Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.
[ Be sure to check out the Does Not Equal Cafepress store for webcomic merchandise featuring Canadians with geometrically-shaped heads! ]
Much like the vampire, the zombie is a long-lived trope of the horror genre whose subtext has mutated alongside the contemporary fears of the audience. So what do current zombie movies and games say about our modern metaphysical boogie-men?
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The Horror genre is a profoundly parasitical creature. Not only is it endlessly adaptable to cultural changes, but it also has a rare capacity to track sources of social anxiety and attach itself to them, mining our deepest fears and presenting them back to us in the shape of art – a cathartic form of art that helps us to overcome our fears by making us confront them in safe environments such as cinemas and comfy chairs [Cinemas are a safe environment? Not in this town, man. – Ed.]. Indeed, Joss Whedon owes much of his fame and following to the fact that Buffy the Vampire Slayer helped millions of TV viewers to overcome the traumas born of attending high school – traumas transformed by Whedon and his staff of writers into monsters physical enough to be defeated week in and week out by a small blonde woman and a gang of geeky side-kicks. Continue reading Fear of a Transhuman Future – Zombies and Resident Evil
An interesting discussion from Thomas Frey at the DaVinci Institute on at which point our individual identity merges with that of our avatars:
With each generation of avatar, they will become more life-like, growing in realism, pressing the limits of autonomy as we become more and more reliant on them for experiencing the world. The avatar will become an extension of ourselves. The pain that we feel is the same pain that they feel, and vice versa. Like symbiotic twins separated only by a dimension or two, we are destined to become one with our avatars.
Karl Schroeder explores a similar notion of avatars becoming extensions of ourselves in Lady of Mazes.
[via FutureBlogger][image from TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³]
Keeping to the gaming theme, here’s Aleks Krotoski at The Guardian asking a very valid question: where are all the sex-based computer games?
It’s not for want of trying. Brathwaite says that when she landed a job as producer on Playboy: The Mansion, in 2005, she found there were countless games developers building titles around love, intimacy and, well, hanky-panky, but they were lost in an ocean of family values propriety, wandering souls buried under regulations and smothered by distributor blacklists, treated as “specialists” whose products only saw the light in extremely independent competitions. And so, with only the odd interruption of a virtual carnal nature, game controversies are dominated by violence. Depravity just isn’t on the regulator’s radar.
And can you imagine what would happen if it were? Just look at the furore over the scenes uncovered in the code of GTA: San Andreas. For heaven’s sake, they were two consenting (digital) adults in an 18-rated game: why did it end up such an issue that the then senator Hillary Rodham Clinton tried to get it banned? Such top-down puritanism forces creative conformity in games for fear that explicitly including sex scenes would lead to a loss of filthy lucre – when on earth has that been the case?
It does seem odd, but then computer games are a comparatively young medium by comparison to film or literature – perhaps the form just isn’t mature enough to carry it off? If that’s the case, though, developments like the interactive software/hardware combinations that run Lionhead’s virtual boy Milo suggest that the technical capability to make a sex-based game that’s going to inspire more than adolescent sniggering may finally be here. How long it will take someone to think of a genuinely engaging set of game mechanics to go with it is anyone’s guess… but I doubt it’ll be too long, despite the puritanical hand-wringing of career demagogues.
In amongst this week’s headlines of ludicrously disproportionate damages being awarded to the RIAA and assorted governments (including my own) clamouring loudly for the privilege of tucking themselves into the moth-eaten and holey pockets of Hollywood, we find a ray of pragmatic sanity: the CEO of computer games publisher Electronic Arts is openly asking software pirates to redistribute their titles. Why? Because they’ve worked out that it’s easier to make money selling stuff within the framework of a game than it is to sell a game itself.
EA thinks this is the secret to stopping—or at least curbing—piracy: games should be services, not products. Or at least products that should be selling other products. We already knew that EA would like to turn Tiger Woods into a subscription-based product, and Sims 3 is a game that wants you to constantly be creating, downloading, and buying new virtual items. The old business model was selling expansion packs, but that was too complicated: why not cut out the retailers and turn the game into its own store to sell the products?
“I’m a longtime believer that we’re moving to selling services that are disc-enabled as opposed to packages that have bolt-ons…. So the point I’m making is, yes I think that’s the answer [to piracy].” Riccitiello told IndustryGamers. “And here’s the trick: it’s not the answer because this foils a pirate, but it’s the answer because it makes the service so valuable that in comparison the packaged good is not. So you can only deliver these added services to a consumer you recognize and know… So I think the truth is we’ve out-serviced the pirate.”
It’s interesting to see a big games vendor like EA waking up to ideas that industry pundits have been suggesting for years, and I expect we’ll see some of the others abandon their King Canute impersonations when they realise that it works. Going forward, I expect that within a few years it’ll be virtually unheard of to “buy a game”; instead, we’ll subscribe to them, or spend time in them socially much the way we do with Facebook now.
That said, I suspect it’s too late for the major music labels to change course given the huge amount of money they’ve pissed away on trying to defend their old business models from change, but I struggle to sympathise; after decades of them screwing consumers and artists alike, I’m rather enjoying seeing the boot on the other foot. [image by Robyn Gallagher]