As part of Verge Hack Week, we’ve invited great minds from around Vox Media to contribute their thoughts on the future of everything — from food to fashion to the written word. In this installment, we welcome Polygon executive producer Russ Frushtick.

In the early 1990s, the power of the slap bracelet was unquestioned. It was a dangerous tool, wielded by the most popular and fashionable members of my second grade class. Wannabes would cluster around, ogling the latest acquisition, be it a sparkly, hypnotic number or one featuring the likeness of a preferred Ninja Turtle. I was drawn in by the fame of it, a wearable social weapon with which to gain friends and intimidate enemies. I was profoundly late to the party, though, acquiring one long after the fad had exploded and just two weeks before the sheathed metal bands were deemed contraband.

At the age of 30, I am reliving that experience on a daily basis. You see, I do not have a FitBit.

In the early 1990s, the power of the slap bracelet was unquestioned

For the last year, I didn’t think much about my lack of a fitness-tracking device. Despite my diet, I’m unintentionally skinny, so weight loss was never an issue, but I do make an effort to use a stationary bike twice a week to ensure that my heart doesn’t explode. The FitBit seemed to be built around encouraging the sedentary to start moving, or the already-exercise-obsessed to proclaim to the world how impressive they are. I fit neither of those descriptors.

And yet, snap bracelet-esque envy has begun to creep back into my daily life in unexpected ways.

I recently took a long weekend with friends out on the North Fork of Long Island. Based on the amount of beer consumed over the weekend, I wouldn’t consider the group overly obsessed with health — and yet about half of the assembled were wearing telltale bands or clip-ons.

Some members hadn’t seen one another in close to a year and, upon spying that they were wearing FitBits, they each took a few minutes to acquire the other’s account name, adding them as friends through the app. Those in the group who had been FitBit friends for longer would exclaim, in awe, when they noticed someone else had posted staggering mobility numbers and regimens were shared.

Meanwhile, I sat meekly in a corner, waiting for the conversation to ebb and for the weekend to begin in earnest.

The kids, I believe, have a term called “FOMO”

The kids, I believe, have a term called “FOMO,” or “fear of missing out,” which generally refers to “awesome parties where awesome things may happen,” thus forcing you to stay out considerably later than your preferred bedtime. Ever since that weekend, I’ve been FOMOing (am I doing this right?) over the prospect of being once again removed from the conversation loop.

The other thing driving me towards the fitness-attachment craze is the urge to crush my girlfriend in some sort of competition that doesn’t leave each of us scowling at the other person. Up until now, our outlets for this have been games like Hearthstone, but those generally end with an “Oh, fuck you!” and a few minutes of silence before we decide to play against strangers instead. Threes was another “competition,” until her skills far outmatched mine and I angrily buried the app deep within an unused folder.

Apparently I’m not the only one who wants to get a FitBit to show-up his significant other. While walking back from brunch, my girlfriend and I overheard another couple.

“See, that’s not fair!” said a tall, scruffy guy in typical slacker sunday-wear. “Mine should count for more!”

“But I’m taking more steps! Of course it should count for more, it’s more effort for me!” said his girlfriend. At just over five feet tall, she was decked out in workout clothes and was obviously more in shape. It quickly devolved into escalated voices, and my girlfriend and I shared a knowing smile. But all I could think was, “I want to be having that fight! I want to complain about the fairness of FitBit tracking technology and whether my strides should count for more!”

I hate wearing something on my wrist but I hate not knowing what time it is even more

Instead my girlfriend comes home every day, proudly proclaiming that she passed her step count goal and I give her a high five. Way less fun than fiery competition that would lead me to unnecessarily circle the block just to get an edge.

My last and most superficial reason for wanting a FitBit: I hate wearing something on my wrist but I hate not knowing what time it is even more. And yes, I could pull out my phone, but I’d much rather just glance down and see what time it is. My options are: get a dorky carabiner watch for like $10 on Amazon or get a FitBit One for $100 with the fringe benefit of being part of a social phenomenon.

I’m close to my breaking point. Each day has more FitBit conversations invading my office and social media feeds. I see people using their GPS devices to draw lions and tigers, centaurs and dicks. Step leaderboards have become battlegrounds, with cash prizes on the line. Insurance companies are even giving premium incentives if card holders track and share their movements. I know it’s reaching a tipping point, a point at which no one will ever want to share their exercise routines with the world again. FitBit and its ilk will buried in an Arizona landfill, never to be heard from again. And, two weeks before that point, I’ll be buying my first FitBit.

Each week the iOS Gaming Watch List will inform you of some noteworthy releases coming to the App Store. Major releases tend to hit on Thursdays, so we’ll be coming at you every Wednesday with the games to look out for, as well as some of the bigger content updates on the way. While this won’t be a comprehensive list of games releasing for a given week, it does offer a quick selection of games and upates that show promise or look interesting for one reason or another. Worth noting that we have not played many of these games, so you shouldn’t take these as short reviews. Think of this more like a helpful guide of games to investigate as they launch on Thursday.

It’s pretty safe to say that a game called Fall of Cybertron is not going to end all that well for Cybertron. But that doesn’t mean things have to end badly for you!

The multiplayer mode in Transformers: Fall of Cybertron lets you team up with fellow Decepticons and Autobots to battle for your doomed corner of the planet. Your end goal, apart from saving Cybertron (at least temporarily) is to build up a more powerful Transformer by leveling up your character. Levels come from earned experience in multiplayer and the best way to earn experience is to stay alive for as long as possible. Matt Tieger of High Moon Studios is here to help give you an edge on the robo-competition with 10 tips to keep you in disguise.

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2. Use the Abilities

Tieger: New players are often so focused on shooting and transforming that they completely forget about their abilities — don’t! Those are game changers and they recharge quickly. If transformation is the first thing on your mind, abilities are a very close second.

3. Learn the Maps

Tieger: Sounds simple, but in a game with so many vehicles rocketing around it can get very fluid in there. Particularly learn the pick-up locations. Those are a real lifesaver.

5. Stick Together

Tieger: 2 on 1 or 3 on 1 is usually no contest, no matter what game mode you are playing. If your team moves together, then the enemies will fall quickly.

6. Two out of three ain’t bad

Tieger: In Conquest, the teams that ping-pong between two nodes have a huge advantage over those that blindly race to all three. Remember each team is accumulating points based on the nodes that they hold. If you have two out of three then sooner or later the game is yours.

8. Protect your Buddy

Tieger: In the Headhunter game mode, you are running around collecting sparks. If you see a teammate with a lot of them, stick to them like glue. One of two things will happen: either you will be able to escort them to the drop off point or, if they go down, you can scoop up those sparks before the other team and cash in for yourself.

9. Play the Healer

Tieger: Balanced teams almost always dominate. Ideally you should be leveling up each and every class, even if you have a favorite. Personally, I love to play the supportive healer, but that isn’t for everyone. Teams with good healers tend to do very well. If you team does not have one, try it. You might like it.

Nels Anderson did not want another Ninja Gaiden.

“That’s kind of weird,” the lead designer of Mark of the Ninja explained in an interview with Polygon. “The ninja as a fictional pop-culture construct affords things like being sneaky and undetected and agile and fast. But, in games, aside from Tenchu, anything with a ninja is just, ‘Fucking murder all the dudes, blood, gore, cutting helicopters with giant swords.'”

It wasn’t a denigration of those games as much as a level of surprise. Ninjas are trained not to be seen, so why do most ninja games involve creating as much chaos as possible?

“If you want to make a stealth game, you don’t want to vomit out some long, complicated exposition like, ‘Oh, you’re commandos with psychic power, blah blah blah.’ You just want to say, ‘You’re a ninja.’ It feels like it should calibrate people’s expectations appropriately, being stealthy and all that. But, for some reason that never really happened in games. So I was like, ‘Fuck it, let’s just do that.'”

Section TOC Title

The Dark Project

While there is a surprising lack of truly stealthy ninja games, there are plenty of core stealth games that don’t star ninjas.

Anderson’s inspiration was Thief, the classic first-person stealth series originally created by Looking Glass Studios. In place of a ninja, Thief starred Garret, a lock-picking ne’er-do-well in the Middle Ages. Despite the setting, the core gameplay tenets were all about the power of being unseen. Anderson wanted to recreate that same feeling… but in 2D.

“The design process involved looking at 3D stealth games, figuring out why they worked the way they did, and then deconstructing that and finding a way to translate it back down into 2D. You can’t just port the notion straight across,” he said.

Bringing a stealth game into side-scrolling 2D, and not the top-down 2D of the original Metal Gear games, is far trickier than it first might seem. Anderson gave the example of the classic stealth gameplay moment where a guard is walking down a hallway and you are hiding around the corner. But in 2D, there are no corners to hide around. Everyone is on the same plane. So how do you get around that? The team struggled to make it work.

“There was definitely a point of time where we were not sure if the game was ever going to be good or if Microsoft would pull the plug,” said Anderson. “We had a lot to figure out and the bits weren’t fitting together.”

“There was definitely a point of time where we were not sure if the game was ever going to be good or if Microsoft would pull the plug.”

Section TOC Title

Unseen trials

“Is this game ever going to be fun? Because right now, it sure as shit ain’t.”

Much of the trouble was with stealth games in general. Anderson pointed to a postmortem done by the Thief team wherein they mentioned that the game wasn’t feeling right until just a few months before launch. They explained that, unlike other genres, in stealth games, everything has to be working before the game starts to feel good.

“In any other action game, if a character’s flanking behavior isn’t working, it’s pretty easy to imagine through what it’d be like when it’s good,” explained Anderson. “But if the AI in a stealth game [doesn’t] behave consistently? The game is basically unplayable. It just sucks. If you’re not able to know whether you’ll be able to be perceived by an enemy because you can’t tell if you’re in darkness or not, the game is basically unplayable. You have to have all of those components more or less working.”

Before everything was working, though, the team began to have doubts about sticking to its stealth ideals and started to experiment elsewhere.

“When things weren’t working, we didn’t totally understand why. Like the sneaking around isn’t very fun. So we need to have more stuff that’s not sneaking! Like, ‘Let’s add a more robust combat system and more direct combat with the enemies.’ That was totally the wrong thing to do.”

The result was that playtesters would just run through the levels, beating up everyone they came across. Not exactly the sort of unseen ninja Anderson had imagined.

But, once the team doubled down on making Mark of the Ninja a core stealth game, Anderson said they could “see things lifting from the trough. We could figure out what’s working and what’s not. Until we got to that point where all the components were working, it was like, ‘Oh god, is this game ever going to be fun? Because right now, it sure as shit ain’t.'”

Section TOC Title

Show, don’t tell

One of the things that worked particularly well was giving the player as much information as possible, a shift from most 3D stealth games that Anderson hoped would bring in core stealth players as well as newcomers.

“The core stealth mechanics are really important to understand, but in a lot of stealth games, they’re totally opaque. Like, if you’re walking down a hallway and there’s some guard up ahead and you make a noise, is he going to turn and hear it? You have no idea. You just try a thing and, Oh, he saw you and shoots you in the face. ‘Oh, next time I should be a bit further away.'”

In Mark of the Ninja, every sound you make radiates a visible ring around your character. If a guard is inside that ring, he’ll hear the noise. If not, you’ll pass by unnoticed. Some stealth games, like Deus Ex, have attempted something similar with the use of radar, but Mark of the Ninja shows you this information right there in the environment so there can be no confusion about whether you’ll be heard.

“We were like, ‘Let’s just get people past that whole experimentation phase and just provide that information so it’s another tool at their disposal,'” said Anderson. “Basically accelerate how quickly people can get to that level of intentional planning and deliberate play that [makes] stealth games different from normal character-based action-adventure games — but without doing it in a way of making the game simpler or providing less systems. It was just about the transparency of those systems.”

The important part of all of this: Mark of the Ninja never sold its soul. It made it through development as a stealth gamer’s stealth game, letting you complete entire levels without being spotted or killing a single guard. You’re a ninja, after all. It’s what you do.

“Let’s just get people past that whole experimentation phase and just provide that information so it’s another tool at their disposal.”