The ladies of New Austin

To put it mildly, Rockstar's games have a history of problematic depictions of female characters. Following on long-running problems with the series, Grand Theft Auto IV famously caused an eruption of outrage thanks to the IGN-produced "Ladies of Liberty City" promo. While the experiences shown in the video were not mandatory for players, they were supported by a game that regularly treated women as disposable objects there for the pleasure of the player. The few female characters that inched above that level were universally bereft of agency and dependent on the player. Given that the Wild West occupies a part of history where women really were looked on as property, I did not have high hopes for Rockstar's western-themed Red Dead Redemption. Yet, I found myself pleasantly surprised to find three competent, independent women at the core of the story.

Read the rest...

APB's blue wall of silence

Well, we've just come to the end of what will probably be the world's least productive week this year. Sports fans had enormous distractions: the NBA finals, the beginning of the US Open, and of course the World Cup, which is something I can't avoid hearing about since I work with a Korean, two Germans, and an Italian. And that's just the soccer-mad people whose teams are actually in the tournament! Fortunately, most of the lab computers do not have speakers, so I am spared the god-forsaken noise of the vuvuzelas while at work. If you've no taste for athletics, however, this week offered an alluring diversion in the form of E3. Between the various webcast events and the constant impact of game and hardware impressions, there was plenty to divert people's attention from work. Apparently, Realtime Worlds took note of the deluge and tried to slip something in under it — a review embargo on their upcoming MMO shooter, APB. Now, there's nothing unusual about a review embargo, but this one is notable because it ends on July 2, a full week after the game is released.

Read the rest...

Games within the game

Rockstar has made a name for itself based on games set in vast, detailed open worlds that, like many large and varied settings, have a substantial decoration of minigames. Although these diversions can play a very important role in world-building and changing up the pace of play, they typically get almost no mention in reviews, unless they form a significant part of the gameplay (GTA: Chinatown Wars' drug-dealing minigame) or have a unique aesthetic (No More Heroes 2's jobs). Red Dead Redemption, in an effort to add texture to its Wild West, includes a number of these side games scattered across its countryside. Unfortunately the result is something of a mixed bag.

Read the rest...

The "real" John Marston

Trying to discuss the real nature of the Wild West is a bit like trying to discuss the real nature of Arthurian Britain. We believe, perhaps we even know, that the relevant historical period exists, but its true character has been almost completely obscured by myth. The early view of the West was fairly simplistic; the dime novels and Hollywood Westerns were characterized by the easy heroism of the gunslinger taking on bandits or the settler fighting savage Indians. Since the 1970s a revisionist attitude has produced a grittier and dirtier take on the West that frequently inverts the stereotypes. It would be a mistake to view these recent films as a more "realistic" vision, however. The changes in the Western reflect an increasing sophistication in cinema's moral attitude, not an increasing dedication to fact. Red Dead Redemption is fully aware that our view of the Old West is more social construction than historical knowledge. I happen to think its main character is also intended to be a construct, a man who is a fiction in the world of the game. That is, the John Marston we play is the man as imagined by his son, Jack.

Read the rest...

The Gringos Who Saved Mexico

I want to begin by saying that I really like Red Dead Redemption, and a positive review will be forthcoming as soon as I stop being so bad at writing it. Rockstar's new Western is an improvement over their work in GTA IV in a lot of ways, not the least of which is that I didn't feel like I needed to take a shower after every play session. But the developer's bad habits have a way of shining through, and to a large extent I liked Red Dead Redemption in spite of itself. No part of the game took more effort to look past than John Marston's adventure in Mexico. The scenery down there is beautiful, but the narrative is a train wreck.

Read the rest...

Those punks felt lucky

I can't imagine how anyone can vote for Rand Paul. I'm not even talking about his moronic take on the Civil Rights Act. I mean, that's pitiably foolish, and his whole "I"m not a racist, but..." act doesn't excuse his adopting the position that government must never interfere with private business even in the face of egregious social injustice. But at least if the people of Kentucky are fools enough to elect the man, the CRA is in no danger of being undone by Paul's idiocy. We might not be so lucky when it comes to his potential choices for dealing with the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, which he recently had the goddamn gall to characterize as an "accident". Paul even criticized the anger towards BP as un-American. To which I say: Fuck you, sir, and the political philosophy you rode in on.

Read the rest...

What's wrong with Leanne

In my last post I mentioned the difficulty I sometimes have in connecting with characters that express values opposed to my own. Because a game is an interactive entertainment that requires the player to exert considerable effort in order to progress, it's important to make sure that the player identifies or sympathizes with the characters he's controlling. This is especially true of 40+ hour games like RPGs. You're spending a lot of time with these people, so they'd better be worthwhile company. Unfortunately, Resonance of Fate had a small cast I didn't enjoy spending time with at all. I found the personalities of the male characters, Vashyron and Zephyr, to be completely repulsive and tiresome. But the female character, Leanne, was problematic in a different way. It wasn't just her personality, although she's not the sort of person I'd generally care to hang around with. Leanne just made me sad, because she was so obviously a patriarchal caricature.

Read the rest...

Who wants to be Lloyd Irving?

Having explained what I thought was wrong with Infinite Space, I feel obliged to talk about what it did right. In this context I'm going to discuss something lots of other games get wrong, from my point of view. Let me start with the proposition that games express values. That may seem trivial to anyone who has played through twenty or so JRPGs with the same neo-luddite earth-friendly themes, but I'm actually not talking about that kind of expression. Games also have intrinsic values that are communicated by the kinds of characters that are chosen as protagonists, the way that the plot evolves around them, and the systems with which the player affects that plot. In marked contrast to many notable JRPGs of the last decade, Infinite Space values intelligence and pragmatism. Because I share those values, I appreciated the game more, perhaps, than its gameplay and plot strictly deserved.

Read the rest...

Lost in Infinite Space

The last three games I've played have something in common, in that they are noble efforts with imperfect outcomes. Infinite Space, Metro 2033, and Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon all have significant positives offset by serious negatives. In particular, I thought Infinite Space and Metro 2033 were pretty compelling despite their problems. The easiest of these to talk about is what's wrong with Infinite Space, so I'll start there.

Read the rest...

Do metamorphic proteins mediate evolutionary structural transitions?

On several previous occasions on this blog I've discussed proteins that undergo significant changes in structure without drastic changes in their primary sequence or solution conditions. In some cases, a few mutations can take a protein to a novel fold, as with Philip Bryan's protein G work. In others, closely related sequences within a whole family populate different kinds of folds, as Matt Cordes illustrated for the case of Cro proteins. In addition, there are some cases such as lymphotactin, where interconversion between two very different structures takes place at equilibrium, as illustrated by Brian Volkman's research. Each time stories like this come up I have mentioned that this kind of behavior (termed "metamorphism" in a 2008 commentary by Alexey Murzin) suggests a means by which proteins could evolve from one structure to another without losing foldedness or function. Recently, a group from the Weizmann Institute published results in PNAS that speak to this possibility.

Read the rest...

Take cisplatin in the morning and call me

Although we are most familiar with the circadian rhythm from its effects on our physiological state, the roots of the phenomenon lie in the molecular biology of individual cells. The circadian rhythm is the result of a transcriptional control system that regulates the levels of many different proteins in the cell with the passing of time. Not all of the proteins subject to this control have yet been catalogued, and as a result some surprising effects are still being discovered. A recent article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from the Sancar lab at UNC suggests that circadian control of a DNA repair factor may be a way to enhance the effectiveness of a chemotherapeutic agent. The article is open access, so I encourage you to open it up and read along.

Read the rest...

Larry the bilker

Matt Taibbi has an article about the destruction of Jefferson County up at Rolling Stone. I strongly recommend you read it, but take your blood pressure medicine first. I would like to be able to say that this story, in which crooked banks and corrupt politicians conspire to inflate the price of a public works project more than 1000 percent, saddling a county with billions of dollars of debt it will take a generation to pay off, is an elaborate April Fool's joke. Unfortunately, as the residents of Birmingham know, it's all too real. Like countless city councilmen, county commissioners, and mayors before him, Larry Langford played the city like a long con, adding the ruinous sewer project to his other notable failures, such as VisionLand. One wonders how much of his talent for failing upward was due to the assistance of men who knew he could be bought.

Read the rest...