What Does Violence Look Like in Pink?

If you subscribe to Criterion, you may have recently noticed the “Corporate Thrillers” playlist that runs through that genre of film, mostly clustered between the late 1990s and the late 2000s, that uses the office building as a kind of pressure chamber: The Firm , Michael Clayton , The International. My wife and I have been working through that Criterion list lately, and what's striking is how reliably this genre surfaces whenever a culture is trying to metabolize what's actually happening inside its companies.

Jacques Tati got there earlier with Playtime in 1967, which pokes at the man in the gray suit and the shining new city built around him. In the 90s, there was a reckoning with 80s deregulation and corporate raiders. Office Space presented anxieties around the consulting class for the Gen X middle manager. The mid-aughts reflected what would become Occupy. Severance is a potshot at founder-led cults. Games have largely sat this conversation out, which is strange given how many millions of people spend the bulk of their waking hours in an office. In fact, game companies themselves are generally staid office parks, outwardly rejecting the ostensible chaos within.

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Climate Floods the Land, Companies Claim What's Left

Catmilk's Gossamer Matrix, an in-development first-person shooter she's been building for roughly four years, joins the small list of games willing to take the office seriously as a site—though it gets there through a hyperviolent sci-fi premise. Climate-driven flooding has shrunk available land, and cities have stacked themselves vertically into single corporate towers, each protected by a private military hired to defend shareholder value. You play a corporate peacekeeper. A business deal goes wrong. The building is taken. You fight your way through.

“Corporate militarism” is how Catmilk describes it, and the phrase has lost most of its sci-fi distance in the last few years. But the premise wasn’t what caught might my eye. It’s all about texture, baby, and that texture is, improbably, irrepressibly pink. Hot, saturated, almost fleshy pink. It started practically with a pinkish tone for the player character's eyes, which figures prominently in the game's screenshots, and the color spread outward until it became the game's visual identity. Set against dayglow yellows and drab grays of the office interiors (Catmilk renders with the unsettling accuracy of someone who has spent years inside one), it creates a feel of a woven quilt, too tightly spun.

They spent those years working IT in a university basement (with great employees, they add), and the level design draws directly from it: maintenance rooms tacked oddly onto hallways, an empty floor where boxes and old desk chairs sat in the dark for months, vending machines stocked with beef jerky of indeterminate age. "I don't know why somebody would buy beef jerky from a vending machine," Catmilk says.

Monet and Heavy Metal in the Same Cubicle

The visual references derive from elsewhere. The Impressionists, for how Monet and his contemporaries used color expressively under restraint. Zdzisław Beksiński, the Polish painter whose surrealist work became shorthand for heavy metal album covers in the '80s. You can see both in Gossamer Matrix 's aesthetic, which has a stitched, almost-sewn quality: eschewing pixel art precision for something chunky, but warmer and more handworked, like something pulled together one color at a time.

Catmilk is heading toward the first round of play testing, and they're nervous about it. That pesky F word raises its head. "When people hear video games, they assume fun," they say, "and that idea is very confusing to me." Catmilk's favorite games have been, by their own description, either purposefully or negligently unfun. We don't have a great word in English for what games actually deliver, which tends to be something more fluid than the specific, gripping, dopamine-forward thing "fun" implies. What matters more is whether the unfun-ness is intentional.

Checking in day by day, Gossamer Matrix will be ready soon enough for your local water cooler. Save some loose change for the vending machine.