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  • ‘Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ and How ‘DEI’ Became Gamergate 2.0’s Rallying Cry

    ‘Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ and How ‘DEI’ Became Gamergate 2.0’s Rallying Cry

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    On May 16, the gaming and entertainment news site Dexerto tweeted an image from the forthcoming game Assassin’s Creed Shadows featuring one of its protagonists, the Black samurai Yasuke, in a fighting pose. Across scores of replies, some voiced optimism, others fatigue with Assassin’s Creed’s now 14-game-long run, and a very vocal few expressed frustration and anger that a Black person was at the center of the narrative.

    “Gonna pass on the DEI games,” wrote one blue-check X user, referencing the acronym for diversity, equity, and inclusion. “Why Wokeism?” asked another. Comments full of racist and sexist language filled the thread.

    A more articulate undercurrent of these reactionaries, across many online forums, had a more specific set of complaints. Some alleged the race of the real Yasuke was never known, others that he wasn’t a samurai but a retainer, and another claimed he was never in combat.

    These were all fairly elaborate conclusions to draw about a guy from 1581 who’s been depicted as a samurai in Japanese media many times, including in the 2017 video game Nioh and Samurai Warriors 5 in 2021, as well as his own animated series on Netflix.

    They also may have been the last bit of armchair history we got on Yasuke if the conversation hadn’t been sustained by a set of accounts looking to build yet another front in the online culture war, fueling what some have been calling Gamergate 2.0. Whereas the Gamergate of 2014 focused on trying to drown out feminist voices, and the voices of women of color, in gaming culture, this second incarnation seems focused on pushing back against diversity in games of all kinds. Yasuke just stepped in their path.

    The resurgence of the Gamergate moniker came earlier this year in reaction to the work of Sweet Baby. Staff at the small consultancy received a wave of harassment this spring stemming from misinformation and conspiracy theories claiming the company was a BlackRock-backed outfit trying to force diversity into games. (It’s not affiliated with BlackRock and merely advises on characters and storylines.) As the controversy around Assassin’s Creed Shadows intensified, several posts mentioned Sweet Baby, even though company CEO Kim Belair says the firm didn’t work on the game.

    “I think it just comes with the post-Gamergate (late-Gamergate?) territory,” Belair wrote in an email to WIRED. “To a certain kind of person, largely trolls, we’re synonymous with their idea of ‘wokeness in games’ or a vague idea of ‘DEI,’ but it’s ultimately reflective of the overall misinformation that fuels this campaign.”

    Gamergate was not the first harassment campaign conceived in the bowels of 4chan and its affiliate websites, but it was perhaps their crowning achievement. The attacks against developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu and media critic Anita Sarkeesian, among others, ranged from doxing to rape and death threats. Its tenets and tactics eventually proved valuable in bringing people into the burgeoning alt-right movement. Even Pizzagate and QAnon can, in some ways, be traced back to what was happening with gamers online in 2014.

    “Gamergate was a recruiting ground, a pipeline to leverage the loneliness, discontentment, and alienation of young men—often white young men—into alt-right politics, extremist misogyny, and outright white supremacy and Nazism,” Thirsty Suitors narrative lead Meghna Jayanth told WIRED.

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  • ‘Crush House’ Is a Game For People Who Love Drama

    ‘Crush House’ Is a Game For People Who Love Drama

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    Recently, while stuck inside sick with Covid-19’s new FLiRT variant, I honored its ridiculous name with a binge-watch of Love Island USA. I dabble in reality TV, especially when sick; a single season graciously offered 36 hours of no-brain-cells-required entertainment. It was my first time watching the show, and one moment has stayed with me above all else: A group of contestants gathered around a phone, eyes glued to a compilation video of their onscreen significant others with other women. Cue the tears and howls of betrayal.

    As television, it is a peak moment of voyeuristic entertainment—a combination of actions slamming face-first into consequences, the real-time reactions to the taboo of cheating, a moment typically reserved for private moments between partners. It’s also a tactic on the producers’ part so manipulative that it feels like psychological torture. This is good reality TV.

    When Nerial announced Crush House, a video game about a reality TV show, it appeared to be a funny, goofy take on a genre many people do not take seriously. Players step into the role of a producer named Jae who just started working on 1999’s biggest reality TV show. Jae selects four cast members for each new season and aims to capture them fighting, flirting, and scheming to stay in the spotlight.

    Much like the grim realities of reality TV, however, Crush House is something far more sinister than its colorful, cupcake aesthetic would have you believe. If reality TV is a pact between performer and audience—a person craving fame at any cost, and the viewers willing to give it to them mob-rule style—is the relationship truly symbiotic, or something worse? Viewers will have their pound of flesh, whether reality stars are willing or not.

    At the start, Crush House’s goal is simple: Keep the show on air, Monday to Saturday, by attracting ratings high enough to avoid cancelation.

    It sounds easier than it is. The difficulty ramps up quickly as players have to juggle new daily audiences, from fans who crave drama or wholesome moments, to those who just want to see a lighthouse, or maybe some feet, in the shot. Each new season is harder to top than the last thanks to increasing audience demands and network pressure, delivered in-game via a faceless superior over a walkie-talkie. The only way to succeed is to get clever with the camera, figuring out how to satisfy multiple demands in one frame before the day ends. Running ads during the show will help you earn cash to buy helpful props; these can be anything from a statue that makes everyone horny for makeouts, to a saxophone for one specific character to play.

    There’s no shortage of drama amongst the castmates, either, of course. They all want their influence felt. Each has a different request for Jae—some want their most dramatic moments captured from their best angles or extra airtime, while others are looking for the chance to showcase their musical talents. Fulfilling those requests is crucial to moving along the story behind the show. There’s something disturbing happening at the Crush House off-camera, a mystery so dramatic that it feels right at home with the dystopian premise of modern reality TV.

    The mix-and-match aspect of casting, along with the game’s procedurally generated dialog, works well to keep seasons feeling unpredictable—though certain characters have strong enough personalities that I was able to plan casts for maximum drama. Ayo, a brash personal trainer, was consistently the bomb I dropped into the house to start fights. French casanova Emile was sure to capture the hearts of audiences and housemates alike.

    While the game does offer a mode that allows you to play through its story without fear of failing ratings, it’s best experienced without that guardrail. Figuring out how to satisfy six audiences at once, while also avoiding shooting footage of anyone’s butt, for example, becomes a slapstick game of sprinting after characters, camera bouncing, to get a Dutch-angled shot of the fight breaking out in front of a garden lighthouse–while also occasionally spinning your camera up into the sky because you lingered on someone’s backside too long.

    Crush House is a mad dash, a game where every minute counts. It’s frantic in a way that feels akin to shotgunning a beer: stupid, silly, yet deadly serious in that specific moment.

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  • How ‘World of Warcraft’ Devs Launched One of the Biggest Unions in Video Games

    How ‘World of Warcraft’ Devs Launched One of the Biggest Unions in Video Games

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    They started with fliers. The group of World of Warcraft developers at Activision Blizzard, determined to unionize, were testing the waters after Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition. Microsoft had pledged to honor a labor neutrality agreement, active 60 days after the deal’s close, that would allow workers to explore collective bargaining without fear.

    Even with that agreement on their side, developers were still nervous about even showing interest in a union, says Paul Cox, a senior quest designer who served on the union’s organizing committee. “Prior to [the agreement], we had a lot of people who were like, ‘I’m interested, but I’m really worried about retaliation. I am terrified about getting my name put anywhere.’” he adds.

    That fear wasn’t unfounded. Prior to Microsoft’s acquisition, when they were still under Activision Blizzard’s leadership, unionized quality assurance workers at a studio in Albany, New York, accused management of engaging in union busting tactics. According to one QA tester WIRED spoke to at the time, management was hostile to their efforts, pulling employees into “spontaneous meetings” and “spread[ing] misleading or false information about unions and the unionization process” in a company Slack channel.

    On July 24, Microsoft voluntarily recognized the World of Warcraft developers’ union, a wall-to-wall unit of over 500 employees spanning multiple departments—an achievement that has long been unthinkable in the video game industry. Due to its size and breadth of departments involved, it’s the first of its kind at Activision Blizzard. Those QA testers in Albany eventually managed to establish their union, but they were just one relatively small group.

    The Warcraft developers follow in the footsteps of Bethesda Game Studios, another Microsoft-owned company, which created the first union at a major studio across its entire team with 241 members. Microsoft also voluntarily recognized that union.

    “It was really only after the Microsoft acquisition that the ball started racing down the hill,” Cox says of union efforts. “The lack of fear of retaliation really helped.”

    Also helpful: Reaching out to as many colleagues as possible. “When you’re trying to talk to people about a union, you can really only do it one-on-one,” Cox says. To do that organizers set up tents on the company campus for people to stop by and get information. Being able to openly exist in a space people might pass on the way to lunch, for example, made that process faster and easier.

    Activision Blizzard did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

    Cox says that because it was previously hard to communicate with other employees due to the discreet nature of organizing, he and his colleagues didn’t realize there was a World of Warcraft QA group already trying to unionize. Once they were aware of each other, they combined efforts. As for deciding who should be in the union, Cox says it boiled down to a very simple idea.

    “It was about game creators,” he says. “The people who you couldn’t make the game without.” Whether that’s writers, sound designers, or producers, it doesn’t matter. “We fought pretty hard to make sure that everybody was in the same group, as much as we could get.”

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  • How Telegram Game ‘Hamster Kombat’ Got 300 Million Users—and the Ire of Iran’s Military

    How Telegram Game ‘Hamster Kombat’ Got 300 Million Users—and the Ire of Iran’s Military

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    The founders reveal their third inspiration, and this one’s less obvious: TikTok.

    “First, there was Musical.ly, and it almost died,” say the founders, referring to the original incarnation of TikTok. Then ByteDance (which acquired Musical.ly) found ways to incentivize sharing. “People underestimate the effect of these tiny mechanisms,” say the creators. “Sometimes, they can turn the tide.”

    Tiny mechanisms are everywhere in Hamster Kombat. You earn coins for inviting friends to the game, watching YouTube videos, subscribing to the Telegram channel, and so on. “We knew that the only way for us to grow was by making everything inside the game viral,” claim the founders. “We simply didn’t have $50 million for marketing.”

    Going viral doesn’t happen by accident. Every day, the founders obsessively follow real-world events and incorporate them into the gameplay. “When Dubai hosted a crypto conference and suddenly got flooded, it was a devastating situation, but you could feel the irony,” say the creators. “We went and made a card [in the game] about this. And then people just started getting this card, taking screenshots, posting on social [media].”

    The game is deeply self-aware and packed with crypto Easter eggs. “I can open Hamster Kombat and see this inside joke that reflects what the community is saying,” says Amanda Cassatt, the CEO of Serotonin, a marketing firm. “The game is fun, and it’s funny.”

    When you first open Hamster Kombat, it looks so simple it doesn’t even feel like a game. Tap, get coins. Tap, get coins. “I wouldn’t consider it a game. It’s sort of entertainment,” says Matvii Diadkov, the founder of the crypto advertising network Bitmedia who has created and analyzed crypto games. “It’s even more primitive than hyper-casual games.”

    But then something weird happens. When you explore the app, you’re confronted with a dizzying menu of options for scaling your hamster’s crypto exchange, such as investing in your UX and UI team, building an NFT metaverse (remember those?), or obtaining a legal license to operate in Nigeria. These options are deep cuts into Web3 nerd-dom, often requiring a bit of research if you’re an outsider. Each option has a cost (in the free coins you earn), but investing in it can boost your hamster’s profit-per-hour. This can get addicting.

    “I realized that strategy helps save time and improve efficiency,” says Liliya Chumarina, a 24-year-old freelance marketer who lives in Milan. At first she just clicked, then she watched the game’s educational videos (racking up social media views for Hamster Kombat), then she created a spreadsheet to help her optimize yield. Thanks to this automation, Chumarina says, “now I usually spend no more than one hour per day.” (Cassatt considers the game not as simple as tic-tac-toe, but not as complicated as chess. “It’s checkers.”)

    The founders seem exasperated by the game’s “hyper-casual” label. “Some people call it a tap-to-play game. It’s not exactly right and dumbs it down,” say the creators. “You only need to tap at the very beginning. Very soon, you get access to all the passive income streams which quickly outweigh everything else.”

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  • ‘Metroid Prime 4’ Gets a Release Date After Years of Troubled Development

    ‘Metroid Prime 4’ Gets a Release Date After Years of Troubled Development

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    Metroid Prime 4 is alive. During today’s Nintendo Direct event, the company revealed that the highly anticipated sequel, now called Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, is headed to Switch next year.

    It’s been roughly seven years since Nintendo first announced the game during 2017’s E3 event with developer Bandai Namco attached. At the time, Metroid Prime 4 was expected to close a decade-long gap between itself and the 2007 Wii game Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Other titles in the overall franchise, including Metroid: Other M, which got a lukewarm reception, and a remaster of Metroid Prime, had dropped in the meantime, but none had satiated the desire for a new full Metroid release. Metroid Prime 4 was intended to do that—until it disappeared.

    Years into development, the entire project was scrapped and started again from scratch in 2019 after it failed to hit “the standards we seek in a sequel to the Metroid Prime series,” Nintendo said at the time. Retro Studios, the series’ original developer, was brought on board for this second shot at Samus Aran’s return, but after their work began news about the game’s development was scant.

    In addition to revealing that Metroid Prime 4: Beyond will be available for Switch some time in 2025, Nintendo released gameplay footage that includes Samus scanning aliens, shooting everything in sight, and turning into a nice neat little ball—the classics, as it were. Few other details were given as the game closed out today’s Nintendo Direct, which also included news of a new Legend of Zelda game, but it felt like a deluge after the five years of information drought that preceded it.

    Metroid Prime 4: Beyond appears to be arriving near the end of the current Switch’s lifecycle. News about the console’s successor is expected with every new Nintendo event, but so far there has been none. Still, Metroid fans are ready to welcome Samus back. Or, as one person put it on X with a screenshot of a 2018 receipt: “My preorder finally means something!”

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  • ‘Cities: Skylines II’ Found a Solution for High Rents: Get Rid of Landlords

    ‘Cities: Skylines II’ Found a Solution for High Rents: Get Rid of Landlords

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    The rent is too damn high, even in video games. For months, players of Colossal Order’s 2023 city-building sim, Cities: Skylines II, have been battling with exorbitant housing costs. Subreddits filled with users frustrated that the cost of living was too high in their burgeoning metropolises and complained there was no way to fix it. This week, the developer finally announced a solution: tossing the game’s landlords to the curb.

    “First of all, we removed the virtual landlord so a building’s upkeep is now paid equally by all renters,” the developer posted in a blog on the game’s Steam page. “Second, we changed the way rent is calculated.” Now, Colossal Order says, it will be based on a household’s income: “Even if they currently don’t have enough money in their balance to pay rent, they won’t complain and will instead spend less money on resource consumption.”

    The rent problem in the city sim is almost a little too on the nose. Over the last few years real-world rents have skyrocketed—in some cases, rising faster than wages. In cities like New York, advocates and tenants alike are fighting against the fees making housing less and less affordable; in the UK, rent is almost 10 percent higher than it was a year ago. From Hawaii to Berlin the cost of living is exorbitant. Landlords aren’t always to blame, but for renters they’re often the easiest targets.

    From this perspective, perhaps Cities’ simulator is too good. Prior to this week’s fix, players found themselves getting tripped up on some of the same problems government officials and city planners are facing. “For the love of god I can not fix high rent,” wrote one player in April. “Anything I do re-zone, de-zone, more jobs, less jobs, taxes high or low, wait time in game. Increased education, decreased education. City services does nothing. It seems anything I try does nothing.”

    On the game’s subreddit, players have also criticised “how the game’s logic around ‘high rent’ contrasts reality,” with one player conceding that centralized locations with amenities will inevitably have higher land values. “But this game makes the assumption of a hyper-capitalist hellscape where all land is owned by speculative rent-seeking landlord classes who automatically make every effort to make people homeless over provisioning housing as it is needed,” the player continued. “In the real world, socialised housing can exist centrally.”

    This is true. It exists in Vienna, which the New York Times last year dubbed “a renters’ utopia.” Except, in Vienna the landlord is the city itself (it owns about 220,000 apartments). In Cities: Skylines II, the devs just got rid of landlords completely.

    The change in-game will have “a transition period as the simulation adapts to the changes,” and the developer “can’t make any guarantees” with how it will impact games with mods. Although the update aims to fix most of the problems at hand, that doesn’t mean players should never expect to see rent complaints again. When household incomes are too low to pay, tenants will be loud about it. “Only when their income is too low to be able to pay rent will they complain about ‘High Rent’ and look for cheaper housing or move out of the city.” Maybe it’s time players had a few in-game tenant groups of their own.

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  • Behind That Viral LA Billboard That Trolled Microsoft and Other Game Companies

    Behind That Viral LA Billboard That Trolled Microsoft and Other Game Companies

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    Last week, while Summer Game Fest attendees shuffled between game reveals and demos in Los Angeles, an unusual digital billboard captured the attention of millions of people online and off. “Gone but not forgotten,” it read, listing shuttered studios like Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks, and Volition, “+ everyone laid off, downsized, & ‘made redundant.’ Thank you for great games.” When the sign flashed to its second message to downtown LA, it was equally direct: “We love you. We miss you. We hate money.”

    The message was signed “your friends at New Blood,” and as soon as Game File reporter Stephen Totilo posted a video of the billboard to X on Thursday, it went viral, eventually racking up more than 3 million views and making headlines on gaming news sites. New Blood Interactive’s co-founder Dave Oshry, who paid for the viral ad, says that he wanted people in the gaming industry to “see it and go ‘hell yeah, good shout’ and pour one out for those studios and just remember the games they made.” But what he ultimately did was troll an industry that’s squeezing developers right as its big wigs were headed to LA to show off their glitzy new releases.

    It’s been a particularly brutal year for developers at studios big and small. Indies continue to close or go on “hiatus,” a more hopeful move that implies they’ll one day return. Big name studios have been laying off developers in the hundreds. Microsoft in particular is responsible for the most recent closures on that billboard list, Arkane Austin and Tango Gameworks.

    Originally, Oshry told Totilo, he wanted to post the names of all of the recently-shuttered studios, but there simply wasn’t enough room on the billboard. Still, his action resonated with the developers who have lost their jobs this year alone, and the others who are looking to support them.

    Oshry says he’s received many messages from people formerly of those studios, so “mission accomplished.” He declined to provide specifics on how much the billboard cost, simply telling WIRED via X DM that the price was “$xx,xxx.” “It cost a lot but not that much,” he adds.

    Whatever the cost, it was likely far less than the money game studios were ponying up to participate in Summer Game Fest, where showing a one-minute trailer can reportedly cost $250,000. Over the Game Fest weekend, companies from Microsoft to Blumhouse got major buzz debuting early looks at games like Doom: The Dark Ages and Sleep Awake, but a lot of the chatter also went to Oshry’s stunt.

    Oshry told Game File that the original messages he brainstormed with his New Blood colleagues were much more direct than what they actually posted. “People started suggesting: ‘You should take shots at the execs,” Oshry said. “Put a picture of Phil Spencer up there and be like, ‘Hey man, what the fuck?’”

    Spencer, Microsoft Gaming’s CEO, spoke to IGN over the weekend about the company’s decision to close studios like Tango Gameworks—a controversial move considering the developer made the widely acclaimed Hi-Fi Rush. “In the end, I’ve said over and over, I have to run a sustainable business inside the company and grow, and that means sometimes I have to make hard decisions that frankly are not decisions I love, but decisions that somebody needs to go make,” Spencer said.

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  • ‘Doom: The Dark Ages’ and 4 More Summer Game Fest Announcements We’re Excited About

    ‘Doom: The Dark Ages’ and 4 More Summer Game Fest Announcements We’re Excited About

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    Now that E3 is fully dead, Summer Game Fest has taken on its mantle as the go-to event for big video game release announcements. This past weekend’s Game Fest delivered, with companies from Microsoft to horror studio Blumhouse sending honchos to LA to show off new gear and new titles.

    News out of the event came in all sizes, from quick teasers for games that still don’t have release dates, to console upgrades, to official entries in beloved series. If you missed the weekend-long event, no need to sweat. We’ve got the most interesting announcements right here for you.

    Blumhouse Set to Release 6 (!!!) Horror Games

    Blumhouse’s gaming division is cooking. The publisher has six horror titles on the way, including projects from indie studio Half Mermaid, which made Immortality and Her Story, and is currently working with Brandon Cronenberg. It’s also working with Eyes Out, the developer founded by Cory Davis (Spec Ops: The Line) and Nine Inch Nails’ Robin Finck.

    During its Friday presentation, the publisher revealed Fear the Spotlight, Crisol, Theater of Idols, Grave Seasons, Sleep Awake, The Simulation, and Project C via a two-minute sizzle reel—the trailer was short, but the lineup looks quite promising.

    A Doom Prequel

    Bethesda and Id Software are releasing a prequel to 2016’s Doom and its 2020 follow-up, Doom Eternal. An origin story called Doom: The Dark Ages, the game has a more fantasy feel to it—they added chainsaw blades to a shield!—but still seems to be packing all of the firepower of previous iterations. And blood. Also maybe a dragon? I think?

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  • ‘Animal Well’ Demonstrates What Gaming Stands to Lose Amid Indie Studio Closures

    ‘Animal Well’ Demonstrates What Gaming Stands to Lose Amid Indie Studio Closures

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    Animal Well also comes at a turbulent time for the game industry. Outfits like Gastrow’s and developers like Basso are getting hit hard. Every month this year has included new headline-making layoffs at big game companies, while smaller studios without the name recognition have faded away quietly or gone on some kind of “hiatus.”

    Even indies that have been acquired by major publishers are struggling. Two days before Animal Well’s release, Microsoft announced it would shutter several studios, including Tango Gameworks, best known for the beloved Hi-Fi Rush.

    Animal Well has started its life as something of an endangered species. Perhaps that’s why efforts to protect the game and its secrets feel so urgent. It is, unfortunately, impossible to talk about what makes its post-game so good without ruining it, and every other post on its subreddit seems to be diligently marked with a spoiler tag as a result. Even as new gamers discover it, they’re implored to participate, and keep mum.

    Sure, this is a lot to hoist onto one title. Hades II’s early-access release, for example, generated as much, if not more, excitement. But coming at a rough time for scrappy upstarts, its success—universal acclaim and a time as a top seller—looks like survival of the fittest.

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  • ‘Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door’ Sets the Standard for Classic Game Remakes

    ‘Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door’ Sets the Standard for Classic Game Remakes

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    In the original, Mario and his friends are flat planes with black outlines, to give the impression they’re drawings, rather than computer graphics. While that design is still present in the remake, you can also see a faint hint of a white highlight around the edges of the character model, much like you’d see on actual paper cutouts. It’s subtle, but pervasive, and it contributes to the sense that these models really were cut out by hand.

    Every piece of the world has this kind of attention to detail. When you first enter Rogueport, there’s a platform in the main square with a noose on it. In the original, the wooden steps are straight, flat, and everything is at a right angle. It’s fine for a background element, and the flat noose cutout sways in the wind, so the effect works.

    In the remake, however, the steps are a little crooked and janky. The side pieces of the steps look bent, like a child accidentally forced it too hard while slotting in the step pieces. It’s standing, but only barely. A mild gust of wind might blow the whole thing over. It might seem unimportant, but details like this make it easy to get drawn into Paper Mario‘s world.

    This is one situation where the improved graphics of a more modern console augmented the design choices from the original game. Switch graphics might mean Mario and his pals can look more realistic, but in this case that just means they look more handmade, like a paper craft model of the Mario from Super Mario 64.

    The rich detail the remake adds—with more complex models, better lighting and reflection systems, and higher resolution textures—makes the illusion so much more immersive and delightful. It’s apparent in every new setting how much effort was put into recreating every aspect of the game.

    Quality of Life Upgrades

    Faithful recreation isn’t always the most ideal way to approach a remake, and thankfully Nintendo agrees. This new version if The Thousand-Year Door comes with a few features that aren’t present in the original, but would’ve been welcome additions.

    The most useful of these, in my opinion, is the Partner Ring. In the original game, you had to open up a menu to swap between different members of your party. It wasn’t difficult per se, but it was tedious. In the remake, you can hold L and tilt the control stick to rapidly swap partners. It’s a shortcut that doesn’t fundamentally alter the game, but is a welcome convenience.

    Similarly, there’s a new option when you fail a battle. Previously, if you lost a fight, you would have to reload from the last time you saved, which could sometimes be annoyingly far from where you were. In the remake, when you lose, you’ll see a new “Try again” option that will bring you back on the most recent section of the map, cutting down on huge amounts of tedious backtracking.

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