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Audio&Games

Lack of diversity in game industry exhibit A

I had totally missed that story this week. For those who didn’t hear about it, there’s a game on Steam called Playing History 2 – Slave Trade in which there’s a mini game of Tetris where you have to put as many slaves as you can inside the boat. Slave Tetris. The game is 2 years old but a recent video put it on the Internet front page.

Obviously, it escalated quickly.

Serious Games Interactive is a Danish studio and it’s not difficult to understand that they probably don’t have access to a lot of black people in their lives because about the mini game any sane, not self-hating black person would have been like:

The main issue here is a lack of diversity in the game development world. Gamasutra is quick to be verbose about ludo-narrative dissonance but I’m going to go ahead and say that it’s not the fucking point, the point is that the very white game industry lacks subtlety about non-white stuff. Simple.

I wouldn’t try to make a serious game about Poland or Ukraine without having at least half the team connected to those countries and that history (which is complex and insane and painful).

You can make games about everything, no doubt. However you can’t use a mechanic like that on a subject that is far from you –I suppose you are a Danish game designer up there in Europe- that is just too easy and displays a lack of empathy. SGI has apologized and removed the Tetris bit.

Guys, that’s the thing: you tackle sensitive subjects that you’re not involved in, for which you are pretty much total strangers. That’s the problem. Using Tetris in a game about slavery when the country with the biggest black diaspora born from slavery and what followed, is still talking about reparations. Over a thousand black people have been killed by police or others as of September 2015 in the US. We witnessed a dude kill people in church being escorted to get a burger. Hundreds of African refugees trying to reach Europe, dying.

Think a little bit. Think about black people’s mindset and feelings when they see that Tetris game. That’s not censorship, that’s just being smart and human. You wouldn’t have a rape simulator using a Track and Field mechanic in a serious game about sexual harassment and present it to rape survivors. You don’t need that gameplay to pass the message across. We can make games about everything, it doesn’t mean we have to.

I think the all going towards a closed society made of plenty of communities who can barely bear each other, is a problem we are already in. We might find that it’s a nice short term solution but it’s not helping us. It doesn’t develop empathy, it does create entitlement. Like Danish developers who sincerely think that they can make a game about black slavery, make a not so good game about it, and not have to be that accountable for it because people who take issue with it are too sensitive and/or eager to jump on the bandwagon.

TL;DR: we really, really, really need more diversity in game development.

Categories
Me Myself&I

lol ashley

From my friend’s newsletter:

Follow up: The vast majority of the women in the Ashley Madison Database never used the site, and were most likely fake accounts. So it’s possible people are killing themselves because they were sexting with a bot.

And by people we’re talking about dudes. Unfaithful, weak, stupid dudes.

The biggest take to me is that it proves my point that women don’t search for dicks like all those borderline fake ass stories about male escorts are trying to make it look like. Women are cool. They masturbate if they want to come. Dudes can’t just do that they have to stick it somewhere, that’s our dumb culture. Most dudes still have the belief that fucking is some kind of territorial business whereas women just help themselves to sleep, they don’t need to colonize dicks (which doesn’t mean they don’t like the D you idiot).

Thank you Ashley for giving us data points on this.

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Audio&Games

Only in Japan, Keita and Katamari

Reading about how this game came out to being made makes me realize how much the Japanese game industry was gliding and surfing at  high speeds in the last years of the 90s.

But despite taking an induction course in development and being deployed on a few prototyping projects as an artist, he struggled to summon an interest in flagship Namco franchises such as Tekken, Ace Combat and Ridge Racer. He found those games formulaic and uninspired, and floundered for two years before realizing that what was missing from Namco’s lineup was a flowerpot goat.

You get hired to create assets for successful franchises and you say fuck that for two years, I want to make my own game?

I mean, who has that kind of power because in studios I’ve been in you would have been hired for three-six months and bye Keita the Weirdo.

The Japanese creative freedom inside mega corporations (At that time in 99, Namco was HUGE) is to this day still unbelievable.

Keita pitched the game to his bosses and they were like “alright, here’s $800,000.” I mean we live in a world where developers are literally begging for budgets. Imagine being unhappy in a big structure and they allow you to be creative director of your own game:

Also, it never happens. On the soundtrack:

At the time, Shibuya-kei – a genre of pastiche-pop born in Tokyo that was typified by artists such as Cornelius and Pizzicato Five – was just about passing, but it left in its wake a post-ironic fusion of leftfield electronica, bossa nova and jazz that meshed perfectly with Katamari Damacy’s anything-goes humour. Unusually for a game, most of the music had vocal melodies.

“I thought it would be fun to sing along while playing the game, which is why we decided to use vocal music,” Takahashi says. “But we didn’t have much money, so we looked for artists who weren’t on a major label, more like B-grade musicians, to make the music.”

B-grade musicians!!?? Who shops for not the best ever?? As a composer I have seen so often studios aiming to get the best musicians they can for their soundtrack, not realizing that good music can be made by millions of people. No, really.

There’s this elitism going on in game culture, it comes probably from the needed coding excellence and game inherent competition aspect but still, when we produce we are like other productions we have to make it work and go for the “good enough” that actually might be much better than what you thought.

Especially with music and audio, the biggest bang for the buck in game development. One last quote:

As he speaks, he denounces the industry, both the majors and the burgeoning indie scene that is so reminiscent of the PS2’s golden era of weird Japanese games, while developments that you might expect him to embrace, such as Nintendo’s GamePad and Kinect, do not interest him at all. “Gaming hasn’t been around very long, so devices like that are unnecessary,” he says. “They’re nothing but a diversion, created for business reasons.

The problem to me is that it’s adding complexity more than anything else. It’s this fallacy that is all over the tech world: more tech will solve our tech problems! No. People are working super hard to get VR controllers right but as Jesse Schell wrote, people like VR experience with mouse –it sounds bad right?- because they know how to manipulate a mouse by now. It’s hard-coded in their brains. Gamepads with 16 buttons are not. Moving in front of a camera is not and new input schemes are being made.

I’ll talk about input in games in another post.

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Me Myself&I Music

Compton, story and story

NWA story is not so great when you look at it without the Hollywood glitter:

A bunch of black dudes create a band that barely existed for 5 years –Ice Cube, the biggest star, left 3 years in-, promoted by a Jewish music executive who had $250,000 personal money to play with and start Ruthless Records.

They wrote lyrics of stories from the hood they were listening to. Stories. They get better each time. Crazier. In the end, those lyrics are as much fantasy than reality. NWA members didn’t fuck with real Gs, only Eazy was. NWA really wanted to not have to gangbang and it’s a part that everyone forgets. When I hear them boasting about the hood on wax I feel more desperation than pride.

They played with that. They were sitting on a huge pile of C4 with millions of $ in it. “Y’all motherfuckers, media, FBI, young white dudes want more crazy stories? We’ll tell them to you and we’ll get bigger. We don’t give a fuck. We hustlin dawg.”

And they did, all moved really fast from NWA –barely five years!- to their personal brands, relocated in nicer suburbs.

The end.

We knew about police brutality. We knew about poor black neighborhoods. In retrospect I don’t think those extreme lyrics helped in any way.

I’ve never understood how they could get away with how misogynists those lyrics are, really showing how society is sexist as a whole.  In the last Dr Dre Compton album that just came out, they fake-kill a woman and it made me so fucking uncomfortable like just stop this shit, stop this shit black people are dying in the streets too often stop this shit. Fuck.

Once again it’s about a narrative –keeping it real??- but the world doesn’t work this way, you’re supposed to grow up. You can’t be doing a fake murder of a black woman on a 2015 record when black women are getting killed by police or boyfriends. You’re fucking 50 Dre and you have a terrible past on that subject. You need to act on this. Be Real, Get Responsible.

Even this album cover is kind of a disgrace. For people outside the LA county, if you live in Compton you don’t go to fucking Hollywood, ever. You don’t see that sign, you don’t see those downtown skyscrapers. You just drive around unlimited suburbs with palm trees around, under a close sun that doesn’t give a damn about you and your broke ass.

The beats are good though.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Amazon, Tech workers and stupid thoughts

So this article has been going around this weekend. Gawker had a lot of articles about Amazon’s workers conditions for the past few years. It is also how most tech companies work: commitment must be way up there. All of that is not new.

  • It’s not wrong to work your ass off for a company.
  • It’s not wrong for a company to use data to get the best of its employees.

What is wrong is having people being deeply dependent on a salary to have a decent life. Yeah, I question that. There’s too much wealth on this planet or in the US to just close my eyes and be like “this is fine just fuck me up”. 1% owning 99%, don’t forget. Never forget, that’s key in changing how society functions.

Like I tweeted Quality of Life shouldn’t be indexed to work. The good news is we can afford it, the bad news is most people can’t grasp that it’s possible. Jeff Bezos “made” $7B in 45 minutes when Amazon stocks jumped a hundred bucks a few days ago. Do you know how many things you can solve with seven billion dollars? Let me help you: a fucking shit ton.

If those Amazon people didn’t have to think about paying rent –being on average half of what we make right?-, they still would work as hard –I think even harder- but they would be freed from pressure if something happens in their lives it wouldn’t be a big deal, just a change of pace. And maybe they would come back to the hard tech world once they feel like they can again.

Failure costs would be at a minimum instead of a maximum: bankruptcy, guilt, feelings of being worthless etc.  All that, gone. Maybe that job wasn’t for you. Maybe you just needed a break!

We need to stop putting all the pressure on people, that’s why people break not because they work hard. We have wealth and we need to redistribute far more efficiently than the way we’re doing it today which is to sprinkle some money on the poor, allow stupid amounts of taxes to not be collected from a stupidly wealthy crowd and ask the middle to do everything more and harder. That’s imploding right now in our faces.

One more thing: Amazon is huge but Amazon is not profitable. You can’t say that you’re that successful if you’re continuously in the red for 15 years. So maybe if pressure comes off people shoulders they will start working on things that are actually making a nice profit for the retail giant and make customers happier. Just sayin’

Categories
Audio&Games

Character creation and inclusivity

And when I say character I mean avatar. Usually developers fail to:

  • Think ahead of time that this, avatar representation, matters.

And usually developers never miss to:

  • Argue that it doesn’t fit the settings/theme/story of the game.

I think the first point is easy to solve.

Especially if your game aims at youngsters and kids, the right thing to do is allow customization. It really counts, it has a tremendous positive effect. You know about the black astronaut who became astronaut because she saw a black woman in Star Trek, right? Tons of stories like that. I remember vividly seeing a black Iron Man and thinking in my little 7 year old head “fuck yeah!” or something. If you are a game developer and believe games can change things, this is a way of doing it.

For the second point, it gets more complicated: no, I don’t think it is a good argument to dismiss skin tone customization in games in which players will spend dozens of hours looking at their avatars by implying that that heroic-fantasy themed game is trying to be realistic or historically accurate.

Guys, there is no “real” accuracy in fiction, never will be. We can do whatever we want. Lara Croft could be Asian and black. Shit is mysterious? So be it. It’s fiction, it’s imagination. Imagination is personal, triggers your own world. You need to leave parts open in your design so that players can enjoy “building” their own interest to characters and stories according to their lives. That’s how you make things inclusive.

Now, I’m a grown ass man and I don’t necessarily need things to match me all the time. I can enjoy a movie and get engaged following the story of a Mexican woman or I can play Just Cause 2 for hours without thinking one second about character customization. In this game it doesn’t matter, the spectacle is the environment.

I need my black people but it’s like water and being hydrated, I don’t need an IV 24/7 for that.

Anyway as often, it’s a case by case thing. How long are you going to look at your character? All the time? Allow customization. Is the game going around your character or is it more about the rest? About the rest and your team is too small to afford to spend time on this? Have no customization.

You can of course make the game exactly like you want, for you and your friends first but if people buy and enjoy your game BUT want/wish they could customize their characters and that you tell them to go away, that’s not very nice. And kind of plain stupid.

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Me Myself&I

Same day, different news

You know, I really feel like we’re stagnating hard. It is exhausting. There are no debate, studies or discussions to have –been there, done that for the past three decades- we need this shit to stop, period.

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Me Myself&I

Another whiny post about the web dying

The web we have to save.

I just love reading so much. I think it’s because it allows me to listen to music at the same time, thing I can’t do if I’m listening to a stream.

I grew so much by reading things I wasn’t supposed to read –thanks hyperlink-, we all did. Algorithms totally suppress that.

No one cares about the web except nerds like us who spent so much time making it, setting up servers and domain names. Masses don’t care about technology/ethics they just use things and the easiest, the better. Then it’s too late.

What scares me the most about the open internet is when Facebook will start a micropayment system in such a way that no one will pay outside that system. The open internet needs that before walled gardens do.

Timing is everything.

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Me Myself&I

Black atheist

There’s this huge elephant in the black america room: religion.

I grew up non-religious in my foster family and then my Catholic dad adopted me, tried to get me into it but gave up when I just didn’t believe. As a kid it was easy for me to dismiss religion: God is good? Then why don’t have I my parents? He ain’t good with me so fuck him, I didn’t start the beef. Pretty sure a black church –through the power of music- would have converted me to a bigger extent but you know, white Catholicism in Europe is probably the best way to not make you religious, ever.

But it was deeper than that. Religion just didn’t fit the 80s, technology, rockets etc. Like, not at all. Go home religion, you’re drunk.

I think that’s why Ta-Nehisi Coates is more feared than appreciated for his glacial and fear-inducing vision of a world where there’s no god.

That’s where I connect with his writing, when he’s not pushing anything but as pure as possible reasoning and simple facts. Chirurgical, devoid of emotions, precise. He demonstrates that  sorry to be blunt, your prayers didn’t do shit and won’t, that black person will still get killed within systems –street, police, employment- that are all, all of them, human made.

This, is all there is. As Ta-Nehisi writes it down so well, it is scary to acknowledge that but oddly comforting to know that we humans made this. Because it means we can unmake this too. It’s not hope, a vague notion, it’s a fact like rocks in the desert: we can change what we made. It’s not hopelessness nor a focus on struggle, it’s a focus on the real, big work/tiny chance we have. That’s all we have. People always seem to prefer fantasy and we’re paying with flesh for that. So much inaction or action that doesn’t change anything.

I know, around 80% of black people in the US are into religion and go to church. I also know how messed up the relationship has been between black people, Christianity and  History.

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice

Christianity to me growing up in Europe and studying there, is kind of a cancer that screwed an entire world up. Imagine a bunch of dudes going down Africa like “hey lil nigga, you heard about that book?”, tricking people into something. The church as a powerful institution is a failure of the state, supposed to provide. So I never had a great, positive view of religion besides watching black people dancing and harmonizing here in the US. We don’t need religion to sing and dance though.

In the end what frightens me the most is the future and  how religion isn’t helping black people, like making them averse to science for example. It’s still true in 2015 and knowing how the world is shaping up I really don’t like seeing that. It makes me feel I will have to wait more and I don’t want that.

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Me Myself&I

Bill Fucking Cosby

I had read his book “Come on, People: On the Path from Victims to Victors”. It was one of the first time I was reading statistics about black people and those numbers were filling me with fear and sweat.

Yes, even in France the Cosby show was huge. Of course my white liberal parents loved it, probably for slightly different reasons I did (though some things are universal like father/son relationships). Fat Albert was big too, we had reruns in the 80s.

I don’t give a fuck about my Bill memories.

We know rapists get away with rape all the time, even when they are not one of the most powerful and respected black man on earth. We know women under-report rape because they know they will not go anywhere with “justice”. We know most rape happen within personal circles family, friends. We also know that people very rarely falsely accuse people of rape. You just don’t do that for fun. Standing up and having the courage to say “that person abused me” is not a little thing.

46 women, 35 together in an article and probably more who didn’t say anything. Yes, I too have this feeling of being wrong to take a black man down. We don’t have a lot of those, at the top, respected by absolutely everyone. In 2005 when the first “rumors” about him and his pills appeared, I didn’t want to believe it but I knew it smelled real: powerful man, young women? I’m going to go for believing the victims because Bill was way too weird about it. Ten years later I know we’re doing the right thing. Since the first reports appeared I couldn’t  trust that man, even from my couch.

James Brown was the first one that I had trouble to deal with, having pretty much invented a music genre I adore by himself and his band, band he completely abused and stole from. He threatened his wife with a shotgun at some point. People are acting like he was losing it, he wasn’t, he was like that from the start we just didn’t see it when he was on stage, looking at his foot work. Hot pants.

The last one I heard about is Marvin Gaye. Yes, another big black icon. The dude was 34 when he went on seducing that 17 year old foster child who will become his wife. Oh of course, he was already married with three kids. It’s already so wrong at so many levels but that’s the start.

Jan Gaye is releasing a memoir in which we learn how Marvin forced her to have sex with other people and other terrible things. This entire freaky, sense that women are things you consume, control and throw away, I’ll never understand. It broke my heart reading that about Marvin Gaye, another one bites the dust. Glad and proud of Jan for doing the right thing, tell the truth.

It’s just that most powerful men are powerful psychopaths with outdated values I guess. We don’t need them.