What do zombies, Japanese schoolgirls, and cowboy hats have in common?

Well, they’re all in this, apparently. I can’t decide if it represents the ultimate in niche markets, or an attempt to toss in as much as possible to appeal to the widest possible demographic — that is, those who like scantily clad women, those who like (simulated) violence, and/or those who hate zombies.

Wiretaps? Let’s not talk about wiretaps…

This story about Ontario Provincial Police using emergency wiretaps on First Nations protesters in 2007 popped up early this week and as of writing, had just under 400 comments posted. This seems like a relatively high number, considering the “top commented” listing had only one article with more (632 — about the taser-related death of a Winnipeg teenager) and the next highest was 289 (a story about the federal government’s defecit).

The article is worth a read, pointing out that the wiretaps were obtained without a judge’s approval, but are provided for under the Criminal Code in case of “extreme emergencies”. There’s some question of whether including the probably uninvolved brother of organizer Shawn Brant in the list of phones tapped was warranted, but it’s interesting to look at the responses to the article to see that this isn’t mentioned much. There’s a lot I’d like to look into about this story and the way people are responding to it — questions of law and order versus due process and autonomy immediately jump out as striking.

However, the one issue I’d like to think about now is the nature of the response system the CBC has in place itself and the kind of comments it lends itself to. On any given comment, one can choose to “recommend” it, adding to a simple tally of how many times unique users have recommended the comment. Alongside this, there’s an option to report “abuse”, which is split into the categories of obscenity/vulgarity, hate speech, personal attack, advertising/spam, copyright/plagiarism, and other. I am not sure how often comments are pulled for any of these qualities, but consider comments like:

if these people were any other race than Indian they would be labelled terriosts.
why is it indians can get away with anything they want or feel they deserve

Whether this comment was simply not reported or remained despite it I can’t be sure of. These kind of comments are intriguing to me since they seem to veer away from the reported subject and towards an underlying sentiment or issue: resentment of a certain group. In this way, these kind of comments are an attempt to change the subject — now the discussion isn’t about wiretapping, and all the difficult questions surrounding it – it’s about perceived Aboriginal privilege, and an exhortation that they “stop complaining” and just assimiliate already. Consider the following:

what i still dont get is, why are the natives still not accepting the fact that they need to join the rest of Canada in civilizing themselves. Yes it might have been unfair for them when they were dominated before, but com’on its the 21st century, if they still try to isolate themselves, they will just cause more trouble

i agree with all of the above comments we non-natives should leave CANADA and alow anybody who can trace their family tree to first nation give what ever they what to them so i am packing right now because i am sure some first nation person will tell me i am on their land GIVE ME A BREAK FIRST NATION PEOPLE want erverytining because their ancestors were not treared properly go away suck it up do not tell me u want to hunt and fish share the land and admit u lost and u love what the ‘white man’ brought

Comments of this nature seem to share sentiments that Aboriginal people should “civilize” themselves and abandon protests. The big theme I can see here is that certain people seem, to put it bluntly, to be tired of putting up with antics on the part of protestors (like blocking roads). The contrast between the protesters and those protesting them is certainly ironic, at least from my perspective.

I wonder whether these type of comments are a product of the anonymity of the situation (CBC doesn’t require you to use your real name when creating an account). Of course, there is some selection bias involved, since probably only the most involved and/or passionate people would sign up for an account, much less post a comment, which might account for the extremity of some of the anti-Aboriginal rhetoric (and conversely, anti-police as well).

I sure am glad the CBC started this service. I am now much better educated about the level of racism and hatred that exists here in Canada. I can only hope that by venting here that those people can somehow resolve the hatred in a harmless way, rather than spread it…

Still, venting as a coping strategy is probably not healthy, especially when the sentiments expressed are so virulently against a particular group. To be honest though, I really just liked the last sentence in the previous post, which brought the subject back to the topic (supposedly) at hand:

Oh, and by the way, your right to vent anything you want on sites like this could be curtailed in the future if these wiretaps are allowed to pass without scrutiny.

Something for the other crowd to consider, perhaps.

(sub)cultures

As someone who’s self-identified with the “nerd” label for quite some time, I sometimes think about the ways in which this “subculture” of sorts is changing and growing. I think that as an alternative to the so-called mainstream, nerd culture is quickly becoming accepted and even partially absorbed into popular entertainment. Just as it happened to leetspeak, once mainly the domain of PC gamers and forum dwellers, it’s happening to memes — to the extent that one “Christopher Poole”, aka moot, founder of 4chan, was featured in Time recently.

It’s a familiar pattern: certain subcultures rise in prominence until they’re fully in the public eye, at which point, inevitably, someone realizes that there’s money to be made. The best examples of this are musical, such as the marketing of punk and hip hop to cash-flushed consumers.

But is this particular instance different? It might be argued that much of what 4chan has wrought is incompatible with popular culture. Yet the same thing might be said of past trends which “bubbled” and were captured, to some degree, by popular outlets. It may just be a matter of picking and choosing the most palatable aspects while leaving the more offensive and bizarre ones behind. Does this mean we’re going to start seeing cats on billboards with captions inquiring “can I has Big Mac?” Maybe not now, at least; but a recent Kraft ad, with the letters “LOL” carved into a thick layer of peanut butter on toast might be something to think about.

(See here for a similar ad — a Google search did not turn up the LOL variant, which seems to be located mainly in bus shelters.)

Blue Shell Subsidies

Imagine for a second a system where you are in direct competition with other agents at a certain task. You and your peers in this group are ranked in terms of performance, and the ranking shifts occasionally as certain individuals either scramble ahead or are knocked behind.

Now, imagine that an external force provides some form of help to you and all the other agents. The amount of help you receive is inversely proportional to how well you’re doing at any one time. The help provided to those at the lower end of the rankings is extreme — sometimes even resulting in them taking the lead, other times simply sabotaging the current leader and leaving the lower standings unchanged. The assistance given to those near the front of the pack is minimal — occasionally helping to maintain their standings, but little else.

What we’ve just described is one of two things: possible effects of government intervention and subsidies on economic competition, or a game of Mario Kart.

In both cases, incentive to strive for success is reduced. Failure is sometimes mitigated by government bailouts and powerful items given only to those doing poorly in the race. Those racers who do well are rewarded with poor items, like banana peels, which only prove a minor deterrence to those behind. Items like the Bullet Bill, which takes hold of your racer and jets you ahead, smashing aside the competition in the process, are given only to those doing extremely badly.

Being “the best” in Mario Kart is potentially much less appealing than doing so in business. A particularly insidious item — the winged Blue Shell — is given fairly often to those near the back of the race. When launched, it seeks out and almost unfailingly devastates the leader, also harming anyone in the immediate vicinity. Even falling behind won’t save you, as the shell targets whoever was in first at the time of launch.

This type of help is different and probably has no direct analogue in economical terms. Unlike other effects which propel the player forward and increase chances of victory (or help a firm “stay in the game”), the blue shell seldom has much effect on the race of the player who launches it. As it seeks out the leader, the shell rarely affects more than two or three players, resulting in a shift in the top standings but not directly impacting those players in the back, including, presumably, the player who fired it. Thus, the shell is more of a vengeance move, and one that greatly reduces incentive to be in the lead.

Any mechanic which wrests sense of control and desire to succeed from a player is dangerous in a game, and it is easy to see how certain individuals might find that they have no real reason to try much harder, when racing at a mediocre level is seemingly rewarded by a system which, as a friend of mine has put it, seemingly does not want you to win — or at least, be winning.

Samus and Sexism: Changing Female Roles in Games

When Metroid was released for the NES in 1987, a deliberate surprise was built into the game. The player’s character, bounty hunter Samus Aran, by all means a mysterious, space-faring, alien-killing badass with a gun for an arm, turned out to be female. At the time, this was unheard of; the Mario Bros. style princess in distress was the standard, and Metroid was asking players to identify with a strong female lead. Of course, not everyone was aware of this immediately, since the big reveal ending was limited to those players who completely the game speedily and efficiently. Over twenty years later, it’s hard to say how players at the time felt when they discovered they had been playing as a woman, or if they were as comfortable playing after entering a password which removed Samus’s armour, leaving her in a purple leotard.

With the release of Smash Brothers Brawl for Wii, “suitless” Samus is a full-fledged character dubbed “Zero Suit Samus”. While she made a brief appearance in a remake of the original game for the Game Boy Advance, this is the first time the character has been really rendered in three dimensions as a playable option, and the way it was done might be seen as a little unfortunate. It’s reasonable enough that Samus might wear a form-fitting suit beneath her power armour suit, but some details seem strange and even pandering. A long blonde ponytail is a bit odd considering the suit, although it could conceivably be tied up closer underneath the helmet. Her figure is athletic, but pretty stereotypically “warrior princess”, as she attacks her foes with a biting energy whip.

When playing as Zero Suit Samus, there is no question about the character’s gender, as opposed to the traditional Samus, whom some players may still confuse with a robot or otherwise assume is male. The armoured Samus then, presents an interesting gender situation for the player of any Metroid game who is aware of Samus’s true identity: they are being asked to identify with a female character who presents little of the characteristics common of such characters in many video games. For example, many loosely-medieval based role-playing games have male characters in heavy armour, while female characters are limited to tight-fitting leather or, at best, strategically placed, often moulded plates designed to show off curves, which might be useful for attracting a teenage male audience but would be of dubious practicality in battle.

We might consider ourselves lucky then, that Samus has remained relatively unchanged over the years, as a strong female figure that challenges common impressions of such characters. Yet the character has evolved over the years, her appearance developing as hardware limitations eased up, starting on the Super NES and continuing to the GBA games, where Samus appeared in less and less armour as the game was completed more successfully with each run. These minor appearances showcased the character in much the same form as today’s Zero Suit Samus.

Perhaps it isn’t entirely surprising, considering that Nintendo’s track record for plot and character innovation has been checkered over the years. There are some outstanding exceptions to the general rule, but for the most part, Mario saves the Princess, and in the Legend of Zelda, Link rescues the title princess. Nintendo’s attempt to reverse the Mario format resulted in a game where the character controlled Princess Peach and attacked foes using emotions: becoming enraged, tearful, or delighted in order to defeat enemies. Peach still swings a frying pan as one of her attacks in SSB:B. In the case of Zelda, her “male” alterego of Sheik proved interesting in The Ocarina of Time, and the character likely made those playing it ask a few questions. Zelda also seems to be a powerful presence in newer titles, proving instrumental in defeating the dark lord Ganondorf in Twilight Princess — but even that game ends with the strong-willed, impish Midna character becoming a beautiful queen, having broken the “curse of ugliness”.

There are examples then, of characters in Nintendo’s history who haven’t needed to be breathtakingly beautiful, or scantily clad to be strong, successful, and interesting for players, and Samus is one of them. However, it seems that recent developments are taking the path too obvious — making Samus into a lithe, whip-slinging gymnast — or downright ridiculous, like Peach’s wild mood swings used to take down Goombas, when jumping on them worked just fine for Mario. Years ago, the film Shrek had Princess Fiona remain an ogre rather than become human, with the titular character then telling her that she was, indeed, beautiful. Yet we still have Midna inevitably transforming into a statuesque queen, even when her appearance is of no major importance to the plot and her fierce and wily character seem at odds with such a regal, static “true” form.

Games have evolved in so many ways, even in the last couple of years. Graphically, artistically, games are becoming more and more refined, presenting us with different worlds, stories, and experiences to enjoy and explore. Yet gender representations are stuck in the past — female leads are often stuck as either damsels in distress, or, as is now more common, hypersexualized warrior princesses. Some might take this as evidence of change, and it’s hard to deny that it is, in some way. At least nowadays, we have more female characters in games than back when Samus was one of few on the block. But isn’t the warrior princess just as much a trope as the damsel in distress?

Metroid gave us a surprising twist, and it’s hard not to be disappointed as Samus becomes just another pretty face among countless other characters. Innovation in this area might seem to go against Nintendo’s “family-friendly” mandate, but it would win them respect and support from those gamers looking for more complex ideas in their games. Let Peach have her own game, just don’t make it about being an emotional wreck. Let Samus keep kicking ass, just don’t turn her into a busty caricature. Make games with female characters, just let them stand as important in their own right — without being sex objects first, and fully-fleshed out actors second.