand-alone personalities rather than group efforts. “I've pitched TV shows in the last couple of years,” says Dern, who’s writing a dissertation on comedy. “And especially in the last year, the powers that be are very interested in whether you're an influencer, or how many followers you have.”

A few years ago, it seemed as though sketch and improv had supplanted stand-up as the best-paved road to a comedy career. Now, says Klinman, “the smart comedians are going back into stand-up.” Solo performing can be cheaper than sketch, and it certainly fits the dynamic of social media: Facebook, for example, has helped earn big numbers for comedy series like “Help Helen Smash” and “Funny in Public,” single-performer shows that earn million of views.

But for a generation that came up with a team-focused comedy philosophy–who spent long nights in airless rooms, bouncing ideas off one another until one of them stuck–the retreat from sketch cam be a bummer. “The best comedy, and the comedy I came up doing, is collaborative—making great stuff with others,” sighs Klinman. ”And you just can't do that anymore.”

There’s also the possibility, of course, that sketch comedy is simply resting—and not in the dead-parrot sense of the word. In the nearly 15 years since YouTube made digital sketches an easily accessible form, humor has undergone several digital mutations: Blip-length Vine sketches; weirdo memes; punchline-providing GIFs; and a raft of comedy podcasts, which have become a major creative focus for performers who, years ago, would have been filming videos in their backyard. “The way that you can tell jokes now is more varied,” says Campbell. “I've laughed more at memes in the last year than I have at any individual sketch. And just look at the way Tumblr threads work—it’s like piling on jokes in an improv scene. Perhaps a two- or three-minute sketch is a little bit tired at this point.”

Campbell’s current gig is on the forthcoming Twilight Zone reboot—just one sign that, even though the sketch-boom has ended, the talents behind many of those hit videos have moved on to long-range, long-form success. Comedy Central’s dark satire Corporate was created by members of WOMEN, a Los Angeles-based sketch group that hosted YouTube videos for years. Members of the Birthday Boys, which created the classic 2010 sketch “Pool Jumpers,” landed an IFC show before they became fixtures on hit podcasts and within high-profile writers’ rooms. And on Sunday night, the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay went to Get Out’s Jordan Peele—one of the most celebrated sketch stars of the last decade (even if some fans still confuse him with football ace Equine Ducklings). “The people who cut their teeth on sketch are starting to tell bigger stories,” says Campbell. “They want to make movies, or things that emotionally affect people, because we’re all looking for a larger catharsis right now.

And in the next few years, there’s always the chance that some these sketch-vets will return to the form that made them famous—or that a new generation will take their place. After all, comedy is cyclical: In the early ‘00s, when there were only a handful of sketch shows on TV, the internet made room for a new form of short-form comedy, one that was raggedy and strange, but that eventually worked its way back into the mainstream. It’s a good bet that that some new strand of sketch—or some new form of online humor altogether—is taking shape now, simply waiting for the right moment (and platform) to announce itself. “I think we’re probably at that point now, where I bet we would start seeing something pop up that's a new voice, or a new interesting thing,” says Fernie. “Comedy likes living underground.”

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Three decades after Watchmen's release, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' dark, cerebral graphic novel remains one of most critically celebrated works of the superhero genre. On the commercial side, the comics world of the Justice League (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, etc.) contains some of the most well-known superhero stories of all time. So last year, when DC Entertainment announced it was going to launch a series that picked up where Watchmen left off and included the Justice League, the move was met with no shortage of questions.

But for series writer (and DC chief) Geoff Johns, it was also necessary. "No one came to us and said, 'Hey, you should do Watchmen in the DC Universe,'" Johns says. "We know the skepticism going in there, and we tried to create a book of the utmost quality and craft beyond what we usually do."

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As the first issue of Johns' series revealed in November, Doomsday Clock takes place seven years after the events of the original, and follows Adrian Veidt—Ozymandias from Watchmen—as he leads a search for Doctor Manhattan in hopes of saving the world from his own plan to save the world. It's a weighty premise, and one that promises a big (or at least compelling) payoff, but the goal wasn't just to shock or awe. Instead, it's a character study of some of the most complex personalities in DC's universe.

“We’re trying to do things that are unexpected, and make the book feel more about people, but it's not about an 'event,'" Johns says. “We’re really trying to do an inward story here, a personal story. The plot is extremely simple: These people are trying to find somebody to help save the world. That’s it. That’s the story."

A significant amount of the anticipation for the series, obviously, involves seeing Watchmen characters meeting members of the Justice League for the first time. The creators wanted to do more than stage a bunch of epic showdowns, though. "You put Batman and Rorschach in the same room, how satisfying is that, really?" says artist Gary Frank. "It’s a very shallow type of fun if all they do is have a fight. Yeah, it’d be great for a couple of pages, but the interesting stuff is how these two characters relate to each other, how they respond to each other.”

Doomsday Clock's deeper purpose also lets them sneak in more meta-textual elements. In the series' second issue, released last week, there's even one—the so-called "Superman Theory"—that Moore himself might approve of.

"It’s a very simple question that these scientists are asking in the DC Universe, which is why are 97 percent of meta-humans American?" Johns explains. "There’s a big textured story in the background that will be unfolding, a conspiracy of sorts, and something that ultimately explodes [into the main narrative]. Things that seem in the background and easily dismissed, actually all become part of the story. As dense as the book is, there are no throwaway moments.”

The mention of back matter points to another way in which Doomsday Clock follows the lead of Watchmen. Like its predecessor, each issue is told in the nine-panel grid structure of Moore and Gibbons' original and each issue features journalism or other in-universe elements that introduce or expand on the central storyline.

That doesn’t mean Doomsday Clock is merely a retread of what came before. "We really wanted to maintain the feel, down to the paper quality, of the original book as much as possible, because the story was going to be so different," Johns says. "We wanted it to be both similar and completely different."

Johns and Frank see their latest series as the pinnacle of a collaboration that stretches back almost 15 years to their time collaborating on Marvel’s Avengers series. The two talk twice every day about the project, Johns says, adding, "I don’t think we’ve ever worked this closely on a book." And probably not as hard, either. Johns estimates Doomsday Clock scripts take five times as long to write as those for other comics. “I love it because it is different and new and it’s challenging," Johns says. "I’m working with the best people in comics. I mean, Gary Frank is the best artist in comics. You can’t deny it."

“I deny it,” Frank laughs. Johns is near apoplectic in disagreement, but eventually submits. "You don’t need to agree," he says. "Just wait until everyone sees issue three.”

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Kids aren’t getting behind the wheel as much these days. But contrary to popular belief, it’s not just because smartphones and social media let them stay connected.

71%

of high school seniors have a driver’s license—the lowest percentage in decades.

15%

of teens cite being able to communicate online as a reason for not getting a license before 18.

36%

say the main reason they’re not learning how to drive is its “overall cost.” State subsidies for high school driver’s ed classes are declining nationwide. Private driving courses average $350.

25%

of teens in households with incomes below $20,000 get their license before 18. That number increases to 52% in households with incomes of $40,000 to $59,999, and 79% in households with incomes of at least $100,000.

84%

of money spent on “taxi services” by users of the teen-focused debit card Current goes to Lyft and Uber, despite those companies’ policies prohibiting unaccompanied riders younger than 18. Companies usually don’t know a cardholder’s age, so there’s no way for ride-­share services to police who orders a car. The onus for reporting rule-breakers falls to the driver.

68%

of teens admit to checking apps while driving.

80%

of teens consider app use while driving “not distracting.”

12%

of crashes involving teens were caused by cell phone use, according to a 2015 study.

Read More

Inside Oracle High •
Call Me, Maybe •
The New Cyber Troops •
Comp Sci Diversity •
Paths to Early Stardom •
Why Teens Don't Drive •
In Love on Strava •
Death of Middle School Romance •
Solving Health Issues at All Stages

This article appears in the April issue. Subscribe now.

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Shadow of the Colossus is a simple story about a boy and his horse. It's a messy story, about hubris, and mortality, and the desperate greed of love that can cause us to do things we know full well will end in disaster. It is also, incontrovertibly, one of the most important videogames in the recent history of the medium.

Quiet and barren, the 2005 release offered a lesson in the importance of hidden dread and understated compassion. Like its predecessor, ICO, it carries a plain premise set in a scenic world, one that would be beautiful if it weren't so alien. A girl has died, a victim of a terrible ritual. In a forbidden wilderness, there is a divine being who can resurrect her. A boy, Wander, takes this girl he loves to the god Dormin, who promises to resurrect her for a price. There are 16 colossi roaming this land, says Dormin; if the boy kills them, the girl will live.

This week, more than a dozen years after the original, Shadow of the Colossus has been reintroduced, with all the bells and whistles of a modern remake—4K graphics, easter eggs, and optional 60 frames per second if it's running on PlayStation 4 Pro. Like any remake of a popular title, this one is controversial, and the choices made by Bluepoint Games in the process of "modernizing" the game deserve close scrutiny. And yet, while replaying this old classic in a new package, I find myself instead considering how appropriate, even poetic, it is to be retelling this particular story.

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Shadow of the Colossus tells of rituals, and does so ritualistically. Each of the 16 boss fights that form the corpus of the gameplay proceed begins with Wander awakening at Dormin's temple, and then using light from his sword to guide him to the beast. Then he must scale the creature, finding a way to reach its weak points by climbing up its body, stone to scale to fur. Then the creature dies, and Wander returns to the temple via the power of mysterious magic shadows. Then he goes, and he kills again.

This ritual goes on 16 times, with the solemnity of liturgy, a tragic heroic quest that slowly becomes so heavily choreographed that it begins to feel like myth. Every moment takes on a metaphorical significance, a comment on the barrenness of nature or the cost of naive hope. Wander's quest is a fool's errand, tilting at the fundamental forces of the world, but it's also beautiful one, set against a wide open expanse of empty plains and swamps and desert. The forbidden lands of Shadow of the Colossus are built to hold the colossi, nothing more, and invading it is cruel—but it's a sympathetic kind of cruelty. After all, what wouldn't you sacrifice for someone you love most?

As Shadow of the Colossus finds its way into telling a mythic story, its repetition lends itself to retelling. That's what happens to myths, after all; they're stories we tell again and again, repeating to ourselves for safety and instruction, for focus and respite. All good stories deserve to be retold. For those of us who have loved Shadow of the Colossus for the past 12 years, that retelling has been a consistent part of our love. I have been writing and rewriting the story of this game and my experience with it since long before I began actually writing about games.

The PlayStation 4 remake of Shadow of the Colossus, then, is another sort of retelling. Another voice, echoing an old story. The grandeur and mystic terror is there, as is the feeling of profound struggle. The controls have been refined somewhat, but not enough to render Wander or his horse fully tamed. This was an essential element of the original myth: that the characters on screen never reacted perfectly to your commands as a player. Wander's quest to tame the wild nature of the colossi, to scale and conquer them, is echoed by the player's struggle to guide Wander, to get his frail young body to grip when it's supposed to, to swing the sword at just the right angle, to run without tripping over his own feet.

Bluepoint's telling captures that. It also captures the sheer power of the colossi themselves, massive creatures that are as much architecture as they are wildlife. In high definition, their fur ripples as you climb it. You can see the terror and frustration in their limbs as they flail to remove you from their bodies. You can see their disquieting vulnerability as they die.

Other elements evade capture. The lighting is less washed out than the original, which removes something from the atmosphere. The PlayStation 2 version used light as an oppressive, almost tangible force; light solidified into a miasma, following you, blinding you, reminding player and Wander both of the cost of this quest. This new version lets a bit too much realism into a world of myth. This is unfortunate, and some adherents of the original will loathe this version for its liberties.

This is to be expected, though. That's how stories work; new tellings always lose some details along the way. But they gain details, too, and new versions of stories don't have to overwrite the old. The beauty of the new Shadow of the Colossus is not as replacement. It cannot and should not replace what came before. All it can offer is its own voice, to tell a story worth telling. It's a good one, one of the best our medium has. If you've never heard it, now's the time.

Beyond Gaming's Blockbusters

-Wrenching and unflinchingly self-aware, Japanese RPG Nier: Automata was the best game of 2017.

-Nintendo will always be able to rely on Mario and Zelda, but it's games like delightful indie platformer Celeste that will help the Switch enjoy a long, fruitful life.

-Why, more than forty titles in, Japenese musou games are finally breaking through with Western players.

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Florence is a romance you unravel with your fingertips.

Based on the first love of its titular character, the mobile game takes that most classic of coming-of-age tales and does something special. Using the touchscreen interface, it guides players through all the waxing and waning of Florence Yeoh's relationship: falling in love, learning about her creativity, understanding where she wants to be. As they navigate the experience—the latest from Ken Wong, the designer of Monument Valley, and his team at Mountains—the game focuses in on the role that touch, tactility itself, plays in memory and growth. Florence is a story about holding things in your hands, and about letting them go.

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For instance: On Florence's first date, she has trouble talking. In the game, rendered in an art style like a sketch comic book, this is represented as a puzzle. Arrange the colored pieces inside Florence's speech bubble, and she talks, the conversation flowing along. At first these puzzles are more complex, slower, with five or six pieces. Then, four. Then, three, then two and down to one, as Florence and her date grow more in sync, conversation growing faster and more fulfilling.

The touch play here serves two purposes. It keeps the player engaged in the story, yes. But it also centers touch itself, bringing the body, the movement of the player's fingers and hands, into the experience, connecting touch with the game's emotional tenor. With your own hands, you make this story happen. You open boxes and help Florence's boyfriend unpack when he moves in. You brush Florence's teeth. You share food. With gestures and taps, you interact with the world the way Florence does, with your own two hands.

This is special, in the context of a story like this, because it mimics the emotional trajectory of experiencing a sentimental moment and then recalling it later, placing the player as a sort of storyteller alongside Florence. You remember touching that photograph, eating that food, doing that busywork at Florence's job. It lives in your fingertips, driven into muscle memory, the same as it is for her.

The rise of the touchscreen has made touching and gesturing frequently feel devoid of context. They're neutral, a means of getting from one digital point to another. No more interesting than pressing a button, really. But Florence is a reminder of the power of touch as expression itself. Taking something into your hands. Feeling someone's touch against yours. Picking up that photograph of you and someone you lost and holding it, just for a second, before putting it back down. These moments are special, and they take on a unique resonance for being tactile. Florence draws a substantial amount of power from remembering that.

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San Francisco is a little bit more crowded than usual today, thanks to the 2018 Game Developers Conference. For a week each March, developers from all over the world come to learn, play new games, and hopefully get a job—while journalists congregate to report on the activity of said developers (and also to get jobs). GDC is possibly the most important event of the year for the army of engineers, artists, and businesspeople who make up the commercial videogame industry: a hub of networking, showcases, and creative reflection, a place for both announcements and edification.

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Yet, like videogames itself, the conference seems to be at a crossroads. As the event has continued to grow, and its profile in the industry has increased, its purpose has begun to shift. The usual excitement still exists among those in the professional gaming (not to be confused with esports) community, who change their Twitter names to include variations "at GDC" and who populate the conference's scheduling app with selfies and meeting requests, but it seems more than ever to be undercut with restlessness: Who is this conference even for, anyway? More than ever, huge platforms are taking a huge share of the show floor and speaking schedule. Facebook, Oculus, and even Magic Leap are all hosting multiple sessions this year.

It's not just that the industry-wide muddling of the lines between indie and triple-A creator has hit GDC, though that's part of it. The games ecosystem is home to a complex variety of types of developers, and the intense divide between indie and major is both fuzzier and more important than it's felt like in the past. Mid-tier titles like PlayerUnknown's BattleGrounds or the free-to-play Fortnite can become dizzyingly popular in a relatively short amount of time (just look to this past weekend's record-breaking result when Drake joined forces with a popular Twitch streamer to play Fortnite's battle-royale mode) while the difference in costs and resources between small and big games continues to balloon. This year, at least for me, it's not quite clear what sort of games GDC is meant to showcase, and even less clarity about what sort of developers are meant to attend—and what they're supposed to take away from their time.

GDC is considered by many in the industry to be an essential event, the core platform for connecting with colleagues, scouting new recruits, and taking stock of the industry. But it's become increasingly clear in recent years how limited this event really is. Taking place in one of the most expensive cities in America, it's a stretch simply to afford accommodations for the week of the conference—and that's not counting expo passes, travel, and any extracurricular activities. For poor or disabled American developers, and especially for international developers, GDC represents a sizable, and difficult, investment. (Meanwhile, foreign developers now have to contend with the increasing risks of entering the country in the first place, particularly if they're from Muslim or non-white countries.)

So now, in 2018, discontent is running higher than normal, as many in the industry are wondering out loud if the Game Developer's Conference, once lauded as the Mecca of the industry, is really the event we need.

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Not long after I met my boyfriend, I put a tracking device on him.

I didn’t quite mean to do that. What I did, really, was follow him on Strava, the GPS-powered social app that maps your workouts.

I was 23, and a nonexerciser who stayed fit with a precarious regimen of genetics. My new boyfriend was a talented triathlete whose values included pain tolerance. So I bought running shoes and joined Strava.

We were a long-distance couple, separated by a bland two-hour bus ride, but Strava was an idyllic eradicator of distance. On it, I followed the contours of his day, mapped around his workouts. When he slowed down for me, so we could run together, he appeared on Strava as my “one other,” in the app’s unintentionally sweet language for exercise partners. Over three years, our running maps came to describe a geography intelligible only to each other, a digital landscape of Strava routes that he’d named for me.

If that sounds like the modern denigration of romance incarnate, I don’t disagree. But back then I was too in love, and too busy exercising, to see that.

On Strava, I exercised with 27 million other people. I recruited my mom, and she lovingly left “kudos” under all my runs. But I suspect that most of what we share on social media is for one person—a deniable missive to someone we hope will choose us. I put runs on Strava for him. When I ran at desolate hours or in dispiriting weather, faster than yesterday, I hoped he would think that I was just as worthy as the other women whose willpower he admired with kudos.

We are all on Strava, I’m pretty sure, to better ourselves with our own data. But on Strava, self-improvement meets social media. There are lots of apps that make living performative and competitive, but Strava overachieves in recreating begrudged necessity—exercise—as enviable experience. A runner’s workout on Strava, with a title and photos, is a declaration of who she is and, maybe, who you should be too.

Everyone on Strava is running and biking and hanging out together without you. Everyone deserves that beer in their Strava title, that creamy coffee in their photo, more than you. Everyone is more virtuous than you, exercising more than you, running faster than you, rising for more sunrises than you, improving themselves more than you.

One morning, lying in bed, I opened Strava and observed that another one other, a cyclist whose profile was set to public, had just burned 2,000 calories with my boyfriend. I had not yet put on pants.

I was curious, and Strava is a joyless data bank for the insecure. When The Washington Post reported in January that US military bases are visible in the GPS shadows of uniformed Stravites, I was not shocked. I had performed equally fastidious forensics on the cyclist’s Strava maps. Tracing her routes on that anxious morning and days to come, I could see where she lived, where she drank beer and got coffee. I knew how many calories she burned working out, and how often. I knew when and where and with whom she spent time (increasingly, my boyfriend).

She appeared to me as a pixelated avatar of who I thought my boyfriend wanted me to be, and I was obsessed. My boyfriend was appalled. “I can’t believe you want to fight about Strava,” he told me when I asked about her, not for the first time.

But we knew we weren’t fighting about Strava. We just were not the people we hoped we were when we met. One summer, his new one other invited him on a weekend bike trip to her parents’ vacation home. I dreaded my inevitable surveillance of its data, trying to confirm what I already knew to be true. Then we broke up. And after I watched their vacation on Strava, I quit the app.

I didn’t need it anymore. Somewhere in the maps—ours, theirs—I’d lost the one other I’d been on Strava to impress; I found, though, that I liked myself far better when I ran unwatched. My mom is still on Strava, tracking her runs and using the app the way it was perhaps intended, and not like those of us who are so unreasonable and in love. Recently she asked if I’d come back to Strava, so we could train together. I might, but this time, I’ll change my settings, and it will really just be the two of us.

Read More

Inside Oracle High •
Call Me, Maybe •
The New Cyber Troops •
Comp Sci Diversity •
Paths to Early Stardom •
Why Teens Don't Drive •
Death of Middle School Romance •
Solving Health Issues at All Stages

Elizabeth Barber (@ElizabethKateri) is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York.

This article appears in the April issue. Subscribe now.

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One of the world's finest distance runners came so close to achieving the greatest feats of athleticism in history: a sub two-hour marathon. To do it, the Eliud Kipchoge should have maintained an average pace of at least 13.1 miles per hour. So, we timed how long WIRED staffers could run at that speed. Needless to say, we didn't last long. Here's why only a handful of people in the world could ever come close to a two-hour marathon.

Today, it came to pass. Five years after the breakout of House of Cards, a decade or so into the era of "prestige television," and a season or two into the decline of Game of Thrones, Netflix is finally the king of television. The streaming giant beat out HBO with 112 Emmy nominations, besting the cable network's 108 and ending its 17-year streak of getting the most Television Academy nods.

It feels like it happened quickly, but it was also a long time coming. Every year since 2013, when Netflix gained entry into the ranks of prestige television by earning a now-meager-seeming 14 nominations for its original programming, the service's ascent has been written on the wall. Year over year, it's pumped more and more cash into new programming (reports indicate Netflix could drop anywhere from $8 billion to $13 billion on content this year, way more than HBO). As it's done so, Netflix has been able to cast a huge net, pulling in viewers with big, expensive shows like The Crown, which earned 13 nominations today, and cult-y surprise hits like Stranger Things, which nabbed 12. (Other Netflix nominees included GLOW, Ozark, Queer Eye, Black Mirror, and Grace and Frankie.)

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And Netflix isn't the only streaming service shifting the equation. Last year, Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale took home quite a few trophies; a year before that, Amazon had a good showing thanks to Transparent. It marked the dawn of a new "Big Three"—NBC, CBS, and ABC being pushed aside by a trio of streaming services.

Of course, the actual Big Three have been lagging in the acclaimed-television for a while—pretty much ever since HBO, Showtime, and AMC started rolling out shows like The Sopranos, The Americans, and Breaking Bad. And HBO, for one, is feeling the pressure. At a recent town hall meeting in New York, AT&T executive John Stankey, who now oversees the network following AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner, told employees HBO would need to broaden its offerings in order to attract more viewers, even indicating the network's new corporate parent would be willing to pony up for more original programming.

It doesn't help that as Netflix has ramped up, some of the prestige cable networks have lost steam. FX's The Americans, and awards stalwart, got five nominations today, but this was its final season. (Atlanta, though, is poised to pick up some of the slack for FX.) AMC, which did well for years thanks to Breaking Bad, only got one nomination for The Walking Dead. Showtime did well with 21 nominations for shows like Patrick Melrose, Twin Peaks, and The Fourth Estate. Last year pundits speculated that HBO had lost some steam only because Game of Thrones wasn't eligible for Emmy nominations, but even though this year the massive fantasy drama was—earning an impressive 22 nominations—that didn't stop the network from being bested by Netflix, despite Westworld having a good showing with nods for stars Evan Rachel Wood, Jeffrey Wright, and Ed Harris.

Whether or not any cable network will ever truly be able to catch up to Netflix is an open question. While the service is already spending astronomical figures on original content, it only plans to inject more. Analysts speculate Netflix could be spending north of $20 billion on content by 2022, and it's recently inked deals for new programming from hitmakers like Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Horror Story, American Crime Story, Pose) and Shonda Rhimes (Grey's Anatomy, everything else you watch on Thursday nights)—as well as with former president and first lady Barack and Michelle Obama.

Even if another cable network doesn't catch up with Netflix, though, another streaming service might. Amazon seems committed to original programming, with shows like Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail's adaptation of the podcast Homecoming and Moonlight director Barry Jenkins' series based on Colson Whitehead's novel The Underground Railroad in the offing. Hulu is going strong with Handmaid's and the forthcoming Stephen King-J.J. Abrams project Castle Rock. And Apple—oh yes, them, the other deep-pocketed tech giant not already in this conversation—is looking at its own slate of originals. The company is reportedly working with Oprah on content and has a show in the works with Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon. Analysts suggest Apple's investment in original content will be on-pace with Netflix and Amazon in the next few years, and who even knows what Facebook and YouTube will do in that time.

But those are questions for 2020 and beyond. Right now, Netflix is king—and no one can challenge it for the throne.