Fugu Talk

In A Long Way to Go, Alice Taylor laments the lack of women listed in Gamasutra’s The Game Developer 50, provides a number of women who could have been included, and suggests splitting the format into 25 men and 25 women. That last idea is an example of going a step too far (although featuring a Top 50 Women list is not a bad idea – then we can debate whether any of them should be in the global Top 50). But it shouldn’t detract from the basic point. Why no women?

To find out why, you really just need to look at the responses, particularly from Gamasutra. We-profile-women-in-other-features is like saying we gave a woman director an Oscar, so everything’s fine in Hollywood. And the defense that those honored were selected specifically for accomplishments last year sounds like a last-minute defense picked out of the air – the inclusion of Jason Della Rocca is essentially a lifetime achievement award (unless they’re rewarding him for stepping down) And then there’s the usual capper – we-work-with-a-lot-of-women-so-we’re-clearly-not-prejudiced. That’s like saying “I’m not prejudiced, some of my best friends are…”

The only way to solve the problem is to admit the problem. Here, I’ll start – when I first read the list on Gamasutra, I didn’t notice that it included no women until I saw Alice’s blog. I’m a guy in a male-dominated industry, I hang out with other guys in the industry, and I’m influenced (programmed, really), by the media (those in the media, you can’t say you’re having a cultural impact and then say you’re not, when it’s convenient). So call me a sexist, I won’t deny it. But I recognize the problem. Put the shoe on the other foot. While I may not be alert as I should be to the ill-representation of women, as an Asian-American, it’s maddening for me to see TV California towns with just one Asian, or a white-populated San Francisco, or Hawaii shows where the leads are all white, or even a sci-fi series set in a future where everyone speaks Chinese but no one is actually Chinese. This happens not because of a lack of talent or we-don’t-have-the-right-role-for-that-type-of-person – it happens because the people in that industry from the top to the bottom will by default select people like themselves, whether it’s scriptwriting, casting, or greenlighting.

I’ll close with one more recent example. Last year I watched the Huntington Beach centennial documentary on HBTV, which was a real snoozer until they unexpectedly waded into serious waters and described the Japanese-American internment of WWII as a “difficult question” of their loyalties “that could not be answered” and only described them as “Japanese residents”, not mentioning that everyone of Japanese descent on the west coast was interned. When I complained to city hall, the response I got was that a “diverse” panel had approved it, and the CD’s had been sent to the local schools! (I can only hope they slept through it). I thought maybe I overreacted, saw it a second time, thought it was even worse than I initially realized, sent another complaint and this time they said they’d ask a Japanese-American member of the Orange County Human Relations Commission to look at it. Six or seven months later, they finally stopped showing the piece and distributing the DVD’s. I would have preferred that they acknowledged the inadequacy of that segment and just included some additional info with the piece directing viewers to resources such as the Japanese American National Museum. But I understand the desire to cover up an embarrassing mistake. Still, I would have appreciated a “Our bad, thanks for pointing it out”, or even better, taking the issue more seriously the first time and doing a little research and introspection.

In the midst of a rant conflating drug cartels with job loss, KTLA’s version of the angry white man radio show had this response to the argument that requiring local police to actively enforce immigration laws will reduce reporting of crime by illegal immigrants:

“Illegal alien criminals victimize mostly illegal aliens so illegal aliens should be glad to see illegal aliens driven from their neighborhood, particularly the criminals.”

This is from memory, so the wording might not be exact, but I’m pretty sure the idiocy is intact. I generally don’t find radio talk shows appealing so I only caught this because KTLA invited these deep thinkers to give their opinions on the broadcast news, and lest you think it an aberration, KTLA has been promoting the radio show with an excerpt about “illegal-lovin” something or other. It’s not even a complete sentence, which is out-of-context even for an out-of-context business, but I guess they just wanted to emphasize the fun words. At least they haven’t followed the CNN path of making them news anchors. Yet.

I’m a proponent of trip reports. They force you to think about what you saw at the conference, the company gets more for their money if you disseminate the information, and it will allay your coworkers’ suspicions that you spent the whole time partying.

Since I’m self-employed and paid my own way, and I didn’t really spend much time at GDC, it’s not quite so useful for me to give a trip report, but I’ll do it anyway.

First, let’s get the conference part out of the way. I primarily went there to network and had a nice dinner in Chinatown with developers from my client (Avatar Reality, the developer of the virtual world Blue Mars) and a croissant with the head of the charity Get Well Gamers.

I only went to the expo for a few hours, and I will repeat my annual complaint that CMP is really milking the event, selling only a three-day expo pass for $250, and it was an unpleasant surprise to find they were not accepting IGDA discounts for on-site registration (the people at the desk didn’t seem to know what IGDA was). I stopped by the IGDA booth and they seemed surprised, too. I generally don’t consider splurging for the whole conference package because, 1) I tend to fall asleep in talks and 2) again they’re milking it, charging separately for the “Mobile Summit”, etc. I remember in my dot-com days that Java One was expensive, too, but once you paid for it, you got the whole conference.

The expo seemed smaller than the last time I went two years ago, and I wouldn’t say there’s a lot new, except two of the middleware packages I use, Unity and Scaleform had more sizeable presences than two years ago, and their reps looked really busy. At the Unity booth, I had a nice talk with the dimeRocker folks and fellow Unity developer Jonathan Czeck of Graveck (it’s always fun talking to other engineers – with marketing, it’s a toss-up, sometimes they’re cool, sometimes they stand there looking bored until someone with an expensive suit shows up). Aside from that, noticed there were a lot of companies offering virtual currency solutions and a pretty cool VR input device that resembled a giant hamster ball.

Aside from that, I eschewed the parties (my return flight seemed to full of hung-over game developers) and checked out the town. Some observations: City Lights Bookstore is a pretty nice bookstore – it doesn’t seem to have any computer books, but there’s a decent sci-fi section. The Crocker Galleria isn’t what it used to be, apparently hit hard by the doldrums of the Financial District. Beard Papa Sweets are tasty. So was the chocolate place next door. Considering the frequency of rain in San Francisco, you’d think some place around the Moscone would sell umbrellas. Smoking is prevalent – get caught walking behind a smoker and you’ll get a lungful. The Museum of Crafts and Folk Art is small, but it’s got a cool gift shop (some carving are from an astrophysics grad student in Arizona). Food in San Francisco is expensive. The Filoli Gardens is amazing. Joy Luck Place in San Mateo has excellent dim sum (I hear Martin Yan of Yan Can Cook goes there). HyperBowl is back in the Metreon and in excellent condition, although it costs $5 per play. Every block in San Francisco, you’ll see Asian faces – yet in Monk, one of my favorite San Francisco shows, I only recall seeing Asians as a laundress and Chinatown gang members. I don’t know if I saw any Chinatown gang members, but I did see a lot of tourists and touristy shops. I have to admit, I bought some touristy stuff – a fan and an abacus. It’s research (think iPhone/iPad app  – I’m serious!).

Some friends of mine were joking about the inanity of the Census letter alerting us to the upcoming Census letter. I’ve seen dumber – just off the top of my head, I recall the MIT student loan office sending me a letter saying they didn’t have my mailing address (and yet I got it), a half-hearted apology (quarter-hearted would be more accurate) from Healthnet saying they “lost” my check into another account and terminated my insurance because I wrote my name “illegably”…and then they addressed me as “Ralph”. And recently, there was the series of letters from the City of Huntington Beach emphasizing the public safety importance of maintaining consistent street address names, so they were going to rename my street and expect all the utility, mapping, government, postal and financial institutions to adjust their databases.

Nonetheless, I filled out and returned the census form when it arrived, because all these people on TV, like the mayor of LA and Ed Begley, JR., say it’s important to make sure resources go where they need to go. But they don’t really explain how that works, and in particular they don’t explain why they ask the questions they ask, many of which are legally forbidden in job interviews.

I especially am tired of answering the which-race-are-you question (and the really weirdly specific are-you-hispanic-and-which-kind). It reminds of my interrogations over the years – “Where are you from? No, before that. No, before that. I mean, where are you really from?”, “How long have you been in this country?” (I used to answer with my age, but then they just respond, “wow, that’s a really long time”, which is starting to make me feel old), and in Oregon recently I got a couple of “Welcome to America!”s.

And I don’t see the point. It’s not as if the census asks what languages I speak (or don’t speak) and will apportion language services accordingly to my area (although what Huntington Beach really needs are better Chinese restaurants, at least something without “Panda” or “Wok” in the name). Maybe they’re just making assumptions based on the race selection. Like that woman at the bottom of the MIT steps who saw me and walked all the way up to hand me an English-as-a-Second-Language flyer. Or the Boston locals who asked me if I spoke English (what am I supposed to say – “No. I don’t speak English”. But at least they asked).

I looked at the IGDA diversity survey recently and thought, while well-intentioned, it looked like it had been done by a college intern (I think it actually was). Now, I think that work is right up there with the professionals’. So, what happened to this “post-racial society” I heard of?

Over a recent dinner with friends I observed that some films could have been made by anyone but more often you can tell the filmmaker (or conglomeration of directors-writers-producers) is white. They resemble the usual pop-fiction novels where apparently the characters are by default white because the race of every non-white character is loudly announced (typically there’s a tough African-American who jokes about being the only African-American).

Unfortunately some of my favorite films and TV shows suffer from WWS (White Writer’s Syndrome). Looking at Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s town of Sunnydale you might think California has no Latinos or Asians (but they do have lots of vampires). Veronica Mars’ town of Neptune did have plenty of Latinos – in a gang. Both shows looked like they made a self-conscious effort to diversify a little in ensuing seasons, but I still can’t get over Joss Whedon’s vision of the future in Firefly, in which the cosmos was split among the remnants of the Chinese and American empires and all the characters you see curse cheerfully in Chinese, and there’s nary an Asian face in sight. It’s the isn’t-Asian-culture-cool esthetic evident in Blade Runner – future LA is suffused with Asian culture in the form of video geisha billboards and Chinese vendors and cyclists in coolie hats, but the main players are Caucasians who look they like fell out of a noir movie.

Of course, if you want to see an LA with Asian influence, you could just look around now. There’s Thai Town, Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Monterey Park, and Asian-Americans like me who live in the burbs, speak English and the most foreign clothing I wear are Hawaiian shirts. This reminds me of my reaction when I watched Dark Angel. It was a bit more diverse than your average show, but with one sassy black character and one Jamaican black character and hardly an Asian in all of Seattle (except Chinatown, of course), I wasn’t surprised when I heard on the DVD commentary that this diversity (including the multi-racial Jessica Alba) was the show creators’ vision of an ethnically diverse future Seattle. I’m going to hazard a guess that you could look around Seattle now and get a better picture.

So far I’ve just been carping about old news, and I could bore the heck out of you (perhaps it’s too late) picking at every show that peeves me and praising the few that don’t (BSG, Eureka). But I find it interesting that animated casts, including the newer CG characters, aren’t faring better (with the exception of a few Disney films). Now, you can’t say you drew or modelled a virtual white character because no minorities applied. (at least virtual character don’t have to worry about the casting couch!) Recently, I finally got around to playing the first Drake’s Fortune game on my PS3. A good game with Indiana Jones type of story, featuring an all-white cast of protagonists ( a scoundrelly Latin-American nemesis). But if you view the behind-the-scene extras, you’ll see the development staff at Naughty Dog is a diverse bunch, more than you’ll likely see in any game or movie. Sometimes, it’d be nice if fantasy was more like real life.

My enjoyment in watching the US Open was marred, not for the first time, by the commentator’s obsession of the nationalities of the individual players. John MacEnroe isn’t too bad with this, but Dick Enberg won’t shut up about it. During one of Federer’s matches, I was reminded four times in one sitting that his opponent is an “Aussie”, and his next opponent I learned was a “Spaniard”, and they never fail to mention the Russian women (“and another Russian…”), although there was some discussion on how Sharapova was really only half Russian, and then how “patriots” in the stands would be rooting the for the remaining American.

I’m not saying this  is totally irrelevant and uninteresting information, but in no other sport outside of the Olympics, not even the nationally mixed NBA or a similarly individual and international sport like golf, do I hear this kind of incessant labelling. It reminds me of the “where are you really from” queries I used to get a lot (not so much here in California, but, for example, in Henry Louis Gates’ city of Cambridge). Interestingly, I don’t hear some of the top players designated by their nationalities so much, e.g. Federer – perhaps it seems disrepectful. The commentators had a chuckle over how Oudin didn’t know about her French ancestry on her father’s side until she was asked about it at the tennis tournament. Maybe that’s more a comment about the tennis world.

I’m used to seeing big words misused on ESPN, but on C-SPAN last week I saw one member of the Center for Immigration Studies (apparently better named as the Center for Anti-Immigration Studies, and the use of “Studies” is questionable, too), while commenting on the uneducated nature of Mexican immigrants, use the word “misnomer” in place of “misconception”. (I wonder if I should create a new blog category titled “Irony”)

A misnomer is a misapplied term. For example,

It’s a misconception to think that “misnomer” has the same meaning as “misconception”.

“Misnomer”  is a misnomer when used to indicate a misconception.

I felt bad for John McCain when he lost the presidential election (although I voted for Barack Obama – McCain made the decision easy when he picked his running mate, who now looks like a big flake). I felt bad not just because of his impressive history and boy-would-we-have-been-better-off-if-he’d-won-the-last-one, but it dismayed me that he was punished in the presidential race for his maverick-ness. After authoring an immigration reform bill with Ted Kennedy, he’s been dogged by the word “amnesty” ever since, especially in the Republican debates where everyone talked about building a fence. In one of those debates, I heard him make one of the finest statements made by any candidate in either party (ignore the one by Tancredo, who came off like Crankredo) – excerpted from OnTheIssues.Org

Q [to Tancredo]: Would you advertise for your campaign in Spanish? Specifically, I’m referring to the highly publicized comment you recently made that Miami was like a third world country.

TANCREDO: No, I would not advertise in Spanish. English is the glue that keeps a country together, any country. McCain’s immigration bill codifies Pres. Clinton’s executive order that said all papers produced by the government have to be in various languages.

McCAIN: Well, first of all, muchas gracias. We have to stop the illegal immigration, but we’ve had waves throughout our history. Hispanics is what we’re talking about, a different culture, a different language, which has enriched my state where Spanish was spoken before English was. In Washington DC, go to the Vietnam War Memorial and look at the names engraved in black granite. You’ll find a whole lot of Hispanic names. They must come into country legally, but they have enriched our culture and our nation as every generation of immigrants before them.

I remember that speech a bit differently – as I recall, he started off by saying “Let’s be frank, when we talk about illegal immigrants, we’re talking about Hispanics”, before pointing out that Hispanic names are on the Vietnam War Memorial and many are currently earning their citizenship while fighting in Iraq. But of course the media didn’t quote him at all on this, just the usual piss-poor practice of playing sound bites.

Obama, on the other hand, started off on board with the McCain-Kennedy bill and then nimbly stepped off by tacking on a union-appeasing amendment that helped kill it, allowing himself to alternately take credit for it and distance himself from it when convenient. Every campaign statement he made expressing some sympathy for immigrants was meticulously accompanied by a mention of the American worker who shouldn’t have to worry about losing their job to one (and what job would that be?) Even poor Hillary was victimized a bit on this issue – in one of the Democratic debates, Obama was one of those who leapt to the attack when she didn’t want to give a simple yes-or-no answer to “Do you support driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants” and then immediately after, when the question was turned to him, managed to evade it with a not-so-fast-it’s not-a-simple-issue. While not exactly a ringing endorsement for “change”, it shows you how the pros do it.

In the meantime, I recently saw McCain giving a speech about controlling the excesses of Big Pharma, and he’s been one of the more vocal supporters of the protesters in Iran. It’s nice to see him back in the Senate.

Since I only have six working TV channels, one of which is the Huntington Beach city channel (HBTV), I’ve been catching snippets of 100 Years of Huntington Beach, basically a pleasant trip down memory lane including reminiscences of the city’s first beach concession, the introduction of surfing, yada yada. But I was appalled by the segment mentioning the internment of local Japanese-Americans (including citizens and whole families) during World War II. It came off as, the General had a tough decision to make, and he made it. Followed by a resident remembering a nice boy she wanted to date before he got sent off to the camp. Oh, well. Sucks to be them.

So I sent a semi-snippy suggestion to the city that they edit the film to remove that segment, if they couldn’t do the topic justice, and received this prompt, polite and not altogether satisfactory reply:

Thank you for your thoughtful comments regarding the history video. I know we tried to include it as part of the history of Huntington Beach. I will share your concerns with others in leadership in the community. The program is featured on our government channel, website and was shown on KOCE. We have also distributed hundreds of copies to individuals, middle schools and high schools. Yours is the first “negative” comment we have received and I can assure you people of all different backgrounds have viewed the video. Thanks again for your input.

No-one-else-complained-about-it is the type of reply I used to get from apartment landlords, and it’s pretty weak as an academic argument. We-already-distributed-it-to-a-bunch-of-students is just upsetting. I don’t remember getting any of this subject when I was in school – I hope there isn’t a whole generation of kids who are learning that sending American citizens to live behind barbed wire because of their race was a “difficult choice”. And aside from portraying it as a debatable decision (I thought we were beyond that, like the debatability of separate-but-equal and anti-miscegenation laws), the segment was light on facts, not mentioning that the governer and President supported it, that it only took place in California and not even Hawaii where Pearl Harbor happened, and that many had their land usurped by unscrupulous neighbors.

Finally, I can’t believe all the “different backgrounds” included anyone who’s family was affected by this, or, say, Arab/Muslim/Persian Americans who might consider this type of thing could happen to them. (If there’s ever a war with China, I guess I better get packing). The HB centennial program includes a couple of talks on the internment, one from the last baby born inside the camp, so surely some people in the city government know better.

Whoever’s in charge of that film could take a cue from Ken Burns, who adjusted his documentary The War after complaints that he failed to depict Latino-Americans. He said afterward that the film was just as good after the change (although in some odd logic he said that validated his original methods – c’mon, you’re a media guy, just admit you’re a product of culture just like everyone else. I grew up with 70′s television, and the only minorities I remember from then is Speedy Gonzales, Pat Morita speaking fake Chinese in Happy Days, various African-Americans on the wrong side of the law in cop movies, and Bill Cosby. And in this supposedly post-racial time, the situation isn’t a lot better – TV land is by default white).

The War also has extensive treatment of the internment and the Japanese-Americans who volunteered anyway to fight in Europe and suffered terrible losses there. If Ken Burns isn’t your cup of tea, you can listen to George Takei talk about it on this web site, or just google “Japanese internment” – there’s plenty of information.

Serenity is the by far the leading vote-getter in NASA’s contest to name the Node 3 addition to the Space Station, though Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity fans may be concerned about write-in’s from Colbert Nation supporters.

This being NASA, I think they should take in account not only how cool the Serenity spaceship looks (especially on the Blue-Ray disc I just bought at the Circuit City meltdown), but also a highly-underpraised aspect of the Firefly/Serenity universe – it’s quiet in space! Almost all sci-fi shows from Star Trek to to Star Wars to Babylon 5 to Battlestar Galactica (old and new) feature a cacaphony of engine’s revving, lasers (sorry, phasers) blasting and guns blazing. 2001: A Space Odyssey showed it could be done quietly and scientifically correctly, and Joss Whedon did it again, without playing the Blue Danube.

But I feel obligated also to point out a highly-undercriticized aspect of Joss Whedon’s sci-fi vision – where are all the Chinese? I’m accustomed to the lack of Asian representation in Hollywood, but this is supposed to be world spawned from a great Anglo-Chinese alliance in which everyone swears in Chinese and knows how to use chopsticks. There are so few recognizably Asian characters in the series and movie, I was startled to see an Asian face in the bonus features on the Blue-Ray disc (I guess that was a bonus!).

Joss Whedon’s shows are among my favorite (still not sure about Dollhouse…), but they do have “written by a white Hollywood screenwriter” stamped all over them, much like Paul Haggis screenplays and half the shows on the WB. In contrast, take Battlestar Galactica – the fleet is visibly mixed-race and led by a Latino, and it’s no big deal. Even the Cylons have gender and racial variety (just don’t call them toasters!) Hmm, for the next Space Station addition, I hope they name it Galactica.